a new intellectual interest; and the new altruism, a new moral one.
The reasons for doing one's best in this life, and doing it actively, are
so much stronger and clearer than they were when so many good people could
fall into asceticism and other-worldliness, that perhaps we are now fit to
be trusted with proofs of an after life. It is very suggestive that these
apparent proofs came contemporaneously with the new knowledge tending to
make them safe; and equally suggestive that it is when we have begun to
suffer from certain breakdowns in religion, that we have been provided
with new material for bracing it up.

At the opposite extreme, it also is suggestive that these new indications
that our present life is a petty thing beside a future one, have come just
when modern science has so increased our control over material nature that
we are in peculiar danger of having our interest in higher things buried
beneath material interests, and enervated by over-indulgence in material
delights.

If it be true that, roughly speaking, we are not entrusted with dangerous
things before we are evolved to the point where we can keep their danger
within bounds, the fact that we have not until very lately, if yet, been
entrusted with any verification of the dream of the survival of bodily
death, would seem to confer upon the spiritistic interpretation of the
recent apparent verifications, a pragmatic sanction--an accidental embryo
pun over which the historic student is welcome to a smile, and which,
since the preceding clause was written, I have seen used in all
seriousness by Professor Giddings. Conclusive or not, that "sanction" is
certainly an addition to the arguments that existed before, including the
general argument from evolution. And, so far as the phenomena go to
establish the spiritistic hypothesis, surely they are not to be lightly
regarded because as yet they do not establish it more conclusively.

* * * * *

When during the last century science bowled down the old supports of the
belief in immortality, there grew up a tendency to regard that belief as
an evidence of ignorance, narrowness, and incapacity to face the music.
May not disregard of the possible new supports be rapidly becoming an
evidence of the same characteristics?

When the majority of those who have really studied the phenomena of the
sensitives, starting with absolute skepticism, have come to a new form of
the old belief; a