Your daily remark is that one cannot be expected to believe unless he becomes an eye-witness. In common with many you blame us for our great secrecy. Yet we know something of human nature, for the experience of long centuries, aye of ages, has taught us. And we know that so long as science has anything to learn, and a shadow of religious dogmatism lingers in the hearts of the multitudes, the world's prejudices have to be conquered step by step, not at a rush. These simple remarks are philosophical, historically accurate, and perfectly true.
All spiritualistic mediums know that their visitors require test after test.
Even the dabbler in psychic matters is aware that his audience or his friends require a constant increase of phenomena and results, and every earnest student of occultism is aware of the fact that in his own circle there are fifty unbelievers to one believer, and that the believers require that they shall see the same thing over again that others report. If the latter has its dicta, so also has the former. This means of course that scientific men as well as other inquirers must conform to the rules of occult science if they wish to know it, and must themselves change their modes of thought and action. He then goes on to analyze the motives of his correspondent, and these motives would be the same as those impelling science to investigate. They are described to be the desire to have positive proofs of forces in nature unknown to science, the hope to appropriate them, the wish to demonstrate their existence to some others in the West, the ability to contemplate future life as an objective reality built upon knowledge and not faith, and to learn the truth about the Lodge and the Brothers.