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"Perhaps we cannot better introduce the reader to the treatise before him, than by giving a short statement of the circumstances which led us to adopt the views therein developed in regard to Spiritualism. Since the year 1850, our residence has been in one of the grand centres of this movement, and where, consequently, the mysterious phenomena were continuously pressed upon our attention. Believing it to be our duty as a religious teacher, and an instructor of youth, sufficiently to acquaint ourself with any influences which are abroad in community, and are operative there with great power to give form and direction to the intellectual, moral, and religious sentiments of the public, to be able to speak intelligently in respect to the same, as occasion may require, we accordingly turned our thoughts more or less upon the mysterious phenomena under consideration. One of the circumstances which first impressed our mind was the utter incompatibility of the fundamental characteristics of these facts, as reported even by spiritualists themselves, with the supposition that they are the intended results of intelligent minds who are communicating with us from the heavenly or infernal world. By no laws of mind known to us could we account for the facts, by a reference to such an origin. When they were referred to good spirits, our reply was: good spirits cannot falsify as these do; for these falsify, when spirits, if present, cannot but know the truth; profess knowledge, when they must know themselves ignorant, and make positive affirmations, when they must know that they are only guessing. Good spirits cannot thus act. When they were referred to bad spirits, our reply was: these spirits do not lie like men in the flesh, nor as any spirits would do whose conduct is governed by any laws known to us. There is a certain "method" even in lying, wherever it appears, and here is lying which has no such method, nor any method at all which can properly be ascribed to spirits aiming at some intelligent end good or bad. "When individuals told us, that they had had communications with their spirit friends, our reply was: the spirit here speaking says some things, that that of your mother, if present, might, and no doubt would say. Your mother, however, when alive and with you, never falsified as this spirit does, and would not thus falsify, if now present. We therefore rejected the extra spirit hypothesis, as wholly incompatible with the facts. We were first led to refer the facts to tricks of the mediums. We found, then, that we had to admit the facts, or take the ground that no strange events can be established by testimony. How then could we ask the world to believe in Christian miracles? We found equally valid evidence for the reality of the facts of Spiritualism, as far as the intelligent communications are concerned. We found ourselves necessitated, therefore, in moral honesty, to admit the facts, and then to seek an explanation of them on some mundane hypothesis, as their character precluded any other supposition than their exclusively mundane origin"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Spiritualism (Philosophy) --- Spiritualism --- Research. --- Davis, Andrew Jackson,