Only a great force of prejudice can explain this acceptance, by
psychologists, of one kind of marvellous tale on no evidence, and this
rejection of another class of marvellous tale, when supported by first
hand, signed and corroborated evidence, of living witnesses. I see only
one escape for psychologists from this dilemma. Their marvellous tales are
_possible_, though unvouched for, because they have always heard them and
repeated them in lectures, and read and repeated them in books. _Our_
marvellous tales are impossible, because the psychologists know that they
are impossible, which means that they have not been familiar with them,
from youth upwards, in lectures and manuals. But man has no right to have
'clear ideas of the possible and impossible,' like Faraday, _a priori_,
except in the exact sciences. There are other instances of weak evidence
which satisfies psychologists.
Hamilton has an anecdote, borrowed from Monboddo, who got it from Mr. Hans
Stanley, who, 'about twenty-six years ago,' heard it from the subject of
the story, Madame de Laval. 'I have the memorandum somewhere in my
papers,' says Mr. Stanley, vaguely. Then we have two American anecdotes by
Dr. Flint and Mr. Rush; and such is Sir William Hamilton's equipment of
odd facts for discussing the unconscious or subconscious. The least
credible and worst attested of these narratives still appears in popular
works on psychology. Moreover, all psychology, except experimental
psychology, is based on anecdotes which people tell about their own
subjective experiences. Mr. Galton, whose original researches are well
known, even offered rewards in money for such narratives about visualised
rows of coloured figures, and so on.
Clearly the psychologist, then, has no _prima facie_ right to object to
our anecdotes of experiences, which he regards as purely subjective. As
evidence, we only accept them at first hand, and, when possible, the
witnesses have been cross-examined personally. Our evidence then, where it
consists of travellers' tales, is on a level with that which satisfies the
anthropologist. Where it consists of modern statements of personal
experience, our evidence is often infinitely better than much which is
accepted by the nonexperimental psychologist. As for the agnostic writer
on the Non-Religion of the Future, M. Guyau actually illustrates the
Resurrection of our Lord by an American myth about a criminal, of whom a
hallucinatory phantasm appeared to each of his gaol companions, separately
and successively, on a day after his execution! For this prodigious fable
no hint of reference to authority is given.[10] Yet the evidence appears
to satisfy M. Guyau, and is used by him to reinforce his argument.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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