simple, the experienced and the inexperienced, is revealed in
something much less accidental and arbitrary than the selection of
any striking background, however significant, of ocean-mystery or
jungle solitude.

The margin of the mind! Margin, mid-way between the known and
the unknown! Do not the obscure images, called up by the feelings
such words suggest, indicate far more intimately than any
description of tropical rivers or Malay seas, the sort of spiritual
atmosphere in which he darkly gives us many strange clues?

I seem to see this shadowy borderland, lying on the extreme "bank
and shoal" of our human consciousness, as a place like that across
which Childe Roland moved when he came to the "dark tower."

I seem to visualise it as a sort of dim marshland, full of waving reeds
and deep black pools. I seem to see it as a place where patches of
dead grass whistle in a melancholy wind, and where half-buried
trunks of rain-soaked trees lift distorted and menacing arms.

Others may image it in a different way, perhaps with happier
symbols; but the region I have in my mind, crossed by the obscure
shapes of dimly beckoning memories, is common to us all.

You can, if you like, call this region of faint rumours and misty
intimations the proper sphere and true hunting-ground of the new
psychology. As a matter of fact, psychologists rarely approach it
with any clairvoyant intelligence. And the reason of that is, it is
much further removed from the material reactions of the nerves and
the senses than the favourite soil of these people's explorations.

So thin and shadowy indeed is the link between the vague feelings
which flit to and fro in this region and any actual sensual impression,
that it almost seems as though this subconscious borderland were in
contact with some animistic inner world--not exactly a supernatural
world, but a world removed several stages back from the material
one wherein our nerves and our senses function; a world wherein we
might be permitted to fancy the platonic archetypes dwelling,
archetypes of all material forms; or, if you will, the inherent "souls"
of such forms, living their own strange inner life upon a plane of
existence beyond our rational apprehension.

It is certain that there are many moments in the most naive people's
experience when, as they walk in solitude along some common
highway, the shape of a certain tree or the look of a certain hovel, or
the indescribable melancholy of