Spiritualism's opponents did not underrate the social threat of the movement, particularly as it regarded sexuality and marriage.
Those scientists who accepted spiritualism saw their new work as continuation of their scientific research.
Suddenly the absurdities of spiritualism are not funny anymore.
They posited metaphysical intervention, spiritualism, imagination, and elitism as the antitheses to sweeping rationalism, simplification, and mass culture.
Perhaps to the astonishment of his opponents, he did not try to inscribe the incompatibility between materialism/ republicanism and spiritualism/monarchism in the brain.
Spiritualism crossed and recrossed the boundaries between the spiritual and material world to offer this information, to provide this direct form of contact.
Later, from the mid nineteenth century, new modes came in with spiritualism and revamped more urbanised astrology and fortune-telling.
The history of spiritualism thus adds a cautionary note to those postmodern theories that see a subversive, utopian subject as a desideratum.
