eated as such. A man is, forensically
speaking, the same man after the nightly break in his consciousness.
After many changes in his body and after long oblivion, parcels of his
youth may be revived and may come to figure again among the factors in
his action. Similarly, if evidence to that effect were available, we
might establish the resurrection of a given soul in new bodies or its
activity in remote places and times. Evidence of this sort has in fact
always been offered copiously by rumour and superstition. The operation
of departed spirits, like that of the gods, has been recognised in many
a dream, or message, or opportune succour. The Dioscuri and Saint James
the Apostle have appeared--preferably on white horses--in sundry
battles. Spirits duly invoked have repeated forgotten gossip and
revealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried.
More often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensible
or useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly compulsion
that crept over them in death, as if a hesitating sickle had left them
still hanging to life by one attenuated fibre.

[Sidenote: "Psychical" phenomena.]

The mass of this evidence, ancient and modern, traditional and
statistical, is beneath consideration; the palpitating mood in which it
is gathered and received, even when ostensibly scientific, is such that
gullibility and fiction play a very large part in the report; for it is
not to be assumed that a man, because he speaks in the first person and
addresses a learned society, has lost the primordial faculty of lying.
When due allowance has been made, however, for legend and fraud, there
remains a certain residuum of clairvoyance and telepathy, and an
occasional abnormal obedience of matter to mind which might pass for
magic. There are unmistakable indications that in these regions we touch
lower and more rudimentary faculties. There seems to be, as is quite
natural, a sub-human sensibility in man, wherein ideas are connected
together by bonds so irrational and tenacious that they seem miraculous
to a mind already trained in practical and relevant thinking. This
sub-human sense, far from representing important truths more clearly
than ordinary apprehension can, reduces consciousness again to a tangle
of trivial impressions, shots of uncertain range, as if a skin had not
yet formed over the body. It emerges in tense and disorganised moments.
Its reports are the more t