and love of his dependent creatures, and in the develop ment of their as yet rudimental free will.

And yet Pantheism is true, though but a part of the truth. If man is the image of his Maker, if the finite is patterned after the Infinite, then the deductions from our facts justify the conception that the nature-element of Deity may in its consciousness be discrete from the omniscient consciousness of God in the Highest. Immanent in the universe, he may there differ in degree from what he is in that transcendent state in which he is above and beyond nature; is the One and only Possibility by which all things have become possible and existent. Thus Pantheism is viewed as the inner circle of a grander Theism, and two ever-conflicting beliefs are found as harmonious as the convex and concave of the same crescent.

We may exist in the midst of a world of spirits just as we do in the midst of that world which was unknown to man till it was revealed by the microscope. Spiritualism assures us that this is not only a possibility but a reality. The universe penetrable to our senses may be but a fraction of that Infinite Whole patent to Omnipotence. Sir W. R. Grove, in his "Correlation of Physical Forces," remarks: "In very many of the forms which matter assumes, it is porous, and pervaded by more volatile essences, which may differ as much in kind as matter does." Sir Humphrey Davy hypothecates an "ethereal matter which can never be evident to the senses, and may bear the same relations to heat, light, and electricity that these refined forms or modes of existence of matter may bear to the gases."

I have but a word to say to that small class of would-be philosophers who, admitting our phenomena, would get rid of them by a "What of it? What do they prove?"

There are certain fundamental convictions of the human mind which are manifestly undemonstrable; and it is an

easy matter for the extreme skeptic to question their truth. But such questioning, because of the lack of formal demonstration, is not always defensible on philosophical grounds. If the ultimate axioms, where reason compels us to make a stand, are rejected, it is useless to attempt to reason further.*

At every step in life we are obliged to recognize a power external to phenomena. Without this recognition we could not regard the world as external, for, strictly speaking, its phenomena are effects on us, and subjective. The recognition of what is outside us in space, and distant in time, depends, then, on the acceptance by reason of what transcends phenomena.

Reason may admit that her conceptions of such realities may be, must be, imperfect; but she will judge also that her conceptions, recognized as imperfect, are nearer the truth than the decision to reject all conceptions of the kind would be, since that would land us in extreme idealism.

Science has to transcend phenomena at every step; the whole fabric of human knowledge would collapse unless the testimony of consciousness was accepted to facts not found among phenomena, but inferred from them.

We all believe that the human beings around us are animated with conscious intelligence. Yet physical evidence of this there is none. Like our conviction of the past and of our own continued existence, it is an inference drawn from phenomena respecting what transcends phenomena; yet it commands the entire assent of reason, and hence takes rank among our fundamental beliefs.

All these considerations are ignored in the skeptical assumption that the reappearance of the form of a deceased. friend, conversing intelligibly, manifesting recognizable traits both physical and mental, giving proofs of identity

* In carrying out this argument I am largely indebted to the late Thomas Martin Herbert's masterly work, "The Realistic Assumptions of Modern Science Examined." London: Macmillan & Co. 1879.

in a knowledge of the past, in affection for kindred, and in other indescribable peculiarities appreciable only by the spectator who has known and loved him, that all this is no evidence of the reappearance of that deceased person. For such a phenomenon there is a cause, and reason must obviously transcend phenomena in order to arrive at that cause. The question whether the cause may not be mundane rather than super-mundane is purely sophistical, and has nothing to do with the vital fact of the trans-mortal survival. The skeptic's position, if tenable, would be equally fatal to all scientific progress by questioning the ultimate grounds, the primary, undemonstrable convictions, on which all science is based.

One of our evangelical assailants tells us that "it is the mistake of the Spiritualist that he makes a religion of what should be a science." Are we then to understand that to know is less a warranty for religious feeling and hope than to believe, or rather to try to believe?

It is for the very reason that Spiritualism has a Scientific Basis in known and demonstrable facts, that it offers the surest ground for religion. It shows us that the only hurtful heresy is the wrong thinking that leads to wrongdoing. It proves to us that as we sow we shall reap.

