But Mr. Crookes denies that he ever took Katie King for a disembodied spirit. What was it then? If it was not Miss Florence Cook, and his word is our sufficient guarantee for it—then it was either the spirit of one who had lived on earth, or one of those that come directly under the sixth theory of the eight the eminent scientist offers to the public choice. It must have been one of the classes named: “Fairies, Kobolds, Gnomes, Elves, Goblins, or a Puck.”[114]
Yes; Katie King must have been a fairy—a Titania. For to a fairy only could be applied with propriety the following poetic effusion which Mr. Crookes quotes in describing this wonderful spirit:
“Round her she made an atmosphere of life;
The very air seemed lighter from her eyes;
They were so soft and beautiful and rife
With all we can imagine of the skies;
Her overpowering presence makes you feel
It would not be idolatry to kneel!”[115]
And thus, after having written, in 1870, his severe sentence against spiritualism and magic; after saying that even at that moment he believed “the whole affair a superstition, or, at least, an unexplained trick—a delusion of the senses;”[116] Mr. Crookes, in 1875, closes his letter with the following memorable words:—“To imagine, I say, the Katie King of the last three years to be the result of imposture does more violence to one’s reason and common sense than to believe her to be what she herself affirms.”[117] This last remark, moreover, conclusively proves that: 1. Notwithstanding Mr. Crookes’s full convictions that the somebody calling herself Katie King was neither the medium nor some confederate, but on the contrary an unknown force in nature, which—like love—“laughs at locksmiths;” 2. That that hitherto unrecognized form of Force, albeit it had become with him “not a matter of opinion, but of absolute knowledge,“the eminent investigator still did not abandon to the last his skeptical attitude toward the question. In short, he firmly believes in the phenomenon, but cannot accept the idea of its being the human spirit of a departed somebody.
It seems to us, that, as far as public prejudice goes, Mr. Crookes solves one mystery by creating a still deeper one: the obscurum per obscurius. In other words, rejecting “the worthless residuum of spiritualism,” the courageous scientist fearlessly plunges into his own “unknown limbo of magic and necromancy!”