222 NATURE AND MAN. 



perspiration. Now the transudation of blood from the skin 

 through the orifices of the perspiratory ducts, under strong 

 emotional excitement, being a well-authenticated physiological 

 fact, there seems to me nothing in the least degree improbable in 

 the narrative ; on the contrary, any one who accepts the &quot; charm 

 ing away&quot; of warts, and the cure of more serious maladies, as 

 results of a strongly excited &quot; expectant attention,&quot; will regard 

 the stigmatization of an Ecstatica as the natural result of the 

 intense concentration of her thoughts and feelings on a subject 

 that obviously had a peculiar attraction for them. 



Thus the belief of the Catholic partizan in the &quot; miraculous &quot; 

 theory, that of his Protestant opponent in the &quot; cheat &quot; theory, 

 and that of the scientific physiologist in the &quot; natural &quot; theory, all 

 of which have the same external testimony as one of their factors, 

 are severally governed by the &quot;personal equation&quot; which consti 

 tutes the other factor, namely, that antecedent mental state which 

 really settles the value to be assigned to the external testimony, 

 by what it regards as the inherent probability or improbability of 

 the fact, and thus indirectly determines the &quot; preponderance of 

 evidence.&quot; Either may, if he thinks proper, accuse each of the 

 two others of being &quot; prejudiced&quot; in favour of his own particular 

 belief; but the &quot;prejudice&quot; is simply, in each case, a resultant 

 of previous training. I, on the one hand, who accept the scien 

 tific explanation, have no right to charge the devout Catholic with 

 absurd superstition, because, having been brought up in the belief 

 that miracles are worked at the present day for the authentication 

 of Divine truth, he accepts this particular case as belonging to 

 the &quot; miraculous &quot; category ; but he, on the other, is not entitled 

 to brand me as a sceptic or an infidel, because, having been 

 brought up in the belief that the age of miracles has ceased, my 

 scientific studies lead me to a rational explanation of the facts 

 which I agree with him in accepting. I may fairly, however, 

 deny the right of his Protestant opponent to question either the 

 honesty or the competence of witnesses, whose prepossessions 

 were obviously rather against than in favour of the genuineness 

 of the phenomena; merely because, while refusing to admit 

 their &quot;miraculous&quot; character, he has not given sufficient atten 

 tion to the body of evidence relating to the influence of 



