xtant who are willing and competent to study the
matter with both patience and rigor. If the Society lives long enough
for the public to become familiar with its presence, so that any
apparition, or house or person infested with unaccountable noises or
disturbances of material objects, will as a matter of course be
reported to its officers, we shall doubtless end by having a mass of
facts concrete enough to theorize upon. Its sustainers, therefore,
should accustom themselves to the idea that its first duty is simply to
exist from year to year and perform this recording function well,
though no conclusive results of any sort emerge at first. All our
learned societies have begun in some such modest way.

But one cannot by mere outward organization make much progress in
matters scientific. Societies can {307} back men of genius, but can
never take their place. The contrast between the parent Society and
the American Branch illustrates this. In England, a little group of
men with enthusiasm and genius for the work supplied the nucleus; in
this country, Mr. Hodgson had to be imported from Europe before any
tangible progress was made. What perhaps more than anything else has
held the Society together in England is Professor Sidgwick's
extraordinary gift of inspiring confidence in diverse sorts of people.
Such tenacity of interest in the result and such absolute impartiality
in discussing the evidence are not once in a century found in an
individual. His obstinate belief that there is something yet to be
brought to light communicates patience to the discouraged; his
constitutional inability to draw any precipitate conclusion reassures
those who are afraid of being dupes. Mrs. Sidgwick--a sister, by the
way, of the great Arthur Balfour--is a worthy ally of her husband in
this matter, showing a similarly rare power of holding her judgment in
suspense, and a keenness of observation and capacity for experimenting
with human subjects which are rare in either sex.

The _worker_ of the Society, as originally constituted, was Edmund
Gurney. Gurney was a man of the rarest sympathies and gifts.
Although, like Carlyle, he used to groan under the burden of his
labors, he yet exhibited a colossal power of dispatching business and
getting through drudgery of the most repulsive kind. His two thick
volumes on 'Phantasms of the Living,' collected and published in three
years, are a proof of this. Besides this, he had exquisite art