Part of a Stereoscopic pair of Spirit Photograph obtained by a Lady October 21 1893.
The results of Mr. Taylor’s investigations are a prophecy and a lesson. A prophecy of the coming time when photographs of our friends, who have passed from earth-life, may be obtainable by the co-operation with us of spirits who desire to help us, and who will find opportunities and conditions to enable them to do so. When Mr. Stead’s proposal for a spiritual bureau becomes an accomplished fact, we may hope, and may reasonably expect, that spirit photography will be a department of it. Many strange events, which, fifty years ago, seemed as unlikely, are now of frequent occurrence. Mr. Taylor’s experiments are a lesson, as well as a prophecy. A lesson to the materialistic spirit of the age, to guide by new paths to old truths. The materialism of to-day is dogmatic and active; it claims science as its handmaid, it boasts that it has sounded the universe and found in it nothing but the material husks of existence, that all spiritual beings are nonentities—the product of diseased brains—of superstitious minds; its scholars have explored space from star to star and have learned that there is no God; that man passes at death into cold oblivion, into blank nothingness. To use the language of its leading teachers:—“Unprejudiced philosophy is compelled to reject the idea of an individual immortality, and of a personal continuance after death. With the decay and dissolution of its material substratum, through which alone it has acquired a conscious existence and become a person, and upon which it was dependent, the spirit must cease to exist!”
Again:—“Experience and daily observation teach us that the spirit perishes with its material substratum; that man dies.”
And:—“There never has been, and never will be, a real apparition, which could make us believe or assume that the soul of a deceased individual continues to exist: it is dead, never to return.”
And once more:—“Spirits and ghosts are only seen by diseased or superstitious individuals.”