farther than most, we must attribute to the medium faculties that have ceased to be human. She must have put herself in touch, whether by perception of events at a distance, or by transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, or again by subliminal clairvoyance, with the two surviving brothers of the deceased owner of the watch; and, in the past subconsciousness of those two brothers, distant from each other, she had to rediscover a host of circumstances which they themselves had forgotten and which lay hidden beneath the heaped-up dust and darkness of six-and-sixty years. It is certain that a phenomenon of this kind passes the bounds of the imagination and that we should refuse to credit it if, first of all, the experiment had not been controlled and certified by a man of the standing of Sir Oliver Lodge and if, moreover, it did not form one of a group of equally significant facts which clearly show that we are not here concerned with an absolutely unique miracle or with an unhoped-for and unprecedented concourse of coincidences. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained: that is another question. When, in connexion with electricity, we use such terms as positive, negative, induction, potential and resistance, we are also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of whose inward essence we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending better. There is, I insist, between these extraordinary manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the dead, but a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of extent or degree and in no wise a difference in kind.

For a discussion of these cases, which would take us too far from our subject, see Mr. J. G. Piddington’s paper, _Phenomena in Mrs. Thompson’s Trance_ (_Proceedings_, Vol. XVIII, pp. 180 _et seq._); also Professor A. C. Pigou’s article in Vol. XXIII (pp. 286 _et seq._), which treats of “Cross Correspondence” without the agency of spirits.

Our Eternity — Part 30