Second Sight
The claim:
"People believed they could see things as a vision in their mind. They called it 'second sight.' We call it 'imagination.' It made no difference to these people if they saw with their natural eyes or their spiritual eyes as both were one and the same."[1]
The CES Letter's move here turns on a single phrase. Some of the men who signed their names to seeing the gold plates described what they saw using religious words: they saw with "spiritual eyes," with "the eye of faith," "in vision," "in the spirit." The CES Letter sets that phrase, "spiritual eyes," equal to "imagination." If the witnesses only ever saw the plates inside their own heads, then their famous testimony is just a shared religious daydream, and the plates may never have existed at all.
Everything in the argument hangs on that one equation: spiritual eye means imagined. So that is where a fair answer has to start, and the fair first step is to grant what is true. The visionary language is real. David Whitmer really did write that "we were in the spirit when we had the view." Martin Harris really did sometimes say "the eye of faith." Faithful scholars do not deny any of those quotes. The whole dispute is about what those words meant to the people who said them in the 1820s and 1830s, and whether "spiritual" back then was a polite word for "made-up." It was not, and the witnesses said as much themselves.
What "spiritual eyes" actually meant
The argument quietly assumes that "spiritual eye" in 1829 meant what "spiritual experience" can loosely mean today: something inward, private, maybe imaginary. That is not how the early Restoration used the word, and the difference is the whole ballgame.
The most distinctive idea in early Latter-day Saint theology was that "spirit" is not the opposite of "matter." A revelation Joseph Smith dictated states it flatly: "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes."[2] In that framework, spirit is not a synonym for unreal. It is real stuff, just finer, and it takes sight that has been sharpened or empowered to perceive it. To say you saw something "with spiritual eyes" was to claim your sight had been lifted up to catch a real object that ordinary eyes were not strong enough to handle. You were claiming more than ordinary seeing, an upgrade rather than a daydream.
You can see the same logic right in scripture the witnesses knew. Moses describes standing in God's presence: "mine own eyes have beheld God; but not my natural, but my spiritual eyes, for my natural eyes could not have beheld; for I should have withered and died in his presence."[3] Moses was actually there. He actually saw. The "spiritual eyes" wording is not a hedge that it might have been a dream; it explains that human eyes cannot survive that kind of glory without being strengthened first. The object was real and standing right there. His sight had simply been lifted up to bear it.
That is exactly how the scholar Richard Lloyd Anderson reads Harris: when Harris said "spiritual eye," he "was confidently claiming something more, not something less than normal sight."[4] The Restoration vocabulary makes the CES Letter's translation, spiritual equals imaginary, a mistranslation of the witnesses' own dictionary.[5]
The witnesses tied both halves together themselves
The cleanest way to test what the witnesses meant is to let them answer the question directly, which one of them did.
In 1887, a critic named Anthony Metcalf wrote to David Whitmer and asked him point blank whether the experience was spiritual or physical. Whitmer, then 82, dictated his answer:
"Of course we were in the spirit when we had the view, for no man can behold the face of an angel, except in a spiritual view, but we were in the body also, and everything was as natural to us, as it is at any time."[6]
Read that slowly, because it dismantles the equation by itself. Whitmer is not picking "spiritual" over "physical." He is holding both at once: yes it took spiritual preparation, because no one looks an angel in the face on ordinary nerve, and we were in our bodies, and everything was as natural to us as any other moment of our lives. The CES Letter quotes men like Whitmer saying "in the spirit" and stops the sentence there. Whitmer himself finished it.
This is the difference between "spiritual eyes" language and a hallucination, and it is worth being precise about, because the CES Letter blurs them on purpose. A hallucination is private, one person at a time, and it is not a thing you can go back and measure. Nothing the witnesses describe fits any of that. Asked late in life whether he had been fooled, Whitmer answered, "I was not under any hallucination, nor was I deceived! I saw with these eyes and I heard with these ears! I know whereof I speak!"[7] The man the CES Letter casts as a visionary dreamer used the word hallucination himself, to reject it.
