But still the central problem of man's being would remain unsolved. Life and thought could not be referred to the working either of aggregated molecules or of etherial undulations. To explain Life by these two environments would be as impossible as it had been to explain Light by the material environment alone. Might there not be yet another environment, - metetherial, spiritual, what you will? Was there any way of reducing this vast and vague problem of Life to manageable definiteness? Were there measurable traces of human faculty working in apparent independence of material or etherial law? Such traces, if he sought long enough, I maintain that he would assuredly find. He would find (as we have found) instances of telaesthesia, or perception beyond the sensory range; instances of telepathy, or direct communication from mind to mind; - nay, telepathic messages from the so-called dead; - signs and apparitions by which minds discarnate impressed themselves upon minds still robed in flesh. How far the ether, in some of its unknown properties, may be concerned in these operations, our Cosmotheorus might be better able to guess than we. To him, perhaps, no environment would seem discontinuous with any other environment.

But, at any rate, here would be definite traces of a new environment of Life and Thought; traces of the mutual action of minds, embodied and unembodied, in apparent independence of matter.

I must not here follow our imagined inquirer further; but surely we leave him launched upon a series of observations and experiments which have no inherent flaw in their basis, and no assignable limit to their scope.

I have dwelt at some length upon this line of argument, because I think that, in some form or other, it is our duty to have it always forthcoming, our duty to set it before the world in varying expression, until our age is really convinced that this great branch of knowledge, which deals with things unseen, can form no exception to those rules by which experience shows us that all valid knowledge has hitherto been won. So confident, indeed, do I feel in this gradual but certain method of approach - in this open, unfrequented way - that even if it had thus far failed to lead us to any discovery, I should feel bound to pursue it still. But it has not failed. This persistent analysis of unexplored faculty has revealed to us already far more than I, for one, had ever dared to hope. I may surely say with no more than the licensed exaggeration of epigram, that our method has revealed to us a hidden world within us, and that this hidden world within us has revealed to us an invisible world without.

Within each man, I say, there is a world of thought and of perception which lies outside the margin, beneath the threshold, deeper than the surface-tension of his conscious being.

"We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea".

We at any rate were among the earliest to attempt to explore and map out that strange, submerged region - half lumber-room and half king's-treasury - where amid things outworn lie things unborn, and possibilities of our unimaginable Future lurk among the exuviae of our immemorable Past. And yet in this confusion all is implicitly congruous and consecutive; each trace of faculty, whether it lie behind our actual stage of progress or before, belongs to a series of developments of personality whose terms have no assignable limit; - a series which carries us onward without a break, from dream and hallucination and bewilderment, up to the utterances of discarnate spirits and the visions of ecstasy.

For, in truth, from the mind's inward vision we may learn more than from the seeing of the eye; from inward audition more than from the hearing of the ear. The automatisms which steal their way upward from hidden depths to manifestation amid man's sensory perceptions and voluntary acts are found on analysis to contain elements of knowledge not attainable in any normal fashion. Such knowledge is shown in telepathic messages between living men, and in apparitions which tell of men dying, and in evidential messages from men whom we call dead. All this - in Phantasms of the Living and in fourteen volumes of Proceedings - I claim that we have adequately shown. And of late years we have advanced and consolidated these fragmentary and fugitive indications of the spirit's survival by certain records of trance-phenomena and spirit-possession;- records as yet inchoate and imperfect, yet which must needs be faced and dealt with by all serious men.

But here I must needs stay a moment to prevent any misunderstanding. Throughout this address, of course, I am speaking for myself alone. I am not giving utterance to any collective view, but to my own view of the general drift and result of our collective action. But at this point I know that most even of those who may have gone with me thus far will - and quite justifiably - suspend their adhesion. Few even of my own colleagues have had full reason to believe that matter of real importance has yet been received from behind the veil, and in the world at large the general impression that even those messages which look evidentially as though they had come from discarnate spirits are yet practically futile and incoherent is strongly and naturally operative in checking public interest in what seems so strangely baffling a research.

I will not now protest, as I might protest, against the accuracy of this general impression of the actual facts. Accepting it for the sake of argument, I will confine myself to one simple line of a priori reasoning, which seems to me sufficient to show what, in the supposed case, is our plain, scientific duty. I say, then, that if once it be admitted, - as we are now assuming, for argument's sake, that it is admitted, - that it is evidentially probable that some of these messages do indeed, in however indirect or confused a manner, emanate from an unseen world, - then it is a blasphemy against the faith of Science to doubt that they must ultimately prove to be of serious, of supreme importance.