My Library

been the accepted champion of all things spectral, should now make such a seeming confession. But human nature is a very strange compound! My heart, my loves, desires, and emotional nature were all on the side of the ghostly, and eagerly grasped and nursed the occult and weird; and when these reigned in my soul I bravely defended the spiritual theory against all comers. I rose to sublime heights of inspiration and speculation, and being thereby rendered morbidly sensitive to affectional influences, readily yielded to the specious social sophistry of the hour, and, for a while, pursued a course from which, had not reason been utterly blinded, I would have shrunk with ineffable horror; but, being surrounded by scores of thousands similarly deluded, it was impossible for a while to break through the accursed meshes of this devil’s net into the clear, cool light of truth beyond. “This was one side of the life-web I was weaving. But there came moments wherein enthusiasm was exchanged for something like sober-mindedness; and then intellect rejected most of what heart had drank in, and challenged the conclusions of my own and others’ in regard to the Phantom-Philosophy. People cried, ‘Inconsistent!’ ‘Variable!’ mistaking honesty for whim—and just as if anything or person was ever consistent! “In the present séance, logic held the reigns of