e with which this book began.

The question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of common
sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final physical
experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of
pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions" in
connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking whether a
dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous to insist that
it shall be under conditions in which no two living souls in their
senses would seriously communicate with each other. The fact that ghosts
prefer darkness no more disproves the existence of ghosts than the fact
that lovers prefer darkness disproves the existence of love. If you
choose to say, "I will believe that Miss Brown called her _fiance_ a
periwinkle or any other endearing term, if she will repeat the word
before seventeen psychologists," then I shall reply, "Very well, if
those are your conditions, you will never get the truth, for she
certainly will not say it." It is just as unscientific as it is
unphilosophical to be surprised that in an unsympathetic atmosphere
certain extraordinary sympathies do not arise. It is as if I said that I
could not tell if there was a fog because the air was not clear enough;
or as if I insisted on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse.

As a common-sense conclusion, such as those to which we come about sex
or about midnight (well knowing that many details must in their own
nature be concealed) I conclude that miracles do happen. I am forced to
it by a conspiracy of facts: the fact that the men who encounter elves
or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen,
farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious; the fact that we all
know men who testify to spiritualist incidents but are not
spiritualists; the fact that science itself admits such things more and
more every day. Science will even admit the Ascension if you call it
Levitation, and will very likely admit the Resurrection when it has
thought of another word for it. I suggest the Regalvanisation. But the
strongest of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural
things are never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or
of materialist dogmatism--I may say materialist mysticism. The sceptic
always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need not
be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed. F