758 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



evidence. The incomprehensible and incredible may turn out 

 true, when we have learned more. The African king would not 

 believe that water could ever take the form of solid lumps, for 

 he had always seen it liquid. An elderly agricultural labourer 

 said to a friend of mine a few years ago, concerning the alleged 

 electric trams of the town: " Don't talk silly! How can they 

 go without 'osses ? " The Greeks did not believe the circum- 

 navigators of Africa when these latter said they had seen the 

 sun in the north. Even so romantic an historian as Herodotus 

 declined to accept such an obvious " traveller's story." " I for 

 my part do not believe them," he says (History, book iv.). Yet 

 all these unbelievers were in error, because of their ignorance. 

 They should have said : " I do not know ; I suspend judgment 

 until I learn more." The lesson of scientific experience is that 

 when a thing seems inexplicable, or when two theories clash, 

 what is wanted is more investigation, more facts. The dis- 

 covery of radioactivity has enabled physicists to concede the 

 geologists' claim concerning the age of the earth ; indeed we 

 now want more facts to help us to see why the earth is not 

 hotter than it is ! Further knowledge always tends to fit things 

 in, though until we see just where to fit them, the facts are 

 naturally distrusted. The hypnotic trance was long looked on 

 as a delusion of Elliotson's, and Esdaile's, and it was even 

 hazarded that the Calcutta natives who underwent severe 

 operations at the hands of the latter were shamming anaesthesia ! 

 But the a priori objections of the ignorant had to give way 

 before the hail of further facts. For example, Mr. Mayo Robson 

 performed evulsion of the great toe-nail, and removal of part of 

 the first phalanx (for exostosis) on a hypnotised patient of Dr. 

 Bramwell's in Leeds, March 25, 1890, and no pain was felt. 

 Another patient had sixteen teeth extracted : no pain, no corneal 

 reflex, and the pulse slowed during the operation. About sixty 

 medical men were present by invitation, to see these and other 

 operations. Anaesthesia in the hypnotic trance of a good 

 subject is now a medical commonplace. Explanation may not 

 yet be fully attained, though we are as near it as we are to 

 explanation of ordinary sleep ; but at least the system of 

 orthodox science had to make room for the new facts. May it 

 not be the same with other psychical phenomena ? I think 

 it will. 



Psychical research covers a wide field. It is rather un- 



