But, it may reasonably be urged, ’the natural familiar facts of life, death, sleep, waking, dreams, breath, and 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 were based on imposture and on mal-observation.  These phenomena, too, were tabooed.  But so many people could testify to them, and they could be so easily explained by the suggestive force of suggestion, that they were reluctantly admitted within the sacred citadel.  Many people, sane, not superstitious, healthy, and even renowned as scientific specialists, attest the existence of the still rarer phenomena which are said, in certain cases, to accompany the now more familiar incidents of hypnotism.  But these phenomena have never yet been explained by any theory which science recognises, as she does recognise that suggestion is suggestive.  Therefore these rarer phenomena manifestly do not exist, and cannot be the subject of legitimate inquiry.