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334 the waking consciousness, at any rate, of civilised man. But Myers claimed that the analysis of the orthodox school is defective and that a more resolute search would ﬁnd traces, beyond the violet end of our soul's spectrum, of other faculties and modes of perception, "which this material or planetary life could not have called into being, and whose exercise even here and now involves and necessitates the existence of a spiritual world."

Amongst these dormant faculties, which we yet cannot reckon as vestigial, are the exceptional powers exhibited by some hypnotic subjects of subconsciously reckoning with precision long periods of time, and the remarkable feats of calculating boys. For at what point of man's upward progress, Myers would ask, could it have proﬁted him to possess a psychic alarum of this kind? or how could it have nerved the arm of the cave-dweller to be able to extract cube-roots, or reckon out logarithms at sight? Telepathy also, to Myers and those who think with him, seems to point to a wider plane of existence, and a spiritual as opposed to a merely terrestrial process of evolution. But it is in its equipment with the transcendental faculties referred to at the beginning of this chapter that the strongest proof of the extra-planetary affinities of the human soul will naturally be sought. It is important therefore to examine carefully the basis upon which the assumption of the existence of these faculties depends.

The earlier students of Mesmerism or "Animal