This brief sketch shows that science is confronted by certain facts, which, in his time, Hume dismissed as incredible miracles, beneath the contempt of the wise and learned.  We also see that the stranger and rarer phenomena which Hegel accepted as facts, and interwove with his general philosophy, are still matters of dispute.  Admitted by some men of science, they are doubted by others; by others, again, are denied, while most of the journalists and authors of cheap primers, who inspire popular tradition, regard the phenomena as frauds or fables of superstition.  But it is plain that these phenomena, like the more ordinary facts of hypnotism, may finally be admitted by science.  The scientific world laughed, not so long ago, at Ogham inscriptions, meteorites, and at palaeolithic weapons as impostures, or freaks of nature.  Now nobody has any doubt on these matters, and clairvoyance, thought-transference, and telepathy may, not inconceivably, be as fortunate in the long run as meteorites, or as the more usual phenomena of hypnotism.

It is only Lord Kelvin who now maintains, or lately maintained, that in hypnotism there is nothing at all but fraud and malobservation.  In years to come it may be that only some similar belated voice will cry that in thought-transference there is nothing but malobservation and fraud.  At present the serious attention and careful experiment needed for the establishment of the facts are more common among French than among English men of science.  When published, these experiments, if they contain any affirmative instances, are denounced as ‘superstitious,’ or criticized after what we must charitably deem to be a very hasty glance, by the guides of popular opinion.  Examples of this method will be later quoted.  Meanwhile the disputes as to these alleged facts are noticed here, because of their supposed relation to the Origin of Religion.

[Footnote 1:  See Mr. Myers’s paper on the ‘Ancient Oracles,’ in Classical Essays, and the author’s ‘Ancient Spiritualism,’ in Cock Lane and Common Sense.]

[Footnote 2:  The italics here are those of Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, in his Miracles and Modern Science.  Mr. Huxley, in his exposure of Hume’s fallacies (in his Life of Hume), did not examine the Jansenist ‘miracles’ which Hume was criticising.]

[Footnote 3:  Moll, Hypnotism, p. 357.]

[Footnote 4:  Animal Magnetism, p. 355.]

[Footnote 5:  A translation of his work was published in the New Review, January 1693.]

[Footnote 6:  La Verite des Miracles, Cologne, 1747, Septiemo Demonstration.]

[Footnote 7:  See Dr. Russell Reynolds’s paper in British Medical Journal, November 1869.]

[Footnote 8:  James, Principles of Psychology, ii. 612.  Charcot, op. cit.]

[Footnote 9:  I do not need to be told that Dr. Maudsley denied the fact in 1886.  I am prepared with the evidence, if it is asked for by some savant who happens not to know it.]