er, surely, to stand upon dignity, and in a truly
conservative spirit (is it too late even now to reassume it?), say,
"These men are mediums, but it does not suit their pockets to confess
it."

Well, they are signs of the times. London loves to be mystified, and
would only have one instead of manifold methods to be so if the
spiritualists and conjurers were to strike hands, and reduce us all to
the dead level of pure faith or relentless reason and cold common
sense!

CHAPTER XLVI.

PROS AND CONS OF SPIRITUALISM.

It has been repeatedly urged upon me on previous occasions, and also
during the progress of these sheets through the press, that I should
make a clean breast of my own belief or disbelief in spiritualism; that
besides being descriptive, I should go one step beyond a mere catalogue
of phenomena, and, to some extent at least, theorize on this mysterious
and generally proscribed subject.

Let me say at the outset that against the proscription of this, or
indeed any topic which does not offend against morals, I would at the
very outset protest as the height of unwisdom. Thus to taboo a subject
is at once to lend it a factitious interest, and more than half to
endorse its truth: and I believe modern spiritualism has been very
generally treated in this way. Whether truth has gained by such
indiscriminate condemnation and prejudgment is, I think, greatly open to
question.

For myself, I have, from the first, steadily refused to look upon
spiritualism in this bugbear fashion. The thing was either true or
false--or, more probably still, partly true and partly false: and I must
bring to bear on the discovery of its truth or falsehood, just the same
critical faculties that I should employ on any other problem of common
life. That, I fancy, is no transcendental view of the matter; but just
the plain common sense way of going to work. It was, at all events,
right or wrong, the method I adopted to get at such results as I proceed
to make public. I declined to be scared from the study either by Bogey
or my esteemed friend Mrs. Grundy, but went at it just in the calm
Baconian inductive method in which I should have commenced any other
study or pursuit.

What I want to do is to tabulate these results in the same order as that
in which they occurred to me; and here I am met by a preliminary
difficulty, not incidental to this subject only, but common to any
narrative where we have to take a retrospective glance