shonesty men of thought are abundantly
guilty, when deeming themselves to be governed only by reason, they are
in fact slaves to some intellectual fashion of the day. Not one of them
in a thousand would dare to appear in public with the clothes of last
century, or to face the laughter of a crowd of his compeers. Hence a
certain indocility and rigidness of mind which they only escape who live
out of the fashion or have strength to lead it or to live above it.
Simple, whether from greatness or littleness, they escape the narrowing
influence inseparable from being identified, even in their own mind,
with a school or coterie; and can afford to say things as they see them.

Contemporary fashion says at present that there are to be no miracles,
nothing supernormal; whatever cannot be reduced in any way to known laws
and causes can be flatly denied, for the supposition of unknown causes
and laws is rank heresy. Until more recent years, it was not permitted
to listen to or show any disposition to investigate the narratives of
phenomena which have since been "explained" and reduced to such
legalized causes as hysteria or hypnotism, and even (of late) to
thought-transference. But since this happy reconciliation has been
effected, such stories are allowed to be believed on ordinary evidence,
although the accounts of other "unclassed" supernormal marvels coming
from the same lips with the same attestation are still brushed aside as
traveller's tales, or as the puerilities of hagiography--not worth a
thought. One would think that some kind of apology or reparation were
due to ecclesiastical tradition, which was credited with wholesale lying
so long as its recorded wonders were classed among impossibilities by
the intellectual fashion-mongers, but it seems we have only partly
escaped the reproach of knavery to incur that of wholesale folly for not
having seen that these apparent miracles were but forms of hysteria or
hypnotism.

Yet what is hysteria and what does it really explain? [1] Surely the
etymology throws no light on the subject! Is it then merely a name for
the unknown cause of phenomena every whit as strange as those which were
held incredible till their like had been actually witnessed and forced
upon the unwilling eyes of science beyond all possibility of denial? Is
it that science blindly refused even to weigh the evidence for abnormal
facts till the same or similar had become matters of personal
observation? Is it that