Having now probably said enough in these confessions to convince every non-spiritualist that I am insane, because I believed the evidence of my senses, and even ventured to look into matters so unorthodox and unscientific as mesmerism and spiritualism, I go on to "make a clean breast," and set myself wrong with the other moiety of my readers. I must candidly confess that the experiences of this year (1866) did not confirm my sudden conviction of the spiritual agency in these phenomena. I drifted back, in fact, to my previous position, accepting the phenomena, but holding the cause an open question. The preface to the book, "From Matter to Spirit," exactly expressed--shall I say expresses?--my state of mind. There is one passage in that preface which appears to me to clinch the difficulty--"I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen and heard, in a manner which should make unbelief impossible, things called spiritual, which cannot be taken by a reasonable being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake. So far I feel the ground firm under me. But when it comes to what is the cause of these phenomena I find I cannot adopt any explanation which has yet been suggested. If I were bound to choose among things which I can conceive, I should say that there is some sort of action--some sort of combination of will, intellect, and physical power, which is not that of any of the human beings present. But thinking it very likely that the universe may contain a few agencies, say half a million, about which no man knows anything, I cannot but suspect that a small proportion of these agencies, say five thousand, may be severally competent to the production of all the phenomena, or may be quite up to the task among them. _The physical explanations which I have seen are easy, but miserably insufficient: the spiritual hypothesis is sufficient but ponderously difficult._" This statement is natural enough from the scientific side of the question. Perhaps the theological inquirer, taking the fact into consideration that Scripture certainly concedes the spiritual origin of kindred phenomena, would rather reverse the statement, and say (what I individually feel) that the psychological explanation is the ponderously difficult--the pneumatological, the comparatively easy one.