Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/749

Rh infamous and consigned to the mercies of antiquated laws), embodies all the impulses of stolid ignorance and malignity which have in past ages warred against science and innovation by prisons and by death penalties.

Every great discoverer introduces something to human knowledge different from the usual understanding of Nature, and is, therefore, by the Carpenterian rule, a fit subject for persecution. The rigorous application of this principle would check progress by a war upon the greatest benefactors of mankind—those who lead them into essentially new ideas of Nature. The rule is therefore thoroughly satanic in its moral aspect, while in its intellectual character it is thoroughly stolid, being a declaration of war against the increase of knowledge in certain directions forbidden by the bull of the materialistic pope.

Considered as an appeal to that great tribunal, the public, this little volume is an extraordinary piece of insolence—what would be called at any judicial tribunal a flagrant contempt of court, entitling the applicant to summary dismissal and punishment. Dr. Carpenter not only pronounces the public, to whom his book is an appeal, incompetent to decide, virtually telling every reader that he has no right to an opinion on what he has seen until Dr. Carpenter (or some one whom he recognizes as a colleague) has told him what to think; but he assumes, like a "border-ruffian," to expel every witness from court who testifies differently from himself. No matter how pure the character, or how lofty the intelligence, if they disagree with him they are falsifiers; but, as to all who agree, their testimony is valuable, no matter how contemptible its source.

It is pitiable to see a gentleman of Dr. Carpenter's standing reproducing the obsolete trash which public intelligence had buried in oblivion. The toe-joint and knee-joint theory of rappings was speedily exploded in America, and has scarcely been heard of for twenty years. Rappings have occurred in thousands of families, in spite of their incredulity, and compelled them to recognize an invisible power which acts sometimes with force sufficient to break furniture, and to be heard at considerable distances. As Dr. Carpenter manifests a remarkable ignorance of the progress and present status of spiritualism, it is probable he does not know that the joint-rapping certificate to which Mrs. Culver's name was attached was refuted immediately after its publication. The séances she describes never occurred at all, Catharine Fox being at that time seventy miles distant at Auburn. How unmanly, how much like a malignant village gossip, in Dr. Carpenter to dig up decomposed slanders, when the lady concerned, now Mrs. Jencken, was in London, and he might at any time have satisfied himself in an hour of the reality of true spirit-sounds and other phenomena!

Throughout his long career. Dr. Carpenter has kept himself willfully ignorant of mesmeric and spiritual facts, which are easier of access