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Modern Magic: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Conjuring
·
Professor Hoffmann
727
A
worthy
doctor
of
philosophy,
only
recently
deceased,
said
in
my
hearing,
while
speaking
of
the
gross
ignorance
that
prevailed
among
believers
in
spiritualism,
that
if
a
man
stood
in
the
middle
of
the
road
with
a
crowd
of
people
round
him,
and
asserted,
with
well-worded
sentences
and
an
apparent
earnestness
and
belief
on
his
own
part,
that
two
and
two
were
five,
he
would
find
some
among
the
crowd
to
believe
him.
Perhaps
the
doctor
went
a
little
too
far
in
his
observation,
but
it
is,
nevertheless,
almost
incredible
that
a
large
number
of
persons
can
be
so
bigoted
and
thick-headed
as
to
persist
in
their
belief
in
spiritualism
when
medium
after
medium
has
been
most
unequivocally
found
to
be
conjuror,
trickster,
and
swindler.
These
conjurors
and
tricksters
are
not
men
who
practise
their
art
of
deceiving
on
the
stage
in
a
legitimate
manner,
but
they
are
men
who
pander
to
the
credulity,
bigotry,
and
fanaticism
of
the
imbecile,
obtuse,
and
weak-minded
person
who
believe
in
spirit
land,
by
claiming
the
power
of
recalling
from
that
unknown
region
to
which
the
soul
is
supposed
to
take
its
flight
when
it
has
shuffled
off
its
mortal
coil,
those
beings
who
have
gone
from
earth
never
to
return
again,
except
by
the
agency
of
these
mediums.
In
asserting
their
power
of
“calling
up
the
spirits
from
the
vasty
deep,”
or
from
the
sky,
they
offer
as
proof
of
their
claim
to
be
believed
certain
tests,
which
have
been,
and
which
I
will
show
are,
simply
the
hanky-panky
tricks
of
the
prestidigitateur
and
magician.
The
credulous
followers
of
these
mediums
cannot
or
will
not
see
the
absurdity
of
bringing
souls
from
the
“world
of
spirits”
merely
to
answer
idiotic
questions,
and
to
perform
such
antics
as
even
a
wild
and
unrestrained
boy
would
not
be
mad
enough
to
do;
but
they
believe
the
assertions
of
the
mediums
simply
because
the
tests
which
are
applied
to
them
consist
of
something
more
material
and
tangible
than
aërial
nothings,
and
appear
to
be
marvellous
and
beyond
the
power
of
the
human
mind
to
understand.
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