The one quote the case leans on, read to the end
The strongest single piece of evidence the CES Letter has is a letter from 1838. A disaffected member named Stephen Burnett wrote that he had heard Martin Harris say "in public that he never saw the plates with his natural eyes only in vision or imagination." That sounds like a confession. The trouble is that the same letter, two sentences later, records Harris standing up in that very meeting and pushing back:
"M Harris arose & said he was sorry for any man who rejected the Book of Mormon for he knew it was true, he said he had hefted the plates repeatedly in a box with only a tablecloth or a handkerchief over them, but he never saw them only as he saw a city throught [sic] a mountain."[8]
Two things matter here. First, Harris's own next breath is "he knew it was true," which the CES Letter leaves out. Second, look at what Harris attaches his "city through a mountain" line to: the plates "in a box with only a tablecloth or a handkerchief over them." That is the giveaway. "Seeing a city through a mountain" is an image for knowing something is there that you cannot look straight at, which is precisely what hefting covered plates feels like. It describes the months Harris spent helping during the translation, when the plates stayed wrapped on the table and he could feel their weight through the cloth but not see them. It is not a description of the later event when an angel held the uncovered plates up in daylight. Harris described that event, all his life, in plain angel-and-eyes language.
So Harris is talking about two different moments, and Burnett (who was renouncing the book on the same page) compressed them into one damning headline. A 2024 scholarly study ran Burnett's letter through a standard reliability checklist and scored it 3 out of 10, "not a reliable source."[9] The same two-phase pattern shows up in the other quote the CES Letter closes on, the "pencil-case" exchange, where Harris actually answered "yes" to seeing the plates with his bodily eyes before adding that during the period in question they were "covered over with a cloth." The in-depth version walks through that quote line by line.
The eight men who never used the word "spiritual" at all
One whole section of the record leaves the second-sight argument with nothing to grip, because there is nothing visionary in it to reinterpret.
Eleven men witnessed the plates, but they split into two groups with two very different experiences. The Three Witnesses (Cowdery, Whitmer, Harris) saw an angel and heard a voice. That is the experience all the "spiritual eye" language attaches to, and it is the only experience the CES Letter's quote chain actually engages. The other group, the Eight Witnesses, had no angel, no voice, no vision. Joseph Smith simply handed them the plates in ordinary daylight and they turned the leaves over in their hands. Their signed 1830 statement reads like an inventory:
"...as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship... for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken."[10]
Every verb in it is a workman's verb: handling, seeing, hefting, examining the engravings, judging the workmanship. Not one mystical word slips in anywhere. The Latter-day Saint scholar Daniel Peterson calls the Eight Witnesses' language "stubbornly matter-of-fact" and "almost distinctly nonreligious in tone."[11] And these men kept talking that way for decades, even after several of them left the Church. John Whitmer, interviewed in 1878 (forty years after he walked away), was asked whether the plates were a real physical object and answered, "Yes, as material as anything can be." He gave the dimensions, "8 by 6 or 7 inches," and described the binding, "three rings, each one in the shape of a D."[12] Hyrum Smith, hearing the "spiritual eyes" rumor already circulating in 1838, answered it head-on: "He said he had but two hands and two eyes. He said he had seen the plates with his eyes and handled them with his hands."[13]
You cannot run the second-sight argument on testimony like that. There is no "spiritual eye" to redefine, no vision to call imaginary. A man giving you the inch-measurements of an object he turned over in his hands is not reporting a daydream. Whatever the argument achieves against the angelic vision of the Three, the Eight are standing entirely outside its reach.
When "spiritual eyes" sounds like a dodge
The visionary language really is the witnesses' own, and to a modern ear it really does sound evasive. That is an unlucky collision of vocabularies. The phrase meant one thing in 1829 and drifted toward "imaginary" in the centuries since, and the witnesses cannot un-say it. A skeptic who presses hardest right on the Three Witnesses' vision, the part that came wrapped in spiritual words, is pressing on the case's softest spot, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
I will also grant that the two-phase reading of Harris, where "city through a mountain" describes only the covered-plates translation period, is an interpretation. It is a strong one: it fits the grammar of Harris's own sentence, it fits how he described the angelic event every other time, and it fits his pushback in that very meeting. But a reading where the metaphor stretches over everything is still formally possible, and a couple of David Whitmer's late-in-life statements do wrap the Three's vision in spiritual language without any tidy qualifier attached. The faithful case here is the better reading of the evidence. It is not a mathematical proof, and selling it as one would be its own kind of dishonesty.
The half the argument can't reach
Notice what the second-sight argument is actually built to do. It is a tool for reinterpreting visionary language: take "spiritual eye" and "in the spirit," redefine them as "imagined," and the testimony dissolves. That tool has a real target, the Three Witnesses' angel, and even there it strains against the witnesses' own integration of the two registers and against what their words meant in their own century. But it has no target at all in the other half of the record. The Eight gave no visionary language to redefine. They gave weight, dimensions, the shape of the rings, the feel of metal leaves turned over by hand in daylight. The gap between what the argument is built to reinterpret and what the Eight actually said is the whole answer.
