ion of
life on all planes and in all forms _knows_, and in knowledge transcends
alike the boundaries of religionists and scientists. The mystic may
smile at the labour expended during the last fifty years on establishing
a strictly evidential basis for the study of transcendental facts. He
has conquered the inherited blindness of our race, and sees spirit not
as a supernatural demonstration, vouchsafed now and then to doubting
humanity, but as the living Presence of which he is joyously a part. He
does not fall into the common error of forgetting that we are spirits
sheathed in flesh, but bearing within ourselves the power over matter
which is destined to achieve the miraculous. He can dispense with a
medium, being himself a fountain of light, and experiencing the wondrous
self-illumination of which Thomas Treherne sang--

O Joy! O wonder and delight!
O sacred mystery!
My soul a spirit infinite!
An image of the Deity!
A pure substantial light!
That being greatest which doth nothing seem!
. . . . .
O wondrous Self! O sphere of light,
O sphere of joy most fair;
O act, O power infinite;
O subtile and unbounded air!
O living orb of sight!
Thou which within me art, yet me! Thou eye
And temple of His whole infinity!

But the spiritual raptures of the mystics of all ages have not moved
souls struggling in the outer darkness for tangible proofs of
immortality. To them the application of the methods approved by reason
and tested by scientific application will ever be welcome. They know
that the mind of man has wrested secret after secret from the earth by
observation, by experiment, by deduction. They know that the great
generalizations of science--the theories of the indestructibility of
matter, of gravitation, of the conservation of energy--are but counters
of mind exchanged in default of elusive realities. They know that the
pressure of research has reduced many of the lesser generalizations and
theories to a fluid and amorphous state. "Immutable" laws have been
turned into faulty conclusions, hastily drawn and readily abandoned
before the advance of new facts. The fixity of the elements in
chemistry, the undulatory movement of light, the stability of the
planetary orbits, the indestructibility of the atom, are all
abstractions which have been subjected to the reforming processes of new
thought.

Progress in physics has been marked