80 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n 



other hand, it is asserted that a man or a woman 

 "levitated" to the ceiling, floated about there, 

 and finally sailed out by the window. And it is 

 assumed that the pardonable scepticism, with 

 which most scientific men receive these state- 

 ments, is due to the fact that they feel themselves 

 justified in denying the possibility of any such 

 metamorphosis of water, or of any such levi- 

 tatipn, because such events are contrary to the 

 laws of nature. So the question of the preacher 

 is triumphantly put: How do you know that 

 there are not " higher " laws of nature than your 

 chemical and physical laws, and that these higher 

 laws may not intervene arid " wreck" the latter? 

 The plain answer to this question is, Why 

 should anybody be called upon to say how he 

 knows that which he does not know? You are 

 assuming that laws are agents efficient causes 

 of that which happens and that one law can 

 interfere with another. To us, that assumption 

 is as nonsensical as if you were to talk of a propo- 

 sition of Euclid being the cause of the diagram 

 which illustrates it, or of the integral calculus 

 interfering with the rule of three. Your question 

 really implies that we pretend to complete know- 

 ledge not only of all past and present phenomena, 

 but of all that are possible in the future, and we 

 leave all that sort of thing to the adepts of 

 esoteric Buddhism. Our pretensions are infinitely 

 more modest. We have succeeded in finding out 



