phenomena do not attribute them to spirits; still, however this may be, no advocate of psychic force can deny that many of the so-called marvel-mongers of the middle ages were at least no mere blind leaders of the blind, but the witnesses of phenomena none the less true because it has been for so long the fashion to ignore them. In the middle ages, people thought that these marvels were the work of spirits good or bad, or at least the result of their co-operation with man. For such an hypothesis, modern science has an almost invincible repugnance, in which I think there is much that is excusable. It is not that the man of science necessarily disbelieves in the existence of spirits; but the idea of their possible interference in phenomena which he has to consider exercises a disturbing influence upon all his calculations. He is as irritated as though he should be called upon to submit to, and make allowance for, the tricks of mischievous children who jerk his arm or clog his machinery. Again, he is haunted with the notion that, by admitting the spirit hypothesis, he is contributing to the inauguration of an era of disastrous reaction. To the eye of his imagination, the bright, open platform, the familiar instruments, each a concrete realization, in honest metal, of a known law, the intelligent modern audience, his own classical tail-coat and white neckcloth, melt away, and he sees himself propitiating fickle spirits with uncouth spells, at the bottom of a mediæval grotto: "A shape with amice wrapped around, With a wrought Spanish baldric bound, Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea." Not that the evil dream could ever be realized in its integrity; but still, when once a spiritualist reaction has set in, who will venture to fix its limits? And so, forgetting that the spirit hypothesis in nowise excludes the operation of psychic conditions, he insists upon every indication of such conditions, as though they were the key to everything, and there were no indications of any other agency. His "mental soil," perhaps, does not permit him to deny the reality of the phenomena of spiritualism, or to talk of unconscious cerebration as a sufficient explanation; and so he is contented to raise his altar to an unknown god, provided only he may baptize him into the dynasty of science by the name of "Psychic Force."