A PICTURE FOR ALL TIME.
*47
“But,” adds Kerner, with a fine irony, “ it is much more con¬
venient to sit at your writing-table by the fireside, and decide on
such things without seeing them.”
His picture of the class of critics who pronounce judgment on
facts in this way is one for all time. Some of these philosophers,
indeed not a few may be found in our own country, mounted
on^eviewers’ stools, and sending forth their oracular criticisms,
weekly or monthly, on matters they know nothing about, in any
practical or experimental sense.
“None of those gentlemen,” writes Kerner, “who call them¬
selves the friends of truth, set so much value upon it, as to
move a single foot over the Resenbach : no one takes the least
trouble to prove these things at the time, and on the spot. For
many years the extraordinary manifestations of the Seeress of
Prevorst were made public; but none of the gentlemen who
now, all at once, pretend that they would have liked so very
much to have seen her, and who sit and write whole blue-books
about her, ever took a moment's trouble, whilst she lived, to see,
to hear, and to test her.
“At their writing-tables they continued sitting, but professed
to have seen, heard, and proved every thing, — much more than
the quiet, earnest, and deeply thinking psychologist, Eschen-
meyer, who did take the trouble to examine and prove every
thing at the time and on the spot, for the truth’s sake, shunning
no journey, when necessary, in the severest cold of winter.
Only by such a method can such things be probed to the truth :
the learned way of knowing and speculating by the pounce-box
proves nothing.
“These gentlemen who construct their heaven and their hell
according to their own wishes, and push the love and grace of
God before them in any direction that is convenient to them,
rather than give themselves up to believe what, from their pride
and sensual indulgences, is most unpleasant and repugnant to
them, labor hard, by all the arts of intellectual acuteness and
of dialectics, to persuade themselves, though it be but for the
brief moment of this life, that the future inevitably awaiting