| OXI PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE 3873 
would consider those facts a very good experimental 
_ verification of your hypothesis, touching the cause 
of the abnormal phenomena observed in your 
parlour, and would act accordingly. 
Now, in this suppositious case, 1 have taken 
phenomena of a very common kind, in order that 
_ you might see what are the different steps in an 
- ordinary process of reasoning, if you will only take 
the trouble to analyse it carefully. All the opera- 
tions I have described, you will see, are involved 
in the mind of any man of sense in leading him 
to a conclusion as to the course he should take in 
order to make good a robbery and punish the 
offender. I say that you are led, in that case, to 
your conclusion by exactly the same train of 
reasoning as that which a man of science pursues 
when he is endeavouring to discover the origin and 
laws of the most occult phenomena. The process 
is, and always must be, the same; and precisely 
the same mode of reasoning was employed by 
Newton and Laplace in their endeavours to dis- 
cover and define the causes of the movements of 
the heavenly bodies, as you, with your own common 
sense, would employ to detect a burglar. The 
only difference is, that the nature of the inquiry 
being more abstruse, every step has to be most 
carefully watched, so that there may not be a 
single crack or flaw in your hypothesis. <A 
flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses of 
Pires. 
