you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand,
and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But
there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men s
eyes, because they know--or think they know--some things which other men
have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to
explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to
explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs,
which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend
to be young--like the fine ladies at the opera. I suppose now you do not
believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in materialisation. No? Nor
in astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading of thought. No? Nor in
hypnotism----
Yes, I said. Charcot has proved that pretty well. He smiled as he
went on: Then you are satisfied as to it. Yes? And of course then you
understand how it act, and can follow the mind of the great
Charcot--alas that he is no more!--into the very soul of the patient
that he influence. No? Then, friend John, am I to take it that you
simply accept fact, and are satisfied to let from premise to conclusion
be a blank? No? Then tell me--for I am student of the brain--how you
accept the hypnotism and reject the thought reading. Let me tell you, my
friend, that there are things done to-day in electrical science which
would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered
electricity--who would themselves not so long before have been burned
as wizards. There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that
Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and Old Parr one hundred and
sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men s blood in her poor
veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more day, we
could have save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do
you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the
qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me
why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived
for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew,
till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps? Can
you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that
come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their
veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang
on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant
nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that
it is hot, flit down on them, and then--and then in the morning are
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