whether or not there were any genuine facts of an unusual nature, which some persons explained by the animistic hypothesis.  To mere ‘bellettristic triflers’ the existence of genuine abnormal and unexplained facts seems to have been the object of inquiry, and we must penitently admit that if genuine communications could really be opened with the dead, we would regard the circumstance with some degree of curious zest, even if the dead were on the intellectual level of curates and old women.  Besides, all old women are not imbeciles, history records cases of a different kind, and even some curates are as intelligent as the apes, whose anatomy and customs, about that time, much occupied Professor Huxley.  In Balaam’s conversation with his ass, it was not so much the fact that mon ane parle bien which interested the prophet, as the circumstance that mon ane parle.  Science has obviously soared very high, when she cannot be interested by the fact (if a fact) that the dead are communicating with us, apart from the value of what they choose to say.

However, Professor Huxley lost nothing by not joining the committee of the Dialectical Society.  Mr. G. H. Lewes, for his part, hoped that with Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace to aid (for he joined the committee) and with Mr. Crookes (who apparently did not) ’we have a right to expect some definite result’.  Any expectation of that kind was doomed to disappointment.  In Mr. Lewes’s own experience, which was large, ’the means have always been proved to be either deliberate imposture . . . or the well-known effects of expectant attention’.  That is, when Lord Adare, the Master of Lindsay, and a cloud of other witnesses, thought they saw heavy bodies moving about of their own free will, either somebody cheated, or the spectators beheld what they did behold, because they expected to do so, even when, like M. Alphonse Karr, and Mr. Hamilton Aide, they expected nothing of the kind.  This would be Mr. Lewes’s natural explanation of the circumstances, suggested by his own large experience.

The results of the Dialectical Society’s inquiry were somewhat comic.  The committee reported that marvels were alleged, by the experimental subcommittees, to have occurred.  Sub-committee No. 1 averred that ’motion may be produced in solid bodies without material contact, by some hitherto unrecognised force’.  Sub-committees 2 and 3 had many communications with mysterious intelligences to vouch for, and much erratic behaviour on the part of tables to record.  No. 4 had nothing to report at all, and No. 5 which sat four times with Home had mere trifles of raps.  Home was ill, and the seances were given up.