360 HUMANISM xix 



they reject the spiritist s version thereof as not super 

 natural enough^ because they are quite sure that if there 

 were a future life at all, it would have to be as full of 

 angels and demons as what they would call the tradi 

 tional mythologies. In a more respectable form the 

 same feeling shows itself in the large number of persons 

 who refuse to accept the evidence, e.g. in the Piper case, 

 because they think they would not like the sort of life to 

 which it seems to point. This may seem a somewhat 

 nai ve ignoratio elencki, but the psychical researcher can 

 hardly afford to smile at it, for he is continually having it 

 impressed upon him how very serious are the obstacles 

 which prejudices of this sort form to the discovery and 

 recognition of the facts, and how manifestly the will to 

 believe is the ratio cognoscendi of truth. Hence a sys 

 tematic challenge of the whole assumption that another 

 world must be as different as is conceivable (or rather 

 inconceivable) from this, is needed to clear the atmosphere. 



And inasmuch as the groundlessness of a false 

 assumption is never revealed more clearly than by a 

 request for the reasons on which it rests, I should like, 

 for my own part, to add to the general challenge a 

 particular request, asking philosophers to show cause 

 why a hypothetical other world must necessarily be 

 conceived as out of time and out of space. The con 

 viction that this must be so underlies, I am sure, much 

 of the high philosophic scorn of empirical spiritism and 

 popular theology, but I do not think it would be easy to 

 support it by a valid and cogent philosophic argument. 

 For so long as temporality and spatiality form indispens 

 able characteristics of the only real world we experience, 

 the presumption surely is that they will pervade also any 

 other, until at least a definite method has been suggested 

 whereby they may be transcended. 1 



(3) Thirdly, it must be recognized that the methodo 

 logical principle of interpreting the unknown by the 

 known tells strongly in favour of the simpler, and prim a 



1 So far as time is concerned the conception of frtpyfia aKivrjeias would seem 

 to involve this. Cp. p. 212. 



