only because it is unusual to see thoughts, though we can always feel them. One may think it is the same thing to see the mental images of departed friends, as it is to see them personally, but it is not. Seeing and hearing, though equal senses, are made unequal in power and effect, when you believe that, though you can feel the mental pain of minds here, you cannot see their images of thought. The sick may not have seen the images of disease, or spoken on the subject to anybody, yet the mind-reader can tell the locality of the pain. Through sympathy yawning is reproduced. So are sickness and tale-bearing.
Seeing is no less an attribute of personal sense than feeling is. Then why is it more difficult to see a thought than to feel it? Education alone determines the difference. In reality there is none. Haunted houses, ghostly voices, unusual noises, apparitions, dark seances, either involve feats by tricksters, or they are images and sounds evolved involuntarily by mortal mind.
How are veritable ideas to be distinguished from illusions? By learning their origin. Ideas are emanations of Spirit. Thoughts, proceeding from the brain or from matter, are beliefs. Ideas are spiritual, harmonious, and eternal. Thoughts proceed from the material senses, at one time supposed to be substance, at another called Spirit.
To love one's neighbor as one's self is an idea of Soul; but physical sense can never see, feel, or understand this idea. Excite the organ of veneration, religious faith, and the individual manifests profound adoration. Excite the opposite development, and he blasphemes. Neither of these results, however, is from Christianity, for both are but the effects of belief.
