Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/282

 This is solemnly attested as a fact undeniable and irrefutable." Now, when Mr. Kiddle declares that he knows there is no delusion in the matter, he simply means that he solemnly believes it, which is the basis on which the mysteries of another world have been revealed from the earliest origin of these superstitions. He gives exactly the kind of evidence that would require us to believe all the insane hallucinations of our lunatic asylums, for no man is so undeniably and irrefutably sure that he is not deluded as a madman.

Freeman had a mission, and regarded himself divinely chosen for a great work. So does Kiddle. He is commissioned to open new relations with' the unseen world. He announces "a new spiritual revelation," a "a new dispensation of religious light," showing "the existence of a future world." Under an "obligation imposed upon the editor by Divine Providence," he promulgates "a revelation of the future destiny of mankind, of transcendent importance to them both here and hereafter." And so all the old spiritual revelations are failures; the existence of a future world remained still to be proved; and the human race having struggled in vain for thousands of years to arrive at this truth of transcendent moment, Mr. Kiddle arrives at it by the aid of a couple of green mediums in the space of about nine months! Fortunate Mr. Kiddle!

Curiously enough, the Superintendent of Schools of the City of New York, who has given his life to the interests of knowledge, now gives notice that he has not a very high opinion of the later tendencies of science, and in this he is not alone. But he further intimates that his revelations of a supersensuous world may be designed by Heaven to thwart the influence of this bad science. We quote a passage from his introductory chapter, and beg the reader to notice that what follows is not from a spirit, but from Kiddle himself:

"When distinguished scientists sneeringly ask: ‘Who has ever seen the soul with the very best microscope that can be made? What physiologist has ever found any human spirit in his most minute dissections?’—when the proud scientist, filled with vainglory by the discovery of some of the laws of light and heat, or puffed up with vanity because he has caught a vision of something which he daringly calls the ‘physical basis of life,’ and, ready to fall down in adoration before his newfound deity, Protoplasm, announces that he finds in matter the ‘promise and potency of every form of life;’ or when he cries 'Amen' to his brother scientist who has traced, by the law of evolution and the ‘survival of the fittest,’ to a common origin himself and all the rest of the animal creation, and glories in his quadrumanous ancestry—when such is the age in which we live—an age characterized by the worst forms of irreligion—is it improbable that the All-Merciful Father should come again to the rescue of his benighted creatures, and for this purpose should in part unveil the glories of the supersensuous world to which all are tending?"

Mr. Kiddle's book, as this extract alone illustrates, is a very debilitated piece of intellectual work. Our first impression was that the man had undertaken to perpetrate a huge joke, but we became soon convinced that he is not himself. Various indications suggest an unhealthy state of mind, that is probably caused by some exhaustion or failure of the brain. The suddenness of his change of conduct at the age of fifty-five in regard to spiritualism; the slyness with which all was done, even to the printing of his book; his obstinacy in refusing to listen to reason and remonstrance in matters where others are concerned; and his egotistic hallucination in supposing himself divinely called upon to do a great religious work—these, taken in connection with the imbecile and idiotic