There are but two modes, I think, of explaining these extraordinary phenomena--either by supposing them effected by supernatural agency, as all seers and diviners from antiquity, through the Middle Ages down to our somnambulists, have pretended that they really stood in communication with spirit; or, by supposing that there is an innate latent divining element in our own natures, which only becomes evident and active under certain circumstances, and which is capable of revealing the _future_ with more or less exactitude just as the mind can recall the _past_. For _past_ and _future_ are but different forms of our own subjective intuition of time, and because this internal intuition represents no figure, we seek to supply the defect by an analogy. For time exists _within_ us, not _without_ us; it is not something which subsists of itself, but it is the form only of our internal sense.
These two modes of explaining the phenomena present, I know, great difficulties; the latter especially. However, the pantheistical solution of the Hegelian school adopted by Kieser, Kluge, Wirth, Hoffman, pleases me still less. I even prefer that of Jung-Stilling and Kerner--but at all events one thing is certain, the _facts_ are there; only ignorance, stupidity, and obstinacy can deny them. The _cause_ is still a subject of speculation, doubt, and difficulty. It is only by a vast induction of facts, as in natural philosophy, that we can ever hope to arrive at the knowledge of a general law. The crown of all creation is _man_; therefore while we investigate so acutely all other creatures, let us not shrink back from the strange and unknown depths of our own nature which magnetism has opened to us.]
I am rejoiced to treat of this subject now, considering how lately that demon Lapp befooled ye all. And I shall give you many signs, whereby in future a prophet of God may be distinguished from a prophet of the devil. 1st, Satan's prophets are not conscious of what they utter; but God's prophets are always perfectly conscious, both of the inspiration they receive and the revelations they make known. For as the Laplander grew frenzied, and foamed at the mouth, so it has been with all false prophets from the beginning. Even the blind heathen called prophesying _mania_, or the wisdom of _madness_. The secret of producing this madness was known to them; sometimes it was by the use of roots or aromatic herbs, or by exhalations, as in the case of the Pythoness, whose incoherent utterances were written by the priests of Apollo, for when the fit was over, all remembrance of what she had prophesied vanished too. In the Bible we find all false prophets described as frenzied. In Isaiah xliv. 25--"God maketh the diviners mad." In Ezekiel xiii. 3--"Woe to the foolish prophets." Hosea ix. 7--"The prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad." And Isaiah xxviii. 7 explains fully how this madness was produced.