The student of psychical research is confronted at the outset by a considerable volume of reasoned and unreasoned opposition. Persons who in other directions are entirely opposed to each other’s points of view combine for a common assault: uncompromising materialists and devout evangelical Christians form a strange alliance against what they vaguely describe as “spiritualism”. An even more curious dislike comes from large masses of our population who, without any deep convictions or reasoned arguments for their hostility, are irritated by a movement which appears to upset the even tenor of their mental conservatism. Even cultured people are not proof against this prejudice: at many dinner tables any sustained reference to the alleged phenomena of mediumship would be regarded as “bad form” and thoroughly objectionable. When the writer entered the House of Commons he was informed by the chairman of his Liberal Association that his membership of the Psychical Research Society would “do him harm in the constituency”. This unintelligent aversion to spiritual novelties, which almost wrecked the Salvation Army in its infancy, secured the triumph of the Dayton “fundamentalists,” and now, though happily with diminishing force, assails the study of clairvoyance or telepathy, seems analogous to that primitive instinct which impels wild birds to combine for the destruction of an exotic parrot which has escaped from its cage. Even as regards the more serious of his opponents, the apologist of psychical research is entitled to object at the start that comparatively few of these are adequately equipped for their task. It is lamentable that our hostile critics have for the most part scarcely taken the trouble to understand our position or furnish themselves with more than a quite superficial knowledge of the facts. What a sorry figure would be cut by most of our lay and ecclesiastical opponents were they set an examination paper on the evidences accumulated by the Psychical Research Society, to go no further! One of the best known opponents of the phenomena of mediumship has admitted that he has never made any personal investigation of the claims of any prominent medium, British or foreign, and a _brochure_ distributed to his audience exhibits an amazing ignorance of the subject matter against which his platform diatribes are directed. There is another reason for popular hostility. Much of the fraud which admittedly exists is of a peculiarly heartless character, for its exponents derive their resources largely from bereaved men and women who fly to spiritualism for tidings of their lost ones and for solace in their grief. The natural indignation felt against such traffickers in human sorrow undoubtedly predisposes many superficial critics to assume in their haste that all public mediumship is fraudulent.