

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



alter the weight of bodies which he originally ad- 

 vanced for Mr. Home, together with his own as- 

 sertion of the existence of a " new force," and 

 his charge against " scientific men" for not ex- 

 perimentally investigating it. Their justification 

 for abstaining from such an investigation was the 

 utter unreliability of the evidence adduced, which 

 consisted simply in Mr. Home's assertion that he 

 was not exerting downward pressure, and in Mr. 

 Crookes's belief that he could not thus have pro- 

 duced the effect ; but, having previously allowed 

 himself to become " possessed " by the spiritual- 

 istic idea, Mr. Crookes could not see this fallacy, 

 accepted Mr. Home's assertion as a scientific fact, 

 and scolded " scientific men " for their incredu- 

 lity ! And yet, while asserting that they were 

 " freely invited to examine " (these asserted facts) 

 " when and where they please," Mr. Crookes ad- 

 mitted that Mr. Home's preternatural power could 

 not, be commanded, that he was " subject to un- 

 accountable ebbs and flows of this force," and 

 that " it has but seldom happened that a result 

 obtained on one occasion could be subsequently 

 confirmed and tested with apparatus specially 

 contrived for the purpose." 



Now, this is precisely what has happened over 

 and over again within my own and others' expe- 

 rience of these pseudo - scientific phenomena 

 which depend upon the instrumentality of a hu- 

 man personnel. Thus it was claimed by Mr. Lew- 

 is, a noted mesmerist of twenty-five years ago, 

 that he could not only draw his somnambules 

 after him by mesmeric traction, but could raise 

 them off the ground against the force of gravity. 



" When Mr. L. stood on a chair," says Dr. 

 Gregory, 1 *' and tried to draw Mr. H. without con- 

 tact from the ground, he gradually rose on tiptoe, 

 making the most violent efforts to rise till he was 

 fixed by cataleptic rigidity. Mr. Lewis said that, 

 had he been still more elevated above Mr. H., he 

 could have raised him from the floor without con- 

 tact, and held him thus suspended for a short time, 

 while some spectator should pass his hand under 

 the feet. Although this was not done in my pres- 

 ence," continues Prof. Gregory, " yet the attraction 

 upward was so strong that I see no reason to doubt 

 the statement made to me by Mr. Lewis and by 

 others who saw it, that this experiment has been 

 successfully performed." 



Yet when a committee of Aberdeen professors 

 subsequently tested Mr. Lewis's powers, under 

 conditions admitted by himself to be perfectly 

 fair, 2 not only did he entirely fail in his endeavor 

 to control the actions of his '* subjects " from a 



1 " Letters on Animal Magnetism," p. 351. 



2 Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medicine, 1852. 



distance, but, finding himself unable to keep 

 either of them, when standing sideways against 

 a wall on the foot nearest to it, in the erect posi- 

 tion, he explained that he had never claimed any 

 other power of overcoming the force of gravity 

 than that which he exerted in causing a subject 

 lying on the ground, by the traction of his hand 

 above him, to rise and stand upright. This is the 

 Mr. Lewis whose pretensions have been recently 

 indorsed by Mr. Alfred R.Wallace; a gentleman 

 for whose achievements in the domain of natural 

 science I have the same respect as I have for 

 those of Mr. Crookes in the line of physical re- 

 search, but all whose statements on this subject 

 are vitiated (like those of Mr. Crookes) by his 

 deficient knowledge of the abnormalities of hu- 

 man nature, by his want of due discrimination be- 

 tween facts and inferences, and by his disability 

 to perceive how much greater should be the 

 cogency of the evidence adduced to command our 

 belief in statements of a most extraordinary kind, 

 than that on which we rest our acceptance of the 

 ordinary facts of daily life. 



Thus, to revert to the cases just cited, the fact 

 in the first of them was simply that the lever- 

 board went down when Mr. Home's hands were 

 laid upon it ; and the testimoney of Mr. Crookes 

 and his friends was quite sufficient to justify 

 others in accepting it as such. On the other 

 hand, Mr. Crookes's assertion that the lever-board 

 went down in obedience to some other force than 

 that of Mr. Home's muscular pressure was not a 

 fact, but an inference drawn by Mr. Crookes ; and 

 this inference he had no scientific right to draw, 

 until he had assured himself by every conceiva- 

 ble test that Mr. Home did not and coidd not so 

 depress it. So, again, the rising-up of Mr. Lewis's 

 subject from the prostrate to the erect position, 

 under Mr. Lewis's outstretched hand, was a fact 

 as to which Prof. Gregory's testimony may be un- 

 questioningly accepted, since it involves no im- 

 probability whatever ; but of Mr. Lewis's power 

 to lift him off the ground, and to keep him sus- 

 pended in the air, we obviously require a much 

 stronger assurance than the assertion made to 

 Prof. Gregory by Mr. Lewis, and by others who 

 saw it. And those who refused to accept that 

 assertion at the time were fully justified by Mr. 

 Lewis's explicit disavowal of it to the Aberdeen 

 professors a few months afterward. 



So, again, Mr. Wallace's recently reiterated 

 affirmation of the possession of the clairvoyant 

 power by Alexis, Adolphe, and other somnambules, 

 is merely the believer's inference from facts which 

 no extraordinary testimony is needed to establish, 



