ry spiritualistic _seance_. Those attending are advised that the
chief condition of a communication with the inhabitants of the other
world is a passive state of mind. This passivity cannot exclude
expectancy, since it is only assumed in order that something may occur.
If nothing occurs, if no communications are received, it is because the
requisite conditions have not been fulfilled, and the sceptic is met
with much semi-scientific jargon as to conditions being necessary to
every scientific investigation. The fact that this passivity and
expectancy, with other attendant circumstances, not the least of which
is the contagious influence of a number of people with a similar mental
disposition, opens the way to self-delusion is ignored. Then when the
expected and desired result follows, the mental attitude cultivated is
taken as the condition of communication with the spiritual world,
instead of its being, in all probability, the true cause of what is
experienced. In this way the story of supernatural intercourse runs
clear and unbroken from primitive savagery to its survival in modern
civilisation. When Professor Tylor says, "The conception of the human
soul is, as to its most essential nature, continuous from the philosophy
of the savage thinker to that of the modern professor of theology,"[21]
he makes a statement that is true of the whole story of supernatural
intercourse in all its varied manifestations.

The chief distinction between primitive and modern man lies in the
consideration that in the first case the blunder is inevitable, in the
latter case the remedy lies to hand. How could primitive man be aware of
the real connection between the use of certain drugs or herbs and an
excitation or depression of the activities of the nervous system? He
does observe consequences, but he is quite ignorant of causes. Even
to-day their full consequences are unknown; and it is absurd to expect
that savage humanity should have been better informed. And even when a
more rational theory exists, the practice persists under various forms.
This is a principle that receives vivid illustration from the history of
religions. The modern believer in mystical states of consciousness no
longer advocates the use of drugs, and even fasting is going out of
fashion. But we still have a continuation of the primitive practice in
the shape of insistence on the cultivation of abnormal frames of mind if
we are to experience a consciousness of communi