Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: “I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance.... I take no interest in the subject ... but supposing the phenomena to be genuine—they do not interest me.”[387] Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: “When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced.”[388] Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion.[389] Professor Carpenter writes, “I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i. e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study ... the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depend upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws ... the process to which I have given the name ‘unconscious cerebration’ ... performs a large part in the production of the phenomena known as spiritualistic.”[390]
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which “corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect.” They called it, furthermore, “a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman.” Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, “with one consent, began to make excuses.”
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the “unconscious cerebration” of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author—although not a spiritualist—bears this honorable testimony: “That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent.... If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever.”[391]
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
“Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn’d
Firm concord holds,—men only disagree
Of creatures rational....”[392]
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same source? Clearly, this is but one more corroboration of the truism that no two men see the same thing exactly alike. This idea is admirably formulated by Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, in a letter to the Dialectical Society.