NOVEMBEK 283 



of that Controlling Head, ' whom no man hath seen or 

 can see,' and of the means whereby He may com- 

 municate mandates or inspire intelligence, we have 

 nothmg in the shape of evidence.^ Wherefore it may 

 seem idle to propound a question to which no answer 

 can be forthcoming. Howbeit, man is insatiably in- 

 quisitive ; a systematic and resolute attempt has been 

 undertaken to fathom the abyss 'of supersensory 

 phenomena. The late Mr. Frederick Myers applied 

 a disciplined intellect to the collation and analysis 

 of hyperphysical experience. He was no dreamy 

 enthusiast, subordinating his critical faculties to 

 prepossession or emotional preconception; he was an 

 advanced and erudite evolutionist, versed in the limi- 

 tations of scientific research, and applying its method 

 to the elucidation of matters which most men of science 

 dismiss either as illusory or outside and beyond the 

 range of research. Few have been found so daring as 

 to follow Mr. Myers over the threshold of his laboratory 

 or even grasp the reality of the enigma to which he 

 addressed himself — not venturing to hope for a solution, 

 only to detect a path which might lead to one; 

 nevertheless, none who is conscious, however dimly, of 

 the presence of a psychical problem, or who has 

 speculated, however inconsequently, upon the pheno- 

 mena of sympathy, suggestion, will, trance, and 

 automatism, can fail to perceive in Mr. Myers's 

 posthumous volumes^ the direction in which advance 



' Doctrine — plenty of it ; dogma — enough and to spare ; but of 

 evidence in the strict sense, not a jot. 

 * Human Peraonaiity and its Survival of Bodily Death, 2 vols, 



