Legend
< The Spiritual Body (continued from page 8-23) >
pressed views similar to those which. Vogt, Buechner, Hoeekel, and other extreme materialists advocate now, was fully convinced by the phenomena of mesmerism that he had made a great mistake in limiting the life of man to its material earthly manifestations. He manfully retracted his whole materialistic philosophy, and, in his last will and testament, proclaimed that he had arrived at a “profound conviction, founded upon incontestable facts,” that there exists “an intelligent principle, altogether different from material existences; in a word, the soul and God.”
If, in their experience the light of Spiritualism had been added to the cognate facts of mesmerism and clairvoyance, the conclusions of both Chavee and Georget would have been still more decisively illustrated.
It was the opinion of Charles Bonnet, the great Swiss nationalist (1720-1793), that man’s future body exists already with the body visible; and he believed that science would “some day have instruments which would enable it to detect this body, formed as it probably is of the elements of ether or of light.” The experiments in spirit photography point to the verification of this prediction; while the form-manifestations through Dr. Monck, as recorded by the Rev. M. Colley and M.A., Oxon, show what science may expect from further persistent investigations in this direction.
Of the operation of an intelligent force, independently of any visible organism, the slate-writing phenomenon gives us a most conclusive proof. This phenomenon is destined to be placed upon a basis of testimony sufficient to meet the most rigorous demands of science. It will go far to confirm the theory of an invisible organism through which the veritable man survives the dissolution of his earthly body.
For a vast amount of learning and testimony on this subject of a spiritual body, see Ralph Cudworth’s Intellectual System of the Universe, first published in the year 1678. He tells us that, “The luciform body can pass through any solid thing. It lieth in this mortal body, continually inspiring it with life. By it is the soul connected with the mortal body. Plato and Aristotle concur in this idea of a luciform body. The latter says, ‘All souls seem to have another body and diviner than that of the elements.’”
In the North American Review (May—June, 1877), Mr. Thomas Hitchcock happily remarks, “The advantage of thus conceiving of the soul as a substantial organism analogous to the body, and affected by mediums similar to those which affect sight and hearing, is that it explains the mystery which surrounds the relations of mind and matter, and accounts for many things which now puzzle the scientific explorer. Allow the soul to be a real substance co-extensive with the body, and intimately interwoven with it, and the difficulty expressed by Professor Tyndall and others in "perceiving the connection between its operations and the molecular changes of the brain need be no greater than that of perceiving the connection between magnetism and the motion of the magnetic needle.”
I have but skimmed a fragment of a subject vast in its proportions and spreading out into the most ample fields of fact and of speculation; a subject on which much more has been written than we seem to be aware of, and the testimony in regard to which is co-extensive with all extant literature.
No. 68, Moreland-street, Boston, U.S.A.
<Untitled> (Mr. J.J. Morse has...)
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A Strange Visitation
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<Untitled> (The discussion...)
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Editor's notes