and try to conceive, as it has power, the experiences and
progressions of the discarnate, but to invest these imaginations with
evidential accuracy is to break down all the limits between the
dependable and the undependable.

And finally, though this is rather a commonplace observation than an
aspect of our investigation, there is little to be gained in the
necessary business of solid living by such an interweaving of the two
worlds as spiritism carries with it. One life at a time is plainly
enough all that we are equal to. Those who surrender themselves to such
conclusions and inquiries are in very great danger of being so detached
from the actualities of the present order as to become themselves errant
and eccentric spirits, finding their true interests in endless seances
and investigations which have no practical bearing upon life as it now
is.

_The Real Alternative to Spiritism_

The writer's observation of the effect of much going to mediums upon
those whom he has personally known leads him to distrust the whole
matter and possibly to react too strongly against it. A discriminating
critic has said that Spiritualism is not Spiritualism at all, but a
subtle materialism, in that it is the effort to verify the reality of
the spiritual in terms of the material. It is, therefore, just one more
unexpected aspect of the hard skepticism of the time, which trusts
nothing it cannot hear, or see, or touch. A faith which is not solidly
established in reason, which does not continue and complete in its own
regions what we know and understand, is a cloud-built faith, but a
faith, on the other hand, which refuses to adventure beyond the limits
of the senses is a faith too largely empty of any noble content.

If the phenomena under examination, then, cannot be explained in terms
of animism and if the spiritistic hypothesis is gravely open to
question, what explanation is left? In what follows the writer has been
greatly influenced by the suggestion of the students of abnormal
personality generally, and partly by the work of certain Frenchmen who,
with French logic and brilliancy of insight, are working toward
far-reaching psychological restatements and even to recasting of the
accepted scientific understandings of matter and force. Maeterlinck says
somewhere in substance that our universe is as tightly sealed as a
sphere of steel and that whatever happens inside must be explained in
terms of its own resident forces, and, in