Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/595

Rh my own inquiries into mesmerism, spiritualism, etc. The most diverse accounts of the facts of a séance will be given by a believer and a skeptic. One will declare that a table rose in the air, while another (who had been watching its feet) is confident that it never left the ground; a whole party of believers will affirm that they saw Mr. Home float out of one window and in at another, while a single honest skeptic declares that Mr. Home was sitting in his chair all the time. And in this last case we have an example of a fact, of which there is ample illustration, that during the prevalence of an epidemic delusion the honest testimony of any number of individuals on one side, if given under a "prepossession," is of no more weight than that of a single adverse witness—if so much. Thus I think it cannot be doubted by any one who candidly studies the witchcraft trials of two centuries back, that, as a rule, the witnesses really believed what they deposed to as facts; and it further seems pretty clear that in many instances the persons incriminated were themselves "possessed" with the notion of the reality of the occult powers attributed to them. No more instructive lesson can be found, as to the importance of the "subjective" element in human testimony, than is presented in the records of these trials. Thus, Jane Brooks was hung at Chard assizes in 1658, for having bewitched Richard Jones, a sprightly lad of twelve years old; he was seen to rise in the air and pass over a garden-wall some thirty yards; and nine people deposed to finding him, in open daylight, with his hands flat against a beam at the top of the room, and his body two or three feet from the ground? If this "levitation of the human body," confirmed as it is in modern times by the testimony of Mr. Crookes, Lord Lindsay, and Lord Adair, to say nothing of the dozen witnesses to Mrs. Guppy's descent through the ceiling of a closed and darkened room, has a valid claim on our belief, how are we to stop short of accepting, on the like testimony, all the marvels and extravagances of witchcraft? If, on the other hand, we put these witnesses out of court, as rendered untrustworthy by their "prepossession," what credit can we attach to the testimony of any individuals or bodies dominated by a strong religious "prepossession;" that testimony having neither been recorded at the time, nor subjected to the test of judicial examination?

Though I have hitherto spoken of "prepossessions" as ideational states, there are very few in which the emotions do not take a share; and bow strongly the influence of these may pervert the representations of actual facts, we best see in that early stage of many forms of monomania, in which there are as yet no fixed delusions, but the occurrences of daily life are wrongly interpreted by the emotional coloring they receive. But we may recognize the same influence in matters which are constantly passing under our observation; and a better illustration of it could scarcely be found than in the following circumstance, mentioned to me as having recently occurred in the practice