t by any arguments drawn from the domain of
human experience. Such is the shape which it seems to me that, in
the present state of philosophy, the hypothesis of a future life must
assume. We have nothing to say to gross materialistic notions of ghosts
and bogies, and spirits that upset tables and whisper to ignorant vulgar
women the wonderful information that you once had an aunt Susan. The
unseen world imagined in our hypothesis is not connected with the
present material universe by any such "invisible bonds" as would allow
Bacon and Addison to come to Boston and write the silliest twaddle in
the most ungrammatical English before a roomful of people who have never
learned how to test what they are pleased to call the "evidence of
their senses." Our hypothesis is expressly framed so as to exclude all
intercourse whatever between the unseen world of spirit unconditioned
by matter and the present world of spirit conditioned by matter in which
all our experiences have been gathered. The hypothesis being framed in
such a way, the question is, What has philosophy to say to it? Can
we, by searching our experiences, find any reason for adopting such an
hypothesis? Or, on the other hand, supposing we can find no such reason,
would the total failure of experimental evidence justify us in rejecting
it?

The question is so important that I will restate it. I have imagined a
world made up of psychical phenomena, freed from the material conditions
under which alone we know such phenomena. Can we adduce any proof of the
possibility of such a world? Or if we cannot, does our failure raise the
slightest presumption that such a world is impossible?

The reply to the first clause of the question is sufficiently obvious.
We have no experience whatever of psychical phenomena save as manifested
in connection with material phenomena. We know of Mind only as a group
of activities which are never exhibited to us except through the medium
of motions of matter. In all our experience we have never encountered
such activities save in connection with certain very complicated
groupings of highly mobile material particles into aggregates which we
call living organisms. And we have never found them manifested to a
very conspicuous extent save in connection with some of those specially
organized aggregates which have vertebrate skeletons and mammary glands.
Nay, more, when we survey the net results of our experience up to the
present time, we find ind