Cock Lane and Common-Sense | Page 7

Huxley, or Lord
Kelvin, to run about the country, examining every cottage where there
are rumours of curious noises, and where stones and other missiles are
thrown about, by undetected hands? That is the business of the police,
and if the police are baffled, as in a Cock Lane affair at Port Glasgow,
in 1864, and in Paris, in 1846, we cannot expect men of science to act
as amateur detectives. {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.
As for the undeniable phenomenon that, in every land, age, and
condition of culture, and in every stage of belief or disbelief, some
observers have persistently asserted their experience of these
occurrences; as for the phenomenon that the testimonies of Australian
blacks, of Samoyeds, of Hurons, of Greeks, of European peasants, of
the Catholic and the Covenanting clergy, and of some scientifically
trained modern physicians and chemists, are all coincident, official
physical science leaves these things to anthropology and folklore. Yet
the coincidence of such strange testimony is a singular fact in human
nature. Even people of open mind can, at present, say no more than that
there is a great deal of smoke, a puzzling quantity, if there be no fire,
and that either human nature is very easily deluded by simple conjuring
tricks, or that, in all stages of culture, minds are subject to identical
hallucinations. The whole hocus-pocus of 'spirit-writing' on slates and
in pellets of paper, has been satisfactorily exposed and explained, as a
rather simple kind of leger-de-main. But this was a purely modern sort

of trickery; the old universal class of useless miracles, said to occur
spontaneously, still presents problems of undeniable psychological
interest.
For example, if it be granted, as apparently it was by Dr. Carpenter, that,
in certain circumstances, certain persons, wide awake, can perform, in
various ways, intelligent actions, and produce intelligent expressions
automatically, without being conscious of what they are doing, then
that fact is nearly as interesting and useful as the fact that we