e British association for the advancement of science, consulted
Stainton Moses with the view of founding a society under better auspices
and the Society for Psychical Research was organized, with Professor
Henry Sidgwick as first president. The Society undertook, according to
its own statement:

1. An examination of the nature and extent of any influence which
may be exerted by one mind upon another, otherwise than through the
recognized sensory channels.

2. The study of hypnotism and mesmerism, and an inquiry into the
alleged phenomena of clairvoyance.

3. A careful investigation of any reports, resting on testimony
sufficiently strong and not too remote, of apparitions coinciding
with some external event (as for instance a death) or giving
information previously unknown to the percipient, or being seen by
two or more persons independently of each other.

4. An inquiry into various alleged phenomena apparently
inexplicable by known laws of nature, and commonly referred by
Spiritualists to the agency of extra-human intelligences.

5. The collection and collation of existing materials bearing on
the history of these subjects.[72]

[Footnote 72: "Spiritualism," Hill, p. 100.]

They sought also "to approach these various problems without prejudice
or prepossession of any kind and in the same spirit of exact and
unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled science to solve so many
problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated."

As a matter of fact the region is the most obscure which inquiry has
ever been called to enter. A noble rationality pervades the whole normal
material order, causes can be controlled, effects anticipated, laws
formulated and above all, the hypotheses of science are, if true, always
capable of a luminous and splendid verification. The disciplined
intellect moves through it all with a sense of "at-homeness" which is
itself a testimony to profound correspondences between the human mind
and the order with which, during its long, long unfolding, it has been
associated in intimacies of action and reaction too close to be
adequately set forth in words. But the mind does not rest easily in the
region which Spiritism claims for its own.

_The Difficulties It Confronts_

Of course this is to beg the whole question. The more scientifically
minded spiritualists might fairly enough answer that they are attempting
to dis