To attribute capricious mechanical performance to the action of live things, is sufficient as a proximate explanation; as we saw in the case of the jumping bean, Chapter I. If the existence of the live thing is otherwise unknown, the explanation may seem forced and unsatisfactory. But if after trying other hypotheses we find that this only will fit the case, we may return to it after all with a clear conscience. That represents the history of my own progress in Psychical Research. APOLOGIA Meanwhile the attitude of scientific men is perfectly intelligible; and not unreasonable, except when they forget their self-imposed limitations and cultivate a baseless negative philosophy. People who study mechanism of course find Mechanics, and if the mechanism is physiological they find Physics and Chemistry as well; but they are not thereby compelled to deny the existence of everything else. They need not philosophise at all, though they should be able to realise their philosophical position when it is pointed out. The business of science is to trace out the mode of action of the laws of Chemistry and Physics, everywhere and under all circumstances. Those laws appear to be of universal application throughout the material Universe,--in the most distant star as well as on the earth,--in the animal organism as well as in inorganic matter; and the study of their action alone has proved an ample task. But scientific workers are sometimes thought to be philosophising seriously when they should be understood as really only expressing the natural scope of their special subject. Laplace, for instance, is often misunderstood, because, when challenged about the place of God in his system, he said that he had no need of such a hypothesis,--a dictum often quoted as if it were atheistical. It is not necessarily anything of the kind. As a brief statement it is right, though rather unconciliatory and blunt. He was trying to explain astronomy on clear and definite mechanical principles, and the introduction of a "finger of God" would have been not only an unwarrantable complication but a senseless intrusion. Not an intrusion or a complication in the Universe, be it understood, but in Laplace's scheme, his _Systéme du Monde_. Yet Browning's "flash of the will that can" in _Abt Vogler_, with all that the context implies, remains essentially and permanently true. Theologians who admit that the Deity always works through agents and rational means can grant to scientific workers all that they legitimately claim in the positive direction, and can encourage them in the detailed study of those agents and means. If people knew more about science, and the atmosphere in which scientific men work, they would be better able to interpret occasional rather rash negations; which are quite explicable in terms of the artificial limitation of range which physical science hitherto has wisely laid down for itself.