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332 all events, now that its work is done. In other words, if the theory of telepathy were accepted, it would not necessarily carry us beyond the boundaries of the known. In its physical aspect, it would be but one more effect of ethereal vibrations; historically, we should rank it as a vestigial faculty, reminding us, like the prehensile powers of the newly born infant, of a time when man was in the making.

But clairvoyance and prevision, the postulated faculties of seeing without the intermediation of any deﬁnite sense organ, and of foreseeing events yet to come, could not apparently be explained by any conceivable extension of physical laws. Nor could the existence of such faculties be accounted for by any process of terrestrial evolution. It is on the supposed existence of these superterrestrial modes of acquiring knowledge, that the late F. W. H. Myers has founded a cogent argument for immortality. As we have seen in the last two chapters, recent psychology tends to show that consciousness in the last analysis is but the transitory co-ordination of countless ill-deﬁned and variable factors; and the study of hypnotism and hysteria has only served to deepen our sense of the inadequacy of this surface consciousness, and to reveal the possibility of other combinations amongst its shifting elements.

Myers accepted to the full the results of recent research. He recognised that the human consciousness, as we know it, is a highly composite and