756 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



severing non-expertness and failure : Science constantly baffled, beaten, 

 utterly overthrown, yet as often returning- to the hopeless contest, 

 vphere delusions always compel a drawn battle, if they do not posi- 

 tively win ; experiments without number that have the form of pre- 

 cision without its substance ; all truth, or even the suggestions of truth, 

 submerged in vast floods of error ; the faith that belongs to religion 

 and emotion carried into the realm of science and intellect ; all along 

 the line of strong endeavor an obvious want not only of the philosophy 

 but even of the instinct of seeking truth from living human beings — in 

 the whole history of folly one shall not find a more instructive chapter 

 than this ; were there no other proof of the limitations of the human 

 brain, sufficient could be found in this fruitless searching after truth on 

 the part of the most intellectual leaders, of the most intellectual of 

 nations, in the most intellectual era of the world. Not only during the 

 past year, in the hospital of Salpetriere, but, by recurring intervals, 

 during the past century, the best science of France has been on its 

 knees before hysterical women, and there it must remain until it has 

 mastered the true philosophy of trance and the involuntary life, and 

 learned by heart the sources of error. 



The time must come when it shall be well understood that experi- 

 ments with living human beings, in which the elements of error are un- 

 recognized, are not only unscientific but are a satire on science ; bear- 

 ing the same relation to the true method of investigation in this special 

 department of physiology that the dreams of the mediaeval sages sus- 

 tained to the general philosophy of induction. The philosophy of the fu- 

 ture will be that the laws of nature are not to be put on the market, and 

 can not be bid off at auction, and that the long-standhig and unaccepted 

 financial prize of the French Academy for the one who should prove to 

 be endowed with clairvoyant or mind-reading power is as unscientific 

 and as puerile as to attempt the bribery of the law of the conservation 

 of force, or to hire the sun to rise in the west instead of the east. 



During the past few years it has been my destiny to have been fre- 

 quently requested to carry out or to plan for others various experi- 

 mental researches with living human beings ; these requests have some- 

 times come from professional and scientific men who, in all dealings 

 with inanimate objects, are amply competent, both by instinct and by 

 reflection, to guard against all illusions and deceptions. It is my hope 

 and belief that this formal attemjot — ill perfected as it may be — will so 

 reduce this subject to a science as to bring it within the po'wer of all 

 physiologists to plan and to complete all such experiments for them- 

 selves, with ample confidence that the results will invariably be in har- 

 mony with the truth. The above analysis, in spite of its necessary con- 

 densation, will, it is hoped, make clear even to those who do not follow 

 all its details, that in this, as in every other realm of knowledge and 

 acquirement, success need not be the result of any special acuteness, or 



