228 NATURE AND MAN. 



testimony and the dictates of common sense depends upon 

 special knowledge ; the negative verdict which ahnost every 

 person of average intelhgence would almost unhesitatingly pro- 

 nounce, being liable to reversal by the lightening of the scale of 

 general experience, while fresh weights are put by special in- 

 vestigation into the scale of testimony. And the " personal 

 equation " which determines the belief of each individual who 

 does not work out the inquiry for himself, here consists mainly in 

 his confidence in the knowledge and judgment of another person. 

 The evidentiary facts on which his scientific guide relies, may be 

 utterly meaningless to himself; but he accepts them, as the 

 merchant would a bill of exchange, on that guide's assurance of 

 their worth; and the "preponderance of evidence," like the 

 balance of an account, is decided accordingly. If any one 

 who is either disqualified by ignorance from rightly appreciating 

 the value of the evidentiary facts, or is unwilling to take the 

 trouble of investigating the case, claims to dispose of it in an 

 off-hand way in accordance with his " common sense " notions, we, 

 who have studied the subject, take leave to tell him that it is a 

 case requiring the z/;zcommon sense that only special culture can 

 bestow, without the possession of which his judgment is altogether 

 worthless. 



But I have now to direct our inquiry to that class of beliefs, 

 which relate to matters lying within the scope of ordinary 

 reason, upon which every thoughtful man feels himself not only 

 competent but called upon to decide for himself, and yet as to 

 which there is no less a diversity in the judgments formed upon 

 the same evidence, than there is in the cases we have already 

 considered. 



While the world has been too ready to charge with moral 

 culpability those who depart from the beaten tracks of religious 

 or scientific orthodoxy, independent thinkers seem to me to have 

 often been unjust as well as unwise in flinging back the accusa- 

 tion, and in imputing to those whose mental development has 

 taken place under a particular system, and whose whole intel- 

 lectual and moral nature has shaped itself into conformity with 

 that system, either a wilful blindness to evidence which at once 



