drugs, by hypnosis, by crystal-gazing, by purposed inattention; and also that the state can occur occasionally without provocation, during sleep and during trance.'

What, then, Professor Lodge asks, is the source of the intelligence manifested during the continuance of a state such as this? Of all the cases of which Professor Lodge. is cognisant, directly or indirectly, he thinks the most striking are the trance state of Mrs. Piper, and the au'tomatism of such writers as Mrs. Newman.' We must again quote verbatim :—

'Mrs. Piper in the trance state is undoubtedly (I use the word in the strongest sense; I have absolutely no more doubt on the subject than I have of any friend's ordinary knowledge of me and other men)Mrs. Piper's trance personality is undoubtedly aware of much to which she has no kind of ordinarily recognised clue, and of which in her ordinary state she knows nothing. But how does she get this knowledge? She herself, when in the trance state, asserts that she gets it by conversing with the deceased friends and relatives of people present. And that this is a genuine opinion of hers-that is, that the process feels like that to her unconscious or subconscious mind, the part of her which calls itself Phinuit-I am fully prepared to believe. But that does not carry us very far towards a knowledge of what the process actually is.

Conversation implies speaking with the mouth, and when receiving or asking information she is momentarily in a deeper slumber, and certainly not occupied in speech. At times, indeed, slight mutterings of one-sided questions and replies are heard, very like the mutterings of a person in sleep undergoing a vivid dream.'

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Dream is certainly the ordinary person's nearest approach to the Phinuit condition, and the fading of recollection as the conscious memory returns is also paralleled by the waking of Mrs. Piper out of the trance. But, instead of a nearly passive dream, it is more nearly allied to the somnambulic state, though the activity, far from being chiefly locomotory, is mainly mental and only partially muscular.

'She is in a state of somnambulism in which the mind is more active than the body; and the activity is so different from her ordinary activity, she is so distinctly a different sort of person, that she quite appropriately calls herself by another name.

It is natural to ask, Is she still herself? But it is a question difficult to answer, unless "herself" be defined. It is her mouth that is speaking, and I suppose her brain and nerves are working the oral muscles; but they are not working in the customary way, nor does the mind manifested thereby at all resemble her mind. Until indeed the meaning of identity can be accurately specified, I find it difficult to discuss the question whether she or another person is really speaking.'

We hardly know whether it adds to or diminishes the difficulty that the other person' in the case is very often

dead. Professor Lodge says that some light is thrown upon this obscure point by the waking experience of Mrs. Newman, the widow of the late Rev. P. H. Newman. In her case the mouth does not speak, but the hand writes, and writes matter not in the mind of the writer. The hand writes, and whilst the conscious mind of the writer is otherwise engaged, the hand is guided by her subconscious or by some other mind.

'The instructive feature about the latter phenomenon is,' continues Professor Lodge, that the minds apparently influencing the hand are not so much those of dead as of living people. The great advantage of this is that they can be catechised afterwards about their share in the transaction; and it then appears that, although the communication purporting to be from them really does convey what they were doing or thinking-in fact, what they might have written-yet actually they know nothing about the writing, neither the muscular fact nor the intelligent substance.'

Sometimes, however, the connexion between the two minds is consciously reciprocal; but Mrs. Newman's experience shows that it need not be so.

'Since the living communicant is not aware of the fact that he is dictating the handwriting, so the dead person need not be consciously operating; and thus conceivably the hand of the automatist may be influenced by minds other than his own, minds both living and dead (by one apparently as readily as by the other), but not by a conscious portion of the mind of any one; by the subconscious or dreamy portion, if by any portion at all.

'When Phinuit, then, or Mrs. Piper in the trance state, reports conversations which she has had with other minds (usually in Phinuit's case with persons deceased), and even when the voice changes and messages come apparently from those very people themselves, it does not follow that they themselves are necessarily aware of the fact, nor need their conscious mind (if they have any) have anything whatever to do with the process.

The signature of an automatist's hand is equivalent to the assertion that Miss X., for instance, is deliberately writing; Phinuit's statement is equally an assertion that Mr. E. is deliberately speaking; and the one statement may be no more a lie than the other is a forgery, and yet neither need be what is ordinarily called "true."

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That this community of mind or possibility of distant interchange or one-sided reception of thoughts exists is to me perfectly clear and certain. I venture further to say that persons who deny the bare fact, expressed as I here wish to express it without any hypothesis, are simply ignorant. They have not studied the facts of the subject. It may be for lack of opportunity, it may be for lack of inclination; they are by no means bound to investigate it unless they choose; but any dogmatic denials which such persons may now perpetrate will

henceforth, or in the very near future, redound to the discredit, not of the phenomena thus ignorantly denied, but of themselves, the overconfident and presumptuous deniers.

'We must not too readily assume that the apparent action of one mind on another is really such an action. The impression received may come from an ostensible agent; but it may come from a third person; or, again, it may, as some think more likely, come from some central mind or Zeitgeist, to which all ordinary minds are related and by which they are influenced. If it could be shown that the action is a syntonic or sympathetic connexion between a pair of minds, then it might be surmised that the action is a physical one, properly to be expressed as occurring directly between brain and brain, or body and body. On the other hand, the action may conceivably be purely psychological, and the distant brain may be stimulated not by the intervention of anything physical or material, but in some more immediate manner, from its psychological instead of from its physiological side.'

