382 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



instance, I invite eight of my scientific colleagues severally to come 

 to my house at their own time, and sit with a medium for whom the 

 evidence already published in our 'Proceedings' had been most note- 

 worthy. Although it means at worst the waste of the hour for each, 

 five of them decline the adventure. I then beg the 'Commission' con- 

 nected with the chair of a certain learned psychologist in a neighboring 

 university to examine the same medium, whom Mr. Hodgson and I 

 offer at our own expense to send and leave with them. They also 

 have to be excused from any such entanglement. I advise another 

 psychological friend to look into this medium's case, but he replies 

 that it is useless, for if he should get such results as I report, he would 

 (being suggestible) simply believe himself hallucinated. When I 

 propose as a remedy that he should remain in the background and 

 take notes, whilst his wife has the sitting, he explains that he can never 

 consent to his wife's presence at such performances. This friend of 

 mine writes ex cathedra on the subject of psychical research, declaring 

 (I need hardly add) that there is nothing in it; the chair of the psychol- 

 ogist with the Commission was founded by a spiritist, partly with a 

 view to investigate mediums; and one of the five colleagues who de- 

 clined my invitation is widely quoted as an effective critic of our evi- 

 dence. So runs the world away ! I should not indulge in the person- 

 ality and triviality of such anecdotes, were it not that they paint the 

 temper of our time, a temper which, thanks to Frederic Myers more 

 than to any one, will certainly be impossible after this generation. 

 Myers was, I think, decidedly exclusive and intolerant by nature. But 

 his keenness for truth carried him into regions where either intellectual 

 or social squeamislmess would have been fatal, so he 'mortified' his 

 amour propre, unclubbed himself completely, and became a model of 

 patience, tact, and humility wherever investigation required it. Both 

 his example and his body of doctrine will make this temper the only 

 one henceforward scientifically respectable. 



If you ask me how his doctrine has this effect, I answer: By 

 coordinating ! For Myers's great principle of research was that in order 

 to understand any one species of fact we ought to have all the species 

 of the same general class of fact before us. So he took a lot of 

 scattered phenomena, some of them recognized as reputable, others 

 outlawed from science, or treated as isolated curiosities; he made 

 series of them, filled in the transitions by delicate hypotheses or 

 analogies, and bound them together in a system by his bold inclusive 

 conception of the Subliminal Self, so that no one can now touch one 

 part of the fabric without finding the rest entangled with it. Such 

 vague terms of apperception as psychologists have hitherto been satis- 

 fied with using for most of these phenomena, as 'fraud,' 'rot,' 

 'rubbish,' will no more be possible hereafter than 'dirt' is possible 



