Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/767

Rh right to demand the legitimate results that must flow from it, as we expect and require the natural results of all other genuine discoveries. Of course, the objection may be interposed that we must not be premature in anticipating the fruits of discovery, because the history of all science shows that the interval between the dawn of a new principle and its developments and applications may be very long. This is true; yet, in every case, we demand at once the effects that flow immediately from the quality of the discovery; in fact, we only know it by these results. It would, of course, have been absurd to expect from the invention of the spy-glass the great results of the modern telescope, which has grown out of it; but it would have been proper to expect from the spy-glass that which was properly claimed for it, and which it at once compelled all men to yield. All scientific discoveries, in fact, are new procurable effects, and are, therefore, their own witnesses. Clairvoyance must give us the new results of a marvelously-sharpened vision; the extra faculty implies extra disclosures. And again we ask, where are they? With a new capacity for seeing, what new thing has been seen? The limitations of vision restrict and measure the usual sphere of knowledge, and with every increase in the power of optical instruments, as the microscope and telescope, in aiding the eye, knowledge has been extended, novel facts brought to light, and it is these that attest the instrumental improvements. But with a power of vision so mysteriously sharpened that opaque objects become transparent, with the barriers actually taken away, what has been revealed? There are thousands of perplexing and unsettled questions, regarding the constitution of material things, which might be cleared up by another increment of visual penetration; but clairvoyance has given no help in conquering these difficulties. If it has been a demonstrated reality these fifty years, it ought long ago to have vindicated its claims by unveiling some of the obscurities of material objects. Yet, claiming to be a superior means of laying open the inner constitution of things, it has not even proved equal to ordinary sight, and has, in fact, done nothing whatever toward extending the boundaries of knowledge. It may, perhaps, be objected that clairvoyant power of seeing through opaque things no more implies a revealing of their inner nature, than looking through the air with the eye implies the recognition of its physical and chemical constitution. But this plea for seeing nothing, with a preternatural gift of sight, is futile, and the advocates of clairvoyance understand well enough that the validity of the claim must turn on what is recognized; accordingly, the French commissioners say it had been demonstrated to them that clairvoyance gave a knowledge of the internal condition of other persons. The body was not looked through as we look through the air, where nothing is seen; but it is claimed that things were seen, internal conditions perceived, morbid actions identified, and features of disease described, that were confirmed by post-mortem examination. Why, then, should this power be confined to the identification of things already ascertained by the common resources of inquiry? The new way of getting into the mysteries of the organism should have attested itself by results not accessible by ordinary means. It is significant that the clairvoyant reports only as far as normal knowing had already reached. Yet the human system is filled with physiological and pathological enigmas and obscurities, the clearing up of which would be priceless to science. Why, then, did not the physicians of the French commission close the investigation at once and forever by throwing light upon organic processes not before understood, and thus vindicating the new method, by showing that it could do, in a direct way, at least as much as