Lehal Library

expressing an opinion, and still more curiously averse from any effort to discover the truth. We have no theories to account for such happenings, and we are apprehensive that discovery might imperil conclusions which have been worked into the fabric of our scientific faith. So we talk airily of thought-forms, or hallucinations, and are content to leave it at that. A move was indeed made, many years ago, to collect available information on the subject, which was published in two considerable volumes as Phantasms of the Living; but their effectiveness was in a measure spoilt by the uncertainty, in many cases, whether the appearance of the phantom had been the last effort of the dying or the first of the dead, and also by the somewhat perverse determination of certain of the compilers to attribute whatever had happened to "telepathic hallucination", although at that date the very possibility of telepathy was in hot debate, and was only reluctantly adopted as an escape from the still more discouraging recognition of survival! Now this question of the "double", complicated though it certainly is, and in many cases difficult of solution, is one quite apart from the problem of survival, or from any spiritualistic implications. It is permissible to conjecture that the fact of man being able to exist or function here in two places—being proof that an invisible part of him, equipped with all his moral, mental, and intellectual faculties, and able to exist for considerable periods independent of his somatic envelope— may encourage a conjecture that the independence will continue after a final excursion from the body; but that does not concern us here. This is an enquiry solely as to what happens to us on this side of the grave, and an attempt to dispel some of our deplorable ignorance about ourselves and our psychic powers;