George Miller Beard

“ When the muscle-reader performs before an enthusiastic audience, he is likely to be loudly applauded after each success; and, if the excitement be great, the applause, with shuffling and rustling, may begin before he reaches the right locality, while he is approaching it; when, on the other hand, he is far away from the locality, the audience will inform him by ominous silence. The performance thus becomes like the hide-and-seek games of children, where they cry "Warm!" as the blindfolded operator approaches the hidden object ”

“ The world's greatest follies and darkest untruths, especially while in the process of dissolution, have always found some justly honored authority in theology, in literature, in philosophy, in law, and in science itself—a Matthew Hale, a Lord Bacon, a Wesley, a Cotton Mather, an Elliotson, a Hare, a Gregory, a Wallace, an Emerson, an Agassiz, a Zollner, committees of learned academies, professors in great colleges—to stand by their bedside, armed with syllogisms, trusting their senses, and conscientiously striving to nurse them back to vigorous life. ”

“ Can any stronger proof be given that it is the universal judgment of mankind that the evidence of sense is a kind of evidence which we may securely rest upon in the most momentous concerns of mankind—that it is a kind of evidence against which we ought not to admit any reasoning, and therefore that to reason either for or against it is an insult to common-sense? ”

“ Likewise in all, or nearly all, the world's memorable contests between science and delusions, the truth has prevailed, not by virtue of logic, but in spite of it; the instincts of mankind—the one saving clause in the constitution of the human brain—rising up in their unconscious majesty, and vindicating their rights and their power against the tyranny of the senses and the cruelty of the syllogism. ”

“ The universe might swarm with demons and angels; ghosts might inhabit the earth and sky, in numbers compared with which the population of the globe is as the seen to the unseen stars; spirits might speak, might rap, might materialize—and yet the human mind would be unable to scientifically prove the supernatural, for still the question, how to distinguish what is above Nature from what is unknown in Nature, would remain unanswered and unanswerable. ”

“ Science constantly baffled, beaten, utterly overthrown, yet as often returning-to the hopeless contest, where delusions always compel a drawn battle, if they do not positively win; experiments without number that have the form of precision without its substance; all truth, or even the suggestions of truth, submerged in vast floods of error; the faith that belongs to religion and emotion carried into the realm of science and intellect ”

“ The reputation of an expert is acquired primarily through other experts, and secondarily through the judgment of mankind. Expertness has its various degrees; there are experts, and experts, and experts: the highest experts are the originators, the explorers, the pioneers, the founders, the creators of science; the lowest experts are the followers, the gleaners, the treasurers, the curators of what others have discovered, and who simply repeat and retain the experiments of genius. ”

“ Figures, to be of arty value in science, must go all around the subject and thoroughly embrace it, else they fail to master it, and become its possessor: for, while the truth is apparently shut in on one side, it is all the time stealthily escaping at the other. Thus it is that the most acute calculators, most logical reasoners, and most accurate observers as well, are so often cheated out of the truths to the search for which their lives are devoted; the instincts of the plow-boy often outstripping the wisdom of the philosopher. ”

“ In many experiments with large numbers of human beings in one room, and operated on simultaneously by some performance that powerfully excites the emotions of wonder, of awe, of reverence, and of expectation, I have proved that a subjective state can be induced in many, if not the majority or all of them, wherein they concurrently see and experience what has no existence; and, after the performance is over, they frequently and permanently persist in their delusions, although they are opposed to the general experience of mankind and all the deductions of science. ”

“ Memory is simply a register of a small fraction of the impressions made on the brain; there are, therefore, as many different kinds of memory as there are different faculties or combinations of faculties. Memory is a measure of mind; but, as there are as many varieties of memory as there are varieties of talents in man, the memory of any man can only measure the talent peculiar to himself. We remember what we have a capacity to comprehend. Any man, it has been said, is willing to admit that his memory is poor, but no one will admit that his judgment is poor ”

“ Such are the principles of evidence that are taught in our colleges and schools. It is no marvel that most of human philosophy is one vast petitio principii. Men reason that if a large number of witnesses agree in their testimony, if there is no possibility of deception (thus begging the very question of questions) , then such and such inferences must follow. On this treacherous quicksand of uncertainty and positive untruth—average human testimony—the world has built, and continues to build, its lofty temples of philosophy, of faith, of history, and of general literature ”

“ Leaving out of view all questions of supernaturalism and all the phenomena of life, what do we know, or, in this world, have we reason to expect to know, of inorganic Nature? What is light? What is heat? What is gravity? Why should one mode of motion make one form of force and not another? Toward the solution of these primal questions—that the infant can ask and the philosopher cannot answer—the sciences and reasoning of all the centuries have made, and are destined to make, no advance. ”

“ An incidental fact impressed on my mind during these researches was the prevalence and the power of the belief in animal magnetism. This delusion may well he regarded as the witchcraft of the nineteenth century; its hand is everywhere—on the press and the pulpit, on all our literature, on science itself, even on physiology, to which its phenomena rightly belong, and by which they can be and are fully explained. It is a tyrant that rules over the whole realm of the seemingly mysterious ”

“ All boasted human learning is a temporary treasure, a loan rather than a permanent gift, which must be watched and tended every moment lest it slip from our possession. Truly has it been said that scholarship consists not in knowledge but in knowing where knowledge can be found: he is the learned man who knows not the contents of books but what the best books in any specialty are. ”

