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HPB-SB-10-134: Difference between revisions
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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Physical Phenomena|10-133}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Physical Phenomena|10-133}} | ||
... | {{Style P-No indent|us small credit for judgment with the really cautious and exact investigator. At dark ''stances ''the elimination of all possible elements of doubt is an exceedingly difficult and tedious process of observation and comparison as between one occasion and another, the persons respectively present, the conditions, occurrences, &c. My early note books are full to the most minute details of these particulars, and of the inferences which seemed necessary; for I never enjoyed the facilities of the home or private circle without professionals. Indeed, but for Slade and his light ''seances, I ''doubt if the truth would ever have been brought home to me with the force of absolute and indisputable certainty; and on this account I can never think of this rarely-gifted medium without feelings of gratitude and regard. Nevertheless, I had arrived ''logically ''at the same conclusion before I met him. At the conclusion of my notes on a particular ''seance ''in London in the summer of 1875, I find the following observations, which may perhaps be worth transcribing:—“Nor can I isolate this phenomenon” (that observed at the ''seance ''of which the note in question treats) “altogether apart from other marvels of which I have a great mass of cumulative, if in scarcely one instance quite conclusive evidence. It did make an impression on me, and I have been trying to determine how great or how small that impression ought logically to be. I dread the facility of assent which seems to come naturally from the very fact of habitual investigation. I go to ''seance ''after ''seance, ''and come away unsatisfied with the evidence at each, yet the aggregate tells upon me. No; there is nothing illogical in this. When the hypothesis of fraud requires a different, often a far-fetched, but above all a different explanation nearly every time, then the hypothesis gets gradually more and more difficult, till its improbability, according to our knowledge and experience of human resources, becomes greater, far greater, than the merely ''a priori ''presumption of our ignorance against the existence of extra-mundane causes.”}} | ||
{{Style P-Signature in capitals| C. C. Massey.}} | |||
December 6th. | |||