from the effects of vibrations violent enough to be dangerous to its own integrity. But even when we have followed vibrations as far as the nerve, and recognised the subtle variation of its own substance by which the nerve conducts the impression of them to the brain, we have no inkling of the means by which the phenomenon of consciousness which we call "mind" is produced. Well, now that by suggestion alone we can with perfect precision, and without the use of any air vibration whatever, cause a hypnotised person (or even a person who has at some earlier period been hypnotised but has recovered his normal state) to hear--in his mind alone--sounds which have no objective existence, just as vividly and clearly as any sounds we can physically produce, does it seem extravagant to believe that the whole mechanism of sense, nay, the dark mind-gulf beyond mechanism too, will receive full illumination from the science of the coming time? Such a discovery would, of course, throw utterly into shadow anything we have yet learned of the nature of man. It would bring us a step nearer to the knowledge of the unknown soul of him. What secrets might it not carry with it of those mysterious co-partners, mind and body, thought and brain? With this, the noblest subject that can be proposed to the intellect of man, the science of a hundred years hence will assuredly be busy, and imagination pales before the contemplation of a notion so vast. Limited as we are by the knowledge of our own time, we cannot even conjecture whither such discoveries might lead us. All we can affirm is that the whole outlook of man, nay, the nature of man himself, might very conceivably be changed by them, and the greatest problems of the thinker may be resolved when we eat of the fruit tendered us by this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps the soul of man may quail before the revelations in store, fearing that in the day we eat thereof we shall surely die. CHAPTER VIII EDUCATION A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE