Modern Magic: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Conjuring

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.