Furthermore, the whole subject of hallucinations of the sane - which hitherto has received very scanty treatment - seems fairly to belong to our subject, and has been treated by Mr. Gurney in Chapter XI (Transient Hallucinations Of The Sane: Ambiguous Cases). We have throughout contended that a knowledge of abnormal or merely morbid phenomena is an indispensable pre-requisite for the treating of any supernormal operations which may be found to exist under somewhat similar forms of manifestation.

*

Once more, it was plainly desirable to inquire whether hypotheses, now admitted to be erroneous, had ever been based in past times on evidence in any way comparable to that which we have adduced. The belief in witchcraft, from its wide extent and its nearness to our own times, is the most plausible instance of such a parallelism. And Mr. Gurney, in his Note on Chapter IV (General Criticism Of The Evidence For Spontaneous Telepathy) [omitted in the present edition. - Ed.], has given the results of an analysis of witch-literature more laborious than previous authors had thought it worth while to undertake. The result is remarkable; for it appears that the only marvels for which respectable testimony was adduced consist obviously of ignorant descriptions of hypnotic and epileptiform phenomena now becoming familiar to science; while as to the monstrous stories - copied from one uncritical writer into another - which have given to this confused record of hypnotic and hysterical illusions the special aromas (so to say) of witchcraft or lycanthropy, - these prodigies have scarcely ever the slightest claim to be founded on any first-hand evidence at all.

§ 20. But while the material here offered for forming an opinion on all these points is, no doubt, much larger than previous writers have been at the pains to amass, we are anxious, nevertheless, to state explicitly that we regard this present collection of facts as merely preliminary; this present work as merely opening out a novel subject; these researches of a few persons during a few years as the mere first instalment of inquiries which will need repetition and reinforcement to an extent which none of us can as yet foresee.

A change in the scientific outlook so considerable as that to which this volume points must needs take time to accomplish. Time is needed not only to spread the knowledge of new facts, but also to acclimatise new conceptions in the individual mind. Such, at least, has been our own experience; and since the evidence which has come to us slowly and piecemeal is here presented to other minds suddenly and in a mass, we must needs expect that its acceptance by them will be a partial and gradual thing. What we hope for first is an increase in the number of those who are willing to aid us in our labours; we trust that the fellow-workers in many lands to whom we already owe so much may be encouraged to further collection of testimony, renewed experiment, when they see these experiments confirming one another in London, Paris, Berlin, - this testimony vouching for cognate incidents from New York to New Zealand, and from Manchester to Calcutta.

With each year of experiment and registration we may hope that our results will assume a more definite shape - that there will be less of the vagueness and confusion inevitable at the beginning of a novel line of research, but naturally distasteful to the savant accustomed to proceed by measurable increments of knowledge from experimental bases already assured. Such an one, if he reads this book, may feel as though he had been called away from an ordnance survey, conducted with a competent staff and familiar instruments, to plough slowly with inexperienced mariners through some strange ocean where beds of entangling seaweed cumber the trackless way. We accept the analogy; but we would remind him that even floating weeds of novel genera may foreshow a land unknown; and that it was not without ultimate gain to men that the straining keels of Columbus first pressed through the Sargasso Sea.

§ 21. Yet one word more. This book is not addressed to savants alone, and it may repel many readers on quite other than scientific grounds. Attempting as we do to carry the reign of Law into a sanctuary of belief and emotion which has never thus been invaded in detail, - lying in wait, as it were, to catch the last impulse of the dying, and to question the serenity of the dead, - we may seem to be incurring the poet's curse on the man "who would peep and botanize upon his mother's grave," - to be touching the Ark of sacred mysteries with hands stained with labour in the profane and common field.

How often have men thus feared that Nature's wonders would be degraded by being closelier looked into! How often, again, have they learnt that the truth was higher than their imagination; and that it is man's work, but never Nature's, which to be magnificent must remain unknown! How would a disciple of Aristotle, - fresh from his master's conception of the fixed stars as types of godhead, - of an inhabitance by pure existences of a supernal world of their own, - how would he have scorned the proposal to learn more of those stars by dint of the generation of fetid gases and the sedulous minuteness of spectroscopic analysis! Yet how poor, how fragmentary were Aristotle's fancies compared with our conception, thus gained, of cosmic unity! our vibrant message from Sirius and Orion by the heraldry of the kindred flame! Those imagined gods are gone; but the spectacle of the starry heavens has become for us so moving in its immensity that philosophers, at a loss for terms of wonder, have ranked it with the Moral Law.

If man, then, shall attempt to sound and fathom the depths that lie not without him, but within, analogy may surely warn him that the first attempts of his rude psychoscopes to give precision and actuality to thought will grope among " beggarly elements," - will be concerned with things grotesque, or trivial, or obscure. Yet here also one hand's-breadth of reality gives better footing than all the castles of our dream; here also by beginning with the least things we shall best learn how great things may remain to do.

The insentient has awoke, we know not how, into sentiency; the sentient into the fuller consciousness of human minds. Yet even human self-consciousness remains a recent, a perfunctory, a superficial thing; and we must first reconstitute our conception of the microcosm, as of the macrocosm, before we can enter on those "high capacious powers " which, I believe, " lie folded up in man".

F. W. H. M.