ible till observed; and therefore it is permissible to listen to
the evidence for it, and forced thereto, to accept the fact.

But have we really disposed of ghosts if we prove the appearance to be
caused by a subjective modification of the perceiver's sensorium and not
by a modification of the external medium--the air or the ether? Since it
is a question of a spiritual substance independent of spatial dimensions
and relations, said to be present only so far and where its effects and
manifestations are present, what does it matter whether it reports
itself by an effect outside or inside the percipient--whether it be a
"vision sensible to feeling, as to sight," or but "a false creation
proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain"? Is not this very distinction of
outside and inside in the matter of perceptions open to no slight
ambiguity? The savage, familiar with the electric sparks caused by the
friction of deer-skins, ascribes the _aurora borealis_ to the friction
of a jostling herd of celestial deer. "Nonsense," says science, after
centuries of false hypotheses, "it is nothing more nor less than
electricity." This is very much the way she is dealing with the
supernormal at present; brushing aside as wholly nonsensical, beliefs
that envelope a core of useful fact in a wrapping of crude explanation,
and then receiving the same facts as new discoveries, because she has
fitted them into an involucre more to her own liking, though perhaps but
little less crude. "Not deer-skin," says science, "but amber; not
miracle, but faith-cure; not prophetic insight, but thought-transference;
not apparition, but hallucination." And so with the rest.

Considering then the bias of the dominant scientific school, which makes
it refuse even to examine the carefully gathered evidence of the S.P.R.;
we need not wonder if the reports of travellers concerning the existence
of like phenomena among savages and barbarians all over the world are
dismissed with a certain _a priori_ superciliousness. Yet surely, on
evolutionist principles, the only possible clue to the mode in which
belief in spirits and in God may have originated with "primitive man,"
is the mode in which those beliefs are actually now sustained, and, so
to say, "proved" by the most primitive specimens of existing humanity;
by, for example, those bushmen of Australia whose facial angle and
cerebral capacity is supposed to leave no room for much difference
between their mind and that of