“What can we do? Shall we recall the disagreeable past? Shall we point to mediaeval scholars conniving with the clergy to deny the Heliocentric theory, for fear of hurting an ecclesiastical dogma?
Must we recall how learned conchologists once denied that the fossil shells, found scattered over the face of the earth, were ever inhabited by living animals at all? How the naturalists of the eighteenth century declared these but mere facsimiles of animals? And how these naturalists fought and quarrelled and battled and called each other names, over their venerable mummies of the ancient ages for nearly a century, until Buffon settled the question by proving to the negators that they were mistaken?
Surely an oyster-shell is anything but transcendental, and ought to be quite a palpable subject for any exact study; and if the scientists could not agree on that, we can hardly expect them to believe at all that evanescent forms – of hands, faces, and whole bodies sometimes – appear at the seances of spiritual mediums, when the latter are honest.”
H. P. Blavatsky
