Sincere skepticism as to the immortality of man’s soul is a malady; a malformation of the physical brain, and has existed in every age. As there are infants born with a caul upon their heads, so there are men who are incapable to their last hour of ridding themselves of that kind of caul evidently enveloping their organs of spirituality. But it is quite another feeling which makes them reject the possibility of spiritual and magical phenomena. The true name for that feeling is—_vanity_. “We can neither produce nor explain it—hence, it _does not_ exist, and moreover, could _never_ have existed.” Such is the irrefutable argument of our present-day philosophers. Some thirty years ago, E. Salverte startled the world of the “credulous” by his work, _The Philosophy of Magic_. The book claimed to unveil the whole of the miracles of the Bible as well as those of the Pagan sanctuaries. Its _resumé_ ran thus: Long ages of observation; a great knowledge (for those days of ignorance) of natural sciences and philosophy; imposture; legerdemain; optics; phantasmagoria; exaggeration. Final and logical conclusion: Thaumaturgists, prophets, magicians, rascals, and knaves; the rest of the world, fools. Among many other conclusive proofs, the reader can find him offering the following: “The enthusiastic disciples of Iamblichus affirmed that when he prayed, he was raised to the height of ten cubits from the ground; and _dupes_ to the same metaphor, although Christians, have had the simplicity to attribute a similar miracle to St. Clare, and St. Francis of Assisi.”[216] Hundreds of travellers claimed to have seen fakirs produce the same phenomena, and they were all thought either liars or hallucinated. But it was but yesterday that the same phenomenon was witnessed and endorsed by a well-known scientist; it was produced under test conditions; declared by Mr. Crookes to be genuine, and to be _beyond_ the possibility of an illusion or a trick. And so was it manifested many a time before and attested by numerous witnesses, though the latter are now invariably disbelieved. Peace to thy scientific ashes, O credulous Eusebe Salverte! Who knows {116} but before the close of the present century popular wisdom will have invented a new proverb: “As incredibly credulous as a scientist.”