umphantly despatched and buried, but here was Darwin making the very
same heresy seem only more plausible. How often has "Science" killed
off all spook philosophy, and laid ghosts and raps and "telepathy" away
underground as so much popular delusion. Yet never before were these
things offered us so voluminously, and never in such authentic-seeming
shape or with such good credentials. The tide seems steadily to be
rising, in spite of all the expedients of scientific orthodoxy. It is
hard not to suspect that here may be something different from a mere
chapter in human gullibility. It may be a genuine realm of natural
phenomena.

_Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus_, once a cheat, always a cheat, such
has been the motto of the English psychical researchers in dealing with
mediums. I am disposed to think that, as a matter of policy, it has
been wise. Tactically, it is far better to believe much too little
than a little too much; and the exceptional credit attaching to the row
of volumes of the S. P. R.'s Proceedings, is due to the fixed intention
of the editors to proceed very slowly. Better a little belief tied
fast, better a small investment _salted down_, than a mass of
comparative insecurity.

But, however wise as a policy the S. P. R.'s maxim may have been, as a
test of truth, I believe it to be almost irrelevant. In most things
human the accusation of deliberate fraud and falsehood is grossly
superficial. Man's character is too sophistically mixed for the
alternative of "honest or dishonest" to be a sharp one. Scientific men
themselves will cheat--at public lectures--rather than let experiments
obey their well-known tendency towards failure. I have heard of a
lecturer on physics, who had taken over the apparatus of the previous
incumbent, consulting him about a certain machine intended to show
that, however the peripheral parts of it might be agitated, its centre
of gravity remained immovable. "It _will_ wobble," he complained.
"Well," said the predecessor, apologetically, "to tell the truth,
whenever _I_ used that machine I found it advisable to _drive a nail_
through the centre of gravity." I once saw a distinguished
physiologist, now dead, cheat most shamelessly at a public lecture, at
the expense of a poor rabbit, and all for the sake of being able to
make a cheap joke about its being an "American rabbit"--for no other,
he said, could survive such a wound as he pretended to have given it.

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