ive force outside of the
patients themselves, or even some manifestation of ill-understood
forces quite apart from matter. Not all the thinking people of the
Middle Ages accepted all the absurd notions sometimes rehearsed in
this matter, but as in our own time, foolish traditions and
superstitions dominated the unthinking classes, which form still,
unfortunately, the great mass of mankind. We have had just the
opposite delusions forced upon our attention in our own day. Large
numbers, supposedly of intelligent people, have pretended to believe
or have definitely accepted the teaching that disease is nothing. This
is quite as foolish as attributing to spiritual agencies what has come
to be recognized as due to physical factors. It is to be hoped that
our generation and its thinking shall not be judged by future
generations to have been utterly foolish, just because a few millions
of us accepted Eddyism,--and it must be remembered that these are not,
as a rule, the uneducated. Another side of this question is even more
interesting, or at least has become so during the last twenty years. A
generation ago it was the custom to scoff not a little scornfully in
scientific circles, at the idea of admitting even the possibility of
the interference of immaterial or spiritual agencies, or of any other
intelligences or wills at work in the ordinary affairs of this life,
than those of men. This scornful attitude still continues to be the
pose of many students and teachers of science. It is by no means so
universal as it was, however. Strikingly enough, the converts from
this attitude of mind have come, not from the lower ranks of teachers
of science, but from among the very leaders in original {365} research
and scientific investigation. We may still continue to laugh at and
ridicule the medieval people for their admission of the activity of
spirits in ordinary mundane affairs, but if we do so, we must also
laugh at and ridicule just as much, such prominent leaders of
scientific thought and progress as Sir William Crookes, Mr. Alfred
Russell Wallace, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Charles Richet, the
distinguished French physiologist, Flammarion the astronomer, and even
of late years Professor Lombroso, the well-known Italian
criminologist, whose special doctrines as to crime and criminals would
apparently insure him against such theories as those of the
spiritualists. All of these men have confessed their belief not only
in the possib