Apparitions of living mortals-The spirit leaving the body during sleep and trance-The spirits of living mortals seen at distant places-Verification of spiritual travels at "both ends of the line"-Details of funerals seen in dream or trance-The materialised spirit of a living Methodist minister seen, recognised, touched, and heard by two witnesses-A human "double" seen by the Revd. Mr. Moore and another witnessThe spirit of Shelley seen by several persons during his lifeThe apparition of a living murderer seen in daylight by some of the Glasgow police-A spiritual interview between two unembodied Americans-Communion with the spirits of the living, the dying, and the dead through the clairvoyance of the wife of a New York physician-War news conveyed to the Baroness Von Vay by the spirit of a living man-Messages carried between London and New Zealand by living human spirits— Strange experiences of Prince Wittgenstein in relation to the evocation of the spirits of the living-A stranger story still Pp. 144-180

CHAPTER IX.

Hallucinations-Untrustworthy dreams and subjective impressions -Materialistic medical men do not understand the nature of some of the maladies with which they deal-False mental impressions may be given by mesmerism-How a susceptible young man saw an angel named Sarah Seabold-How Sarah Seabold inspired him to deliver trance speeches-An interview with Elijah the Prophet-How a policeman tried to converse on spiritual subjects and failed

CHAPTER X.

Pp. 181-200

The powers of the spirits of living mortals capable of being brought under experimental control-A real apparition produced by an experimental method-Words uttered by the lips of the bodies of sensitives, heard also at distant places where their apparitions were present-These powers capable of development to the stage of telegraphic utility-Possible future competition with deep-sea cables-The phenomena producible with moderate precision and certainty-The carriage of light objects between distant places by the spirits of living mortals--Impediments to the lowering of spiritual powers to materialistic and selfish purposes-The most fruitful direction for future experimental research in psychology-The trances of Andrew Jackson Davis and of Alfred Tennyson-General conclusions and remarks about the contents of this volume.

Pp. 201-220

SPIRITS BEFORE OUR EYES.

Chapter First.

THE OBJECTS AND METHOD OF THIS BOOK-ULTRA-MATERIALISM A NECESSARY REACTION FROM BLIND SUPERSTITION, BUT NOW PROBABLY AT ITS HIGHEST ALTITUDE -THE DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS OF ULTRA-MATERIALISM ON THE FINER ELEMENTS OF MAN'S NATURE-A REACTION FROM ABNORMAL MATERIALISM TAKING PLACE IN SOCIETY-THE MENTAL DEMAND FOR THE PLAY OF IDEALITY A NATURAL ONE, WITH MEANS IN THE UNIVERSE FOR ITS LEGITIMATE GRATIFICATION-KNOWLEDGE OF PHYSICS NOT THE HIGHEST ORDER OF INTELLECTUAL ACQUIREMENT-THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF INDIVIDUAL CERTAINTY OF THE REALITY OF A LIFE BEYOND THE GRAVE-ABUNDANT PHENOMENAL EVIDENCE OF THE REALITY OF A FUTURE LIFE OPEN FOR CRITICAL EXAMINATION.

AUTHENTICATED records of the occasional appearance of spirits in all ages are so numerous, and so many books have been written about apparitions, that, in spite of the rapid growth of modern Materialism, a vague uneasiness pervades the mind of the general public, that possibly a solid foundation of evidence exists in favour of the occasional visitation of mortals by the spirits of the departed. To those who have closely examined the evidence, the reality of apparitions is demonstrated; for those who have not made such investigation, strong testimony is scattered throughout this book, although the convincing of the uninformed on this point is not the object of the work.

A

My main object is not to add another to the already long list of books full of ghost stories, but to classify some of the authenticated apparitions of our own and past times, to examine the conditions under which the spirits of human beings are seen, to show that the spirit of man can sometimes temporarily leave the earthly body, and to seek to draw only those conclusions which well-proved facts warrant. Thus may laws and principles be deduced, to guide future explorers of the realm between the known and the unknown, in relation to spirit existence.

The present time, when Materialism is at its height, specially needs evidence of a life beyond the grave ; specially needs a scientific answer to the question"If a man die, shall he live again?" The pendulum of human thought has, I think, now reached the greatest limit of its swing in the direction of Materialism, in its useful recession from the opposite extreme of blind superstition; but no farther can it move in the present direction. Materialism has at last brought us to the sublime doctrine of the present orphanage of man and his future nonentity; it has given us a universe built up of a sea of interstellar ether, washing the boundaries of infinitely small atoms-a kind of small-shot-governed by natural law; and after conferring this legacy, leaves us without God and without hope, with nothing to gratify the aspirations of the human heart, nothing to satisfy either the emotional or the highest intellectual nature. Ideality has been trampled under foot in its march. At the present time we have few great poets, and the publishers in Paternoster Row are inclined to think any of their number

SOUL-DEGRADING EFFECTS OF CERTAIN TRIUMPHS. 15

mad who attempts to bring forward a new poet; the book trade will scarcely look at poetry, because the taste for it has been lost by the bulk of the public. Men, now-a-days, are too much engrossed in the hard, blind fight for material ascendancy, in which they ruthlessly destroy the finer elements of their own souls, and by habitual inversion of true affections are successful" in life at the cost of personal spiritual degradation. Materialism has degraded popular art-culture. What wealthy city on the face of the earth makes such a spectacle of itself, from an artistic point of view, as London, when judged by the sights and sounds in its streets? In the daily rush for material wealth or social precedence, a process of soul-degradation goes on, which may be forcibly arrested by demonstration that life does not end with the grave, and that what to ordinary minds may be a rational existence on the assumption of there being no hereafter, becomes the quintessence of folly when the reality of that future life is brought home to the consciousness. Imagine the position of a blear-eyed, decrepit mortal, who in gaining his worldly ends has crushed out everything in his own soul which entitled him to the name of man fancy him sinking into the grave to the delight of his children, who, in feeling joy at his departure, but act up to the principles he taught them: picture him on the other side of life entering the presence of six or seven of the noble and the great of past ages, with all those glories of the human spirit, which he had nipped in the bud in himself, developed to their highest degrees of expression-how beseechingly he would ask for some rat-hole to crawl into, some

channel whereby he could reach the desired "hell' inhabited by spirits of his own kind! By a voluntary act, he would enter infernal regions-infernal because peopled by individuals like himself, drawn together by a law of spiritual affinity, just as in chemistry certain different salts dissolved in one liquid without mutual decomposition, will form their own crystals, and not become entangled in the crystals of their neighbours. Everywhere close analogies exist between the laws and facts of physics and the laws and facts of spirit life. There is a tale that, at the ceremonial opening of the first International Exhibition in Hyde Park, the police directed every visitor to a particular seat, and made all the members of the swell-mob known to them sit alongside each other. Those men were not happy. So far as can be gathered from the utterances of spirits who return, they live among their own kind, and at first were made neither better nor worse by passing through the realm of the Angel, Death.

The present demand for some play for true affections, for some sphere for the healthy exercise of ideality, is not without expression. The Duke of Argyll, at the British Association meeting at Glasgow in 1876, lauded physicists to the skies, then asked in effect" But where are our great literary idealists ? Where are our great poets?" forgetting that the men before him had innocent blood on their hands, and that one of their functions had been to kill out ideality, poetry, and evidence of the existence and nature of the things of the spirit. The reaction of the time against coarse and vulgar realism is also seen in