“ The impressions made on the retina do not of themselves carry thoughts to the mind, any more than the impression on the photographer's plate carries thought to the instrument behind it. The eye is an instrument through which the brain sees—the telescope and microscope of the mind. Of itself the eye is as incompetent to see as is the telescope to discover a new planet, or the microscope to detect a humble organism.
"The eye sees what it brings the means of seeing; "it is the astronomer and microscopist that discover; it is the brain that sees through the doors opened by the eye. ”

“ In investigating any new claims whatever, experts—consciously or unconsciously—keep this order in mind: they first inquire whether the claims can be explained by laws already known to experts; if not so explained, then they are referred to the second order—the unknown in Nature—and attempts are made to bring them into the first order, or the known in Nature: such is the philosophy of all human progress in science. But when men go further, and assert that these unknown phenomena are of supernatural character, they bid good-by to the scientific method ”

“ One needs but to follow the details of a few great causes, as the McFarland trial, the Beecher-Tilton, the Tichborne, and the Vanderbilt cases, to see that by the rules of evidence, or at least by the actual practice of courts, testimony which scientifically is valueless is admitted, while the only testimony that is, or promises to be, of any scientific value is systematically excluded.
The great advances in science have not been made in courts of justice. ”

“ Specialism is not peculiar, as some would believe, to modern science or recent civilization; all the famous Greeks were specialists: one could not conceive of a Socrates, Homer, Phidias, Pericles, Demosthenes, and Sophocles, combined in a single individual. Although poetry and philosophy, being nearly allied, have been the twin products of one superlatively endowed intellect—although Goethe has demonstrated the possibility of uniting the genius of song with the genius of speculative science—yet no human being as yet proved himself at once great in poetry and mathematics. ”

“ Even when on questions of science experts are called to testify, their testimony is obtained in such a way as to impair, if not destroy, its value, and to obscure more than to reveal the truth.
From the scientific point of view, a legal trial is really an experiment with living human beings, and, like all experiments of that kind, is liable to six sources of error, all of which must be guarded against if we are to find the exact truth. The science and art of experimenting with living human beings are not yet understood, even by physiology and pathology, to which department they belong. ”

“ But at the present time the public performers probably understand, in a general way, the philosophy of their success, at least enough to know that their claims of a sixth sense are baseless.
Lying, like stealing, may become a passion, and, in like manner also, may concentrate all its force in some one direction, for folly as well as wisdom has its specialties and hobbies: there is a monomania for deceiving, where naught is gained save its own gratification; one who is in all other directions honorable and just may become an inebriate of falsifying, and be half his days intoxicated thereby. ”

“ The senses, indeed, are not formed to enable man to solve the problems of Nature, but, as with the lower animals, merely to make existence possible, and, in a limited and incidental way, agreeable. And yet it is through these feeble senses that all human knowledge enters the brain, since all deductive reasoning must be based on previous inductive observation. More humiliating still, and more instructive in its relations to human testimony, is the lack of precision and power of appreciating details at long distances through the eye. ”

“ Average testimony, therefore, in regard to unprecedented, or marvelous, or wondrous phenomena, as the manifestation of supposed new forces, or strange symptoms of disease, or the raising of the dead, or any unusual appearances in Nature, on the earth, in the air, in the sky—such as would be likely to excite the emotions of awe, of wonder, of reverence, or of fear, in the presence of large assemblages—can have no scientific value; a whole army may be entranced, and may see and hear what is dreaded or expected. ”

“ All modern science is the product of exclusively expert evidence: until an expert develops, there can indeed be no science; and yet, one may look in vain through all the authors on logic for a satisfactory definition of an expert, or for any detailed arrangement of tests by which expertness is to be estimated.
The subject of human testimony has, in short, never been scientifically studied; practical rules for the guidance of those who employ it are all that either logic or law has yet given to the world. ”

“ In the present century, science has become so specialized that all the advances are made by specialists in comparatively restricted fields, by men whose entire energies are concentrated for a lifetime in some single path of research beyond which they never wander, and in which alone they are accepted as guides. So universal is this law of specialism that the instincts of men regard with suspicion any one who attempts to become an authority on more than one branch of science, while literature is so split up into divisions and subdivisions that eminence in all is unattainable. ”

“ The philosophy of the future will be that the laws of nature are not to be put on the market, and can not be bid off at auction, and that the long-standing and unaccepted financial prize of the French Academy for the one who should prove to be endowed with clairvoyant or mind-reading power is as unscientific and as puerile as to attempt the bribery of the law of the conservation of force, or to hire the sun to rise in the west instead of the east. ”

“ Even if an expert could be supposed who should exhaustively know Nature in his own department, how could he know that he knew it? Not knowing that he knew all Nature in his own realm, what tests would he have—could he have—to distinguish between the supernatural and what might be unknown in Nature? ”

“ The principles of evidence that have heretofore commanded the world's acceptance make no distinction in the quality or quantity of testimony for different varieties of claims; the discovery of a new planet is as credible as the daily rising of the sun; the introduction of a new force needs no more and no better auspices than the observation of the established phenomena of an old one; the passing from death into life is to be received with as little question as the passing from life into death. ”