UNSHEETING THE GHOST

Professor McDougall's report on the "Margery Mediumship?. In last evening's Transcript reaches the conclusion that every unbiased observer might have expected. He can find no proof justifying the award to her of the "Scientific American's" prize for the first conclusive case of spiritual manifestations. Professor McDougall assumes the scientific attitude of "not proved". The perusal of his evidence might even lead a casual observer to cry fraud.

Refutation of "Margery's" claims will reach innumerable people. Just how many of them it will convert to a scientific view is another matter. Man-kind will always believe, in what it wants to believe, and it wants to believe in life after death. The possibility of communicating with the dead is merely a method of proving to its own thorough satisfaction that immortality is a fact.

In the days of scholastic metaphysics the existence of God and of a future life was proved upon the basis of the existence of ideas of them, and it seems that these same outological methods are still the ones that lend tenacity to belief in spiritualism. Scientific methods can go on disproving forever, and yet they cannot be conclusive for people whose desire is their belief. Even a dramatic expose like the recent one in London where "spirits" photographs were recognized as living pugilists and show girls does not seem to quash the idea. It is one which humanity cherishes, and therefore one which will recur again and again.