the spiritual world any more than in the physical world. That is beside my argument. My argument at present is simply this, that within the realm of law, clearly understood as such, there is food for the faculty of wonder in all its legitimate aspirations far more enduring, far greater, and far grander than anything that can be developed in the way of those communications of table-turning, table-rapping, or anything of that kind. And the instance I gave was just one out of endless instances—to try and conceive of the manner in which the spirit of man, that which he knows to exist, and, in fact, to be himself—his ego—communicates through his nerves with his muscles—how it is capable of being so minutely directed that along the lines of nervous communication it will arrive at a particular muscle or particular group of muscles, and perform all the complicated muscular acts which we know to be the physical and tangible results of the manifestations of our spirit. In other words, the most commonplace appearance of a spirit that you can name—the most every-day manifestation in the world, and that which we are most certain of in our own consciousness—is, when you come to think of it, an absolute and perfect mystery, which only becomes comprehensible to us because we know it to be a fact, and because it lies within the divine order of things. It is physiological. What spiritism or spiritualism appears to require of us is, that having got our every-day consciousness of this matter for wonder—having got all this marvelous adaptation of spirit to matter—having a set of thoroughly organized and thoroughly known channels by which the spiritual world is revealed in the material, and by which the Great and Supreme Spirit is enabled to reveal himself to every one of us—having, I say, got the absolute proof and evidence in our own souls and our own bodies of a set of laws appertaining to this matter, what spiritualism requires of us to do is to cast aside the whole of these laws, and to admit a set of interferences, not exceptional, not for grand and very, very exceptional objects, but a set of every-day constant interferences with the law of the action of spirit and matter—as such, known to all of us—interferences which are not only not in accordance with that law, but which are absolutely subversive of the ordinary results of that law. Just let us suppose this: Suppose it proved, once for all, that the spirit of a departed person—a disembodied spirit, a spirit that is wandering in space, a spirit which is not limited by the conditions of material investment—has the power to appear to you, and to reveal to you what is being done or written, or has been done by some friend of yours on the other side of the globe, or who has passed beyond the grave, and that it has had access to documents no mortal could have seen, what appears to be the necessary consequence of this doctrine? This, among others, that no scrap of writing—that no single act that a man does could be concealed, or at least could be perfectly sure of being concealed, from his neighbor—from any man who may have the greatest possible interest in know-
