Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/748

728 There is not a scientific spiritualist who would not repudiate the statement as calumnious. If the laws of Nature can be violated, there is no absurdity or chimera which is not admissible; but, instead of believing this possible, spiritualists are the foremost of all men in insisting on the universal inviolability of all the laws of Nature, extending their infrangible power not only over all physical phenomena, but throughout the equally extensive psychic realm (in spite of all metaphysical speculations to the contrary)—an extension which Dr. Carpenter has not affirmed himself.

Dr. Carpenter presumes that liberal thinkers must be at war with the laws of Nature, because he thinks those laws incompatible with the new phenomena. The obfuscation of his mind is the same which has characterized narrow-minded bigots in all ages. The narrow-minded man cannot conceive two widely-different truths at once, and perceive their harmonies: he adopts one with zeal, and rejects the other firmly, because he thinks them incompatible. Narrow-minded men are of course bitter partisans, and the great majority of mankind from defective brains and irrational education see only one aspect of truth, and reject all others.

Dr. Carpenter sees no truth in mesmerism, and Baron Dupotet sees no reliable truth in medicine; Hahnemann rejected the entire accumulations of allopathy, and the old school indignantly rejected Hahnemann's discoveries as nonentities. A doctor who administers three grain pills will not tolerate homœopathic pellets; and he who has discovered that infinitesimals will cure is often equally intolerant of the three-grain pills: and so they call each other quacks and impostors, in the same spirit in which Dr. Carpenter assails those who see more of the truth than himself, and are equally interested in psychic and physical facts. How long shall it be before the "survival of the fittest," or the improvement of education, shall give us a generation with brains enough to entertain two ideas at once?

The difficulty of Dr. Carpenter and all other narrow-minded people lies in the poverty of their conceptions. They have no idea that it is possible for Nature to show her powers in any new way to which they are unaccustomed. Hence, the ascent of a balloon seemed miraculous to the ignorant peasants, who took it for the work of the devil; and the formation of a solid block of ice from water was a similar violation of Nature's laws to the Asiatic despot, who felt justified in treating the traveler as a liar who told him of it. Had Dr. Carpenter been his prime-minister, the traveler might have fared worse.

There is no better evidence of philosophic imbecility than a sentiment of the all-sufficiency of our present meagre knowledge of Nature. The proposition of Dr. Carpenter that all new, marvelous facts shall be treated as impossibilities, and the witnesses who, without any other motive than the love of truth, attest them at the expense of their own popularity, shall be treated as impostors (which means, made personally