orded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal
possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and
productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar
individuals over persons and things in their neighborhood. We suppose
that 'mediumship' {301} originated in Rochester, N. Y., and animal
magnetism with Mesmer; but once look behind the pages of official
history, in personal memoirs, legal documents, and popular narratives
and books of anecdote, and you will find that there never was a time
when these things were not reported just as abundantly as now. We
college-bred gentry, who follow the stream of cosmopolitan culture
exclusively, not infrequently stumble upon some old-established
journal, or some voluminous native author, whose names are never heard
of in _our_ circle, but who number their readers by the
quarter-million. It always gives us a little shock to find this mass
of human beings not only living and ignoring us and all our gods, but
actually reading and writing and cogitating without ever a thought of
our canons and authorities. Well, a public no less large keeps and
transmits from generation to generation the traditions and practices of
the occult; but academic science cares as little for its beliefs and
opinions as you, gentle reader, care for those of the readers of the
Waverley and the Fireside Companion. To no one type of mind is it
given to discern the totality of truth. Something escapes the best of
us,--not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist.
The scientific-academic mind and the feminine-mystical mind shy from
each other's facts, just as they fly from each other's temper and
spirit. Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity with
them. When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the
academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to
interpret and discuss them,--for surely to pass from mystical to
scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity; but on
the other hand if there is {302} anything which human history
demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary
academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present
themselves as wild facts, with no stall or pigeon-hole, or as facts
which threaten to break up the accepted system. In psychology,
physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate between the mystics and the
scientifics has been once fo