NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 157 



confounded by generalities, he should hardly be able otherwise to explain it. 

 A few weeks afterward, what purported to be the spirit of that brother nar- 

 rated the essential particulars of the interview, the place where, down to the 

 well-recollected fact that he was adjusting the stirrups of his horse, preparatory 

 to a distant journey, when it was held I Pretty early, however, in his invest- 

 igations, Dr. Bell began to find that, however correct his spiritual conferees 

 were in most of their responses, the moment a question was put involving a 

 response the truth of which was unknown to him, uniform failure occurred- 

 Sometimes when he believed at the time that his questions were truly 

 answered, subsequent information had shown him that he had been mistaken. 

 He had answers which he believed to be true, when the facts were decidedly 

 otherwise. Pursuing this train of inquiry, he found the "spirits," while aver- 

 ring that they could see him distinctly, "face to face," never could read the 

 signatures taken from an old file, and unfolded without his having seen the 

 writing. Yet as soon as he had cast his eye upon the signature, without 

 allowing any one else to see it, it was promptly and correctly reproduced by 

 the alphabetical rappings. And again, when he had made a previous arrange- 

 ment with his family that they should do certain things every quarter of an 

 hour at home he, of course, not knowing what while he was to ask the 

 "spirit" what was done at the instant, uniform failure occurred. He proved, 

 too, that the theory of the "Spiritualists" to meet such difficulties, viz.: that 

 evil or trilling spirits interfered at their end of the telegraph was not tenable. 

 For the responses just before and after these gross failures had been eminently 

 and wonderfully accurate, and the "spirits" not only declared that they saw 

 with perfect clearness what was going on at his house, but denied that there 

 had been any interruption or interference. Dr. Bell also gave examples 

 where test questions, involving replies unknown to the interrogator, had been 

 designedly intermixed with those which were known. The result uniformly 

 was that the known responses, however curious and far remote, were cor- 

 rectly reproduced ; the unknown were a set of perfectly wild and blundering 

 errors, the responses often being obviously formed out of the phraseology of 

 the question, as a stuck school-boy guesses out a reply ! The result of the 

 inquiries of Dr. Bell and his friends for several gentlemen of eminently fitting 

 talents pursued the investigation with him was briefly this: that what the 

 questioner knows, the spirits know; what the questioner does not know, the spirits 

 are entirely ignorant of. In other words, that there are really no superhuman 

 agencies in the matter at all no connection with another state of existence ; 

 but that it bears certain strong analogies to some of the experiences of clair- 

 voyance, in that mysterious science of animal magnetism, as it has been pro- 

 truding and receding for the last hundred years. Dr. Bell thought there was 

 some reason to believe that the matter reproduced may come not only from 

 the questioner, but if in the mind of any one at the circle, that it might be 

 evolved. He made some observations upon the evidences of spirit existence, 

 drawn from the character of the matter communicated by the mediums in a 

 state of impression, when, as is believed, spirits express themselves through 

 the human agent. Of course, the quality of such composition is more or less 

 a question of taste. Much of it is elevated, indicating high intellectual and 



