investigation of other marvels for
whose universality some basis must be sought in the uniform nature of
things. Cheats will not always and everywhere hit on the same plan, nor
will the independent testimony of false witnesses be found agreeing.

But if besides facts and appearances that science can really explain
away, there be a residue which takes us into a region wherein science as
yet has set no foot, then we may indeed be on our way to a confirmation
of the usually accepted arguments for immortality by which the
positivist may be met upon his own ground. In truth, metaphysical,
moral, and religious arguments, however much they may avail with
individuals who are subjectively disposed to receive them, cannot in
these days influence the crowd of men who need some sort of violence
offered to their intellect if they are to accept truths against which
they are biassed. The temper of the majority is positivist; it will
believe what it can see, touch, and handle, and no more. If then the
natural truth of the independent existence of spirits can be inade
experimentally evident--and _a priori_, why should it not?--men may not
like it, but they will have either to accept it, or to deny all that
they accept on like evidence. Such unwilling concession would of itself
make little for personal religion in the individual; but its widespread
acceptance could not fail to counteract the ethics of materialism, and
so prepare the way for perhaps a fuller return to religion on the part
of the many.

It is the belief, and perhaps the hope, of not a few men of light and
learning that a comparison of the results of the S.P.R. investigations
with those of anthropology touching the beliefs and superstitions of
savages and ruder races, may point to an order of facts which, with
reference to the admissions of existing science, are rightly called
supernormal, and yet which are in another sense strictly normal, namely,
with reference to that science of experimental psychology which, amid
the usual storm of ridicule and jealousy, is slowly struggling into
existence--ridicule from all devout slaves of the intellectual fashion
of the times; jealousy from the neighbour sciences of mental physiology
and neurology, which it declares bankrupt in the face of
newly-discovered liabilities.

So far this gathered evidence seems, in the eyes of some of its
interpreters, to point to a close connection, if not of being, at least
of influence, between soul