Another of the so called scientific tests, so useful in a phenomenon alleged to be either spiritual or psychical, consisted of a small instrument which immediately warned the witnesses of the slightest personal impulsion on their part, or rather, according to Mr. Faraday’s own expression, “it warned them when they changed from the passive to the active state.” This needle which betrayed the active motion proved but one thing, viz.: the action of a force which either emanated from the sitters or controlled them. And who has ever said that there is no such force? Every one admits so much, whether this force passes through the operator, as it is generally shown, or acts independently of him, as is so often the case. “The whole mystery consisted in the disproportion of the force employed by the operators, who pushed because they were forced to push, with certain effects of rotation, or rather, of a really marvellous race. In the presence of such prodigious effects, how could any one imagine that the Lilliputian experiments of that kind could have any value in this newly discovered Land of Giants?”[139] Professor Agassiz, who occupied in America nearly the same eminent position as a scientist which Mr. Faraday did in England, acted with a still greater unfairness. Professor J. R. Buchanan, the distinguished anthropologist, who has treated Spiritualism in some respects more scientifically than any one else in America, speaks of Agassiz, in a {64} recent article, with a very just indignation. For, of all other men, Professor Agassiz ought to believe in a phenomenon to which he had been a subject himself. But now that both Faraday and Agassiz are themselves _disembodied_, we can do better by questioning the living than the dead. Thus a force whose secret powers were thoroughly familiar to the ancient theurgists, is denied by modern skeptics. The antediluvian children—who perhaps played with it, using it as the boys in Bulwer-Lytton’s _Coming Race_, use the tremendous “_vril_” called it the “Water of Phtha;” their descendants named it the _Anima Mundi_, the soul of the universe; and still later the mediæval hermetists termed it “sidereal light,” or the “Milk of the Celestial Virgin,” the “Magnes,” and many other names. But our modern learned men will neither accept nor recognize it under such appellations; for it pertains to _magic_, and magic is, in their conception, a disgraceful superstition.