"Spiritualism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bored by the study of physiology or anatomy or pathology or materia medica. Again, to the preaching mind spiritual vision and spiritual hearing will commonly be attended with less effort than in the case of most men; though even the preacher will find that there are times and times. Spiritualism talks of its "mediums," some of whom are said to "see" while others are said to "hear." The preaching mind will be in the best sense both clair-voyant and clair-audient. Call the man a seer, if you will, and speak of preaching as prophecy, ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... myself famous as the Gibbon of the decline and fall of this reverend gentleman, once so honorably established on the everlasting hills of Orthodoxy, and now so overthrown and trampled under foot by the Alaric of Spiritualism. I do not expect, indeed, that anybody will take warning by my friend's sad history; nor do I insist that people in general would find it advantageous to learn much wisdom from the experience of others; for it is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... example, before he would believe even in the Lisbon earthquake. Yet he seriously discussed the truth of second-sight; he carefully investigated the Cock-lane ghost—a goblin who anticipated some of the modern phenomena of so-called "spiritualism," and with almost equal absurdity; he told stories to Boswell about a "shadowy being" which had once been seen by Cave, and declared that he had once heard his mother call "Sam" when he was at Oxford and she at Lichfield. The apparent inconsistency ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... ages introduced spiritualism in art; before this new idea the smiling untruths of Greek poetry fled away frightened. The classical form so beautiful, so pure, cannot contain high Catholic thought. A new art is formed; on this side the Alps it does not reach the maturity that produces masterpieces. But at that time ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... clear, the language pure and well chosen. It is, in the main, a well- reasoned defence of the historical truth of the Articles of the Creed relating to the Second Person of the Trinity, against the mystical teaching of the followers of George Fox, who, by a false spiritualism, sublimated the whole Gospel narrative into a vehicle for the representation of truths relating to the inner life of the believer. No one ever had a firmer grasp than Bunyan of the spiritual bearing of the facts of the recorded life of Christ on the souls of men. But ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... young person who loved to dabble in the supernatural. Her taste in literature was for Edgar A. Poe. In religion she inclined toward spiritualism. Her favorite amusement was to gather a few shuddering friends about her, turn out the gas, and tell ghost stories. She had an extensive repertoire of ghoulish incidents, that were not fiction but the actual experience of people she knew. She had even had one or ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... youthfulness in the exaggerated estimate thus implied of his imaginative sins; for the tendency of "Pauline" is both religious and moral; and no man has been more innocent than its author, from boyhood up, of tampering with any belief in the black art. His hatred for that "spiritualism," which is its modern equivalent, is indeed matter of history. But the trick he has here played himself may confuse the mind of those who only know him from his works, and for whom his vivid belief in the supernatural may point to ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Taking this ground, a man may maintain the story of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' in the face of all the science in the world. You urge, in vain, that science has given us all the knowledge of the universe which we now possess, while spiritualism has added nothing to that knowledge. The drugged soul is beyond the reach of reason. It is in vain that impostors are exposed, and the special demon cast out. He has but slightly to change his shape, return to his house, and find it 'empty, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... show,—others looked upon their husbands, the lawful protectors of their name and fame, with easy indifference, as though they were mere bits of household furniture,—others, having nothing better to do, "went in" for spiritualism,—the low spiritualism that manifests itself in the turning of tables and moving of side-boards—not the higher spiritualism of an improved, perfected, and saint-like way of life—and these argued wildly on the theory of matter ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... observe in the old papers much that would indicate a belief in modern Spiritualism; but it would seem from some accounts that "angels" were occasionally seen. In the cases we quote, the kind of "angels" is not stated. Whether they were real live beauties, or not, can only be conjectured. Who would not now like to buy one of these books ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... man. There was no one to touch her in boys' parts in burlesque. A dashed fine woman she is—though I say it, dashed fine!" He seemed to reflect a moment. "She's a spiritualist. I wish she wasn't. Spiritualism gets on her nerves. I've no use for it myself, but it's her life. It gives her fancies. She got some sort of a silly notion—don't tell her I said this, Carlie—about Rosetta Rosa. Says she's unlucky—Rosa, I mean. Wanted me to warn Smart against engaging her. Me! Imagine it! Why, Rosa will ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... His interest in spiritualism is merely one illustration in a thousand. The hard scientists knew it was a hoax because they couldn't explain it, and the sentimentalists knew it was the truth because they wished it to be: but James wanted to know the facts. So he went to Mrs. Piper, and heard her ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... come over popular opinions in regard to predestination and future punishment. Does erudite theology regard the crucifixion of Jesus chiefly as providing a ready pardon for all sinners who ask for it and are willing to be forgiven? Does spiritualism find Jesus's death necessary only for the presentation, after death, of the material Jesus, as a proof that spirits can return to earth? Then we must differ from them both." It is not to be wondered at that she takes her stand with Thomas Paine in rejecting ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... of the same hue; and all worldly conditions and all the fame of