There are moments, I confess, when it seems to me that we place science on too high a pedestal. By ‘science,’ of course, I do not mean knowledge ‘in the abstract’; but just the opinion, or obiter dictum, of this, that, or the other scientific gentleman. In England, when people say ‘science’ they commonly mean an article for Professor Huxley in the Nineteenth Century. The learned Professor has lately collected in ‘Science and Christian Tradition’ (Macmillan) a number of his Homeric combats with Mr. Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll, battles waged over such themes as demonology and coral islands. ‘I'm no caring,’ as the Scotch say, but about demonology it is notoriously difficult. ‘Demonology is doomed,’ says Professor Huxley (p. 347). Now, in 1858, M. Littré wrote, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, an essay in which he said that the study of demoniacal affections had, as yet, scarcely been sketched out. M. Littré was a considerable man of science, and his notable scepticism stood in the way of his election to the French Academy.

About ‘demoniacal affections’ he gave forth a very uncertain sound, as was natural and right, seeing that the subject had never, in his opinion, been properly investigated. If, in the thirty-six years that have intervened, science has completed what, in Littré's time, was a mere sketch, I wish I could be informed about the works in which the task is done, and about the new researches on the strength of which demonology is ‘doomed.’ My difficulty is increased by another saying of Professor Huxley's (pp. 391, 392). He has been warring with Mr. Gladstone, and quotes a criticism of that philosopher's ‘grossest exaggerations,’ his ‘arguments based upon the slightest hypotheses,’ and so remarkable for their ‘intrinsic hollowness.’ The critic was Mr. A.J. Balfour. Mr. Balfour, cries Mr. Huxley, ‘has science in the blood’ (which Mr. Gladstone has not), ‘and has the advantage of a natural, as well as a highly cultivated, aptitude for the use of methods of precision in investigation.’

Très bien. But then Mr. Balfour, with science in his blood, does not seem to hold that demonology is doomed. On the contrary, he is president of a society for the investigation of demonology, among other matters; and I gather, from a summary of his speech to the society, that he ‘thinks there is something in it.’