Büchner. “Ghosts and spirits have hitherto only been seen by children, or ignorant and superstitious individuals” (p. 152).
Reader. Did not Saul see the ghost of Samuel?
Büchner. “All that has been narrated of the visits of departed spirits is sheer nonsense; never has a dead man returned to this world. There are neither table-spirits nor any other spirits” (p. 153).
Reader. How can you account for such a singular assertion?
Büchner. “The naturalist entertains, from observation and experience, no doubt as to these truths; a constant intercourse with nature and its laws has convinced him that they admit of no exception” (p. 153).
Reader. This is not true. Naturalists, with their observation and experience of natural things, do not and cannot reject facts of a higher order, though they have not observed them. Their non-observation is no argument, especially when we have other witnesses of the facts, and when we know that the naturalists of your school are pledged to materialism, and therefore shut their eyes to the facts which oppose their theory. The majority of educated persons admit the facts; not indeed all the facts narrated, but many of them which no critical rule allows us to reject.
Büchner. Where are those facts? “The scientific impossibility of clairvoyance has been confirmed by an examination of the facts by sober and unprejudiced observers, and were proved to be deceptions and illusions” (p. 153).
Reader. Of course there are juggleries and impositions; but what of that? Would you maintain that there can be no doctors because there are quacks? I appeal to your logic.
Büchner. “The faculty of medicine of Paris many years ago took the trouble of submitting a number of such cases to a scientific examination; they were all proved to be deceptions, nor could a single case be established of a perception without the use of the senses. In 1837 the same academy offered a prize of 3,000 francs to any one who could read through a board. No one gained the prize” (ibid.)
Reader. You forget, doctor, that in 1837 spiritism was as yet most imperfectly known. It was only about ten years later that it developed throughout America and Europe. Let the medical faculty of Paris again offer a prize to any one who can read through a board; and no one doubts there would be no lack of competitors. When we see that physicians and others, owing to their own experience of spiritual manifestations, were compelled to repudiate their previous materialistic opinions; when we know that infidels by the same manifestations were brought to believe the immortality of the soul; when the learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the layman and the churchman, the diplomatist, the philosopher, and the theologian, bear witness to the reality of the spiritual phenomena, and are ready to bring forward innumerable facts [pg 182] in support of their affirmation, we do not care what the faculty of medicine of Paris may have pronounced many years ago. You say that the faculty “submitted a number of such cases to a scientific examination,” and that “they were all proved to be deceptions”; but you would be very much embarrassed to say in what that “scientific examination” consisted. On the other hand, the proofs of the deception have never appeared; and the simple truth is that the spiritual phenomena were à priori rejected, as clashing with the materialistic theory of the faculty. You pretend that “whenever the proper means were employed to prevent deception, clairvoyance was at an end” (p. 153). Such an assertion proves that you are completely ignorant of what is going on in the world, or that you are determined obstinately to ignore whatever could compel you to acknowledge the existence of spiritual substances.