My defense, therefore, for not beginning and possibly confining this discussion to the question of the scientific legitimacy of the telepathic hypothesis is that, in the present status of opinion, it does not seem to me hopeful to influence belief by such a presentation. It seems to me a far more practical step to present the unwarranted character of the hypothesis and its logical insufficiencies as a means of influencing those who had been, or were likely to be, impressed by coincidences and death-warning experiences and guessing experiments. And, moreover, it is necessary, so long as such experiences have a strong hold on the popular imagination and shape the popular conceptions of the nature both of mental processes and of the field of psychology, to portray as well as may be the natural explanation and significance of the phenomena, and to indicate the general trend of the conceptions under which they may be profitably viewed; and this, even though it be but measurably possible to apply general principles to special cases. This step is an essential part of the logical task here attempted. Under other circumstances it would have been advisable, as it always would be proper, to determine the legitimacy of an hypothesis before considering it as worthy of detailed examination on other counts. But here, as is frequently the case, it is a condition and not one of our own choosing that confronts us. VIII What is the logical conclusion to be drawn from the data offerable in evidence of some supersensory form of thought-transference, and whence the disposition to believe in the existence of such a procedure?--these remain the central questions of the discussion. As to the former, I can say no more in dismissing the topic than that to me the phenomena represent a complex conglomerate, in which imperfectly recognized modes of sense-action, hyperæsthesia and hysteria, fraud, conscious and unconscious, chance, collusion, similarity of mental processes, an expectant interest in presentiments and a belief in their significance, nervousness and ill health, illusions of memory, hallucinations, suggestion, contagion, and other elements enter into the composition; while defective observation, falsification of memory, forgetfulness of details, bias and prepossession, suggestion from others, lack of training and of a proper investigative temperament, further invalidate and confuse the records of what is supposed to have been observed. Many of the reported facts are not facts at all; others are too distortedly and too deficiently reported to be either intelligible or suggestive; some are accurately observed and properly recorded, and these sometimes contain a probable suggestion of their natural explanation, sometimes must be put down as chance, and more often must be left unexplained. To call this absence of an explanation telepathy is surely no advance; to pose this hypothetic process as the _modus