indicates that the suggestion is almost a forlorn hope by asking further—"Is it inconceivable that our mundane ideas of space and distance may be superseded in these subtile regions of unsubstantial thought where 'near' and 'far' may lose their usual meaning? The difficulty is indeed so great as to induce some thinkers to suggest that the psychical process may be without a physical parallel—that the connection between the two psychical states may conceivably be found in the psychical world alone.[1]
But after all such a conclusion rests entirely upon a negation—our present inability to conceive of an explanation. And that inability the progress of scientific research may at any time remove, as has happened again and again in the past in the case of similar problems which at one time seemed equally secure against explanation in physical terms. The phenomena of animal life were not so very long ago held to stand outside the physical world: the very substances of which our tissues are composed were supposed to owe some of their physical properties to a principle of vitality. But chemists can now build up, out of the bricks and mortar of the dead world, many of these once mysterious organic compounds. They have not yet, it is true, built up
- ↑ This was, so far as I can gather the view held by Mr. Meyers (see Human Personality, especially vol. i, p. 8. "this direct and supersensuous communion of mind with mind"). See also report of the Committee on the Census of Hallucinations (Proceedings, vo. x., p. 27.) and the Presidential address to the Society by Mr. A. J. Balfour, Proceedings, vol. x., p. 9–11.
