Admitting the facts, there are three possible explanations. First, the Daimonistic. There are, according to this theory, in the unseen world--wherever and whatever that may be--an order of beings akin to ourselves, either less or more highly developed, mischievous or benign. This is an old, old belief; it has pervaded animistic religions, fathered witchcraft, persisted in the belief of demoniac control, enriched folk lore, filled the friendly silences of the night with terror and haunted humanity. Now it has found its renaissance in the full blaze of Twentieth Century Science. "It seems not improbable," says Sir William Barrett, "that many of the _physical_ manifestations witnessed in a spiritualistic seance are the product of human-like but not really human intelligence--good or bad daimonia they may be, _elementals_ some have called them, which aggregate round the medium; drawn from that particular plane of mental and moral development in the unseen which corresponds to the mental and moral plane of the medium."[78] This is, with little enough alteration, the very point from which we set out in the remote dawn of our endeavour to interpret the mystery of the world about us. The only difference is that Sir William has his daimon for a tipping table and the savage had his for a flowing spring. Sir William may be right but primitive man was wrong. The whole trend of science heretofore has been to eliminate capricious and isolated elements from observed phenomena and include them in a sweep of law for whose operation the resident forces in the universe and human personality are seen to be sufficient. The daimonistic hypothesis has always up to this time been proved not only unnecessary but positively misleading. It belongs to a region where proof and disproof are equally impossible, but the weight of experience and especially all our truer understandings of ourselves and our world, dearly bought through the intellectual travail of our race, are against it. To accept it is really to turn back the clock and populate the unseen again with the creation of our fears or our fancies. It is at the best the too easy solution of a challenging problem, at the worst an aspect of that renaissance of superstition which is one of the strangest characteristics of our own time. [Footnote 78: "On the Threshold of the Unseen," p. 113.]