They are unasked for because we are ignorant of our need, and so they differ from self-suggestions consciously offered by a necessitous objective self. In the light of this philosophy, may not every man learn to be his own guardian angel?

Some years ago a patient suffering from nervous exhaustion engaged passage for Iceland at Leith; but the night before the steamer was to sail an irresistible mental coercion forced him to abandon the project, and he went to Switzerland instead, where he recovered. The steamer on which he had booked was caught in an icefloe for weeks, and before she made port the passengers felt the pinch of hunger and exposure. Had he embarked at Leith, his opportunity for recuperation would have been seriously interfered with.

Of like nature are the sudden presentations of important unremembered data, the uninvited impulses to decline propositions fraught with insidious peril, and the intimations that one is wanted somewhere. An unescapable force pushes him on, and he arrives at the critical moment. While taking an evening stroll last winter, the writer was suddenly made aware of an imperative necessity for his presence at the bedside of a patient who was not in danger when seen two days before. He reached her hotel in time to give a hypodermic and save her life.

Instances of this nature might be multiplied ad libitum. The history of genius scintillates with them-the unbidden, unsolicited, unworkedfor utterances of the God in man.

One of the most remarkable cases of etheric communication recorded in history is told in Aubrey's Miscellanies (1696) of Dr. William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Harvey had gone to Dover to cross the Channel, but when he presented his pass he was apprehended by the governor and, despite his protestations, he was detained until after the vessel on which he intended to embark had sailed. A storm came up, and all on board the transport went down. In explanation of his conduct, the governor declared that the night before he had experienced a vision of Dr. Harvey, whom he had never seen, and a warning to stop him. Thus a valuable life was saved to science, and by what?

In such a case as this- and psychological records are not without many confirmatory instances who will deny that God Himself may not stir the subliminal consciousness to intervene? "I conceive the Invisible Goodness," wrote Maeterlinck, "to be one of the forces that safeguard mankind." And many an awe-stricken man, under such circumstances, has acknowledged in expressions of gratitude the hand of

Providence that so regulated cause and effect as to insure his escape. The soul that concedes this spiritual interdependence, and in the fullness of faith petitions the ultimate Source of all power for protection, is genuinely in tune with the Infinite. And what a man receives in answer to prayers for spiritual discernment and power is the interpenetration of the Holy Spirit (Hagion Pneuma) through all the motions of his subliminal nature-a fuller vitalizing inflow from the all-environing energy.

Some scienticians offer a different explanation of what have been called "Thoughts from the Ether," viz., that they are the communications of benevolent daimons, uncarnate spirits that have access to us, or of postcarnate human beings, our beloved dead, who, they believe, are commissioned to watch over us. The author of this volume has never met with conclusive evidence as to the identity of the soi-disant departed, purporting to communicate with us. And yet in view of the constitution of man as body, soul, and spirit, why may not a postcarnate intelligence interblend with the animating principle of the body directly, and so impel, caution, guard, and save? Certainly our subliminal selfs are obnoxious to the impact of immaterial beings and tender to the spirit touch. This must be the law of cosmic relationship, this

freedom of intercourse among excarnate personalities.

The writer does not deny the possibility of impression by extra-human intelligences. Whence come the beautiful and practical thoughts that impress us in states of sleep or reverie, the exaltation that Tennyson described so graphically, when the soul lives for a time in cosmic loftiness and grandeur-the "thoughts ye cannot stay with brazen chains"? Granted during the hours of rest symposiums of kindred subliminal spirits having interests in common and free to intermingle; granted on such occasions unrestricted access on the part of every soul to the knowledge and experience and impulses and ideals cherished by every other soul, as well as to a cosmic reservoir of ideas therein stored or, for aught we know, produced-and thought transference during states of abstraction is rationally explained through creative communication. It were pleasant to feel that a contingent of our better thoughts is inspired by those we have loved, who when they appear in visions always appear as living, thinking, acting personalities, never as lifeless forms. Perhaps there lies in this latter fact a suggestion of that immortality which psychic vision and psychic audition incontestably prove in that they illustrate the power of the soul to operate as a discar

nate entity, as a spirit disentangled from the flesh.

The immateriality that exalts the operator in the suggestional procedure is the same that is freed permanently at the moment of death. Why should it cease to project aspirations, modify attitudes, communicate ideas, and uplift human natures, simply because it is forever done with the perishable body as an instrument of expression? If then, in the providence of God, disembodied spirits are free so to do, assuredly they have it in their power to communicate directly with us through impression of the double consciousness fused in the single human complex, and happy is that man who is susceptible to the reality of the unseen.

Spiritistic communication on this principle implies a plane of meeting infinitely higher than that of the common séance, where soul and daimon are supposed to communicate through the mind of an entranced medium who chatters a confused mass of trivialities and irrelevancies. The human soul intuitively abhors an intermediary. The idea of intercourse with the dead through the machinery of the séance is repugnant to reason, and cannot be reconciled with an exalted conception of the powers of disembodied spirits.