This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ...future state, had not the partiality of a pet notion recommended the reasons which offered themselves, however weak they were. 'The same ignorance makes me so bold as to absolutely deny the truth of the various ghost stories, and yet with the common, although queer, reservation that while I doubt any one of them, still I have a certain faith in the whole of them taken together. The reader is free to judge as far as I am concerned. The scales are tipped far enough on the side containing the reasons of the second chapter to make me serious and undecided when listening to the many strange tales of this kind. But, as reasons to justify one's self are never lacking when the mind is prejudiced, I do not want to bother the reader with any further defence of such a way of thinking. As I am now at the conclusion of the theory of spirits, the confidence that the conceptions thence evolved are right. Our inner perception, and the conclusions drawn from it, being like reason, bring us, if they remain uncorrupted, to that point to which reason itself would lead us if it were more enlightened, and of a greater scope.46 I am bold enough to say that this study, if properly used. by the reader, exhausts all philosophical knowledge about./ t such beings, and that in future, perhaps, many things y may be thought about it, but never more known. This assumption sounds rather vainglorious. For of such multifariousness are the problems offered by nature, in its smallest parts, to a reason so limited as the human, that there is certainly no object of nature known to the senses, be it only a drop of water or a grain of sand, which ever could be said to be exhausted by observation or reason. But the case is entirely different with the philosophical conception of...