“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.  They come for little or no object—­they seldom speak, if they do come; they utter no ideas above that of an ordinary person on earth.  These 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 notable, 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 by electric wires, to my own brain from the brain of another.  In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and those may produce chemic wonders—­in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these produce electric wonders.  But they differ in this from Normal Science—­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 the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested with a semisubstance.  That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe:  some material force must have killed my dog; it might, for aught I know, have sufficed to kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as the dog—­had my intellect or my spirit given me no countervailing resistance in my will.”