It is natural to suppose that prepossession of such intensity could occur only amongst the less intelligent and less discerning portions of mankind; but to a considerable extent, and certainly in sporadic instances, this is not the case. The distinguished naturalist who shares with Darwin the honor of contributing to modern thought the conceptions of evolution, in his ardent advocacy of Spiritualism, has recorded his assent to the belief that professional conjurers, performing at the Crystal Palace in London, could not accomplish their tricks without supernatural aid. With peculiar obliviousness to the double-edgedness of his remark, he writes: "If you think it all juggling, point out where the difference lies between it and mediumistic phenomena." The same prepossession renders him so impervious to the actual status of the evidence for Spiritualism as to permit him to record so preposterous a statement as the following: The physical phenomena of Spiritualism "have all, or nearly all, been before the world for twenty years; the theories and explanations of reviewers and critics do not touch them, or in any way satisfy any sane man who has repeatedly witnessed them; they have been tested and examined by skeptics of every grade of incredulity, men in every way qualified to detect imposture or to discover natural causes,--trained physicists, medical men, lawyers, and men of business,--but in every case the investigators have either retired baffled, or become converts." And in the latest utterances of the same authority the failure to credit the marvels of Spiritualism is put down along with the equal neglect of phrenology, as among the signal failures of our "wonderful century." If any further instances be required of the astounding effects of bias and prepossession in matters spiritualistic, the vast literature of the subject may be referred to as a sad but instructive monument of its influence.
The consideration of the effects of a prepossession in favor of a belief in spirit-agency leads naturally to a consideration of the origin of the belief. This tendency to believe in the return to earth of the spirits of the departed, is probably to be viewed as a form of expression of the primitive animism that dominates savage philosophy, that pervades the historical development of religion and of science, and that crops out in various ways throughout all grades of civilization and all levels of society. Combined with it is an equally fundamental love for the marvelous, and a more or less suppressed belief in the significance of the obscure, the mysterious, the occult. These belief-tendencies, accordingly, have an anthropological significance and an historical continuity which Mr. Lang thus presents: "These instances prove that, from the Australian blacks in the Bush, who hear raps when the spirits come, to ancient Egypt, and thence to Greece, and last, in our own time, and in a London suburb, similar experiences real or imaginary are explained by the same hypothesis. No 'survival' can be more odd and striking, none more illustrative of the permanence, in human nature, of certain elements. To examine these psychological curiosities may, or may not, be 'useful,' but, at the lowest, the study may rank as a branch of mythology or folk-lore." Mr. Tylor fully concords with this view: "The received spiritualistic theory," he says, "belongs to the philosophy of savages.... Suppose a wild North American Indian looking on at a spirit-séance in London. As to the presence of disembodied spirits, manifesting themselves by raps, noises, voices, and other physical actions, the savage would be perfectly at home in the proceedings; for such things are part and parcel of his recognized system of nature." Mr. Podmore's comment upon the spiritualistic hypothesis expresses a kindred thought. "As the peasant referred the movement of the steam-engine to the only motive force with which he was acquainted, and supposed that there were horses inside, so the spiritualists, recognizing, as they thought, in the phenomena the manifestations of will and intelligence not apparently those of any person visibly present, invoked the agency of the spirits of the dead. We can hardly call this belief an hypothesis or an explanation; it seems indeed at its outset to have been little more than the instinctive utterance of primitive animism."