her children—for Elizabeth Whittier then shared the fame—were to her wholly subordinate things, to be taken as the Lord gave. On one point only this blameless soul seemed to have a shadow of solicitude, this being the new wonder of Spiritualism, just dawning on the world. I never went to the house that there did not come from the gentle lady, very soon, a placid inquiry from behind her knitting-needles, 'Has thee any farther information to give in regard to the spiritual communications, as they call them?' But if I attempted ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... Spiritualism may be said to have had its birth, and the remarkable manifestations of the Fox sisters brought numbers of people to Rochester, where they had-removed as soon as they began to be widely known. This form of religious ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... lived on Seventh Street near F Street, now a commercial center. Mr. Sumner and I walked to her house from my home on G Street and found several guests in her drawing-room, where the topic of conversation, in the course of the evening, drifted to the subject of spiritualism. It was announced that at a recent seance the spirit of Washington had appeared and uttered the usual platitudes, whereupon Miss Strother, without a moment's hesitation, remarked: "I wonder what General Washington ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... scenes and incidents are startling, and if the book should fail to change certain notions in regard to spiritualism, it certainly will confound sceptical ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... her as being another revelation of Christ and as having his authority. Being persecuted by the outside world, her followers, after her death, formed a community in which to live and enjoy their religion alone and: undisturbed. Their principles may be summed up as special revelation, spiritualism, celibacy, oral confession, community, non-resistance, peace, the gift of healing, miracles, physical health and separation from the world. Like the Rappists, they neither marry nor have any substitute for marriage, receiving all their children by adoption. They live in large families ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... upon table-turning and spirits, and Countess Nordston, who believed in spiritualism, began to describe ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... inspiration of love and Italy gave herself anew to her work. The feeling for liberty was constantly with her, as was to be seen from Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress. About 1855, when she was on a visit to England, through the work of Daniel D. Home, a notorious American exponent of spiritualism, Mrs. Browning became interested in the current fad, and gave to it vastly more serious attention than most other initiates. Browning himself, while patient, was intolerably irritated with those whom he regarded ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... have been found a sufficient number of well authenticated facts in similar lines of experience to warrant the investigation and classification of them (if possible) under a modern name, "Psychic Research," and under a well established and not so recent one, Spiritualism. ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... objected to spiritualism, table rappings, and such things, because they were undignified, because the ghosts cracked jokes or waltzed with dinner-tables. I do not share this objection in the least. I wish the spirits were more farcical than they are. ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... slate-writing medium, Mrs. Patterson. The sections by the Acting-Chairman, Dr. Horace Howard Furness, on Mediumistic Development, Sealed Letters, and Materialization were the occasion of acrimonious and violent attack on the whole work of the Commission by those periodicals devoted to spiritualism and its propaganda. Age cannot wither the charm of the good humoured satire with which the Acting-Chairman treated these subjects; and it was largely the spirit in which they were thus approached that inspired the intense hostility ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... also a copy of Fitzgerald's Calderon. Rossetti seemed to be a reader of Swedenborg, as White's book on the great mystic testified; also to have been at one time interested in the investigation of the phenomena of Spiritualism. Of one writer of fiction he must have been an ardent reader, for there were at least 100 volumes by Alexandre Dumas. German writers were conspicuously absent, Goethe's Faust and Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm, Meister, being about the only notable German works in the library. ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... believers. Sensual images,—semi-Mahometan descriptions of the condition of the "saints,"—exultations over the destruction of the "sinners,"—mingle with the beautiful and soothing promises of the prophets. There are indeed occasionally to be found among the believers men of refined and exalted spiritualism, who in their lives and conversation remind one of Tennyson's Christian knight-errant in his yearning towards the hope ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... conjunction with Lieutenant C.W. HILL, he worked it for all it was worth. His record of their adventures and of the sufferings, physical and mental, which they had to face is really astounding; but I fear it will be received coldly by the psychist. Spiritualism, indeed, is treated with scant respect, and whatever our own view of this vexed subject may be most of us will admit that Lieutenant JONES has considerable reason ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... after I had read the article you would have found a much perplexed man. (777/1. Probably Sir W. Crookes' "Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism" (reprinted from the "Quarterly Journal of Science"), London, 1874. Other papers by Crookes are in the "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.") I cannot disbelieve Mr. Crooke's statement, nor can I ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... What fair liquid tints of blue, and rose, and glorious gold! This period which, in art, began with Giotto and ended with Botticelli, culminated in Fra Angelico, who flooded the world of painting with a heavenly spiritualism not material, and gave his dreams of heaven the colours of the first pure ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... pure, wholly free from those vile theories about love and marriage which have been so prevalent among the spiritualists. This new sect devotes