ising to find their explanation sometimes wrong.

It is very easy, to my mind, for men of our generation to be too hard
in their judgments of the men of {381} the Middle Ages with regard to
the curious phenomena, psychic, spiritistic and occult, which, with
all our advance in science, are still almost as obscure to the eye of
the intellect as they were seven centuries ago. The medieval
generations saw a great many things that they could not explain
happening round them, and attributed them to spiritual agencies. We
have learned since that many of these things are merely natural, and
must not be considered as due to anything else than the ordinary laws
of nature. We have not eliminated belief in the spiritual world,
however, and there is still a large proportion of mankind who think
that they see, even in the matter-of-fact world around them of the
present day, many signs of interference in human affairs by agencies
distinct from those of human beings and quite independent of matter.
It is easy to dismiss this side of the question with a shrug of the
shoulders and say that it need not be taken into account. A man who
does this easily succeeds in convincing himself that there are no
evidences for spiritual manifestations in our life, and that the
stories with regard to them are all nonsense.

It is curious, however, that anyone who investigates and does not
merely dismiss at once, is very prone to come to a contrary
conclusion, even though all his training and the traditions of his
education are opposed to such an admission. There are many prominent
scientists who have allowed themselves to be drawn into the
investigation of spiritualistic manifestations so-called. Very few of
them have come away from their investigations entirely convinced that
there was nothing in them. Frauds they have found; sleight-of-hand
impositions they have exposed; but apart from all these, there {382}
is a residue of phenomena which they cannot explain and which
convinces many of them of the existence and the mundane action of
forces independent of matter. The men who come to these conclusions
are not only the ignorant, nor the over-credulous, but frequently
representative leaders in scientific thought--men who are known to be
thoroughly capable of weighing evidence, prominent lawyers and judges,
above all, men who are accustomed to investigation as most painstaking
scientists and faithful students of nature.

A few examples will illustrate