Theologians who admit that the Deity always works through agents and rational means can grant to scientific workers all that they legitimately claim in the positive direction, and can encourage them in the detailed study of those agents and means. If people knew more about science, and the atmosphere in which scientific men work, they would be better able to interpret occasional rather rash negations; which are quite explicable in terms of the artificial limitation of range which physical science hitherto has wisely laid down for itself.

It is a true instinct which resents the mediæval practice of freely introducing occult and unknown causes into working science. To attribute the rise of sap, for instance, to a 'vital force' would be absurd, it would be giving up the problem and stating nothing at all. Progress in science began when spiritual and transcendental causes were eliminated and treated as non-existent. The simplicity so attained was congenial to the scientific type of mind; the abstraction was eminently useful, and was justified by results. Yet unknown causes of an immaterial and even of a spiritual kind may in reality exist, and may influence or produce phenomena, for all that; and it may have to be the business of science to discover and begin to attend to them, as soon as the ordinary solid ground-plan of Nature has been made sufficiently secure.

Some of us—whether wisely or unwisely—now want to enlarge the recognised scope of physical science, so as gradually to take a wider purview and include more of the totality of things. That is what the Society for Psychical Research was established for,—to begin extending the range of scientific law and order, by patient exploration in a comparatively new region. The effort has been resented, and at first ridiculed, only because misunderstood. The effort may be ambitious, but it is perfectly legitimate; and if it fails it fails.

But advance in new directions may be wisely slow, and it is readily admissible that Societies devoted to long-established branches of science are right to resist extraneous novelties, as long as possible, and leave the study of occult phenomena to a Society established for the purpose. Outlandish territories may in time be incorporated as States, but they must make their claim good and become civilised first.

Yet unfamiliar causes must be introduced occasionally into systematised knowledge, unless our scrutiny of the Universe is already exhaustive. Unpalatable facts can be ruled out from attention, but they cannot without investigation be denied. Strange facts do really happen, even though unprovided for in our sciences. Amid their orthodox relations, they may be regarded as a nuisance. The feeling they cause is as if capricious or mischievous live things had been allowed to intrude into the determinate apparatus of a physical laboratory, thereby introducing hopeless complexity and appearing superficially to interfere with established laws. To avoid such alien incursion a laboratory can be locked, but the Universe can not. And if ever, under any circumstances, we actually do encounter the interaction of intelligences other than that of living men, we shall sooner or later become aware of the fact, and shall ultimately have to admit it into a more comprehensive scheme of existence. Early attempts, like those of the present, must be unsatisfactory and crude; especially as the evidence is of a kind to which scientific men for the most part are unaccustomed; so no wonder they are resentful. Still the evidence is there, and I for one cannot ignore it. Members of the Society for Psychical Research are aware that the evidence already published—the carefully edited and sifted evidence published by their own organisation—occupies some forty volumes of Journal and Proceedings; and some of them know that a great deal more evidence exists than has been published, and that some of the best evidence is not likely to be published,—not yet at any rate. It stands to reason that, at the present stage, the best evidence must often be of a very private and family character. Many, however, are the persons who are acquainted with facts in their own experience which appeal to them more strongly than anything that has ever been published. No records can surpass first-hand direct experience in cogency.

Nevertheless we are also aware, or ought to be, that no one crucial episode can ever be brought forward as deciding such a matter. That is not the way in which things of importance are proven. Evidence is cumulative, it is on the strength of a mass of experience that an induction is ultimately made, and a conclusion provisionally arrived at; though sometimes it happens that a single exceptionally strong instance, or series of instances, may clinch it for some individual.

But indeed the evidence, in one form and another, has been crudely before the human race from remote antiquity; only it has been treated in ways more or less obfuscated by superstition. The same sort of occurrences as were known to Virgil, and to many another seer—the same sort of experiences as are found by folk-lore students, not only in history but in every part of the earth to-day—are happening now in a scientific age, and sometimes under scientific scrutiny. Hence it is that from the scientific point of view progress is at length being made; and any one with a real desire to know the truth need not lack evidence, if he will first read the records with an open mind, and then bide his time and be patient till an opportunity for first-hand critical observation is vouchsafed him. The opportunity may occur at any time: the readiness is all. Really clinching evidence in such a case is never in the past; a prima facie case for investigation is established by the records, but real conviction must be attained by first-hand experience in the present.

The things to be investigated are either true or false. If false, pertinacious inquiry will reveal their falsity. If true, they are profoundly important. For there are no half-truths in Nature; every smallest new departure has portentous consequences; our eyes must open slowly, or we should be overwhelmed. I once likened the feeling of physical investigators in the year 1889 to that of a boy who had long been strumming on the keyboard of a deserted organ into which an unseen power had begun to blow a vivifying breath.[40] That was at the beginning of the series of revolutionary discoveries about radiation and the nature of matter which have since resounded through the world. And now once more the touch of a finger elicits a responsive note, and again the boy hesitates, half delighted, half affrighted, at the chords which it would seem he can now summon forth almost at will.

Footnotes

[40] Modern Views of Electricity, p. 408 of third and current edition.