Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887: Volume 1, Number 6
Philosophy
Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887: Volume 1, Number 6
Medicine -- Periodicals; Phrenology -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
THE SEYBERT COMMISSION has reported against the claims of
Spiritualism. Their report will not even have the effect of the French
Academy report against animal magnetism, which checked its progress in
the medical profession but not among the people; but before the
century passed, the medical profession has taken up the science in
earnest, and re-named it hypnotism. The Seybert report will not even
be a temporary damper, for while thousands of inquirers, fully as
competent as the commission, and many of them far more competent to
the investigation, have made themselves familiar with the facts, the
commission has done nothing but to emphasize the fact already familiar
among the intelligent, of the prevalence of fraud among mediums.
Notwithstanding the wonderful powers of Slade, no one acquainted with
his history would place any reliance on his integrity. The more
intelligent Spiritualists understood such matters, and the Ladies' Aid
(Spiritualist) Society of Boston, recently had considerable amusement
in the exhibition in their parlors of the materializing and
dematerializing wire apparatus used by the fraudulent medium, Mrs.
Ross, which was said to have been carried in her bustle. Mrs. Ross
when prosecuted for her frauds was found to be protected by the law of
coverture which makes the husband alone responsible. This is a relic
of the idea of female subordination and obedience which ought to be
abolished. The progress of spiritualism has been marked by as many
follies as that of any popular movement, and the bequest of $60,000,
by Mr. Seybert, to the old fogies of the Pennsylvania University was
among the stupidest of these follies. If a friend of Galileo had made
such a bequest to the Catholic church in his time, to get an opinion
of the new astronomy, it would have been as sensible a proceeding. It
will however have one good result; it will erect a permanent monument
to the ignorance of the universities, a record from which they cannot
hereafter escape. Prof. Leidy was one of the salaried commissioners
whose mental status was thus exhibited in the last journal:
"Your doctrine of life eternal,
And everything else supernal,
Might well be pronounced an infernal
Delusion!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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