ld him the whole story. He declared the contrariness
manifested by the medium to be entirely characteristic of Turner, and
had the drawing in question down for examination. We scrutinized it
closely, and both recognized beyond dispute that the drawing had been
executed in the way that Miss A. indicated. Ruskin advised me to send
an account of the affair to the "Cornhill," which I did; but it was
rejected, as might have been expected in the state of public opinion
at that time, and I can easily imagine Thackeray putting it into the
basket in a rage.

I offer no interpretation of the facts which I have here recorded,
but I have no hesitation in saying that they completed and fixed my
conviction of the existence of invisible and independent intelligences
to which the phenomena were due. The question of the identity of these
intelligences--which we may, without prejudging their nature,
leaving that to be determined by more complete experiences, consider
_disembodied_--with the persons in the flesh whose names they use, is
one on which I have great difficulty in forming a conclusion, though,
as a rule, my experience in "circles" has been that the imposture was
too gross to deceive a person of ordinary intellectual power. The two
cases which I have related in the foregoing pages are the only ones in
which I have ever been able to find the color of an identification,
and of the probability of this I leave the reader to judge. More on
the internal than on the external evidence, I consider the probability
in the two cases narrated to be in favor of the identity; beyond that
I am unwilling to go.

Of the actuality of a disembodied and individual being which, for want
of more intelligence of its nature, we call a "spirit," I have no more
doubt than I have of my own embodied and individual existence. If,
to my philosophic and skeptical critics, this is an indication of
intellectual weakness, and excites contempt of my faculties, I cannot
help it. I will be honest with myself and the world, have the courage
of my convictions, and take the consequences; and I am of the opinion
that, if all the cultivated minds which, having studied the subject,
agree with me in my conclusions were to be as frank as I am, there
would be a large body of witnesses in accord with me. If the inference
of a disembodied intelligence, as the source of such phenomena, is
difficult of acceptation, that of fraud and collusion is inadmissible,
and that of hall