ave no intention of
troubling my present readers with any detailed rehearsal of the
phenomena which presented themselves. The testimony which my
observations during this period enabled me to offer has already more
than once been given to the world in print, and the catalogue of similar
and yet more extraordinary experiences has become too long, and the
witnesses to them too numerous and too well known to the public, for
such details to have any further interest at the present day. I feel
bound, however, to state that no amount of suspicious watching which I
was able to exercise in my house, and which Powers was able to exercise
in his, enabled us to discover any smallest degree of imposture, or fair
grounds for suspecting imposture, as regards the physical or material
phenomena which were witnessed. Such is my testimony, and such was that
of Powers, who, by his aptitude for inventing and understanding
mechanical contrivances of all kinds, was a man specially well fitted
for the task of watching the performance of such wonders. I have spoken
here, it will be observed, altogether of the _material_ and
_physical_ phenomena witnessed. As to what are called the spiritual
manifestations, Powers was perhaps not an entirely unbiased estimator of
these. He was an eminently sincere, earnest and zealous Swedenborgian,
and several of the leading tenets and dogmas of the Swedenborgian faith
are calculated to make such communications with the world of spirits as
Spiritualists claim to experience much less startling, less strange to
the mind and more acceptable, than they usually appear to other people.
To a Swedenborgian who is perfectly convinced that the spirits of the
departed are ever around him and interested in his welfare, it does not
seem a very strange or extraordinary thing that these visitors should
under certain circumstances be able to express the interest which they
always feel. Powers regarded all the professed manifestations of
spiritual communications from that stand-point, and was enabled to
accept them therefore somewhat more easily than another person might
have done. Yet, despite such predisposing proclivities, and though he
was disposed to think a great variety of professed communications from
the world of spirits to have been genuinely what they purported to be,
the habitual uprightness and truthfulness of Powers's mind led him, as I
believe I am justified in saying, to the conclusion that in the case
which I am