certain automatic phenomena. The conjurer, priest, or medium acts,
or pretends to act, in various ways beyond his normal consciousness.
Savages, ancient mystics, and spiritualists ascribe his automatic
behaviour to the control of spirits, gods or demons. No such
hypothesis is needed.

On the other side, however, are phenomena not automatic, 'spiritual'
lights, and sounds; interferences with natural laws, as when bodies
are lifted in the air, or are elongated, when fire does not fasten
on them, and so on. These phenomena, in ancient times, followed on
the performance of certain mystic rites. They are now said to occur
without the aid of any such rites. Gods and spirits are said to
cause them, but they are only attained in the presence of certain
exceptional persons, mediums, saints, priests, conjurers. Clearly
then, not the rites, but the peculiar constitution of these
individuals is the cause (setting imposture aside) of the phenomena,
of the hallucinations, of the impressions, or whatever they are to
be styled. That is to say, witnesses, in other matters credible,
aver that they receive these peculiar impressions in the society of
certain persons and not in that of people in general. Now these
impressions are, everywhere, in every age and stage of civilisation,
essentially identical. Is it stretching probability almost beyond
what it will bear, to allege that all the phenomena, in the Arctic
circle as in Australia, in ancient Alexandria as in modern London,
are, always, the result of an imposture modelled on savage ideas of
the supernatural?

If so we are reduced to the choice between actual objective facts of
unknown origin (frequently counterfeited of course), and the
theory,--which really comes to much the same thing,--of identical