or ‘dowser.’  Ritter gives details of seventy-four experiments in ‘dowsing’ for water, metals, or coal.  He believes in the faculty, but not in ‘psychic’ explanations, or the Devil.  He talks about ‘electricity’ (pp. 170, 190).  He describes his precautions to avoid vulgar fraud, but he took no precautions against unconscious thought-transference.  He reckoned the faculty ‘temperamental’ and useful.

Amoretti, at Milan, examined hundreds of cases of the so-called Divining Rod, and Jung Stilling became an early spiritualist and ’full-welling fountain head’ of ghost stories.

Probably the most important philosophical result of the early German researches into the hypnotic slumber is to be found in the writings of Hegel.  Owing to his peculiar use of a terminology, or scientific language, all his own, it is extremely difficult to make Hegel’s meaning even moderately clear.  Perhaps we may partly elucidate it by a similitude of Mr. Frederic Myers.  Suppose we compare the ordinary everyday consciousness of each of us to a spectrum, whose ends towards each extremity fade out of our view.

Beyond the range of sight there may be imagined a lower or physiological end:  for our ordinary consciousness, of course, is unaware of many physiological processes which are eternally going on within us.  Digestion, so long as it is healthy, is an obvious example.  But hypnotic experiment makes it certain that a patient, in the hypnotic condition, can consciously, or at least purposefully, affect physiological processes to which the ordinary consciousness is blind—­for example, by raising a blister, when it is suggested that a blister must be raised.  Again (granting the facts hypothetically and merely for the sake of argument), at the upper end of the spectrum, beyond the view of ordinary everyday consciousness, knowledge may be acquired of things which are out of the view of the consciousness of every day.  For example (for the sake of argument let us admit it), unknown and remote people and places may be seen and described by clairvoyance, or vue a distance.

Now Hegel accepted as genuine the facts which we here adduce merely for the sake of argument, and by way of illustrations.  But he did not regard the clairvoyant consciousness (or whatever we call it) which, ex hypothesi, is untrammelled by space, or even by time, as occupying what we style the upper end of the psychical spectrum.  On the contrary, he placed it at the lower end.  Hegel’s upper end ‘loses itself in light;’ the lower end, qui voit tant de choses, as La Fontaine’s shepherd says, is not ’a sublime mental phase, and capable of conveying general truths.’  Time and space do not thwart the consciousness at Hegel’s lower end, which springs from ‘the great soul of nature.’  But that lower end, though it may see for Jeanne d’Arc at Valcouleurs a battle at Rouvray, a hundred leagues away, does not