753. And yet it is by no means needful, it would be by no means wise, to close even this earlier branch of the inquiry without some few words on its ethical, its religious aspect. If one hopes to influence opinion, one must realise where that opinion at present stands which one would fain lead into further truth. The novelties of this book are intended to work upon preconceptions which are ethical quite as much as intellectual. It would be mere pedantry to avoid all mention of ethical implications, when matters are touched upon which the majority of thinking men are agreed to regard from a point of view which is as yet ethical rather than scientific. If the new facts, of such far-reaching import, are to enter deeply into the consciousness of our race, they must be seen to be morally, as well as intellectually, coherent and acceptable.

For the most part, indeed, such discussion may be postponed to my concluding chapter. But one point already stands out from the evidence - at once so important and so manifest, that it seems well to call attention to it at once - as a solvent more potent than any Lucretius could apply to human superstition and human fears.

In this long string of narratives, complex and bizarre though their details may be, we yet observe that the character of the appearance varies in a definite manner with their distinctness and individuality. Haunting phantoms, incoherent and unintelligent, may seem restless and unhappy. But as they rise into definiteness, intelligence, individuality, the phantoms rise also into love and joy. I cannot recall one single case of a proved posthumous combination of intelligence with wickedness. Such evil as our evidence will show us, - we have as yet hardly come across it in this book - is scarcely more than monkeyish mischief, childish folly. In dealing with automatic script, for instance, we shall have to wonder whence come the occasional vulgar jokes or silly mystifications. We shall discuss whether they are a kind of dream of the automatist's own, or whether they indicate the existence of unembodied intelligences on the level of the dog or the ape. But, on the other hand, all that world-old conception of Evil Spirits, of malevolent Powers, which has been the basis of so much of actual devil-worship and of so much more of vague supernatural fear; - all this insensibly melts from the mind as we study the evidence before us.

Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.

Here surely is a fact of no little meaning. Our narratives have been collected from men and women of many types, holding all varieties of ordinary opinion. Yet the upshot of all these narratives is to emphasise a point which profoundly differentiates the scientific from the superstitious view of spiritual phenomena. The terror which shaped primitive theologies still tinges for the populace every hint of intercourse with disembodied souls. The transmutation of savage fear into scientific curiosity is of the essence of civilisation. Towards that transmutation each separate fragment of our evidence, with undesigned concordance, indisputably tends. In that faintly opening world of spirit I can find nothing worse than living men; I seem to discern not an intensification but a disintegration of selfishness, malevolence, pride. And is not this a natural result of any cosmic moral evolution? If the selfish man (as Marcus Antoninus has it) "is a kind of boil or imposthume upon the universe," must not his egoistic impulses suffer in that wider world a sure, even if a painful, decay; finding no support or sustenance among those permanent forces which maintain the stream of things?