The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-02-21

but with much less success. knocking abou, tables when they can get chance and when they cannot, or have minds rather too subtle and acute for such idle amusements, hypnotzing so-called mediums" with visions of a dreamy and generally more or less misleading character, Mir, Alfred Russell Wallace evidently thinks that even in these o2- equations that are most usefully em- ployed, for in his new edition of his book on spirltualism he gives us a long array Of the evidence of an unseen world with which these dlsembodied spirits furnish us by virtue of their tam perings with the order of the seen world
 We are far from denying that much of his evidence is very striking; but what we do deny entirely is that there is anything that ought to be accounted spiritually impressive in the disclosures in which those very intellectual endeav- ors end. It appears to us that their chief end is to convince us that they are meddling with world with which they ought to have completed their re- latlons before they passed into the world of spirits, and are only displaying their inability to let their own mangled career alone. That, no doubt, is to some extent in itself an impressive lesson, but it is lesson of warning rather than one of example. It is possible, and even perhaps probable, that those who have lived chiefly in the little settlements of of a sensuous life may be very forlorn without these settlements, and may in- n oA tt1 n1l 4n ! these settlements with very insufficient means But that is not a lesson on which we can feed ourselves forever; and 1t does appear to us that the so- called spiritual lessons which we gain from these meddling spirits are only the disjecta membra of the greater re- ligions.
 What seems to us a curious feature of our time is this-that while in other I days that which came from the world of the unseen to the world of visible things was almost always a source of new power and strength to the visible World-and we are speaking not only of the great Christian revelation, for even the Mahommedan and the Buddhist re- ligions were rich sources of new though not always pure life and strength--that Which comes to us in our modern day from the unseen, so far as it is trust worthy at all, for the most part shows Us how very much of the most trivial and poorest human nature abides be- hind the veil which separates us from the unseen world. We used to consider the unseen the region of reality as dis tinguished from what is mere show and l ,~n n hi,t fl,. ful and skilful of those who have stud jed the phenomena of modern spiritual ism seem to hold that a great deal of the life in the unseen is life of the merest shallowness, a life of tricks, a life of seeming, and often of as mere seeming and plausibility as the most frivolous life of earth.
 l MT. Wallace even boasts that the spir- 1tual world, as it is shown to him by the trance medium" is q world of hu- nor. Well, surely we need no revela- ton from the unseen to teach us to de- velop to the utmost the innocently friv- olous side of human nature. And though 1t is no new discovery that in the un- seen world there must be plenty of moral and intellectual poverty as well as in the seen world, still 1t does seem rather strange that 1t should be, as it were, ostentatiously revealed to us that ghosts are empty headed creatures like men, and that they make use of those special organizations which are more or less able to communicate with the unseen world for the purpose of informing us of their revenges and their foolishness and their often very legitimate fears. Perhaps 1t is because they have given themselves 50 much to mere seeming and plausibility in the body that they are compelled to give themselves to if in the world of spirits by way of retri- intimidation Spectator.