A Reply to the Quarterly Review. 5 
right, and that there is nothing in it but unconscious cerebration and muscular 
action.” 
At this juncture some good Samaritan turned the torrent of words on to him- 
self; I thankfully escaped with a sigh of relief, and my memory recalled 
my first interview with Faraday, when we discussed table-turning and his 
contrivance to detec the part played by involuntary muscular effort in the 
production of that phenomenon. How different his courteous, kindly, candid 
demeanour towards me in similar circumstances compared with that of the 
Quarterly Reviewer ! 
Now, let me ask, what authority has the reviewer for designating me a 
recent convert to spiritualism? Nothing that I have ever written can justify 
such an unfounded assumption. Indeed the dissatisfa@ion with which many 
spiritualists have received my articles clearly proves that they consider me 
unworthy of joining their fraternity. In my first published article the following 
sentences occur :— 
** Hitherto I have seen nothing to convince me of the ‘spiritual’ theory. 
In such an enquiry the intellect demands that the spiritual proof must 
be absolutely incapable of being explained away; it must be so 
strikingly and convincingly true that we cannot, dare not deny it.” 
** Accuracy and knowledge of detail stand foremost amongst the great aims 
of modern scientific men. No observations are of much use to the 
student of science unless they are truthful and made under test con- 
ditions; and here I find the great mass of spiritualistic evidence to 
fail. In a subject which, perhaps, more than any other lends itself to 
trickery and deception, the precautions against fraud appear to have 
been, in most cases, totally insufficient.” 
“IT confess that the reasoning of some spiritualists would almost seem to 
justify Faraday’s severe statement that many dogs have the power of 
coming to much more logical conclusions. Their speculations utterly 
ignore all theories of force being only a form of molecular motion, and 
they speak of Force, Matter, and Spirit as three distinct entities.” 
In a subsequent paper, I said that my experiments appeared to establish the 
existence of a new force connected, in some unknown manner, with the human 
organisation; but that it would be wrong to hazard the most vague hypothesis 
respecting the cause of the phenomena, the nature of this force, and the corre- 
lation existing between it and the other forces of nature. ‘ Indeed,” said I, ‘it 
is the duty of the enquirer to abstain altogether from framing theories until 
he has accumulated a sufficient number of facts to form a substantial basis 
upon which to reason.’’ New forces must be found, or mankind must remain 
sadly ignorant of the mysteries of nature. We are unacquainted with a 
sufficient number of forces to do the work of the universe. 
In a third paper, I brought forward many quotations from previous experi- 
mentalists, which showed that they did not ascribe the phenomena to 
Spiritualism. I then said that the name Psychic had been chosen for the sub- 
ject “because I was most desirous to avoid the foregone conclusions implied in 
the title under which it has hitherto been claimed as belonging to a province 
beyond the range of experiment and argument.” 
Do these quotations look like spiritualism? Does the train of thought run- 
ning through them justify the Quarterly Reviewer in saying that ‘ the lesson 
afforded by the truly scientific method followed by this great master of 
