Thus much, one may say, has been evident since man first speculated on such subjects at all. But the advance of knowledge has added a new presumption--it can be no more than a presumption--to all such cosmic speculations. I mean the presumption of _continuity_. Learning how close a tie in reality unites man with inferior lives,--once treated as something wholly alien, impassably separated from the human race--we are led to conceive that a close tie may unite him also with superior lives,--that the series may be fundamentally unbroken, the essential qualities of life the same throughout. It used to be asked whether man was akin to the ape or to the angel. I reply that the very fact of his kinship with the ape is proof presumptive of his kinship with the angel. It is natural enough that man's instinctive feeling should have anticipated any argument of this speculative type. Men have in most ages believed, and do still widely believe, in the reality of prayer; that is, in the possibility of telepathic communication between our human minds and minds above our own, which are supposed not only to understand our wish or aspiration, but to impress or influence us inwardly in return. So widely spread has been this belief in prayer that it is somewhat strange that men should not have more commonly made what seems the natural deduction--namely, that if our spirits can communicate with higher spirits in a way transcending sense, they may also perhaps be able in like manner to communicate with each other. The idea, indeed, has been thrown out at intervals by leading thinkers--from Augustine to Bacon, from Bacon to Goethe, from Goethe to Tennyson. Isolated experiments from time to time indicated its practical truth. Yet it is only within the last few years that the vague and floating notion has been developed into definite theory by systematic experiment. To make such experiment possible has indeed been no easy matter. It has been needful to elicit and to isolate from the complex emotions and interactions of common life a certain psychical element of whose nature and working we have beforehand but a very obscure idea. If indeed we possessed any certain method of detecting the action of telepathy,--of distinguishing it from chance coincidence or from unconscious suggestion,--we should probably find that its action was widely diffused and mingled with other more commonplace causes in many incidents of life. We should find telepathy, perhaps, at the base of many sympathies and antipathies, of many wide communities of feeling; operating, it may be, in cases as different as the quasi-recognition of some friend in a stranger seen at a distance just before the friend himself unexpectedly appears, and the _Phêmê_ or Rumour which in Hindostan or in ancient Greece is said to have often spread far an inexplicable knowledge of victory or disaster.