THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEF. 235 



pletetely inadmissible into our fabric of thought, that we should 

 have suspected our American friend of amusing himself by trying 

 upon us one of those ingenious hoaxes for which his countrymen 

 have shown a special aptitude. 



Let us suppose our professor to have further assured us that 

 he was able by the same method to determine the existence of 

 many of the terrestrial elements even in the fixed stars ; that he 

 had found hydrogen not only to be universally present, but to 

 perform the leading part in those changes which give rise in 

 certain cases to the known variations in their brightness (a star 

 previously invisible to the naked eye suddenly blazing out with a 

 lustre surpassing that of Jupiter, and declining almost as rapidly) ; 

 and that he was further able to prove that many of these luminaries 

 have a motion of approach to or recession from us, such as no 

 measurement of their angular positions could detect, no telescopic 

 scrutiny would lead us even to surmise, though its rate may be 

 fifty miles per second ; we should scarcely have been unreasonable 

 in regarding his statements as ingenious inventions devised to try 

 how far our credulity might extend. 



And if, not satisfied with this, he ventured a still higher flight, 

 and had assured us that he had obtained by the same simple 

 method the solution of that grand astronomical problem — the 

 constitution of the nebulae — which the ablest observers, armed 

 with the largest and most perfect instruments, had declared to 

 be beyond their ken ; and that he could classify the irresolvable 

 nebulae with certainty into those which are mere whiffs of vapour, 

 and those which are aggregations of stars too remote to be sepa- 

 rately discerned ; — we should, I think, have begun to respect his 

 imaginative power for the sublimity of its conceptions, while the 

 extravagance of this last assertion would have seemed fully to 

 justify our repudiation of the whole series as utterly destitute of 

 any claim on our belief 



But suppose that our Transatlantic visitor, instead of laying 

 his claims before an incredulous public, had privately brought 

 together some half-dozen of the most eminent physicists of 

 Europe, who were acquainted with all that had been previously 

 learned as to the constitution of the solar spectrum, and the modi- 

 fications produced in flame by the presence of certain chemical 

 II 



