ne cannot get demonstrative proof here. One has to
follow one's personal sense, which, of course, is liable to err, of the
dramatic probabilities of nature. Our critics here obey their sense of
dramatic probability as much as we do. Take "raps" for example, and
the whole business of objects moving without contact. "Nature," thinks
the scientific man, is not so unutterably silly. The cabinet, the
darkness, the tying, suggest a sort of human rat-hole life exclusively
and "swindling" is for him the dramatically sufficient explanation. It
probably is, in an indefinite majority of instances; yet it is to me
dramatically improbable that the swindling should not have accreted
round some originally genuine nucleus. If we look at human imposture
as a historic phenomenon, we find it always imitative. One swindler
imitates a previous swindler, but the first swindler of that kind
imitated some one who was honest. You can no more create an absolutely
new trick than you can create a new word without any previous
basis.--You don't know how to go about it. Try, reader, yourself, to
invent an unprecedented kind of "physical phenomenon of spiritualism."
When _I_ try, I find myself mentally turning over the regular
medium-stock, and thinking how I might improve some item. This being
the dramatically probable human way, I think differently of the whole
type, taken collectively, from the way in which I may think of the
single instance. I find myself believing that there is "something in"
these never ending reports of physical phenomena, although I have n't
yet the least positive notion of the something. It becomes to my mind
simply a very worthy problem for investigation. Either I or the
scientist is of course a fool, with our opposite views of probability
here; and I only wish he might feel the liability, as cordially as I
do, to pertain to both of us.

I fear I look on Nature generally with more charitable eyes than his,
though perhaps he would pause if he realized as I do, how vast the
fraudulency is which inconsistency he must attribute to her. Nature is
brutal enough, Heaven knows; but no one yet has held her non-human side
to be _dishonest_, and even in the human sphere deliberate deceit is
far rarer than the "classic" intellect, with its few and rigid
categories, was ready to acknowledge. There is a hazy penumbra in us
all where lying and delusion meet, where passion rules beliefs as well
as conduct, and where the ter