280 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



parallel existence of two different causative factors 

 leading to similar results, until every means of com- 

 bining the two into a single hypothesis has been ex- 

 hausted. So the requirement (a) above is met with 

 the simple statement that scientific duty forces us to 

 question the spiritoid prima facies of trance medium- 

 ship and clairvoyance, by making an earnest attempt 

 to bring these under a single generalization with the 

 psychometry that is so like them in so many other 

 ways. 



Further fortification for this viewpoint is got from 

 a type of psychical performance which I have not yet 

 cited. The crystal gazer, or scrier, has to have a sit- 

 ter; he has also to have an object. The object bears 

 no relation to the sitter; It is a mere crystal ball or 

 comparable something into which the scrier stares 

 fixedly as a means of getting sufficiently out of himself 

 to enter the hallucinatory stage of auto-hypnosis. The 

 things he sees in these hallucinations take usually the 

 form of pictures in the ball; they are indifferently of 

 spiritoid prima facies like the clairvoyant's visions, or 

 of non-spiritoid aspect as when he sees the sitter alone 

 re-enacting incidents out of his own past. Their per- 

 sistent common characteristic is that they pertain to 

 the sitter, and are true. That is, they constitute our 

 familiar common denominator of a cognition to which 

 the operator has no right by any normal process. 

 Especially when allowance is made for variation in 

 individual techniques and for the fact that numerous 

 spiritoid mediums can actually do psychometry, it must 

 appear that in scrying we have a true mean between 

 psychometry and the spiritoid types, and that a divid- 

 ing line will be drawn with difficulty or not at all. So 



