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, fl 



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, without 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, w^hile the person who 

 conducted the experiment, according to his own account, was engaged writing 

 notes, and that forth Mdth 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. 



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 " Satui'day 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- 

 borne case was an instructive one in many ways, for the secret of the 

 claimant's power w^as 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 have been suspended. 



