CARPENTER, WALLACE, AND SPIRITUALISM. 



463 



ly of as little account in science as the other ques- 

 tion, Cuinocet? 1 Hence whether the evolution 

 doctrine favors the Socialists or the Ultramon- 

 tanes, the high and dry Conservatives, the Mod- 

 erates, the Liberals, the Radicals, or any other 

 party, must be a matter of entire indifference to 

 the earnest investigator, and must not be per- 

 mitted for a moment to lead him astray in his re- 

 searches. The truth must be established for its 

 own sake, and for no other purpose. Any other 

 consideration, even though it were 'urged by a 

 Virchow, must be absolutely rejected. 



Ever since science first began there have been 

 heard authoritative voices calling " Halt ! " to the 

 restless spirit of speculation, and it were a grave 

 injustice not to recognize the value of such ad- 

 monitions. They who warn against danger, and 

 they who engage in scientific speculation, are 

 both indispensable for the development of science ; 

 but we must ever bear in mind that scientific 

 progress always, almost without an exception, 



has come from the labors of those who dared 

 to give expression to thoughts which were as a 

 leaven to the minds of their contemporaries, and 

 who were persecuted for heresy and laid under a 

 ban by the authorities. The most splendid tri- 

 umphs of science are the fruit of the empiric 

 demonstration of ingenious hypotheses. Even in 

 cases where these hypotheses have proved un- 

 tenable, they have caused men to think, and that 

 in itself constitutes a new advance of science. We 

 could as little dispense with them as with the 

 leaven in bread. All honor, then, first of all to 

 the men to whom we are indebted for hypotheses 

 which have given a stimulus to research ; which, 

 so to speak, constitute a landmark in the history 

 of science ; finally, in the mastering of which, in 

 the one sense or in the other, a full generation or 

 more has been employed ! Honor, again, to those 

 intellectual princes of whom the German proverb 

 is true that, " when kings build, there is work for 

 cartmen ! " — Kosmos. 



CARPENTER, WALLACE, AND SPIRITUALISM. 



LETTER FROM MR. WALLACE. 



OWIXG to absence from home I have only 

 just seen Dr. Carpenter's letter in the 

 Athenceum of December 22d, to which I now beg 

 leave very briefly to reply. 



I must first remark on the extreme inconven- 

 ience of Dr. Carpenter's erratic mode of carrying 

 on a discussion. As soon as his lectures on 

 " Mesmerism, Spiritualism, etc.," were published, 

 I wrote a review of them in the Quarterly Jour- 

 nal of Science of July last. To this Dr. Carpenter 

 replied in Frasers Magazine of November, prom- 

 ising a fuller reply to certain points in the new 

 edition of his " Lectures," then in the press. As 

 the article in Fraser was of a very personal char- 

 acter, I issued a rejoinder in the same periodical 

 the following month. A discussion has also been 

 carried on in Nature, and the scene of the con- 

 test is now removed to the Athenceum, many of 

 whose readers are probably ignorant of its pre- 

 vious phases. 



Dr. Carpenter comes before a fresh audience 

 in order to reply to a specific charge of misstate- 

 ment which I made against him in the Quarterly 



1 Who is hurt ? 



Journal of Science (July, 1877, p. 398), which 

 charge, as I will proceed to show, he endeavors 

 to evade by a wordy defense, which really amounts 

 to an admission of it. In his "Lectures" (p. 71) 

 is the following passage : 



" It was in France that the pretensions of 

 mesmeric clairvoyance were first advanced ; and 

 it was by the French Academy of Medicine, in 

 which the mesmeric state had been previously 

 discussed with reference to the performance of 

 surgical operations, that this new and more ex- 

 traordinary claim was first carefully sifted, in con- 

 sequence of the offer made in 1837 by M. Burdin 

 (himself a member of that Academy) of a prize 

 of 3,000 francs to any one who should be found 

 capable of reading through opaque substances. 

 The money was deposited in the hands of a 

 notary for a period of two years, afterward ex- 

 tended to three; the announcement was exten- 

 sively published ; numerous cases were offered for 

 examination ; every imaginable concession was 

 made to the competitors that was compatible 

 with a thorough testing of the asserted power; 

 and not one was found to stand the trial." 



My readers will observe that this is deliber- 

 ately stated to be the first time that clairvoyance 



