Through a Glass, Darkly Quotes

“Doyle was not alone in his growing disenchantment with the deadness, the self-aggrandizing, self-appointed hierarchy that ran the shop, and the scorn for other religions that seemed to characterize the Catholic Church. In fact, scholars have observed that one of the driving forces behind the emergence of the new “religion” called spiritualism in the Victorian and Edwardian eras was loss of faith in organized religion.”
― Stefan Bechtel, Through a Glass, Darkly: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Quest to Solve The Greatest Mystery of All

“Science depends on being able to repeat a finding, again and again, before it's declared true. It's about controlling the variables. And that is simply impossible in a séance room. Results are never replicable, strictly. The experimenter isn't in charge. Even the medium isn't in charge. The spirits decide if and when they'll come through, and what they'll do when they get here.”
― Stefan Bechtel, Through a Glass, Darkly: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Solve the Greatest Mystery of All