ILLUSTRATIONS.
| PAGE. | |
| Fig. 1. Spirit Photograph, by the author | [Frontispiece] |
| Fig. 2. Portrait of Dr. Henry Slade | [47] |
| Fig. 3. The Holding of the Slate | [51] |
| Fig. 4. Slate No. 1 | [65] |
| Fig. 5. Slate No. 2 | [71] |
| Fig. 6. Slate No. 3 | [77] |
| Fig. 7. Home at the Tuileries | [97] |
| Fig. 8. Crookes’ Apparatus No. 1 | [116] |
| Fig. 9. Crookes’ Apparatus No. 1 | [119] |
| Fig. 10. Crookes’ Apparatus No. 1 | [120] |
| Fig. 11. Crookes’ Apparatus No. 1 | [121] |
| Fig. 12, 13, 14, 15. Crookes’ Diagrams | [124-125] |
| Fig. 16. Crookes’ Apparatus No. 2 | [126] |
| Fig. 17. Crookes’ Apparatus No. 2 | [127] |
| Fig. 18, 19, 20. Crookes’ Diagrams | [128-130] |
| Fig. 21. Hammond’s Apparatus | [133] |
| Fig. 22. The Davenport’s in their Cabinet | [139] |
| Fig. 23. Trick Tie and in Cabinet Work | [143] |
| Fig. 24. Charles Slade’s Poster | [158-159] |
| Fig. 25. Pierre Keeler’s Cabinet Seance | [162] |
| Fig. 26. Pierre Keeler’s Cabinet Curtain | [163] |
| Fig. 27. Portrait of Eusapia Paladino | [176] |
| Fig. 28. Eusapia before the Scientists | [177] |
| Fig. 29. Spirit Photograph, by the author | [191] |
| Fig. 30. Spirit Photograph, by pretended medium | [195] |
| Fig. 31. Sigel’s Original Picture of Fig. 30 | [199] |
| Fig. 32. Portrait of Madame Blavatsky | [215] |
| Fig. 33. Mahatma Letter | [221] |
| Fig. 34. Mahatma Envelope | [225] |
| Fig. 35. Portrait of Col. H. S. Olcott | [233] |
| Fig. 36. Oath of Secrecy of the Charter Members of the Theosophical Society | [235] |
| Fig. 37. Portrait of W. Q. Judge | [241] |
| Fig. 38. Portrait of Mrs. Annie Besant | [273] |
| Fig. 39. Portrait of Mrs. Tingley | [285] |
| Fig. 40. Autograph of Madame Blavatsky | [293] |
PREFACE.
There are two great schools of thought in the world—materialistic and spiritualistic. With one, MATTER is all in all, the ultimate substratum; mind is merely the result of organized matter; everything is translated into terms of force, motion and the like. With the other, SPIRIT or mind is the ultimate substance—God; matter is the visible expression of this invisible and eternal Consciousness.
Materialism is a barren, dreary, comfortless belief, and, in the opinion of the author, is without philosophical foundation. This is an age of scientific materialism, although of late years that materialism has been rather on the wane among thinking men. In an age of such ultra materialism, therefore, it is not strange that there should come a great reaction on the part of spiritually minded people. This reaction takes the form of an increased vitality of dogmatic religion, or else culminates in the formation of Spiritualistic or Theosophic societies for the prosecution of occult phenomena. Spiritualists are now numbered by the million. Persons calling themselves mediums present certain phenomena, physical and psychical, and call public attention to them, as an evidence of life beyond the grave, and the possibility of spiritual communication between this world and the next.
The author has had sittings with many famous mediums of this country and Europe, but has seen little to convince him of the fact of spirit communication. The slate tests and so-called materializations have invariably been frauds. Some experiments along the line of automatic writing and psychometry, however, have demonstrated to the writer the truth of telepathy or thought-transference. The theory of telepathy explains many of the marvels ascribed to spirit intervention in things mundane.
In this work the author has endeavored to give an accurate account of the lives and adventures of celebrated mediums and occultists, which will prove of interest to the reader. The rise and growth of the Theosophical cult in this country and Europe is of historical interest. Theosophy pretends to a deeper metaphysics than Spiritualism, and numbers its adherents by the thousands; it is, therefore, intensely interesting to study it in its origin, its founder and its present leaders.
THE AUTHOR.
