rifling the more startingly literal their
veracity. It seems to represent a stratum of life beneath moral or
intellectual functions, and beneath all personality. When proof has been
found that a ghost has actually been seen, proof is required that the
phantom has been rightly recognised and named; and this imputed identity
is never demonstrable and in most cases impossible. So in the magic
cures which from time immemorial have been recorded at shrines of all
religions, and which have been attributed to wonder-workers of every
sect: the one thing certain about them is that they prove neither the
truth of whatever myth is capriciously associated with them, nor the
goodness or voluntary power of the miracle-worker himself. Healer and
medium are alike vehicles for some elemental energy they cannot control,
and which as often as not misses fire; at best they feel a power going
out of them which they themselves undergo, and which radiates from them
like electricity, to work, as chance will have it, good or evil in the
world. The whole operation lies, in so far as it really takes place at
all, on the lowest levels of unintelligence, in a region closely allied
to madness in consciousness and to sporadic organic impulses in the
physical sphere.

[Sidenote: Hypertrophies of sense.]

Among the blind, the retina having lost its function, the rest of the
skin is said to recover its primordial sensitiveness to distance and
light, so that the sightless have a clearer premonition of objects about
them than seeing people could have in the dark. So when reason and the
ordinary processes of sense are in abeyance a certain universal
sensibility seems to return to the soul; influences at other times not
appreciable make then a sensible impression, and automatic reactions may
be run through in response to a stimulus normally quite insufficient.
Now the complexity of nature is prodigious; everything that happens
leaves, like buried cities, almost indelible traces which an eye, by
chance attentive and duly prepared, can manage to read, recovering for a
moment the image of an extinct life. Symbols, illegible to reason, can
thus sometimes read themselves out in trance and madness. Faint vestiges
may be found in matter of forms which it once wore, or which, like a
perfume, impregnated and got lodgment within it. Slight echoes may
suddenly reconstitute themselves in the mind's silence; and a
half-stunned consciousness may catch brief glimpses of