However it be accomplished, and whatever reception the present-day scientific world may give to the assertion, there are many now who know, by first-hand experience, that communication is possible across the boundary--if there is a boundary--between the world apprehended by our few animal-derived senses and the larger existence concerning which our knowledge is still more limited. Communication is not easy, but it occurs; and humanity has reason to be grateful to those few individuals who, finding themselves possessed of the faculty of mediumship, and therefore able to act as intermediaries, allow themselves to be used for this purpose. Such means of enlarging our knowledge, and entering into relations with things beyond animal ken, can be abused like any other power: it can be played with by the merely curious, or it can be exploited in a very mundane and unworthy way in the hope of warping it into the service of selfish ends, in the same way as old and long accessible kinds of knowledge have too often been employed. But it can also be used reverently and seriously, for the very legitimate purpose of comforting the sorrowful, helping the bereaved, and restoring some portion of the broken link between souls united in affection but separated for a time by an apparently impassable barrier. The barrier is turning out to be not hopelessly obdurate after all; intercourse between the two states is not so impossible as had been thought; something can be learnt about occurrences from either side; and gradually it is probable that a large amount of consistent and fairly coherent knowledge will be accumulated. Meanwhile broken ties of affection have the first claim; and early efforts at communication from the departed are nearly always directed towards assuring survivors of the fact of continued personal existence, towards helping them to realise that changed surroundings have in no way weakened love or destroyed memory, and urging upon their friends with eager insistence that earthly happiness need not be irretrievably spoiled by bereavement. For purposes of this kind many trivial incidents are recalled, such as are well adapted to convince intimate friends and relatives that one particular intelligence, and no other, must be the source from which the messages ultimately spring, through whatever intermediaries they have to be conveyed. And to people new to the subject such messages are often immediately convincing.