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Thus the first ten years of the society's existence were marked by few positive results, the most important being the statement of the case for telepathy and of its possible relationships to apparitions and hauntings, as well as to the purely psychical phenomena of spiritualism.
It had been continually urged as an argument against the claims of Modern Spiritualism, first, that it shunned the light and clave to 'dark' circles; secondly, that it was over-sensitive on the subject of 'sceptics. Surely, we are all sceptics in the sense of investigators. The most pretentious disciple of Spiritualism does not claim to have exhausted the subject.
The movement they thus set on foot gradually grew into the vast fabric of modern spiritualism, and though it would perhaps be unfair to hold the originators of the scheme directly responsible for many of the results which have followed, we must admit that they have achieved their purpose to the extent of converting vast numbers of people from a belief in nothing in particular to a firm faith in at any rate some kind of future life.
Josephine let down her back hair dowdily, partook recklessly of poetry and pickles, read inordinately in bed, leaning all night on her elbow, and was threatened with spinal curvature and spiritualism. Adelaide set invisible little traps in every nook and cranny, every cupboard and drawer, from basement to attic, and with a cheerful, innocent smile sat watching them night and day.
In discussing them we touched upon modern spiritualism, and I made some joking allusion to the impostures of Slade, upon which, to my surprise, he warned me most impressively against confusing the innocent with the guilty, and argued that it would be as logical to brand Christianity as an error because Judas, who professed that religion, was a villain.
The term spiritualism has come to signify more than has usually been ascribed to it, for some recent authors are now using the term to denote a neurosis or nervous affection peculiar to that class of people who claim to be able to commune with the spirits of the dead.
Science has all along had to combat such wresting of its more obscure and unexplained facts into alliance with the ends of practical quackery, fraud, and superstition; and psychologists need just now to be especially alive to their duty of combating the forms of this alliance which arise when the newer results of psychology are so used, whether it be to supplement the inadequate evidence of "thought-transference," to support the claims of spiritualism, or to justify in the name of "personal liberty" the substitution of a "healer" for the trained physician.
Blessed are those who can speak, I say. But don't you see from this how I must want "spiritualism" above most persons? Now let me be ashamed of this egotism, together with the rest of the weakness obtruded on you here, when I should rather have congratulated you, my dear friend, on the great crisis you are passing through in America.
Of the three aspects under which it is possible to view spiritualism, the scientific, the theological, and the social, I shall not touch at all on the first since I am not a scientific man; shall only glance at the second, because this is not the place for a theological discussion.
Many of the most remarkable testimonies to the truth and validity of spiritualism have been obtained through this phase of mediumship, and it is the aim of all investigators to witness, and of most mediums to be the channel of the production of, this remarkable phase of mediumistic phenomena.
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