HO THE FOURTH DIMENSION. 



everything in the world can be explained. If we adopt a point of 

 view which regards it as natural for spirits arbitrarily to interfere in 

 the workings of the world, all scientific investigation will cease, for 

 we could never more trust or rely upon any chemical or physical ex- 

 seriment, or any botanical or zoological culture. If the spirits are 

 ihe authors of the phenomena that are mysterious to us, why should 

 they also not have control of the phenomena which are not myste- 

 rious? The existence of mysterious phenomena justifies in no man- 

 ner or form the assumption that spirits exist which produce them. 

 Would it not be much simpler, if we must have supernatural in- 

 fluences, to adopt the naive religious point of view, according to 

 which everything that happens is traceable to the direct, actual, and 

 personal interference of a single being which we call God? Things 

 which formerly stood beyond the sphere of our knowledge and were 

 regarded as marvellous events, as a storm, for example, now stand 

 in the most intimate connection with known natural laws. Things 

 that formerly were mysterious are so no longer. If one hundred and 

 fifty years ago some scientists were in the possession of our present 

 knowledge of inductional electricity and had connected Paris and 

 Berlin with a wire by whose aid one could clearly interpret in 

 Berlin what another person had at that very moment said in Paris, 

 people would have regarded this phenomenon as supernatural and 

 assumed that the originator of this long-distance speaking was in 

 league with spirits. 



We recognise, thus, that the things which are termed super- 

 natural depend to a great extent on the stage of culture which hu- 

 manity has reached. Things which now appear to us mysterious, 

 may, in a very few decades, be recognised as quite natural. This 

 knowledge, however, is not to be obtained by the lazy assumption 

 of bands of spirits as the authors of mysterious phenomena, but by 

 performing what in physics and chemistry is called experiment. 

 But the first and essential condition of all scientific experimenting 

 is that the experimenter shall I e absolutely master of the conditions 

 under which the experiment is or is not to succeed. Now, this cri- 

 terion of scientific experimenting is totally lacking in all spiritualistic 

 experiments. We can never assign in their case the conditions un- 





