The Fox Sisters and the Spiritualism Movement

We are perfectly aware that to the mass of those persons now laboring under the spiritual delusion, all that we can do to open their eyes will be fruitless. We are at this moment acquainted with numbers whose belief in the imposture has become absolute monomania. It is not to these that we address ourselves, but to the stronger minded ones, whose aid we would enlist in exposing and checking a system of fraud and jugglery, which has sent so many unfortunate victims to the lunatic asylum.

We consider these absurd exhibitions of human credulity, called spiritual manifestations, to originate from three causes:

1. Common money-making imposture.
2. Deception practiced without other motive than the pleasure of showing superior cunning.
3. Self-delusion, and the natural love of the marvelous.