Читать книгу The Shadows Around Us: Authentic Tales of the Supernatural - Morrison Arthur - Страница 3

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THE narratives here set down are among the most fully attested of the many modern records of those phenomena which appear to be independent of known natural laws. It has been fashionable among the semi-informed outwardly to pooh-pooh at any suggestion of the presence about us of unseen existences and influences, or, indeed, of any thing not yet recognised, analysed, and labelled by science. Fifty years ago, persons of narrow capacity would have sneered at the suggested possibility of the telephone and the phonograph, just as they did not very long before at that of the steam engine. Men of science, whose researches teach them how comparatively little the greatest among them knows of the scheme of the universe, are more modest. There is, of course, no need, because it may be admitted—as it must be—that things have happened, and are happening, of a character which is called supernatural, for an immediate and unreserved return to the vulgar old belief in fairies and witches, with their accompanying trap-doors and blue fire. Our acquaintance with the matters in question is, however, much too slight to warrant the formulation of anything like fixed doctrines, and it is quite possible that with only our material senses to guide us we may never arrive at a stage of knowledge justifying any such formulation.

The incidents set forth in the ensuing pages are as completely testified to as written facts well may be—that is to say, infinitely more care has been taken to verify and substantiate them than is taken to authenticate the matter-of-fact news published in a daily newspaper and accepted by everybody without question. For several of the cases the compiler is indebted to the investigations of the Society for Psychical Research.