ped you as the essence or
elements of the flower. Still you may make a spectrum of it. And this
phantom, though in the popular superstition it is held to be the soul of
the departed, must not be confounded with the true soul; it is but the
eidolon of the dead form.

"Hence, like the best-attested stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing
that most strikes us is the absence of what we hold to be soul--that is,
of superior emancipated intelligence. They come for little or no
object--they seldom speak, if they do come; they utter no ideas above
that of an ordinary person on earth. These American spirit-seers have
published volumes of communications in prose and verse, which they
assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious
dead--Shakespeare, Bacon--heaven knows whom. Those communications,
taking the best, are certainly not a whit of higher order than would be
communications from living persons of fair talent and education; they
are wondrously inferior to what Bacon, Shakespeare, and Plato said and
wrote when on earth.

"Nor, what is more notable, do they ever contain an idea that was not on
the earth before. Wonderful, therefore, as such phenomena may be
(granting them to be truthful), I see much that philosophy may question,
nothing that it is incumbent on philosophy to deny--viz. nothing
supernatural. They are but ideas conveyed somehow or other (we have not
yet discovered the means) from one mortal brain to another. Whether, in
so doing, tables walk of their own accord, or fiend-like shapes appear
in a magic circle, or bodyless hands rise and remove material objects,
or a Thing of Darkness, such as presented itself to me, freeze our
blood--still am I persuaded that these are but agencies conveyed, as by
electric wires, to my own brain from the brain of another. In some
constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and those may produce
chemic wonders--in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and
these produce electric wonders. But they differ in this from Normal
Science--they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous.
They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed,
and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I
saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I
believe unconsciously to himself as to the exact effects produced, for
this reason: no two persons, you say, have ever told you that they
experienced exactly the same