m Crookes, by phenomena of one sort or another which do
not come under his laws, and he assigns to them causes which lie
altogether out of his field. Indeed the temper and training of the
scientist handicap him in all psychical investigations. He has only one
of two alternatives: to explain what he sees in terms of what his
laboratories have told him, or else in terms of forces with which he is
not familiar. His training in careful experimentation may fit him to
test and isolate physical phenomena, but if they cannot be explained in
terms of the forces and laws with which he is familiar his conclusions
are no more authoritative than the conclusions of any other reasonably
intelligent man. He may, therefore, lend the weight of a great name to
conclusions--or conjectures--entirely outside his own province. The
element of trickery in the ordinary professional seance is
notorious.[75] The ordinary physical phenomena of spiritism have almost
without exception been duplicated by conjurers--many of whom have
mystifying tricks of their own no medium can duplicate and even the most
unusual phenomena, such as Home's apparent ability to handle fire
unburnt and his levitation can be paralleled in savage rites or the
performance of Indian fakirs, to which no professedly spiritistic
explanation is attached. In many instances a trained conjurer would be
far more apt to detect fraud than a trained scientist. He would at least
know where to look for a probable explanation.

[Footnote 75: Carrington, "The Psychical Phenomena of Spiritualism," pp.
6 and 7.]

_The Society for Psychical Research Gives Intellectual Standing to Their
Investigations_

If the explanations of the whole group of phenomena is not in the known
resident forces about us it is presumably in powers or aspects of
personality not yet fully known. Here the psychologist is a better
witness than the scientist and it is significant that psychologists have
been slower to accept the spiritistic hypothesis than the scientist.
Hyslop is an exception but the extent to which Hyslop has of late gone
in some of his reported utterances would seem to indicate that he has
passed far beyond the bonds of the scientific. And indeed, the whole
tendency of those who let themselves go strongly with the spiritistic
tide is exactly in this direction. It ought, however, to be said that
even these members of the S.P.R. who have become spiritistic have
generally been savingly conservative in