Some persons, in whom the religious or devotional instinct may be yet feeble or undeveloped, may long remain untouched by the vast religious significance of a knowledge of immortality; but in times of bereavement and great affliction it may rush back to the heart with a divine, awakening meaning and force; and sorrow may reveal to us that the certainty of a reunion with our beloved has in it, for the heart that is not petrified, the highest and purest religious element, since it must give rise to the profoundest gratitude to the Infinite Giver of life and love.

Concessions.

I GRANT that of the facts here affirmed to be real, many are very strange, uncouth, and improbable; and that we cannot understand them or reconcile them with the commonly received notions of spirits and the future state.

I allow that there are many over-credulous persons; and that frauds, impostures, and delusions have been mixed up and confounded with real facts in Spiritualism.

I grant that melancholy and imagination have very great force, and beget strange persuasions; and that many stories of apparitions have been but melancholy fancies.

I know and yield that there are many strange, natural diseases that have odd symptoms, and produce astonishing effects beyond the usual course of nature; and that these are sometimes quoted as explaining preternatural facts.

Lostulata.

HAVING made these concessions, the postulata which I demand of my adversaries as my just right are:

That whether our phenomena occur or not is a question of fact, and not of à priori reasoning.

That matters of fact can only be proved by immediate sense, or by the testimony of others. To endeavor to demonstrate fact by abstract reasoning or speculation is as if a man should attempt to prove by algebra or metaphysics that Julius Cæsar founded the empire of Rome.

A certain amount and character of human testimony cannot be reasonably rejected as incredible, or as supporting facts contrary to nature, since all facts within the realm of nature must be natural.

That which is sufficiently and undeniably proved ought not to be denied because we know not how it can be; that is, because there are difficulties in the conceiving of it; otherwise sense and knowledge are gone as well as faith. For the modus of most things is unknown, and the most obvious in nature have inextricable difficulties in the conceiving of them.

Altered from REV. JOSEPH GLANVIL (1636–1680).

350

APPENDIX.

"A Scientific Basis of Belief."

THE Rev. John Page Hopps, an English liberal preacher, is the author of a little pamphlet entitled "A Scientific Basis of Belief in a Future Life; or the Witness borne by Modern Science to the Reality and Pre-eminence of the Unseen Universe." As he pursues a somewhat different method from my own, but arrives at similar results, an outline or abridgment of his excellent brochure may be here appropriate. It should be premised that he has satisfied himself of the fact of direct writing and other spiritual phenomena, though he does not refer to them here.

If faith in God or Immortality depends on the conviction of the infallibility of the Bible, faith is already doomed. The marvellous spread of scientific knowledge has led to a totally new demand for evidence and demonstration as the antecedent to all belief.

The inquiry into a future life or an unseen universe is a strictly scientific one. But all the science we can attain to is relative to our limited capacities. The first thing to do is to take the whole subject out of the realm of mystery, unreality, fantasy, and awe, and make it the object of cool thought and, if possible, of scientific experiment. We have too long been accustomed to speak of the dead in a vague, dreamy, unreal way. A future life can only mean the actual going on of the human being in spite of the incident called "death."

The science of the present day, in hypothecating atoms as the ultimate constituents of matter, confesses that it does not know what an atom is. Even in relation to the world of sense, it is confessedly true that the ideal world, or world of consciousness, is immeasurably more vital than what is usually called the world of matter. Huxley himself affirms that the inner world of consciousness is the only one we know at first hand, — that the external world is only an inference from our sensations.

The illustration requires a little close thought. We hear the sound of a bell, but, in the exciting cause, there is nothing like the sound of a bell. Certain waves of air- in themselves only forms of motion - produce in us as sound, something wholly different from what they themselves are. We are not conscious of the waves of air, but only of the effect produced on us. This will show what science means when it says that we are more directly certain of states of con ciousness than of states of matter.

351