itself to a study of the Bible, and a practice of curing disease without mesmerism or spiritualism. It treats Darwin and materialists with ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... this book which occurred at Hydesville, in the house of the Fox Family, are those by which Modern Spiritualism made its advent into this world as a ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... months. I believe Captain C—— to be honest about it. He seemed to have no control over his hand, and his arm trembled until it became exceedingly painful. Of course, I do not actually believe in Spiritualism; but there is certainly something in it one cannot understand; and Mrs. Badger's experience is enough to convert one, alone. Each was startled in turn by extraordinary revelations concerning themselves. Gibbes was to be transferred to the Trans-Mississippi Department,[17] ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... Encyclopaedia Britannica; annexed as many of the Vedas as had been translated into French or English, and talked of all the rest; built in the German versions of what is left of the Zend Avesta; encouraged White, Grey and Black Magic, including spiritualism, palmistry, fortune-telling by cards, hot chestnuts, double-kerneled nuts and tallow droppings; would have adopted Voodoo and Oboe had it known anything about them, and showed itself, in every way, one of the most accommodating arrangements that had ever ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... thing that "spiritualism" and its wonders have invited scientific study. The tendency to become spiritists is, of course, furthered in many by an uncomfortable belief that without spiritualism a future life is not insured; only the coming again to them of the spirits of the dead assures them that ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris
... style. He is a true child of nature; his eye brightened and his whole face became radiant, and at last tears rolled down his cheek when I read the account of the glory of the sunrise. Then he read us a very able paper on Spiritualism which he was writing. The den was dense with smoke, and very dark, littered with hay, old blankets, skins, bones, tins, logs, powder flasks, magazines, old books, old moccasins, horseshoes, and relics of ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... his feathers. The laird was therefore unable to speak with authority respecting such things, and was not particularly anxious to influence the mind of his son concerning them. Happily, in those days the platitudes and weary vulgarities of what they call SPIRITUALISM, had not been heard of in those quarters, and the soft light of imagination yet lingered about the borders of that wide region of mingled false and true, commonly called Superstition. It seems to me the most killing poison to the imagination must be a strong course of "spiritualism." For ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... spirits are two quite different things," he said. "One may discredit the whole business of spiritualism and yet firmly believe ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... and, by the power of the divine currents passing through him, do many things astonishing to every-day experience. The feats of a vulgar thaumaturgy, designed to make the ignorant stare, may well be dispensed with. But the fact that "spiritualism," with all its crudities of doctrine and errors of practice, has spread over Christendom with a rapidity to which the history of religious beliefs affords no parallel, shows that the realization of supernatural ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... he went on with a smile, "we have already demonstration by the absurd, but this may be called demonstration by the abject, for if the Eucharistic mystery is sublime, it is not the same with spiritualism, which is after all only the latrine of ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... of half the people of this country, would have been everywhere sung in song and told in story. But the suffrage women of America always have been afraid to give voice to the "thank you" in their hearts, for Spiritualism has been fully as unpopular as woman suffrage; and they feared if they displayed too much gratitude for this endorsement the public would at once pronounce them Spiritualists and they would thus be doubly damned. But there are a few of our members who are brave enough to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... employing the word "human," we would have our intention understood to include organic spiritualism—the superhuman treated, from a human pou sto, as ideal mind, form, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... turned on Spiritualism. Dauvit is a firm believer, and he often goes to Dundee and Aberdeen to ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... most eloquent exponents, highly esteemed by all as an able and earnest worker in the service of the two worlds. Fennimore Fenwick, my father, soon became much interested in her wonderful mediumship, and later became convinced of the absolute verity of the mighty truths of Spiritualism. He at once declared himself its willing and outspoken advocate: in his enthusiasm of delight he even hailed it as the coming religion of ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in the wider sense, of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces. It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed to spiritualism or theism. The laws of physical nature are what run things, materialism says. The highest productions of human genius might be ciphered by one who had complete acquaintance with the facts, out of ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... character in them at all. Mr. Sludge is a bad Yankee, as well as impudent pleader. The lines never sparkle, even with the poet's indignation, but they seem to be all the time blown into a forced vivacity and heat. Nemesis attends the poet who plunges his arm for a subject into this burrow of Spiritualism. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... 1914, where Sylvia and the more than queer company at the pension of Mere Gontran are surprised by the outbreak of war. Incidentally, Mere Gontran herself, with her cats, whose tails wave in the gloom "like seaweed," and her tawdry spiritualism—"key-hole peeping at infinity" the heroine (or the author) rather happily calls it—is one of the least forgettable figures in the galaxy. I have no space to indicate what turns of this glittering ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... Indeed, De Brosses himself did seek and find at least one African motive, 'The conjurers (jongleurs) persuade them that little instruments in their possession are endowed with a living spirit.' So far, fetishism is spiritualism. ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... was then again brought into contact with "spiritualism"; and sleepless nights—for the excitement of overwork was telling upon him—were becoming too frequent in his own experience; and yet the lectures on Reynolds went off with success.[37] The magic of his oratory transmuted the scribbled jottings of his MS. into a magnificent flow of rolling paragraph ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... great danger which Spiritualism or Liberalism has brought to their sight, they endeavor to return to their first estate, but in returning they ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... in my way to speak of that strange murmuring of phantoms and their attendant seers, psychometers, and dactylomancers, which in these latter days has revived among us. And what I may have to say about what is called Spiritualism will reflect actual observations. I do not forget that to the advocacy of the "New Dispensation" are devoted many men of earnestness and a few of ability. It is possible that the facts they build upon may render mine exceptional and unimportant. What is here set down is but a trifling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... We cheerfully accept these canons of philosophical inquiry; and it is just because no one substance is sufficient, in our estimation, to account for all the appearances, that we equally reject the "spiritualism" of Berkeley, who would resolve all phenomena into "mind," and the "materialism" of Priestley, who would resolve all phenomena into "matter." Matter and Mind may, indeed, be said to resemble each other in some respects,—in their being equally existent, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... of Mirza is to this day loose upon the world, and is forced, by a deathless, unnatural longing to seek incarnation in a human body. It is such awful pariahs as this, Lord Lashmore, that constitute the danger of so-called spiritualism. Given suitable conditions, such a spirit might gain control of a ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... me begin at the beginning. My own conversion to spiritualism came about, like that of so many others, through the more or less casual remark of ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... direct. The sentimental treacherous things, like women who betray by arousing pity, are the dangerous things because their attack is made in the guise of great things. Tears look like grief, sentiment looks like love; love feels like nobility; spiritualism ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Neoplatonism is a term which covers a very wide range of varying thought; essentially, it was a combination of philosophy and religion, arising from the intellectual movement in Alexandria. It covered a great deal of mysticism, magic and spiritualism, and the followers of the system, as it developed, became believers in the efficacy of certain exercises and symbols to cure diseases. They entered as Kingsley wrote, "the fairy land of ecstasy, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... person. She doesn't believe in "signs," although she might feel uncomfortable if she broke a looking-glass or saw the new moon over her left shoulder. She has a most amazing fund of common-sense and is "down" on Spiritualism to a degree. It is one of Bayport's pet yarns, that at the Harniss Spiritualist camp-meeting when the "test medium" announced from the platform that he had a message for a lady named Hephzibah C—he "seemed to get the name Hephzibah ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with my reading an article on "How to be a Success at an Evening Party." I was rather surprised to know that, for one thing, some knowledge of Spiritualism is necessary to enable one to be a popular entertainer nowadays. It has never struck me before that spiritualists were such a genial class, full of bonhomie and great joy; but then, although I read the Sunday papers, I'm afraid I don't know ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... body else, in London they are interested in hypnotism, spiritualism, etc.—interested, I mean, as inquirers, not as believers, and I saw a table move round briskly under the pretty fingers of Mrs. Hunt and a young lady ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... [35] that, "when analyzed by science, spiritualism leads straight to materialism;" free-will "can be annihilated by the simple mechanical expedient of looking at a black wafer stuck on a white wall;" that if "Smith falls into a trance and believes himself to be Jones, he really is Jones, and Smith has become a stranger to him while the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... character of a chameleon, and adapted himself to his surroundings with almost uncanny facility. At college he had been an ardent member of a dozen cliques, even falling under the egotism of the men who dabbled in Spiritualism, but a clarity of thought and a strain of Dutch ancestry kept his feet on the earth when the rest of him showed signs ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... not susceptible of being held as a mere theory. It is hoary with time. It takes hold of eternity, voices the infinite, and governs the universe. No greater opposites can be conceived of, physically, morally, and spiritually, than Christian Science, spiritualism, and theosophy. ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... off this conversation impatiently. This wasn't conversation. This was oral death, though he did not put it thus. He joined the other men. They were discussing Spiritualism. He listened, ventured an opinion, was heard respectfully and then combated mercilessly. He rose to the verbal fight, and ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... has gone out of the people in spots, there's the rankest growth of all sorts of crazy heresies, and the old scriptural nomenclature has given place to something compounded of the fancifulness of story-paper romance and the gibberish of spiritualism. They make up their names, sometimes, and call a child by what sounds pretty to them. I wonder how the ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... Dr. Opimian. Agapete. But I never pretended to this sort of spiritualism. I followed the advice of Saint Paul, who says ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... gathering of workmen the son of Adam Ward saw men of many religions, sects and creeds: Christians and pagans; Catholics and Protestants; men