In this laboratory-fixation age it is well to remember that certain even of the physical sciences quite or mostly elude laboratory experimentation. Take astronomy, a great and promising but difficult and problematical field of research. No sun of all the millions, no planet, no planetary satellite, no comet, no tiniest of the asteroids can be brought into a laboratory. Once in a while a meteoric stone reaches the earth, and this can be analyzed, but no laboratory can control or predict time or place of its falling. It is necessary to devise agencies, telescopes, spectroscopes and so on, which, in a sense, go out and bring back data about the subjects of this science, and to develop methods of mathematical deduction by which to reach conclusions which are accepted by most people on authority only, since to most people the mathematics is quite unintelligible.
Astronomy, perhaps entitled to be called the most ancient of sciences, is one of the most difficult. A multitude of theories to account for its multitudinous phenomena have been supplanted by others; within the memory of persons now living many opinions once firmly held have been discarded or at least called in question. This is not in the least to the discredit of the science, but it is a fact. Today there are many contradictions of opinion among astronomers. While an article by a scientific man was printing in the Scientific American expressing the common view that in a little while, about a million million years, the earth will become too cold for anybody to live on it, another scientist was announcing to the world his reasons for questioning that conclusion. Even facts of a declared visual character are called in question. Professor Percival Lowell to his death in 1916 supported Schiaparelli’s announced discovery of canals on Mars, described them as he saw them through the telescope, and declared that they must be of artificial origin. It is said that there are astronomers who can see the canals but who question that they are artificial. And it is certain that there are astronomers who deny that there are any canals at all, and who claim that what seem to be canals to some are optical illusions or sheer hallucinations. (Is not astronomy getting to look like psychic research?)
But in spite of all its shifting and reconstruction of theories, its assertions and counter-assertions, the complexity and enormous difficulty of its numerous problems, and the exceedingly subtle methods by which, in a great measure, these problems must be studied, no one is so foolish as to think that astronomical investigation should not be pursued, or that there does not lie before it a great field for the pursuit of truth.
To a very large extent psychic research is analogous with astronomy. It, the youngest of the sciences (by few as yet acknowledged to be a science), has a very difficult field, lying as far apart from the ordinary life of most men as the multitudinous realities of infinite space lie outside the range of thought of ordinary men; its problems are many, theories are shifting and contradictory, certain facts are both affirmed and denied, and, what is more to the point for our present purpose, only to a limited extent can its problems be taken into the laboratory, but for the most part techniques and logical methods have to be devised to fit the nature of the facts with which we deal. In astronomy, most of the subjects of study can be found in place at any time; the great drawback is that they are so fearfully distant as to be sensed very slightly. On the other hand, with certain exceptions, either of kind or degree, the subjects of psychical study cannot be found in place whenever wanted but appear occasionally, yet when they do appear often do so with a nearness and clearness which spares the witnesses the necessity of those cautious qualifying phrases so common in articles dealing with astronomy.
In order at length to turn the attention of scientific men to a quarter of reality to which most of them are now voluntarily blind, we must continue to do what some people contemn as “old stuff,” and that is to multiply the number of intelligent and reputable witnesses by teaching people how to observe and how to record, and by ridding them of the cowardice which now keeps at least five out of six potential witnesses of such standing silent.
[7]. It is so judged from such expressions as “Or maybe she has been asleep and comes out with the tail end of a dream, and has written down what appears to be a lot of rubbish but turns out to be a reproduction of something her husband has been reading or writing at that very moment”; “Says my wife, ‘There are some notes of a dream I just had.’”
[8]. The words “Bob drew watch,” etc., were added by Mrs. Sinclair after she had read his statement.
[9]. “Ulceration and bleeding are also common symptoms, hence the term ‘bleeding piles.’” Encyclopedia Britannica.
[10]. [Deleted.]
[11]. “I explain that in these particular drawings the lines have been traced over in heavier pencil; the reason being that Craig wanted a carbon copy, and went over the lines in order to make it. This had the effect of making them heavier than they originally were, and it made the whirly lines in Craig’s first drawing more numerous than they should be. She did this in the case of two or three of the early drawings, wishing to send a report to a friend. I pointed out to her how this would weaken their value as evidence, so she never did it again.”