The faith with which statements of so-called “cures” in all sorts of illnesses were received was just as widespread as that which later accepted Clairvoyance, Hypnotism and Christian Science. These, one after the other, followed the Mesmerism and Magnetism waves; but they are all precisely the same thing, under other names, and they are all more or less influenced by what is called Spiritualism. And the countless “miracle” workers, under a host of names, are all of the same class. The desire for the assistance of superrational influences is one of the greatest obstacles which the human mind has to overcome. It will take centuries of education before the majority of thinking beings will learn that a cell will produce only its like, that modifications of the cell are produced only after a time of slow and, as yet, imperceptible changes, and not suddenly by prayer or personal magnetism. One of the most perplexing phenomena which I observed was that educated men themselves became victims of these delusions. For instance, I knew a professor of botany who was so completely absorbed in the phenomena of _Spiritualism_ and _Magnetism_ that he submitted himself to treatment by these uneducated pretenders for an ailment produced by malaria. It is sometimes almost discouraging to see that even education will not prevent faith in the superrational or supernatural. But the Earth has billions and billions of years to live, and at the rate of mental development as we have observed it, I have no doubt that the human intellect will grow out of its present infantile condition into a maturity of which even the present generations have no conception, although, unconsciously, we all assist in nursing the embryo of intelligence which we call “knowledge” and “science.” One may dream of the greatness of the human mind when all the inhabitants of the earth will be as well-developed mentally as the few out of the billions are to-day. One may imagine that the lowest of the Pygmies in mid-Africa or the stupidest Esquimaux near the North Pole will be able to think, to reason and to enjoy, as much as I do now; and that the then great minds will work and struggle to bring up in the scale such poor ignorant mortals as those of my present level, these then existing by the billions as we have the billions of illiterate existing to-day. [Walt Whitman had a similar thought, and it is interesting to compare her and his expression of it, remembering the difference between prose and poetry, and the obstruction to expression caused by a foreign tongue which never became easy to her. In “Leaves of Grass,” he says: This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven, And I said to my Spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?_ And my Spirit said, _No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond._]