What then is the secret of the dowser's often remarkable success? The question is whether, after making every allowance for shrewdness of eye, chance, coincidence, and local geological knowledge, the dowser has any instinctive or supernormal power of discovering the presence of underground water. Professor Barrett, who has perhaps devoted more time to the subject than any other man living, is inclined to answer in the affirmative. "There appears to be evidence," he writes, "that a more profound stratum of our personality, glimpses of which we get elsewhere in our 'Proceedings,' is associated with the dowser's art; and the latter seems to afford a further striking instance of information obtained through automatic means being more remarkable than, and beyond the reach of, that derived from conscious observation and inference." In another passage he adds: "For my own part, I have been driven to believe that some dowsers-- "Whose exterior semblance doth belie The soul's immensity" nevertheless give us a glimpse of "The eternal deep Haunted for ever by the eternal mind." CHAPTER IX MEDIUMISTIC PHENOMENA In my inquiry so far the reader will note that I have taken one thing for granted--the fact of telepathy. In order to convince him to the extent to which this great scientific truth has convinced me, it would be necessary for me to lead him through a thousand pages of evidence for telepathic phenomena, attested by some of the leading physicists of the day. I am aware that there are still sceptics on the subject of telepathy, but the testimony is overwhelming, and every year sees the ranks of scepticism growing thinner. Not many years ago a very learned man, the late Professor von Helmholtz, although confronted with _prima-facie_ evidence of thought transference or telepathy, declared: "I cannot believe it. Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, would lead me to believe in the transmission of them from one person to another. It is clearly impossible." An opinion in these terms is very rare to-day. We are apt to express our incredulity in language far more guarded and less emphatic. About hallucinations, however, there is no scepticism. We have remarked sensory hallucinations of an occasional nature; we now come to regard them as a cult, for I suppose there is no manifestation in the world, no gift, no prodigy even, that is not prone to the fate of being exploited for particular ends. A poet, we will say, by some rare "subliminal uprush," produces a beautiful poem. He is at once chained to his desk by publishers and compelled to go on producing poetry for the rest of his life. It is inevitable that many of his manifestations will be false; and for that reason, in spite of an occasional jewel of truth, he runs serious risks of being denounced in the end as no poet.