We
are still, it is true, waiting for the domestication of the new
force, its practical application to daily use. We are waiting for
the all-revealing, decisive manifestation which will remove our
last doubts and throw light upon the problem down to its very
source. But let us admit that we are likewise waiting for this
manifestation in the great majority of sciences. In my case, we
are already in the presence of an astonishing mass of
well-weighed and verified materials which, until now, had been
taken for the refuse of dreams, fragments of wild legends,
meaningless and unimportant. For more than three centuries, the
science of electricity remained at very much the same point at
which our psychical sciences stand to-day. Men were recording,
accumulating, trying to interpret a host of odd and futile
phenomena, toying with Ramsden's machine, with Leyden jars, with
Volta's rough battery. They thought that they had discovered an
agreeable pastime, an ingenious plaything for the laboratory or
study; and they had not the slightest suspicion that they were
touching the sources of an universal, irresistible, inexhaustible
power, invisibly present and active in all things, that would
soon invade the surface of our globe. Nothing tells us that the
psychic forces of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse have
not similar surprises in store for us, with this difference, that
we are here concerned with energies and mysteries which are
loftier, grander and doubtless fraught with graver consequences,
since they affect our eternal destinies, traverse alike our life
and our death and extend beyond our planet.
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