SPIRITUALISM AS A SCIENTIFIC QUESTION. 583 



all natural laws were overthrown by the fact, and that in the fact 

 itself no kind of law or order was to be perceived. This case lies 

 before us here. The laws of gravitation, of electricity, of light, and of 

 heat are altogether, as we are assured, of a purely hypothetical valid- 

 ity ; they have authority as long as the inexplicable spiritualistic some- 

 thing does not cross them. In this something itself, however, there 

 is to be perceived no sort of law except, at the most, that it is hooked 

 to the heels of certain individuals, the so-called mediums. An author- 

 ity which asserts this demands more than a scientific authority has 

 ever demanded ; it demands that natural Science shall abandon the 

 presupposition of a universal causality, the presupposition upon which 

 all the methods of her investigation rest, and without which an estab- 

 lishment of facts or even of laws of occurrence could never be spo- 

 ken of. 



You will agree with me that this would not be the place to enter 

 upon any long discussion of the origin of the law of causation. You 

 will also probably admit that the most favorable assumption which 

 we could make for spiritualism would be that of its purely empirical 

 origin. Empirical laws can at any time be refuted by other empiri- 

 cal laws. How now, with this premise, is the trustworthiness of a 

 universal causality related to the trustworthiness of the spiritualistic 

 phenomena ? On the one side stands the authority of the whole his- 

 tory of science, the totality of all known natural laws, which have not 

 only been discovered under the presupposition of a universal causali- 

 ty, but have also without exception confirmed the same ; on the other 

 side stands the authority of a few certainly most eminent naturalists, 

 who, in all which they have discovered in the absence of mediumistic 

 influences, have contributed their part to the confirmation of that most 

 general result of natural investigation, but who now in this one point, 

 under a constellation of circumstances which make exact observation 

 difficult in the highest degree, announce the discovery that causality 

 has a flaw and that we must consequently abandon our former view of 

 nature. 



I have spoken of the unfavorable constellations under which the 

 spiritualistic phenomena were observed, and, since you might question 

 the warrant of this expression, I must give it a somewhat better basis. 

 I call the constellations unfavorable for observations or experiments, 

 when the observer can not freely manage his senses and his instru- 

 ments. You would yourself probably call it an unjust demand if a 

 physicist were asked to observe the oscillations of a magnet through a 

 key-hole or an astronomer to take a cellar for his observatory. Yet 

 the observers of spiritualistic phenomena must content themselves with 

 equally unfavorable conditions. The first condition of the success of 

 the experiments is that all persons present shall lay their hands to- 

 gether upon a table and that no observer shall be outside the circle. 

 Thereby a great part of the field of operation is withdrawn from the 



