This rampant and mischievous nonsense was dear to the psychical inquirers of the Restoration; it was circulated by Glanvill, a Fellow of the Royal Society; by Henry More; by Sinclair, a professor in the University of Glasgow; by Richard Baxter, that glory of Nonconformity, who revels in the burning of an ’old reading parson’—­ that is, a clergyman who read the Homilies, under the Commonwealth.  This unlucky old parson was tortured into confession by being ‘walked’ and ’watched’—­that is, kept from sleep till he was delirious.  Archbishop Spottiswoode treated Father Ogilvie, S. J., in the same abominable manner, till delirium supervened.  Church, Kirk, and Dissent have no right to throw the first stone at each other.

Taking levitation, haunting, disturbances and apparitions, and leaving ‘telepathy’ or second sight out of the list for the present, he who compares psychical research in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries finds himself confronted by the problem which everywhere meets the student of institutions and of mythology.  The anthropologist knows that, if he takes up a new book of travels in the remotest lands, he will find mention of strange customs perfectly familiar to him in other parts of the ancient and modern world.  The mythologist would be surprised if he encountered in Papua or Central Africa, or Sakhalin, a perfectly new myth.  These uniformities of myth and custom are explained by the identical workings of the uncivilised intelligence on the same materials, and, in some cases, by borrowing, transmission, imitation.

Now, some features in witchcraft admit of this explanation.  Highland crofters, even now, perforate the image of an enemy with pins; broken bottle-ends or sharp stones are put, in Russia and in Australia, in the footprints of a foe, for the purpose of laming him; and there are dozens of such practices, all founded on the theory of sympathy.  Like affects like.  What harms the effigy hurts the person whose effigy is burned or pricked.  All this is perfectly intelligible.  But, when we find savage ‘birraarks’ in Australia, fakirs in India, saints in mediaeval Europe, a gentleman’s butler in Ireland, boys in Somerset and Midlothian, a young warrior in Zululand, Miss Nancy Wesley at Epworth in 1716, and Mr. Daniel Home in London in 1856-70, all triumphing over the law of gravitation, all floating in the air, how are we to explain the uniformity of stories palpably ridiculous?

The evidence, it must be observed, is not merely that of savages, or of persons as uneducated and as superstitious as savages.  The Australian birraark, who flies away up the tree, we may leave out of account.  The saints, St. Francis and St. Theresa, are more puzzling, but miracles were expected from saints. {100a} The levitated boy was attested to in a court of justice, and is designed by Faithorne in an illustration of Glanvill’s book.  He flew over a garden!  But witnesses in such trials were fanciful people.