orld-theory; one ought to understand that lively intolerance of the
least grain of romanticism in the views of life of other people, which
are such characteristic marks of those who {325} follow the scientific
professions to-day. Our debt to science is literally boundless, and
our gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must be
correspondingly immense. But the S. P. R.'s Proceedings have, it seems
to me, conclusively proved one thing to the candid reader; and that is
that the verdict of pure insanity, of gratuitous preference for error,
of superstition without an excuse, which the scientists of our day are
led by their intellectual training to pronounce upon the entire thought
of the past, is a most shallow verdict. The personal and romantic view
of life has other roots besides wanton exuberance of imagination and
perversity of heart. It is perennially fed by _facts of experience_,
whatever the ulterior interpretation of those facts may prove to be;
and at no time in human history would it have been less easy than
now--at most times it would have been much more easy--for advocates
with a little industry to collect in its favor an array of contemporary
documents as good as those which our publications present. These
documents all relate to real experiences of persons. These experiences
have three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous,
and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for their
production; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life.
Those who preferentially attend to them, and still more those who are
individually subject to them, not only easily may find, but are
logically bound to find, in them valid arguments for their romantic and
personal conception of the world's course. Through my slight
participation in the investigations of the S. P. R. I have become
acquainted with numbers of persons of this sort, for whom the very word
'science' has become a name of reproach, for reasons that I now both
understand {326} and respect. It is the intolerance of science for
such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of
their existence or of their significance (except as proofs of man's
absolute innate folly), that has set science so apart from the common
sympathies of the race. I confess that it is on this, its humanizing
mission, that the Society's best claim to the gratitude of our
generation seems to me to depend. It has restored continui