In regard to this subject, as to the others, the spiritualists are fond of saying:
“If you refuse to admit the agency of spirits, the majority of these phenomena are absolutely inexplicable.”
Agreed; nor do we pretend to explain them, for hardly anything is to be explained upon this earth. We are content simply to ascribe them to the incomprehensible power of the mediums, which is no more improbable than the survival of the dead and has the advantage of not going outside the sphere which we occupy and of bearing relation to a large number of similar facts that occur among living people. Those singular faculties are baffling only because they are still sporadic and because but a very short time has elapsed since they received scientific recognition. Properly speaking, they are no more marvellous than those which we use daily without marvelling at them: our memory, for instance, our understanding, our imagination and so forth. They form part of the great miracle that we are; and, having once admitted the miracle, we should be surprised not so much at its extent as at its limits.
Nevertheless, to close this chapter, I am not at all of opinion that we must definitely reject the spiritualistic theory: that would be both unjust and premature. Hitherto, everything remains in suspense. We may say that things are still very little removed from the point marked by Sir William Crookes, in 1874, in an article which he contributed to the _Quarterly Journal of Science_:
“The difference between the advocates of Psychic Force and the Spiritualists consists in this—that we contend that there is as yet insufficient proof of any other directing agent than the Intelligence of the Medium, and no proof whatever of the agency of Spirits of the Dead; while the Spiritualists hold it as a faith, not demanding further proof, that Spirits of the Dead are the sole agents in the production of all the phenomena. Thus the controversy resolves itself into a pure question of _fact_, only to be determined by a laborious and long-continued series of experiments and an extensive collection of psychological _facts_, which should be the first duty of the Psychological Society, the formation of which is now in progress.”