Some persons, seeing me collect such a mass of facts and paint them as
they are, with passion for their motive power, have supposed, but
wrongly, that I must belong to the school of Sensualism and
Materialism--two aspects of the same thing--Pantheism. But their
misapprehension was perhaps justified--or inevitable. I do not share
the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in
man's improvement in himself. Those who insist on reading in me the
intention to consider man as a finished creation are strangely
mistaken. _Seraphita_, the doctrine in action of the Christian Buddha,
seems to me an ample answer to this rather heedless accusation.

In certain fragments of this long work I have tried to popularize the
amazing facts, I may say the marvels, of electricity, which in man is
metamorphosed into an incalculable force; but in what way do the
phenomena of brain and nerves, which prove the existence of an
undiscovered world of psychology, modify the necessary and undoubted
relations of the worlds to God? In what way can they shake the
Catholic dogma? Though irrefutable facts should some day place thought
in the class of fluids which are discerned only by their effects while
their substance evades our senses, even when aided by so many
mechanical means, the result will be the same as when Christopher
Columbus detected that the earth is a sphere, and Galileo demonstrated
its rotation. Our future will be unchanged. The wonders of animal
magnetism, with which I have been familiar since 1820; the beautiful
experiments of Gall, Lavater's successor; all the men who have studied
mind as opticians have studied light--two not dissimilar things--point
to a conclusion in favor of the mystics, the disciples of St. John,
and of those great thinkers who have established the spiritual world
--the sphere in which are revealed the relations of God and man.