Only a great force of prejudice can explain this acceptance, by psychologists, of one kind of marvellous tale on no evidence, and this rejection of another class of marvellous tale, when supported by first hand, signed and corroborated evidence, of living witnesses.  I see only one escape for psychologists from this dilemma.  Their marvellous tales are possible, though unvouched for, because they have always heard them and repeated them in lectures, and read and repeated them in books. Our marvellous tales are impossible, because the psychologists know that they are impossible, which means that they have not been familiar with them, from youth upwards, in lectures and manuals.  But man has no right to have ‘clear ideas of the possible and impossible,’ like Faraday, a priori, except in the exact sciences.  There are other instances of weak evidence which satisfies psychologists.

Hamilton has an anecdote, borrowed from Monboddo, who got it from Mr. Hans Stanley, who, ‘about twenty-six years ago,’ heard it from the subject of the story, Madame de Laval.  ’I have the memorandum somewhere in my papers,’ says Mr. Stanley, vaguely.  Then we have two American anecdotes by Dr. Flint and Mr. Rush; and such is Sir William Hamilton’s equipment of odd facts for discussing the unconscious or subconscious.  The least credible and worst attested of these narratives still appears in popular works on psychology.  Moreover, all psychology, except experimental psychology, is based on anecdotes which people tell about their own subjective experiences.  Mr. Galton, whose original researches are well known, even offered rewards in money for such narratives about visualised rows of coloured figures, and so on.

Clearly the psychologist, then, has no prima facie right to object to our anecdotes of experiences, which he regards as purely subjective.  As evidence, we only accept them at first hand, and, when possible, the witnesses have been cross-examined personally.  Our evidence then, where it consists of travellers’ tales, is on a level with that which satisfies the anthropologist.  Where it consists of modern statements of personal experience, our evidence is often infinitely better than much which is accepted by the nonexperimental psychologist.  As for the agnostic writer on the Non-Religion of the Future, M. Guyau actually illustrates the Resurrection of our Lord by an American myth about a criminal, of whom a hallucinatory phantasm appeared to each of his gaol companions, separately and successively, on a day after his execution!  For this prodigious fable no hint of reference to authority is given.[10] Yet the evidence appears to satisfy M. Guyau, and is used by him to reinforce his argument.

The anthropologist and psychologist, then, must either admit that their evidence is no better than ours, if as good, or must say that they only believe evidence as to ‘possible’ facts.  They thus constitute themselves judges of what is possible, and practically regard themselves as omniscient.  Science has had to accept so many things once scoffed at as ‘impossible,’ that this attitude of hers, as we shall show in chapter ii., ceases to command respect.