{11} Again, it is hardly to be expected that our chosen modern leaders of opinion will give themselves up to cross-examining ladies and gentlemen who tell ghost stories.  Barristers and solicitors would be more useful for that purpose.  Thus hardly anything is left which physical science can investigate, except the conduct and utterances of the hysterical, the epileptic, the hypnotised and other subjects who are occasionally said to display an abnormal extension of the perceptive faculties, for example, by way of clairvoyance.  To the unscientific intelligence it seems conceivable that if Home, for example, could have been kept in some such establishment as the Salpetriere for a year, and could have been scrutinised and made the subject of experiment, like the other hysterical patients, his pretensions might have been decided on once for all.  But he merely performed a few speciosa miracula under tests established by one or two English men of science, and believers and disbelievers are still left to wrangle over him:  they usually introduce a question of moral character.  Now a few men of science in England like Dr. Gregory about 1851, and like Dr. Carpenter, and a larger number on the continent, have examined and are examining these peculiarities.  Their reports are often sufficiently astonishing to the lay mind.

No doubt when, if ever, a very large and imposing body of these reports is presented by a cloud of scientific witnesses of esteemed reputation, then official science will give more time and study to the topic than it is at present inclined to bestow.  Mr. Wallace has asserted that, ’whenever the scientific men of any age have denied, on a priori grounds, the facts of investigation, they have always been wrong’. {12} He adds that Galileo, Harvey, Jenner, Franklin, Young, and Arago, when he ’wanted even to discuss the subject of the electric telegraph,’ were ’vehemently opposed by their scientific contemporaries,’ ‘laughed at as dreamers,’ ‘ridiculed,’ and so on, like the early observers of palaeolithic axes, and similar prehistoric remains.  This is true, of course, but, because some correct ideas were laughed at, it does not follow that whatever is laughed at is correct.  The squarers of the circle, the discoverers of perpetual motion, the inquirers into the origin of language, have all been ridiculed, and ruled out of court, the two former classes, at least, justly enough.  Now official science apparently regards all the long and universally rumoured abnormal occurrences as in the same category with Keely’s Motor, and Perpetual Motion, not as in the same category with the undulatory theory of light, or the theory of the circulation of the blood.  Clairvoyance, or ghosts, or suspensions of the law of gravitation, are things so widely contradictory of general experience and of ascertained laws, that they are pronounced to be impossible; like perpetual motion they are not admitted to a hearing.