human faculty, that by most people as yet, the very existence, even as
a potentiality, of psychic powers, which some of us all the while are
consciously exercising every day, is scornfully denied and derided.
The situation is sadly ludicrous from the point of view of those who
appreciate the prospects of evolution, because mankind is thus
wilfully holding at arm's length, the knowledge that is essential to
its own ulterior progress. The maximum cultivation of which the human
intellect is susceptible while it denies itself all the resources of
its higher spiritual consciousness, can never be more than a
preparatory process as compared with that which may set in when the
faculties are sufficiently enlarged to enter into conscious
relationship with the super-physical planes or aspects of Nature.

For anyone who will have the patience to study the published results
of psychic investigation during the last fifty years, the reality of
clairvoyance as an occasional phenomenon of human intelligence must
establish itself on an immovable foundation. For those who, without
being occultists--students that is to say of Nature's loftier aspects,
in a position to obtain better teaching than that which any written
books can give--for those who merely avail themselves of recorded
evidence, a declaration on the part of others of a disbelief in the
possibility of clairvoyance, is on a level with the proverbial
African's disbelief in ice. But the experiences of clairvoyance that
have accumulated on the hands of those who have studied it in
connection with mesmerism, do no more than prove the existence in
human nature of a capacity for cognizing physical phenomena distant
either in space or time, in some way which has nothing to do with the
physical senses. Those who have studied the mysteries of clairvoyance
in connection with theosophic teaching have been enabled to realize
that the ultimate resources of that faculty range as far beyond its
humbler manifestations, dealt with by unassisted enquirers, as the
resources of the higher mathematics exceed those of the abacus.
Clairvoyance, indeed, is of many kinds, all of which fall easily into
their places when we appreciate the manner in which human
consciousness functions on different planes of Nature. The faculty of
reading the pages of a closed book, or of discerning objects
blindfold, or at a distance from the observer, is quite a different
faculty from that employed on the cognition of