Transcendental Experiments.

I may point out that these Scientific investigations have been carried on with great thoroughness, with the most scrupulous scrutiny and under strictly Scientific test conditions. Many of these tests seem almost ludicrous in their exacting requirements, but the very fact that they were so rigid as to absolutely preclude all possibility of fraud or delusion makes them the more valuable and gives the results greatly added weight. The investigations, moreover, have extended over a very long interval of time. It is not a matter of a year or two, or even of a decade. From 30 to 40 years have elapsed since the study of psychic phenomena was taken in hand by the leading Scientific minds of that time, and in more recent years the subject has received the closest attention of page 14 Scientists in England and America, and in Germany, France and Italy.

Certain peculiarly constituted persons called Psychics, or Sensitives, or Mediums, or "Automatists," as Sir Oliver Lodge describes them, have been found from time to time possessing in a very remarkable degree that mysterious agent known as psychic force, which is given off from their organisms as an invisible emanation, and which is said to be the potent agency through which the manifestations witnessed have been obtained.

There was a time when these manifestations were regarded either as delusions or frauds. That, however, was before the Scientists took their investigations systematically in hand, and now, after years of experiment, and after taking all the precautions which human ingenuity could devise to safeguard themselves against trickery, these brilliant lights in the Scientific firmament unanimously declare these almost stupefying phenomena to be absolutely real, absolutely genuine. That, at any rate, is an enormous advance, for we now know that we are dealing with a great reality, and not with an imposture or an imaginary freak.