If True? [March, 
have latterly obtruded themselves into our calculations, and 
to re-constitute a Science. If no such limits exist, or if they 
are undiscoverable, we do not see how any body of exadt, 
co-ordinated knowledge can exist. 
Be it well understood that we cannot refuse to accept 
tiuth, however unwelcome. If the “reign of law” never 
has existed, or having existed is giving way to the “ reign of 
the arbitrary, the sooner we awake from our pleasing 
dreams the better. 
In a lecent number of “ Light ” we read the following 
significant words : “ Spiritualism . . . comes to scientists 
and tells them that there are other laws than those they 
lecognise, -puts fadts before them which mystify or are 
ignoied until Science has learnt to accept human testimony 
and human consciousness as a part of the great revelation. 
The scorn with which sceptics have hitherto treated human 
testimony shall be unwrung (?), and law discovered in those 
realms hitherto dedicated to the imagination. . . . I may 
be in the minoiity. I can calmly wait and think of Socrates 
and Galileo ! ” 
Passing over other portions of this utterance we must call 
attention to the words which we have italicised. Science 
does not rejedt human testimony save when it is incapable 
of \ ei lfication. Is she henceforth to be less scrupulous? 
Is she to accept every assertion made without scrutiny, and 
thus to desert the method by which she has effedted so 
much ? The very procedure taught and followed by all the 
lefoimers of Science from Roger Bacon to Galileo was to 
look to things rather than words, and to depend upon ob- 
servation and expeiiment in place of hearsay. For anyone 
who upholds testimony and consciousness — ever self-contra- 
didtory as means of extending knowledge, to pose in the 
attitude of Galileo is, to say the least, singular. As for 
Sociates, even if the head and front of his offending was 
not, as many think, a vice not to be named, he has the de- 
ment of turning human inquiry away from things to words 
and of retarding the progress of truth for more than a 
thousand years. 
