SPIRITUALISM AS A SCIENTIFIC QUESTION. 589 



tion and, upon the ideal loom which Christianity offered, to spin fur- 

 ther " to-day it may please Divine Providence to interfere with the 

 course of nature in this way, in order to call back into the thoughts of 

 men their moral nature and end. You acknowledge, indeed, that the 

 written communications of the spirits have a very insignificant content, 

 and that their other performances also seem to be substantially to no 

 purpose ; but you console yourself with the thought that the principle 

 of development will also find its application in the other life, so that 

 the souls of the dead only gradually attain the highest perfection of 

 knowledge and will. 



Here, unfortunately, I must oppose your conclusions in the most 

 decided manner. I hold these conclusions to be as false as they are 

 dangerous, and of this I will endeavor to convince you and your 

 readers. 



In the first place, I beg to call your attention to an unwarranted 

 assumption which is intermingled with your conclusions. You con- 

 jecture that Providence, in consideration of the lamentable circum- 

 stances and conditions of the present, has felt itself bound to inter- 

 fere in this peculiar manner. Your conjecture is based upon the as- 

 sumption that similar phenomena have never been observed in former 

 times. This assumption, however, is false. On the contrary, there 

 has never been a time, so far as I know, when phenomena resembling 

 the spiritualistic phenomena more or less, and in some respects most 

 strikingly, were lacking. To say nothing of the everywhere common 

 appearances of ghosts, I refer you to the facts which occur among nu- 

 merous peoples and to which the anthropologists give the name of 

 " Shamanism." * The so-called Shamans are manifestly persons with 

 mediumistic properties. They even perform, by means of spirits, who 

 obey their summons, many things which are often astounding, and not 

 seldom resemble, down to the most particular features, the spiritualis- 

 tic phenomena. I would further call your attention to the fact that, 

 from the fourteenth century on until into the seventeenth, the spirit- 

 ualistic manifestations, then designated by the terms witchcraft and 

 magic, clearly reached an extent, compared with which their present 

 circulation can be called a declining one. The witches appear, indeed, 

 to have united to a certain extent the properties of the mediums and 

 of the spirits. This, however, in view of the great strength in which 

 the wonderful force was at that time apparently distributed, is quite 

 intelligible. On the other hand, there are often very striking rela- 

 tions ; for example, the canceling of the law of gravitation, observed 

 also in recent times, was such an ordinary occurrence that, as is well 

 known, the famous witches' ordeal was based upon it. We even pos- 



* The term has primary reference to the superstitions of certain of the Siberian races, 

 but phenomena similar to those observed among these people are met with in many parts 

 of the world, in the Pacific islands, for instance, and among the Indian " medicine-men." 

 Translator. 



