Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/608

590 numerous certificates of judges, whose credibility can certainly not be unconditionally denied, according to which a witch sometimes weighed only half an ounce, sometimes even nothing at all. You answer that all this belongs to the realm of superstition, and that the pretended facts were never investigated by trustworthy observers. But upon what is this assumption of superstition founded? Simply upon the fact that we have hitherto held the things in question to be impossible. Now you maintain not only the possibility but also the actuality of phenomena equally astonishing, and, moreover, very similar. By all rules of scientific investigation, we are logically bound to assume that those earlier phenomena also may, indeed, in many instances have rested upon deception, but that they were scarcely altogether without foundation. There was of course a lack of exact observers in those days. But do you believe that the Galileian laws of falling bodies were not in force before Galileo demonstrated them by his experiments? There opens up to us from your standpoint an essentially new view of history. Phenomena hitherto regarded as lamentable expressions of a corrupting superstition are transformed into evidences of an especially gracious dissemination of supersensible mysteries.

But I proceed to your real conclusions themselves. The spiritualistic phenomena, silly as they may be in detail, pass with you, by reason of the certainty which they give of another world, as a new source of moral and religious conviction. Our opinion hitherto has been that Providence veiled the future from men with a wise purpose; that its will was to leave the religious nature to form for itself a moral ideal, which should remain untouched by the imperfections of the world of sense. This condition of things is by your view essentially changed. Our future destiny is no longer a subject of moral demands and religious convictions, but, to a certain extent at least, belongs to our knowledge and perception. You do indeed lay stress upon the fact that precisely that phase of the other world which we perceive may be the less perfect phase. That might pass, if at least the beginning of a process of perfection were apparent to us. But I see only the shocking contrary of this. What conception must we form of the condition of our deceased fellow men, if your view is correct? I find myself forced to the following conclusions, against which, so far as I can see, you can urge no material objections:

1. Physically the souls of our dead fall into the bondage of certain living men, the so-called mediums. These mediums are, at present at any rate, not very widely spread, and appear to belong almost exclusively to the American nationality. At the command of the mediums, the souls execute mechanical performances, which bear throughout the character of purposelessness: they knock, lift tables and chairs, play harmoniums, etc.

2. Intellectually the souls fall into a condition which, so far as