ficult. For reasons already touched upon, America
has been strongly predisposed to phases of public opinion which in their
intensity and want of balance have the generally accepted
characteristics of hysteria. Some of them have been religious, great
awakenings, revivals and the like. These in their more extreme form have
been marked by trances, shoutings and catalepsy and, more normally, by a
popular interest, strongly emotionalized, which may possess a real
religious value. Other religious movements have centered about the
second coming of Christ and the end of the world. Many of these peculiar
excitements have been political. The whole offers the psychologists a
fascinating field and awaits its historian.[70] Yet the result is always
the same. The critical faculty is for the time in abeyance; public
opinion is intolerant of contradiction; imposture is made easy and
charlatans and self-appointed prophets find a credulous following.
Movements having this genesis and history are in themselves open to
suspicion.

[Footnote 70: Sidis has a resume of Social Epidemics in part three of
his work on the "Psychology of Suggestion."]

_It Crosses to England and the Continent_

The American interest in Spiritualism from 1848 to 1852 belongs
distinctly to this region. The Fox sisters have been generally
discredited, but what they began carried on. In 1852 a Mrs. Hayden and a
little later a Mrs. Roberts introduced raps and table turnings to
England. There, and more particularly on the Continent, Spiritualism met
and merged with a second line of development which in turn reacted upon
American Spiritualism, and, in America, released movements on the
surface wholly unrelated to Spiritism. In France to a degree and in
Germany strongly Mesmerism lent itself to spiritistic interpretations. I
quote Podmore, who is commenting upon the trance utterances of a Mrs.
Lindquist: "It is to be noted that the ascription of these somnambulic
utterances to spirit intelligences was in the circumstances not merely
easy but almost inevitable. The entranced person was in a state
obviously differing very widely from either normal sleep or normal
wakefulness; in the waking state she herself retained no recollection of
what happened in the trance; in the trance she habitually spoke of her
waking self in the third person, as of some one else; the intelligence
which manifested in the trance obviously possessed powers of expression
and intellectual resourc