o I will turn to the more general positive question of
whether superhuman unities of consciousness should be considered as
more probable or more improbable.

In a former lecture I went over some of the fechnerian reasons for
their plausibility, or reasons that at least replied to our more
obvious grounds of doubt concerning them. The numerous facts of
divided or split human personality which the genius of certain medical
men, as Janet, Freud, Prince, Sidis, and others, have unearthed were
unknown in Fechner's time, and neither the phenomena of automatic
writing and speech, nor of mediumship and 'possession' generally, had
been recognized or studied as we now study them, so Fechner's stock of
analogies is scant compared with our present one. He did the best with
what he had, however. For my own part I find in some of these abnormal
or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior
co-consciousness being possible. I doubt whether we shall ever
understand some of them without using the very letter of Fechner's
conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth's
inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when the
threshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut out
leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us. But those
regions of inquiry are perhaps too spook-haunted to interest an
academic audience, and the only evidence I feel it now decorous to
bring to the support of Fechner is drawn from ordinary religious
experience. I think it may be asserted that there _are_ religious
experiences of a specific nature, not deducible by analogy or
psychological reasoning from our other sorts of experience. I think
that they point with reasonable probability to the continuity of
our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from which
the ordinary prudential man (who is the only man that scientific
psychology, so called, takes cognizance of) is shut off. I shall begin
my final lecture by referring to them again briefly.

LECTURE VIII

CONCLUSIONS

At the close of my last lecture I referred to the existence of
religious experiences of a specific nature. I must now explain just
what I mean by such a claim. Briefly, the facts I have in mind may
all be described as experiences of an unexpected life succeeding upon
death. By this I don't mean immortality, or the death of the body. I
mean the deathlike termination of certain mental processes within th