FROM MATTER TO SPIRIT.*

Tilts book is by an anonymous author, and the preface, by a different hand, is also anonymous ; but as we happen to know the writer of the preface well, and know him to be a man not only of the highest probity, but of very high intellectual power, and have, at least, much more than a good guess at the author, we have read it with a groat deal more interest and curio- sity than most of the accounts of marvels of which so many have been recently published. For of this we can feel certain,— the facts are not fraudulently narrated: whatever errors there are in them must be due either to the carelessness of the author, or, if to fraud at all, the fraud of others than the author•. We do not, indeed, give any higher credit to the so•called revelations of the spiritual world here made, than to previous ones of the same order ; they are equally monotonous, childish, and gaudy. There is to us the earns sort of horrible satiety in reading marvel after marvel here as there is in all these so-called spiritual writings,— of which the effect upon us always is to inspire profound thankful- ness that earth is not like that,—and a warm preference for the great arena of human society, with its politics, its law, its litera- ture, its dramatic traits, its great strifes, its beautiful scenery, its wonderful scientific problems, and its subduing faiths effmveseing with long imprisoned thought and sentiment, to the monotonous lambs, and angels, and roses, and ladders, and gates, and gold and silver and precious stones, and all the rest of the common-place symbolism which the different mediums repeat and repeat till, if we could only credit it, we should shudder at the prospect of exhausting our spiritual life on the interpretation of all this gaudy celestial emblazonry. Fortunately for us we have no belief that earth is really fuller of large and substantial interests than the world beyond the grave,—we have no fear that God has ex- hausted all that is great and various on this life, as the spiritual- istic books would tend to teach. But no doubt it takes away a great deal from the interest of facts, however well attested, of this nature, to find that they culminate, as it were, in this sort of thing: — " At length she exclaimed, 'Now I see !' and described the vision, which was written from her own words. see a church of emeralds ; an altar, over which is a beautiful bright light, and a steeple, illumi- nated. The pavement is inlaid, and of the richest colours. A great deal ofsurple, but no black. The deepest colour, that which would have been black, is blue. The ends of the pews are arched, and all of precious stones. Now I see a number of people coming. There is so much purple about them. They have loose robes of purple. They appear to have formed ranks on each side, and a number of beautiful children are come, all in white, with wreaths held up over their heads. They pass up the church and are kneeling before the illuminated part, which 18 a tower rather than an altar. Now I see a beautiful altar, not a crescent. The top is inlaid with marble of beautiful colours, highly polished. The windows are purple and gold. In the centre of each window is a large precious stone ; it is as large as a dinner-plate. Tho first is bright gold, the second is ruby or carbuncle, the third is bright blue. Now I see them (the people) all going up the immense tower. What a height 1 It makes me giddy to look at it ! Now they have wings, and I see them all in the air. There is a bright circle, and they have passed through it. They are all gone into heaven. Everything is dissolving, and a bright light coming again. Where the illuminated tower stood I see the cross of Christ, and beside it stands our Saviour. Oh! how beautiful, He looks ! pointing upwards towards His cross 1"

Instead of bringing Christ nearer to us, this sort of vision seems to us, we confess, to make Him far less real, both to the conscience and the heart. It is like substituting a child's gaudy paintings of scenes from the New Testament for the impression which the simple narrative engraves upon the memory.

But we admit that it is not fair to judge the marvels, as marvels, by the poverty of the fruits. If there be any truth at all in these " spiritualistic" phenomena, the excessive childish- ness of the results may be due to the want of capacity iu the so- called mediums. Supposing the fact of mediumship be in any degree true, and the writer of the preface to this book, Mr. "A. B.," should ever himself become a " medium," whatever that may mean, we might find, instead of purple angels, emerald churches and carbuncled windows, that we should gain a new philosophy of periodic stars, or a new grasp of the principle of gravitation in its higher developments. We are concerned at

• From ➢falter to Spirit. The Result of Ten Years' Experience in Spirit Manifesta- tions; intended as a Guide to Inquirers. By " C. D." With a Preface by " A. B." Longman. present not with the moral yield of these new phenomena, which seems to us as yet nil, or a negative, if not an imaginary, quan- tity, but with their reality and probable cause. The writer of the preface says most truly :— " Suppose a person wholly new to both subjects, wholly =drilled both in theology and in physics. He is to choose between two assertions, one true and one false, and to lose his life if he choose the false one. The first assertion is that there are incorporeal intelligences in the uni- verse, and that they sometimes communicate with men ; the second is that the particles of the stars in the milky way give infinitesimal per- manent pulls to the particles on our earth. I suspect that most, even among those who have all existing prepossessions, would feel rather puzzled to know which they would have chosen, had they been situated as above described."

We know very well which of the two we should have chosen,

and ninety-nine out of every hundred persons too ; it would not have been the Newtonian hypothesis ; but then, /z priori,

probability is but little guide to truth.

