Page:Faithhealingchri00buckiala.djvu/200

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186
PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS

also postponed. Telepathy does not bear directly upon apparitions in the sense of the direct manifestations of the dead only so far as it is connected with alleged perceptions by living persons of others who have just died or are in the very article of death at the time when it is alleged that they are perceived by the said living persons remote from them. At the close of the second part of "A Theory of Apparitions," published by the Society of Psychical Research, the writer says, "Of apparitions after death we say nothing here," and makes use of telepathy merely for the purpose of analogy. Modern spiritualism has so many phases, and its alleged and real phenomena are many of them so dissimilar in matter and manner to the spontaneous apparitions referred to by Lord Byron in

I merely mean to say what Johnson said,
That in the course of some six thousand years,
All nations have believed that from the dead
A visitant at intervals appears,

as to make it necessary to consider it separately.

What I design is to show that when the evidence is rigorously though fairly examined, the Scotch verdict "Not proven" must be rendered concerning the reality of apparitions; and that the presumptions of their natural origin are so strong as to leave little doubt in minds not intoxicated by a love of the marvelous, or who do not desire to find by sensuous evidence an "Elysian road which will conduct man undoubtingly to such beliefs as his heart most craves."

Before the development of the scientific spirit belief in apparitions was universal. Scarce an instance can be given from antiquity of a tale of supernatural events carefully investigated, because to be told of