And with that defiant phrase she swept past him down to the street, forgetting Dr. Britt in her frenzy of indignation and defeat.
VI[ToC]
SERVISS LISTENS SHREWDLY
Meanwhile Morton, with an armful of the publications of "The Society for Psychical Research" before him, was busied with the arguments of the spiritists and their bearings on Viola Lambert's case.
The thing claimed—that the dead spoke through her—he could not for a moment entertain. Such a claim was opposed to all sound thinking, to every law known to science—was, in short, preposterous.
He had acquired all the prejudices against such a faith from Emerson's famous phrase, "rat-hole philosophy," down to the latest sneer in the editorial columns of The Pillar, to the latest "exposé" in The Blast. Upon the most charitable construction, those who believed in rappings, planchettes, materialized forms, ghosts, messages on slates, and all the rest of the amazing catalogue, were either half-baked thinkers, intellectual perverts, or soft-pated sentimentalists, whose judgment was momentarily clouded by the passing of a grief.
"And yet," said one author, "go a little deeper and you will find in the very absurdities of these phenomena a possible argument for their truth. A manufactured system would be careful to avoid putting forward as evidence a thing so childish and so ludicrous as a spirit tipping a table, writing in a bottle, or speaking through a tin horn. Who but a childlike and trusting soul would expect to convince a man of science of the immortality of the soul by causing a message from his grandfather to appear in red letters on his arm? The hit-or-miss character of all these phenomena, the very silliness and stupidity which you find in the appeal, may be taken as evidence of the sincerity of the psychic."