Read and Download Free eBooks
/
Categories
Browse by category
1,965 books to get lost inYours to read. Yours to keep.
No books found.
Try another title or author.
Try another title or author.
George Whitefield Samson examines reported spiritual manifestations through a series of letters that combine historical testimony with questions about natural causes. Spiritualism Tested considers contemporary phenomena alongside older accounts, asking how observations made in different settings might be classified and explained.
The author discusses relations among physical effects, nervous influence, imagination and religious interpretation. His approach allows the reality of an observed event to be considered separately from the explanation assigned to it. Ancient and modern writers supply examples through which he develops his comparison of possible causes.
The work first appeared in 1852 as To Daimonion, or The Spiritual Medium, under the name Traverse Oldfield. This complete 1860 edition uses Samson’s name and the new title, and includes an additional supplementary letter. Its original preface explains the change of title and the development of the argument. The letters provide a connected account of one nineteenth-century attempt to bring historical, scientific and religious questions into the same inquiry.