I found it very difficult to attack him in the intrenchments he had thrown up.  I thought I would just try for a moment to act on the Spiritualist’s advice, and, throwing aside all “intellectual and logical processes,” all appeals to the “critical faculties,” advance “lightly equipped as Priestley himself,” making my appeal to the “spiritual faculty.”  I cannot say that the result was at all what “spiritualism” promises.  On the contrary, Harrington parried all such appeals in a twinkling.  He said he did not admit that he had any “spiritual faculty” which acted in isolation from the intellect; that religious faith must be founded on religious truth, and even quasi-religious faith on quasi-religious truth.  That the intellect and the moral and spiritual faculties (if he had any) acted together, since he felt that he was indivisible, and that the former man be satisfied as well as the latter; that it was so with all his faculties, none of which acted in isolation; that however hunger might prompt to food, he never took what his senses of sight and touch told him was sand or gravel; that if he indulged love, or pity, or anger, it was only as the senses and the imagination and the understanding were busied with objects adequate to elicit them; that if beautiful poetry excited emotion, it was only as he understood the meaning and connection of the words.  “And what else are you doing now, while urging me to realize by direct ‘insight,’ by ‘gazing’ on ‘spiritual truth,’ and so forth, the things you wish me to realize, —­I say what are you doing but appealing to me, through these same media of the senses and the imagination, by rhetoric and logic?  How else can you gain any access to my supposed ’spiritual faculties’?” I replied, that even the spiritualist did that,—­he endeavored to convince men, I supposed.  “Yes,” he replied, laughing, “because he is privileged doubly to abuse logic at one and the same time; to abuse it in one sense as a fallacious instrument of religious conviction in the hands of others, and to abuse it in another sense, as an instrument of fallacious conviction in his own.  But you are not so privileged.”

Harrington insisted on the fact, that the whole thing was a delusion; I might appeal, he said, if I thought proper, to any faculties, or rudiments of faculties, he possessed, spiritual or otherwise; but he really could not pretend even to comprehend one syllable I said, if I denied him the use of his understanding.  I might as well, and for the same reasons, appeal to him without the intervention of his senses, —­for his “soul” could not be more different from his “intellect” than from them.  “Besides,” he continued, “I know you do not imagine that any spiritual faculty acts thus independently of the intellect; and therefore you are only mocking me.”

I thought it best to cut my cable and leave this unsafe anchorage.