28 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I have paid a great deal of attention during the last twenty years 

 to this subject, and I can assure you that I have, in many instances, 

 known things most absurd in themselves, and most inconsistent with 

 the facts of the case as seen by myself and other sober-minded wit- 

 nesses, believed in by persons of very great ability, and, upon all ordi- 

 nary subjects, of great discrimination. But I account for it by the 

 previous possession of their minds by this dominant idea the expecta- 

 tion they have been led to form, either by their own earnest desire for this 

 kind of communication, or by the sort of contagious influence to which 

 some minds are especially subject. I say " the earnest desire," for it 

 is a very curious thing that many of those who are the most devout 

 spiritualists are persons who have been themselves previously rather 

 skeptical upon religious matters ; and many have said to me that this 

 communication is really the only basis of their belief in the unseen 

 world. Such being the case, I cannot wonder that they cling to it 

 with very strong and earnest feeling. A lady, not undistinguished in 

 the literary world, assured me several years ago that she had been 

 converted by this spiritualism from a state of absolute unbeHef in 

 religion ; and she assured me, also, that she regarded medical men and 

 scientific men, who endeavored to explain these phenomena upon ra- 

 tional principles, and to expose deception, where deception did occur, 

 as the emissaries of Satan, who so feared that the spread of spiritualism 

 would destroy his power upon earth, that he put it into the minds of 

 medical and scientific men to do all that they could to prevent it. 

 Now that, I assure you, is a fact. That was said to me by a lady of 

 considerable literary ability, and I believe it represents, though rather 

 extravagantly, a state of mind which is very prevalent ; the great 

 spread of the intense materialism of our age tending to weaken, and in 

 some instances to destroy, that healthful longing which we all have, I 

 believe, in our innermost nature, for a higher future existence, and 

 which is to my mind one of the most important foundations of our be- 

 lief in it. We live too much in the present ; we think too much of the 

 things of the world as regards our material comfort and enjoyment, 

 instead of thinking of them as they bear upon our own higher nature. 

 I believe that this tendency, which I think is especially noticeable in 

 America or at least it was a few years ago from all that I was able 

 to learn, had a great deal to do with the spread of this belief in what is 

 called Spiritualism. The spiritualists assert that in America they are 

 numbered by millions, and that there are very few people of any kind 

 of intellectual culture who have not either openly or secretly given in 

 their adhesion to it. I believe that is a gross exaggeration ; still, there 

 can be no doubt, from the number of periodicals they maintain, and 

 the advertisements in them of all kinds of strange things that are done 

 spirit-drawings made, drawings of deceased friends, and spiritual in- 

 struction given of various kinds that there must be a very extended 

 belief in this notion of communication with the unseen world through 

 these " media." 



