SPIRITUALISM.

Evening Star, Volume VII, Issue 1962, 19 August 1869, Page 2

SPIRITUALISM.

Professor 0. F. Varley, the celebrated electrician, appeared lately, by request, before the Committee of the London Dialectical Society, and made a long and interesting statement, from which we take the following extract: — “ He instituted a number of scientific experiments, to see whether the mesmeric or spirit force was the same as magnetism or electricity, and he found that it was quite distinct. The odic force of Eeichenbach was quite distinct from magnetism and electricity. The whole matter required, he said, most careful investigation; and, unfortunately, but few were capable of investigating at all. He stated that he was not a spirit-rapper, for he could not produce raps. I firmly believe, he said, from the cases detailed, that we are not our bodies ; that when our bodies die we exist. The spirits are not magnetisms, and are not electricity. From this point of view much can be explained. A man finds air not solid at all he can move through it as if it did not exist, but when he comes up to an iron-clad ship he is stopped, he cannot go through the iron. Well, electricity finds air the most solid substance possible ; it cannot pass through it, but it passes through the iron-clad ship as if it were not in existence. An iron wire is to an electrician simply a hole bored through a solid rock of air, so that the electricity may pass freely. Glass is opaque to electricity, but transparent to magnetism, whence we may infer that everything is solid in respect to other things. There is no relation between electricity, &c., and the spiri-

tual force. Electricity has no weight. Light is the vibration of a substance. As to magnetism he did not know what it was. He believed the mesmeric trance and the spiritual trance to be the same, save that the first was produced by the spirit from a body, and in the latter by a spirit not in a body. As all known powers have to be treated as solid in regard to something —iron to man, air to electricity, «te., thought may be in some sort sffid.”