But then it is not the soul but the body that is worn out in seventy or eighty of the Earth's revolutions." "Ay," he said; "but if man were such a duplex being, it might be that the wearing out of the body was necessary, and had been adapted to release the soul when it had completed its appropriate term of service in the flesh." I could not answer this question, and he did not pursue the theme.
Presently I inquired, "If you allow no appeal to popular feeling or passion, to what was I so nearly the victim?
And what is the terrorism that makes it dangerous to avow a credulity or incredulity opposed to received opinion ?" "Scientific controversies," he replied, "enlist our strongest and angriest feelings.

It is held that only wickedness or lunacy can resist the evidence that has convinced a vast majority.

By arithmetical calculation the chances that twelve men are wrong and twelve thousand [11] right, on a matter of inductive or deductive proof, are found to amount to what must be taken for practical certainty; and when the twelve still hold out, they are regarded as madmen or knaves, and treated accordingly by their fellows.

If it be thought desirable to invoke a legal settlement of the issue, a council of all the overseers of our scientific colleges is called, and its decision is by law irrevocable and infallible, especially if ratified by the popular voice.

And if a majority vote be worth anything at all, I think this modern theory at least as sound as the democratic theory of politics which prevailed here before the Communistic revolution, and which seems by your account to be gaining ground on Earth." "And what," I inquired, "is your political constitution?
What are the powers of your rulers; and how, in the absence of public discussion and popular suffrage, are they practically limited ?" "In theory they are unlimited," he answered; "in practice they are limited by custom, by caution, and, above all, by the lack of motives for misrule.