EPIDEMIC DELUSIONS. 27 



greater aptitude for looking at things as they are, and for not allowing 

 strange, absurd notions to take possession of the mind ; while, again, 

 I can trace, even within the last ten years, in a most remarkable man- 

 ner, the prevalence of a desire to do right things for the right's sake, 

 and not merely because they are politic. And I am quite sure that 

 there is a gradual progress in this respect, which has a most important 

 influence in checking aberrations of the class of which I have spoken. 

 Still we see these aberrations, and there is one just now which is 

 exciting a good deal of attention that which you have heard of un- 

 der the name of " Spiritualism." Now, I look upon the root of this 

 spiritualism to lie in that which is a very natural, and in some respects 

 a wholesome disposition of the kind a desire to connect ourselves in 

 thought with those whom we have loved and who are gone from us. 

 Nothing is more admirable, more beautiful, in our nature than this 

 longing for the continuance of intercourse with those whom we have 

 loved on earth. It has been felt in all nations and at all times, and 

 we all of us experience it in regard to those to whom we have been 

 most especially attached. But this manifestation of it is one which 

 those who experience this feeling in its greatest purity and its greatest 

 intensity feel to be absurd and contrary to common-sense that the 

 spirits of their departed friends should come and rap upon tables and 

 make chairs dance in the air, and indicate their presence in grotesque 

 methods of this kind. The most curious part of it is that the spirits 

 should obey the directions of the persons with whom they profess to 

 be in communication that when they say, " Rap once if you mean yes, 

 and raj) twice if you mean no," and so on, they should just follow any 

 orders they receive as to the mode in which they will telegraph re- 

 plies to their questions. It seems to me repugnant to one's common- 

 sense ; but the higher manifestations of these spiritual agencies seem 

 to me far more repugnant to common-sense ; and that is when persons 

 profess to be able to set all the laws of Nature at defiance ; when it is 

 said, for instance, that a human being is lifted bodily up into the air 

 and carried, it may be, two or three miles, and descends through the 

 ceiling of a room. One of the recent statements of this kind, you 

 know, is that a certain very stout and heavy lady was carried a dis- 

 tance of about two miles from her own house, and dropped plump 

 down upon the table round which eleven persons were sitting; she 

 came down through the ceiling, they could not state how, because they 

 were sitting in the dark, and that darkness has a good deal to do with 

 most of these manifestations. Now, let us analyze them a little. I 

 am speaking now of what I will call the genuine phenomena those 

 which happen to persons who really are honest in their belief. I ex- 

 clude altogether, and put aside the cases, of which I have seen num- 

 bers, in which there is the most transparent trickery, and in which the 

 only wonder is, that any rational persons should allow themselves to 

 be deceived by it. 



