estigations to include all these
conditions. That is to say, the border-land phenomena of consciousness
as stressed and manifested in the more bizarre cults have really
supplied the material upon which the new psychology has been working,
and the psychologist to-day is seriously trying to explain a good many
things which his predecessors, with their hard and fast analyses of the
mind and its laws, refused to take seriously.

They concede that a complete psychology must have a place in it for the
abnormal as well as the normal, and for the exceptional as well as for
the staid and universally accepted. Those who have been fathering new
religions and seeking to make the abnormal normal have been quick to
avail themselves of the suggestions and permissions in the new
psychology. Once we have crossed the old and clearly defined frontiers,
almost anything seems possible. Personality, we are now taught, is
complex, far-reaching, and is really, like a floating iceberg, more
largely below the sea level of consciousness than above it. How far it
extends and what connections it makes in these its hidden depths, no one
of us may know. Normal consciousness, to change the figure, is just one
brilliantly illuminated center in a world of shadow deepening into
darkness. The light grows more murky, the shadows more insistent, as we
pass down, or out, or back from that illumined center. We cannot tell
how much of the shadow is really a part of us, nor do we dare to be
dogmatic about what may, or may not, there be taking place.

Indeed, we may fill the shadows with almost anything which caprice or
desire may suggest. Our curiously inventive minds have always loved to
fill in our ignorances with their creations. We formerly had the
shadowed backgrounds of the universe to populate with the creatures of
our fear or fancy, but now, strangely enough, since science has let in
its light upon the universe psychology has given us the subconscious as
a region not yet subdued to law or shot through with light. And the
prophets of new cults and border-land movements have taken advantage of
this. "Since there is," they say in substance, "so much in life of which
we are not really conscious, and since there are hints within us of
strange powers, how can we set limits to what we may either be or do,
and may not one man's caprice be as reasonable as another man's reason?"

The popularization of the new psychology has thus created a soil finely
receptive