“And this phantom, though in the popular superstition it is held to be the soul of the departed, must not be confounded with the true soul; it is but eidolon of the dead form.  Hence, like the best attested stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing that most strikes us is the absence of what we hold to be soul; that is, of superior 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, viz., 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 fiend-like shapes appear in a magic circle, or bodyless 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 if by electric wires, to my own brain from the brain of another.  In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and these 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 believe unconsciously to himself as to the exact effects produced, for this reason:  no two persons, you say, have ever told you that they experienced exactly the same thing.  Well, observe, no two persons ever experience exactly the same dream.  If this were an ordinary imposture, the machinery would be arranged for results that would but little vary; if it were a supernatural agency permitted by the Almighty, it would surely be for some definite end.  These phenomena belong to neither class; my persuasion is, that they originate in some brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct volition in anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that it has been but