to say telepathy as if he were saying telegraphy. If everybody
is satisfied about how it is done, why does not everybody do it?
Why does not a cultivated clergyman in Cornwall make a casual remark
to an old friend of his at the University of Aberdeen? Why does
not a harassed commercial traveller in Barcelona settle a question
by merely thinking about his business partner in Berlin? The common
sense of it is, of course, that the name makes no sort of difference;
the mystery is why some people can do it and others cannot;
and why it seems to be easy in one place and impossible in another.
In other words it comes back to that very mystery which of all
mysteries the modern world thinks most superstitious and senseless;
the mystery of locality. It works back at last to the hardest of
all the hard sayings of supernaturalism; that there is such a thing
as holy or unholy ground, as divinely or diabolically inspired people;
that there may be such things as sacred sites or even sacred stones;
in short that the airy nothing of spiritual essence, evil or good,
can have quite literally a local habitation and a name.

It may be said in passing that this _genius loci_ is here very much
the presiding genius. It is true that everywhere to-day a parade of the
theory of pantheism goes with a considerable practice of particularism;
and that people everywhere are beginning to wish they were somewhere.
And even where it is not true of men, it seems to be true of the
mysterious forces which men are once more studying. The words we now
address to the unseen powers may be vague and universal, but the words
they are said to address to us are parochial and even private.
While the Higher Thought Centre would widen worship everywhere
to a temple not made with hands, the Psychical Research Society
is conducting practical experiments round a haunted house.
Men may become cosmopolitans, but ghosts remain patriots.
Men may or may not expect an act of healing to take place at a holy well,
but nobody expects it ten miles from the well; and even the sceptic who
comes to expose the ghost-haunted churchyard has to haunt the churchyard
like a ghost. There may be something faintly amusing about the idea
of demi-gods with door-knockers and dinner tables, and demons,
one may almost say, keeping the home fires burning. But the driving
force of this dark mystery of locality is all the more indisputable
because it drives against most modern theories and as