CHAPTER III.

"The mirror of the sou cannot reflect both earth and heaven; and the one van' shes from its surface, as the other is glassed upon its deep." ZANONI.

"Qui, donc, t'a donné la mission d'annoncer au peuple que la Divinité n'existe pas-quel avantage trouves tu à persuader à l'homme qu'une force aveugle préside à ses destinées et frappe au hazard le crime et la vertu ?" Robespierre (Discours), May 7, 1794.

WE

E believe that few of those physical phenomena which are genuine are caused by disembodied human spirits. Still, even those that are produced by occult forces of nature, such as happen through a few genuine mediums, and are consciously employed by the so-called "jugglers" of India and Egypt, deserve a careful and serious. investigation by science; especially now that a number of respected authorities have testified that in many cases the hypothesis of fraud does not hold. No doubt, there are professed "conjurors" who can perform cleverer tricks than all the American and English "John Kings" together. Robert Houdin unquestionably could, but this did not prevent his laughing outright in the face of the academicians, when they desired him to assert in the newspapers, that he could make a table move, or rap answers to questions, without contact of hands, unless the table was a prepared one.* The fact alone, that a now notorious London juggler refused to accept a challenge for £1,000 offered him by Mr. Algernon Joy, to produce such manifestations as are usually obtained through mediums, unless he was left unbound and free from the hands of a committee, negatives his exposé of the occult phenomena. Clever as he may be, we defy and challenge him to reproduce, under the same conditions, the "tricks" exhibited even by a common Indian juggler. For instance, the spot to be chosen by the investigators at the moment of the performance, and the juggler to know nothing of the choice; the experiment to be made in broad daylight, without the least preparations for it; without any confederate but a boy absolutely naked, and the juggler to be in a condition of semi-nudity. After that, we should select out of a variety three tricks, the most common among such public jugglers, and that were recently exhibited to some gentlemen belonging to

* See de Mirville's "Question des Esprits," and the works on the “Phénomèner Spirites, by de Gasparin,

Honorary Secretary to the National Association of Spiritualists of London.

the suite of the Prince of Wales: 1. To transform a rupee-firmly clasped in the hand of a skeptic-into a living cobra, the bite of which would prove fatal, as an examination of its fangs would show. 2. To cause a seed chosen at random by the spectators, and planted in the first semblance of a flower-pot, furnished by the same skeptics, to grow, mature, and bear fruit in less than a quarter of an hour. 3. To stretch himself on three swords, stuck perpendicularly in the ground at their hilts, the sharp points upward; after that, to have removed first one of the swords, then the other, and, after an interval of a few seconds, the last one, the juggler remaining, finally, lying on nothing-on the air, miraculously suspended at about one yard from the ground. When any prestidigitateur, to begin with Houdin and end with the last trickster who has secured gratuitous advertisement by attacking spiritualism, does the same, then-but only then-we will train ourselves to believe that mankind has been evolved out of the hind-toe of Mr. Huxley's Eocene Orohippus.

We assert again, in full confidence, that there does not exist a professional wizard, either of the North, South or West, who can compete with anything approaching success, with these untutored, naked sons of the East. These require no Egyptian Hall for their performances, nor any preparations or rehearsals; but are ever ready, at a moment's notice, to evoke to their help the hidden powers of nature, which, for European prestidigitateurs as well as for scientists, are a closed book. Verily, as Elihu puts it, "great men are not always wise; neither do the aged understand judgment."* To repeat the remark of the English divine, Dr. Henry More, we may well say: ". . . . indeed, if there were any modesty left in mankind, the histories of the Bible might abundantly assure men of the existence of angels and spirits." The same eminent man adds, “I look upon it as a special piece of Providence that. . . . fresh examples of apparitions may awaken our benumbed and lethargic minds into an assurance that there are other intelligent beings besides those that are clothed in heavy earth or clay . . . . for this evidence, showing that there are bad spirits, will necessarily open a door to the belief that there are good ones, and lastly, that there is a God." The instance above given carries a moral with it, not only to scientists, but theologians. Men who have made their mark in the pulpit and in professors' chairs, are continually showing the lay public that they really know so little of psycholo gy, as to take up with any plausible schemer who comes their way, and so make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of the thoughtful student. Public opinion upon this subject has been manufactured by jugglers and self-styled savants, unworthy of respectful consideration.

* Job.

PRETENDED EXPOSURES.

75

The development of psychological science has been retarded far more by the ridicule of this class of pretenders, than by the inherent difficulties of its study. The empty laugh of the scientific nursling or of the fools of fashion, has done more to keep man ignorant of his imperial psychical powers, than the obscurities, the obstacles and the dangers that cluster about the subject. This is especially the case with spiritualistic phenomena. That their investigation has been so largely confined to incapables, is due to the fact that men of science, who might and would have studied them, have been frightened off by the boasted exposures, the paltry jokes, and the impertinent clamor of those who are not worthy to tie their shoes. There are moral cowards even in university chairs. The inherent vitality of modern spiritualism is proven in its survival of the neglect of the scientific body, and of the obstreperous boasting of its pretended exposers. If we begin with the contemptuous sneers of the patriarchs of science, such as Faraday and Brewster, and end with the professional (?) exposés of the successful mimicker of the phenomena, -, of London, we will not find them furnishing one single, well-established argument against the occurrence of spiritual manifestations. "My theory is," says this individual, in his recent soi-disant "exposé," ," "that Mr. Williams dressed up and personified John King and Peter. Nobody can prove that it wasn't so." Thus it appears that, notwithstanding the bold tone of assertion, it is but a theory after all, and spiritualists might well retort upon the exposer, and demand that he should prove that it is so.