And the eleven were not testifying in a vacuum. They were pointing at an object: the Book of Mormon, a book of roughly a quarter-million words that Joseph dictated aloud in something like two months of working days, never going back to patch the early pages as the later ones came, with no draft anyone has ever found.[14] The witnesses are telling you they held the source of that book in their hands. The question of whether some of them were unstable or gullible people belongs to a different page; so does the comparison to other men who later claimed their own plates. Those are answered in Credibility Concerns and the James Strang comparison. The narrow second-sight question is simpler than either. The argument can only reach the witnessing it can recast as a vision, and the most physical, most hard-edged testimony in the whole record was never a vision to begin with.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," p. 93. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 131:7–8, dictated by Joseph Smith on May 17, 1843. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/131. ↩︎
Moses 1:11. The Pearl of Great Price. ↩︎
Richard Lloyd Anderson, quoted in Scripture Central, "Why Did Martin Harris Sometimes Say He Saw the Plates with Spiritual Eyes?" KnoWhy #775, January 28, 2025. ↩︎
"Why Did Martin Harris Sometimes Say He Saw the Plates with Spiritual Eyes?" Scripture Central KnoWhy #775, January 28, 2025. https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/why-did-martin-harris-sometimes-say-he-saw-the-plates-with-spiritual-eyes. The KnoWhy draws on Neal Rappleye, "Material Plates, Spiritual Vision: Martin Harris, Divine Materiality, and Seeing with 'Spiritual Eyes'" (BYU Scholars Archive). ↩︎
David Whitmer, letter to Anthony Metcalf, April 2, 1887. Reproduced in Anthony Metcalf, Ten Years Before the Mast (Malad City, ID: 1888), 73–74; in Lyndon W. Cook, ed., David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness (Orem, UT: Grandin Book, 1991), 245–247. Whitmer dictated the letter to his brother J.J. Snyder; Whitmer was 82 years old. ↩︎
David Whitmer, interview with Joseph Smith III, 1884, in Cook, David Whitmer Interviews, 134. ↩︎
Stephen Burnett to "Br. Johnson" (Lyman E. Johnson), April 15, 1838, Joseph Smith Letterbook 2, pp. 64–66, Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-from-stephen-burnett-15-april-1838/1. ↩︎
Neal Rappleye and Stephen O. Smoot, "Stephen Burnett versus the Eight Witnesses: An Exercise in Mature Historical Thinking," Religious Educator 25, no. 2 (2024): 27–64. https://rsc.byu.edu/vol-25-no-2-2024/stephen-burnett-versus-eight-witnesses. Rappleye and Smoot apply Sweat and Alford's five-factor source-evaluation framework and rate Burnett 3 out of 10 — "not a reliable source." ↩︎
"The Testimony of Eight Witnesses," Book of Mormon (Palmyra: E.B. Grandin, 1830). Page-image available via Joseph Smith Papers: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/book-of-mormon-1830/621. ↩︎
Daniel C. Peterson, "The Book of Mormon Witnesses and Their Challenge to Secularism," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 27 (2017): vii–xxviii. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/the-book-of-mormon-witnesses-and-their-challenge-to-secularism. ↩︎
P. Wilhelm Poulson, interview with John Whitmer, July 1878, Deseret Evening News, August 6, 1878 (citing Poulson's letter to the editors dated July 31, 1878). Reproduced in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 5:243–247. Whitmer described the plates as "8 by 6 or 7 inches," "very heavy," with "three rings, each one in the shape of a D"; when asked if the plates were "a material substance," Whitmer answered: "Yes, as material as anything can be." ↩︎
Sally Parker to John Kempton, August 26, 1838. Original letter and full transcription in Janiece L. Johnson, "'The Scriptures Is a Fulfilling': Sally Parker's Weave," BYU Studies Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2005): 110–122, with Hyrum's quote at p. 110. Also in Steven C. Harper, "The Eleven Witnesses," in The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon: A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, ed. Dennis L. Largey, Andrew H. Hedges, John Hilton III, and Kerry Hull (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2015), 117–132 (Parker quote at p. 126). https://rsc.byu.edu/coming-forth-book-mormon/eleven-witnesses. ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: 'Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'" BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 10–50. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/timing-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon-days-and-hours-never-to-be-forgotten/. Welch documents the ~65 working day translation window (April–June 1829) for the surviving ~270,000-word Book of Mormon manuscript. ↩︎