HPB-SB-3-5: Difference between revisions

  | item = 1

  | type = article

  | continues = 6

  | author = Denton E.M.F.

  | untitled =  

  | source title = Banner of Light, The

  | original date = 1876-08-02

  | notes =  

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In your paper of June 24th. Dr Buchanan tells us that “lacking in the higher philosophical and imaginative faculties, our modern Horkeys will argue against the existence of the spirit-world, after hundreds of its inhabitants have been among us thoroughly materialized, and their appearances as well attested as our own existence.” And he refers my inability to admit that the “material phenomena of Spiritualism” are any proof of disembodied spirit existence to a deficiency in imagination (though he seems unwilling to call it by that name), which, he claims, “gives breath of spiritual conception.” He doubtless believes his conclusion correct. But he must have forgotten that it is, as claimed by Spiritualists, precisely because these phenomena supply the evidence demanded by those who are thus lacking in the “imaginative faculties,” that those “ruffianly sceptics — the ''savants'' of science” — are challenged to the investigation. And it is precisely to this claim that I have objected. I did not, however, expect to find my objection thus sustained by the direct testimony of a man so thoroughly pledged to the support of the theory. Lacking, then, that “breadth of spiritual conception” supplied by a highly cultivated imagination, I find, and others find as well, that the more material phases of the phenomena fail to furnish the supposed evidence, because we see no way by which we can assure ourselves of their supermundane source. But Dr. Buchanan graciously admits that I am honest, and I ask him to tell me, in all honesty, by what possible method I can assure myself that these phenomena are not due to forces pertaining only to the living human being. He must remember I have not denied their occurrence, though, so far as I have been able to discover, the conditions have never yet in my presence justified the conclusion that they are due to other than most material, mundane causes. Still admitting, as is claimed, that we are confronted by the stupendous fact of actual ''materialization'' in the spiritualistic sense of that term, I repeat what I have said elsewhere, I can conceive of no possible method by which these forms can prove themselves or be proven to be the production of disembodied spirits, until they can come to us independent of all mediumship and of all human conditions.

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