shadows, are all
versae causae, do undeniably exist, and, without the aid of any of
your abnormal facts, afford basis enough for the animistic
hypothesis. Moreover, after countless thousands of years, during
which superstition has muttered about your abnormal facts, official
science still declines to hear a word on the topic of clairvoyance
or telepathy. You don't find the Royal Society investigating second
sight, or attending to legends about tables which rebel against the
law of gravitation.'

These are cogent remarks. Normal facts, perhaps, may have suggested
the belief in spirits, the animistic hypothesis. But we do not find
the hypothesis (among the backward races) where abnormal facts are
not alleged to be matters of comparatively frequent experience.
Consequently we do not _know_ that the normal facts, alone,
suggested the existence of spirits to early thinkers, we can only
make the statement on a priori grounds. Like George Eliot's rural
sage we 'think it sounds a deal likelier'. But that, after all,
though a taking, is not a powerful and conclusive syllogism.

Again, we certainly do not expect to see the Royal Society inquiring
into second sight, or clairvoyance, or thought transference. When
the Royal Society was first founded several of its members, Pepys,
F.R.S.; Mr. Robert Boyle, F.R.S.; the Rev. Joseph Glanvill, F.R.S.,
went into these things a good deal. But, in spite of their title,
they were only amateurs. They had no professional dignity to keep
up. They were well aware that they, unlike the late Mr. Faraday,
did not know, by inspiration or by common-sense, the limits of the
possible. They tried all things, it was such a superstitious age.
Now men of science, or the majority of them, for there are some
exceptions, know what is, and what is not possible. They know that
germs of life may possibly come down on meteorites from somewhere
else, and they produced an argument for the existence of a
bathybius. But they also know that a man is not a bird to be in two
places at once, like Pythagoras, and that nobody can see through a
stone wall. These, and similar allegations, they reckon impossible,
and, if the facts happen, so much the worse for the facts. They can
only be due to imposture or mal-observation, and there is an end of
the matter. This is the view of official science. Unluckily, not
many years ago, official science was equally certain that the
ordinary phenomena of hypnotism we