it takes account. They are one in
affirming the mastery of the psychical over the physical. They either
affirm or imply faculties which do not depend upon the senses for their
material; they suggest a range of personality which, if the facts which
they supply are sound, demands a very considerable recasting of our
accepted beliefs about ourselves.

Christian Science and New Thought confine themselves largely to the
present term of life, though Christian Science affirms strongly enough
that death is an error of the mortal mind. New Thought places a shifting
emphasis upon immortality. Spiritualism centers wholly upon the
phenomena of the discarnate life, upon the power of the discarnate to
communicate with us and upon our power to receive and interpret their
communications.

Spiritualism, or Spiritism, the name its adherents prefer, is, however,
by no means so simple as this definition of it. It may be anything from
the credulity which accepts without question or analysis the trick of a
medium, to the profound speculation of Meyer or Hyslop or the new
adventures in psychology of Emile Boirac and his French associates. It
may be a cult, a philosophy or an inquiry; it may organize itself in
forms of worship and separate itself entirely from the churches. It may
reinforce the faith of those who remain in their old communions.
Spiritism has a long line of descent. The belief that the spirit may
leave the body and maintain a continued existence is very old. Mr.
Herbert Spencer finds the genesis of this belief in dreams. Since
primitive men believed themselves able, in their dreams, to wander about
while the body remained immobile and since in their dreams they met and
spoke with their dead, they conceived an immaterial existence. The
spirit of a dead man, having left the body, would still go on about its
business. They, therefore, set out food and drink upon his grave and
sacrificed his dogs, his horses or his wives to serve him in his
disembodied state. All this is familiar enough and perhaps the whole
matter began as Mr. Spencer suggested, though it by no means ends there.

The animism which grew out of this belief characterizes a vast deal of
early religion, penetrates a vast deal of early thinking. Primitive man
lived in a world constantly under the control of either friendly or
hostile spirits and the really massive result of this faith of his is
registered in regions as remote as the capricious genders of French
noun