OF THE FACULTY OF WONDER. Ig? 



the spiritual world any more than in the physical world. That is 

 beside my argument. My argument at present is simply this, that 

 within the realm of law, clearly understood as such, there is food for 

 the faculty of wonder in all its legitimate aspirations far more endur- 

 ing, far greater, and far grander than anything that can be developed 

 in the way of those communications of table-turning, table-rapping, or 

 anything of that kind. And the instance I gave was just one out of 

 endless instances to try and conceive of the manner in which the 

 spirit of man, that which he knows to exist, and, in fact, to be himself 

 his ego communicates through his nerves with his muscles how it 

 is capable of being so minutely directed that along the lines of nervous 

 communication it will arrive at a particular muscle or particular group 

 of muscles, and perform all the complicated muscular acts which we 

 know to be the physical and tangible results of the manifestations of 

 our spirit. In other words, the most commonplace appearance of a 

 spirit that you can name the most every-day manifestation in the 

 world, and that which we are most certain of in our own consciousness 

 is, when you come to think of it, an absolute and perfect mystery, 

 which only becomes comprehensible to us because we know it to be a 

 fact, and because it lies within the divine order of things. It is physi- 

 ological. "What spiritism or spiritualism appears to require of us is, 

 that having got our every-day consciousness of this matter for wonder 

 having got all this marvelous adaptation of spirit to matter having 

 a set of thoroughly organized and thoroughly known channels by 

 which the spiritual world is revealed in the material, and by which the 

 Great and Supreme Spirit is enabled to reveal himself to every one of 

 us having, I say, got the absolute proof and evidence in our own 

 souls and our own bodies of a set of laws appertaining to this matter, 

 what spiritualism requires of us to do is to cast aside the whole of 

 these laws, and to admit a set of interferences, not exceptional, not 

 for grand and very, very exceptional objects, but a set of every-day 

 constant interferences with the law of the action of spirit and matter 

 as such, known to all of us interferences which are not only not in 

 accordance with that law, but which are absolutely subversive of the 

 ordinary results of that law. Just let us suppose this : Suppose it 

 proved, once for all, that the spirit of a departed person a disem- 

 bodied spirit, a spirit that is wandering in space, a spirit which is not 

 limited by the conditions of matei'ial investment has the power to 

 appear to you, and to reveal to you what is being done or written, or 

 has been done by some friend of yours on the other side of the globe, 

 or who has passed beyond the grave, and that it has had access to 

 documents no mortal could have seen, what appears to be the neces- 

 sary consequence of this doctrine ? This, among others, that no scrap 

 of writing that no single act that a man does could be concealed, or 

 at least could be perfectly sure of being concealed, from his neighbor 

 from any man who may have the greatest possible interest in know- 



