Ghost phenomena do not come into the province of practising Spiritualism. The average Spiritualist is content to follow the Catholic doctrine of offering up a few devout prayers for the rest of the uneasy spirit should circumstances throw him into contact with it. Apparitions as a whole affect the Spiritualist with as much unreasoning terror as falls to the lot of the non-Spiritualist mortal. The chance-met apparition of the dead is after all a fairly common phenomenon. The theory of the veridic apparition of the recently dead is explainable by various hypotheses, but there is little reason to suppose that the human spirit still animates the astral body that appears. The luminous quality or phosphorescence of astral light that enwraps the astral body of the apparition is not necessarily a proof of the survival of the identity of the soul whose astral body appears. The phosphorescent radiance associated with certain kinds of fish survives the death of the organism, and luminous bodies or glands extracted from these creatures may be preserved for months after death and still retain elements of luminosity. The thinking Spiritualist does not disregard the lessons and analogies of science. The great names in the history of Spiritualism have been those of scientists like Lodge and Crookes,[12] and it has ever been their desire to translate the apparent miracles of the supernatural into no less miraculous but more deeply understood parallels with the natural. The great slogan of Spiritualism is that it is a perfectly natural understandable thing; thus is it the duty of every Spiritualist to reduce those things which non-Spiritualistic thought deems supernatural to the realms of the understood, the explained and the known,--in a word, to the state of the natural. It is no good to tell a materialistic world that owing to the intervention of spirit force mechanical results contrary to all natural laws were obtained. The sceptic, and above all the logical sceptic--who is the easiest of all to convert, can you but once bring him to see the fallacies that underlie his logic--demands proof, proof not in terms of second-hand evidence, but proof in terms of cold matter-of-fact science. The missionary effort of Spiritualism must be made a crusade not into the minds of the unintelligent but straight into the citadels of reason of the men of science. It is necessary first of all to demonstrate the spirit forces and then to _prove_ that they are forces of the spirit and not natural, so far as the meaning of the term “natural” may be held to imply limitation to the physical laws governing this mortal earth.