THE IDEAS AND SOUECES OF MYTH. 25 



than others to repudiate, as it will appear in the 

 present work. I am far from blaming the courteous 

 critics who allege such objections to my theory, and 

 indeed I am honoured by their notice. I must blame 

 m} r self for not having, in my desire to be brief, 

 sufficiently denned my conception. 



I hold the psychical manifestation to be not only 

 conditioned by the organism, to speak scientifically, 

 and to be rendered physiologically possible by these 

 conditions, but I consider it to be of the same nature 

 as the other so-called forces of the universe ; such, 

 for example, as the manifestations of light, of elec- 

 tricity, of magnetism, and the like. When physicists 

 speak of these forces if the necessities of language 

 and the brevity of the explanation constrain us to 

 adopt the term forces, as though they were real 

 substances they certainly do not believe, nor wish 

 others to believe, that they are really such. It is well 

 known that such expressions are used to signify the 

 appearance under certain circumstances of some 

 special phenomena which group themselves by their 

 mode and power of manifestation into one generic 

 conception as a summary of the whole. They always 

 take place, relatively to these circumstances, in the 

 same mode and with the same power, so that they 

 may at once be experimentally distinguished from 

 others which have been grouped together in like 

 manner. 



Such manifestations do not imply a real cosmic 



