pose but was
forced to yield to the truth.

About 1891, I had joined the Psychical Research Society and had the
advantage of reading all their reports. The world owes a great deal to
the unwearied diligence of the Society, and to its sobriety of
statement, though I will admit that the latter makes one impatient at
times, and one feels that in their desire to avoid sensationalism they
discourage the world from knowing and using the splendid work which
they are doing. Their semi-scientific terminology also chokes off the
ordinary reader, and one might say sometimes after reading their
articles what an American trapper in the Rocky Mountains said to me
about some University man whom he had been escorting for the season.
"He was that clever," he said, "that you could not understand what he
said." But in spite of these little peculiarities all of us who have
wanted light in the darkness have found it by the methodical,
never-tiring work of the Society. Its influence was one of the powers
which now helped me to shape my thoughts. There was another, however,
which made a deep impression upon me. Up to now I had read all the
wonderful experiences of great experimenters, but I had never come
across any effort upon their part to build up some system which would
cover and contain them all. Now I read that monumental book, Myers'
Human Personality, a great root book from which a whole tree of
knowledge will grow. In this book Myers was unable to get any formula
which covered all the phenomena called "spiritual," but in discussing
that action of mind upon mind which he has himself called telepathy he
completely proved his point, and he worked it out so thoroughly with so
many examples, that, save for those who were wilfully blind to the
evidence, it took its place henceforth as a scientific fact. But this
was an enormous advance. If mind could act upon mind at a distance,
then there were some human powers which were quite different to matter
as we had always understood it. The ground was cut from under the feet
of the materialist, and my old position had been destroyed. I had said
that the flame could not exist when the candle was gone. But here was
the flame a long way off the candle, acting upon its own. The analogy
was clearly a false analogy. If the mind, the spirit, the intelligence
of man could operate at a distance from the body, then it was a thing
to that extent separate from the body. Why then should it not