men at once coarse and cautious;
the fact that we all know men who testify to spiritualistic incidents
but are not spiritualists, the fact that science itself admits
such things more and more every day. Science will even admit
the Ascension if you call it Levitation, and will very likely admit
the Resurrection when it has thought of another word for it.
I suggest the Regalvanisation. But the strongest of all is
the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are
never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of
materialist dogmatism--I may say materialist mysticism. The sceptic
always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need
not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed.
For I hope we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted
in the mere recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or
trick miracles. That is not an argument at all, good or bad.
A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as
a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England--
if anything, it proves its existence.

Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur
(my evidence for which is complex but rational), we then collide
with one of the worst mental evils of the age. The greatest
disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men began
to use the word "spiritual" as the same as the word "good."
They thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was
to grow in virtue. When scientific evolution was announced,
some feared that it would encourage mere animality. It did worse:
it encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to think that so long
as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel.
But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil. A man of genius,
very typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly.
Benjamin Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of
the angels. He was indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels.
He was not on the side of any mere appetite or animal brutality;
but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the princes
of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery,
and contempt of all obvious good. Between this sunken pride
and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose,
spirits of shapes and sizes. Man, in encountering them,
must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering
any other varie