heir conclusions and in some instances of
very great intellectual force, have taken an opposite view. They have
felt the testimony to be both sound and sufficient. There is an
unescapable personal equation here which probably finally determines
divergent attitudes. As has been said before, those generally who have
accepted the spiritistic explanation have been led to do so through
communications in which they discovered some personal note or touch, to
which they themselves would be hospitably susceptible and which would
have far less weight with those whose affections and previous
associations were not thus involved. This does not necessarily prove
their conclusions to have been false. Perhaps just this personal element
is necessary to give final meaning to what otherwise is so perplexing
and even contradictory. The dogmatism which shuts the door squarely in
the face of spiritism is as unreasonable, as unscientific, as the
credulity which opens the door wide and accepts everything which comes
through.

_The Influence of Spiritism Upon Its Adherents_

There are other considerations which bear more or less indirectly upon
this difficult matter, but which have their weight. In general, those
who have whole-heartedly accepted spiritism have been unable thereafter
to maintain the balanced detachment which they urge upon others. They
tend to become unduly credulous; they force their explanation beyond its
necessary limits; they tend to become persons of the idee fixe type;
they become sponsors for extravagant stories, and, in general, lead
those who are influenced by their position or name far beyond the limits
which impartial investigation, even on the part of those sympathetic,
has as yet justified. Those descriptions of the discarnate state,
moreover, which reach us through mediums are undependable.

There is a machinery of planes and spheres and emanations and
reincarnations which is not at all peculiar to spiritism but belongs to
the fringes of the occult in every manifestation of it, which is
perpetually recurrent in modern spiritualistic literature. We are on the
frontiers of a region where the reason which steadies us in the
practical conduct of life and guides us in an order with which we are
familiar through age-old inheritances, has no value at all. Our very
terminology ceases to have any meaning. A generous creative imagination
may build for itself what cities it will of habitation, furnish them as
it desires