And here arises the pressing question - notoriously still undecided, difficult and complex beyond any anticipation - as to whether supernormal phenomena of this physical kind do in fact occur at all; or whether they are in all cases - as they undoubtedly have been in many cases - the product of mere fraud or delusion. This question, as it seems to us, is one to which we are bound to give our most careful attention; and if we have as yet failed to attain a decisive view, it is not for want of laborious observation, continued by several of us throughout many years. But we are unwilling to pronounce until we have had ample opportunities - opportunities which so far we have for the most part sought in vain - of investigating phenomena obtained through private sources, and free, at any rate, from the specific suspicion to which the presence of a "paid medium" inevitably gives rise.

I need not add further illustrations of the cautionary, the critical attitude which befits such a Society as ours at the present juncture. This attitude is in one way unavoidably ungracious; for it has sometimes precluded us from availing ourselves of the labours of predecessors whose zeal and industry we should have been glad to praise. The time, we hope, will come when enough of daylight shall shine upon our path to make possible a discriminating survey of the tracks which scattered seekers have struck out for themselves in the confusion and dimness of dawn. At present we have mainly to take heed that our own groping course shall at least avoid the pitfalls into which others have fallen. Anything like a distribution of awards of merit would be obviously premature on the part of men whose best hope must be that they may conduct the inquiry into a road firm enough to enable others rapidly to outstrip them.

II

§ 14. Enough, however, has now been said to indicate the general tenor of the task which the Society for Psychical Research has undertaken. It remains to indicate the place which the present work occupies in the allotted field, and the reasons for offering it to public consideration at this early stage of our inquiry.

We could not, of course, predict or pre-arrange the order in which opportunities of successful investigation might occur to the searchers in this labyrinth of the unknown. Among the groping experiments which seemed to have only too often led to mere mistake and confusion, - the "thousand pathways"

"qua signa sequendi Falleret indeprensus et inremeabilis error," it was not easy to choose with confidence our adit of exploration. The approach which proved most quickly productive was one from which it might have seemed that there was little indeed to hope. A kind of drawing-room game sprang up - it is hard to say whence - a method of directing a subject to perform a desired act by a contact so slight that no conscious impulsion was either received or given. Careful observers soon ranked the "willing-game" as an illustration of involuntary muscular action on the wilier's part, affording a guidance to which the subject yielded sometimes without being aware of it. But while the modus operandi of public exhibitions of this misnamed "thought-reading" was not difficult to detect, Professor [now Sir William] Barrett was one of the first who - while recognising all these sources of error - urged the duty of persistent watching for any residuum of true thought-transference which might from time to time appear. As will be seen from Chap. II. of this book it was not till after some six years of inquiry and experiment (1876-82) that definite proof of thought-transference in the normal state could be placed before the world.

This was done in an article in the Nineteenth Century for June, 1882, signed by Professor Barrett, Mr. Gurney, and myself. The phenomenon of transmission of thought or sensation without the agency of the recognised organs of sense had been previously recorded in connection with the mesmeric state, but, so far as we know, its occasional occurrence in the normal state was now for the first time maintained on the strength of definite experiment. And the four years 1882-1886 have witnessed a great extension of those experiments, which no longer rest on the integrity and capacity of the earliest group of observers alone.

§ 15. The foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 gave an opportunity to Mr. Gurney and myself, as Hon. Sees, of a Literary Committee, to invite from the general public records of apparitions at or after death, and other abnormal occurrences. On reviewing the evi-dence thus obtained we were struck with the great predominance of alleged apparitions at or near the moment of death. And a new light seemed to be thrown on these phenomena by the unexpected frequency of accounts of apparitions of living persons, coincident with moments of danger or crisis. We were led to infer a strong analogy between our experimental cases of thought-transference and some of these spontaneous cases of what we call telepathy, or transference of a shock or impulse from one living person to another person at such a distance or under such conditions as to negative the possibility of any ordinary mode of transmission. An article, signed by Mr. Gurney and myself, in the Fortnightly Review for March, 1883, gave a first expression to the analogy thus suggested.

The task of collection and scrutiny grew on our hands; Mr. Podmore undertook to share our labours; and the Council of the Society for Psychical Research requested us to embody the evidence received in a substantive work.

It will be seen, then, that the theory of Telepathy, experimental and spontaneous, which forms the main topic of this book, was not chosen as our theme by any arbitrary process of selection, but was irresistibly suggested by the abundance and the convergence of evidence tending to prove that special thesis. We were, and are, equally anxious to inquire into many other alleged marvels - clairvoyance, haunted houses, Spiritualistic phenomena, etc. - but telepathy is the subject which has first shown itself capable of investigation appearing to lead to a positive result; and it seemed well to arrange its evidence with sufficient fulness to afford at least a solid groundwork for further inquiry.