32 KEPORT— 1898. 



subconscious mentation is still to be developed, we must beware of 

 rashly assuming tiiat all variations from the normal waking condition are 

 necessarily morbid. The human race has reached no fixed or changeless 

 ideal ; in every direction there is evolution as well as disintegration. It 

 would be hard to find instances of more rapid progress, moral and physical, 

 than in certain important cases of cure by suggestion — again to cite a few 

 names out of many — by Liebeault, Bernheim, the late Auguste Voisin, 

 Berillon (in France), Schrenck-Notzing (in Germany), Forel (in Switzer- 

 land), van Eeden (in Holland), Wetterstrand (in Sweden), Milne-Bramwell 

 and Lloyd Tuckey (in England). This is not the place for details, but the 

 vis medicatrix thus evoked, as it were, from the depths of the organism, is 

 of good omen for the upward evolution of mankind. 



A formidable range of phenomena must be scientifically sifted before 

 we effectually grasp a faculty so strange, so bewildering, and for ages so 

 inscrutable, as the direct action of mind on mind. This delicate task 

 needs a rigorous employment of the method of exclusion— a constant 

 setting aside of irrelevant phenomena that could be explained by known 

 causes, including those far too familiar causes, conscious and unconscious 

 fraud. The inquiry unites the difficulties inherent in all experimentation 

 connected with mind, with tangled human temperaments and with obser- 

 vations dependent less on automatic record than on personal testimony. 

 But difficulties are things to be overcome even in the elusory branch of 

 research known as Experimental Psychology. It has been characteristic 

 of the leaders among the group of inquirers constituting the Society for 

 Psychical Research to combine critical and negative work with work 

 leading to positive discovery. To the penetration and scrupulous fair- 

 mindedness of Professor Henry Sidgwick and of the late Edmund Gurney 

 is largely due the establishment of canons of evidence in psychical research, 

 which strengthen while they narrow the path of subsequent explorers. 

 To the detective genius of Dr. Richard Hodgson we owe a convincing 

 demonstration of the narrow limits of human continuous observation. 



It has been said that ' Nothing worth the proving can be proved, nor 

 yet disproved.' True though this may have been in the past, it is true 

 no longer. The science of our century has forged weapons of observation 

 and analysis by which the veriest tyro may profit. Science has trained 

 and fashioned the average mind into habits of exactitude and disciplined 

 perception, and in so doing has fortified itself for tasks higher, wider, and 

 incomparably more wonderful than even the wisest among our ancestors 

 imagined. Like the souls in Plato's myth that follow the chariot of Zeus, 

 it has ascended to a point of vision far above the earth. It is, henceforth, 

 open to science to transcend all we now think we know of matter, and to 

 gain new glimpses of a profounder scheme of Cosmic Law. 



An eminent predecessor in this chair declared that ' by an intellectual 

 necessity he crossed the boundary of experimental evidence, and discerned 

 in that matter, which we in our ignorance of its latent powers, and not- 

 withstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, liave hitherto covered 



