Psychologists of the materialistic school would probably say
that it was a survival of the tribe-and-war instinct. At any rate,
there it is.
Added to all this was the peculiar relation in which the medium stood
to the boy; it was he who had first opened the door towards that
strange other world that so persistently haunts the imaginations of
certain temperaments; it was through him that Laurie had had brought
before the evidence of his senses, as he thought, the actuality of the
things of which he had dreamed--an actuality which his religion had
somehow succeeded in evading. It was not that Laurie had been
insincere in his religion; there had been moments, and there still
were, occasionally, when the world that the Catholic religion preached
by word and symbol and sacrament, became apparent; but the whole thing
was upon a different plane. Religion bade him approach in one way,
spiritualism in the other. The senses had nothing to do with one; they
were the only ultimate channels of the other. And it is
extraordinarily easy for human beings to regard as more fundamentally
real the evidence of the senses than the evidence of faith....
Here then were the two choices--a world of spirit, to be taken largely
on trust, to be discerned only in shadow and outline upon rare and
unusual occasions of exaltation, of a particular quality which had
almost lost its appeal; and a world of spirit that took shape and form
and practical intelligibility, in ordinary rooms and under very nearly
ordinary circumstances--a world, in short, not of a transcendent God
and the spirits of just men made perfect, of vast dogmas and theories,
but of a familiar atmosphere, impregnated with experience, inhabited
by known souls who in this method or that made themselves apparent to
those senses which, Laurie believed, could not lie.
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