Modern spiritism; its science and religion - SpiritArchive.org

1
72 MODERN SPIRITISM
Seeing
the Invisible
And so all the sober-minded men and women
went forth to welcome them, and hear and see them;
and they did all three.
They stood on the bridges and cheered the
Russians that weren't there. They saw in thousands
men that did not exist, and heard Russian
tongues everywhere, which were nowhere. And
yet to doubt their word, to tell the smallest vestige
of the truth, was to be a traitor of the deepest
dye, unworthy of the society of honest Englishmen.
"Thank God, they could believe their own eyes
and ears," and they did; and they now know with
what result.
From this it would appear that a hallucination
may persist for days (or years?), and small details
(when under a false belief) may be seen and recorded
by men of the highest standing, that absolutely
were never seen and never existed. In short, the
"Russian legend" is the most complete proof of the
possible unreality of all phenomena accounted real
in Spiritism. The rejoinder, of course, is that nothing
can then be proved as true or real. The reply can
only be, "You must judge each individual case on
its own merits. Consider the Russians; apply the
conditions; and in examining the supposed phenomena
bear these in mind, and apply such tests,
as your ingenuity suggests, that will exclude every
form of hallucination by 'collective hypnotism' or
otherwise."