The first and the only important fact which we are inclined to think established, so far as the authority of a very intellectual, accurate, and truthful observer can establish anything,—is an occasional power in persons of certain temperament, usually

called clairvoyance when produced by mesmerism, which enables them in particular states of exalted nervous power to read literally the thoughts of those present with them, and sometimes to follow the minutest actions of those at a distance. Thus the " A. B." of the present volume, whose testimony on such a point we

should think final, tells us that one evening, when Mrs. Hayden (the first celebrated American medium) "came alone" to his house, the so-called spirit of a deceased friend announced himself, and was asked by " A. B." " whether he remembered a certain review which was published soon after his death, and whether he could

give me the initials of an epithet (which happened to be in five words), therein applied to himself." In answer, not only was the

right series of initials rapped out along the alphabet, but some-

thing more also ;—which "A. B." had not expected to be rapped out, and was not looking for (though it was, perhaps, in his mind), namely, the initials also of the first three words of the sentence,—words preceding the epithet—i. e., the initials of his de- ceased friend's name, and of the word " the " as well as the initials

of each word in the epithet itself. Mrs. Hayden, the medium, was seated six feet from " A. B. ;" a bright table lamp was between them, and the alphabet used by "A. B." was further hidden by a book, so that, says " A. B.," she " could neither see my hand nor my eye, nor at what rate I was going through the letters." This story, if true (and to such a fact it is difficult to imagine better testimony than "A. B.'s ''), must imply,

at least, a power in the medium not only to make the

raps (which may be easy) ; but to read off the sentence that was running in "A. B.'s" head, and rap out its ini- tials. If " A. B.'s " account be accurate, the letter he first expected was " F," and he was near pronouncing the experi- ment a failure because he did not get it, but got " C. D.," the ini- tials of his Mend's name, and " T," the initial of the word " the," before " F," the initial of the first word in the epithet. The story

is one exceedingly hard to believe, but we know two things harder —either that " A. B." has told a wilful falsehood ; or th at by mere accident eight letters out of the twenty-six, all previously fixed

by the conditions of the question, should have been assigned in the right order,—against which the presumption would have been some thousands of millions. Possibly it may be thought that, in spite of the obstacles, the manner of" A.B." may have told an acute eye when to rap; but as regards the first three letters, at least, this possibility seems to be disposed of by his own different expectations. lf, however, there be no illusion in the story, it seems obvious that the explanation of it which implies Mrs. Hayden's power to read "A. B.'s" mind, marvellous as it is, is much more likely than the strictly spiritual explanation. "A. B." tells us that the review in question was written in 1817, just thirty-six years

before the séance, and published after the death of the person therein described. Now, it is certainly either a curious compliment to terrestrial literature that a spirit should sedulously peruse and

master it after his entrance into another life,—a circumstance, however, which would be exceedingly natural if the blue and gold visions of the mediums gave any true impression of the desolateness of intellectual life there,—or else, the spirit in question must have been individually a good deal given, like Lord Brougham, to the intellectual vanity of hunting up all the post- humous descriptions of him that had appeared. We should prefer

to suppose that the one mind certainly present in that room, and certainly master of the knowledge in question, was somehow the

source whence the knowledge was drawn, than to assume that a departed spirit had read the reviews of his own writings published after his death, and remembered distinctly a single sentence in one of them. The question remains quite unsolved as to the rapping power. "A. B." gives a curious piece of evidence as to the strange character of the raps, which, like all his evidence as to plain facts, we must think unimpeachable :-

" The raps began in the usual way. They were to my ear clean, clear, faint sounds, such as would be said to ring, had they lasted. I likened them at the time tothe noise whichthe ends of knitting-needles would make if dropped from a small distance upon a marble slab, and instantly checked by a damper of some kind; and subsequent trial showed that my description was tolerably accurate. . . . At a late period in the evening, after nearly three hours of experiment, Mrs. Hayden having risen, and talking at another table while taking refreshment, a child suddenly called out, Will all the spirits who have been here this evening rap together ?' The words were no sooner uttered than a hailstorm of knit- ting-needles was heard, crowded into certainly less than two seconds ; the big needle sounds of the men, and the little ones of the women and children, being clearly distinguishable, but perfectly disorderly in their arrival."

When we remember that Mrs. Hayden "came alone" to his house, this is sufficiently extraordinary.

Another story, seeming to us to establish clairvoyance from a distance, and resting on the same authority, is told here. It is a story we have long been familiar with, and as we happen to know

who was the person visited as well as the visitor, though not the

clairvoyante employed, it impresses us more than it will the ordinary reader. In this instance, however, the clairvoyance

was attributable directly to mesmerism, and not to spiritual agency of any sort which had not at that time been discovered. The feat performed (related p. 47-8) was simply that the clairvoyants followed " A. B." in her

trance to a house with which " C. D.," the present author, her mesmeriser, was not acquainted, described minutely and

truly the company present, the furniture, and the position of "A. B." in the room, and asserted that " A. B." was, at a

moment specified, pointing at " C. D." (the mesmeriser), and looking at herself, the clairvoyante. The clairvoyante then added,

" Now the other gentleman has fetched a lady, and the lady has joined them, and they are all three talking together." At that moment,—so we are told, it was afterwards ascertained—" A. B." was recounting to his friend some of this clairvoyante's achieve- ments under the mesmeric influence of "C. D.,"—and the gentleman bad called to his wife to come and hear what was said. We cannot resist the testimony to this curious fact. Indeed, one of the editors of this journal has himself verified a mesmerized clair- voyante's power of discerning everything he asked her to discern, among things whether distant or near, which was already clear to his own imagination at the moment ; but in this case the clair- voyante's power failed exactly where his own knowledge failed, the clairvoyante being quite unable to discern that of which he him- self was ignorant, though anxious to be informed. Still it does not follow that this curious exaltation of the faculties should always produce like results in different patients. In some cases it may give a great power of thought-reading, in another, of discerning things distant. That some such occasional power really exists we have little or no doubt.

