wrong."

"Future ages will, I believe, be astonished at the vast amount of
energy and ignorance displayed by so many {388} of the great men of
this century in opposing unpalatable truths, and in supposing that
_a priori_ arguments, accusations of imposture or insanity, or
personal abuse, were the proper means of determining matters of fact
and of observation in any department of human knowledge."

If these hard-headed scientists, whose training has been obtained in
what physical scientists themselves, at least, are fain to call the
rigid school of the logic of facts, and under the severe mental
discipline of the inductive method, accept on the evidence afforded
them, the manifestations of the spiritual world and its influences in
this as true, surely we will not condemn these men of the Middle Ages,
who approached the subject in such a different temper, if they came to
the same conclusion. We recognize that the modern scientist, with his
trained powers of observation and his elaborate facilities for
eliminating the adventitious in his experiments, is in a position to
judge impartially with regard to such subjects. More than this, his
life has usually been spent in making such syntheses of evidence for
and against the significance of facts, as should enable him to be a
proper judge. If, then, whenever he seriously devotes himself to such
an investigation, he comes almost inevitably to the conclusion that
spirits do intervene in our affairs, yet we refuse to believe with
him, it is hard to know on what principle we shall accept his
scientific conclusions. If we cannot bring ourselves to think his
conclusions are of equal value in both cases, we place ourselves in a
strange dilemma. The medieval scholars were prone, because of the
faith to which they had given their whole-hearted adhesion, to see
spiritual powers at work in many things. In this they were {389}
sometimes sadly mistaken, but not so much mistaken as certain
generations of the nineteenth century, who absolutely refused to
accept any possibility of spiritual interference in things mundane.
Both the extremes are mistakes. It is manifestly more of a mistake,
however, to deny spiritual influence entirely (I talk now from the
standpoint of the scientist and not the believer), than to accept so
much of spiritual interference as the medieval generations permitted
themselves to be convinced of.

This whole subject is one that cannot be dismissed as the