who worshiped the God of Abraham and men who worshiped no God; followers of strange fanatical spiritualism and followers of a stranger materialism. And he saw those many shades of human beliefs blended and harmonized—brought into one comprehensive whole by the power of the common necessities of ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... being independent and refuting the accusations of those who called him Fray Ibanez. Padre Camorra liked his adversary, as the latter was the only person who would take seriously what he styled his arguments. They were discussing magnetism, spiritualism, magic, and the like. Their words flew through the air like the knives and balls of jugglers, tossed back and forth from one ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas. The fundamental doctrines of materialism, like those of spiritualism, and most other "isms," lie outside "the limits of philosophical inquiry," and David Hume's great service to humanity is his irrefragable demonstration of what these limits are. Hume called himself a sceptic, and therefore others cannot be blamed if they apply ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... opinions that he holds are few and simple. When he had been disappointed by the Presbyterians, and had finally turned from them, his beliefs inclined more and more, in two points at least, to the tenets of the newly arisen sect of Quakers—to a pure spiritualism in religion, and the complete separation of Church and State. Their horror of war he never shared. The model of the Church he sought in the earliest records of Christianity, and less and less even there; the model of the State in the ancient republics. All subsequent experience ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... not by ghosts proper; and a man may live years in Arabia before he ever hears of the "Tayf." With the Hindus it is otherwise (Pilgrimage iii. 144). Yet the ghost, the embodied fear of the dead and of death is common, in a greater or less degree, to all peoples; and, as modern Spiritualism proves, that ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... negations, a negative in chief, is thus described in the Mahbhrat: It is indivisible, inconceivable, inconceptible: it is eternal, universal, permanent, immovable: it is invisible and unalterable. Hence the modern spiritualism which, rejecting materialism, can ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... heaven, and to hear voices bidding her to go or come, to do or abstain from doing, am I too to shape my conduct after these fancied monitions? Or if it comes into her mind to serve tables, and to listen in all faith to the miracles of spiritualism, am I, lest I should pain her, to feign a surrender of all my notions of evidence, to pretend a transformation of all my ideas of worthiness in life and beyond life, and to go to seances with the same regularity ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... several financial institutions were doing business in reclaimed ruins. One of these was the California Safe Deposit and Trust Company, which had made spectacular history of late. It was said that spiritualism entered into its affairs. Frank had been working on the ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... the corporeal world by means of forces quite different from those familiar to science, that Crookes decided to devote himself to this scientific quest. Thus he first came into touch with that sphere of phenomena which is known as spiritualism, or perhaps more suitably, spiritism. Crookes now found himself before a special order of happenings which seemed to testify to a world other than that open to our senses; physical matter here showed itself capable of movement in defiance ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... humble and lowly,—not that I have the slightest doubt,—but I cannot get her rapturous assurance of acceptance. My friend, William Harness, got me to employ our kind little friend, Mr. ——, to procure for him Judge Edmonds's "Spiritualism." What an odious book it is! there is neither respect for the dead nor the living. Mrs. Browning believes it all; so does Bulwer, who is surrounded by mediums who summon his dead daughter. It is too frightful ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... us to Sir Neville," MacLeod added. "He dabbles in spiritualism; he and Suzanne do planchette-seances. A planchette can be manipulated. Maybe Suzanne produced a communication advising Sir Neville ...
— The Mercenaries • Henry Beam Piper
... Visiter was one of great mental activity—a period of hobbies—and it, having assumed the reform roll, was expected to assume all the reforms. Turkish trowsers, Fourierism, Spiritualism, Vegetarianism, Phonetics, Pneumonics, the Eight Hour Law, Criminal Caudling, Magdaleneism, and other devices for teaching pyramids to stand on their apex was pressed upon the Visiter, and it held by ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... of ever curing Doc, when one day a feller come to town and give a lecture in the dance room over the grocery. He was one of these spiritualism fellers, and as soon as it was noised around that he was comin', I knowed Doc would be the first man to go and the last to come away, and he was. Thinks I, 'Let him go. If Doc jines in with spiritualists, it will be better'n what he believes in now, and if he begins changin' ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... her bright beer-brown eyes upon him gravely. "Yes," she said, "I am an alcoholic medium. It is the latest and most superior form of spiritualism. By gazing upon crystal—particularly upon an empty tumbler—I am able to throw myself into a trance in which I can communicate with departed spirits. A good drink does not die, you know: its soul hovers ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... out for fools to sport with, sir! Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as says St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... exclaimed, the figure vanished, and on the return of the party it appeared that the sick man had died about the time of the vision." [169] The belief in wraiths has survived into modern times, and now and then appears in the records of that remnant of primeval philosophy known as "spiritualism," as, for example, in the case of the lady who "thought she saw her own father look in at the church-window at the moment he was ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... any generation which, not having brains to think for itself, yet desiring to follow the intellectual motif of the day, adopts whatever is the fashionable attitude for the moment towards unseen things. Yesterday it was blank negation; to-day it tends, as we shall see, to be spiritualism; to-morrow it might be earnest faith: let us hope so. And as to Calvinism, all this was post hoc of course; propter ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... movement carried along with it a variety of other social and political movements such as spiritualism, total abstinence, and the prevention of capital punishment; which prevented many sympathetic friends of the cause from joining it, and gave it a quaint, and sometimes even a comical aspect. These Utopian and impracticable notions were accepted by the abolitionists partly ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... would hold science in leading strings. THE CONTINENTAL seeks the light, condemns to silence no new Galileo, tortures no creative Kepler, has no fires for heretics, and nothing worse than an incredulous smile for the shivering witches and mediums, the muscular demons of modern spiritualism. It rejects no scientific investigation honorably pursued, for all paths lead back to the Maker of the Universe, and the honest seeker must find Him at the end of his route. That God is our Father, that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the fearlessness with which Berkeley propounds his spiritualism, his anxious endeavors to take away the appearance of paradox from his immaterialistic doctrine, and to show its complete agreement with common sense, excite surprise. Even the common man, he argues, desires nothing more than that his perceptions be real; the distinction between idea and object ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... imprison the atmosphere of every scene. The castle of Montauto fascinates the family. Catholicity penetrates the heart of both husband and wife, in spite of much armor. Stella humbly and silently expresses religious gentleness. Spiritualism introduces its clumsy morbidness to Mrs. Hawthorne in the presence of the Brownings. Mr. and Mrs. Browning described from the enthusiastic memory of a child. Motley's letter about ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... philosophies hitherto known—above all creeds hitherto propagated in his name'—the true Christian doctrine, after having been hid from ages and generations, being reserved to be disclosed, we presume, by Mr. Foxton. His spiritualism, as usual with the whole school of our new Christian infidels, is, of course, exquisitely refined,—but, unhappily, very vague. He is full of talk of 'a deeep insight,'—of a 'faith not in dead histories, but living ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... Gunpowder: that it makes all men alike tall. Nay, if thou be cooler, cleverer than I, if thou have more Mind, though all but no Body whatever, then canst thou kill me first, and art the taller. Hereby, at last, is the Goliath powerless, and the David resistless; savage Animalism is nothing, inventive Spiritualism ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... moment—then went on: "You have desired to know the secret of the active and often miraculous power of the special form of religion I and my brethren follow; well, it is all contained in Christ, and Christ only. His is the only true Spiritualism in the world—there was never any before He came. We obey Christ in the simple rules he preached,—Christ according to His own enunciated wish and will. Moreover, we,—that is, our Fraternity,—received our commission from ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... in that final disintegration of his great soul was the interest he took in the atrocious frauds of spiritualism. He was even duped into believing in the cheap swindle of table-tipping. The bliss of Robert Browning's home was broken up in this same form, of all-encompassing credulity, only it was Mrs. Browning who was the spiritualist in this ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... to be ignorant, uncultured men, nor can even the professors whom they sometimes outwit in their own professorial domain perceive that they have been outwitted by men of superior scientific attainments to their own. The following passage from Dr. Carpenter's "Mesmerism, Spiritualism," &c., may serve ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... deny such an accusation. Yes, it is a sad thing, but true, and only weak minds recoil from the truth: reality exists only in material objects; all the rest is merely deception and fancy. All poetry is a dream, all spiritualism a fraud! Why not apply to love the accommodating philosophy which takes the world as it is, and does not throw a savory fruit into the press under the pretext of extracting I know not what imaginary essence? Two beautiful eyes, a satin skin, white teeth, and a shapely foot and hand are ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... tendency to question is met by the unanalyzing instinct of reverence. The old church calls back its frightened truants. Some who have lost their hereditary religious belief find a resource in the revelations of Spiritualism. By a parallel movement, some of those who have become medical infidels pass over to the mystic band of believers in the fancied miracles ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... have just missed Dale Owen, with whom I wished to have conversed on spiritualism. {150} Harris is lecturing here on religion. I ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... he could have no traffic. The Cartesian motto of thought as the essence of existence became another fixed point for him, and his last questioning phrase half suggests the line of reasoning which, as he afterwards put it, asserts that, philosophically speaking, materialism is but spiritualism ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, the three great elements; these outward and visible expressions lose force and significance, making place for that Law of which they are the rude exponents. The marvellous spread of Spiritualism, whose god is the UNKNOWABLE, and whose prophet was Swedenborg, is but the polished form of the Mpongwe Ibambo and Ilogo; the beneficent phantasms have succeeded to the malevolent ghosts, the shadowy deities of man's childhood; as the God of Love formerly took the place ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... suzerain and the nobility. It was these political and theological aspects of the movement that disgusted Heine. He says that just as Christianity was a reaction against Roman materialism; and the Renaissance a reaction against the extravagances of Christian spiritualism; and romanticism in turn a reaction against the vapid imitations of antique classic art, "so also do we now behold a