striving to look towards a light that blinds, or to
gaze into a darkness that bewilders, the smaller
order of speculative minds are ready to take up
with all sorts of theories which empirics put forth
as capable of solving difficulties which more
patient and more humble souls acknowledge to be
too much for them. Some are ready to grasp—in
their desire to know—at the miserablest
delusions, and so will lend themselves to follies which,
but for their blasphemous pretensions, one could
be content to treat with silent contempt.

Any attempt to report on the exact state of
our public constitution, would be incomplete
without some mention of so remarkable a
symptom as the spiritual credulity which has of
late years manifested itself in a certain portion
of the community.

Between the viler kinds of magnetic imposture,
as shown in pretended clairvoyance and
the like, and the more recent spiritualistic
deceptions, there seems some affinity. At all
events, what Horatio said of the King of
Denmark's funeral, and his widow's marriage, will
apply here—"it followed hard upon." The
history of this small national disease, which
happily never spread very far, though it was,
where it existed, very virulent, is told in a dozen
words. Certain persons, with a view to their
own advancement and to the acquirement of
gain, came from America and elsewhere, giving
themselves out as able to hold communication
with another world, and also to be the media
through which other and less gifted persons
could hold intercourse with deceased friends,
and others whose career in this world was
ended. The persons who went over to this
faith were of four classes. First, the
professional charlatan, who made money by it; secondly,
the amateur, who made notoriety by it; thirdly,
the immense class who half-consciously and
half-unconsciously assisted the professional or
amateur impostor; lastly, the very weak and
credulous, whose throats and powers of swallowing,
were large out of all proportion to their
brains and capabilities of discerning. The result
of this combination of forces—or of weaknesses
—may be easily imagined. The professional
medium, as representing class No. 1, makes hay
while the sun shines (in the eyes of his victims);
the amateur medium, representing class No. 2,
becomes a remarkable person, gets soon
committed to more than he or she at first intended,
and goes on from small impostures to greater;
the willing self-deceivers of the third class are
ready to lend themselves to anything that will
keep the fiction going, shutting their eyes
tightly to everything that could undeceive
them; and class No. 4 goes on swallowing and
swallowing more and more, until its throat
becomes a perfect cavern of size and profundity to
swallow anything.

Being present at one of these spiritual sittings
—which I attended, less with the expectation of
seeing anything wonderful than with the desire
to speak with some authority on the matter—I
was requested to write down the name of a
deceased friend, introducing it among other names,
seven or eight—any names—people I knew,
people I did not know. It occurred to me that
any person versed in the laws of probability would
never think it likely that I should put the name
to be guessed, first on the list. I therefore wrote
the name of my deceased friend—with some
reluctance—at the top of a slip of paper, and
under it I wrote six or seven other names, John
Robinson, Thomas Smith—what not. About the
middle of my list I inserted the name of a public
character recently dead, a name known to every
one, the name of a person whom the medium
might very well suppose to have been an
acquaintance of my own. The list was handed to
the medium, who glanced down it and gave it
back to me, requesting that I would take a
pencil and go down the list, touching each name
with the pencil as I passed it. I touched the
first name, that of my friend, and there was no
response from the table; I touched the second,
the third, and still silence; but the moment my
pencil touched the name which, be it remembered,
was the only name on the paper which the
medium knew to be that of a deceased person,
there was a volley of raps: so confident were
the spirits that this was the name I had thought
of. One instance such as this, is as good as a
dozen. But I may add that the professional
gentleman who failed most dismally in this
particular and in every particular on the occasion
in question—who could succeed in nothing when
he was attentively watched by five persons
seated in his own room at his own table: of
which five persons the writer was one, the
Conductor of this journal another, and M. ROBIN of
the Egyptian Hall a very dangerous third—had
been trumpeted about London as the most
wonderful of all the wonderful mediums ever
wondered at.

It has been still in considering the things that
we do not know, that we have stumbled upon
this subject: it being in sheer impatience of our
littleness in knowledge of the unreal that some
of us have lent ourselves to this miserable
nonsense—have believed that the dead could be
summoned from their solemn rest by showmen, and
that being so summoned they would take our
upholstery into their confidence, and through it
reveal the most preposterous trifles.

And if in the things that we cannot know,
"our littleness" is conspicuous, so is it in an
eminent degree with regard to the things that
we cannot do. All that mass of machinery, so
marvellous in its power, so unerring in its
accuracy, which shakes the very girders at the
Great Exhibition—what is it for? To carry our
bodies from place to place, to shift us hither and
thither on the earth's surface, to twist the lumps
of cotton-wool into strings, and then plait those
strings together, till a web is made with which we
may cover us. It can plait woollen strings
together as well as cotton, and make a carpet for
our feet. It can lift the water from the low-lying
lands, and drain them for our use. It
can bore through the Alps, or carry a thought
a hundred miles in an electric flash, or give the
fulness (sometimes the emptiness) of a mind to
the world, on paper. But it cannot give health,
or a quiet mind, or a fair exterior. It cannot