We cannot for a moment question the sincerity of purpose and honesty of intention of many of the leaders of modern scientific enlightenment, whatever we may think of the said crowd of _vulgarisateurs_--those camp-followers who bring disgrace on every respectable cause. But beside wilful bias and unfairness, there is unconscious bias from which none of us are free, but from which we need to be delivered by mutual criticism; for, however much a man can see of himself, he can never get behind his own back. Of such unwitting dishonesty men of thought are abundantly guilty, when deeming themselves to be governed only by reason, they are in fact slaves to some intellectual fashion of the day. Not one of them in a thousand would dare to appear in public with the clothes of last century, or to face the laughter of a crowd of his compeers. Hence a certain indocility and rigidness of mind which they only escape who live out of the fashion or have strength to lead it or to live above it. Simple, whether from greatness or littleness, they escape the narrowing influence inseparable from being identified, even in their own mind, with a school or coterie; and can afford to say things as they see them. Contemporary fashion says at present that there are to be no miracles, nothing supernormal; whatever cannot be reduced in any way to known laws and causes can be flatly denied, for the supposition of unknown causes and laws is rank heresy. Until more recent years, it was not permitted to listen to or show any disposition to investigate the narratives of phenomena which have since been "explained" and reduced to such legalized causes as hysteria or hypnotism, and even (of late) to thought-transference. But since this happy reconciliation has been effected, such stories are allowed to be believed on ordinary evidence, although the accounts of other "unclassed" supernormal marvels coming from the same lips with the same attestation are still brushed aside as traveller's tales, or as the puerilities of hagiography--not worth a thought. One would think that some kind of apology or reparation were due to ecclesiastical tradition, which was credited with wholesale lying so long as its recorded wonders were classed among impossibilities by the intellectual fashion-mongers, but it seems we have only partly escaped the reproach of knavery to incur that of wholesale folly for not having seen that these apparent miracles were but forms of hysteria or hypnotism.