ME. CEOOKES’ NEW PSYCHIC FOECE. 
357 
quick to imagine, and equally quick to decide ; and yet, when 
all its boasted judgment and foresight are proved utterly 
wrong, it is by no means taught by experience. At the next 
opportunity men commit the same errors of judgment, and 
again Experience would teach them ; but all to no purpose ; 
they cannot and will not be taught by her. 
The history of popular delusions is one of the most instruc- 
tive, and at the same time the most saddening of all historical 
narratives. The weakness of the so much lauded and boasted 
human understanding, the firm belief that men have placed, 
and apparently ever will place, in the mere statements of their 
fellow-men, the gross and almost unimaginable credulity they 
are constantly exhibiting, all these make up a picture as sad- 
dening as it is true. See how long and how widely the univer- 
sal belief in astrology, magic, and witchcraft prevailed, and 
when these beliefs had to give way at the first dawn of true 
science, it was only to make place for new ones, until, in recent 
times, almost every ten years has seen a new imposture arise, 
has seen it in its full glory, and has witnessed its sudden 
overthrow. To mention but the titles of many of these would, 
to most of our readers, be but a string of mere names ; but if 
we confine ourselves to the last fifty years only, what a rush of 
them there is — animal magnetism, the odic force, electro- 
biology, mesmerism, table-rapping, table-turning, spiritualism, 
&c. &c. The more apparently scientific the name, the more it 
was considered likely to take a hold on the public. But just 
as medical men find such great difficulty in convincing the 
great mass of mankind that thousands and thousands of lives 
are annually lost by a belief in quack medicines and quack 
doctors, so too now it has become most difficult for scientific 
men to make the outside world believe that the grossest impo- 
sitions and the most outrageous impostures are constantly 
being palmed off upon them. Few people have any true 
idea how outrageous many of these pseudo- scientific delusions 
really are, and how they, like parasitic fungi, grow at the 
expense of those who support them. 
The history of spiritualism illustrates this well. As far as 
we can remember, it first dawned upon the world from the 
other side of the Atlantic, under the shape of table-rapping 
and table-turning. An ordinary innocent table was stated to 
be capable of answering any questions put to it, and also of 
capering about and raising itself in the air, under the influence 
of some one or more persons whose innocent hands were placed 
lightly upon it. To account for the first series of these phe- 
nomena, some ingenious person called to his aid the spirits of 
departed persons ; the ever-credulous world jumped at this 
theory, and its originators and followers, having thus struck a 
VOL. X. NO. XLI. B B 
