een called in to aid in
evoking the spirits, the reason why it is as potent now as ever it
was in aiding the spirits to manifest themselves, is simple enough:
the rhythmic vibrations of music set in active motion the magnetic
waves through whose means alone the two worlds, spiritual and
material, can hold communication. The quality and the value of these
vibrations depend mainly, no doubt, upon the magnetic power,
conscious or other, of the musician, but partly also upon the kind of
instrument used. The vibrations awakened by stringed instruments have
been long known to be more subtle than any others: instruments of the
violin kind are of course the most subtle of all. Doubtless this is
why among the Welsh hills the old saying used to be "The spirits
follow the crwth."'

'Which folly is the more besotted,' I said, as I read and re-read the
marginalia--'that of the scholar with his scientific nonsense about
vibrations, or that of the ignorant Gypsy with her living mullos
drawn through the air by music and love?'

But now my eyes fell upon a very different kind of marginal note
which ran thus:--

'The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth
and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in
Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of
the nineteenth.

'The warring of the two impulses governing man (and probably not man
only, but the entire world of conscious life)--the impulse of
acceptance, the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the
phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront
these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder--will occupy all the
energies of the next century.

'The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its
infancy has to come back--has to triumph--before the morning of the
final emancipation of man can dawn.

'But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those
in which it was exercised in the past. The materialism which at this
moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of evolution
will go. Against their own intentions certain scientists are showing
that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not the
creature of organism--is a something outside the material world, a
something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal
expression.

'The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the
testimony of the senses, is begi