And now let me say, in the words of our great novelist:
"Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out!"
Only I trust in this case we have managed to rise a little above the usual atmosphere of Vanity Fair.
Surely the aim of all psychic research should be to give us a scientific, as we have already, thank God, a spiritual, foundation for the "Hope that is in us."
Spirit photographs and spirit materialisations and abnormal visions or abnormal sounds amount to very little, if we look upon them as an end in themselves, and not as the symbols and the earnest of those greater things which "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive."
I remember, years ago, in the course of a deeply interesting conversation with Phillipps Brooks, the late Bishop of Massachusetts, that I asked him what he thought about modern theosophy, which was just then becoming a culte in his native town of Boston. There was a great deal of talk at the time about the new philosophy and the wonderful phenomena said to accompany its propaganda. Sir Edwin Arnold had written his "Light of Asia," and Oliver Wendell Holmes had welcomed it with wondering awe, as something approaching a new revelation. And smaller people were talking about the historical Blavatsky tea-cups, and hidden heirlooms found in Indian gardens, and some of us were wondering how soon we should learn to fly, and what would come next.
The bishop's answer to my question was so genial, so characteristic, and showed such divine common-sense!
"It is not a question of flying," he said. "I should like to fly as much as anybody; and a queer sort of bird I should appear!" (He was well over six feet, and broad in proportion.)
"If you suddenly found you could fly," he continued, "it would be absorbing on Monday morning, intensely interesting on Tuesday, interesting on Wednesday, and quite pleasant on Thursday, but by the end of the week it would be getting normal, and you would want to discover some other new power. No, believe me, the real question is not flying, but where you would fly, and what you would do when you got there."
This sums up the case in a nut shell, and seems to me only another way of saying: "Don't forget the spiritual significance beneath the scientific symbol."