"The subject allotted to me for this evening is 'Spiritualism' (or rather Magnetism, Occultism, and similar matters) 'in Eastern Lands,' and I would obtain your leave to enter into a personal matter which may interest Spiritualists. As regards standpoint, it can matter little to an audience what may be the opinions, spiritual or unspiritual, psychological or unpsychological, of one whose humble duty is to collect and narrate a few facts. But it would hardly be fair to enter upon such a subject without briefly laying down the standpoint from which it is viewed. Of course the _point de vue_ is that of the individual who pretends to be right individually, but who has no pretension to be right either absolutely or relatively to others. "The standpoint is intelligent enough. Seen from it, life is nothing but the innate condition of man's material and sensuous organization; as the old Materialist said, 'it is the _swabhám_ (nature of things) which thinketh in man.' Consciousness, concerning which battle still rages, is not a 'quality of the sentient principle, or, in other words, the soul;' but a condition of life inexplicable to us at present--a life itself. The supernatural is the natural misunderstood or improperly understood--we cannot say where nature either begins or ends. The superhuman is the superlative of human; we know what our senses and their 'interpenetration' teach us, but no man--positively, absolutely, no man--neither deity nor devil--angel nor spirit--ghost nor goblin--has ever wandered beyond the narrow limits of this world--has ever brought us a single idea or notion which belongs to another and a different world--has ever eluded the simple cognizance of man's five wits. 'I refuse,' says Verax, 'to doff my hat and go on my knees and strip myself of all that is deemed spiritual in my being, in deference to an arbitrary negation, which they who propound it profess their inability to maintain.' Let him keep his hat on, and point out one single spiritual entity which is not subject to our animal senses, or rather to the brain which directs them. With such belief, or absence of belief, I must be contented to remain, as a facetious friend said, 'a Spiritualist without the Spirits.'