Something more akin to modern research began about the time of the Reformation, and lasted till about 1680.  The fury for burning witches led men of sense, learning, and humanity to ask whether there was any reality in witchcraft, and, generally, in the marvels of popular belief.  The inquiries of Thyraeus, Lavaterus, Bodinus, Wierus, Le Loyer, Reginald Scot, and many others, tended on the whole to the negative side as regards the wilder fables about witches, but left the problems of ghosts and haunted houses pretty much where they were before.  It may be observed that Lavaterus (circ. 1580) already put forth a form of the hypothesis of telepathy (that ‘ghosts’ are hallucinations produced by the direct action of one mind, or brain, upon another), while Thyraeus doubted whether the noises heard in ‘haunted houses’ were not mere hallucinations of the sense of hearing.  But all these early writers, like Cardan, were very careless of first-hand evidence, and, indeed, preferred ghosts vouched for by classical authority, Pliny, Plutarch, or Suetonius.  With the Rev. Joseph Glanvil, F.R.S. (circ. 1666), a more careful examination of evidence came into use.  Among the marvels of Glanvil’s and other tracts usually published together in his ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus’ will be found letters which show that he and his friends, like Henry More and Boyle, laboured to collect first-hand evidence for second sight, haunted houses, ghosts, and wraiths.  The confessed object was to procure a ‘Whip for the Droll,’ a reply to the laughing scepticism of the Restoration.  The result was to bring on Glanvil a throng of bores—­he was ’worse haunted than Mr. Mompesson’s house,’ he says-and Mr. Pepys found his arguments ’not very convincing.’  Mr. Pepys, however, was alarmed by ‘our young gib-cat,’ which he mistook for a ‘spright.’  With Henry More, Baxter, and Glanvil practically died, for the time, the attempt to investigate these topics scientifically, though an impression of doubt was left on the mind of Addison.  Witchcraft ceased to win belief, and was abolished, as a crime, in 1736.  Some of the Scottish clergy, and John Wesley, clung fondly to the old faith, but Wodrow, and Cotton Mather (about 1710-1730) were singularly careless and unlucky in producing anything like evidence for their narratives.  Ghost stories continued to be told, but not to be investigated.

Then one of the most acute of philosophers decided that investigation ought never to be attempted.  This scientific attitude towards X phenomena, that of refusing to examine them, and denying them without examination, was fixed by David Hume in his celebrated essay on ‘Miracles.’  Hume derided the observation and study of what he called ‘Miracles,’ in the field of experience, and he looked for an a priori argument which would for ever settle the question without examination of facts.  In an age of experimental philosophy, which derided a priori methods, this was Hume’s great contribution to knowledge.  His famous argument, the joy of many an honest breast, is a tissue of fallacies which might be given for exposure to beginners in logic, as an elementary exercise.  In announcing his discovery, Hume amusingly displays the self-complacency and the want of humour with which we Scots are commonly charged by our critics: