Nay, in the infinite Universe man may now feel, for the first time, at home. The worst fear is over; the true security is won. The worst fear was the fear of spiritual extinction or spiritual solitude; the true security is in the telepathic law.
Let me draw out my meaning at somewhat greater length.
As we have dwelt successively on various aspects of telepathy, we have gradually felt the conception enlarge and deepen under our study. It began as a quasi-mechanical transference of ideas and images from one to another brain. Presently we found it assuming a more varied and potent form, as though it were the veritable ingruence or invasion of a distant mind. Again, its action was traced across a gulf greater than any space of earth or ocean, and it bridged the interval between spirits incarnate and discarnate, between the visible and the invisible world. There seemed no limit to the distance of its operation, or to the intimacy of its appeal.
ἑν θἡρσιν ἑν βροτοἱσιν ἑν θεοις ἁνω.
This Love, then, which (as Sophocles has it) rules "beasts and men and gods" with equal sway, is no matter of carnal impulse or of emotional caprice. Rather it is now possible to define Love (as we have already defined Genius) in terms which convey for us some new meaning in connection with phenomena described in this work. Genius, as has been already said, is a kind of exalted but undeveloped clairvoyance. The subliminal uprush which inspires the poet or the musician presents to him a deep, but vague perception of that world unseen, through which the seer or the sensitive projects a narrower but an exacter gaze. Somewhat similarly, Love is a kind of exalted but unspecialised telepathy;—the simplest and most universal expression of that mutual gravitation or kinship of spirits which is the foundation of the telepathic law.
This is the answer to the ancient fear; the fear lest man's fellowships be the outward and his solitude the inward thing; the fear lest all close linking with our fellows be the mere product of the struggle for existence,—of the tribal need of strength and cohesion;—the fear that if love and virtue thus arose, love and virtue may thus likewise perish. It is an answer to the dread that separate centres of conscious life must be always strangers, and often foes; their leagues and fellowships interested and illusory; their love the truce of a moment amid infinite inevitable war.
Such fears, I say, vanish when we learn that it is the soul in man which links him with other souls; the body which dissevers even while it seems to unite; so that "no man liveth to himself nor dieth to himself," but in a sense which goes deeper than metaphor, "We are every one members one of another." Like atoms, like suns, like galaxies, our spirits are systems of forces which vibrate continually to each other's attractive power.
All this as yet is dimly adumbrated; it is a first hint of a scheme of thought which it may well take centuries to develop. But can we suppose that, when once this conception of the bond between all souls has taken root, men will turn back from it to the old exclusiveness, the old controversy? Will they not see that this world-widening knowledge is both old and new, that die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen? that always have such revelations been given, but develop now into a mightier meaning,—with the growth of wisdom in those who send them, and in us who receive?
Surely we have here a conception, at once wider and exacter than ever before, of that "religious education of the world" on which theologians have been fain to dwell. We need assume no "supernatural interference" no "plan of redemption." We need suppose only that the same process which we observe to-day has been operating for ages between this world and the next.
Let us suppose that whilst incarnate men have risen from savagery into intelligence, discarnate men have made on their part a like advance. Let us suppose that they have become more eager and more able to use, for communication with earth, the standing laws of relation between the spiritual and the material Universe.