§ 8. From Biology we may pass, by an easy transition, to what is commonly known as Anthropology, - the comparative study of the different races of men in respect either of their physical characteristics, or of the early rudiments of what afterwards develops into civilisation.

The connection of anthropology with psychical research will be evident to any reader who has acquainted himself with recent expositions of Primitive Man. He may think, indeed, that the connection is too evident, and that we can hardly bring it into notice without proving a good deal more than we desire. For as the creeds and customs of savage races become better known, the part played by sorcery, divination, apparitions becomes increasingly predominant. Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock have made this abundantly clear, and Mr. Spencer has gone so far as to trace all early religion to a fear of the ghosts of the dead. In the works of these and similar authors, I need hardly say, we are led to regard all these beliefs and tendencies as due solely to the childishness of savage man - as absurdities which real progress in civilisation must render increasingly alien to the developed common-sense, the rational experience of humanity. Yet it appears to me that as we trace the process of evolution from savage to civilised man, we come to a point at which the inadequacy of this explanation is strongly forced on our attention. Certainly this was my own case when I undertook some years ago to give a sketch of the Greek oracles.

It soon became evident to me that the mass of phenomena included under this title had, at any rate, a psychophysical importance which the existing works on the subject for the most part ignored. I scarcely ventured myself to do more than indicate where the real nodi of the inquiry lay. But when a massive treatise on Ancient Divination appeared from the learned pen of M. Bouche-Leclercq, I looked eagerly to see whether his erudition had enabled him to place these problems in a new light. I found, however, that he explicitly renounced all attempt to deal with the phenomena in more than a merely external way. He would record, but he would make no endeavour to explain; - taking for granted, as it appeared, that the explanation depended on fraud alone, and on fraud whose details it would now be impossible to discover.

I cannot think that such a view can any longer satisfy persons adequately acquainted with the facts of hypnotism. Whatever else, whether of fraud or reality, there may have been on the banks of Cassotis or Castaly, - undo superstitiosa primum sacra evasit vox fera, - there were at least the hypnotic trance and hystero-epilepsy. And until these and similar elements can be sifted out of the records left to us, with something of insight gained by familiarity' with their modern forms, our knowledge of Pythia or of Sibyl will be shallow indeed.

Still more markedly is such insight and experience needed in anthropology proper - in the actual observation of the savage peoples who still exist. It is to be hoped that shamans and medicine-men will not vanish before the missionary until they have yielded some fuller lessons to the psycho-physicist - until the annals of the Salpetriere and the experiments of Dean's Yard1 have been invoked in explanation of the weird terrors of the Yenisei and the Congo.

§ 9. Passing on from Anthropology to history in its wider acceptation, we find these psycho-physical problems perpetually recurring, and forming a disturbing element in any theory of social or religious evolution. The contagious enthusiasms of the Middle Ages - the strange endemic maladies of witchcraft, vampirism, lycanthropy - even the individual inspiration of a Mahomet or a Joan of Arc - these are phenomena which the professed historian feels obliged to leave to the physician and the alienist, and for which the physician and the alienist, in their turn, have seldom a satisfactory explanation.

Nor do phenomena of this kind cease to appear with the advance of civilisation. In detailed modern histories, in the biographies of eminent men, we still come upon incidents which are, at any rate at first sight, of a supernormal² kind, and over which the narrator is forced to pass with vague or inadequate comment.

But it is, of course, in dealing with the history of religions that our lack of any complete grasp of psychical phenomena is most profoundly felt. And here, also, it is as a result of recent progress, - of the growth of the comparative study of religions, - that we are able to disengage, in a generalised form, the chief problems with which our "psychical" science, if such could be established, would be imperatively called on to deal.

1 [The then office of the Soeiety for Psychical Research. - Ed].

2 "I have ventured to coin the word 'supernormal' to be applied to phenomena which are beyond what usually happens - beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown psychical laws. It is thus formed on the analogy of abnormal. When we speak of an abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which contravenes natural laws, but one which exhibits them in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly by a supernormal phenomenon, I mean, not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the action of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in every-day life. By higher (either in a psychical or in a physiological sense), I mean * apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution.' " - Proceedings of the S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 30. Throughout this treatise we naturally need a designation for phenomena which are inexplicable by recognised physiological laws, and belong to the general group into the nature of which we are inquiring. The term psychical (which is liable to misapprehension even in the title of our Soeiety) can hardly be used without apology in this specialised sense.