ngs,
stray bits of whose memory she is able to seize and use for her
purposes, without the spirit being any more aware of it than the sitter
is aware of it when his own mind is similarly tapped.

This is one possible way of interpreting a certain type of psychical
phenomenon. It uses psychological as well as "spiritual" factors, and
quite obviously it throws open for us far more questions than it
answers, questions about our subconscious constitution and its curious
tendency to humbug, about the telepathic faculty, and about the
possibility of an existent spirit-world.

I do not instance this theory to defend it, but simply to show what
complicated hypotheses one is inevitably led to consider, the moment
one looks at the facts in their complexity and turns one's back on the
_naive_ alternative of "revelation or imposture," which is as far as
either spiritist thought or ordinary scientist thought goes. The
phenomena are endlessly complex in their factors, and they are so
little understood as yet that off-hand judgments, whether of "spirits"
or of "bosh" are the one as silly as the other. When we complicate the
subject still farther by considering what connection such things as
rappings, apparitions, poltergeists, spirit-photographs, and
materializations may have with it, the bosh end of the scale gets
heavily loaded, it is true, but your genuine inquirer still is loath to
give up. He lets the data collect, and bides his time. He believes
that "bosh" is no more an ultimate element in Nature, or a really
explanatory category in human life than "dirt" is in chemistry. Every
kind of "bosh" has its own factors and laws; and patient study will
bring them definitely to light.

The only way to rescue the "pure bosh" view of the matter is one which
has sometimes appealed to my own fancy, but which I imagine few readers
will seriously adopt. If, namely, one takes the theory of evolution
radically, one ought to apply it not only to the rock-strata, the
animals and the plants but to the stars, to the chemical elements, and
to the laws of nature. There must have been a far-off antiquity, one
is then tempted to suppose, when things were really chaotic. Little by
little, out of all the haphazard possibilities of that time, a few
connected things and habits arose, and the rudiments of regular
performance began. Every variation in the way of law and order added
itself to this nucleus, which inevitably grew more considerable