HOURS WITH THE GHOSTS.
INTRODUCTORY ARGUMENT.
“If a man die, shall he live again?”—this is the question of the ages, the Sphinx riddle that Humanity has been trying to solve since time began. The great minds of antiquity, Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle were firm in their belief in the immortality of the soul. The writings of Plato are luminous on the subject. The Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, as practiced in Egypt, and those of Eleusis, in Greece, taught the doctrine of the immortality of the individual being. The Divine Master of Arcane knowledge, Christ, proclaimed the same. In latter times, we have had such metaphysical and scientific thinkers as Leibnitz, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schleiermacher advocating individual existence beyond the grave.
It is a strange fact that the more materialistic the age, the deeper the interest in spiritual questions. The vitality and persistence of the belief in the reality of the spiritual world is evidence of that hunger for the ideal, for God, of which the Psalmist speaks—“As the heart panteth after water brooks so panteth my soul after Thee, O God!” Through the passing centuries, we have come into a larger, nobler conception of the Universal Life, and our relations to that Life, in which we live, move, and have our being. Granting the existence of an “Eternal and Infinite Spirit, the Intellectual Organizer of the mathematical laws which the physical forces obey,” and conceiving ourselves as individualized points of life in the Greater Life, we are constrained to believe that we bear within us the undying spark of divinity and immortality. Evolution points to eternal life as the final goal of self-conscious spirit, else this mighty earth-travail, the long ages of struggle to produce man are utterly without meaning. Speaking of a future life, John Fiske, a leading American exponent of the doctrine of evolution, says (“The Destiny of Man”): “The doctrine of evolution does not allow us to take the atheistic view of the position of man. It is true that modern astronomy shows us giant balls of vapor condensing into fiery suns, cooling down into planets fit for the support of life, and at last growing cold and rigid in death, like the moon. And there are indications of a time when systems of dead planets shall fall in upon their central ember that was once a sun, and the whole lifeless mass, thus regaining heat, shall expand into a nebulous cloud like that with which we started, that the work of condensation and evolution may begin over again. These Titanic events must doubtless seem to our limited vision like an endless and aimless series of cosmical changes. From the first dawning of life we see all things working together toward one mighty goal, the evolution of the most exalted spiritual qualities which characterize Humanity. The body is cast aside and returns to the dust of which it was made. The earth, so marvelously wrought to man’s uses, will also be cast aside. So small is the value which Nature sets upon the perishable forms of matter! The question, then, is reduced to this: Are man’s highest spiritual qualities, into the production of which all this creative energy has gone, to disappear with the rest? Are we to regard the Creator’s work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just for the pleasure of knocking them down? For aught that science can tell us, it may be so, but I can see no good reason for believing any such thing.”
A scientific demonstration of immortality is declared to be an impossibility. But why go to science for such a demonstration? The question belongs to the domain of philosophy and religion. Science deals with physical forces and their relations; collects and inventories facts. Its mission is not to establish a universal metaphysic of things; that is philosophy’s prerogative. All occult thinkers declare that life is from within, out. In other words life, or a spiritual principle, precedes organization. Science proceeds to investigate the phenomena of the universe in the opposite way from without, in; and pronounces life to be “a fortuitous collocation of atoms.” Still, science has been the torch-bearer of the ages and has stripped the fungi of superstition from the tree of life. It has revealed to us the great laws of nature, though it has not explained them. We know that light, heat, and electricity are modes of motion; more than that we know not. Science is largely responsible for the materialistic philosophy in vogue to-day—a philosophy that sees no reason in the universe. A powerful wave of spiritual thought has set in, as if to counteract the ultra rationalism of the age. In the vanguard of the new order of things are Spiritualism and Theosophy.
Spiritualism enters the list, and declares that the immortality of the soul is a demonstrable fact. It throws down the gauntlet of defiance to skepticism, saying: “Come, I will show you that there is an existence beyond the grave. Death is not a wall, but a door through which we pass into eternal life.” Theosophy, too, has its occult phenomena to prove the indestructibility of soul-force. Both Spiritualism and Theosophy contain germs of truth, but both are tinctured with superstition. I purpose, if possible, to sift the wheat from the chaff. In investigating the phenomena of Spiritualism and Theosophy I will use the scientific as well as the philosophic method. Each will act, I hope, as corrective of the other.