means at worst the waste of the hour for
each, five of them decline the adventure. I then beg the "Commission"
connected with the chair of a certain learned psychologist in a
neighboring university to examine the same medium, whom Mr. Hodgson and I
offer at our own expense to send and leave with them. They also have to
be excused from any such entanglement. I advise another psychological
friend to look into this medium's case, but he replies that it is
useless; for if he should get such results as I report, he would (being
suggestible) simply believe himself hallucinated. When I propose as a
remedy that he should remain in the background and take notes, whilst his
wife has the sitting, he explains that he can never consent to his wife's
presence at such performances. This friend of mine writes _ex cathedra_
on the subject of psychical research, declaring (I need hardly add) that
there is nothing in it; the chair of the psychologist with the Commission
was founded by a spiritist, partly with a view to investigate mediums;
and one of the five colleagues who declined my invitation is widely
quoted as an effective critic of our evidence. So runs the world away!
I should not indulge in the personality and triviality of such anecdotes,
were it not that they paint the temper of our time, a temper which,
thanks to Frederic Myers more than to any one, will certainly be
impossible after this generation. Myers was, I think, decidedly
exclusive and intolerant by nature. But his keenness for truth carried
him into regions where either intellectual or social squeamishness would
have been fatal, so he "mortified" his _amour propre_, unclubbed himself
completely, and became a model of patience, tact and humility wherever
investigation required it. Both his example and his body of doctrine
will make this temper the only one henceforward scientifically
respectable.

If you ask me how his doctrine has this effect, I answer: By
co-ordinating! For Myers' great principle of research was that in order
to understand any one species of fact we ought to have all the species of
the same general class of fact before us. So he took a lot of scattered
phenomena, some of them recognized as reputable, others outlawed from
science, or treated as isolated curiosities; he made series of them,
filled in the transitions by delicate hypotheses or analogies; and bound
them together in a system by his bold inclusive conception of the
Subliminal Sel