But from this to the spiritualist's hypothesis is a long step, of which the present book, though we believe heartily that it is written in good faith, quite fails to convince us. One of the most curious stories, as told by a witness, whom, however fanciful, we really believe thoroughly honourable, we will quote, given on the author's own personal knowledge. The author does not appear to be a " completely developed " medium, and tells no visions of her own (we say "her own," because she speaks of entering " my nursery," in a style in which only a lady would speak) ; but she relates on her own authority a curious experiment

on her friend Miss L., of whom she says, " My acquaintance with her has lasted thirteen years. She readily wins, and never, to my knowledge, has lost the confidence of those who know her."

Very soon,' she says, after the discovery of Miss L.'s power in writing [as a medium], her hand with mine on it (it would not move without) was guided to write :—" I could show myself to you if you would look in the crystal." ' This crystal, says the author, is an egg-shaped piece of clear glass, which mesmerizes, or aids to mesmerize, or at least to throw into a peculiar condition, the nerves of vision. Miss L., we are told, gazed into the crystal, and did see the form of the deceased relative, who professed to have moved her hand, which it is easy enough to believe she would do. But after this Miss L. described herself as " seeing" or "being in" a lovely park, and as recognizing a group of which she mentioned three whom she knew, and one whom she did not know, and whom, she said, " they are bringing here, and seem to

wish to introduce him to us." " She then described very minutely," says the author, " the features and expression, in- cluding a peculiar mode of shutting the eyes, of the person she saw. Strange to say, I had no idea who the spirit was, and puzzled myself for some time with attempts to conjecture,—but in vain." The next morning a " writing medium" revealed to the author, " C. D.," who the unknown and formerly well-known person was,—one who had died three or four months before, and whom she had well known. And the author determined to experi. ment on Miss L., to test at once the truth of her vision and of the " writing medium's " report. Let her continue in her own words :— "I remembered a good photograph of him which had been carefully locked up as a treasure, and which Miss L—, who since I received it had only visited me on the one occasion when she looked in the crystal, had never seen. There was no name attached to the photograph. One evening, when I expected a visit from Miss L—, I laid this framed photograph, and another of a friend of hers which is in a case, on the table. They were in the midst of a quantity of books, papers, and work, and looked as if they had been placed there accidentally. Miss L — sat down by the table, and after a very few sentences had passed between us, her attention was drawn to the likeness in the frame. Will you excuse me ?' she said, taking it up ; ' but I think I know this face. I must have seen this gentleman here.' No, you have not. He has not been here for many years. You did not know him, I think. Look at this other photograph of —.' She looked, said it was like, but could not forget the first. I am certain I have seen that face somewhere. Did he belong to the ---?' (an institution in which she had been interested). No, indeed.' She was evidently unconvinced, and though apparently trying to turn her attention to other things, could not keep it from the photograph. After some time she exclaimed, 'Now I know that picture! That is the new spirit whom I saw in the crystal! Did not I tell you his eyes and hail wore ?' &c., &c., pointing out the characteristic trait she bad remarked.'

This is a type of the kind of story in which,—if we could absolutely depend on the accuracy as well as fidelity of the author,—there is the nearest approach to a presumption, to use the language of " A. B.," of " some combination of will, intellect, and physical power which is not that of any of the human beings present." But all conviction on this head must necessarily wait for personal experience,—and to us, hitherto, it has happened that every attempt to get first-hand evidence of such facts as these has invariably failed. Whatever be the ex- planation of these curious phenomena, we are persuaded that much more will be found to depend on the mind of the medium, and much less on the assumed external agency, if there be any such external agency at all, than is at present supposed. Even this author very candidly admits that style, spelling, even mode of thought, varies completely with the different mediums, even when the so-called dictating spirit is the same,—and is, to use a mathematical phrase, a "function of the medium," rather than of the supposed spiritual agency. She regards the medium as a sort of coloured glass, which stains the spiritual light with its own hue. We are glad to agree with her cordially thus far,— the uncertain point being whether there is any independent spiritual agency left, after allowing for this highly colouring medium which might not be otherwise explained. Certainly, the melancholy spirit who explains at such length in one part of this book how awfully dull it is in the other life would exactly express our own views, unless these roses, and angels, and emeralds, and rubies, and so forth, be the fictions of the medium's poverty-stricken imagination, and not really the tedious intel-

lectual symbolism into the midst of which we are there to be plunged.