ich
have been evolved; and the highest manifestations of the psychic power
known to the occupants of this planet is that which emanates from the
human brain. Thus does science invert the pantheistic pyramid."

Such is the fog that emanates from the institution that should help
the advance and diffusion of knowledge. No God! no soul! not even the
awful power that Spencer blindly acknowledges--nothing but matter
bubbling up and organizing itself into temporary forms that decay and
are gone forever. We may well reciprocate his suggestion, and say that
such doctrines belong to the _limbus fatuorum_, and, if enjoyed as Mr.
Ward enjoys them, they may well be called the "fool's paradise." I
think Hegel has some similar notion--that God becomes conscious only
in man, unconscious everywhere else! And even so brilliant a writer as
M. Renan says, "For myself I think that there is not in the universe
any intelligence superior to that of man." In reading such expressions
we are strongly reminded of the poem on the "rationalistic chicken,"
which would not admit that it ever came out of an egg. When the wisdom
shown in the universe is so immensely beyond the comprehension of man,
how can he assume his own to be the highest wisdom?

To such dreary absurdities as this the _Open Court_ newspaper at
Chicago is devoted, and it has a bevy of well-educated friends and
supporters--well-educated as the world goes,--and graced with literary
capacity and culture, but educated into blindness and ignorance of the
scientific phenomena of psychic science,--unwilling to investigate or
incapable of candid investigation. The coterie sustaining such a
newspaper are precisely in the position of the contemporaries of
Galileo, who refused to look through his telescope or study his
demonstrations.

It is not from any scientific spirit or scientific acumen that this
materialistic coterie avoid psychometric and spiritual facts. The
newspapers which ignore or sneer at such knowledge are easily gulled
in matters of science. A writer in the _Open Court_ upon the
possibilities of the future, which he presents as being confined
"strictly to legitimate deductions from present knowledge," exhibits
an amount and variety of ignorant credulity which ought not to have
gained admission to an intelligent journal. He speaks of an unlimited
freedom of submarine navigation and navigation of the air which would
not have appeared possible to any but the most superficial sci