34 PHYSICAL SCIENCE 



is the only sure road to the understanding of 

 Nature; and, in times to come, it may lead us into 

 regions now unknown, or considered to be closed 

 to the investigations of science. The evolution 

 and disintegration of matter, the problems of 

 hypnotism and of direct thought transference, are 

 questions which seem to be coming rapidly within 

 the range of scientific inquiry. It is possible that 

 an advance has already been made towards clear- 

 ing away part of the mystery, so attractive to 

 some, so repellent to others, that surrounds these 

 phenomena. At any rate, in several of the great 

 schools of psycho-medicine, notably in France 

 and America, materials are being accumulated, 

 their trustworthiness examined, and the results 

 systematically collated. It may be that these 

 investigations, so beset with evident difficulties, 

 are indeed indefinitely complicated in their issues 

 by questions of racial predisposition, of individual 

 temperament and mental condition, both of 

 observed and observers. Whether any or all 

 of these problems will prove amenable to the 

 methods of dispassionate observation and experi- 

 ment is a matter which the years to come alone 

 can show. 



We must thus look on natural laws merely as 

 convenient shorthand statements of the organised 

 information that at present is at our disposal. 

 But when Physical Law, as understood in the 

 eighteenth century, has been dethroned from a 

 place that was never rightly its own, let us not 

 think that its usefulness has been diminished or its 

 dignity unduly lowered. Without the possibility 

 of discovering such laws, and framing theories of 