Does telepathy operate through a physical mechanism ? Is the power of operating upon the minds of terrestrial persons confined to living terrestrial people? To put these questions to the test of crucial experiment' Professor Lodge declares to be desirable, though difficult. As for intrinsic probabilities, he would expect to find other regions many-peopled, and with extraordinary variety; and, since mental action is conspicuous on the earth, he expects to find it existent elsewhere:

'If life is necessarily associated with a material carcase, then no doubt the surface of one of the many lumps of matter must be the scene of its activity; but if any kind of mental action is independent of material or physical environment, then it may conceivably be that the psychical population is not limited to the material lumps, but may luxuriate either in the interstellar spaces or in some undimensional forms of existence of which we have no conception.'

Now, every one acquainted with the proceedings of the Psychical Research Society is aware that the utterances of Phinuit and others, and the writings of automatists, abound 'with communications purporting to come from minds not now ' associated with terrestrial matter,' and the difficulty is to settle by experiment whether the claim is well founded. It may be that these communications have really been telepathed' from some living mind, for Professor Lodge finds it difficult to establish that the substance of the communication is known only to the dead. Perhaps some of our readers may be willing to act upon his curious suggestion, and make trial of what he describes as a severe, though not

absolutely conclusive, test. Here, again, we must give his own words:

'Responsible people ought to write an 1 deposit specific documents, for the purpose of posthumously communicating them to some one, if they can, taking all reasonable precautions against fraud and collusion; and also, which is, perhaps, a considerable demand, taking care that they do not forget the contents themselves.

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But, after all, even if this were successfully achieved, the proof to us of mental action on the part of the deceased agent" is still incomplete, for it may be that they are done by clairvoyance; that the document, though still scaled or enclosed in metal, is read in some unknown or fourth-dimensional manner by the subliminal self.'

Perhaps we had better wait till the thing is done before we account for the doing of it. A further question which Professor Lodge wishes to bring to an experimental test is whether it is possible to become aware of events before they have occurred, an affirmative answer to which question might, he thinks, vitally affect our metaphysical notions of 'Time,' but would not necessarily have any bearing on the existence in the universe of intelligences other than our

own:

'A cosmic picture-gallery,' as Mr. Myers calls it, or photographic or phonographic record of all that has occurred or will occur in the universe, may conceivably in some sense exist, and may be partly open and dimly decipherable to the lucid part of the automatist's or entranced person's mind.'

A last question is whether mental action can directlythat is, without the intervention of known physical means -affect matter; for example, can an entranced, or any other, person raise a chair or a table without pressing it up and without conjuring? Assertions that such events publicly occur are, says Professor Lodge, innumerable,' nay, photographs have been taken of tables soaring in air without visible support; and yet he finds difficulty in getting experimental proof of the fact, and the theory of collective hypnotism, or collective hallucination, is still open. We have ourselves seen photographs alleged to represent ghosts; and we are inclined to agree with the Professor 'that it may be desirable to get a phonographic record of the speech of a ghost, if it can be done. But (even eliminating fraud) there would be nothing crucial about this, unless one could be sure that the ghostseer has not in a somnambulic state spoken the necessary words into

the instrument itself.'

Now, we have given these lengthy extracts from Professor Lodge's lecture for two reasons. First, because they prove

conclusively that Mr. Balfour in no degree exaggerated the state of the case when he declared (referring to telepathy) that the Society is face to face not only with facts which are extraordinary in themselves, but with a kind of facts which do not fit in with anything we know at present in the region either of physics or of physiology;* facts which may make it necessary to reconsider our general view, if not of the material universe, at least of the universe of phenomena in time and space. Secondly, in order that, from these extracts, our readers may judge for themselves of the attitude of mind in which the Psychical Research Society approaches and conducts its investigations. We have so far abstained from all note and comment. We have not, to use the phrase of the Professor, 'perpetrated a dogmatic denial' of anything whatever. Still he is proposing to bring about a complete bouleversement of the conceptions of educated men as to their own world and the outside universe. We are not so fortunate as he is in enjoying the acquaintance of Mrs. Piper or Phinuit, and Mrs. Newman. But perhaps we may be allowed to remark that they are exceptionally gifted ladies, and to congratulate the Society upon numbering amongst its members those who can bring them into direct communication with the dead. Our readers will have observed that, though to have a mind on the spot' is, for mundane affairs' and ordinary purposes, useful enough, for brilliant achievement, such as is associated with genius, a hazy condition of the intellect is to be preferred. Poetic inspiration, it appears, seizes the poet when his senses are half-asleep! And a brown study, many will be glad to hear, is what upon a larger scale becomes a period of inspiration! The half-trance condition opens the mind to impressions to which the wide-awake condition is closed. Most men have probably, at some period of their lives, observed other men in a state closely akin to the initial condition of 'anaesthesia,' which is, we are told, so favourable a condition for receiving psychical impressions. Now, against all this we protest. We and the Psychical Research Society also are for the time being here on earth, and we cannot brush mundane affairs' aside. We shall require far stronger evidence than any we have yet seen to induce us to rank the half-asleep, or hypnotised, or half-intoxicated mind, for any mental purpose whatever, above the wide-awake, businesslike intellect which is on the spot.'

Proceedings of Psychical Research Society, vol. x. p. 11.