reaction against the re-introduction of that Catholic, feudal mode of thought, of that knight-errantry and priestdom, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... world of the dead commonly feel that none the less it ought to be taboo to the too-curious intellect of man. They feel there is something uncanny about spirits that makes it unsafe to approach them with an inquisitive mind. I am not concerned either to attack or defend Spiritualism. I merely suggest that a rational attack on Spiritualism must be based on the insufficiency of the evidence put forward in its behalf, not on the ground that the curiosity which goes in search of such ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... nobly, yet all too blindly, negatively to do for his age and its successors, must be done positively by some great coming literatus, especially poet, who, while remaining fully poet, will absorb whatever science indicates, with spiritualism, and out of them, and out of his own genius, will compose the great poem of death. Then will man indeed confront Nature, and confront time and space, both with science, and con amore, and take his right place, prepared ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... open to all kinds of superstition and self-deceit. The pursuit of truth for its own sake is essentially a religious thing: but the motives of many amateur dabblers in psychical research are far from being truly religious or spiritual. Much popular spiritualism, whether it assumes the form of table-turnings, of spirit-rappings, or of mediumistic seances, is thoroughly morbid and undesirable, and the Christian Church ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Mrs. Makely to me, and then frowned and shook his head. I asked her if she knew what he meant. "Why, didn't you know that spiritualism was that poor man's foible? He lost his son in a railroad accident, and ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... made, you know. We've been taking up Spiritualism again — our little group, you know. And I'm going to give a Spirit Fete, and of course it will take a great deal of dressing ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... house and sharing the same bed! [315:1] All the while the parties repudiated the imputation of any improper intercourse, but in some cases the proofs of profligacy were too plain to be concealed, and common sense refused to credit the pretensions of such an absurd and suspicious spiritualism. The ecclesiastical authorities felt it necessary to interfere, and compel the professed virgins and the single clergy to abstain from a degree of intimacy which was unquestionably not free from ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... be right," Freddy said. "But for your happiness, Meg, I wish he'd chuck it. The 'sublime truth of spiritualism' he talks about, and the 'God-ruled world-state'—the one's dangerous to his bodily welfare, the other's the Utopian dream of failures. I don't want you to marry a failure, old girl. I want you to have the sort of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... said, "it is kind of you to come. I wanted to see you very much, for three reasons. First, I wish to beg your pardon for having drawn you into this spiritualism without your knowing that I was doing so. I have told you what my motive was, and therefore I will not repeat it, as my strength is small. Secondly, I wish you to promise me that you will never go to another seance, since now I am quite sure that it is dangerous ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... The Dreamer had at least one mental trait in common—a tendency toward spiritualism—a more than half belief in the communion of the spirits of the dead with those of the living and of those of the living ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... brain study. The relation of the new rays to thought rays is being eagerly discussed in what may be called the non-exact circles and journals; and all that numerous group of inquirers into the occult, the believers in clairvoyance, spiritualism, telepathy, and kindred orders of alleged phenomena, are confident of finding in the new force long-sought facts in proof of their claims. Professor Neusser in Vienna has photographed gallstones in the liver of one patient (the stone showing snow-white in the negative), and ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... take issue with you there, Mr. Pinkham. I admit there's a good deal in spiritualism which we haven't got at yet; the science is in its infancy; it is still attached to the bosom of speculation. It is a beautiful science, that of psychological phenomena, and the spiritualists will yet become an influential class of"—Mr. Craggie was going to say voters, but glided ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the occult sciences, and to this day we find Metais, Waubonos, Chees-a-kees and others bearing the common designation of Medicine men. In modern parlance we would call them Professors of Natural Magic, or of Magnetism, or Spiritualism. The difference however between these Indian professors of magic and those of modern date is, that while the latter travel round the country exhibiting their wonderful performances to gaping crowds, at a shilling a head, the former ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... voice of the medium—an elderly gentleman residing obscurely in Clerkenwell—informed her without a moment's hesitation that she possessed a relative with the Christian name of George. (I am not making this up—it is real.) This gave her at first the idea that spiritualism was a fraud. She had no relative named George—at least, so she thought. But a morning or two later her husband received a letter from Australia. "By Jove!" he exclaimed, as he glanced at the last page, "I had forgotten all about the poor ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... Paradise; they know that matter has also its merits, and is not all the devil's, and they now defend the delights of this world, this beautiful garden of God, our inalienable inheritance. And therefore, because we have grasped so entirely all the consequences of that absolute spiritualism, we may believe that the Christian Catholic view of the world has reached its end. Every age is a sphinx, which casts itself into the abyss when man ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... doings, if we ask, What of England's doings the Law of Nature had accepted, Nature's King had actually furthered and pronounced to have truth in them,—where is our answer? Neither the 'Church' of Hurd and Warburton, nor the Anti-Church of Hume and Paine; not in any shape the