_In any case, as I said in a letter published in_ The Times, _so long ago as September 1876, before science is in a position to frame any satisfactory hypothesis of the so-called Spiritualistic phenomena, a number of antecedent questions will have to be investigated and decided. Prominent among these, I urged more than thirty years ago, was the question whether ideas or information can be voluntarily or involuntarily transferred from one mind to another independently of the recognised organs of perception. Experiments I had then recently made led me to the conclusion that something new to science, which might provisionally be called thought-transference, now known in its wider aspect as telepathy, did really exist. This, if established, would, as I pointed out, unquestionably solve some of the so-called spirit communications which had so puzzled investigators. But the idea of thought-transference was at that time just as obnoxious to official science as Spiritualism. Mr Willson quotes the implacable disbelief, even in the possibility of telepathy, which that great man Helmholtz expressed to me. And it is amusing now to recall the fierce outcry aroused by the paper I read at the British Association meeting in 1876, when, after narrating certain apparently transcendental phenomena I had witnessed, I asked that a committee of scientific men should be appointed to investigate preliminary question of the possibility of thought-transference.[1] It is true the evidence on behalf of telepathy has since become so abundant that now few deny its probability, but even telepathy has not yet taken its place among the recognised scientific verities. I hope this recognition will not be long delayed, but until it occurs it is almost as illegitimate to use telepathy, as some do so freely, for the foundation of their theories of transcendental phenomena as to use the spiritualistic hypothesis itself._ [Footnote 1: The Spectator, _I believe, alone, generously supported me, and in an editorial article on 30th September 1876 expressed the hope that "the British Association would really lake some action on the subject of the paper, in spite of the protests of the party, which we may call the party of superstitious incredulity_."] _To those who have carefully studied the evidence there is, however, little doubt that telepathy does afford an adequate explanation of certain well-attested phenomena, such as phantasms of the living or dying person. And telepathy, which may now be considered as highly probable, leads on to the evidence for man's survival after death--to this I will return later on._