Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/606

588 previously to employ common terms of speech. As the modern geometrician speaks of a "plane and in itself congruent manifold of three dimensions," without understanding by it anything else than the space well known to all of us, so he designates with the term "intelligent beings of four dimensions" simply what we ordinary men are accustomed to call ghosts. I believe now with you that the hypothesis which alone is left for us is at the same time the sole hypothesis which would be able to explain the phenomena—their reality being presupposed—and we can therefore confidently make it the basis of our further conclusions. For my own part, I should prefer the term "intelligent beings of four dimensions," because it is more scientific; but for the sake of brevity I will employ the current name of ghosts.

You now put the question—a question worth taking to heart—"Who are these ghosts?" Your deductions lead you to the conclusion that we have to see in them the souls of men who have died, which possess the power to assume again, partially or fully, their former bodily form. Although in Mr. Slade's sittings only detached members—hands and feet—became visible, partly immediately and partly in impressions, it still appears from American advices that materializations of entire bodies are not wanting. I can only assent to this conclusion. I am also essentially determined here by the impression, to which you refer—of a man's foot deformed by a tight shoe—upon a blackened tablet. The assumption that the beings of some other world unknown to us would naturally resemble us not only in their bodily constitution, but also in their dress, has to me only a very slight probability. I confess, indeed, that the thought that hard-hearted shoemakers might even in the next world continue their attempts to improve the anatomical structure of our feet gives me great uneasiness, while I could more easily reconcile myself to the idea that some abiding effects of sufferings here might accompany us into the future. Under this assumption, I count it not altogether impossible that a specialist might be able to conclude from the peculiar character of the deformity as to the period in which the possessor of the foot lived, and perhaps even as to the nation to which he belonged. I regret that this investigation does not appear to have been thought of.

We will assume, therefore, that the ghosts belonged to our deceased fellow men, who advise us in this way of their survival and their condition after death. What significance have the phenomena, then? You, respected sir, believe that you must view this significance as lying above all else in the fact that nothing could more powerfully strengthen our faith in a supreme moral government of the world, nothing more surely counteract the materialism and indifferentism of the time, than the certainty of immortality. To-day, when faith has become tottering, when, at the same time, there are no youthful races (like the Celts, the Teutons, the Slavs) able, as at the time of the decay of ancient civilization, "to take up the broken thread of