It requires but one step more for the admission that psychical communications may be established between an inhabitant of Mars and an inhabitant of the earth.
We are often asked what all these studies amount to. That is still unknown. If they should end in a scientific proof of the existence and immortality of the soul, these investigations would forthwith surpass in value all other human sciences put together, without a single exception.
It must be acknowledged that this reason is a sufficient authorization for us not to despise this class of researches. But this argument is needless. These investigations relate to the unknown, and that reason is all-sufficient.
Did Galvani in examining the convulsions of his frogs, have any idea of the immense, the prodigious, the universal part which electric science was to perform in less than a century? Denis Papin and Robert Fulton, Benjamin Franklin and James Watts, Jouffroy and Daguerre,—all the inventors, all the searchers after truth,—were they wrong in losing themselves in their pursuit of the unknown? It is such men who cause the advance of humanity. It is to them mankind owes its progress.
If it were proved, we say, that there exists outside of us, and even within us, an immaterial and spiritual force, which eludes the known processes of nature, and the acknowledged laws of life,—and which reveals itself by other processes and other laws, which do not supplant the first, but take an equal place beside them, this new knowledge might enlighten somewhat the shadows which now conceal the great secret of the origin and destiny of such poor beings as ourselves.
First of all, let us seek the truth. To be sure, Taine has written very wittily: “I never thought that a truth could be of any practical use!” but we may not be of the same mind, and may think, on the contrary, that the search for truth is the prime object of men’s intellectual existence.
THE SWISS AND AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONS,
BY W. D. McCRACKAN.