448 Proceedings. 
the spread of knowledge than to show any tendency to disappear ; nay instead 
of, as in his day, lurking in the dark places where— 
“In the deep windings of the glen no more 
The hag obscene and grisly phantom dwell,” 
its acolytes seem to take advantage of the popular recoil against the clear, 
cold deductions of reason, to come out in the face of day, and to erect their 
emotional ecstasies into a system. 
The most popular dream of our day, the so-called spiritualism, with its 
walking and talking tables, and other upholstery, has hitherto taken such a 
shape that serious minds have not been called upon to notice it, but now 
when I find in several numbers of a periodical with so imposing a title as 
the “Quarterly Journal of Science” serious papers on what the writer 
calls “ psychic force,” it cannot be unbecoming in anyone to refer to it. For 
my own part I find still the same want as before of any facts on which to 
found an induction, but whatever be the value of psychic force it is at all 
events a very curious and interesting fact in psychology that a gentleman 
of scientific eminence, and whose perfect good faith there is no reason to 
doubt, should really dignify by the name of experiments some oscillations 
produced in a balance, withont apparent contact, by a professional conjurer 
(or “medium” which I take it is the modern slang for fortune-teller, as a 
barber now-a-days calls himself a professor) standing beside the friendly shelter 
of a dining table in connection with the apparatus, while the person who 
condifcted the experiment, according to his own account, was engaged writing 
notes, and that forthwith instead of exercising his ingenuity in striving to find 
out “how he did it,” he should deliberately attribute these shakings to a 
psychic force, which is to do away with or to suspend gravitation and all 
those laws on which physics and astronomy depend. 
t - I cannot consider this curious case without my mind referring to the only 
explanation possible of the persistent hallucination which seems to have 
affected so many honest but utterly mistaken witnesses on the recent trial 
which has excited so much attention wherever our language is spoken. It 
seems that the “ very improbable” has a singular fascination for many minds, — 
and that with such persons, to quote the “ Saturday Review,” “as soon as the 
attention has been caught by some salient fact which they can believe, and 
which awakens their faculties of wonder, they become interested in believing 
the whole story, and their intellects succeed in representing every new fact as 
somehow confirmatory of the foregone conclusion. The lesson of the Tich- 
case was an instructive one in many ways, for the secret of the 
claimant’s power was precisely the secret upon which all spiritualists and 
other impostors depend for success. A man is first asked whether he has 
‘been the victim of a hoax, or the laws of nature bave been suspended. 
