his devotion to the same inquirings. Brought up on literature and
sentiment, something of a courtier, passionate, disdainful, and
impatient naturally, he was made over again from the day when he took
up psychical research seriously. He became learned in science,
circumspect, democratic in sympathy, endlessly patient, and above all,
happy. The fortitude of his last hours touched the heroic, so
completely were the atrocious sufferings of his body cast into
insignificance by his interest in the cause he lived for. When a man's
pursuit gradually makes his face shine and grow handsome, you may be
sure it is a worthy one. Both Hodgson and Myers kept growing ever
handsomer and stronger-looking.

Such personal examples will convert no one, and of course they ought
not to. Nor do I seek at all in this article to convert any one to
belief that psychical research is an important branch of science. To
do that, I should have to quote evidence; and those for whom the
volumes of S. P. R. "Proceedings" already published count for nothing
would remain in their dogmatic slumber, though one rose from the dead.
No, not to convert readers, but simply to _put my own state of mind
upon record publicly_ is the purpose of my present writing. Some one
said to me a short time ago that after my twenty-five years of dabbling
in "Psychics," it would be rather shameful were I unable to state any
definite conclusions whatever as a consequence. I had to agree; so I
now proceed to take up the challenge and express such convictions as
have been engendered in me by that length of experience, be the same
true or false ones. I may be dooming myself to the pit in the eyes of
better-judging posterity; I may be raising myself to honor; I am
willing to take the risk, for what I shall write is _my_ truth, as I
now see it.

I began this article by confessing myself baffled. I _am_ baffled, as
to spirit-return, and as to many other special problems. I am also
constantly baffled as to what to think of this or that particular
story, for the sources of error in any one observation are seldom fully
knowable. But weak sticks make strong faggots; and when the stories
fall into consistent sorts that point each in a definite direction, one
gets a sense of being in presence of genuinely natural types of
phenomena. As to there being such real natural types of phenomena
ignored by orthodox science, I am not baffled at all, for I am fully
convinced of it. O