years, without the greatest
among you being able to solve the least of my riddles.

In this, as in the cases before adduced, we have the unknown for
our problem. I am far from saying that the force brought into
play in these phenomena can some day be employed like
electricity or steam. Such a notion would be neither more nor
less than absurd! Nevertheless, though differing essentially
from those, occult force is not the less real.

Several years ago I designated this unknown force by the title
_psychical_. This designation may well be retained.

Can we not find the happy medium between absolute negation and
dangerous credulity? Is it reasonable either to deny everything
we do not comprehend, or to accept all the fantasies engendered
in the vortex of disordered imaginations? Can we not achieve at
the same time the humility which becomes the weak and the
dignity which befits the strong?

I conclude this statement as I began it, by declaring that it is
not in favor of the Davenport Brothers that I plead; nor do I
take up the gauntlet for any sect, for any group of people, or
for any person whatsoever; but I contend in behalf of certain
facts, of whose validity I was convinced years ago, though
without understanding their cause.

I beg the reader to excuse the length of this citation; but it seems to
me to serve so naturally as an introduction to this present inquiry that
even to-day, after a lapse of a quarter-century, I really see no
important changes to be made in this old declaration, except to add that
it now appears to me to have been rather audacious on the part of a man
so very young, and that it forthwith won him many hearty enemies among
the elect of science.

The experimental method is bound to conquer here, as everywhere. Let us,
then, without partisanship, study the question under its divers aspects.

1

"The immortality of the soul is a matter so important," writes Pascal,
"that one must have lost all moral sensibility if he remains indifferent
as to its nature."

Why should we give up the hope of ever arriving at a knowledge of the
nature of the thinking principle which animates us, and of ascertaining
whether or not it outlives the destruction of the body? It must be
admitted that hitherto science has taught us nothing on this fundamental
subject. Is this any reason for renouncing the study of the problem? On
t