988. The true discoverers, however, show no wish to be thus sharply distinguished from ourselves. Their aim is a collaboration with us as close as may be possible. Some of them were on earth our own familiar friends; we have spoken with them in old days of this great enterprise; they have promised that they would call to us, if it were possible, with the message of their undying love. It may be that the most useful thing that some of us have done on earth has been to interest in this inquiry some spirit more potent than himself, who has passed into that world of un-guessed adventure, not forgetful of his friend.

The very faintness and incoherence of such a spirit's message, besides being a kind of indication that we are dealing with the imperfections of actual reality rather than with the smoothly finished products of mere imagination, does also in itself constitute a strong appeal to our gratitude and reverence. Not easily and carelessly do these spirits come to us, but after strenuous preparation, and with difficult fulfilment of desire. So came Tennyson's Persephone:-

"Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies All night across the darkness, and at dawn Falls on the threshold of her native land, And can no more. ..".

They commune with us, like Persephone, willing and eager, but "dazed and dumb with passing through at once from state to state." They cannot satisfy themselves with their trammelled utterance; they complain of the strange brain, the alien voice. What they are doing, indeed, they desire to do - this is their willing contribution to that universal scheme by which the higher helps the lower, and the stronger the weaker, through all the ideal relationships of the world of Life. But we on our part ought to remember that there may be a dignity in this very confusion, - a proof of persistent strong affection in the very hesitancies and bewilderments of some well-loved soul.

"After the tempest a still small voice." One may have listened perhaps, to the echoing pomp of some (Ecumenical Council, thundering its damnations Urbi et Orbi from an Infallible Chair; and yet one may find a more Christlike sanctity in the fragmentary whisper of one true soul, descending painfully from unimaginable brightness to bring strength and hope to kindred souls still prisoned in the flesh.

Vicit iter durum pietas. But here the effort has been, so to say, on the part of Anchises, not of Æneas; the piety of heaven towards earth rather than of earth towards heaven. It is some enfranchised soul - some soul, like George Eliot's, filled to the brim with loving pity for struggling lives on "the dark globe" - which has penetrated the world-old secret, and has piloted the innavigable way.

Beyond us still is mystery; but it is mystery lit and mellowed with an infinite hope. We ride in darkness at the haven's mouth; but sometimes through rifted clouds we see the desires and needs of many generations floating and melting upwards into a distant glow, "up through the light of the seas by the moon's long-silvering ray".

The high possibilities that lie before us, should be grasped once for all, in order that the dignity of the quest may help to carry the inquirer through many disappointments, deceptions, delays. But he must remember that this inquiry must be extended over many generations; nor must he allow himself to be persuaded that there are byways to mastery. I will not say that there cannot possibly be any such thing as occult wisdom, or dominion over the secrets of nature ascetically or magically acquired. But I will say that every claim of this kind which my colleagues or I have been able to examine has proved deserving of complete mistrust; and that we have no confidence here any more than elsewhere in any methods except the open, candid, straightforward methods which the spirit of modern science demands.

All omens point towards the steady continuance of just such labour as has already taught us all we know. Perhaps, indeed, in this complex of interpenetrating spirits our own effort is no individual, no transitory thing. That which lies at the root of each of us lies at the root of the Cosmos too. Our struggle is the struggle of the Universe itself; and the very Godhead finds fulfilment through our upward-striving souls.