mediaeval tales, occur most frequently
in the presence of convulsionaries, like the so-called victims of
witches, like the Hon. Master Sandilands, Lord Torphichen's son
(1720), like the grandson of William Morse in New England (1680),
and like Bovet's case of the demon of Spraiton. {355}

The 'mediums' of modern spiritualism, like Francis Fey, are, or
pretend to be, subject to fits, anaesthesia, jerks, convulsive
movements, and trance. As Mr. Tylor says about his savage
jossakeeds, powwows, Birraarks, peaimen, everywhere 'these people
suffer from hysterical, convulsive, and epileptic affections'. Thus
the physical condition, all the world over, of persons who exhibit
most freely the accepted phenomena, is identical. All the world
over, too, the same persons are credited with the _rejected_
phenomena, clairvoyance, 'discerning of spirits,' powers of
voluntary 'telepathic 'and 'telekinetic' impact. Thus we find that
uniform and recurrent evidence vouches for a mass of phenomena which
science scouts. Science has now accepted a portion of the mass, but
still rejects the stranger occurrences. Our argument is that their
invariably alleged presence, in attendance on the minor occurrences,
is, at least, a point worthy of examination. The undesigned
coincidences of testimony represent a great deal of smoke, and
proverbial wisdom suggests a presumption in favour of a few sparks
of fire. Now, if there are such sparks, the animistic hypothesis
may not, of course, be valid,--'spirits' may not exist,--but the
universal belief in their existence may have had its origin, not in
normal facts only, but in abnormal facts. And these facts, at the
lowest estimate, must suggest that man may have faculties, and be
surrounded by agencies, which physical science does not take into
account in its theory of the universe and of human nature.

We have already argued that the doctrines of theism and of the soul
need not to be false, even if they were arrived at slowly, after a
succession of grosser opinions. But if the doctrines were reached
by a process which started from real facts of human nature, observed
by savages, but not yet recognised by physical science, then there
may have been grains of truth even in the cruder and earlier ideas,
and these grains of gold may have been disengaged, and fashioned,
not without Divine aid, into the sacred things of spiritual
religion.

The stories which we have been considering are often trivia