Perception of strong indications, more than twenty years ago, that keen intelligence wielding strange power was evolving before human senses, raps, table-tippings, and the like,--which intelligence, if properly invoked and treated, might become one's helpful teacher,--induced the author to use as well as possible each occurring opportunity for increasing his acquaintance with the strange visitants, not doubting that in the end he should gain wherewith to instruct and benefit both himself and his fellow-men, enough, and more than enough, to richly compensate for whatever loss of caste, favor, or reputation his course might occasion. During his well-meant, protracted, and reverential searchings along the faintly twilighted borders of spirit-land, ever and anon he has been catching glimpses of laws, forces, conditions, and agents, which earth-born beings--the embodied and the disembodied--can, and limitedly now do, conjointly use for reciprocal communings, and for mutual helps toward improvement, elevation, and bliss--for social, intellectual, moral, and religious growth. He means _mutual_; for those who have escaped from the flesh are helped by intercommunings with mortals. The reward is ample.
His immediate topic is only witchcraft; but light which he seeks to make bear on that, penetrates below all perceptible phenomena, down to the question which underlies all others pertaining to man's highest interest, viz., Does _animism exist_? Or, in other words, is there in nature, or in God, or anywhere, an animating principle, which, having had individualizing connection with an organized material form, will retain its consciousness and individuality after that connection shall have been dissolved? Who but visible or audible spirits, proving themselves to be such, can give decisive response to that momentous question? Who but they can stop the advance of and effectually cripple that growing materialistic faith which laughs at and tramples over everything save _demonstration_,--demonstration either scientific or sensible,--but is at once and permanently palsied when it encounters that? Man knows of none else who can.
The world as yet is little conscious of the real nature, power, and worth of spiritualism, or of its own need of help obtainable from no other perceptible source. Therein lies enfolded not only charity and justice for our remoter fathers, and correction for later commentators upon them, which may be brought forth and applied in the present work, but also PROOFS of man's survival beyond the tomb.