Of the actuality of a disembodied and individual being which, for want of more intelligence of its nature, we call a "spirit," I have no more doubt than I have of my own embodied and individual existence. If, to my philosophic and skeptical critics, this is an indication of intellectual weakness, and excites contempt of my faculties, I cannot help it. I will be honest with myself and the world, have the courage of my convictions, and take the consequences; and I am of the opinion that, if all the cultivated minds which, having studied the subject, agree with me in my conclusions were to be as frank as I am, there would be a large body of witnesses in accord with me. If the inference of a disembodied intelligence, as the source of such phenomena, is difficult of acceptation, that of fraud and collusion is inadmissible, and that of hallucination more difficult than that of the spiritual origin. Of the different hypotheses, then, I take that which seems the most satisfactory one in view of the ascertained facts. But "seeing is believing," and I can fully appreciate the incredulity of reasonable minds as to phenomena which are not in line with our ordinary experience of life, and which, at the same time, are of extreme rarity, and require, for their investigation and actual observation, great patience and the sacrifice of much time and the exercise of much tolerance, surrounded, as the subject is, by gross charlatanry and fraud. But if the beginnings of physical life are worth the years of patient study which science has accorded them, I must believe that the final issue of it is worth the time and study needed to arrive at such results as would, I am convinced, finally crown them. If it were worth while, I could, I am persuaded, define, _a priori_, the lines of investigation along which we should move, but each investigator will choose his own route, and better so. Two conclusions I draw from my investigations as immovably established, so far as I am concerned. The first is that there are about us, and with certain facilities for making themselves understood by us, spiritual individualities; and, second, that the human being possesses spiritual senses, parallel with the physical, by which it sees what the physical sense cannot see, and hears what is inaudible to the physical ear. And my general and, I think, logical conclusion is that the spiritual senses appertain to a spiritual body which survives the death of the physical. CHAPTER X LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS