[The following formed originally a Presidential Address to the Society for Psychical Research, delivered in May, 1900. Hence the allusion to the personal position occupied by the author in that Society during that year. - Editors].

When I heard, in absence from England, that the Council of this Society had done me the honour of electing me as its President for the current year, I felt that a certain definite stage in the Society's evolution had been reached at an earlier date than I should originally have expected.

My predecessors in this Chair, I need not say, have, without exception, been men of the highest distinction. The list has included men whose leadership would confer honour on any body of men whatever; - on such bodies, for instance, as the British Association or the House of Commons. We have been grateful to these eminent persons for lending the sanction of their names to our early beginnings. And we have other names in reserve of similar distinction; - destined, I hope, some day to adorn our list of Presidents. Yet for the current year the Council have preferred to choose a man who has little claim to such a distinction, beyond the fact that he has worked for the objects which our Society seeks, from days even before the Society's formation;- and that he is determined to go on thus working so long as his faculties may allow. So have our friends chosen; and if a man may speak thus of his own election, I think that the choice is appropriate enough. For the time has come when we may fairly indicate to the world that we believe our Society can stand on its own bottom; that it carries on a branch of scientific work which, although novel and tentative, is legitimate and honourable; and therefore that we do not need to put forward in its prominent positions only those names which have been made independently illustrious by good work of other kinds performed elsewhere.

As representing the principle that the plain, unadorned Psychical Researcher is just as respectable in his own way as anybody else, I am proud indeed to see my humbler name inscribed after the names of Henry Sidgwick, Balfour Stewart, Arthur Balfour, William James, and William Crookes.

But here one thought must rise - must rise for all who knew the early days of this research, but most of all for me - Would that Edmund Gurney were standing where I stand now ! For us who knew him best the years since he left us have but served to illustrate his uniqueness and to deepen his memory; have made us feel how much of the humorous adventure, the sympathetic fellowship, the deep delight of this research of ours has with him passed irrevocably away. On the lighter side of things, we can never renew the intellectual enjoyment of those years of our small beginnings spent at his side; - watching how his flashing irony, his fearless dialectic, dealt with the attacks which then poured in from every quarter; - with the floundering platitudes of obscurantist orthodoxy, or with the smug sneers of popular science, belittling what it will not try to understand. On the graver side, we shall hardly see another example of just that attitude of mind with which Gurney entered on this research, - and which made for us so deep an element in his incomparable charm.

For in that many-chorded nature sympathy was the deepest strain; - sympathy which flowed forth indeed to those he loved in such penetrating and intimate tenderness as few mortals have had the happiness to know, - but which expended itself more widely in a profound compassion for the multiform sorrows of men. And thus, as needs must happen in those responsive minds which hear, in the Apostle's words, the whole creation groaning and travailing until now, there came to him the conviction that the question of life after death was the only test which we could really apply to the existence of a Providence; - nay, that it was no mere articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesice, but in sombre earnest, for all humankind, the articulus stantis aut cadentis Dei. Strangely enough, it was for others rather than for himself that Gurney desired this great possibility; his own mournful and stoic temper dwelt little on any personal hope. But he felt that if the First Cause has summoned into life on earth, though it were but one single man alone, miserable amid all the happy; - one single soul foredoomed to eternal protest and inescapable woe; - then that First Cause is not a God to whom a good man can offer love, or a just man worship.

Alas! how many theologies does this clear moral axiom shrivel as with burning fire! how many philosophies does it scatter to the winds! - philosophies of men walking delicately on wordy bridges across the grim abyss of things, - satisfied that the world is well enough, while round them wronged, degraded lives by millions are perishing in agony and for ever. It was in response to such easy optimism that Gurney's logic was the most intolerably trenchant, his sombre silence the fullest of sad scorn; - for in truth this contented blindness of sealed spirits is in itself the vilest woe of man. He could not avert his eyes, and disport himself in a fool's Paradise. He could not weave a web of words, and stifle in a philosopher's dream. Suffer me to apply to my friend for a moment even those lofty lines in which a great poet has invoked the greatest:-

"Thou that seest universal Nature moved by universal Mind; Thou, majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of humankind".

It is well that this noble figure should stand at the entrance of our research;- should show how unselfish may be the impulse which has prompted to eager labour, - eager even beyond the limit which physical powers allowed. But assuredly the mass of us Psychical Researchers have no need whatever of heroic virtue. We have enough and to spare of such motives as appeal to ordinary men. We have the stimulus of intellectual curiosity, - more richly satisfied, I think, in ours than in any other quest; - and beyond this most of us, I think, have the healthful, primary desire for the prolongation - the endless prolongation - of life and happiness. I know, indeed, that for various reasons some men of strong and high nature, as well as many men of feebler nature, do fail to feel this desire; but on the whole one must regard that form of Welt-Schmerz as but a passing mood of our race's immaturity, - as what physicians call a neurosis of development; - one must admit that usually when a man cares little for existence this is because existence cares little for him, and that it has been doubt as to the value of life and love which has made the decadence of almost all civilisations.