Cock Lane and Common-Sense | Page 9

the motion of Dr.
Edmunds. The committee was heterogeneous. Many of the names now
suggest little to the reader. Mr. Bradlaugh we remember, but he chiefly
attended a committee which sat with D. D. Home, and it is admitted
that nothing of interest there occurred. Then we find the Rev. Maurice
Davies, who was wont to write books of little distinction on
semi-religious topics. Mr. H. G. Atkinson was a person interested in
mesmerism. Kisch, Moss, and Quelch, with Dyte and Isaac Meyers,
Bergheim and Geary, Hannah, Hillier, Reed (their names go naturally
in blank verse), were, doubtless, all most estimable men, but scarcely
boast of scientific fame. Serjeant Cox, a believer in the phenomena, if
not in their spiritual cause, was of the company, as was Mr. Jencken,
who married one of the Miss Foxes, the first authors of modern
thaumaturgy. Professor Huxley and Mr. G. H. Lewes were asked to join,
but declined to march to Sarras, the spiritual city, with the committee.
This was neither surprising nor reprehensible, but Professor Huxley's
letter of refusal appears to indicate that matters of interest, and, perhaps,
logic, are differently understood by men of science and men of letters.
{18} He gave two reasons for refusing, and others may readily be
imagined by the sympathetic observer. The first was that he had no
time for an inquiry involving much trouble, and (as he justly foresaw)
much annoyance. Next, he had no interest in the subject. He had once
examined a case of 'spiritualism,' and detected an imposture. 'But,
supposing the phenomena to be genuine, they do not interest me. If
anybody would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of
old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline
the privilege, having better things to do.' Thus it would not interest
Professor Huxley if some new kind of telephone should enable him to

hear all the conversation of persons in a town (if a cathedral town)
more or less distant. He would not be interested by the 'genuine' fact of
this extension of his faculties, because he would not expect to be
amused or instructed by the contents of what he heard. Of course he
was not invited to listen to a chatter, which, on one hypothesis, was that
of the dead, but to help to ascertain 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