1895. Passion and reason, the parents of will, are properties as manifest as those which, surrounding a centre, give to it that idea of a central force which indicates the presence of material atoms, though it does not constitute them, as I have urged.
1896. The existence of vis inertiæ, gravitation, and chemical affinity, is not more evident as properties of ponderable matter than reason and passion and consequent will are of mind; nor is will less evidently the offspring of reason and passion, than momentum is of vis inertiæ and gravitation. The existence of these attributes of mind is as evident as is the existence of those of ponderable matter, and the incomprehensibility of their origin or mode of operation should no more be an obstacle to belief in the former case than in the latter.
1897. Nothing is more thoroughly fundamental and essential in the doctrine inculcated by revelation than the omnipotency of the will of God. According to Scripture, the whole heaven and earth, and all that is in them, sprung into existence in consequence of the fiat of the Deity, whose will, under the designation of “overruling providence,” is alleged to regulate every thing, even to the fall of a sparrow, or the advent of a pestilence. It follows that the suggestions which I have made respecting the powers of mind are perfectly orthodox, so far as the mind of the Creator is concerned; and as, according to orthodoxy, man is made after God’s own image, however humble and minute may be the being so made, his mind, so far as it exists, must be, within the sphere allotted to it, existing upon an analogous footing to that of its author. The idea of all things coming from the creative power of God as the first cause, involves the existence of the divine-will power, of the first cause; and consequently, beings endowed with an analogous will, must, so far as they have any available existence, be endowed with will-power, of which the potentiality may be more extensive in spirits than in mortals.
1898. It is because there is no other imaginable power which can be productive of the rationality of the universal creation, that forms the great argument for assuming the will of a reasoning Deity to be the cause of causes. Vain were it to appeal to any irrational force under the name of odylic, or any other, to explain the divine attributes on which this argument reposes. In like manner, the assailants of Spiritualism cannot find any nominal force, whether new or old, which can explain the rationality of the results which I have submitted to the public in this book, as coming from the minds of my spirit friends.
Of Spirit independently, or as distinguished from Mind and Matter.
1899. It has been alleged above, that three ideas must exist in the conception of every rational being; nihility, mind, matter.
1900. Mind is distinct from matter in its usual acceptation; but it also differs from nihility. There are some attributes common to mind and matter; since they cannot be considered as nothing, they must both be something. Therefore, the word thing applies to either, and thing is sometimes received as synonymous with matter. But between these two kinds of things, mind and matter, we have an intermediate thing called spirit, which is sometimes confounded with mind. In its original sense, this word merely denoted a thin or refined matter, such as air, wind, breath. In chemistry, it has been applied to every thing obtained by distillation, as, for instance, spirit of wine, spirit of salt, spirit of nitre, of vitriol, spirit of turpentine.[44]
1901. Hence, by analogy, when the mind of a mortal, after death, was seen, or supposed to be seen, in a shadowy form called a ghost or shade, it was conceived to be the spirit or essence of the mortal body which it had inhabited. It was the body which the mind took or kept for its integuments after abandoning its perishable mundane casket, as the spirits are wont to call the carnal body.
1902. It is difficult for us mortals to conceive of mind without such a spiritual body. Yet, agreeably to information from my spirit friends, the substances of which the bodies, the country, and habitations of spirits are constituted, seem to have the attributes of materiality no less than the substances of which the bodies, the territory, and the habitations of mortals are constituted. Their spiritual substances perform for them the same offices as our material substances do for ours, yet it is expedient to distinguish them by different appellations, and those cited here have been sanctioned by custom at least as far as the time of St. Paul, or when these words in Genesis were first used: “The spirit of God moved on the surface of the water.”
1903. Hence, the words materialism and materialist have been made synonymous with unbelief or unbeliever in a future state of spiritual existence.