be satisfied as well as the latter; that it was so with all
his faculties, none of which acted in isolation; that however
hunger might prompt to food, he never took what his senses of sight
and touch told him was sand or gravel; that if he indulged love, or
pity, or anger, it was only as the senses and the imagination and
the understanding were busied with objects adequate to elicit them;
that if beautiful poetry excited emotion, it was only as he understood
the meaning and connection of the words. "And what else are you doing
now, while urging me to realize by direct 'insight,' by 'gazing' on
'spiritual truth,' and so forth, the things you wish me to realize,
--I say what are you doing but appealing to me, through these same
media of the senses and the imagination, by rhetoric and logic? How
else can you gain any access to my supposed 'spiritual faculties'?"
I replied, that even the spiritualist did that,--he endeavored to
convince men, I supposed. "Yes," he replied, laughing, "because he
is privileged doubly to abuse logic at one and the same time; to
abuse it in one sense as a fallacious instrument of religious conviction
in the hands of others, and to abuse it in another sense, as an
instrument of fallacious conviction in his own. But you are not so
privileged."

Harrington insisted on the fact, that the whole thing was a delusion;
I might appeal, he said, if I thought proper, to any faculties, or
rudiments of faculties, he possessed, spiritual or otherwise; but he
really could not pretend even to comprehend one syllable I said, if
I denied him the use of his understanding. I might as well, and for
the same reasons, appeal to him without the intervention of his senses,
--for his "soul" could not be more different from his "intellect" than
from them. "Besides," he continued, "I know you do not imagine that any
spiritual faculty acts thus independently of the intellect; and
therefore you are only mocking me."

I thought it best to cut my cable and leave this unsafe anchorage.

I told him that, as he doubted whether man had any distinctly marked
religious and spiritual faculties, while I affirmed that he had,
--although he was quite right in supposing that I did not believe that
they acted except in close conjunction with the intellect,--it made
it difficult to hold any discourse with him. Doubting the Bible, he had
also learned to doubt that doctrine of human depravity, which he once
thought harmonized--and I stil