Spiritualism of England: all this is already seen, or beginning to be seen, for what it is; a thing that Nature does not own. On the one side is dreary Cant, with a reminiscence of things noble and divine; on the other is but acrid Candour, with a prophecy ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... best of these people, having lost very dear children, had taken refuge in what was called "spiritualism"; and I was invited to witness some of the "manifestations from the spirit-land," and assured that they would leave no doubt in my mind as to their tremendous reality. Among those who thus invited me were a county judge of high ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... he mused. "But why more distinct from that inaccessible hill than from the others? Was it the work of—ah, pshaw! I am allowing the absurdity of spiritualism to get the better of my reason. And yet, after all, who knows? There be more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. But ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... Colonel Scribner and wife, where I met also Colonel Griffin and wife; had a long conversation about spiritualism, mesmerism, clairvoyance, and subjects of that ilk. At night there was a fearful thunder-storm. The rain descended in torrents, and the peals of thunder were, I think, louder and more frequent than I ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... dark subject has ever been proposed. Whether we can believe it or not, is another question; yet undoubtedly it provides a solution for every difficulty; it accepts with equal welcome the extremes of materialism and of spiritualism: and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy that it will explain phenomena and reconcile contradictions, it is hard to account for the fact that a system which bears such a test so admirably, should nevertheless be so incredible ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... noteworthy and valuable book dealing with the new cults some of which have been much to the fore for a couple of decades past, such as: Faith Healing; Christian Science; New Thought; Theosophy and Spiritualism, etc. $2.50 ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... value to me," said Mr. Dempster, "I have had my faith strengthened, and my sorrows comforted. We do want to know more of our departed friends—to have more assurance of their continued existence, and of their continued identity than we have without spiritualism. I always believed that nothing was lost in the divine economy; that as matter only decayed to give way to new powers of life, so spirit must only leave the material form it inhabits to be active in a new sphere, or to be merged in the One Infinite Intelligence. But this is merely an analogy—a ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist. But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. But if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really much more of a pure ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... M. de Laprade is to defend what he calls "Spiritualism in Art." He wages an unrelenting war against the modern school of Realism. It is not the representation of visible Nature that the artist must seek; his aim must be "the representation of the invisible." He grows eloquent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... will she had made leaving her property to the Red Cross, on condition that it kept up Mr. Wiggins' lot in the cemetery. But just as we were feeling more cheerful Aggie had a warning. She had been reading everywhere of the revival in spiritualism, and once before when she was in doubt she had been most successful with a woman who told the future with the paste letters that are used in soup. She went to a clairvoyant and he told her to be very careful of high places, and that the warning came ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... France, in search of useful information. The empress, having heard of Home's strange feats of table-turning and spirit-rapping in fashionable salons of the capital, was eager to witness his performances. The women in the high society of Paris were greatly excited about them. Spiritualism was the fad of the season, and the empress caught the infection. The emperor, who was present at many of the exhibitions at the Tuileries, was also, it is said, much impressed by some of them, especially by a mysterious invisible hand laid firmly on his shoulder, and by an icy breath that passed ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... connected with the convulsions of that period was the appearance of a mental condition, called, in the language of the day, a state of ecstasy, bearing unmistakable analogy to the artificial somnambulism produced by magnetic influence, and to the trance of modern spiritualism. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Heaven unless they want to, and they can go on their own favorite paths too, be they blue Presbyterian paths, or Methodist pasters, or by the Baptist boat, or the Episcopalian high way, or the Catholic covered way, or the Unitarian Broadway, or the Shadow road of Spiritualism. ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... to be assembled. Thus the first ten years of the society's existence were marked by few positive results,—the most important being the statement of the case for telepathy and of its possible relationships to apparitions and hauntings, as well as to the purely psychical phenomena of spiritualism. ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... and jocund. And 't is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms, our politics, and schools, and religion. I say our, for it cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics written for England may be read to America. Evermore thanks for the brave stand you have made for Spiritualism in these writings. But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... those which were said to accompany D. D. Home, do not impress him at all. For, as Mr. Maskelyne justly remarks, their antiquity and world-wide diffusion (see essays on 'Comparative Psychical Research,' and on 'Savage and Classical Spiritualism') may be accounted for with ease. Like other myths, equally uniform and widely diffused, they represent the natural play of human fancy. Inanimate objects are stationary, therefore let us say that they move about. Men do not float ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... to focus his glassy eyes upon the arcana of spiritualism, rocking ambiguously the while upon the kerb. Mark murmured something more about the need for going ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie |
