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 256 NEW BOOKS. must fail to solve the other with any completeness. Nor is the cause of his failure far to seek. His attitude is too little that of the psychologist, less interested in outward fact than in mental process ; too much that of the ordinary man, concerned rather to explain away than really to explain. For him a delusion is a delusion, and it is nothing more. He sees it from the outside only. It is an inevitable consequence of this attitude that for him the history of Spiritualism practically resolves itself into the history of the phenomena alleged to have occurred in the presence of spiritualist mediums. But this is surely an erroneous view. Mr. Podmore himself is never tired of pointing out how the Spiritualist's faith has survived the exposure of countless fraudulent mediums, how it has remained unshaken even while its flimsy edifice of accumulated marvels was crumbling to the ground. The faith may or may not have been really occasioned by the alleged phenomena. At least it is something very different from a rational theory about them. It is a form of Supernaturalism, and it is to be regretted that Mr. Pod- more has missed a splendid opportunity of making a solid contribution to the psychology of religion by analysing this belief. Book i. is called the Pedigree of Spiritualism. But that is a misnomer. It is really a pedigree of the spiritualistic phenomena. There is no continuity between the supernaturalist belief in witchcraft, and modern spiritualism ; as Mr. Podmore points out the Sympathetic System and the doctrines of Paracelsus and his followers were essentially scientific, and supernaturalist only by way of exception, as in the case of Valentine Greatrakes. So too the explanations given by the French mesmerists from Mesmer himself down to Petetin and Deleuze, of their patients' convulsions, trances and automatisms round the baquet, were one and and all naturalistic in type. The continuity is between the phenomena which gave rise to these different beliefs and theories. In France, Alphonse Cahagnet (1848) seems to have been the first spiritualist of any note. But whether he approached the problem of mediumship as the result of earlier experiences with mesmerism, and what was the connexion between the ordinary magnetic somnambule and Adele Maginot, we are not told. Indeed Mr. Podmore makes it probable that Cahagnet was not unacquainted with the writings of Swedenborg ; and in the sequel he shows how great was Swedenborg's influence upon the development of spiritualism in the United States. It is therefore at least strange that in this ' pedigree of Spiritualism ' there should be such scant mention of the Swedish seer's visions. Mr. Podmore must remedy this serious defect in a second edition. In Germany, thanks to the prev- alent idealistic interpretation of the laws of nature, mesmerism took quite early a spiritualistic turn. In England, mesmerism, as it was in- troduced from France, so it followed the French example. The phenom- ena were explained on the analogy of magnetism and electricity, with an occasional appeal to Reichenbach's odylic force. It is in America that the evolution of the magnetic somnambule into the inspirational medium was consummated, thanks to the trance-utterances of the Poughkeepsie seer, Andrew Jackson Davis. Mr. Podmore shows the connexion be- tween the new forms of religion started by Davis, " Principles of Nature," fostered by the ' Univercselum,' and all manner of novel ideas social, moral, political then fermenting in the raw brain of the United States ; and he makes good use of this connexion when he essays to account for the "facile acceptance and ready spread of the new marvels" of Spiritualism. He finds the essential conditions in the general character of the milieu " in the general diffusion of education combined with an absence of authoritative standards of thought and the want of critical training; in the democratic genius of the American people; in their