During the subsequent winter the subject of spiritism occupied the world of the curious and the thoughtful a good deal; and, with my brother Paul, who was a disciple of Swedenborg, I took every occasion that offered to investigate it.  Many of my friends were interested in it, and I soon became convinced that it was not the foolish delusion which the scientific world and most religious people pronounced it.  In fact, if there be any basis of reality in the phenomena, it is hard to conceive a subject of such vital importance as the determination of the actuality of an individual existence after the physical death.  It had always been evident to me that the immense majority of men had no real belief in human immortality, all their pursuits and acquisitions being of a purely material character.  My own convictions were ingrained and immovable, but a physical demonstration of their verity seemed to me an eminently desirable result, if attainable, and I entered into the investigation with earnestness and all my patience.  Society was largely occupied by the table-tippings and the “rappings.”  “Circles” were forming amongst all classes, and the mediums became an important element in the world of New York.  I very soon came to the conclusion that the professional, paid mediums were, in many cases, the worst kind of impostors, and, in all cases, so far as any intellectual evidence was concerned, of an absurd triviality.  Even in the private circles, where no trace of fraud could be suspected, the good faith of all entering them being assured, I found sometimes such extraordinary credulity that the subject would have been offensive to any dispassionate investigator who was not, like myself, determined to get to the bottom of it.  The majority of the persons who entered into a circle were ready to believe any extraordinary thing that came to them, and the inanity of the general proceedings, even when fraud was excluded, was sufficient to indispose serious people to take part in them.  To me the question had such vital importance that I was determined that neither fraud nor the inconsequent nature of the pretended communications should dissuade me from the most thorough investigation possible.

This investigation lasted several years, and included, to greater or less extent, every form of psychological and physical phenomenon which was offered by spiritism.  My experience with the professional mediums was such that I soon ceased to pay any attention to them, finding that, what with the frivolity of their utterances and the evident imposture which, in the case of some of them, invariably marked the display of their powers, the sittings were simply farcical; nor did I ever find, in the doings of the mediums, or in the revelations of the regular spiritistic circles (and I sat in the most important one of them, that over which Judge Edmonds presided, during the two winters) in which no paid medium took part, anything which was not, or could not have been, imposture.