e floor, no one touching it, through a room where
there were at least a dozen persons sitting; and it was repeatedly
stopped within a few inches of me, when it was coming with a violence
which, if not arrested, must have broken my legs."

Of the phenomena classed under the head of spiritualistic three
explanations have been offered. One is that they are purely the result
of fraud in the mediums and self-delusion in the believers. A second is
that they are due to some unknown law and force of nature, the physical
manifestations being ascribed to a psychic energy of nervous origin, the
mental to _unconscious cerebration_. A third explanation is that they
are due to the action of disembodied spirits, who are able to return to
the earth and make their presence manifest in all the methods above
recounted. Of these explanations the first is that given by the general
public, and particularly by those who know nothing practically about the
subject, but have reached their opinions by their own inner
consciousness and without troubling themselves to investigate the facts.
That it does apply, however, to much of what is known as spiritual
manifestations there can be no doubt. Of frauds under the name of
mediums there has been an abundance. Of dupes under the name of
Spiritualists there has been an equal abundance. And the tricks of false
mediums have been so often detected as to throw a shadow of doubt over
everything connected with the asserted phenomena. Yet that it is not all
fraud has been abundantly proved by the testimony of the men above named
and many others of equal powers of discrimination, and by the occurrence
of numerous phenomena under circumstances that absolutely precluded
deception, either in medium or audience. To these cases one or other of
the second and third explanations must be given. Acceptance of the
third, that they are really the work of spirits, would of course settle
the whole business and explain all the phenomena in a word. But the
great body of critical observers are disinclined to accept this theory,
for the reason that many of the scientific class doubt the existence of
any spirit beyond the earth-life, that many of the religious class
question the possibility of freed spirits returning to earth, and that
many of an intermediate class consider the manifestations too puerile
and the mental communications given too unsatisfactory and too far below
the mental calibre of the professed speakers to be wo