If so, the further question arises whether we are to classify all these
with lunatics in whom the phenomena of auditory hallucination are
habitual.

Without doubt this hypothesis is most in accordance with the temper of
our age, partly because it obeys the law of parsimony, and partly
because it [negatives] _a priori_ the possibility of revelation.

But if we look at the matter from the point of view of pure agnosticism,
we are not entitled to adopt so rough and ready an interpretation.

Suppose then that not only Socrates and all great religious reformers
and founders of religious systems both before and after him were
similarly stricken with mental disease, but that similar phenomena had
occurred in the case of all scientific discoverers such as Galileo,
Newton, Darwin, &c.--supposing all these men to have declared that their
main ideas had been communicated by subjective sensations as of spoken
language, so that all the progress of the world's scientific thought had
resembled that of the world's religious thought, and had been attributed
by the promoters thereof to direct inspirations of this kind--would it
be possible to deny that the testimony thus afforded to the fact of
subjective revelation would have been overwhelming? Or could it any
longer have been maintained that supposing a revelation to be
communicated subjectively the fact thereof could only be of any
evidential value to the recipient himself? To this it will no doubt be
answered, 'No, but in the case supposed the evidence arises not from the
fact of their subjective intuition but from that of its objective
verification in the results of science.' Quite so; but this is exactly
the test appealed to by the Hebrew prophets--the test of true and lying
prophets being in the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of their prophecies