288 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



is intrinsically worth talking about. For there can no 

 longer be any doubt that a large percentage of the 

 cognitive phenomena with which psychical research 

 deals are due to a strictly personal, non-spiritistic cog- 

 nitive faculty residing in the operator. Certainly we 

 find mediums who give us the strongest grounds for 

 suspecting that some of their communications are 

 genuine in the spiritistic sense, and who at other times 

 display also the non-spiritistic type of cognition. I 

 incline to believe that we even find the two types side 

 by side in the same seance, rather inextricably inter- 

 woven. Whatever we come to believe of the one type, 

 the other is a phenomenon of the operator alone — and 

 of the universe in which he lives. 



This last clause is of the utmost importance, and in 

 fact brings me to the raison d'etre for my whole 

 paper, and particularly for its inclusion within the 

 present volume. Science — existing orthodox science, 

 still of the nineteenth-century breed because the modi- 

 fications which the twentieth century is effecting had 

 not yet been assigned their definite place in the struc- 

 ture of orthodox science, so that it was still possible 

 to attack these new theories under the pose of cham- 

 pionship of orthodoxy — existing orthodox science, I 

 say, has always turned thumbs down upon the whole 

 field of psychical research. This was for a very good 

 reason. The phenomena were regarded as explain- 

 able only in terms of a spiritistic hypothesis. Science 

 had a picture of the universe, and in that picture there 

 was no place for human survival or for a survived 

 human. It was not merely a canonistic negation to 

 deny these possibilities; it was an actual fact that under 



