e would not be interested by
the 'genuine' fact of this extension of his faculties, because he
would not expect to be amused or instructed by the contents of what
he heard. Of course he was not invited to listen to a chatter,
which, on one hypothesis, was that of the dead, but to help to
ascertain whether or not there were any genuine facts of an unusual
nature, which some persons explained by the animistic hypothesis.
To mere 'bellettristic triflers' the existence of genuine abnormal
and unexplained facts seems to have been the object of inquiry, and
we must penitently admit that if genuine communications could really
be opened with the dead, we would regard the circumstance with some
degree of curious zest, even if the dead were on the intellectual
level of curates and old women. Besides, all old women are not
imbeciles, history records cases of a different kind, and even some
curates are as intelligent as the apes, whose anatomy and customs,
about that time, much occupied Professor Huxley. In Balaam's
conversation with his ass, it was not so much the fact that mon ane
parle bien which interested the prophet, as the circumstance that
mon ane parle. Science has obviously soared very high, when she
cannot be interested by the fact (if a fact) that the dead are
communicating with us, apart from the value of what they choose to
say.

However, Professor Huxley lost nothing by not joining the committee
of the Dialectical Society. Mr. G. H. Lewes, for his part, hoped
that with Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace to aid (for he joined the
committee) and with Mr. Crookes (who apparently did not) 'we have a
right to expect some definite result'. Any expectation of that kind
was doomed to disappointment. In Mr. Lewes's own experience, which
was large, 'the means have always been proved to be either
deliberate imposture . . . or the well-known effects of expectant
attention'. That is, when Lord Adare, the Master of Lindsay, and a
cloud of other witnesses, thought they saw heavy bodies moving about
of their own free will, either somebody cheated, or the spectators
beheld what they did behold, because they expected to do so, even
when, like M. Alphonse Karr, and Mr. Hamilton Aide, they expected
nothing of the kind. This would be Mr. Lewes's natural explanation
of the circumstances, suggested by his own large experience.

The results of the Dialectical Society's inquiry were somewhat
comic. The committee reported that marvels wer