CONTENTS

[PREFACE ]iii
[INTRODUCTION] vii
I.[THE UNCONSCIOUS] 2
II.[COMPLEXES] 9
III.[FORGETTING AND REPRESSION] 16
IV.[DISSOCIATION] 24
V.[WATER-DIVINING] 34
VI.[SUGGESTION] 44
VII.[HYPNOTISM] 59
VIII.[DREAMS] 66
IX.[HYSTERIA] 74
X.[EXPERIMENTS, DOMESTIC AND OTHER] 91
XI.[ABOUT MEDIUMS] 101
XII.[THE ACCOUNTS OF BELIEVERS] 112
XIII.[THE EVOLUTION OF THE MEDIUM] 132
[CONCLUSION] 155

INTRODUCTION

By PROFESSOR LEONARD HILL, F.R.S.

The body of man is made up of an infinite number of cells—minute masses of living substance—grouped into organs subserving particular functions, and held together by skeletal structures, bones and containing membranes such as the horny layer of the skin which are formed by the living cells. The whole is comparable to citizens grouped in farms and factories subserving one or other function necessary for the commonweal; and just as the city has its transport connecting the whole, distributing food and the various products of the factories, a drainage and scavenger system taking away the waste material, and a telephone system through which operations can be ordered and co-ordinated according to the needs of the commonweal, so has the body its blood circulation, digestive and excretive systems, and a co-ordinating nervous system. How small are the cells, how infinite their number is shown by the fact that each drop of blood the size of a pin's head contains five million red corpuscles; there are five or six pints of blood in the body!

The living substance, e.g. of a nerve cell, appears as a watery substance crowded with a countless number of granules, which are so small that only the light dispersed around each is visible under the highest power of the microscope when illuminated by a beam of light against a dark ground, just as the halo of each dust particle in the air is made visible by a beam of light crossing a dark room, and just as these dust particles are in dancing motion due to the currents of air, so are the particles in the living substance ceaselessly kept dancing by the play of inter-molecular forces. From the dead substance of the cells the chemist extracts various complex colloidal substances, e.g. proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and various salts, and these in their turn he can resolve into chemical elements. The interplay of energy between the multitude of electrically charged granules inside the cell, and the environment outside keeps up the dance of life, the radiant energy of the sun, and the atomic energy of the elements being the ultimate source of the energy transmutations exhibited by both living and non-living matter.