Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/772

752 and therefore to make it a part of Nature, which we hold is simply to confuse all distinctions and confound the natural with the supernatural. Dr. Buchanan cannot do this in the name of science, for science itself has only come into existence by marking off the natural from the supernatural, and it belongs by its very essence and origin to one term of this contrasted relation. We cannot undo the great work of science, and cancel all that has been gained in the intellectual progress of mankind, by going back to primitive times when the natural and the supernatural were all mixed up, and nothing was known or suspected of such things as the laws of Nature. It was then believed that, there exists an upper sphere inhabited by gods who interfered as they chose with earthly matters; the spiritualists now believe in a corresponding ghost realm, inhabited by disembodied spirits, who have still the power of meddling with the course of terrestrial affairs.

This ultra-material realm, it is claimed, is manifested by material effects. But it is not by those effects which occur regularly and uniformly, and to which we give the name of laws, that it is the office of science to trace out. These are not attributed to spiritual agencies. The spirits are never alleged to be the causes of cohesion, refraction, digestion, gravity, or any of the matter-of-course operations that go on around us. They are only disclosed to us by striking, wonderful, exceptional, or miraculous manifestations; that is, the common order of Nature gets along without them, and they are only known by breaking through it. In Nature we see with our eyes; in the "psychic realm" men are said to see with the backs of their heads. In Nature tables remain at rest upon the floor' forever unless some definite terrestrial force is applied to move them; in the "psychic realm" they travel about or rise to the ceiling without the intervention of any earthly cause. In Nature a bouquet will not pass through the woody barrier of a door, or the resisting masonry of a wall; in the "psychic realm" "a large bunch of hollyhocks, asters, laurels, and other shrubs and flowers," is mysteriously spirited into a house without coming through the usual openings in the usual way by which material bodies are transferred. In Nature, if a man unguardedly loses his balance in a window, he falls to the earth; but in the "psychic realm" Mr. Home "floats in the air by moonlight out of one window and in at another at a height of seventy feet from the ground." In Nature, if we wish to go to a house, we must walk there or get a conveyance to be carried, and then can only get inside by the opening of some passage of entrance; but in the "psychic realm" buxom Mrs. Guppy "sails through the air all the way from Highbury Park to Lamb's Conduit Street, and is brought by invisible agency into a room of which the doors and windows were closed and fastened, coming plump down in the midst of a circle of eleven persons who were sitting in the dark shoulder to shoulder."

Can those who believe these things be said to maintain the laws of Nature? Certainly not, in any such sense as that which science affirms. The spiritualists say that these apparently miraculous effects are not really miraculous, but are simply the consequences of higher laws of Nature by which the lower ordinances of the material sphere are overcome. But it is clear that before the man of science can accept such astounding propositions he must give to the winds all those laws of the natural world which he has been accustomed to regard as of demonstrated constancy. In life, by all his resources, the most gifted man cannot suspend the operation of gravity upon a single particle of matter by an infinitesimal fraction. But when he dies we are taught that his ghost can come back, and suspend