erant
derision, which is the Englishman's attitude towards whatsoever is without
his own contracted ken, my article, the work of months, was dismissed and
forgotten in a few days. I had essayed the stupendous feat of awaking the
British nation to a new idea, and the British nation had responded with a
characteristic snore of unfathomable indifference. My name has not
appeared in its vermin press from that day to this; it was not mentioned
in the paragraph about the psychic photographer which went the rounds
about a year ago. Yet I was that photographer. I am the serious and
accredited inquirer to whom the London hospitals refused admittance to
their pauper deathbeds, thronged though those notoriously are by the raw
material of the British medical profession. Begin at the bottom of the
British medical ladder, and you are afforded the earliest and most
frequent opportunities of studying (if not accelerating) the phenomena of
human dissolution; but against the foreign scientist the door is closed,
without reference either to the quality of his credentials or the purity
of his aims. I can conceive no purer and no loftier aim than mine. It is
as high above that of your ordinary physician as heaven itself is high
above this earth. Your physician wrestles with death to lengthen life,
whereas I would sacrifice a million lives to prove that there is no such
thing as death; that this human life of ours, by which we set such
childish store, is but a fleeting phase of the permanent life of the
spirit. One shrinks from setting down so trite a truism; it is the common
ground of all religion, but I have reached it from the opposite pole.
Religion is to me the unworthy triumph of instinct over knowledge, a lazy
substitution of invention for discovery. Religion invites us to take her
postulates on trust; but a material age is deserving of material proofs,
and it is these proofs I have striven to supply. Surely it is a higher
aim, and not a lower, to appeal to the senses that cannot deceive, rather
than to the imagination which must and does? But I am trenching after all
upon ground which I myself have covered before to-day; it is my function
to-night to relate a personal narrative rather than to reiterate personal
views. Suffice it that to me, for many years, the only path to the
Invisible has been the path of so-called spiritualism; the only lamp that
illumined that path, so that all who saw might follow it for themselves,
t