happen, but because of the strong wish and belief that they would happen. The earnest expectation of the event excites a vivid idea or image of it, so that the image, not the reality, is seen and observation falsified. For example, it was a firmly rooted superstition at one time that the corpse of a murdered person would bleed afresh when the murderer was brought into its presence and made to touch it, and the experiment was repeatedly made with the successful result of obtaining so conclusive a piece of damning evidence.* So late as the time when Dr. Cudworth wrote his learned treatise, it was the received opinion "that evil spirits or demons do sometimes really act upon the bodies of men by inflicting or augmenting bodily distempers or diseases." He entertained no doubt that some maniacal persons, who were really demoniacs, could discover secrets, declare things past

* Two respectable clergymen, for example, swore at trial in the time of Charles I. (1628-29) that the body having been taken out of the grave and laid on the grass, thirty days after death, and one of the parties accused of murder required to touch it," the brain of the dead began to have a dew or gentle sweat arise on it, which increased by degrees till the sweat ran down in drops on the face; the brow turned to a lively flesh-colour, and the deceased opened one of her eyes and shut it again; and this opening of the eye was done three several times; she likewise thrust out the ring or marriage finger three times, and pulled it in again; and the finger dropped blood from it on the grass." In regard of any extraordinary event, one may safely conclude that it would be a greater miracle, and therefore a more unlikely explanation of it, to see a real miracle in it than to make a miracle of it through misseeing.

and to come, and speak in languages which they had never learned; and he quotes in proof what he calls "an unquestionable instance" of a maniacal woman who, though she knew no language but her mothertongue, spoke to a stranger who was an Armenian in Armenian, and foretold future events correctly.* It is well known that the circumstances following the burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ are differently narrated by the writers of the different Gospels, one point of signal disagreement being as to whether two angels were seen sitting in the empty sepulchre or whether only one sat there. Now, the person who is said to have seen the "two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain," was Mary Magdalene ; a woman who, having had seven devils cast out of her, we may justly suppose, if not to have been insane once, to have had that kind of nervous constitution, loosely compact and unstably balanced, in which a vivid idea easily attains to such an intensity and separateness as to be seen as an actual image. Running to the sepulchre early in the morning, in eager and anxious excitement, and finding the sepulchre open and the body of Christ gone, in fulfilment of His declaration that, after being delivered into the hands of men and killed, He should rise from * Intellectual System, ch. viii. p. 349.

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the dead on the third day,* what more likely than that the agitated glance at the separate pieces of linen" the linen clothes lying there, and the napkin that was about the head not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself " suggested the ideas, and the ideas the visible images, of two angels?† Thus, perhaps, might be explained one discrepancy in the story, were discrepancies of tail of any real moment in the descriptions of an it unparalleled in human experience, transcendng human explanation, confounding human apprehension.

It is obvious, from the foregoing exposition, that want of opportunities and means, want of habit and training, and want of sincerity owing to one or more of the manifold causes of bias, are the three great causes of bad observation of the overlooking of essential conditions or factors of the problem whereby premature and erroneous conclusions, positive and negative, are based upon insufficient data. A strong positive conclusion from incomplete data is more likely to be corrected soon than a strong negative

* Matt. xvi. 21; Mark ix. 31; Luke ix. 22.

It is certain that the disciples themselves were not convinced by the testimony, for the "words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not" (Luke xxiv. 7); and that John and Peter, who both entered the sepulchre, and found it empty, did not see the angels which Mary, staying there weeping, afterwards saw (John xx. 11, 12),

conclusion from incomplete data; it must needs run often against the tests of experience, and so provoke scrutiny; whereas a negative conclusion may require a very wide, if not an exhaustive, experience of nature in order to make sure whether it is well founded or not. If the statement be made positively that a ghost walks regularly in a certain place at midnight, or that an immense sea-serpent, floating full many a rood, disports itself every night in the English Channel between Dover and Calais, it is not difficult to settle whether the statement is true or false; but if the assertion be made that a ghost never does walk because a ghost does not exist, being no more than a phantom of brain-sick imagination, or that the seaserpent is a mere chimera, it is easy to object that the assertion is unwarrantably dogmatic, because human knowledge of nature is very limited. Always will it be open to the person who has not made himself acquainted with the method and results of such positive knowledge of nature as actually exists, and imbued his mind with its principles-who has not, in fact, had the opportunities, used the means, and trained himself to the capacity of observing, and eliminated from his mind the bias of its prepossessions to inveigh against the arrogant dogmatism and bigoted prejudice of those scientific students of nature who deny the apparitions of sea-serpents and

of spiritual beings. In order to get entirely rid of this class of objection, it would be necessary, not only that the knowledge of nature should be pretty nigh or completely exhaustive, but that everybody should have an exhaustive knowledge of it when it was complete. That is a consummation not to be looked for ; in all time to come there will be, as in time past there has been, abundant room and occasion for the uninstructed exercise of imagination.

(e) The last cause of the vitiation of observation and thought to be noticed lies in the misuse and abuse of words: a common, deep, and wide-reaching cause of fallacies.

There is seemingly an inveterate proclivity to believe that a word must mean an entity, when it may be the sign of an abstraction only, and that the same word must have the same meaning, when it may have very different meanings in different mouths or in the same mouth on different occasions. How widely different are the contents of meaning which the word "matter" actually has in the mind of a philosopher of to-day from what it had in the mind of a philosopher formerly, or has now in the mouth of the vulgar! Although the same word be used, the talk is not of the same thing, but of different things under the same name. In like manner, when the metaphysical psychologist and the physiological