William Tennant Gairdner

“ But, still, in my career instances have come to my knowledge, and it was in consideration of all these that I was led to attempt to formulate a few nights ago the state of my mind upon the subject by saying—and it is something like a distinct, and I think not an untrue and unintelligible definition—that I call the state of mind of people inclined to spiritualism a diseased condition of the family of wonder. I hold that the faculty of wonder, or reverence, if you like to call it so, is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The state of mind of the persons who come prepared to believe these things—who come to the investigation of them with previously established ideas, who regard doubt or hesitation as I would say, a sin, but let us rather say an error, and a sure way of keeping manifestations back, while openmouthed credulity is the only frame of mind in which to come to the investigation; the state of mind of such persons—who, I believe, may be numbered in thousands, and possibly in millions, in this country and in America—is, to my idea, a diseased state of mind. ”

“ It would have entirely destroyed that system of law by which we know that, in a way which is absolutely wonderful and absolutely inscrutable, spirit does communicate with matter, as we know, every day of our lives in this world. ”

“ There is nothing to hinder, so far as we know the laws of this newly invented spirit world— [2] there is nothing to hinder any disembodied spirits who are about from getting access to the paper, and having it published in the newspapers. ”

“ 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 knowing it, perhaps for a nefarious purpose. You write a document of the most private character; you shut it up in a locked drawer; it affects the character of many persons ”