to each other with their leaves, and
Conanicut and Newport hear each other's fog-horns. But the trees also
commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also
hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum
of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but
accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a
mother-sea or reservoir. Our "normal" consciousness is circumscribed
for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is
weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the
otherwise unverifiable common connection. Not only psychic research,
but metaphysical philosophy, and speculative biology are led in their
own ways to look with favor on some such "panpsychic" view of the
universe as this. Assuming this common reservoir of consciousness to
exist, this bank upon which we all draw, and in which so many of
earth's memories must in some way be stored, or mediums would not get
at them as they do, the question is, What is its own structure? What
is its inner topography? This question, first squarely formulated by
Myers, deserves to be called "Myers' problem" by scientific men
hereafter. What are the conditions of individuation or insulation in
this mother-sea? To what tracts, to what active systems functioning
separately in it, do personalities correspond? Are individual
"spirits" constituted there? How numerous, and of how many hierarchic
orders may these then be? How permanent? How transient? And how
confluent with one another may they become?

What again, are the relations between the cosmic consciousness and
matter? Are there subtler forms of matter which upon occasion may
enter into functional connection with the individuations in the psychic
sea, and then, and then only, show themselves?--So that our ordinary
human experience, on its material as well as on its mental side, would
appear to be only an extract from the larger psycho-physical world?

Vast, indeed, and difficult is the inquirer's prospect here, and the
most significant data for his purpose will probably be just these dingy
little mediumistic facts which the Huxleyan minds of our time find so
unworthy of their attention. But when was not the science of the
future stirred to its conquering activities by the little rebellious
exceptions to the science of the present? Hardly, as yet, has the
surface of the facts called "psychi