roken. His analyses here are both keen and
suggestive and tend to confirm the conclusions of other students that we
have resident in human personality elements which are adequate to the
explanation of any phenomena which have been as yet presented.

As far as the physical phenomena go, he cites experiments which seem to
reveal "threads of substance and rigid rods, sometimes visible,
sometimes invisible, proceeding from the fingers of the medium" and
serving as a real mechanism for the movement of distant and sometimes
quite heavy articles. He argues from this that there is a possible
exteriorization of power which may itself be governed by ideas and
believes also that such facts as this will eventually compel us to
recast our conceptions of matter and force and profoundly affect biology
and all evolutionary theories. The whole matter is necessarily obscure,
but such studies do give a new direction and a larger significance to
our whole subject matter.

In substance the spiritistic hypothesis is inadequate; it is too simple,
too easy. We are evidently only upon the threshold of the whole subject.
All conclusions are necessarily inconclusive; there is no region in
which one has less right to be dogmatic. The bearing of it all upon
immortality seems to the writer to be not at all where the spiritists
place it. If human personality has in itself such latent powers, if
there are these extensions of a mysterious force which operate beyond
our normal mechanism, if there are contacts of consciousness deeper than
consciousness itself in which information is given and received outside
normal methods of communication, we are led to conceive that what for
want of a better name we call spirit has an unexpected range and force.
We are by no means so shut in by the walls of the material and the
sensible as we have heretofore supposed. There is a transcendence of
spirit over matter and materially imposed conditions which must give us
pause. If, in the murky ways which have been brought to our attention,
spirit can transcend matter, we have at least one more reason for
affirming its supremacy and one more suggestion of a force or a reality
which may be able to survive even the dissolution of matter itself. In
other words, here is a line of testimony, richly suggestive, though by
no means clear, to the power of the soul to make its own conditions, and
what is immortality but just this?

The phenomena of so-called spiritism, while not a