he lamp of spirit photography. It is a path with a bad name, a path
infested with quacks and charlatans, and by false guides who rival the
religious fanatics in the impudence of their appeal to man's credulity.
Even those who bear the lamp I hold aloft are too often jugglers and
rogues, to whose wiles, unfortunately, the simple science of photography
lends itself all too readily. Nothing is easier than the production of
impossible pictures by a little manipulation of film or plate; if the
spiritual apparition is not to be enticed within range of the lens,
nothing easier than to fabricate an approximate effect. And what
spiritualist has yet succeeded in summoning spirits at will? It is the
crux of the whole problem of spiritualism, to establish any sort or form
of communication with disembodied spirits at the single will of the
embodied; hence the periodical exposure of the paid medium, the smug scorn
of the unbeliever, and the discouragement of genuine exploration beyond
the environment of the flesh. There is one moment, and only one, at which
a man may be sure that he stands, for however brief a particle of time, in
the presence of a disembodied soul. It is the moment at which soul and
body part company in what men call death. The human watcher sees merely
the collapse of the human envelope; but many a phenomenon invisible to the
human eye has been detected and depicted by that of the camera, as
everybody knows who has the slightest acquaintance with the branch of
physics known as 'fluorescence.' The invisible spirit of man surely falls
within this category. To the crystal eye of science it is not so much
invisible as elusive and intractable. Once it has fled this earth, the
sovereign opportunity is gone; but photography may often intercept the
actual flight of the soul."

"I say no more than 'often' because there are special difficulties into
which I need not enter here; but they would disappear, or at least be
minimised, if the practice received the encouragement it deserves, instead
of the forbidding ban of a sentimental generation. It would hurt nobody;
it would comfort and convince the millions who at present have only their
Churches' word for the existence of an eternal soul in their perishable
bodies. It would prove more, in the course of a few experiments, than all
the Churches have proved between them in nineteen centuries. Yet how are
my earnest applications received, in hospitals where men die dail