cover the laws of the occult and reduce an anarchical system to
order, that our feeling of strangeness in these regions is only because
of our little contact with them. There are, they claim, undeveloped
aspects of personality which we have had as yet little occasion to use,
but which would, once they were fully brought into action, give us the
same sense of rapport with a super-sensible order that we now have in
our contact with the sensible order. The crux of the whole contention is
probably just here and in view of what has heretofore been accomplished
in discovering and formulating the laws of the physical universe and in
reducing an immense body of apparently unrelated facts to order, there
is doubtless possible a very great systematization of psychical
phenomena, even the most obscure. Nor may we readily set bounds to the
measure of human development. But at any rate the statement with which
this paragraph began is true. The region which the Society for Psychical
Research set out to explore is obscure and is, as yet, so far from
yielding to investigation that the investigators are not even agreed as
to their facts, let alone the conclusions to be drawn from.

The proceedings of the Society literally fill volumes (thirty-two); it
would require a specialist to follow them through and an analysis here
impossible, rightly to evaluate them. When such careful investigators as
Hill and Podmore, dealing with the same body of fact, differ constantly
and diametrically in their conclusions, it is evident that the facts so
far collected have not cumulative force enough to establish in the
generality of disciplined minds a substantial unanimity of conviction.
There are far too many alternatives in the interpretation of the facts
and, in general, the personal equation of the investigator colours the
conclusions reached. Of course this is, in a measure, true in every
field of investigation, but it is outstandingly true in psychical
research.

_William James Enters the Field_

For some years the Society was mainly occupied with hypnotism and
thought transference, with occasional reports on "apparitions, haunted
houses, premonitions, automatic writing, crystal vision and multiple
personality." Professor William James' experiment with Mrs. Piper
carried the Society over into the field of trance mediumship. James had
a sound scientific interest in every aspect of the play of human
consciousness and was earlier than any of his co