pinks and tulips of philosophy, have as much as 999, and poor blind spiritualists only 1001. Think of this as certainly not impossible, and then read the slashing review which 999 wrote against 1001, beginning After all the diffusion of education, after all the triumphs of science, in the middle of our enlightened century. . . 'Or take it the other way, let our bias be that of incredulity, in which case 1001 writes as above against 999. Put all these things together and stir them up; the result will be a gradual perception of the meaning and force of difference of opinion, and perhaps a suspicion that the rational point for the time being is somewhere between the two extremes, and that the people who 'don't know what to make of it,' are nearer the true result of the present state of materials than either negative philosophers or positive spiritualists. But, as already hinted, these intermediaries will not settle the question; the disputants must do that all that the undecided can attempt is inducing both parties to keep the peace, to suspect the existence of their several biases, and to acknowledge that they are supporting their theories, ready made by help of prepossessions, not dispassionately constructing them.

The spiritualists, beyond a doubt, are in the track that has led to all advancement in physical science: their opponents are the representatives of those who have striven against progress. I take for granted that there is a large body of unexplained phenomena. Imposture men and coincidence men I leave to see their king anointed, and to rejoice and say, Long live the king. When navigators first began to make observations with instruments on deck, the self-sufficient called them star-shooters, and when a star's altitude was taken would ask if they had hit it. When the pendulum was first employed in this country to measure time, the incredulous were more than usually happy in their jests upon the swing

swangs, as they called them. It is likely enough that the first set really believed that the navigators were pretending to hold communication with the heavenly bodies; and that the second set took the regularity of the movements of the pendulum for a succession of coincidences. But there is a higher class of obstructives who, without jest or sarcasm, bring up principles, possibilities, and the nature of things. These most worthy and respectable opponents are, if wrong, to be reckoned the lineal descendants of those who proved the earth could not be round, because the people on the under side would then tumble off. This sect is useful in raising doubts and difficulties, but absurd when it pronounces decisions upon them. It was proper to suspect that the locomotives would, with a flat wheel on a flat rail, refuse to go on for want of friction, the wheels doing what by military analogy might be called goose-roll: but it was absurd to affirm this incapacity as existing. When the great engineer said before the parliamentary committee that he expected more than ten miles an hour, the greater barrister-greater for the moment-turned away and said, 'I will not ask this witness another question.' The barrister's* moment is gone: the engineer's moment is a long future. Any one who chose might collect such a list as would powerfully edify those who can do without, and would not do a bit of good to those who want the warning.

I have said that the deluded spirit-rappers are on the right track: they have the spirit and the method of the grand time when those paths were cut through the uncleared forest in which it is now the daily routine to walk. What was

* When I say the barrister, I mean the clients who instructed him. The hint is worth giving, for people who know that Garrick would have been one of the last men to give a kingdom for a horse, are apt to think that learned counsel are the fools they are paid to be taken for. Are the bar better actors than Garrick?

that spirit? It was the spirit of universal examination, wholly unchecked by fear of being detected in the investigation of nonsense. When the Royal Society was founded, the fellows set to work to prove all things, that they might hold fast that which was good. They bent themselves to the question whether sprats were young herrings. They made a circle of the powder of a unicorn's horn, and set a spider in the middle of it; but it immediately ran out:' they tried several times, and the spider' once made some stay in the powder.' They inquired into Kenelm Digby's sympathetic powder Magnetical cures being discoursed of, Sir Gilbert Talbot promised to communicate what he knew of sympathetical cures; and those members who had any of the powder of sympathy, were desired to bring some of it at the next meeting.' June 21, 1661, certain gentlemen were appointed curators of the proposal of tormenting a man with the sympathetic powder:' I cannot find any record of the result. And so they went on, until the time of Sir John Hill's satire, in 1751. This once well-known work is, in my judgment, the greatest compliment the Royal Society ever received. It brought forward a number of what are now feeble and childish researches in the 'Philosophical Transactions.' It showed that the inquirers had actually been inquiring and that they did not pronounce decisions about natural knowledge' by help of natural knowledge.' But for this, Hill would neither have known what to assail, nor how. Matters are now entirely changed. The scientific bodies are far too well established to risk themselves. Ibit qui zonam perdidit—

6

6

Let him take castles who has ne'er a groat.

These great institutions are now without any collective purpose, except that of promoting individual energy: they print

:

for their contributors, and guard themselves by a general declaration that they will not be answerable for the things they print. Of course they will not put forward anything for everybody but a writer of a certain reputation, or matter of a certain look of plausibility and safety, will find admission. This is as it should be: the pasturers of flocks and herds and the hunters of wild beasts are two very different bodies with very different policies. The scientific academies are what a spiritualist might call 'publishing mediums;' and their spirits fall occasionally into writing which looks as if minds in the higher state were not always impervious to nonsense. Again, the spiritualists have taken the method of the old time. There was a strong head, one Bacon, who laid down a scheme of philosophising which, in England,* is supposed to have been the guiding star of all subsequent successes. But Bacon was great as a destroyer, feeble as a constructor: he could upset, but he could not set up. His plan was to collect all the facts; after which, to use his own expression, sciences would be made as easily as a circle is drawn with a pair of compasses. But no answer has ever been given to the question, What science owed its birth or growth to Bacon's directions how to make a science? Many have profited much by the descriptions which Bacon (Beacon?) has given of error: a few may have profited a little by his expositions of the way to truth. Those who are acquainted with the build of the successful sciences can only bring themselves within the pale of the established worship by making induction mean other things besides itself. It is universally acknowledged that Bacon's attempt at a discussion of heat, on his own plan of

* The Bacon-worship of the continent was much less than that of England, though not small. The reaction is now so strong that it is protested against as excessive by the French translator of Aristotle, Barthélemy St.-Hilaire. This was written before I saw Liebig's assault.

setting up, does not come near enough to deserve even the name of a failure. There was another strong head, called Newton, whose opinion of Bacon may be gathered from the fact that he does not, in any one of his works, make any allusion* whatever to Bacon's name, system, or writings. To this Newton we owe, inter multa alia, the foundation of our present knowledge of the moon's motion. How did he proceed? By collecting facts? No! by vigorous and rigorous I had written one of these words, and afterwards could not tell which; but both are true-developement of one of the most outrageous ideas that ever was conceived, and trying how its consequences worked. His predecessors had started the notion that dead matter pulls other dead matter; they had an idea that the pull of the earth kept the moon at proper satellite distance. Newton trumped their trick with a vengeance: for he made it his hypothesis that every atom of matter pulls every other atom. I purposely avoid the grand words gravitate towards and attract: they mean pull without volition, or they mean nothing. There are stars in the milky way of which it is now pretty clear that their light takes at least scores, probably hundreds of years to reach us, at the express speed of 190,000 miles odd in a second and no stoppages. Newton laid down as his theory that there is not a particle in the salt-cellar in any one of these stars but is always pull, pull, pulling, at every particle in the salt-cellar on our earth; aye, and in the pepper-box too: our pepper and salt, of course, using retaliatory measures. And he had the impudence to say, Hypotheses non fingo! But for all

* Newton, in some of his early optical writings, uses the phrase experimentum crucis, which raises a presumption, though by no means a proof, that he had looked into Bacon's writings. If he had really done so, his silence must be intentional.