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His father was Robert Dale Owen, the theorist and communist you may have heard of in England some years since. Years ago, in Naples, I visited Mr. Owen for the first time, and found him directing his attention to the phenomena of spiritism.
"I deny that the question of immortality is insoluble!" replied Clarke, his eyes glowing with the fire of his faith. "It is because you scientists ignore the phenomena of spiritism that you remain ignorant of the messages which come from the other side." "What other side?" "The realm of those you call 'the dead." He caught up a book.
As for the evocation of the dead, the mere thought that the butcher on the corner can force the soul of Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, to converse with him, would put me beside myself, if I believed it. Ah, no. Materialism, abject as it is, is less vile than that." "Spiritism," said Carhaix, "is only a new name for the ancient necromancy condemned and cursed by the Church."
He begins by saying: "All things considered, Mrs. Piper is probably the best 'psychic' now before the public for the scientific investigation of spiritualism and it must be admitted that if her alleged communications from discarnate spirits cannot be traced to any other source, the claims of spiritism have been confirmed."
The Influence of Spiritism Upon Its Adherents There are other considerations which bear more or less indirectly upon this difficult matter, but which have their weight. In general, those who have whole-heartedly accepted spiritism have been unable thereafter to maintain the balanced detachment which they urge upon others.
Those descriptions of the discarnate state, moreover, which reach us through mediums are undependable. There is a machinery of planes and spheres and emanations and reincarnations which is not at all peculiar to spiritism but belongs to the fringes of the occult in every manifestation of it, which is perpetually recurrent in modern spiritualistic literature.
According to his age or ability these speculations give us alchemy or chemistry, astrology or astronomy, magic or religion, spiritism or psychology, the were-wolf or psycho-analysis, phrenology or psychiatry, and so on.
This is the dilemma which spiritism is finally brought to face and from this dilemma there is absolutely no escape.
The ordinary physical phenomena of spiritism have almost without exception been duplicated by conjurers many of whom have mystifying tricks of their own no medium can duplicate and even the most unusual phenomena, such as Home's apparent ability to handle fire unburnt and his levitation can be paralleled in savage rites or the performance of Indian fakirs, to which no professedly spiritistic explanation is attached.
Thus we see that out of mythologic philosophy, as branches of the great tree itself, there grow ancientism, theistic society, spiritism, thaumaturgics, mythic tales, and religion. I shall now give a summary characterization of zoötheism, then call attention to some of the relics of hecastotheism found therein, and proceed with a brief statement of the higher stages of theism.
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