The Nichiren Buddhists, with praiseworthy astuteness, employ women as vehicles for the divine descent for this very reason, and the resulting trance is so easily entered as sometimes to pass counterfeit for a sham.
The French display a like proneness to altro-possession. Had they not been relatively easily influenced, Mesmer would not have failed of a livelihood in Vienna to become the rage in Paris; nor would Charcot and Nancy have been the pioneer names of modern hypnotism. For an art does not become the vogue among those who have no natural aptitude for it. Nature divorces such incompatibility of temper. Priority of practice is thus the best proof of fitness.
Now it is these same three classes of mind, the far-oriental, the feminine and the French, different as they otherwise are, that we saw to be relatively so impersonal. Personality, then, appears to be the opposite pole to proneness to possession. Spirits of this world and of the next would seem to have a reciprocatory action in their possession of the human body; the more man the less god. This suggests that the qualitative difference between selves is in some sort a
