its presumption weakened, but the truth itself of the belief is
decisively overthrown. If I may employ the language of the
professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by
a particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are
black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you
prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper.
In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that
knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use
of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may
be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to
make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no
escape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I
cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the 'rigorously
scientific' mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of
nature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in
spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. The
rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark.
Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To
suppose that it means a certain set of {320} results that one should
pin one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius,
and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.

We all, scientists and non-scientists, live on some inclined plane of
credulity. The plane tips one way in one man, another way in another;
and may he whose plane tips in no way be the first to cast a stone! As
a matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my own
mind the limits of the admitted order of nature. Science, so far as
science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust
for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present
is that science be built up again in a form in which such things may
have a positive place. Science, like life, feeds on its own decay.
New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and
new together into a reconciling law.

And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney's
work. They are trying with the utmost conscientiousness to find a
reconciling conception which shall subject the old laws of nature to
the smallest possible strain. Mr. Myers uses that method of gradual
approach which has pe