God, imploring that some light might be given to me. Of course, as soon as the facts admitted of no other explanation than that my father, sister, brother, and other spirit friends, had been engaged in efforts to convince me of their existence, and of that of the spirit world, the most intense desire arose to verify the facts tending to settle the all-important question, whether man is immortal.

48. If the evidence of the truth of revelation were as adequate as represented by its votaries, my conscientious inability to believe in it would indicate an undue constitutional skepticism; whence I required more proof than the great mass of Christians, in order to produce credence. Yet, now having found the evidence of immortality in the case of Spiritualism satisfactory, it cannot be urged that my hesitation respecting the evidence of revelation arose from any unwillingness to believe in a future state, or unreasonableness as to the evidence requisite to justify belief. Manifestly, it would be inconsistent to accuse me of disbelieving in the one case from undue, hard-hearted incredulity, and yet, in the other, yielding from the opposite characteristics.

49. Fundamentally, my reasons for not believing in revelation have been, that it violates certain axioms above stated, (18,) which have been as clear to my mind as those collated by Euclid.

50. It may be shown that the existing system fails to give any evidence which can be subjected to the intuition of each generation successively. It rests on the alleged intuition of human beings who existed ages ago, and of whom we know nothing but what they say of themselves through history or recorded tradition. It reposes entirely on the testimony of propagandists, who were interested to give it importance, or on partial human narrators or compilers. It has been erected on a species of hearsay evidence, inadmissible in courts of justice. This species of testimony in the case of Spiritualism is contemptuously set aside. No one will believe in manifestations unless intuitively observed. Wherefore this faith in ancient witnesses, this skepticism of those of our own times, even when they are known to be truthful?

51. On my stating to a distinguished savan a fact which has been essentially verified since in more than a hundred instances, his reply was— I would believe you as soon as any man in the world, yet I cannot believe what you mention. He suggested the idea of its being an epidemic, with which I was of course infected; nevertheless, that savan, as a professing Christian, admitted facts vastly more incredible, depending on the alleged intuition of witnesses who lived two thousand years ago, nearly. This, doubtless, was the consequence of educational bigotry, which would have caused a belief in the miracles of any other religion in which he should have been brought up.

52. Such persons strain at the gnats of Spiritualism, yet swallow the camels of Scripture.

53. In like manner an Eastern sovereign treated a Dutch ambassador as deranged, because he alleged that bodies of water, in his country, were capable of solidification, so as to support people on the surface.

54. But if this skepticism is shown with respect to observers of our day, how can it be expected that it should not be displayed toward observers of antiquity?

55. Spiritualism will in this respect have a great advantage, as it will always be supported by the intuition of its actual votaries. It will not rest on bygone miracles, never to be repeated, if they ever occurred, but will rest upon an intercourse with the spirit world which will grow and improve with time.

56. One of the pre-eminent blessings resulting from this new philosophy will be its bringing religion within the scope of positive science. This word positive is employed by the learned atheist Comté to designate science founded on observation and experiment. It will give the quietus. to the cold, cheerless view of our being's end and aim presented in hist work.

57. Professor Nichol endeavoured, in the following way, to comfort hist Christian auditors against the apparent incompatibility of the phenomena of the sidereal creation with the language of Scripture: Having drawn two lines from the same point, making a right angle, the learned lecturer said, Suppose A sets out and pursues one of these routes, B pursues the other, and both arrive at certain truths; although these results should not seem to have any thing to do with each other; yet, said he, if they be truths, they must come together eventually; they cannot always travel away from each other. But if any person find that, agreeably to all his experience, the results thus attained, tend to greater and greater remoteness and inconsistency, there would be little comfort found in the idea of a possible ultimate approximation.

58. It is upon this actual fundamental discordancy between scriptural impressions, and the truths ascertained by experimental and intuitive investigation, that Comté builds his inference that theology is to be entirely abandoned. But very different is the position of Spiritualism relative to positive science. It starts from the same basis of intuition and induction from facts. It does not controvert any of the results of positive science within the ponderable material creation, to which the results contemplated by Comté belong. It superadds new facts respecting the spirit world, which had so entirely escaped the researches of materialists, that they entertain the highest incredulity merely upon negative grounds, merely because the facts in question have not taken place within the experience of those who have investigated the laws of ponderable matter and one or two imponderable principles associated therewith.

59. Such was the ground of my incredulity; which, however, vanished before intuitive demonstration.

60. It is admitted by Comte that we know nothing of the sources or causes of nature's laws; that their origination is so perfectly inscrutable, as to make it idle to take up time in any scrutiny for that purpose. He treats the resort to the Deity as the cause, as a mere abstraction tending to comfort the human mind before it has become acquainted with true science, and doomed to be laid aside with the advance of positive science.

61. Of course his doctrine makes him avowedly a thorough ignoramus as to the causes of laws, or the means by which they were established, and can have no other basis but the negative argument above stated, in objecting to the facts ascertained in relation to the spiritual creation. Hence when the spirits allege that by their volition they can neutralize gravity, or vis inertia,* there is nothing in positive science to confute this. The inability of material beings to neutralize gravitation by their powers is no proof that spiritual beings cannot effect this change.

62. Thus while allowing the atheist his material dominion, Spiritualism will erect within and above the same space a dominion of an importance as much greater as eternity is to the avarage duration of human life, and as the boundless regions of the fixed stars are to the habitable area of this globe.

63. But although Comte be a man of great learning, his fundamental opinions appear to be faulty, and his distribution of the operations of the mind imaginary.

64. In treating of gravitation as the primary law, does he not commit a blunder? Is not vis inertia indispensable to gravitation, since it may be conceived to exist without gravitation, while gravitation cannot exist without vis inertiæ ?

