o be employed
against it? And by what other means than through the intervention of
your senses, by which you read his pages,--your imagination, by which
you seize his illustrations,--your intellect, by which you comprehend
his arguments, did he reclaim you, as you say he has done, from many
of your ancient errors? How else, in the name of common sense, did he
get access to your soul at all?"

"I cannot pretend to defend Mr. Newman's consistency," said he, "in
his various statements on this subject. I acknowledge I am even puzzled
to find out how he did convince me, upon his hypothesis."

"Are you sure," said I, laughing, "that he ever convinced you at all?
However, all your perplexity seems to me to arise from supposing the
spiritual powers of man to act in greater isolation from his other
powers than is conceivable or even possible. Not apart from these,
but in intimate conjunction with them, are the functions of the soul
performed. The divorce between the 'spiritual faculties' and the
intellect, which your favorite, Mr. Newman, has attempted to effect,
is impossible. It is an attempt to sever phenomena which coexist in
the unity of our own consciousness. I am bound in justice to admit,
that there are others of our 'modern spiritualists' who condemn this
attempt to separate what God hath joined so inseparably. Even Mr. Newman
does practically contradict his own assertions; and outraged reason
and intellect have avenged his wrongs upon them by deserting him when
he has invoked them, and left him to express his paradoxes in endless
perplexity and confusion. But this conversation is no bad preface to
some observations on this important fallacy, (as I conceive,) which
I have appended to the paper I have read, and, with your leave, I
will finish with them." They assented, and I proceeded.

It is very common for philosophers, spiritual and otherwise, to be
guilty of two opposite errors, both exposed in the first book of the
Novum Organum. One is, that of supposing the phenomena which they
have to analyze more simple, more capable of being reduced to some
one principle, than is really the case; the other, that of
introducing a cumbrous complexity of operations unknown to nature.
It is unnecessary here to adduce examples of the last; quite as
frequently, at least, man apt to be guilty of the first. He imagines
that complex and generally deeply convoluted phenomena he is called
to investigate are capable of being more summar