“It was taken for granted that the results of my experiments would be in accordance with their preconceptions. What they really desired was not _the truth_, but an additional witness in favor of their own foregone conclusions. When they found the facts which that investigation established could not be made to fit those opinions, why, ... so much the worse for the facts. They try to creep out of their own confident recommendations of the inquiry, by declaring ‘that Mr. Home is a clever conjurer who has duped us all.’ ‘Mr. Crookes might, with equal propriety, examine the performances of an Indian juggler.’ ‘Mr. Crookes must get better witnesses before he can be believed.’ ‘The thing is too absurd to be treated seriously.’ ‘It is impossible, and therefore can’t be.’ ... (I never said it was impossible, I only said it was true.) ‘The observers have all been biologized, and fancy they saw things occur which really _never_ took place,’ etc., etc., etc.”[110] After expending their energy on such puerile theories as “unconscious cerebration,” “involuntary muscular contraction,” and the sublimely ridiculous one of the “cracking knee-joints” (_le muscle craqueur_); after meeting ignominious failures by the obstinate survival of the new force, and finally, after every desperate effort to compass its obliteration, these _filii diffidentiæ_—as St. Paul calls their class—thought best to give up the whole thing in disgust. Sacrificing their courageously persevering brethren as a holocaust on the altar of public opinion, they withdrew in dignified silence. Leaving the arena of investigation to more fearless champions, these unlucky experimenters are not likely to ever enter it again.[111] It is easier by far to deny the reality of such manifestations from a secure distance, than find for them a proper place among the classes {46} of natural phenomena accepted by exact science. And how can they, since all such phenomena pertain to psychology, and the latter, with its occult and mysterious powers, is a _terra incognita_ for modern science. Thus, powerless to explain that which proceeds directly from the nature of the human soul itself—the existence of which most of them deny—unwilling at the same time to confess their ignorance, scientists retaliate very unjustly on those who believe in the evidence of their senses without any pretence to science. “A kick from thee, O Jupiter! is sweet,” says the poet Tretiakowsky, in an old Russian tragedy. Rude as those Jupiters of science may be occasionally toward us credulous mortals, their vast learning—in less abstruse questions, we mean—if not their manners, entitles them to public respect. But unfortunately it is not the gods who shout the loudest.