Special Observations.
These experiments are only a repetition and absolute confirmation of those that have been described all through this volume, from its very first pages. Yet they are enough in themselves alone to justify one's convictions.
This first sub-committee, the principal experiments of which we have been giving, was studying only physical phenomena. Sub-committee No. 2 was more especially occupied with intelligent communications and mediumistic dictations. They need not detain us here, but will find their place in a special work on Spiritualism.
The same committee published in its general report the following letter, which it did me the honor of requesting:
I must confess to you, in the first place, gentlemen, that, of those who call themselves "mediums" and "spiritists," a considerable number are persons of limited intelligence, incapable of bringing the experimental method to bear on the investigation of this order of phenomena, and consequently are often the dupes of their credulity or ignorance; while others, of whom the number is also considerable, are impostors whose moral sense has become so blunted by the habit of fraud that they seem to be incapable of appreciating the heinousness of their criminal abuse of the confidence of those who apply to them for instruction or for consolation.
And even where the subject is being investigated seriously and in good faith, the force to which the production of these phenomena is due is so capricious in its action that much delay and disappointment is inevitable in the prosecution of any experimental inquiry in regard to them. It is, therefore, no easy matter to put aside the obstacles thus placed in the way of the serious inquirer, to eliminate these sources of error, and to get at genuine manifestations of the phenomena in question; carefully guarding one's own mind against all error, all self-deception in the methodical and scrupulous examination of the order of facts now under discussion. Nevertheless, I do not hesitate to affirm my conviction, based on personal examination of the subject, that any scientific man who declares the phenomena denominated "magnetic" "somnambulistic," "mediumistic," and others not yet explained by science, to be "impossible," is one who speaks without knowing what he is talking about; and also any man accustomed, by his professional avocations, to scientific observation—provided that his mind be not biased by preconceived opinions, nor his mental vision blinded by that opposite kind of illusion, unhappily too common in the learned world, which consists in imagining that the laws of Nature are already known to us, and that everything which appears to overstep the limit of our present formulas is impossible—may acquire a radical and absolute certainty of the reality of the facts alluded to.
After an affirmation so categorical, it is hardly necessary for me to assure the members of the Dialectical Society that I have acquired, through my own observation, the absolute certainty of the reality of these phenomena....
But although thus compelled, in the absence of conclusive data in regard to the cause of the so-called "Spiritual Phenomena," to refrain from making any positive affirmation in regard to this part of the subject, I may add that while the general assertion of its spiritual nature, on the part of the occult force which, within the last quarter of a century, has thus manifested itself all over the globe, constitutes a feature of the case which, from its universality, merits the attention of the impartial investigator—the history of the human race, from the earliest ages, furnishes instances of coincidences, previsions and presentiments of warnings experienced in certain critical moments, of apparitions more or less distinctly seen, which are stated, on evidence as trustworthy as that which we possess with regard to any other branch of historical tradition, to have occurred, spontaneously, in the experience of all nations, and which may therefore be held to strengthen the presumption of the possibility of communication between incarnate and discarnate spirits.
I may also add that my own investigations in the fields of philosophy and of modern astronomy have led me, as is well known, to adopt a personal and individual way of regarding the subject of space and time, the plurality of inhabited worlds, the eternity and ubiquity of the acting forces of the universe, and the indestructibility of souls, as well as of atoms.
The everlastingness of intelligent life ought to be regarded as the result of the harmonious succession of sidereal incarnations.