dence--and Podmore does not feel absolutely
sure of Home--of the group whose judgment the rest of us have to depend
upon, we have a situation in which the average untrained seeker dealing
with the average medium can have no sound confidence at all. The whole
region is shot through and through with uncertainties, deceits and
alternative hypotheses.

_Spiritism a Question of Testimony and Interpretation_

It is all fundamentally a matter of testimony. We have, or we have not,
a body of fact for which we are in debt to observation. The observation
may be first hand--as in Sir Oliver Lodge's sittings where he reports
what he saw and heard. It may be second hand as the cases reported in
the larger part of the authoritative literature of psychic phenomena.
(Second hand, that is, for the authors and those who depend upon them.)
Trustworthy observation is probably more difficult here than in any
region of investigation. The whole situation is unfavourable; low lights
and high emotion, the instinctive tendency to read into the facts a
desired content even in watching them, the possibility of hallucinations
and forms of hypnosis, all combine to render human testimony unreliable
and introduce errors of observation. Nowhere can we be less sure of our
facts and even when the facts are admitted the interpretation of them
still remains, and here the room for difference is equally great. At
best we are dealing with forces not yet subdued to law, phenomena for
which normal experience supplies no parallel. It is all a region of
intimations and possible permissions, but never for a moment of
inevitable conclusions. One must go slow enough in offering any opinion
at all. The writer recognizes and accepts, to begin with, a
preponderance of dependable testimony for physical phenomena not to be
explained in terms of any force with which science is now familiar.

In this he goes beyond Podmore who would eliminate all physical
phenomena from the problem, and fully as far as Carrington. But Sir
William Crookes never admitted entire error in this region,[76] and the
conclusions of Geley (though he cites in part Eusapia Palladino, who is
more or less discredited) point in the same direction. His studies of
materialization are so vivid as to be uncanny and his photographs a
series of documents which still await explanation.[77] There would seem
to be a possible exercise of personal force not dependent upon muscular
pull or pressure, bodily move