"It does seem to me," said Mr Balfour, in his famous Society for Psychical Research address, "that there is at least strong ground for supposing that outside the world, as we have, from the point of science, been in the habit of conceiving it, there does lie a region, not open indeed to experimental observation in the same way as the more familiar regions of the material world are open to it, but still with regard to which some experimental information may be laboriously gleaned; and even if we cannot entertain any confident hope of discovering what laws these half-seen phenomena obey, at all events it will be some gain to have shown, not as a matter of speculation or conjecture, but as a matter of ascertained fact, that there are things in heaven and earth not hitherto dreamed of in our scientific philosophy." AFTERWORD _And so our little tour into the occult is ended and we return into the glare of common things--things which we know and can touch and find a practical use for. If only a little of this light we hold so cheap were to illumine the tenebrous fastnesses we have just left, then, perhaps we, in our dull worldly way, might be able to assimilate the mystic to the common, the unseen to the seen, the unknown to the known. But we are not vouchsafed this white light; yet, even in the shadows to which our eyes have grown accustomed, we have heard enough to make us wonder and maybe make us doubtful when some voice, even such a voice as Matthew Arnold's, cries out to us: "Miracles are touched by Ithuriel's spear"--"Miracles do not happen."_ _True, miracles do not happen: but there are events of frequent occurrence in this age, as in all ages of which we have a record, which are miraculous in the sense of their being supernormal--for which science offers no consistent explanation. Is not hypnotism a miracle? Is not telepathy a miracle? Is not the divining rod a miracle? Would Sir William Ramsay or Sir James Crichton-Browne throw these manifestations into the limbo of humbug and charlatanism? And supposing they, and such as they, continue incredulous--is not incredulity a fixed quantity in any society? Were men ever unanimous in their impressions--in their prepossessions, in the chromatic quality with which they steep every surrounding fact before they allow their critical faculties to be focussed upon it?_ _It may be objected by the reader that I who have led him on this little tour into the wilderness of the occult have myself seen no ghosts. Where are my own experiences? Where the relation of my own personal contact with hypnotists, telepathists, mediums, mysteries? Would not that have been of interest? It may be so: if the phenomena appertaining to those in their best and most convincing quality were always to appear on a casual summons and if I were confided in by the public at large as a sane, unprejudiced witness._