130 Presidential Address 



experience which appeal to them more strongly than any- 

 thing that has ever been published. No records can sur- 

 pass first-hand direct experience in cogency. 



Nevertheless members of the Society for Psychical 

 Research are also aware, or ought to be, that no one crucial 

 episode can ever be brought forward as deciding such a 

 matter. That is not the way in which things of import- 

 ance are proven. Evidence is cumulative, it is on the 

 strength of a mass of experience that an induction is ulti- 

 mately made and a conclusion provisionally arrived at; 

 though sometimes it happens that a single exceptionally 

 strong instance, or series of instances, may clinch it for 

 some individual. 



But indeed the evidence in one form and another has 

 been crudely before the human race from remote antiquity, 

 only it has been treated in ways more or less obfuscated by 

 superstition. The same sort of occurrences as were known 

 to Virgil and many another seer the same sort of experi- 

 ences as are found by folk-lore students, not only in history 

 but in every part of the earth to-day are happening now 

 in a scientific age and sometimes under scientific scrutiny. 

 Hence it is that from the scientific point of view progress 

 is at length being made, and any one with a real desire to 

 know the truth need not lack evidence if he will first read 

 the records with an open mind and then bide his time and 

 be patient till an opportunity for first-hand critical observ- 

 ation is vouchsafed him. The opportunity may occur at 

 any time: the readiness is all. Really clinching evidence 

 in such a case is never in the past; a prima facie case for 

 investigation is established by the records, but real con- 

 viction must be attained by first-hand experience in the 

 present. 



Page 104 



The quotation is from the writings of Symmachus, an 

 important personage in the 4th century A.D.; not the Pope 



