acteristic of the charlatan,--but the fact that it
had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and
that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever
dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack,
spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the
genuineness of his attainments.

For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the
"man who knows." There was a trace of pity in his voice--contempt he
never showed--when he spoke of their methods.

"This classification of results is uninspired work at best," he said
once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years.
"It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is
playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it
would be, to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily
slip into place and explain themselves. For the sources are accessible,
and open to all who have the courage to lead the life that alone makes
practical investigation safe and possible."

And towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was
significantly sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power
was, and that what is commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than
a keen power of visualising.

"It connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more," he would
say. "The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds
a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction. And you
will find this always to be the real test."

Thus it was that John Silence, this singularly developed doctor, was
able to select his cases with a clear knowledge of the difference
between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction
that claimed his special powers. It was never necessary for him to
resort to the cheap mysteries of divination; for, as I have heard him
observe, after the solution of some peculiarly intricate problem--

"Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves, are
merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the
inner vision may become open. Once the method is mastered, no system is
necessary at all."

And the words were significant of the methods of this remarkable man,
the keynote of whose power lay, perhaps, more than anything else, in the
knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly,
that thought is dynamic