Gradually my mental health returned, and I
am now beyond all danger of ever again being led into such fatal
dissipations. The writing of this narrative, in fact, has been a test of
my ability to overlook and describe my experience without being touched
by its past delusions. If some portions of it should not be wholly
intelligible to the reader, the defect lies in the very nature of
the subject.
It will be noticed that I have given but a partial explanation of the
spiritual phenomena. Of the genuineness of the physical manifestations I
am fully convinced, and I can account for them only by the supposition
of some subtile agency whereby the human will operates upon inert
matter. Clairvoyance is a sufficient explanation of the utterances of
the Mediums,--at least of those which I have heard; but there is, as I
have said before, _something_ in the background,--which I feel too
indistinctly to describe, yet which I know to be Evil. I do not wonder
at, though I lament, the prevalence of the belief in Spiritualism. In a
few individual cases it may have been productive of good, but its
general tendency is evil. There are probably but few Stiltons among its
apostles, few Miss Fetterses among its Mediums; but the condition which
accompanies the trance, as I have shown, inevitably removes the
wholesome check which holds our baser passions in subjection.
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