MODERN MYSTICISM AND MODERN SCIENCE. 287 



debatable ground on which such faith as that accorded to 

 homoeopathy and spiritualism is held. Accepted each, partly 

 as a science, partly as faith beyond science, there is no satis- 

 factory way of committing them to the keeping of history. 

 If spiritualists, if homoeopathists, will boldly choose the scien- 

 tific arena, electing to stand or fall by the issue of experiment, 

 prosecuted according to a scheme agreed upon as best calcu- 

 lated to elicit truth, well and good. Physicists would soon 

 grapple with the issue, and truth or error, as the case might 

 be, would soon become apparent. Or if (repudiating this), 

 they would say, * Leave us alone ; we deal with mysteries ; we 

 are as priests dispensing a religion, we brook 110 reasoning ;' 

 then, again, the position taken would be clear before the 

 world. The evil comes of a double stand-point, half mys- 

 ticism, half science. 



By those who are willing to investigate modern mysticism 

 as a science, refusing to bow down to it reverently as to a 

 religious belief, the circumstance can hardly fail to have been 

 remarked, that, subsequently to the experiment performed by 

 Faraday to demonstrate the fallacy of table-turning, that sort 

 of spiritual manifestation has here, in England, at least, fallen 

 very much into decadence. Occasionally do we hear of a 

 table turning, ostensibly without the aid of mechanical force, 

 but rarely. Summoned spirits would seem to avoid a mani- 

 festation that has been polluted by the "touch of the hands of 

 a philosopher. The spirits now prefer to rap, but the Tapp- 

 ings may be fully accomplished without supernatural agencies. 

 Some operators can produce these rapping sounds by one or 

 more of their joints at pleasure. Perhaps the knee-joint 

 affords the greatest facilities. The knee-cap, or patella, is 

 lubricated underneath by a fluid termed by the anatomist 

 synovia. Some operators have the faculty, by assuming a cer- 

 tain position, of preventing the flow of synovia upon the sur- 

 face lying between the patella, or knee-pan, and the bones 

 constituting the knee. The flow prevented and the knee 



