needed does
already exist, and appears in man's relations with his fellow-men,
then the transition to messages from the unseen will be so much the
less violent. We shall only be supposing that man can receive from the
disembodied a kind of message which he already receives from the
embodied, and which has no obvious dependence on a corporeal
embodiment. One single proved transmission, direct from mind to mind,
of the most trivial fact or percept, will do more to make communion
with the unseen _scientifically_ conceivable,--I do not say more to
make it _morally_ conceivable,--than all the poetry and all the
rhetoric which has ever stirred the hearts of men.

Such, on the one side, is my deductive argument from the very
conception of communication with unseen intelligences.

And do we, on the other hand, find, by empirical observation of the
phenomena around us, anything which indicates the existence of a
supernormal perceptivity such as theory would suggest? It is known to
readers of the Society for Psychical Research _Proceedings_ that we do
find such indications, scattered at first, and appearing unsought-for
amid the phenomena of mesmeric or somnambulic states; but now to some
slight extent isolated into distinctness, and brought under
experimental control.

To some slight extent only, I repeat; for the experiments thus far
made, although completely convincing to those who, like myself, have
witnessed many of them, under very varied conditions, have
nevertheless not yet passed into that desired stage at which one may
be able to repeat them before any observer, at any moment. At present
they are proved by the same kind of evidence as certain rare
pathological phenomena (I do not of course mean that telepathy is
itself in any way a morbid product)--phenomena such as those
surprising rises and falls of the human temperature which are
unpredictable, sporadic, and transitory, and must rest for their
evidence on the good faith and accuracy of comparatively few
observers.

Yet these telepathic experiments have a very hopeful side. Experience
has already shown that the phenomena may be developed at any moment,
between quite normal persons, and with no bad effects of any sort
whatever. Only we cannot tell except by actual trial, and trial of a
patient and careful kind, between _which_ persons, out of all mankind,
these telepathic messages can be made to run.

What we desire, then, what we ask of all who sympathize with