65. The power of a body A to draw B toward it can never exceed that which is necessary to put it into motion, which must be directly as its vis inertiæ; and where the one is null, the other must be null.

66. I cannot imagine how any philosopher so learned as Comte should not perceive the reduction of the phenomena of the universe to "different aspects" of the one faculty of gravitation to be utterly impossible. In

* Vis inertice, or force of inertness, is the force by which a body, when at rest, resista being put into motion, or, when in motion, resists arrestation. The force, in this latter case, is called momentum, being directly as the weight multiplied by the velocity. Thus, two pounds, moving at the rate of one foot per second, exercise exactly the same momentum as one pound moving at the rate of two feet per second.

The force of a spring, or of explosive compounds, cannot be called momentum; neither velocity nor weight enter into its constitution; though, when transferred to a projectile, it produces momentum proportional to the force with which it acts, the weight moved, and velocity imparted.

Muscular force does not come within the definition of momentum, although it produces this property in a hammer, proportionably to its weight and the resulting velocity. Nor is the force of gravity momentum, though momentum be generated by it in falling bodies.

the first place, it has been shown that gravitation could not be the basis of vis inertiæ, without which it cannot exist; and in the next place, gravitation has always, at any given point of time, its possible influence limited. to the power of making a body move toward an appropriate centre of gravity, and afterward remain forever at rest, unless affected by some

extraneous cause.

67. It is alleged also that the phenomena of the universe are explained by gravitation. I here quote his own words:

68. “Our business is—seeing how vain is any research into what are called causes, whether first or final—to pursue an accurate discovery of these laws, with a view to reducing them to the smallest possible number.”

69. How is it possible, I demand, to reduce the orbitual motion of a planet to fewer causes than vis inertiæ, motion, and gravitation? Vis inertiæ and motion are necessary to momentum; and momentum thus arising, acting in a tangential direction to that of gravitation, is indispensable to form, with the force of gravity, the resultant which constitutes the orbitual

curve.

70. Yet from subsequent language in the same paragraph, the idea is suggested of reducing planetary motions to one cause, gravitation! This will be perceived from his language, subjoined as follows:

71. "The best illustration of this is in the case of the doctrine of gravitation. We say that the general phenomena of the universe are explained by it, because it connects, under one head, the whole immense variety of astronomical facts, exhibiting the constant tendency of atoms toward each other in direct proportion to their masses, and in inverse proportion to the squares of their distance."

72. How can the revolution of a single planet about the sun be explained without the centrifugal or tangential force due to momentum ? Were not gravitation resisted by the projectile velocity constituted by motion and vis inertiæ, would not all the planets fall into their suns, respectively?

73. Are there not three essential elements in such orbitual movements, —vis inertiæ, motion, and gravitation? Are not these as necessary to an orbit as three sides are to a triangle? and is it not as great an error to suppose that such movements can continue by the agency of one of them, as to make one right line serve to enclose a superficies ?

74. Between two philosophers, both equally learned with Comte, one may be, like him, an atheist, the other, like Newton, a believer in God; and yet, as respects the whole range of positive science, would there be any clashing? They would attribute every thing to the same laws, whether these should be ascribed to a deity or not. The origin of the laws recognised by both would, by one, be ascribed to an inscrutable God; by the other, to inscrutability without a God.

75. Because the movements of the heavenly bodies are ascribed to the

three elements above mentioned, an unknown source of projectile force, vis inertiæ, by which that force is perpetuated, and gravitation, by which it is modified into elliptical, orbitual revolution, operating as laws governing planetary movement,-it does not make the astronomer who adopts this conception less of a theologian; it only makes him a more enlightened theologian. We ascribe less to the special interference of the Creator in proportion as our knowledge enables us to perceive results attained by general laws. This, Comté conceives, causes theists to be less theological, and to lessen what he seems to view as the domain which theology is allowed to have. But is it not more correct to assume that it is only the domain of ignorance which grows less, while that of theology becomes simpler and more correct, but not less extensive? It is not that less is ascribed to God, but that the aggregate is more intelligently ascribed as the laws through which his agency is recognised are fewer.

76. Newton assumed inertia, gravitation, and motion as the foundation of his philosophy; but attributed these fundamental properties, or states of matter, to the will of that governing mind of which he held the existence to be as evident as that of the matter governed. Comte does not consider that there is any positive proof of the existence of such a ruling mind, and does not, therefore, find it necessary to admit the existence of a Deity. Thus, the states or properties above mentioned are, with Newton, proximate, with Comte, ultimate, causes. Hence, when we arrive at the foundation of the Newtonian doctrine, we cannot go deeper without admitting the existence of a God. Without this admission, we involve ourselves in the irremediable darkness of atheism.

77. In this respect, I have always been a follower of Newton. Evidently, both the governing reason and the creation which it rules must have existed from eternity; since, if nothing ever existed exclusively, it must have forever endured, and there never could have been any thing. So, if there ever had been no mind, there never could have been any mind.

78. The human mind, says Comte, by its nature employs, in its progress, three methods of philosophizing,-the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, differing essentially from each other, and even radically opposed. Hence, he assumes the successive existence of three modes of contemplating the aggregate phenomena of the universe, any one of which excludes the others. The first, "is the point of departure of the human understanding; the third, its ultimate, fixed, definite state; the second, merely a state of transition from the first to the third."

79. It seems to be assumed that the intellectual progress of the human mind must necessarily be through these three stages. Moreover, it is suggested that each individual, in reviewing the progression of his mind from childhood to mature age, will perceive that he was a theologian in his childhood, a metaphysician in his youth, and a natural philosopher in