onditions, which
we call normal or abnormal, and we guarantee the accuracy of our
conclusions."

However, it would be very well if they added:

"But having no pretensions to assure the world that we are acquainted
with all the forces of nature, known and unknown, we do not claim the
right to hold back other people from bold investigations in regions
which we have not reached as yet, owing to our great cautiousness and
also to our moral timidity. Not being able to maintain that the human
organism is utterly incapable of developing certain transcendental
powers, which are rare, and observable only under certain conditions,
unknown to science, we by no means wish to keep other explorers within
the limits of our own scientific discoveries."

By pronouncing this noble, and, at the same time, modest speech, our
physiologists would doubtless gain the undying gratitude of posterity.

After this speech there would be no fear of mockery, no danger of
losing one's reputation for veracity and sound reason; and the learned
colleagues of these broad-minded physiologists would investigate every
phenomenon of nature seriously and openly. The phenomena of spiritualism
would then transmigrate from the region of materialized
"mothers-in-law" and half-witted fortune-telling to the regions of the
psycho-physiological sciences. The celebrated "spirits" would probably
evaporate, but in their stead the living spirit, which "belongeth not to
this world," would become better known and better realized by humanity,
because humanity will comprehend the harmony of the whole only after
learning how closely the visible world is bound to the world invisible.

After this speech, Haeckel at the head of the evolutionists, and Alfred
Russel Wallace at the head of the spiritualists, would be relieved from
many anxieties, and would shake hands in brotherhood.

Seriously speaking, what is there to prevent humanity from acknowledging
two active forces within itself; one purely animal, the other purely
divine?

It does not behove even the greatest amongst scientists to try to
"bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades," even if they have chosen
"Arcturus with his sons" for their guides. Did it never occur to them
to apply to their own intellectual pride the questions the "voice out of
the whirlwind" once asked of long-suffering Job: "where were they when
were laid the foundations of the earth? and have the gates of death been
opened unto them?" If so, o