Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
The signs are, that both the moral and the religious systemsof the future will be greatly modified by the advanceof science. They will be more and more conformed to thefacts of nature; not only to the facts which a diligent Materialism,working in a single direction, has brought to light,but to the transcendent facts which Modern Spiritualismhas restored and proved. The one order of facts is incompletewithout the other; and Materialism is as surelydoomed to be encircled and transfigured by the widerhorizon of Spiritualism, as the Ptolemaic system of theuniverse was doomed to be superseded by the Copernican.
Unpopular facts often encounter an opposition quite aspersistent as that which follows unpopular theories; and sointelligent Spiritualists are not disturbed by the antagonismwhich their facts have met with from the Huxleys, Tyndalls,Carpenters, and Büchners of our day. All these men,working as they are for science in their different ways,though under the disadvantage of an ignorance of certainphenomena of vast significance, are welcomed as fellow-laborersin the cause of truth by Spiritualists; for the latter,relying on their facts, are confident that genuine Scienceincludes them all, and that every new discovery must be inharmony with all that they hold as true. Opposition to thephenomena, proceeding as it does from lack of knowledge,simply indicates the magnitude and astonishing characterof the facts themselves, which could excite such incredulityin the face of such overwhelming testimony.
Among the men of science who have either admitted thefacts, or both the facts and the theory, of Spiritualism, areHare, chemist; Varley, F. R. S., electrician; Flammarion,astronomer; Crookes, F. R. S., chemist; Hoefle, author ofthe “History of Chemistry;” Nichols, chemist; Fichte, philosopher;ivLiais, astronomer; Hermann Goldschmidt, astronomer,and the discoverer of fourteen planets; Von Esenbach,the greatest modern German botanist; Huggins, F. R. S.,astronomer and spectroscopist; De Morgan, mathematician;Dille, physicist; Elliotson, Ashburner, and Gray, physiciansand surgeons. To no one eminent man of science, however,has Spiritualism been more indebted than to AlfredRussell Wallace, F. R. S., distinguished for his researchesin natural history, paleontology, and anthropology. His“Defence of Spiritualism,” here presented, appeared originallyin the London Fortnightly Review for May and June,1874. Containing as it does the latest facts, no better t