curiosity about knowledge that men have fought most stubbornly.  Galileo was forbidden to be curious about the moon.  One of the most difficult things to establish is our right to be curious about facts.  The dogmatists offer to provide us with all the facts a reasonable man can desire.  If we persist in believing that there is a world of facts yet undiscovered and that it is our duty to set out in quest of it, in the eyes of the dogmatists we are scorned as heretics and charlatans.  Even at the present day, when the orthodoxies sit on shaky thrones, dogma still opposes itself to curiosity at many points.  A great deal of the popular dislike of psychical research is due to hatred of curiosity in a new direction.  People who admit the existence of a world of the dead commonly feel that none the less it ought to be taboo to the too-curious intellect of man.  They feel there is something uncanny about spirits that makes it unsafe to approach them with an inquisitive mind.  I am not concerned either to attack or defend Spiritualism.  I merely suggest that a rational attack on Spiritualism must be based on the insufficiency of the evidence put forward in its behalf, not on the ground that the curiosity which goes in search of such evidence is in itself wicked.

It is odd to see how men who take sides with dogma give themselves the airs of men who live for duty, while they regard the more curious among their fellows as licentious, trifling, irreverent and self-indulgent.  The truth is, there is no greater luxury than dogma.  It puts an eminence under the most stupid.  At the same time I am not going to deny the pleasures of curiosity.  We have only to see a cat looking up the chimney or examining the nooks of a box-room or looking over the edge of a trunk to see what is inside in order to realise that this is a vice, if it is a vice, which we inherit from the animals.  We find a comparable curiosity in children and other simple creatures.  Servants will rummage through drawer after drawer of old, dull letters out of idle curiosity.  There are men who declare that no woman could be trusted not to read a letter.  We persuade ourselves that man is a higher animal, above curiosity and a slave to his sense of honour.  But man, too, likes to spy upon his neighbours when he is not indifferent to them.  No scrupulous person of either sex would read another person’s letter surreptitiously.  But that is not to say that we do not want to know what is in the letter.  We can hardly see a parcel lying unopened in a hall without speculating on what it contains.  We should always feel happier if the owner of the parcel indulged us to the point of opening it in our presence.  I know a man whose curiosity extends so far as to set him uncorking any medicine-bottles he sees in a friend’s house, sniffing at them, and even sipping them to see what they taste like.  “Oh, I have had that one,” he says, as he lingers over the bitter flavour of strychnine.  “Let me see,” he reflects, as he sips another bottle, “there’s nux vomica in that.”  Half the interesting books of the world were written by men who had just this sipping kind of curiosity.  Curiosity was the chief pleasure of Montaigne and of Boswell.  We cannot read an early book of science without finding signs of the pleasure of curiosity in its pages.  Theophrastus, we may be sure, was a happy man when he wrote: