Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/776

756 non-expertness and failure: Science constantly baffled, beaten, utterly overthrown, yet as often returning-to the hopeless contest, where delusions always compel a drawn battle, if they do not positively win; experiments without number that have the form of precision without its substance; all truth, or even the suggestions of truth, submerged in vast floods of error; the faith that belongs to religion and emotion carried into the realm of science and intellect; all along the line of strong endeavor an obvious want not only of the philosophy but even of the instinct of seeking truth from living human beings—in the whole history of folly one shall not find a more instructive chapter than this; were there no other proof of the limitations of the human brain, sufficient could be found in this fruitless searching after truth on the part of the most intellectual leaders, of the most intellectual of nations, in the most intellectual era of the world. Not only during the past year, in the hospital of Salpêtrière, but, by recurring intervals, during the past century, the best science of France has been on its knees before hysterical women, and there it must remain until it has mastered the true philosophy of trance and the involuntary life, and learned by heart the sources of error.

The time must come when it shall be well understood that experiments with living human beings, in which the elements of error are unrecognized, are not only unscientific but are a satire on science; bearing the same relation to the true method of investigation in this special department of physiology that the dreams of the mediæval sages sustained to the general philosophy of induction. The philosophy of the future will be that the laws of nature are not to be put on the market, and can not be bid off at auction, and that the long-standing and unaccepted financial prize of the French Academy for the one who should prove to be endowed with clairvoyant or mind-reading power is as unscientific and as puerile as to attempt the bribery of the law of the conservation of force, or to hire the sun to rise in the west instead of the east.

During the past few years it has been my destiny to have been frequently requested to carry out or to plan for others various experimental researches with living human beings; these requests have sometimes come from professional and scientific men who, in all dealings with inanimate objects, are amply competent, both by instinct and by reflection, to guard against all illusions and deceptions. It is my hope and belief that this formal attempt—ill perfected as it may be—will so reduce this subject to a science as to bring it within the power of all physiologists to plan and to complete all such experiments for themselves, with ample confidence that the results will invariably be in harmony with the truth. The above analysis, in spite of its necessary condensation, will, it is hoped, make clear even to those who do not follow all its details, that in this, as in every other realm of knowledge and acquirement, success need not be the result of any special acuteness, or