975. There is, however, one feeling which has done much to deter inquiry in these directions. To many minds there seems to be a want of dignity in this mode of acquiring knowledge of an unseen world. It is felt that even as there is something grand and noble in the object, there ought to be something correspondingly exalted in the means employed. This has, it is thought, been the case with all former revelations which have made any serious claim on the attention of mankind. Religions have been supported by tradition, by miracle, by the deep personal emotion which they have been able to generate. There is something paltry or even repugnant in the notion of establishing a new faith upon a series of experiments dealing mainly with certain kinds of physical sensibility which seem at best to be scattered at random among mankind.

There is real prima facie force in such an objection. It is not fanciful to demand something of manifest congruity between means and end; not fanciful, at any rate, to distrust any powers merely of the flesh as explaining to us the powers of the spirit.

And yet, on a wider view, we shall perceive that what is missing in this new inquiry lies merely in such elements of impressiveness as befit the mere childhood of the world; while, on the other hand, we are gaining for the quest of spiritual truth that truer dignity which Science has given to man's scattered knowledge; - the dignity of universal cogency and of unarrested progressiveness. Science, as we know, will not rest with complacency in presence of the exceptional, the catastrophic, the miraculous. Such qualities constitute for her not a claim to reverence but a challenge to explanation. She' finds a truer grandeur in the colligation of startling phenomena under some comprehensive generalisation. Her highest ideal is cosmic law; - and she begins to suspect that any law which is truly cosmic is also in some sense evolutionary.

Now I repeat, - and in the present stage of human thought it can scarcely be repeated too often, - that in the law of telepathy, developing into the law of spiritual intercommunication between incarnate and dis-carnate spirits, we see dimly adumbrated before our eyes the highest law with which our human science can conceivably have to deal. The discovery of telepathy opens before us a potential communication between all life. '

And if, as our present evidence indicates, this telepathic intercourse can subsist between embodied and disembodied souls, that law must needs lie at the very centre of cosmic evolution. It will be evolutionary, as depending on a faculty now in actual course of development. It will be cosmic; for it may - it almost must - by analogy subsist not on this planet only, but wherever in the universe discarnate and incarnate spirits may be intermingled or juxtaposed.

This surely is a generalisation as vast, as impressive, as the human mind can entertain. Tradition, miracle, personal emotion; - which of these ancient buttresses is any longer needed for the firmer, the scientific faith? And yet, if it be a question of tradition, what single religion can unite and harmonise oecumenical tradition like this old-new creed? The legendary lore of all countries, - the sacred books of all religions, - the Bible itself included, - are full of psychical phenomena which thus only are made coherent and intelligible. If there be question of miracle, what sacred history can show such strange apparent contraventions of the physical order, - such victories over the grossness of matter, - as our observations involve? - or (better still) can reduce all these so convincingly under the realm of Higher Law? While as for personal emotion; - what can there be at once more intimate and more exalting than the waking reality of converse with beloved and enfranchised souls? So shall a man feel the ancient fellow-labour deepened, the old kinship closer still; the earthly passion sealed and hallowed by the irreversible judgment of the Blest.

976. Among the cases of trance discussed in this chapter, we have found intimately interwoven with the phenomena of possession many instances of its correlative, - ecstasy. Mrs. Piper's fragmentary utterances and visions during her passage from trance to waking life, - utterances and visions that fade away and leave no remembrance in her waking self; Moses' occasional visions, his journeys in the "spirit world" which he recorded on returning to his ordinary consciousness; Home's entrancement and converse with the various controls whose messages he gave; - all these suggest actual excursions of the incarnate spirit from its organism. The theoretical importance of these spiritual excursions is, of course, very great. It is, indeed, so great that most men will hesitate to accept a thesis which carries us straight into the inmost sanctuary of mysticism; which preaches "a precursory entrance into the most holy place, as by divine transportation".

Yet I think that this belief, although extreme, is not, at the point to which our evidence has carried us, in any real way improbable. To put the matter briefly, if a spirit from outside can enter the organism, the spirit from inside can go out, can change its centre of perception and action, in a way less complete and irrevocable than the change of death. Ecstasy would thus be simply the complementary or correlative aspect of spirit-control. Such a change need not be a spatial change, any more than there need be any spatial change for the spirit which invades the deserted organism. Nay, further: if the incarnate spirit can in this manner change its centre of perception in response (so to say) to a discarnate spirit's invasion of the organism, there is no obvious reason why it should not do so on other occasions as well. We are already familiar with "travelling clairvoyance," a spirit's change of centre of perception among the scenes of the material world. May there not be an extension of travelling clairvoyance to the spiritual world? a spontaneous transfer of the centre of perception into that region from whence discarnate spirits seem now to be able, on their side, to communicate with growing freedom?

The conception of ecstasy - at once in its most literal and in its most lofty sense - has thus developed itself, almost insensibly, from several concurrent lines of actual modern evidence. It must still, of course, be long before we can at all adequately separate, - I can hardly say the objective from the subjective element in the experience, for we have got beyond the region where the meaning of those words is clear, - but the element in the experience which is recognised and responded to by spirits other than the ecstatic's, from the element which belongs to his own spirit alone.

In the meantime, however, the fact that this kind of communion of ecstasy has been, in preliminary fashion, rendered probable is of the highest importance for our whole inquiry. We thus come directly into relation with the highest form which the various religions known to men have assumed in the past.