552 REPORT — 1891. 



I wish, however, strenuously to guard against its being supposed that this 

 Association, in its corporate capacity, lends its countenance to, or looks with 

 any favour on, the outcast. What I have to say — and after all it will not 

 be" much — must rest on my own responsibility. I should be very sorry for any 

 adventitious weight to attach to my observations on forbidden topics from the 

 accident of their being delivered from this chair. At the same time not only do I 

 claim the right to express myself concerning matters on which I have worked, but 

 I conceive it to be a duty, from which, if I shrank, I should shrink from no higher 

 motive than simple cowardice, fhough I know them to be topics on which it is quite 

 impossible, as well as undesirable, for everyone to think alike. 



It is but a platitude to say that our clear and conscious aim should always be truth, 

 and that no lower or meaner standard should ever be allowed to obtrude itself before 

 us. Our ancestors fought hard and suffered much for the privilege of free and open 

 inquiry, for the right of conduct ing investigation untrammelled by prej udice and fore- 

 gone conclusions, and they were ready to examine into any phenomenon which pre- 

 sented itself. This attitude of mind is perhaps necessarily less prominent now, 

 when so much knowledge has been gained, and when the labours of many indivi- 

 duals may be rightly directed entirely to its systematisation and to the study of its 

 inner ramifications ; but it would be a great pity if a too absorbed attention to what 

 has already been acquired, and to the fringe of territory lying immediately adjacent 

 thereto, were to end in our losing the power of raising our eyes "and receiving 

 evidence of a totally fresh kind, of perceiving the existence of regions into which the 

 same processes of inquiry as had proved so fruitful might be extended, with re- 

 sults at present incalculable and perhaps wholly unexpected. I myself think that 

 the ordinary processes of observation and experiment are establishing the exist- 

 ence of such a region ; that in fact they have already established the truth of some 

 phencimena not at present contemplated by science, and to which the orthodox man 

 shuts his ears. 



For instance, there is the question whether it has or has not been established 

 by direct experiment that a method of communication exists between mind and 

 mind irrespective of the ordinary channels of consciousness and the known organs 

 of sense, and if so, what is the process ? It can hardly be through some unknown 

 sense organ, but it may be by some direct physical influence on the ether, or it 

 may be in some still more subtle manner. Of the process I as yet know nothing. 

 Further investigation is wanted. No one can expect others to accept his woid for 

 au entirely new fact, except as establishing a prima facie case for investigation. 



But I am only now taking this as an instance of what I mean ; whether it be 

 a truth or a fiction, I doubt if one of tlie recognised scientific societies would receive 

 a paper on the subject. What I wish is to signalise a danger — which I believe 

 to be actual and serious — that investigation in this and cognate subjects may be 

 checked and hampered by active hostility to these researches on the part of the 

 majority of scientific men, and a determined opposition to the reception or discus- 

 sion of evidence. 



That individuals should decline to consider such matters is natural enough ; they 

 may be otherwise occupied and interested. Everybody is by no means bound to in- 

 vestigate everything ; though, indeed, it is customary in most fields of knowledge 

 for those who have kept aloof from a particular inquiry to defer in moderation to 

 those who have conducted it, without feeling themselves called upon to express an 

 opinion. But it is not of the action of individuals that I wish to speak, it is of the 

 attitude to be adopted by scientific bodies in their corporate capacity ; and for a 

 corporate body of men of science, inheritors of the hard-won tradition of free and 

 fearless inquiry into the facts of nature untrammelled by prejudice, for any such 

 body to decline to receive evidence laboriously attained and discreetly and in- 

 offensively presented by observers of accepted competency in other branches, 

 would be, if ever actually done and persisted in, a terrible throwing away of their 

 prerogative, and an imitation of the errors of a school of thought against which 

 the struggle was at one time severe. 



In the early days of the Coperuican theory, Galileo for some years refrained from 

 teaching it, though fully believing its truth, because he considered that he had 



