‘all reasonable people.’  The result was to deprive Science of the best sort of record of facts which she welcomes as soon as she thinks she can explain them.[10] Examples of the folly of a priori negation are common.  The British Association refused to hear the essay which Braid, the inventor of the word ‘hypnotism,’ had written upon the subject.  Braid, Elliotson, and other English inquirers of the mid-century, were subjected to such persecutions as official science could inflict.  We read of M. Deslon, a disciple of Mesmer, about 1783, that he was ’condemned by the Faculty of Medicine, without any examination of the facts.’  The Inquisition proceeded more fairly than these scientific obscurantists.

Another curious example may be cited.  M. Guyau, in his work ’The Non-Religion of the Future,’ argues that Religion is doomed.  ’Poetic genius has withdrawn its services,’ witness Tennyson and Browning!  ’Among orthodox Protestant nations miracles do not happen.’[11] But ’marvellous facts’ do happen.[12] These ‘marvellous facts,’ accepted by M. Guyau, are what Hume called ‘miracles,’ and advised the ‘wise and learned’ to laugh at, without examination.  They were not facts, and could not be, he said.  Now to M. Guyau’s mind they are facts, and therefore are not miracles.  He includes ‘mental suggestion taking place even at a distance.’  A man ’can transmit an almost compulsive command, it appears nowadays, by a simple tension of his will.’  If this be so, if ‘will’ can affect matter from a distance, obviously the relations of will and matter are not what popular science tells us that they are.  Again, if this truth is now established, and won from that region which Hume and popular science forbid us to investigate, who knows what other facts may be redeemed from that limbo, or how far they may affect our views of possibilities?  The admission of mental action, operative a distance, is, of course, personal only to M. Guyau, among friends of the new negative tradition.

We return to Hume.  He next argues that the pleasures of wonder make all accounts of ‘miracles’ worthless.  He has just given an example of the equivalent pleasures of dogmatic disbelief.  Then Religion is a disturbing force; but so, manifestly, is irreligion.  ’The wise and learned are content to deride the absurdity, without informing themselves of the particular facts.’  The wise and learned are applauded for their scientific attitude.  Again, miracles destroy each other, for all religions have their miracles, but all religions cannot be true.  This argument is no longer of force with people who look on ‘miracles’ as = ‘X phenomena,’ not as divine evidences to the truth of this or that creed.  ’The gazing populace receives, without examination, whatever soothes superstition,’ and Hume’s whole purpose is to make the wise and learned imitate the gazing populace by rejecting alleged facts ‘without examination.’  The populace investigated more than did the wise and learned.