.

This is one of the causes of the doubt of scientists. It is not the only
or the chief cause. The latter is the fact that the claims of spiritism
lift man into an entirely new domain of the universe, remove him from
the great field of the material with which he is physically affiliated
and to which his senses are closely adapted, and place him in a region
beyond the scope of the senses, a vast kingdom which is held to underlie
or subtend the physical, and which the ordinary outlook of the scientist
fails to perceive. It requires no strain of the imagination to admit the
existence of a new constituent of the atmosphere. It requires a great
strain to admit the existence of a new constituent of the universe, a
vast spiritual substratum to the domain of matter. Religion, with its
ideal tests, has long maintained this to be a fact. Science, with its
rigid material tests, sternly questions it, and demands that the
existence of an inhabited spiritual realm shall be incontestably proved
by scientific evidence before it can be accepted.

This demand is a reasonable one. The world is growing rapidly more
scientific, and the old method of arriving at conclusions is daily
losing strength. Beliefs based on ideal or imaginative postulates, once
strong, are now weak. Faith founded on ancient authority is active
still, but promises to become obsolete. The way of science is growing
to be the way of the world, and in the time to come intelligent men will
doubtless demand incontestable evidence of any fact which they are asked
to accept.

As regards the phenomena in question, however, it cannot be said that
they have been fairly or fully investigated by scientists. They have
been set down as the work of charlatans, and their apparent results
ascribed to fraud, collusion, credulity, and mental obliquity in
general. The fact, that of the scientists who have exhaustively
investigated the spiritistic phenomena, a considerable number have
accepted them as valid, has had no effect upon scientists as a body,
who, in this particular, occupy the position which they accuse
non-scientists of maintaining, that of forming opinions without
investigating phenomena.

This attitude of the scientific world toward these problematical
occurrences is quite comprehensible. Throughout the nineteenth century
the attention of scientists has been almost wholly directed toward the
investigation of the forms and forces of matter, the phenomena and
principles