impossible, but the weight of experience
and especially all our truer understandings of ourselves and our world,
dearly bought through the intellectual travail of our race, are against
it. To accept it is really to turn back the clock and populate the
unseen again with the creation of our fears or our fancies. It is at the
best the too easy solution of a challenging problem, at the worst an
aspect of that renaissance of superstition which is one of the strangest
characteristics of our own time.

[Footnote 78: "On the Threshold of the Unseen," p. 113.]

The second explanation is spiritistic. There are unseen presences but
they are the discarnate who seek in the more trivial phenomena to bring
themselves to our attention and in the more important to assure us of
their continued existence and satisfy their longing and ours in renewed
personal contacts. Given a faith in immortality, this explanation is
natural enough--even inevitable. If the discarnate still live they must
remember and desire. Death does not end affection on our side. It should
not end affection on their side. There must be, moreover, what one may
call a discarnate status--an order, that is, of relationships and
activities in which discarnate personality realizes and expresses
itself. Our racial curiosities about the state of the dead are
quenchless. Every religion has its creeds, its dreams, its assurances.
From the Nirvana of the Buddhist to the ardent paradise of the
Mohammedan, faith and longing have built their structure and peopled it
with their dead. Great ranges of literature are coloured by such
speculations. Christian hymnology is instinct with them and not a little
of our noblest poetry. We have set our hells over against our heavens
and opposed their terror to celestial splendours. Modern Spiritualism
has to head it the whole drive of such speculations as these. For if the
generality have been content to leave the solution of the very great
difficulties which any faith in immortality involves, to the
demonstrations of eventual experience, and rest in what is really the
poetry of their faith, others either more curious or more credulous seek
the testimony of the senses. Such as these naturally find what they seek
in the phenomena of trance mediumship. They believe that the discarnate
are constantly seeking to penetrate the veil between their order and
ours and avail themselves of every opportunity to recall themselves to
the memory of the incarn