as
history went on; while the aberrant and inconstant variations, not
being similarly preserved, disappeared from being, wandered off as
unrelated vagrants, or else remained so imperfectly connected with the
part of the world that had grown regular as only to manifest their
existence by occasional lawless intrusions, like those which "psychic"
phenomena now make into our scientifically organized world. On such a
view, these phenomena ought to remain "pure bosh" forever, that is,
they ought to be forever intractable to intellectual methods, because
they should not yet be organized enough in themselves to follow any
laws. Wisps and shreds of the original chaos, they would be connected
enough with the cosmos to affect its periphery every now and then, as
by a momentary whiff or touch or gleam, but not enough ever to be
followed up and hunted down and bagged. Their relation to the cosmos
would be tangential solely.

Looked at dramatically, most occult phenomena make just this sort of
impression. They are inwardly as incoherent as they are outwardly
wayward and fitful. If they express anything, it is pure "bosh," pure
discontinuity, accident, and disturbance, with no law apparent but to
interrupt, and no purpose but to baffle. They seem like stray vestiges
of that primordial irrationality, from which all our rationalities have
been evolved.

To settle dogmatically into this bosh-view would save labor, but it
would go against too many intellectual prepossessions to be adopted
save as a last resort of despair. Your psychical researcher therefore
bates no jot of hope, and has faith that when we get our data numerous
enough, some sort of rational treatment of them will succeed.

When I hear good people say (as they often say, not without show of
reason), that dabbling in such phenomena reduces us to a sort of jelly,
disintegrates the critical faculties, liquifies the character, and
makes of one a _gobe-mouche_ generally, I console myself by thinking of
my friends Frederic Myers and Richard Hodgson. These men lived
exclusively for psychical research, and it converted both to spiritism.
Hodgson would have been a man among men anywhere; but I doubt whether
under any other baptism he would have been that happy, sober and
righteous form of energy which his face proclaimed him in his later
years, when heart and head alike were wholly satisfied by his
occupation. Myers' character also grew stronger in every particular
for