Here Dr. Carpenter does not attempt to show cause why the ‘manifestations’ are always the same, for example, why spirits rap in the Australian Bush, among blacks not influenced by modern spiritualism:  why tables moved, untouched, in Thibet and India, long before ‘table-turning’ was heard of in modern Europe.  We have filled up the lacuna in the doctor’s argument, by suggesting that the phenomena (which are not such as a civilised taste would desire) were invented by savages, and handed on in an unbroken catena, a chain of tradition.

But, in following Dr. Carpenter, we are brought up short at one of our old obstacles, we trip on one of our old stumbling-blocks.  Granting that an epileptic patient made strange bounds and springs, we can conceive savages going farther in fancy, and averring that he flew, or was levitated, or miraculously transported through space.  Let this become matter of traditional belief, as a thing possible in epilepsy, i.e., in ‘diabolical,’ or ‘angelical possession’.  Add the honest but hallucinatory persuasion of the patient that he was so levitated, and let him be a person of honour and of sanctity, say St. Theresa, St. Francis, or St. Joseph of Cupertino.  Granting the survival of a savage exaggeration, granting the hallucinated saint, we may, perhaps, explain the innumerable anecdotes about miraculous levitation of which a few are repeated in our paper on ’Comparative Psychical Research.’  The witnesses in witch trials, and in ecclesiastical inquiries, and Lord Orrery, and Mr. Greatrakes, and the Cromwellian soldiery in Scotland, the Spanish in Peru, Cotton Mather in New England, saw what they expected to see, what tradition taught them to look for, in the case of a convulsionary, or a saint, or a catechumen.  The consensus in illusion was wonderful, but let us grant, for the sake of argument, that it was possible.  Let us add another example, from Cochin China.

The witness and narrator is Delacourt, a French missionary.  The source is a letter of his of November 25, 1738, to Winslow the anatomist, Membre de l’Academie des Sciences a Paris.  It is printed in the Institutiones Theologicae of Collet, who attests the probity of the missionary. {324}

In May or June, 1733, Delacourt was asked to view a young native Christian, said by his friends to be ‘possessed’.

‘Rather incredulous,’ as he says, Delacourt went to the lad, who had communicated, as he believed, unworthily, and was therefore a prey to religious excitement, which, as Bishop Callaway found among his Zulu converts, and as Wodrow attests among ‘savoury Christians,’ begets precisely such hallucinations as annoyed the early hermits like St. Anthony.  Delacourt addressed the youth in Latin:  he replied, Ego nescio loqui Latine, a tag which he might easily have picked up, let us say.  Delacourt led him into church, where the patient was violently convulsed.  Delacourt then (remembering the example