He does not therefore condemn these offhand; he is content to suspend judgment, is he not?  Why cannot he adopt the same attitude with respect to psychic phenomena?  Our correspondent might here make the obvious retort that it is we who are begging the question, not he, because such happenings as are described in this book have no existence apart from the imaginative or inventive faculties of certain persons.  This would be equivalent to saying bluntly that a considerable number of people in Ireland are either liars or fools, or both.  This point we shall deal with later on.  Our correspondent belongs to a type which knows nothing at all about psychical research, and is not aware that some of the cleverest scientists and deepest thinkers of the day have interested themselves in such problems.  They have not found the answer to many of them—­goodness knows if they ever will this side of the grave—­but at least they have helped to broaden and deepen our knowledge of ourselves, our surroundings, and our God.  They have revealed to us profundities in human personality hitherto unsuspected, they have suggested means of communication between mind and mind almost incredible, and (in the writer’s opinion at least) these points have a very important bearing on our conceptions of the final state of mankind in the world to come, and so they are preparing the way for that finer and more ethical conception of God and His Creation which will be the heritage of generations yet unborn.  The materialist’s day is far spent, and its sun nears the horizon.

Another objection to the study of the subjects dealt with in this book is that we are designedly left in ignorance of the unseen world by a Wise Creator, and therefore that it is grossly presumptuous, not to say impious, on the part of man to make any attempt to probe into questions which he has not been intended to study.  Which is equivalent to saying that it is impious to ride a bicycle, because man was obviously created a pedestrian.  This might be true if we were confined within a self-contained world which had, and could have, no connection with anything external to itself.  But the very essence of our existence here is that the material and spiritual worlds interpenetrate, or rather that our little planet forms part of a boundless universe teeming with life and intelligence, yet lying in the hollow of God’s hand.  He alone is “Supernatural,” and therefore Transcendent and Unknowable; all things in the universe are “natural,” though very often they are beyond our normal experience, and as such are legitimate objects for man’s research.  Surely the potential energy in the human intellect will not allow it to remain at its present stage, but will continually urge it onwards and upwards.  What limits God in His Providence has seen fit to put upon us we cannot tell, for every moment the horizon is receding, and our outlook becoming larger, though some still find it difficult to bring their eyesight to the focus consequently required.  The marvellous of to-day is the commonplace of to-morrow:  “our notion of what is natural grows with our greater knowledge.”