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to decry Byzantine history and to deny the name of literature to the writings of the medieval Greeks. Finlay rehabilitated the Byzantine Empire from the contempt which Gibbon had thrown upon it; in Greece a succession of modern writers, beginning with Paparrhegopoulos, in his great History of the Hellenic Nation,' have reminded his countrymen that Greek history is a whole, and that contemporary Hellas owes as much, or more, to the great figures of the Middle Ages as to the heroes of classical antiquity; in France MM. Schlumberger and Diehl have combined, in truly French fashion, great erudition with great literary skill in dealing with the 'Byzantine epic' of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and with the female figures that in various ages filled the Court of Constantinople. Of these Anna Comnena is perhaps the most curious. We are too much accustomed to regard Byzantine personages as merely so many stainedglass portraits, all decorations and angles, instead of men and women of like passions with ourselves. Anna Comnena was, in her loves and her dislikes, her vanities and her ambitions, very much a woman. Beneath her Attic prose, acquired by study and polished by art, there transpire the feminine feelings, which lend a peculiar turn to her history. Among the sovereigns, lawyers, statesmen, soldiers, and ecclesiastics who form the corpus of the Byzantine historians, she is the only woman.

WILLIAM MILLER.

Vol. 233.-No. 462,

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Art. 5.-MODERN SPIRITUALISM.

1. Raymond: or Life and Death. By Sir Oliver J. Lodge. Methuen, 1916.

2. Experiments in Psychical Research at Leland Stanford Junior University. By John Edgar Coover. Stanford University, California, 1917.

3. The Question: If a man die, shall he live again?' By Edward Clodd; with a postscript by Prof. H. E. Armstrong. Grant Richards, 1917.

4. Spiritualism and Sir Oliver Lodge. By Charles A. Mercier, M.D. The Mental Culture Enterprise, 1917. 5. Spirit Experiences. By Charles A. Mercier, M.D. Watts, 1919.

To the eye of the philosophic historian, few things are more remarkable than the unchangeableness of the human mind. It is natural indeed that the leading passions of mankind should persist unaltered, for upon them depend the continued preservation of the individual and the species. But it is not only the leading passions that endure; the minor passions and convictions, nay even the opinions of men, maintain through centuries a stability which even the most adverse circumstances cannot shake. When ancient civilisation slowly dissolved away in the great ocean of medieval barbarism, it might have been thought that if, out of that desolate waste, any new civilisation could ever arise, it must surely be of very different character from the earlier one, whose landmarks had been so effectively washed away. A thousand years rolled by, and a new civilisation did arise. And as its features gradually became discernible through the lifting cloud of darkness, behold! it was not a new type of society that was evolving, it was the old type, though rollicking once more in all the vigour and freshness of youth. 'Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.'

We are here concerned only with one point in the resemblance between past and present, namely resemblance in the sphere of philosophic thought. Alike in ancient, mediæval, and modern times, there stand out two main currents of opinion among learned men-the one tending towards religion, idealism, and spiritualism; the

other towards rationalism, science, and materialism. The former works by the subjective method, invoking, as Bergson puts it, instinct rather than intellect; the latter works by the objective method, and ultimately comes to rest on the pillars of observation and experiment. This great antithesis in thought, first noted by F. Schlegel, has altered its form no doubt in the course of time, but has always preserved its substance. Among the ancient Greeks, there was Democritus on the one side, Socrates on the other; Epicurus on one side, Plato on the other. Lucretius, the Roman poet, gave the highest expression to ancient materialism. Plotinus, the Egyptian, was the last exponent of ancient idealism.

With the transition to the Middle Ages, the objective school passed into impenetrable obscurity, while the subjective flourished universally in a low and barbarous form, under the domination of priestcraft. But the materialist line of thought had not perished altogether; it was merely in abeyance. As time went on, it became more insistent. Roger Bacon, William of Occam, and Nicolaus de Autricuria made their voices heard through the darkness, until at length the Renaissance burst forth like spring after a Polar winter, and objective philosophy broke through its fetters on every side. But, even then, the old antithesis remained, now on a far higher level of thought. There was Francis Bacon on the one side, Descartes on the other; Hobbes on the one side, Berkeley on the other. The strongest expression of later Materialism was among the pre-Revolutionary French writers, especially La Mettrie and D'Holbach ; while Idealism culminated in the extreme views of Hegel and his followers. In more recent times, objective thought has been drawn within the expanding sphere of science; and the antithesis tends to adopt the form of science versus metaphysics.

