ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.
THE PSYCHIC BOOKSHOP,
ABBEY HOUSE,
VICTORIA STREET, S.W.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. The Story of Swedenborg
II. Edward Irving: The Shakers
III. The Prophet of the New Revelation
IV. The Hydesville Episode
V. The Career of the Fox Sisters
VI. First Developments in America
VII. The Dawn in England
VIII. Continued Progress in England
IX. The Career of D. D. Home
X. The Davenport Brothers
XI. The Researches of Sir William Crookes (1870-1874)
XII. The Eddy Brothers and the Holmeses
XIII. Henry Slade and Dr. Monck
XIV. Collective Investigations of Spiritualism
Appendix
[Index and Bibliography at end of Volume Two]
ILLUSTRATIONS
(not included in this eBook)
Little Katie Fox Gets An Answer To Her Signals
Emanuel Swedenborg
Andrew Jackson Davis
Margaretta Fox-Kane: Kate Fox-Jencken: Leah Underhill
Sir William Crookes
D. D. Home
Professor Crookes's Test To Show That The Medium And The Spirit
Were Separate Entities
Alfred Russel Wallace
CHAPTER I
THE STORY OF SWEDENBORG
It is impossible to give any date for the early appearances of external intelligent power of a higher or lower type impinging upon the affairs of men. Spiritualists are in the habit of taking March 31, 1848, as the beginning of all psychic things, because their own movement dates from that day. There has, however, been no time in the recorded history of the world when we do not find traces of preternatural interference and a tardy recognition of them from humanity. The only difference between these episodes and the modern movement is that the former might be described as a case of stray wanderers from some further sphere, while the latter bears the sign of a purposeful and organized invasion. But as an invasion might well be preceded by the appearance of pioneers who search out the land, so the spirit influx of recent years was heralded by a number of incidents which might well be traced to the Middle Ages or beyond them. Some term must be fixed for a commencement of the narrative, and perhaps no better one can be found than the story of the great Swedish seer, Emanuel Swedenborg, who has some claim to be the father of our new knowledge of supernal matters.
When the first rays of the rising sun of spiritual knowledge fell upon the earth they illuminated the greatest and highest human mind before they shed their light on lesser men. That mountain peak of mentality was this great religious reformer and clairvoyant medium, as little understood by his own followers as ever the Christ has been.
In order fully to understand Swedenborg one would need to have a Swedenborg brain, and that is not met with once in a century. And yet by our power of comparison and our experience of facts of which Swedenborg knew nothing, we can realize some part of his life more clearly than he could himself. The object of this study is not to treat the man as a whole, but to endeavour to place him in the general scheme of psychic unfolding treated in this work, from which his own Church in its narrowness would withhold him.
Swedenborg was a contradiction in some ways to our psychic generalizations, for it has been the habit to say that great intellect stands in the way of personal psychic experience. The clean slate is certainly most apt for the writing of a message. Swedenborg's mind was no clean slate, but was criss-crossed with every kind of exact learning which mankind is capable of acquiring. Never was there such a concentration of information. He was primarily a great mining engineer and authority on metallurgy. He was a military engineer who helped to turn the fortunes of one of the many campaigns of Charles XII of Sweden. He was a great authority upon astronomy and physics, the author of learned works upon the tides and the determination of latitude. He was a zoologist and an anatomist. He was a financier and political economist who anticipated the conclusions of Adam Smith.