many years' study of
spiritualism, I pause, and--so to say, empanelling a jury--ask the
question it seems I ought to answer at others' asking--Am I a
Spiritualist?

One word of apology further before entering on the details of the
matter. It will be inevitable that the first personal pronoun shall
recur frequently in the course of this paper, and that so the paper
shall seem egotistical. The very question itself sounds so. I am not
vain enough to suppose that it matters much to anybody here whether I am
a spiritualist or not, except in so far as I may be in any sense a
representative man. I believe I am. That is, I believe, nay, am sure,
that a great many persons go as far as I do, and stop where I stop.
There is a largish body of investigators, I believe, dangling there,
like Mahomet's coffin, between heaven and earth, and it would be a
charity to land them somewhere. Of the clerical mind, I do _not_ claim
to be a representative, because the clerical mind, qua clerical, has
made up itself that the phenomena in question are diabolical. Of course
if I accepted this theory my question would be utterly irrelevant, and I
should claim a place among the spiritualists at once. The diabolical
people not only accept the phenomena, but admit their spiritual origin,
and, more than this, identify the spirits. They are in point of fact the
most thorough-going spiritualists of all.

In sketching their creed, I have mentioned the three stages through
which most minds must go in this matter. Some few, indeed, take them by
intuition, but most minds have to plod patiently along the path of
inquiry, as I have done. The first stage is acceptance of the phenomena,
the second the assignment of those phenomena to spirits as their source,
the third is identification of these spirits.

1. On the first part of my subject I shall venture to speak with some
boldness. I am not a philosopher, therefore I can afford to do so. I
shall suppose my five senses to serve my purposes of observation, as
they would be supposed to serve me if I were giving evidence in a court
of justice. If I saw a table move, I shall say _it did_ move, not "it
appeared to move." I do this in my capacity of a commonplace instead of
a philosophical investigator; and I must say, if I were, as I supposed
myself just now, in the witness-box, with a good browbeating counsel
cross-examining me on this point, I would rather have to defend the
position of the commonplace inquirer