l the teachings of science and
of experience are against the claim. No one who had the most superficial
idea of what knowledge is and how facts can be proven, would for a
moment accept such a preposterous story, no matter by whom asserted.

The whole subject is one which is to be examined into and determined
like any other matter, and yet, when a proposition is made to
investigate by skilled observers the remarkable claim put forward, it is
met with abuse and misrepresentation, as if these people thought that
all they had to do was to make an assertion of a phenomenon which,
according to what we know of nature, is absurd and impossible, to have
it at once accepted by those who know, by painful experience, how
doubtful all things are till they are proven, and how difficult it is
to get satisfactory evidence of the most simple event in physiology or
pathology. No one doubts the abstract possibility of a human being
living without food, for, bearing in mind the discoveries that are
constantly being made, nothing can be regarded as absolutely impossible
outside the domain of mathematics. Two and two cannot make six, neither
can two distinct bodies occupy the same space at the same time, nor the
square of the hypothenuse be otherwise than equal to the sum of the
squares of the other two sides of a right-angled triangle.

Our knowledge of natural science is, however, founded on experience.
Looking at a bear, for instance, for the first time, and with no
knowledge of its habits and capacities we would not be apt to believe
that the animal could go into retirement at the beginning of winter and
remain till spring in a condition of semi-existence and without food.
But experience teaches us that the bear when it begins to hibernate is
fat; that during hibernation it is in a perfectly quiescent state; that
when it emerges into active life again it is emaciated, and that during
the whole period of retirement it has taken nothing into its stomach. We
then know by observing that all bears go through the same process, that
it is a law of their organism to do so, and that their reduced
functional actions are maintained by the consumption of the fat with
which in the beginning their bodies were loaded. Even here, then, there
is no exception to the law that there is no force without the
decomposition of matter. Now, it is just possible that by some hitherto
unknown or unrecognized condition of the system a man or woman may
obtain the fo