and of people at the point of death. There are also everywhere, in the lowest savagery as among ourselves, second-sighted people, who profess to behold things distant in space or in past or future time. There are "mediums," who are thought to be possessed by and to speak on the inspiration of the dead; the Zulus, the Fijians, the Maoris, have their Mrs. Pipers. In every part of the savage world there are crystal-gazers, who see, or pretend to see, in water, or in crystal, or in polished basalt or obsidian, or in the liver of an animal, things hidden from ordinary eyes. The red Indians do it; and the Australian black fellows, the Fijians, and the Samoyeds do it, just as did the Incas and the Greeks. The divining-rod is used, and the table that tilts, or the boat that tilts on the water, and answers questions as in our table-turning. In a book styled The Making of Religion I have collected many examples of identical alleged phenomena or experiences, ancient and modern—savage, barbaric, and civilized—experiences "supernormal," but not, of course, "supernatural." They are all in nature, but many are beyond ordinary familiar nature. I ought not to omit savage cases of physical eccentricities, things flying about with no known physical cause, as in the usually fraudulent performances of modern "spiritualists."
The absolute harmony of the evidence, ancient, savage, classical, medieval, modern (for example, as given in the letter of Iamblichus to Porphyry, in which all the marvels of Daniel Dunglas Home are attributed to Egyptian mediums fifteen hundred years ago), certainly needs explaining. We know that a few popular beliefs (as in meteoric masses which "fall from heaven"), after being long rejected by science, are now accepted. We know that savages discovered "mesmerism" or "hypnotism" long before Mesmer or Braid. A savage in a South Sea isle hypnotized Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, which, at home, nobody had been able to do. Thus ignorant, uncivilized peoples may hit on matters not remarked by our science. They attest experiences which have always had their witnesses, and still have, but they explain them, as they explain anything that they do not understand, by the agency of "spirits," ignotum per ignotius: the unknown by the still more unknown. The "spiritualists" sing to the same tune. Recently I read in a large book on Australia that, in the opinion of the author, Mr. Curr, black men had been taught "by direct divine interference" to cook with safety certain roots from which a white scientific man was unable to disengage the poisonous properties! In the same wild way people have accounted for all these supernormal phenomena by the direct interference of spirits,—mainly the spirits of the dead!
About twenty-five years ago the founders of the Society for Psychical Research—Mr. F. W. H. Myers, Mr. Edmund Gurney, and Professor Sidgwick, with some men of physical science, like Clerk-Maxwell, Balfour Stewart, Sir William Crookes, Hertz, the famous electrician, and others—took this line. There is, perhaps, they said, something worth seriously investigating in strange experiences so universally reported. There may be faculties in human nature which science has neglected to examine, but of which Hegel was convinced, while Kant was half convinced, and Sir William Hamilton was curious.
They founded their society. They inquired closely into all stories of "ghosts," "wraiths," and "haunted houses," examining and cross-examining persons who could give evidence at first hand to these phenomena. They "sat with" mediums, and detected crowds of impostors. They practised and encouraged experiments in all sorts of "automatisms," such as automatic writing, table-tilting, crystal-gazing, and the use of the so-called divining-rod for water-finding. An automatism is what a person does, or persons do, not of deliberate purpose and consciously, but as when a man, letting his hand with a pencil rest on a piece of paper, reads a book aloud. If the hand writes, the thing written is not directed by him consciously. If I see Jones beside me as I write, Jones being absent, and my own thoughts absorbed in my article, I did not consciously call up Jones: as far as I am concerned, my experience is "automatic."
To take another case: I was once laying my hands, alone, on a little table which
