And this position we still maintain. This book, as will be seen, does not attempt to deal with the most exciting and popular topics which are included in our Society's general scheme. And we shall be careful in the pages that follow to keep within our self-assigned limits, and to say little as to any light which our collected evidence may throw on the possibility of an existence continued after our physical death.

That master-problem of human life must be assailed by more deliberate approaches, nor must we gild our solid arguments with the radiance of an unproved surmise. But it would, nevertheless, be impossible, in a discussion of this general kind, to pass over the relation of psychical research to religion altogether in silence. And, indeed, since our inquiries began, the situation has thus far changed that we have now not anticipation merely, but a certain amount of actual achievement, to which to appeal. We hold that we have proved by direct experiment, and corroborated by the narratives contained in this book, the possibility of communications between two minds, inexplicable by any recognised physical laws, but capable (under certain rare spontaneous conditions) of taking place when the persons concerned are at an indefinite distance from each other. And we claim further that by investigations of the higher phenomena of mesmerism, and of the automatic action of the mind, we have confirmed and expanded this view in various directions, and attained a standing-point from which certain even stranger alleged phenomena begin to assume an intelligible aspect, and to suggest further discoveries to come.

Thus far the authors of this book, and also the main group of their fellow-workers, are substantially agreed. But their agreement as to the facts actually proved does not extend - it is not even to be desired that it should extend - to the speculations which in one direction or another such facts must inevitably suggest. They are facts which go too deep to find in any two minds a precisely similar lodgment, or to adjust themselves in the same way to the complex of pre-existent conceptions. The following paragraphs, therefore, must be taken merely as reflecting the opinions provisionally held by a single inquirer.

I may say, then, at once that I consider it improbable that telepathy will ever receive a purely physical explanation, - an explanation, that is to say, wholly referable to the properties of matter, as molecular matter is at present known to us. I admit, of course, that such an explanation is logically conceivable; that we can imagine that undulations should be propagated, or particles emitted, from one living organism to another, which should excite the percipient organism in a great variety of ways. But it seems to me, - and I imagine that in this view at any rate the majority of Materialists will concur, - that if the narratives in this book are to be taken as, on the whole, trustworthy, the physical analogies are too faint, and the physical difficulties too serious, to allow of our intruding among the forces of material Nature a force which - unlike any other -would seem (in some cases at least) neither to be diminished by any distance nor to be impeded by any obstacle whatsoever.

I lay aside, for the purposes of the present argument, the possibility of a monistic scheme of the universe, - of a consentiens conspirans continuata cognatio rerum which may present in an unbroken sequence both what we know as Matter and what we know as Mind. Such a view, - though to higher intelligences it may perhaps be an intuitive certainty, - can for us be nothing more than a philosophic opinion. Our scientific arguments must needs be based on the dualism which our intellects, as at present constituted, are in fact unable to transcend.

I maintain, therefore, that if the general fact of telepathic communication between mind and mind be admitted, it must also be admitted that an element is thus introduced into our conception of the aggregate of empirically known facts which constitutes a serious obstacle to the materialistic synthesis of human experience. The psychical element in man, I repeat, must henceforth almost inevitably be conceived as having relations which cannot be expressed in terms of matter.

Now this dogma, though wholly new to experimental science, is, of course, familiar and central in all the higher forms of religions. Relations inexpressible in terms of matter, and subsisting between spirit and Spirit, - the human and the Divine, - are implied in the very notion of the interchange of sacred love and love, of grace and worship. I need hardly add that the reality of any such communion is rigidly excluded by the materialistic view. The Materialist, indeed, may regard prayer and aspiration with indulgence, or even with approval, but he must necessarily conceive them as forming merely the psychical side of certain molecular movements of the particles of human organisms, and he must necessarily regard the notion of Divine response to prayer as an illusion generated by subsequent molecular movements of the same organisms, - the mere recoil and reflux of the wave which the worshipper himself has created.

It would, of course, be mere offensive presumption to draw a parallel between our telepathic experiments and such a relation between a human and Divine spirit as the devout soul believes itself to realise in prayer. One side of that communion must ex hypothesi transcend the measurement or analysis of finite minds. But, confining our view wholly to the part played by the human organism, it seems to me incontestable that our experiments suggest possibilities of influence, modes of operation, which throw an entirely fresh light on this ancient controversy between Science and Faith. I claim at least that any presumption which science had established against the possibility of spiritual communion is now rebutted; and that inasmuch as it can no longer be affirmed that our minds are closed to all influences save such as reach them through sensoryavenues, the Materialist must admit that it is no longer an unsupported dream but a serious scientific possibility, that if any intelligences do in fact exist other than those of living men, influences from those intelligences may be conveyed to our own mind, and may either remain below the threshold of consciousness, or rise into definite consciousness, according as the presence or absence of competing stimuli, or other causes as yet unknown to us, may determine.