There are very many such persons, and for them these problems will remain questions that they consider it idle to discuss, and lying outside the province of possible or profitable knowledge. We may, however, remind ourselves that the boundaries which men have from time to time laid down as limits of human knowledge which mankind would do well not to try to overstep have varied with every successive age. To-day men are pushing forward along new roads and are opening up new regions of thought and experience of which the last century had little conception, and the limits of which we cannot see. But even though this is the ease, and though the new regions of enquiry be recognised as lawful fields for scientific investigation, there are still great difficulties in the way of obtaining the evidence that is required with regard to many experiences of the human mind. This is especially true of evidence of the transmission of messages from mind to mind when such communications are believed to come not from the living but from the dead.

It is clear that much evidence will be required before this belief meets with general acceptance; at the same time, this evidence is especially difficult to obtain because these experiences are necessarily so intimate that they are seldom spoken of, but are treasured in the heart as things too near and too dear to be generally communicated. Their very nature often precludes their discussion, although they may be as convincing to the recipient of them as any other of the deepest experiences of the human spirit. If this were not the case, it would, I think, be found that these experiences are less rare than men have supposed. The dread of giving way to superstition or of being thought superstitious, the fear of possible self-deception, combined with our natural reluctance to speak of things that are so closely interwoven with our most intimate joys and sorrows, prevent our imparting to or learning from each other much that would be of the deepest interest and value.

1 Sir Oliver Lodge, letter to The Times.

Few of us have either the faith or the moral courage that made it possible to give to the world such a book as "Raymond"; for most of us the barriers in the way of such sincere revelation are too great, and hence our records will perhaps always be incomplete and scantier than they need otherwise be, but perhaps even this difficulty will not for ever stand in the way, when we realise more fully the need of this knowledge, and the necessity of testing and sifting the evidence that bears on it. Whatever our beliefs may be, whether we stand, as I certainly do, among those to whom the survival of human personality after bodily death, and the power of communication with those who have so survived, are realities and facts of experience, or whether we are in the large majority, for whom this faith in the possibility of communication between the living and the dead is at the utmost a matter of very doubtful conjecture, we may all agree that it is a question that transcends our understanding, and that in any case we stand only upon the threshold of such knowledge.

There are, however, other open points which, though they may also be disputable matters, excite less passionate and heated controversy. Amongst these are certain questions relating to possible telepathic communication between the living. If for the purposes of enquiry we may provisionally accept the hypothesis that under certain circumstances communications may take place between mind and mind through apparently immaterial channels, our enquiry might take the form of trying to ascertain whether either in the dream state or the borderland state the mind is specially sensitive to such impressions.

We cannot draw a hard and fast line between certain stages of borderland consciousness and the lightest stages of dreaming sleep, for the two states pass imperceptibly the one into the other. On the upper levels of sleep, when the dreamer is nearest to being awake, sense impressions from without have power more or less to affect his consciousness, and may alter the current of his dream. It may conceivably be the case that, in some such way as the senses of the dreamer are affected by sound or by light, a current of thought may influence a mind sensitive to such impressions. I have never found that in the actual dream state my own mind is specially gifted with this sensitiveness. The material and fashioning of dreams seem rather to come from within and to be the creation of my own mind; and although imagination working under dream conditions is marvellously quickened and heightened, it is generally occupied with the remembered facts of normal experience, facts which it alters and glorifies beyond recognition, but the materials of which are nevertheless supplied by memory. In other words, the greater number of dreams would seem to me to be evolved from without.

On such points we each speak from our personal experience, and I can only say that in my own case my mind is not sensitive in this way in sleep.1 In the course of all its dreaming activities it has never received with any conviction of certainty they do not prove telepathy; rather they are themselves shown to be telepathic by the analogies of the more cogent evidence drawn from waking hours • • • but they are instructive • . . they initiate us into the methods of subconscious processes."- Myers, "Phantasms of the Living.99 the impression of messages or thoughts transmitted by another mind. Such messages I have received from time to time; but they have never come in dreams but always in the condition of partially suspended mental activity and complete bodily tranquillity attained in the quiet mood when we wait for sleep or have just emerged from it, when the normal activities of sensory perception are more or less in abeyance. Mr. Jastrow describes this state as "that state upon the verge of sleep in which the mind seems peculiarly open to suggestion"; and both my own and many other people's observations would seem to confirm the fact of this special receptiveness of the mind to suggestion and communication in the borderland state.

1 "Dreams form only a very subsidiary part of the evidence99 (for telepathic communication); ". . •

It is only in this state that I am personally familiar with the condition of tranquillity in which the mental faculties are thus heightened and sensitised; but I know that it is a state that is reached by others in other ways and at other times. Some are able to enter it when they choose by a definite act of will, by great concentration of mind, and by refusing to allow casual impressions to divert their attention. It is in such a condition that the inspiration of poets and thinkers, the spiritual vision of saints and mystics, has come to them. Their new conceptions, their clearest vision of spiritual things, have been realised in such moods. And it is in such moments, when the surface of the mind is unruffled like that of a dark still pool, that the artist finds himself able to apprehand a part of that essential truth that he is always seeking to express in his work.

The state in which at times the artist's mind works is, in fact, analogous in many respects to the mental condition reached in the borderland state. The following note that a painter sends me describing his own method of work, when the design of a picture is being thought out, is therefore not without interest in this place:

" At the crucial moment in the planning of a picture the design has to be fused into a unity; it is often necessary to shut oneself up alone, reduce the light, and bring the mind into a state of perfect stillness. The reduction of the light is of importance; not merely because the details of the design are thus subordinated, but because in darkness the mind is less disturbed by external stimuli, and becomes more receptive to the internal stimuli. It becomes easier to ignore the ascertained facts of a particular picture and to draw directly upon the imaginative memory which I suppose supplies one's dreams".

A somewhat similar state is described in the notebooks of Leonardo; and Kakki, the great Chinese painter of the eleventh century, gives a full description of the method by which he attained to this condition, which he found to be essential for his art.

"Ku K'ai-chih of Tsin builded a high-storied pavilion for his studio, that his thought might be more free. . .. Unless I dwell in a quiet house, seat myself in a retired room with the windows open, table dusted, incense burning, and the ten thousand trivial thoughts crushed out and sunk, I cannot have good feeling for painting or beautiful taste, and cannot create the 'yu' (the mysterious and wonderful)."1

The borderland state that we have been considering happens to present a certain analogy not only to the condition of mind in which the artist works, but also to the condition reached in hypnosis.

"When sleep is approaching, the flow of our thoughts is gradually diminished and the activity of the brain subsides; certain ideas and the neural systems corresponding to those ideas are still active. . . There is still kept a certain channel of entry to the brain; and the impressions that are introduced at such a time tend to operate with abnormally great effect because they work in a free field, unchecked by rival ideas and tendencies." 2

This brief extract from Mr. McDowell's account of hypnotic sleep and the approach to it describes a condition which obviously bears a strong resemblance to the approach of normal sleep; and Mr. McDowell's explanation of the manner in which certain impressions are enhanced suggests a possible explanation of the. manner in which mental faculties are heightened in the transition state which we have described in this chapter.

This analogy is clearly one on which it would be dangerous for the amateur student, unequipped with the necessary scientific knowledge, to lay too much stress. Moreover, whilst the observations in this book axe based upon personal experience, I have no such personal experience of the hypnotic state; any attempt to apply the suggested analogy would therefore almost certainly lead me into error.

1 Translation of an essay by Kakki. Fenellosa, "Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art"

2 W. McDowell, EncyclopwdiS Britannica, "Hypnotism".