180 A THEORY FOB SPIRITUALISTS. 



it is based, but I utterly deny that such phenomena are the 

 works of disembodied spirits. I myself have seen what ut- 

 terly confounded me, and while I reject all idea of super- 

 natural agencies, all interposition of departed spirits, yet I 

 have become thoroughly satisfied that there are more things 

 in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. 

 These phenomena of which the Spiritualists speak, I will not 

 undertake to pronounce all lies. Some of them are doubt- 

 less impostures the work of knaves, who speculate upon the 

 credulity and superstitions which are attributes of the human 

 mind ; but they are not all such. But while I admit their 

 reality, I insist that such as are so, are the results of natural 

 laws, which will one day be discovered, and which will turn 

 out to be as simple as tie spirit which presides over the 

 telegraph, or that which constitutes the life of a steam en- 

 gine. There may be, and probably is, a great undiscovered 

 principle which underlays these spiritual manifestations, as 

 they are called, and MIND is after it, looking for it care- 

 fully ; and what MIND has once started in pursuit of earnestly, 

 it seldom fails to overtake. 



" I have sometimes amused myself by endeavoring to fur- 

 nish a theory for the Spiritualists to stand upon, based upon 

 the demonstrations of the past, the evidences brought to 

 light by the researches of science, which at all events should 

 have about it truth enough to give color and respectability 

 even to an error as stupendous as that of Spiritualism. 

 This theory I have predicated upon the progress of the ma- 

 terial world, aside from animal life, showing that what may 