But the most inveterate, uncompromising enemies of Spiritualism are a class very fortunately composed of but few members, who, nevertheless, declaim the louder and assert their views with a clamorousness worthy of a better cause. These are the pretenders to science of young America-a mongrel class of pseudo-philosophers, mentioned at the opening of this chapter, with sometimes no better right to be regarded as scholars than the possession of an electrical machine, or the delivery of a puerile lecture on insanity and mediomania. Such men are--if you believe them-profound thinkers and physiologists; there is none of your metaphysical nonsense about them; they are Positivists-the mental sucklings of Auguste Comte, whose bosoms swell at the thought of plucking deluded humanity from the dark abyss of superstition, and rebuilding the cosmos on improved principles. Irascible psychophobists, no more cutting insult can be offered them than to suggest that they may be endowed with immortal spirits. To hear them, one would fancy that there can be no other souls in men and women than "scientific" or "unscientific souls ; " whatever that kind of soul may be.*

*See Dr. F. R. Marvin's "Lectures on Mediomania and Insanity."

Some thirty or forty years ago, in France, Auguste Comte a pupil of the Ecole Polytechnique, who had remained for years at that estab lishment as a repetiteur of Transcendant Analysis and Rationalistic Mechanics-awoke one fine morning with the very irrational idea of becoming a prophet. In America, prophets can be met with at every street-corner; in Europe, they are as rare as black swans. But France is the land of novelties. Auguste Comte became a prophet; and so infectious is fashion, sometimes, that even in sober England he was considered, for a certain time, the Newton of the nineteenth century. The epidemic extended, and for the time being, it spread like wildfire over Germany, England, and America. It found adepts in France, but the excitement did not last long with these. The prophet needed money : the disciples were unwilling to furnish it. The fever of admiration for a religion without a God cooled off as quickly as it had come on; of all the enthusiastic apostles of the prophet, there remained but one worthy any attention. It was the famous philologist Littré, a member of the French Institute, and a would-be member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, but whom the archbishop of Orleans maliciously prevented from becoming one of the "Immortals." *

The philosopher-mathematician-the high-priest of the "religion of the future"-taught his doctrine as do all his brother-prophets of our modern days. He deified "woman," and furnished her with an altar; but the goddess had to pay for its use. The rationalists had laughed at the mental aberration of Fourier; they had laughed at the St. Simonists; and their scorn for Spiritualism knew no bounds. The same rationalists and materialists were caught, like so many empty-headed sparrows, by the bird-lime of the new prophet's rhetoric. A longing for some kind of divinity, a craving for the "unknown," is a feeling congenital in man; hence the worst atheists seem not to be exempt from it. Deceived by the outward brilliancy of this ignus fatuus, the disciples followed it until they found themselves floundering in a bottomless morass.

Covering themselves with the mask of a pretended erudition, the Positivists of this country have organized themselves into clubs and committees with the design of uprooting Spiritualism, while pretending to impartially investigate it.

Too timid to openly challenge the churches and the Christian doctrine, they endeavor to sap that upon which all religion is based-man's faith in God and his own immortality. Their policy is to ridicule tnat which affords an unusual basis for such a faith-phenomenal Spiritualism.

*Vapereau: "Biographie Contemporaine," art. Littré; and Des Mousseaux : "Le Hauts Phénomènes de la Magie," ch. 6.

COMTE'S RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.

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Attacking it at its weakest side, they make the most of its lack of an inductive method, and of the exaggerations that are to be found in the transcendental doctrines of its propagandists. Taking advantage of its unpopularity, and displaying a courage as furious and out of place as that of the errant knight of La Mancha, they claim recognition as philanthropists and benefactors who would crush out a monstrous superstition.

Let us see in what degree Comte's boasted religion of the future is superior to Spiritualism, and how much less likely its advocates are to need the refuge of those lunatic asylums which they officiously recommend for the mediums whom they have been so solicitous about. Before beginning, let us call attention to the fact that three-fourths of the disgraceful features exhibited in modern Spiritualism are directly traceable to the materialistic adventurers pretending to be spiritualists. Comte has fulsomely depicted the "artificially-fecundated" woman of the future. She is but elder sister to the Cyprian ideal of the free lovers. The immunity against the future offered by the teachings of his moonstruck disciples, has inoculated some pseudo-spiritualists to such an extent as to lead them to form communistic associations. None, however, have proved long-lived. Their leading feature being generally a materialistic animalism, gilded over with a thin leaf of Dutch-metal philosophy and tricked out with a combination of hard Greek names, the community could not prove anything else than a failure.

Plato, in the fifth book of the Republic, suggests a method for improv. ing the human race by the elimination of the unhealthy or deformed individuals, and by coupling the better specimens of both sexes. It was not to be expected that the "genius of our century," even were he a prophet, would squeeze out of his brain anything entirely new.

Comte was a mathematician. Cleverly combining several old utopias, he colored the whole, and, improving on Plato's idea, materialized it, and presented the world with the greatest monstrosity that ever emanated from a human mind!

We beg the reader to keep in view, that we do not attack Comte as a philosopher, but as a professed reformer. In the irremediable darkness. of his political, philosophical and religious views, we often meet with isolated observations and remarks in which profound logic and judiciousness of thought rival the brilliancy of their interpretation. But then, these dazzle you like flashes of lightning on a gloomy night, to leave you, the next moment, more in the dark than ever. If condensed and repunctuated, his several works might produce, on the whole, a volume of very original aphorisms, giving a very clear and really clever definition. of most of our social evils; but it would be vain to seek, either through the tedious circumlocution of the six volumes of his Cours de Philoso