It is not to be supposed that this broad line of cleavage in human thought makes its appearance only in high metaphysics. It is a deep fact of human character, and so comes out everywhere,-in religion, in politics, in science, and in literature. One of the most striking of its minor manifestations is in the great controversy about spiritualism, with which we have now to deal. Some men and some women have a natural

tendency to believe in the genuineness of spiritualistic manifestations, and others to disbelieve in it, before any evidence on either side has been presented. Belief or disbelief is largely a matter of mental constitution, and as such is little shaken by a slight preponderance of logical argument on one side or the other. It is no mere problem of chilly mathematics that we have before us, where one solution is as readily acceptable as the other. On the contrary, we are touching one of the deepest and most permanent chords in human nature. We have to contend, not only with the delicate refinements of intellect, but with the massive inertia of instinct.

We shall therefore depart somewhat from the conventional mode of presenting the subject. It would indeed be of little value to recite the evidence adduced in favour of spiritualism, or the arguments marshalled against it; for that evidence and those arguments are well enough known already, at least as regards their general nature. The works named at the head of this article furnish an excellent illustration of the weapons used on either side. But it seems probable that too much stress has been laid on the question of evidence. We all know that it has been sufficient to convince various leading men of science, and that it has entirely failed to convince others. We have a right to suspect that any further evidence which may be forthcoming will confirm the conviction of those who already believe, and increase the antagonism of those who do not. If evidence alone could settle the matter, it would long ago have been settled. The mere piling-up of fresh instances per simplicem enumerationem does not strengthen the case, where the validity of the whole procedure is denied. The question of evidence is but a part of the problem before us. We have to consider, not only that, but the whole bearing of the controversy, its relation to other parts of human experience, the full implications which it conveys. Perhaps this method of attacking the problem may be more productive of results than a mere recitation of alleged occurrences.

The matter in dispute is relatively simple. In all science and practical life, events hinge together according to a mechanistic scheme of so unvarying a nature that

from it the unchangeable natural laws' of science have been induced. Thus if we leave a room with a chair in a certain position, and, returning shortly afterwards, find it in a different position, we immediately infer either that some one has moved it during our absence, or that some kind of material force has acted upon it, such as a gust of wind, or a gravitational pull due to an inclined floor, or some other force of that nature. True, there is another alternative, which we normally consider. We may have been mistaken in our recollection of the place where we left the chair, or, on the other hand, we may be suffering from some optical illusion, while the chair has in fact not moved at all. These various possibilities agree in attributing the apparent motion of the chair to agencies well recognised in human experience, and purely mechanistic in character.

Now spiritualism would admit another kind of possibility. It would consider that possibly we are subject to no delusion-the chair has really moved-and yet that possibly no material force has been brought to bear upon it. This is commonly expressed by saying that some spiritual agency has been at work; the phenomenon is due to nothing that we should recognise as a 'natural' cause, but to a 'supernatural' cause. It is of a totally different order from the ordinary events of life or of science; it is in short a miracle, whether or not it is wrought by some superhuman or disembodied mind.

Now the admission of such an alternative as this constitutes a very deep inroad on all our habitual methods of thought and action. It would indeed be a revolutionary overturning of all the axioms of common life. The foundations of applied science-of engineering and medicine-would be sapped. If unknown spiritual forces add their quota to known material forces, then the best designed bridges may fall, the strongest foundations may shift, water may flow uphill. An element of indetermination and doubt is everywhere introduced, for all the works of man are based on the material forces which he can control; and, if they are subject also to unknown spiritual forces, nothing any longer can be controlled; chaos lies at the root of all things.

Yet every one knows that chaos does not lie at the root of all things. If a train is wrecked through a signal