ndifference of the majority of scientists, the
problems of spirit intercourse have proved sufficiently attractive to
stimulate a vast amount of experimentation and theorizing. The study of
mediumship has necessarily become the study of consciousness and the
occult powers of the human mind. In the centre a handful of fearless
scientists: Crookes, Wallace, Richet, Flammarion, Morselli, Baraduc,
Myers, Lombroso, Lodge, and Barrett; in the inner circle a number of
academic investigators, disdaining alike the premature proclamation of
phenomenal results and the obstinate denial of facts; in the outer
circle an ever-growing mass of souls clamouring for the crumbs of
evidence, hungry for something personal and soul-warming in our dealings
with the Divine dispensation.

The annals of psychic science--in different tongues and of different
continents--are largely devoted to the investigation of trance,
clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, hypnotism, dreams, premonitions,
automatic writing, visions, and messages from the dying, multiple
personality, and all the phenomena associated with the subconscious
self. Many students have dispensed with the spirit hypothesis as an
unnecessary and embarrassing complication in a subject already
overburdened with difficulties. Spirit messages are to them examples of
the activity of the subliminal self, and a medium is a person gifted--or
cursed--with extraordinary subconscious force and lucidity.
Materializations, they argue, are produced through the effluvia of the
living and controlled by the subliminal forces of the participators in
the seance. Spirits are nothing but thought-forms. The painstaking
investigation recorded in the _Proceedings_ and _Journal of the Society
for Psychical Research_ has to a great extent been carried on by
inquirers unencumbered by any bias towards "spookery." But the theories
in elaboration of psycho-pathological vagaries and dissociation of
personality which have been substituted for the spirit hypothesis
certainly do not err on the side of intelligible explication. They have
but deepened the mystery and show the vista of new and unexplored paths
in psychic science.

Others, again, who are not unwilling to believe that the phenomena are
produced by the action of intelligences other than that of the medium,
abandon further study because of the meagreness of the intellectual
results. They have waited on the visitors from another world, notebook
in hand, plying