406 Relations between Spiritualism and Science. [July, 
to justify the cruel punishments by which it was attempted 
to be suppressed. Local folk-lore and superstitions acquire 
a living interest, since they are often based on phenomena 
which we can reproduce under proper conditions, and the 
same may be said of much of the sorcery and magic of the 
Middle Ages. In these and many other ways history and 
anthropology are illuminated by Spiritualism. 
“ Science will equally benefit, since it will have opened to 
it a new domain of surpassing interest. Just as there is 
behind the visible world of Nature an ‘ unseen universe ’ of 
forces, the study of which continually opens up fresh worlds 
of knowledge often intimately connected with the true com- 
prehension of the most familiar phenomena of Nature, so 
the world of mind will be illuminated by the new fadts and 
principles which the study of Spiritualism makes known to 
us. Modern science utterly fails to realise the nature of 
mind or to account for its presence in the universe, except 
by the mere verbal and unthinkable dogma that it is ‘ the 
produdt of organisation.’ Spiritualism, on the other hand, 
recognises in mind the cause of organisation, and perhaps 
even of matter itself, and it has added greatly to our know- 
ledge of man’s nature by demonstrating the existence of 
individual minds indistinguishable from those of human 
beings, yet separate from any human body. It has made 
us acquainted with forms of matter of which materialistic 
science has no cognisance, and with an ethereal chemistry 
whose transformations are far more marvellous than any of 
those with which Science deals. It thus gives us proof that 
there are possibilities of organised existence beyond those of 
the material world, and in so doing removes the greatest 
stumbling-block in the way of belief in a future state of 
existence' — the possibility so often felt by the student of ma- 
terial science of separating the conscious mind from its 
partnership with the brain and nervous system. 
“ On the spiritual [Spiritualist] theory man consists es- 
sentially of a spiritual nature and mind intimately associated 
with a spiritual body or soul, both of which are developed 
in and by means of a material organism. Thus the whole 
raison d'etre of the material universe — with all its marvellous 
changes and adaptations, the infinite complexity of matter 
and of the ethereal forces which pervade and vivify it, the 
vast wealth of Nature in the animal and vegetable king- 
doms — is to serve the grand purpose of developing human 
spirits in human bodies.” 
This last passage calls for a few remarks. My estimate 
