d operation as every kind of religion
postulates. "Possession" is of course a fable; the superabundant
world-wide, world-old evidence for the phenomenon was thrust aside
without a glance, till hypnotic experiments brought to light what is
called "alternating personality." As though this name had explained
everything in accordance with materialism, forthwith it was permitted to
believe the aforesaid evidence, provided one laughed loudly enough at
the theory of "possession." It is allowed that the hypnotic patient may
in some sense be said to be "possessed" by the hypnotiser for the time
being; nay, even a certain chronic possession of this kind is
observable. But an invisible hypnotiser and possession by a disembodied
spirit is still out of fashion, notwithstanding all Mrs. Piper's efforts
and Dr. Hodgson's audacious declaration of his not very willing belief
that those who speak through her "are veritably the personalities they
claim to be, and that they have survived the change we call death."

Thought-transference, however, promises to be a potent and popular
solvent of psychic problems. Thought-transference was a supremely
ludicrous supposition till comparatively recently; nor could there be
any credible testimony for what was known antecedently to be quite
impossible. But some way or other, facts which demanded a name were
forced upon the direct observation of science, and so Mr. F. Podmore has
written a book in which, assuming thought-transference to be a
scientifically recognized possibility, he proceeds to reduce many of the
marvels collected by the S.P.R. to that simple and obvious cause, and to
reject the residue on the sound old principle that what is known to be
impossible cannot be true. Hallucinations, solitary and collective, and
other perplexing instances are tortured into cases of thought-transfer
with an ingenuity which we should smile at in a mediaeval scholastic
explaining the universe by the four elements and the four temperaments.
But is not thought-transference itself lamentably unscientific? No;
because we see that unconnected magnets affect one another
sympathetically; and the brain being a sort of magnet may well affect
distant brains. Thought is a kind of electricity, and electricity, if
not exactly a fluid, yet may some day be liquefied and bottled. At all
events, science has seen something very remotely analogous to
thought-transference and every whit as unintelligible and antecedently
incred