The law supports the opposition of the Church and frowns on the practice of mediumship and clairvoyance. The law denies the possibility of spirit intercourse and forbids the exercise of supernormal faculties in exploring the untrodden realms of the future. Prosecutions are instituted under the old Witchcraft and Vagrancy Acts, and psychic practitioners are fined or sent to prison in the hope of stemming the tide of inquiry. The law and the spirit were ever at variance. But it is difficult to understand why those who mourn, and who ask questions, should be deprived of the comfort which they may find through visits to professional mediums. The risk of deception and false pretences is there, it is true, but that risk exists everywhere. There are lawyers, politicians, and physicians who tell “fortunes” and practise “witchcraft” of their own brand, decidedly more
harmful and disruptive than the visions of the unlettered clairvoyant.
The magistrate, who sends a clairvoyant to prison because he is convinced that all claims to psychic gifts and to communion with discarnate spirits are fraudulent, is not troubled by his ignorance, and the evidence of psychic research is not acceptable in his court. He typifies the perpetual official, ever ready to suppress new and evolutionary thought. After all, psychic science fares no worse than the physical sciences in the judgment of respectable mediocrity. The progress of science in the nineteenth century was one long conquest of territory in the land of the impossible. Inventors and inventions have met with incredulity and mockery. Railways, steamships, aeroplanes, telegraphy, telephony and cinematographs have all emerged from the region of “impossibilities.” Röntgen-rays and radium have descended from the sphere of miracles.
Experience should endow us with cautiousness in proclaiming impossibilities of the future. The study of psychic science has imposed no greater strain on my reason than the attempt to explain the mysteries of biology and astronomy. Observation and classification do not
necessarily imply elucidation. The miracle of the fœtus taking human shape and soul, or of the oak rising out of the acorn and the brown earth is to me as baffling as the materialization of a spirit. The marvels of the cell-life and the daily chemistry which maintain the body charm my attention as much as the mysterious clouds of light with which spirits are wont to signalize their presence in the séance-room. I have sat for hours on a summer night by the Mediterranean watching the phosphorescent waves throw a luminous spray over the shore, and meditating on the inexhaustible fertility of the sea. And I have watched with the same intense wonder the phenomena of the soul illuminated by the daimon of inner vision and the infinite manifestations of the power of spirit over matter. From the point of view of science there is no clearly defined frontier between the natural and the supernatural, the commonplace and the miraculous. All is soil for the plough, all defies our designs for complete explanation. From the point of view of religious emotion, there is the greatest possible difference between the sciences of psychic force and those that seek to probe the mysteries
of the physical world. The question of the immortality of the human soul is infinitely more engrossing than that of the formation of the skull of neolithic man. The strictly evidential demonstration of communion between the living and the dead might be almost negligible in quantity, and yet the importance of one rap from the world of discarnate spirits, scientifically demonstrated, would outweigh tomes of theories in physics.
True, those who live in the spirit need no demonstrations provided by scientific investigators of psychic problems. The mystic consciousness with its intuition of immortality, its sensitiveness to the vibration of life on all planes and in all forms knows, and in knowledge transcends alike the boundaries of religionists and scientists. The mystic may smile at the labour expended during the last fifty years on establishing a strictly evidential basis for the study of transcendental facts. He has conquered the inherited blindness of our race, and sees spirit not as a supernatural demonstration, vouchsafed now and then to doubting humanity, but as the living Presence of which he is joyously a part. He does not fall into the common error of forgetting that
we are spirits sheathed in flesh, but bearing within ourselves the power over matter which is destined to achieve the miraculous. He can dispense with a medium, being himself a fountain of light, and experiencing the wondrous self-illumination of which Thomas Treherne sang—
O Joy! O wonder and delight! O sacred mystery! My soul a spirit infinite! An image of the Deity! A pure substantial light! That being greatest which doth nothing seem!