why some hesitate to admit that these obscure occurences in the American village of Hydesville were the beginning of their movement. The late Professor Hyslop, for instance, one of the most distinguished of spiritualist writers, says, in regard to the practice of dating Spiritualism from 1848, that "there is little excuse for this narrowness of view."[1] Since it is the usual spiritualist practice, Professor Hyslop's words may seem strange. But the reader of his work will find that he, like other cultivated Spiritualists, regards the Hydesville performances as at least mainly fraudulent, and he is anxious to strip them of anything like a fundamental character. He thinks that "modern Spiritualism really originated in the work of Swedenborg." Other writers go much farther back along the dim ways of history. Some take us amongst the savage tribes, whose practices represent the life of man long before the dawn of history. Spiritualism is as old as man, they say; and they draw a distinction between ancient and modern Spiritualism. De Vesme began to write an exhaustive history of it, and in his two published volumes he has only just reached the events of 1848.
I do not propose to follow these writers through earlier ages or amongst savage peoples. The essence of what we now know as Spiritualism is, both in popular opinion and in its own official literature, the claim of communication with deceased human beings. At one time a Spiritualist was any man who believe
- ↑ Contact with the Other World (1919), p. 23.
