On every side we find, as we try to show, in all ages, climates, races, and stages of civilisation, consentient testimony to a set of extraordinary phenomena.  Equally diffused we find fraudulent imitations of these occurrences, and, on one side, a credulity which has accepted everything, on the other hand, a scepticism which denies and laughs at all the reports.  But it is a question whether human folly would, everywhere and always, suffer from the same delusions, undergo the same hallucinations, and elaborate the same frauds.  The problem is one which, in other matter, always haunts the student of man’s development:  he is accustomed to find similar myths, rites, customs, fairy tales, all over the world; of some he can trace the origin to early human imagination and reason, working on limited knowledge; about others, he asks whether they have been independently evolved in several places, or whether they have been diffused from a single centre.  In the present case, the problem is more complicated.  Taboos, totemism, myths explanatory of natural phenomena, customs like what, with Dr. Murray’s permission, we call the Couvade, are either peculiar to barbarous races, or, among the old civilised races, existed as survivals, protected by conservative Religion.  But such things as ‘clairvoyance,’ ‘levitation,’ ‘veridical apparitions,’ ’movements of objects without physical contact,’ ‘rappings,’ ‘hauntings,’ persist as matters of belief, in full modern civilisation, and are attested by many otherwise sane, credible, and even scientifically trained modern witnesses.  In this persistence, and in these testimonies, the alleged abnormal phenomena differ from such matters as nature-myths, customs like Suttee, Taboo, Couvade, and Totemism, the change of men into beasts, the raising of storms by art-magic.  These things our civilisation has dropped, the belief in other wild phenomena many persons in our civilisation retain.

The tendency of the anthropologist is to explain this fact by Survival and Revival.  Given the savage beliefs in magic, spirit rapping, clairvoyance, and so forth, these, like Marchen, or nursery tales, will survive obscurely among peasants and the illiterate generally.  In an age of fatigued scepticism and rigid physical science, the imaginative longings of men will fall back on the savage or peasant necromancy, which will be revived perhaps in some obscure American village, and be run after by the credulous and half-witted.  Then the wished-for phenomena will be supplied by the dexterity of charlatans.  As it is easy to demonstrate the quackery of paid ‘mediums,’ as that, at all events, is a vera causa, the theory of Survival and Revival seems adequate.  Yet there are two circumstances which suggest that all is not such plain sailing.  The first is the constantly alleged occurrence of ‘spontaneous’ and sporadic abnormal phenomena, whether clairvoyance in or out of hypnotic trance, of effects on the mind