ade certain experiments on Home's
power of causing a balance to move without contact he succeeded; in
the presence of some Russian savants a similar experiment failed.
Granting that Mr. Crookes's tests were accurate (and the lay mind,
at least, can see no flaw in them), we must suppose that the
personal conditions, in the Russian case, were not the same.

Now an electric current will inevitably do its work, if known and
ascertained conditions are present; a personal current, so to speak,
depends on personal conditions which are unascertainable. It is
inevitable that science, accustomed to the invariable, should turn
away from phenomena which, if they do occur, seem, so far, to have a
will of their own. That they have a will of their own is precisely
their attraction for another class of minds, which recognises in
them the action of unknown intelligences. There are also people who
so dislike our detention in the prison house of old unvarying laws,
that their bias is in favour of anything which may tend to prove
that science, in her contemporary mood, is not infallible. As the
Frenchman did not care what sort of scheme he invested money in,
'provided that it annoys the English,' so many persons do not care
what they invest belief in, provided that it irritates men of
science. Just as rationally, some men of science denounce all
investigation of the abnormal phenomena of which history and rumour
are so full, because the research may bring back distasteful
beliefs, and revive the 'ancestral tendency' to superstition. Yet
the question is not whether the results of research may be
dangerous, but whether the phenomena occur. The speculations of
Copernicus, of Galileo, of the geologists, of Mr. Darwin, were
'dangerous,' and it does not appear that they have added to the sum
of human delight. But men of science are still happiest when
denouncing the 'obscurantism' of those who opposed Copernicus, Mr.
Darwin, and the rest, in dread of the moral results. We owe the
strugforlifeur of M. Daudet to Mr. Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace,
and the strugforlifeur is as dangerous and disagreeable as the half-
crazy spiritualist. Science is only concerned with truth, not with
the mischievous inferences which people may draw from truth. And
yet certain friends of science, quite naturally and normally, fall
back on the attitude of the opponents of Copernicus: 'These
things,' they say, 'should not even be examined'.

Such are the h