l supply the requisite suggestion:
the neck of the giraffe, the stripes of the tiger, the tail of the
beaver may, without offence, provide analogies for the faith in organic
human perfectibility. The processes of natural selection and variation
cannot have been brought to a standstill; they must be at work now and
may yet--should surroundings and necessity create the demand--halve the
neck of the giraffe, give snow-white lamb's clothing to the tiger, and
turn the rudder of the beaver into the prehensile tail of the monkey.
There is no biological completion, no finitude. It is only a matter of
time--sufficient time--and our bodies may become as strangely
interesting to posterity as are to us the dinosaurs and mammoths of the
remote past.

Mind is not arrested by formal obstacles. It builds, destroys, and
rebuilds. It may take a million years to fashion a useful organ.
Slowness is no deterrent. The powers that shaped the genius of
Michelangelo and Shakespeare out of the rude brain of savage man needed
time, but the achievement was worthy of the labour. To-day there are
signs and portents that psychic faculties once possessed by the very
few are in process of development in the many, that new senses are
awakened which will find contact with realities hitherto unperceived.
The imperfections of mediumship and the remoteness of a psychic
super-humanity, godlike in wisdom and ethereal in constitution, do not
conceal the trend of mental evolution. The medium is often a strange
blend of spiritual and carnal tendencies, of knowledge and ignorance, of
delicate perception and denseness. Those who expect saintliness as the
first attribute of psychic advancement will certainly be disillusioned.
These gifts and graces may appear, not only without any corresponding
degree of culture and learning, but associated with a certain vulgarity
of thought and conduct. The psychic is essentially impressionable,
liable to mental contagion, easily stirred by suggestion. The tendency
to instability, to emotional excess, is part of this receptivity which
culminates in the state of being "controlled." An untrained psychic who
is mastered by his impressions, instead of being their master, may
easily be induced to tell lies and give false messages by a visitor who
is determined to discover fraud. The same psychic may rise to
unaccustomed levels of spiritual clearsight in the presence of a visitor
who demands the truth only.

The ladder of psychic dev