But here let us pause, and consider what is the truest conception which we are by this time able to form of telepathy. The _word_ has been a convenient one; the _central notion_--of communication beyond this range of sense--can at any rate thus be expressed in simple terms. But nevertheless there has been nothing to assure us that our real comprehension of telepathic processes has got much deeper than that verbal definition. Our conception of telepathy, indeed, to say nothing of telæsthesia, has needed to be broadened with each fresh stage of our evidence. That evidence at first revealed to us certain transmissions of thoughts and images which suggested the passage of actual etherial vibrations from brain to brain. Nor indeed can any one say at any point of our evidence that etherial vibrations are demonstrably _not_ concerned in the phenomena. We cannot tell how far from the material world (to use a crude phrase) some etherial agency may possibly extend. But telepathic phenomena are in fact soon seen to overpass any development which imaginative analogy can give to the conception of etherial radiation from one material point to another. For from the mere transmission of isolated ideas or pictures there is, as my readers know, a continuous progression to impressions and apparitions far more persistent and complex. We encounter an influence which suggests no mere impact of etherial waves, but an intelligent and responsive _presence_, resembling nothing so much as the ordinary human intercourse of persons in bodily nearness. Such visions or auditions, inward or externalised, are indeed sometimes felt to involve an even closer contact of spirits than the common intercourse of earth allows. One could hardly assign etherial undulations as their cause without assigning that same mechanism to all our emotions felt towards each other, or even to our control over our own organisms. Nay, more. There is--as I have striven to show--a further progression from these telepathic intercommunications between living men to intercommunications between living men and discarnate spirits. And this new thesis,--in every way of vital importance,--while practically solving one problem on which I have already dwelt, opens also a possibility of the determination of another problem, nowise accessible until now. In the first place, we may now rest assured that telepathic communication is not necessarily propagated by vibrations proceeding from an ordinary material _brain_. For the discarnate spirit at any rate has no such brain from which to start them. So much, in the first place, for the _agent's_ end of the communication. And in the second place, we now discern a possibility of getting at the _percipient's_ end; of determining whether the telepathic impact is received by the _brain_ or by the _spirit_ of the living man, or by both inseparably, or sometimes by one and sometimes by the other.