a 
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pass to a greater name, that of Professor Tyndall. In his well- 
known essay, Science and the Spirits, he writes as follows :— 
“Belief in spiritualism is a state perfectly compatible with extreme intel- 
lectual subtilty, and a capacity for devising hypotheses which only require the 
hardihood engendered by strong conviction to render them impregnable. The 
logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps 
down the weed of superstition, not by logic, but by slowly rendering the mental 
soil unfit for its cultivation,” 
This is sound and excellent, but danger lurks in its unqualified 
acceptance. Let us all beware of the impediments acquired know- 
ledge places in the way of obtaining more. It has been said with 
truth that all women and most men generalise a great deal too 
much. Any flattering unction the sterner sex may lay to their 
souls on the score of this saying is more than dissipated by the 
fact that as they for the most part think on more important matters, 
so their generalisations are the more mischievous in their conse- 
quences. An article by Lord Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, 
based on deductions drawn from acquired facts, postponed the 
recognition of the true Undulatory Theory of light for sixty years. 
To reason without generalising from acquired facts would be like 
refusing to use logarithms in a proposition of algebra. But the 
confidence we can repose in one process is not the same confidence 
we can place in the other. The deductions we may draw from 
facts acquired, or supposed to be acquired, should lead us only, 
never guide us. The word “impossible” should be sparingly used. 
“Highly improbable,” “totally inconsistent with the recognised 
views of existing facts,” are more philosophic. Nay, more, we may 
be called upon to allow two theories, each supported with evidence 
of the same value, and each absolutely irreconcileable with each 
other, to lie side by side in our minds till more extended knowledge 
establishes one and destroys the other, or shows that after all they 
are not irreconcileable. How easy for the amateur, how difficult 
for the discoverer and the man of science. His invention, his 
discovery, his recognised theory is not only true in itself, but look 
at it properly, and it is much more a key and compendium of the 
universe. With a slight tendency to look at only the affirmative 
side, the conviction grows that it, and the deductions that can be 
