fter having made this exposition of my opinion concerning the
apparitions of angels, demons, souls of the dead, and even of one
living person to another, and having spoken of magic, of oracles, of
obsessions and possessions of the demon; of sprites and familiar
spirits; of sorcerers and witches; of spectres which predict the
future; of those which haunt houses--after having stated the
objections which are made against apparitions, and having replied to
them in as weighty a manner as I possibly could, I think I may
conclude that although this matter labors still under very great
difficulties, as much respecting the foundation of the thing--I mean
as regards the truth and reality of apparitions in general--as for the
way in which they are made, still we cannot reasonably disallow that
there may be true apparitions of all the kinds of which we have
spoken, and that there may be also a great number very disputable, and
some others which are manifestly the work of knavery, of
maliciousness, of the art of charlatans, and flexibility of those who
play sleight of hand tricks.

I acknowledge, moreover, that imagination, prepossession, simplicity,
superstition, excess of credulity, and weakness of mind have given
rise to several stories which are related; that ignorance of pure
philosophy has caused to be taken for miraculous effects, and black
magic, what is the simple effect of white magic, and the secrets of a
philosophy hidden from the ignorant and common herd of men. Moreover,
I confess that I see insurmountable difficulties in explaining the
manner or properties of apparitions, whether we admit with several
ancients that angels, demons, and disembodied souls have a sort of
subtile transparent body of the nature of air, whether we believe them
purely spiritual and disengaged from all matter, visible, gross, or
subtile.

I lay down as a principle that to explain the affair of apparitions,
and to give on this subject any certain rules, we should--

1st. Know perfectly the nature of spirits, angels and souls, and
demons. We should know whether souls by nature are so spiritualized
that they have no longer any relation to matter; or if they have,
again, any alliance with an aerial, subtile, invisible body, which
they still govern after death; or whether they exert any power over
the body they once animated, to impel it to certain movements, as the
soul which animates us gives to our bodies such impulsions as she
thinks proper