Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/607

 and, upon the ideal loom which Christianity offered, to spin further”—to-day it may please Divine Providence to interfere with the course of nature in this way, in order to call back into the thoughts of men their moral nature and end. You acknowledge, indeed, that the written communications of the spirits have a very insignificant content, and that their other performances also seem to be substantially to no purpose; but you console yourself with the thought that the principle of development will also find its application in the other life, so that the souls of the dead only gradually attain the highest perfection of knowledge and will.

Here, unfortunately, I must oppose your conclusions in the most decided manner. I hold these conclusions to be as false as they are dangerous, and of this I will endeavor to convince you and your readers.

In the first place, I beg to call your attention to an unwarranted assumption which is intermingled with your conclusions. You conjecture that Providence, in consideration of the lamentable circumstances and conditions of the present, has felt itself bound to interfere in this peculiar manner. Your conjecture is based upon the assumption that similar phenomena have never been observed in former times. This assumption, however, is false. On the contrary, there has never been a time, so far as I know, when phenomena resembling the spiritualistic phenomena more or less, and in some respects most strikingly, were lacking. To say nothing of the everywhere common appearances of ghosts, I refer you to the facts which occur among numerous peoples and to which the anthropologists give the name of “Shamanism.” The so-called Shamans are manifestly persons with mediumistic properties. They even perform, by means of spirits, who obey their summons, many things which are often astounding, and not seldom resemble, down to the most particular features, the spiritualistic phenomena. I would further call your attention to the fact that, from the fourteenth century on until into the seventeenth, the spiritualistic manifestations, then designated by the terms witchcraft and magic, clearly reached an extent, compared with which their present circulation can be called a declining one. The witches appear, indeed, to have united to a certain extent the properties of the mediums and of the spirits. This, however, in view of the great strength in which the wonderful force was at that time apparently distributed, is quite intelligible. On the other hand, there are often very striking relations; for example, the canceling of the law of gravitation, observed also in recent times, was such an ordinary occurrence that, as is well known, the famous witches' ordeal was based upon it. We even