Mis-spelling explained.-Drugs, &c.-Nervous epidemics.

not the fact. Cases are on record of mis-spelled communications coming through mediums who could spell correctly, much to their chagrin.a But even if the fact were as claimed, it might be accounted for either by supposing that illiterate mediums attracted illiterate spirits, or by supposing that spirits, in order to communicate, are obliged partially to incarnate themselves in the body of the medium, and to take on, in part, its organic and mental habits.

So also of the influence of drugs, manipulations, dis

eases

The pneumatic theory is, that as the soul may by these means be assisted, or disabled, in the use of its own brain, so disembodied spirits may, in the use of an invaded brain. When the odylic conditions are by these means prepared, the spirit can insinuate itself; when they are by these means destroyed, it is compelled to forego its hold. So in regard to nervous epidemics. The theory is, that these may exist without the agency of disembodied spirits. But that when they exist, developing proper odylic conditions, spirits may be expected to take advantage of them. Hence, to find cases of nervous epidemics, where no indications of spiritual agency are apparent, proves nothing, except that the odylic conditions were not favourable.

a A striking instance of this is given in The Spiritual Telegraph. New-York, Charles Partridge. No. 84. "What manner of Spirit?"

Scepticism is unphilosophic.-Isaac Taylor.

While, then, the pneumatic hypothesis accounts for all the facts adduced by the other theories, as well as they, it also accounts naturally for other facts by which they are embarrassed. It is, therefore, probably the true hypothesis. And before rejecting it, let that saying of Isaac Taylor's be well pondered, that we ought not to reject the almost universal belief of occasional supernatural interference till we can prove an impossibility. "An absolute scepticism on this subject can be maintained only by the aid of Hume's oft-repeated sophism, that no testimony can establish an alleged fact which is at variance with common experience; for it must not be denied that some few instances of the sort alluded to rest upon testimony in itself thoroughly unimpeachable; nor is the import of the evidence in these cases at all touched by the now wellunderstood doctrine concerning spectral illusions."a

Now the apneumatic argument virtually implies an impossibility of establishing the reality of spiritual communication by any amount of evidence. Suppose a departed spirit, the wife of Oberlin for example, were permitted to attempt to converse with her husband-not to establish a new revelation, not to display divine power, but merely to exercise such potentiality as might pertain to a disembodied spirit, for her own

a Physical Theory of Another Life, p. 215.

Apneumatism implies that pneumatic evidence is impossible.

and her husband's edification and satisfaction. How could she do it, in the face of the apneumatic theories under consideration? She speaks to him, moves his furniture, touches his dress, his person ;—all automatic action of some brain en rapport with that locality. She sings, plays the guitar or piano, takes a pencil and writes, and he sees the pencil in free-space tracing his wife's autograph;-automatic still. She shows him a cloudy hand-nay, a luminous form, and smiles and speaks as when in life; that is an optical illusion, or hallucination, or a particle exhaled from her body has impinged on his sensitive brain, and created a subjective vision. She communicates facts, past, present, and future, beyond the scope of his knowledge; that might be clairvoyance or cerebral sensing. Alas! then, what could she do more? She must retire baffled, and complaining that he had become so scientific that all communication with him was impossible.

But if the denial of the pneumatic hypothesis be unphilosophical, it is no less unscriptural.

Chap. VI.-Nature of the "demon" of the Greeks.-Jamblichus.

CHAPTER VI.

TRANSITION TO SCRIPTURE ARGUMENT.

By way of transition, it may be well to consider a moment Traverse Oldfield's strange idea that the Greek daμwviov was nothing but the nervous principle; and to give a little prominence to the ancient universal belief touching converse with the dead, for it is in the light of that belief that the language of the sacred writers may be best understood. Let us hear one into whom seems distilled the quintessence of Egyptian and Chaldee, not to say Hebrew, Greek, and Roman, doctrine on this matter.

a

JAMBLICHUS, perhaps, had read those valuable manuscripts, on curious arts, burned at Ephesus in Paul's day, and those two volumes by Chrysippus, afterward edited in one by Diogenes Babylonius, in two by Antipater, and in five by Posidon, of which Cicero speaks. Thus infiltrations of ancient occult lore, percolating clear

a Ac. 19:19-valued at some say $7,500, others $28,000.

b De Divinatione, lib. i. ch. 4.

Ancient Egyptian "mediums," like the modern.

of sediment through manifold mental strata, sparkle at last in this Coelo-Syrian cave. The arch-pagan, Porphyry, it seems, had written a sceptical letter to an Egyptian priest, Anebo, filled with sly questions on divination. Jamblichus, his own disciple, answered it in the work before us. After describing the epiphanies of the seven orders of superior beings, he thus speaks of the effects on the mediums.

"Some are agitated throughout the whole body, others in some of their members, others, again, are entirely quiet. Sometimes there are pleasing harmonies, dances and according-voices, and sometimes the reverse. Again, the body either appears taller, or larger, or is borne aloft through the air, or is affected by the opposite of these."a

From the characteristics here and elsewhere noted by this author, it is evident that the "mediums" now are like those of the remotest antiquity.

Did Jamblichus, then, writing in the name of all antiquity, imagine these phenomena to result merely from a disturbance of the nervous principle? "If prophecy be only the liberation of the diviner part of the soul," he answers, "or a sequestration or intensification of mind, or a more forcible and exaggerated

a Jamblichus, De Mysteriis. Oxonii, E. Theatro Sheldoniano, A. D. 1678. Sec. iii. c. 5.