emancipated intelligence. These apparitions come for little or no
object,--they seldom speak when they do come; if they speak, they
utter no ideas above those of an ordinary person on earth.
American spirit seers have published volumes of communications, in
prose and verse, which they assert to be given in the names of the
most illustrious dead: Shakespeare, Bacon,--Heaven knows whom.
Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not a whit of
higher order than would be communications from living persons of
fair talent and education; they are wondrously inferior to what
Bacon, Shakespeare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth. Nor,
what is more noticeable, do they ever contain an idea that was not
on the earth before. Wonderful, therefore, as such phenomena may
be (granting them to be truthful), I see much that philosophy may
question, nothing that it is incumbent on philosophy to deny,--
namely, nothing supernatural. They are but ideas conveyed somehow
or other (we have not yet discovered the means) from one mortal
brain to another. Whether, in so doing, tables walk of their own
accord, or fiendlike shapes appear in a magic circle, or bodiless
hands rise and remove material objects, or a Thing of Darkness,
such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood,--still am I
persuaded that these are but agencies conveyed, as by electric
wires, to my own brain from the brain of another. In some
constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and those constitutions
may produce chemic wonders,--in others a natural fluid, call it
electricity, and these may produce electric wonders. But the
wonders differ from Normal Science in this,--they are alike
objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no
grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true
sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw
or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I