Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ANCIENT SPIRITUALISM. M. Littre on 'demoniac affections] a subject, in his opinion, worthy of closer study. Outbreak of Modern Spiritualism. Its relations to Greek and Egyptian Spiritualism recognised. Popular and literary sources of Modern Spiritualism. Neoplatonic thaumaturgy not among these. Porphyry and lamblichus. The discerning of Spirits. The ancient attempts to prove ' spirit identity'. The test of ' spirit lights' in the ancient world. Perplexities of Porphyry. Dreams. The Assynt Murder. Eusebius on Ancient Spiritualism. The evidence of Texts from the Papyri. Evocations. Lights, levitation, airy music, ancesthesia of Mediums, ancient and modern. Alternative hypotheses : conjuring, ' suggestion' and collective hallucination, actual fact. Strange case of the Rev. Stainton Moses. Tabular statement showing historical continuity of alleged phenomena. In the Revue des Deux Mondes, for 1856, tome L, M. Littre published an article on table-turning and ' rapping spirits'. M. Littr6 was a savant whom nobody accused of superstition, and France possessed no clearer intellect. Yet his attitude towards the popular marvels of the day, an attitude at once singular and natural, shows how easily the greatest minds can pay themselves with words. A curious reader, in that period of excitement about ' spiritualism,' would turn to the Revue, attracted by M. Littre'sname. He would ask: 'Does M. Littre accept the alleged facts; if so, how does he explain them ?' And he would find that this guide of human thought did not, at least, reject the facts; that he did not (as he well might have done) offer imposture as the general explanation; that he regarded the topic as very obscure, and eminently worthy of study,—and that he pooh-poohed the whole affair! This is not very consistent or helpf...