own hand.  The flight was of about eighty yards.  He flew up into a tree once, and perched on a bough, which quivered no more than if he had been a bird.  A rather commonplace pious remark uttered in his presence was the cause of this exhibition.  Once in church, he flew from his knees, caught a priest, lifted him up, and gyrated, laetissimo raptu, in mid air.  In the presence of the Spanish ambassador and many others, he once flew over the heads of the congregation.  Once he asked a priest whether the holy elements were kept in a particular place.  ‘Who knows?’ said the priest, whereon Joseph soared over his head, remained kneeling in mid air, and came down only at the request of his ecclesiastical superior.  Joseph was clairvoyant, and beheld apparitions, but on the whole (apart from his moral excellence) his flights were his most notable accomplishment.  On one occasion he ‘casual remarked to a friend,’ ‘what an infernal smell’ (infernails odor), and then nosed out a number of witches and warlocks who were compounding drugs:  ’standing at some considerable distance, standing, in fact, in quite another street’.

Iamblichus, in the letter to Porphyry, describes such persons as St. Joseph of Cupertino.  ’They have been known to be lifted up into the air. . . .  The subject of the afflatus has not felt the application of fire. . . .  The more ignorant and mentally imbecile a youth may be, the more freely will the divine power be made manifest.’  Joseph was ignorant, and ‘enfeebled by vigil and fasts,’ so Joseph was ‘insensible of the application of fire,’ and ’was lifted up into the air’.  Yet the cardinals, surgeons, and other witnesses were not thinking of the pagan Iamblichus when they attested the accomplishments of the saint.  Whence, then, comes the uniformity of evidence?

The sceptical Calef did not believe in these things, because they are ‘miracles,’ that is, contrary to experience.  But here is experience enough to which they are not contrary.

There are dozens of such depositions, and here it is that the student of testimony and of belief finds himself at a deadlock.  Believe the evidence we cannot, yet we cannot doubt the good faith, the veracity of the attesting witnesses.  Had we only savage, or ancient and uneducated testimony, we might say that the uniformity of myths of levitation is easily explained.  The fancy wants a marvel, it readily provides one by positing the infraction of the most universally obvious law, that of gravitation.  Men don’t fly; let us say that a man flew, like Abaris on his arrow!  This is rudimentary, but then witnesses whose combined testimony would prove almost anything else, declare that they saw the feat performed.  Till we can find some explanation of these coincidences of testimony, it is plain that a province in psychology, in the relations between facts as presented to and as represented by mankind, remains to be investigated.  Of all persons who