In substance the spiritistic hypothesis is inadequate; it is too simple, too easy. We are evidently only upon the threshold of the whole subject. All conclusions are necessarily inconclusive; there is no region in which one has less right to be dogmatic. The bearing of it all upon immortality seems to the writer to be not at all where the spiritists place it. If human personality has in itself such latent powers, if there are these extensions of a mysterious force which operate beyond our normal mechanism, if there are contacts of consciousness deeper than consciousness itself in which information is given and received outside normal methods of communication, we are led to conceive that what for want of a better name we call spirit has an unexpected range and force. We are by no means so shut in by the walls of the material and the sensible as we have heretofore supposed. There is a transcendence of spirit over matter and materially imposed conditions which must give us pause. If, in the murky ways which have been brought to our attention, spirit can transcend matter, we have at least one more reason for affirming its supremacy and one more suggestion of a force or a reality which may be able to survive even the dissolution of matter itself. In other words, here is a line of testimony, richly suggestive, though by no means clear, to the power of the soul to make its own conditions, and what is immortality but just this? The phenomena of so-called spiritism, while not as yet justifying Spiritualism, certainly make a dogmatic materialism increasingly different. Those of us who are as anxious for a sustaining faith in immortality as any of our comrades in the great quest may possibly be, but who are as yet unwilling to accept their conclusions, may nevertheless find in this subject matter which is common both to us and to them, the permission to believe that that which is most distinctly ourselves possesses enduring possibilities. If it may from time to time break through in curious ways the walls which now shut it in, may it not in some very real way pass through the gate which Death opens and still continue in such a richness of consciousness and identity as to organize for itself another life beyond the grave? _The Meaning of Spiritism for Faith_