_know_--that is
enough--that we inhabit an invisible spiritual environment from which
help comes, our soul being mysteriously one with a larger soul whose
instruments we are.

One may therefore plead, I think, that Fechner's ideas are not without
direct empirical verification. There is at any rate one side of life
which would be easily explicable if those ideas were true, but of
which there appears no clear explanation so long as we assume either
with naturalism that human consciousness is the highest consciousness
there is, or with dualistic theism that there is a higher mind in the
cosmos, but that it is discontinuous with our own. It has always been
a matter of surprise with me that philosophers of the absolute should
have shown so little interest in this department of life, and so
seldom put its phenomena in evidence, even when it seemed obvious that
personal experience of some kind must have made their confidence in
their own vision so strong. The logician's bias has always been too
much with them. They have preferred the thinner to the thicker method,
dialectical abstraction being so much more dignified and academic than
the confused and unwholesome facts of personal biography.

In spite of rationalism's disdain for the particular, the personal,
and the unwholesome, the drift of all the evidence we have seems to
me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form
of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be
co-conscious. We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our
libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having
no inkling of the meaning of it all. The intellectualist objections
to this fall away when the authority of intellectualist logic is
undermined by criticism, and then the positive empirical evidence
remains. The analogies with ordinary psychology and with the facts of
pathology, with those of psychical research, so called, and with those
of religious experience, establish, when taken together, a decidedly
_formidable_ probability in favor of a general view of the world
almost identical with Fechner's. The outlines of the superhuman
consciousness thus made probable must remain, however, very vague, and
the number of functionally distinct 'selves' it comports and carries
has to be left entirely problematic. It may be polytheistically or
it may be monotheistically conceived of. Fechner, with his distinct
earth-soul functioning as our guardian angel, s