These examples may suggest the sort of facts which can hardly be too often stated or too carefully explained, and which are ten times more convincing to a layman than the most imposing array of testimonials to character or of ex cathedrâ judgments. I am not excusing the mistakes and exaggerations of the abolitionists; I regard them as of painful importance, since from them careless or bigoted opponents draw their cheap excuse for treating all consideration of the question from any but their own standpoint as ignorance and presumption. But I do not believe that even the best instructors can exercise their legitimate influence on popular opinion, or meet opposition in a really effective way, without paying more heed to the bearings of the various points here discussed points which, obvious enough, and coming with no force at all from me, only need to be fully and fairly recognised by them to make the future of English physiology secure. 227 THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE IN AMONG contemporary studies, that which (for the convenience of including its various departments under a common name) has been designated as 'Psychical Research' holds, in more ways than one, a position of unfortunate uniqueness. The main peculiarity, which is at the root of most of the others, seems to be this-that, while the study is primarily one of facts, and, to have any permanent value, must be a scientific examination of the facts as part of Nature, it offers (at any rate in some of its more striking branches) little immediate attraction and little direct opportunity to the men of facts—the men whose recognised mission is to deal with natural phenomena in a scientific way. Superior knowledge and strength of conviction are not usually here, as in other departments of natural science, the result of skill and pains. Those first convinced of the facts are not, as a class, persons of any intellectual superiority, not persons whom some special aptitude for observation or power of reasoning has taught truths to which the great body of mankind must be led up by following their guidance; but simply persons who, without any special training or ability, often even without any will or effort of their own, have come across certain somewhat rare phenomena. It follows as a matter of course that surprising facts, in the hands of persons who are average specimens of the uncritical majority of mankind, should get involved with all sorts of misinterpretation, bad argument, and wild theory; and that the conviction of reality which the facts inspire should be equally extended to purely subjective hallucinations, and to results of conscious and unconscious deception. One consequence of this is that those who seriously endeavour to advance the study of the facts have always to be facing in two directions at once, and to wage equal war on two opposite habits or tendencies-the tendency to easy credulity on the one hand, and to easy incredulity on the other. No subject has ever suffered so much at the same time from those who profess friendship and those who profess hostility to it. And the difficulty of making way in this double-facing sort of fashion is much increased by the relation of the two opposite extremes to one another. Sometimes the path of progress gets encumbered by the cross-lunges of the infuriated disputants on right and left of it; but more often both these parties, in their desire to get out of sight and hearing of one another, get also out of sight and hearing of the unfortunate middle party on the path; and so march happily along, each claiming a victory, but without a fight, to the oftrepeated tune of a few fine-sounding formulæ. It is, indeed, only natural that a subject so large, and for scientific purposes so new, should offer special facilities for controversialists, even with the best intentions, to miss each other and to avoid close grappling; and it is in the hope of in some measure defining the ground of the 'psychical researcher's' contention with the incredulous opponents of his work that the following remarks are offered. For it is impossible for him not to feel that the real issues between that party and himself are missed or confused, when he so constantly finds them resting their case on general facts which he would be the first to admit, and directing their attacks to particular absurdities which he would be the first to condemn. For example, Dr. Carpenter in his Spiritualism, Mesmerism, &c., has rightly laid down the two great sources of fallacy in such matters-the disposition to attribute whatever is not immediately understood to occult agencies; and the myth-making tendency, in yielding to which the average imagination of mankind finds its easiest and most congenial exercise. Again, he has shown just scientific instinct in his exposure of the particular lapses and weaknesses even of scientific opponents-e.g. Prof. Gregory's easy assumption that because a mesmerist caused a man to rise to the very tips of his toes by holding his hand over him, he could have held the man suspended without contact; or the same gentleman's hypothesis that the reason why clairvoyants could not read the number of Simpson's bank-notes was that the selfish motive for employing the power prevented its proper exercise. But in dwelling on these points, he contrives to give the controversy an air which saves the trouble of any close argument. The idea is inevitably suggested to the mind of the ordinary reader that any one who differs from Dr. Carpenter's conclusions must be both so incapable of a wide view of mental history and science as |