the smallest degree, has led me to suppose that
a Spirit can be, as it is termed, materialized. It is superfluous to add
that I never recognized a materialized Spirit; in only two instances
have any Spirits professed to be members of my family, and in one of
those two instances, as it happened, that member was alive and in robust
health, and in the other a Spirit claimed a fictitious relationship,
that of niece.

Of course this assertion applies only to those Spirits who materialized
especially for me. I do not pretend to answer for Spirits who came to
other people. All that I am quite sure of is that all the Spirits who
singled me out from the circle, and emerged from the Cabinet for my
benefit, were not only abundantly 'padded round with flesh and fat,' but
also failed utterly in any attempt to establish their individuality; and
moreover, in the instances where I had seen the Medium before she
entered the Cabinet, so closely resembled the Medium as, in my eyes, to
be indistinguishable from her.

It is, I confess, a very puzzling problem (it is, in fact, the problem
to which I alluded above) to account for the faith, undoubtedly genuine,
which Spiritualists have in the personal reappearance of their departed
friends. Again and again have I asked those who have returned, from an
interview with a Spirit at the Cabinet, to their seats beside me,
whether or not they had recognized their friends beyond a peradventure,
and have always received an affirmative reply, sometimes strongly
affirmative. I was once taken to the Cabinet by a woman and introduced
to the Shade of her dead husband. When we resumed our seats, I could not
help asking her: 'Are you _sure_ you recognized him?' Whereupon she
instantly retorted, with much indignation, 'Do you mean to imply that I
don't _know_ my _husband_?' Again, at another seance, a woman, a
visitor, led from the Cabinet to me a Materialized Spirit, whom she
introduced to me as 'her daughter, her dear, darling daughter,' while
nothing could be clearer to me than the features of the Medium in every
line and lineament. Again and again, men have led round the circles the
Materialized Spirits of their wives, and introduced them to each visitor
in turn; fathers have taken round their daughters, and I have seen
widows sob in the arms of their dead husbands. Testimony, such as this,
staggers me. Have I been smitten with color-blindness? Before me, as far
as I can detect, stands the very Medium h