This stage of the borderland state is peculiar not only by reason of this heightening of the mental faculties, but also because it is the condition in which certain abnormal experiences are met with, which are among the most curious and significant of which the human mind is capable. The following note relates to such an abnormal experience which occurred to me while in this condition. It happened only once in my life; it seemed so different in nature from anything else that I had known and has remained so entirely outside all my ordinary experience that, although I now know that a similar thing has happened to others, I shall have found it difficult to believe in it, if it had not happened to myself.

I awoke before six o'clock one morning in my London bedroom and lay quietly thinking in a mood of great stillness. Quite suddenly my spirit seemed to leave my body - at least it is only in such words as these that I can describe what happened. I found myself outside my body - looking downwards from a little height above the foot of the bed at my own form lying there just below me. I saw O -, I saw my bed and the pale wall behind it, and the light window - I saw myself - but it was 1, my own self, who looked on, who thought, and who in an instant was conscious of intolerable loneliness and of a great sense of desolation.

I wanted - how intensely I wanted - to come back to the warmth and shelter of human love! I felt that I could not bear the separation from everything I understood and loved - and I crept back shuddering into my bodily existence. I know that I was crying bitterly when I came back, and that it needed all the comfort that O - could give me to make me feel safe again; because for a time I felt so insecurely anchored to life and to my body. By degrees the feeling of distress went away, and I was comforted when I realised how completely I had still been my own self whilst this happened; how unchanged my identity was during those moments when I was freed from my body and looked at it from the outside.

Such riddles of the mind as these are very puzzling when we meet them thus as isolated individual experiences; they frill into their proper place in such books as "Phantasms of the Living," where they are duly related to other similar phenomena of dream and border consciousness.

"The submerged life of the mind, however mysterious and elusive, yet persistently attracts the naturalist of the mental world."1 The mystery and elusiveness of the mental phenomena which belong especially to the border state have always made a strong appeal to thinkers like Mr. Myers and those who have followed along similar paths of enquiry. They have not been afraid to acknowledge that many of these phenomena lie beyond man's present knowledge, and still elude his understanding. There is a readiness now to approach in a spirit of enquiry questions which would not formerly have been admitted as matters for serious study and discussion. Amongst such questions none has perhaps attracted more attention and exacted more controversy than that of the possible existence of a human faculty, hitherto unrecognised by science, by means of which communications may take place between mind and mind through channels other than those of the senses. This question of telepathic communication is being systematically examined from different points of view by many of the most serious thinkers of the present day, and all available evidence for and against the existence of such a faculty is being considered and weighed.

Some among them, for instance Professor Lodge, men whose names are known and honoured throughout the world of science, go further, and affirm with unquestionable sincerity their assurance that such communications are not only transmitted from living mind to living mind, but are also transmitted by those who have crossed the threshold of death.

1 Jastrow, "The Unconscious".

The implications of this belief are so great, involving as this faith does the vital question of man's survival of bodily death, that whilst it excites in many minds the most intense interest, it seems with equal force to repel others. The discussion of questions of such vast magnitude, which are the field of such acute controversy, is beyond the scope of this book; but these questions cannot be ignored when writing about the borderland state, for there is an intimate connection between them which must be taken into account when the nature of the mental faculties and the manner of their operation in this state are considered. All that can fittingly be urged is that, whatever view be taken, our judgment should not be formed without a study of the evidence that is available. This evidence is no longer left to mere hearsay; much has been collected and sifted by men of distinction in science, letters, and philosophy. Some of the evidence collected has been already published in the journals and Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, and have been dealt with in the writings of Sir Oliver Lodge, Mr. Myers, Mr. Gurney, and others. Much still remains to be published which will eventually be available.

Evidence that has been tested in the "spirit of critical examination and enquiry" that these men have brought to bear on it cannot be lightly dismissed, even by those whose natural inclinations would lead them to reject any such investigation; it deserves at the least respectful and attentive study. But however scientifically such evidence as this has been weighed, however judicially tested, it is quite possible that it may never wholly satisfy men's natural longing for positive and easy certainties of proof. It will always be impossible to prove with the simple conclusiveness of a problem in geometry that certain of the mental experiences of which some of us may feel most sure, but which are outside the common run of men's experience, are indeed facts and not illusion. From the very nature of these phenomena, no easy proof is possible, and the evidence concerning them cannot be grasped at all "without a mind sufficiently open to permit the beginning of an unusual course of study."1 It will therefore never bring conviction to the large class of persons who have resolved that things that lie beyond their own experience, and outside the ordinary experience of men, are impossible and not to be believed.