The rank and file of Spiritists have simply transferred to certain new dogmas - for most of which they at least have some comprehensible evidence - the uncritical faith which they were actually commended for bestowing on certain old dogmas, - for many of which the evidence was at least beyond their comprehension. In such a case ridicule is no remedy. The remedy lies, as I have said, in inculcating the intellectual virtues; - in teaching the mass of mankind that the maxims of the modern savant are at least as necessary to salvation as the maxims of the mediaeval saint.

Now here, I take it, lies the special, the characteristic duty of the Society for Psychical Research. It is a duty far wider than the mere exposure of fraud; far wider than the mere production of specimens of patient and intelligent investigation. Our duty is not the founding of a new sect, nor even the establishment of a new science, but is rather the expansion of Science herself until she can satisfy those questions which the human heart will rightly ask, but to which Religion alone has thus far attempted an answer. Or rather, this is the duty, the mission, of the coming century's leaders of spiritual thought. Our own more special duty is to offer through an age of transition more momentous than mankind has ever known, that help in steadying and stimulating psychical research all over the world which our collective experience should enable us richly to bestow. Such function ought, I say, to be ours indeed. We alone have taken the first steps to deserve it. I see our original programme completely justified. I see our raison d'etre indisputably established. I see all things coming to pass as we foresaw. What I do not see, alas ! is an energy and capacity of our own, sufficient for our widening duty; - enough of labourers for the vineyard so ripe for harvest.

Speaking, if so I may, for the remnant of that small company of labourers of the first hour of the day, I must confess that our strength, at least, cannot suffice for the expanding task; - nay, could not so suffice, even if Edmund Gurney were with us still; - non, si ipse meus nunc adforet Hector. Other workers, good men and true, have joined themselves to us; - but we have need of many more. We invite them from each department of science, from every school of thought. With equal confidence we appeal for co-operation to savant and to saint.

To the savant we point out that we are not trying to pick holes in the order of Nature, but rather, by the scrutiny of residual phenomena, to get nearer to the origin and operation of Nature's central mystery of Life. Men who realise that the etherial environment was discovered yesterday, need not deem it impossible that a metetherial environment - yet another omnipresent system of cosmic law - should be discovered to-morrow. The only valid a priori presumption in the matter is the presumption that the Universe is infinite in an infinite number of ways.

To the Christian we can speak with a still more direct appeal. "You believe," I would say, "that a spiritual world exists, and that it acted on the material world two thousand years ago. Surely it is so acting still! Nay, you believe that it is so acting still; for you believe that prayer is heard and answered. To believe that prayer is heard is to believe in telepathy, - in the direct influence of mind on mind. To believe that prayer is answered is to believe that unembodied spirit does actually modify (even if not storm-cloud or plague-germ) at least the minds, and therefore the brains, of living men. From that belief the most advanced 'psychical' theories are easy corollaries. You may reply, indeed, that the Church or the Bible has told men all of the unseen world that they need to know, and that whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil. What say you to this argument when it is retorted on you by Omar with his Koran?"

But let us cease to speak as though the infinite Unseen World were a mere preserve or battleground of theologies. If every dogma ever promulgated from the Vatican were literal truth, Science would still affirm that scarcely anything of that world was known. If Religion be more than "the guess of a worm in the dust, and the shadow of its desire," it must be (I say once more) the spirit's normal answer to objective fact. The Cosmos is what it is, and Revelation can do no more than reveal it. Holiness itself must be the reflection of a reality behind the veil. If this be so, then Science has come not to destroy but to fulfil; Religion must needs evolve into Knowledge; for Religion can in no age admit an aim narrower than the prayer of Cleanthes, - the willing response of the soul to all she knows of cosmic law.

Out of the long Stone Age our race is awakening into consciousness of itself. We stand in the dawn of history. Behind us lies a vast and unrecorded waste - the mighty struggle humanam condere gentem. Since the times of that ignorance we have not yet gone far; a few thousand years, a few hundred thinkers, have barely started the human mind upon the great aeons of its onward way. It is not yet the hour to sit down in our studies and try to eke out Tradition with Intuition - as one might be forced to do in a planet's senility, by the glimmer of a fading sun. Daphni, quid antiquos signorum suspicis ortus? The traditions, the intuitions of our race are themselves in their infancy; and before we abandon ourselves to brooding over them let us at least first try the upshot of a systematic search for actual facts. For what should hinder? If our inquiry lead us first through a jungle of fraud and folly, need that alarm us? As well might Columbus have yielded to the sailors' panic, when he was entangled in the Sargasso Sea. If our first clear facts about the Unseen World seem small and trivial, should that deter us from the quest? As well might Columbus have sailed home again, with America in the offing, on the ground that it was not worth while to discover a continent which manifested itself only by dead logs.

One final word to each main division of our critics; - to those first who have been disappointed so often that they refuse to listen to any further promise of news from the Unseen; - and then to those who, relying on some grander revelation, - whether received from without them or from within, - disdain our slow, collective process and comminuted fragments of truth. I would remind the Agnostic that a pike was once kept in the same tank with a perch. There was at first a sheet of glass between them, and the pike bruised his nose so often in snapping at the perch, that in time he gave up that endeavour, - as the Agnostic his endeavour after proof of a spiritual world, - with a sigh or a sneer. Then silently the transparent screen was removed; but now the pike was so convinced that his prey was unreachable, that, - like the Agnostic in presence of our new evidence, - he continued simply to let the perch alone.

For those other men I will resort to a bold metonymy, and will speak of that great incurrent truth to which each man severally holds under the figure of the great stone at Ephesus which fell down from Jupiter. The faithful who proclaimed that wondrous fall were essentially in the right, - were far more in the right than the freethinkers who derided it. But whence and why that stone had truly fallen, - how vast the significance of that cosmic trajectory and rushing flame, - this could be known only when humble labourers had catalogued many a lesser congener of the mighty mass; and had gathered the meteoric dust from the ocean's floor; and had learnt that no field of heaven had been found so desolate as not to carry still the impress of ultimate energy and universal law.