with Professor Barrett,
Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney, the Society for Psychical Research.
These men hoped that if the material were treated rigorously, and, as
far as possible experimentally, objective truth would be elicited, and
the subject rescued from sentimentalism on the one side and dogmatizing
ignorance on the other. Like all founders, Sidgwick hoped for a
certain promptitude of result; and I heard him say, the year before his
death, that if anyone had told him at the outset that after twenty
years he would be in the same identical state of doubt and balance that
he started with, he would have deemed the prophecy incredible. It
appeared impossible that that amount of handling evidence should bring
so little finality of decision.

My own experience has been similar to Sidgwick's. For twenty-five
years I have been in touch with the literature of psychical research,
and have had acquaintance with numerous "researchers." I have also
spent a good many hours (though far fewer than I ought to have spent)
in witnessing (or trying to witness) phenomena. Yet I am theoretically
no "further" than I was at the beginning; and I confess that at times I
have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended
this department of nature to remain _baffling_, to prompt our
curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure, so that,
although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits,
are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they
also can never be susceptible of full corroboration.

The peculiarity of the case is just that there are so many sources of
possible deception in most of the observations that the whole lot of
them _may_ be worthless, and yet that in comparatively few cases can
aught more fatal than this vague general possibility of error be
pleaded against the record. Science meanwhile needs something more
than bare possibilities to build upon; so your genuinely scientific
inquirer--I don't mean your ignoramus "scientist"--has to remain
unsatisfied. It is hard to believe, however, that the Creator has
really put any big array of phenomena into the world merely to defy and
mock our scientific tendencies; so my deeper belief is that we
psychical researchers have been too precipitate with our hopes, and
that we must expect to mark progress not by quarter-centuries, but by
half-centuries or whole centuries.

I am strengthened in this belief by my im