142 
If True ? 
[March, 
force of gravitation by causing a table to rise, say, up to 
the ceiling of a room where it stood. We know that man 
can do this only by means of certain appliances, natural or 
artificial. Thus he must either lift the table up from below, 
or raise it by ropes from above, or buoy it up by attaching 
to it some substance lighter than common air, such, e.g., as 
a balloon filled with hydrogen gas. It is upon this know- 
ledge of the constancy of the Divine will, and of the limits 
and mode of adtion of human power, that our conception of 
an established order in the universe, of so-called laws of 
Nature, is founded. It is thus that we are able, in the 
simpler and better-known classes of phenomena at least, to 
predidt the future, — to know what will happen under given 
conditions. If, still employing the theistic hypothesis, God 
were, from time to time and at irregular intervals, to modify 
the properties of matter and the adtion of energy, we should 
be intellectually confounded and put to shame. Science — 
and we mean here not Science as at present constituted, but 
any co-ordinated body of knowledge — would be simply im- 
possible : not merely so, but the practical business of common 
life would be paralysed. The belief in the uniformity of 
Nature extends even below the human species. According 
to some experiments performed by Mr. Romanes a dog has 
exhibited something very like superstitious fear when a bone, 
with which he was playing, was suddenly jerked by means 
of a slender silk cord. 
Or suppose even that a man, sitting in his chair, could by 
a mere effort of will move objects at the other side of the 
room without touching them directly or indirectly; even 
then we should be in a state of the utmost perplexity until 
we knew the precise limits of this power and the conditions 
under which it is exerted. 
It seems now to us that if the contentions of Spiritualism 
are true, we are placed, for the present at least, in a position 
not unlike what we should occupy if the Deity were capri- 
cious, or if man could exert his activity without the ordinary 
appliances. We are told that there exist around us beings, 
ordinarily invisible, capable of interfering in the order of 
things, and possessing greater power than man. We neither 
know the limits of this power, the conditions of time, place, 
and circumstance under which it is exerted, nor the ends to 
which it may be directed. 
Thus we read of persons being “ murdered by malignant 
spirits ” ; we are told of burning coals taken from an ordi- 
nary fire and laid upon the head of an elderly gentleman 
without even singeing his hair; of a “ medium ” becoming 
