June 19, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



887 



it seems to me, conclusively proved oue 

 thing to the candid reader, and that is that 

 the verdict of pure insanitj', gratuitous of 

 preference for error, of superstition with- 

 out an excuse, which the scientists of our 

 day are led by their intellectual training to 

 pronounce upon the entire thought of the 

 past, is a most shallow verdict. The per- 

 sonal and romantic view of life has other 

 roots besides wanton exuberance of imagi- 

 nation and perversitj^ of heart. It is per- 

 enially fed by facts of experience, whatever 

 the ulterior interpretation of those facts may 

 prove to be ; and at no time in human his- 

 tory would it have been less easy than now, 

 at most times it would have been much 

 more easy, for advocates with a little in- 

 dustry to collect in its favor an array of 

 contemporary documents as good as those 

 which our publications present. These 

 documents all relate to real experiences of 

 persons. These experiences have three 

 characters in common: Thej^ are capricious, 

 discontinuous and not easilj^ controlled ; 

 they require peculiar persons for their pro- 

 duction ; their significance seems to be 

 wholly for personal life. Those who pre- 

 ferentially attend to them, and still more 

 those who are individuallj^ subject to them, 

 not only easily may find, but are logically 

 bound to find, in them valid arguments for 

 their romantic and personal conception of 

 the world's course. Through my slight 

 participation in the investigations of the 

 Society for Physical Eesearch, I have be- 

 come acquainted with numbers of persons 

 of this sort, for whom the very word Science 

 has become a name of reproach, for reasons 

 that I now both understand and respect. 

 It is the intolerance of Science for such 

 phenomena as we are studying, her peremp- 

 tory denial either of their existence, or of 

 their significance except as proofs of man's 

 absolute innate folly, that has set Science 

 so apart from the common sympathies of 

 the race. I confess that it is on this, its 



humanizing mission, that our Society's best 

 claim to the gratitude of our generation 

 seems to me to depend. We have restored 

 continuity to history. "We have shown 

 some reasonable basis for the most super- 

 stitious abberations of the foretime. We 

 have bridged the chasm, healed the hideous 

 rift that Science, taken in a certain narrow 

 way, has shot into the human world. 



I will even go one step further. When 

 from our present advanced standpoint we 

 look back upon the past stages of human 

 thought, whether it be scientific thought or 

 theological thought, we are amazed that a 

 Universe which appears to us of so vast 

 and mysterious a complication should ever 

 have seemed to any one so little and plain 

 a thing. Whether it be Descartes' world 

 or ISTewton's ; whether it be that of the ma- 

 terialists of the last century or that of the 

 Bridge water treatises of our own; it always 

 looks the same to us — incredibly perspec- 

 tiveless and short. Even Lyell's, Fara- 

 day's, Mill's and Darwin's consciousness 

 of their respective subjects are already 

 beginning to put on an infantile and inno- 

 cent look. Is it then likely that the Science 

 of our own day will escape the common 

 doom, that the minds of its votaries will 

 never look old-fashioned to the grandchil- 

 dren of the latter? It would be folly to 

 suppose so. Yet, if we are to judge by the 

 analogy of the past, when our Science once 

 becomes old-fashioned, it will be more for 

 its omissions of fact, for its ignorance of 

 whole ranges and orders of complexity in 

 the phenomena to be explained, than for 

 any fatal lack in its spirit and principles. 

 The spirit and principles of Science are mere 

 affairs of method ; there is nothing in them 

 that need hinder Science from dealing suc- 

 cessfully with a world in which personal 

 forces are the starting-point of new effects. 

 The only form of thing that we directly 

 encounter, the only experience that we 

 concretely have, is our own personal life. 



