It must be confessed that there is something very suggestive of trickery, and of silly trickery, in the attempts made from time to time by the spirits to flatter into good-humor the anti-spiritualistic critic of the company; as when Professor Tyndall was dubbed "Poet of Science,"[196] and when Dr. Edmunds' portrait was given in such glowing colors that, except in the character of a sceptic, he would have been ashamed to reproduce it (Report). Again, that something like systematic trickery has sometimes been attempted would seem to be established by the very remarkable evidence of Mr. W. Faulkener Surgeon (Rep., p. 125): "He said that for years he had been in the habit of supplying magnets for the production of rapping sounds at spiritual séances.... Some of these magnets—as, for instance, the one he had brought with him—were made for concealment about the person; while others were constructed with a view to their attachment to various articles of furniture.... He had never himself fitted up a house with these magnets, and he only knew of one house, Mr. Addison's, that is so fitted up. He also stated that he had not supplied any of these magnets for two or three years."

As regards the company's predisposition to believe in spiritualism, I admit that a sufficient predisposing reaction against materialism has taken place, giving room for a man to constitute what "Sludge" calls

"Your peacock perch, pet post
To strut, and spread the tail, and squawk upon,
Just as you thought, much as you might expect,
There be more things in heaven and earth, Horatio."

Nay, I admit that the following fiercely graphic catalogue of the medium's patrons only sins by omission:

1. "Fools who are smitten by imaginary antecedent probabilities.

2. ... "their opposites
Who never did at bottom of their hearts
Believe for a moment—men emasculate,
Blank of belief, who played, as eunuchs use,
With superstition safely.

3. "The other picker-up of pearl
From dung-heaps, ay, your literary man,
Who draws on his kid gloves to play with Sludge
Daintily and discreetly; shakes a dust
Of the doctrine, flavors thence he well knows how
The narrative or the novel—half believes
All for the book's sake, and the public stare,
And the cash that's God's sole solid in this world.

4. "There's a more hateful kind of foolery—
The social sage's Solomon of saloons
And philosophic diner-out, the fribble
Who wants a doctrine for a chopping-block
To try the edge of his faculty upon;
Prove how much common sense he'll hack and hew
In the critical minute 'twixt the soup and fish:
These were my patrons...."

And far stronger than any such predispositions is the intense and widespread feeling, so pathetic even in its uncouthest manifestations, to which Dr. Edmunds refers (Rep., p. 57): "Prior to the experience gained in this inquiry, I never realized the vast hold which the supernatural has upon mankind. Minds which have broken away from the commonplace lines of faith, and thrown overboard their belief in revealed religion, have not cast out the longing after immortality." And I may add, that when all religious assurance of what the soul must needs desire is absent, the longing for some visible, palpable witness becomes proportionably intenser. And so just now, from the very lack of faith, there is an exceptionally vehement desire that some one should come with unmistakable credentials from beyond the grave, and make us see, and feel, and know what we cannot help longing for; and it is difficult to say to what extent the wish may not be father to the thought.

I admit that all this constitutes an adverse momentum of antecedent probability. But, after all, spiritualists, as a whole, are not persons who have given any indications that this yearning has so wholly overbalanced their critical faculty as to make them incompetent witnesses. Moreover, we have, as witnesses to spiritualistic phenomena, not merely the spiritualists proper, but persons who, as regards the predominance of this sentiment, are their extremest opposites—viz., the advocates of psychic force. It must be admitted that these persons are either without the yearning for evidence of a future life, or at least hold it in complete subordination to the critical faculty.