My object in maintaining the mental questioning was, of course, to prevent Miss A. from getting any clue to the meaning of the questions, and I carried the precaution so far as not to look at her while forming the questions in my mind.  I also ascertained that she knew nothing of drawing, or of Turner; but while I could not resist the evidence of a mental activity absolutely independent of that of Miss A., I was convinced that there was no question of actual identity.  Both the doctor and I were, however, satisfied that on the part of Miss A. there was no attempt at deception, and that the phenomenon, whatever might be the case as to identity, was a genuine manifestation of an intelligence independent of that of the girl.  Six weeks later I sailed for England, and, on arriving in London, I went at once to see Ruskin, and told him the whole story.  He declared the contrariness manifested by the medium to be entirely characteristic of Turner, and had the drawing in question down for examination.  We scrutinized it closely, and both recognized beyond dispute that the drawing had been executed in the way that Miss A. indicated.  Ruskin advised me to send an account of the affair to the “Cornhill,” which I did; but it was rejected, as might have been expected in the state of public opinion at that time, and I can easily imagine Thackeray putting it into the basket in a rage.

I offer no interpretation of the facts which I have here recorded, but I have no hesitation in saying that they completed and fixed my conviction of the existence of invisible and independent intelligences to which the phenomena were due.  The question of the identity of these intelligences—­which we may, without prejudging their nature, leaving that to be determined by more complete experiences, consider disembodied—­with the persons in the flesh whose names they use, is one on which I have great difficulty in forming a conclusion, though, as a rule, my experience in “circles” has been that the imposture was too gross to deceive a person of ordinary intellectual power.  The two cases which I have related in the foregoing pages are the only ones in which I have ever been able to find the color of an identification, and of the probability of this I leave the reader to judge.  More on the internal than on the external evidence, I consider the probability in the two cases narrated to be in favor of the identity; beyond that I am unwilling to go.

Of the actuality of a disembodied and individual being which, for want of more intelligence of its nature, we call a “spirit,” I have no more doubt than I have of my own embodied and individual existence.  If, to my philosophic and skeptical critics, this is an indication of intellectual weakness, and excites contempt of my faculties, I cannot help it.  I will be honest with myself and the world, have the courage of my convictions, and take the consequences; and I am of the opinion that, if all the cultivated