“There ye are, ye see!” said the Doc., and they all jeered, loud and long.
They agreed it could not be done by memory.
“Can you think of any other way of fudging it?” I asked. They could not.
“Then if it is not my memory it must be yours, Doc.”
“What’s the good of sayin’ it is me when I’m tellin’ ye it’s not,” said the Doc. wrathfully. “You are as bad as the worst sceptic in the place. I couldn’t do it if I tried, nor could the best man among you. It can’t be a fudge! Look the facts in the face and admit it!”
“I don’t see how it can,” said Matthews. “We must look for some other explanation—telepathy, or subconscious communication, or something of that sort. That’s the next problem.”
“We are getting on,” I said.
We were. But not in the sense they imagined.
Advanced investigators of Spiritualism are like sword-swallowers. They can take in with ease what no ordinary mortal can stomach. For in matters of belief, as elsewhere, “il n’y a que le premier pas qui coute.” It is all a matter of practice and experience. We in Yozgad had not yet acquired the capacity of an Oliver Lodge or a Conan Doyle, but we were getting along very well for beginners. The stage of “True-believerdom” was in sight when my little flock would cease from talking about “elementary details” and concentrate their attention on the “greater truths of the World Beyond.” Once a medium has been accepted as bona fide he has quite a nice job—as easy as falling off a log, and much more amusing. Experto credo!
The growth of a belief is difficult to describe, for growth is not a matter of adding one piece here and another there. It is not an addition at all, it is a process; and the most that can be done in describing it is to state a few of the outstanding events and say, “this marks one stage in the process, that another.” But the process itself does not move by jerks. Nor is it the sum total of these separate events. In any investigation each point as it is reached is subjected to proof. Once passed as proved it forms in its turn part of the foundation for a further advance in belief. It is the part of the investigator to make certain he does not admit as correct a single false deduction. If he does the whole of his subsequent reasoning is liable to be affected.