said a scientific friend to me
the other day, "is always the unclassified residuum." Round about the
accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort
of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and
irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to
ignore than to attend to. The ideal of every science is that of a
closed and completed system of truth. The charm of most sciences to
their more passive disciples consists in their appearing, in fact, to
wear just this ideal form. Each one of our various _ologies_ seems to
offer a definite head of classification for every possible phenomenon
of the sort which it professes to cover; and so far from free is most
men's fancy, that, when a consistent and organized scheme of this sort
has once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme is
unimaginable. No alternative, whether to whole or parts, can any
longer be conceived as possible. Phenomena unclassifiable within the
system are therefore paradoxical {300} absurdities, and must be held
untrue. When, moreover, as so often happens, the reports of them are
vague and indirect; when they come as mere marvels and oddities rather
than as things of serious moment,--one neglects or denies them with the
best of scientific consciences. Only the born geniuses let themselves
be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no
peace till they are brought within the fold. Your Galileos, Galvanis,
Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting confounded and
troubled by insignificant things. Any one will renovate his science
who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena. And when the
science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of
the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

No part of the unclassified residuum has usually been treated with a
more contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena
generally called _mystical_. Physiology will have nothing to do with
them. Orthodox psychology turns its back upon them. Medicine sweeps
them out; or, at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of them
as 'effects of the imagination,'--a phrase of mere dismissal, whose
meaning, in this connection, it is impossible to make precise. All the
while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the
surface of history. No matter where you open its pages, you find
things rec