Yet so slowly do the masses move in intellectual life, so tardily do truths, concerning not merely occult but physical and material investigation, percolate through to the workaday world, that the researches, the activities, the ascertained truths of students of psychical phenomena are as a closed book. Perhaps the attitude of apathy with which occult phenomena and occult science are regarded by the average man is not unnatural. To him all miracles that are not Scriptural and ancient and, as it were, institutional are highly improbable, if not impossible. All super-naturalism, he will tell you, is morbid. "There may be something in these things," he says, "but it is not proved. As for spiritualism, my belief is that mediums are impostors. Most of the spiritualists I have seen are 'cranks'--they are certainly dupes--and I have no doubt that if I interested myself in these matters I should end by becoming also a 'crank.'" This I maintain is the position of the ordinarily educated normal man. "The moment," wrote Lord Lytton, "one deals with things beyond our comprehension, and in which our own senses are appealed to and baffled, we revolt from the probable, as it appears to the senses of those who have not experienced what we have." Now, that is just what the candid inquirer must avoid throughout his inquiry. It is often difficult to resist employing supernormal hypotheses; but, until normal hypotheses are exhausted, the resistance must be made. On the other hand, it is well to bear in mind Mr Andrew Lang's timely remark, "there is a point at which the explanations of common-sense arouse scepticism." At all events, not even the most materialistic man-in-the-music-hall, with two eyes in his head, can deny that the great wave of occultism, which twenty years ago seemed to be receding, is again returning with greater force and volume, submerging many of the old sceptical theories and wetting even the utterly callous and ignorant with its spray. It is not so long ago that the very fact of hypnotism was doubted--Mesmer was long regarded as a mere quack--but to-day the induced trance is universally credited. To hypnotism must the miracle of telepathy now be added? Has it really been ascertained, after a thousand experiments and beyond the possibility of error, that a mode of apprehension exists which has no connection with the five senses? For twenty-five years the members of the Society of Psychical Research have carried on their investigations of both sleeping and waking subjects, under every conceivable condition, and are at last fain to announce that such a mystic faculty does exist by which brain can communicate with brain without any known sensory agency. As to the kind of "ghost" story recorded above, what an exact analogy it bears to the following, to be found in a recent volume of the "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research!" The statement was received from a Madame Broussiloff, of St Petersburg:--