If the return of the heavenly visitant would but end here, I think the impression would be deeper and more abiding.  The filmy, vague outline of the white figure thoroughly harmonizes with all established, orthodox notions of ghosts, and if this were all of the apparition vouchsafed to us, we might, perhaps, have a harder problem to deal with than when the Spirit actually emerges from the Cabinet with outstretched arms of greeting.  A substantial, warm, breathing, flesh and blood ghost, whose foot-falls jar the floor, is slightly heterodox and taxes our credulity; if hereunto be added an unmistakable likeness to the Medium in form and feature, many traces, I am afraid, of the supernatural and spiritual vanish.

Mindful of our endeavour as a Commission, to have as many observers as possible in cases demanding close observation, I never attended a Materializing seance as a member of this Commission.  Whenever I happened to be personally known (and my ear-trumpet soon makes me a marked man), that official capacity was unavoidably imputed to me, but I never announced it nor claimed it.  I was present merely as an observer on my own account, with the intention of making arrangements, if practicable, for seances with the rest of the Commission, if what I saw seemed to me sufficiently remarkable to justify the expense, which experience, with other Mediums in other lines, had taught me would be very considerable.  I therefore took no notes, and could at this late day only after much difficulty furnish dates.  Wherefore all that I propose in this Memorandum is to give my own private conclusion, which is worth no more than the conclusion of any other private individual, and to mention the test to which I subjected all the Spirits whom I had the pleasure of specially ‘interviewing’; as this test can be applied by any one, at any time, at any seance, it partakes of the nature of a general truth, which does not need the support of dates, or names, or places to uphold it.  I suppose I have attended between twenty and thirty Materializing seances.

I do not hesitate to acknowledge that I have been throughout sincerely and extremely anxious to become converted to Spiritualism.  In whatever direction my judgment is warped, it is warped in favor of that belief.  I cannot conceive of the texture of that mind which would not welcome such an indisputable proof of immortality as Spiritualism professes to hold out.

In general, then, let me say at once and emphatically that I have never seen anything which, in the smallest degree, has led me to suppose that a Spirit can be, as it is termed, materialized.  It is superfluous to add that I never recognized a materialized Spirit; in only two instances have any Spirits professed to be members of my family, and in one of those two instances, as it happened, that member was alive and in robust health, and in the other a Spirit claimed a fictitious relationship, that of niece.