Perhaps the best attested occurrences of current supernaturalism are the phenomena of spiritualism. It will tend to the illustration of this subject, if we consider the grounds on which we reject a large portion of its reported phenomena quite irrespectively of the evidence produced in favour of their reality, and ascribe the belief in them to the effect of an excited imagination, and in some cases to imposture. In considering this subject, it is not necessary to examine whether the phenomena alleged by spiritualists, if true, would be really supernatural, or belong to an order of nature hitherto unknown. Many of the manifestations of spiritualism possess a grotesqueness which we see in no other class of natural phenomena. If they are alleged to be the results of the action of natural forces previously unknown, then they must belong to a class of forces which contrast in a most remarkable degree with all known ones; that is to say, the known and the unknown forces of nature must be utterly out of harmony with one another. I am now speaking on the supposition that such forces are merely natural ones, not under the guidance of intelligence. In that case they must have been always in existence, only latent; yet they now for the first time manifest themselves under very special circumstances and conditions, such as are highly favourable to the existence of delusion. The abnormal character of these phenomena, so entirely at variance with the known order of nature, forms the strongest ground for the conviction that they cannot be the results of the action of unknown natural forces. It would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to convince us that these two sets of natural forces, distinguishable by the strongest possible contrasts, (viz. those which produce the visible phenomena of nature, and those which produce another class, intermittent in their action, of which grotesqueness and monstrosity are the most striking characteristics, and which only manifest their existence under circumstances calculated to throw a suspicion on their reality), can be the results of the action of forces which have been present in nature during all past time.