the nature of our evidence, as before anthropologists, by showing that, for the savage belief in the supernormal phenomena, we have exactly the kind of evidence on which all anthropological science reposes.  The relative weakness of that evidence, our need of more and better evidence, we would be the very last to deny, indeed it is part of our case.  Our existing evidence will hardly support any theory of religion.  Anyone who is in doubt on that head has only to read M. Reville’s ’Les Religions des Peuples Non-Civilises,’ under the heads ‘Melanesiens,’ ‘Mincopies,’ ‘Les Australiens’ (ii. 116-143), when he will observe that this eminent French authority is ignorant of the facts about these races here produced.  In 1883 they had not come within his ken.  Such minute and careful inquiries by men closely intimate with the peoples concerned, as Dr. Codrington’s, Mr. Hewitt’s, Mr. Man’s, and the authorities compiled by Mr. Brough Smyth, were unfamiliar to M. Reville, Thus, in turn, new facts, or facts unknown to us, may upset my theory.  This peril is of the essence of scientific theorising on the history of religion.

Having thus justified our evidence for the savage belief in supernormal phenomena, as before anthropologists, we turned to a court of psychologists in defence of our evidence for the fact of exactly the same supernormal phenomena in civilised experience.  We pointed out that for subjective psychological experiences, say of telepathy, we had precisely the same evidence as all non-experimental psychology must and does rest upon.  Nay, we have even experimental evidence, in experiments in thought-transference.  We have chiefly, however, statements of subjective experience.  For the coincidence of such experience with unknown events we have such evidence as, in practical life, is admitted by courts of law.

Experimental psychology, of course, relies on experiments conducted under the eyes of the expert, for example, by hypnotism or otherwise, under Dr. Hack Tuke, Professor James, M. Richet, M. Janet.  The evidence is the conduct rather than the statements of the subject.  There is also physiological experiment, by vivisection (I regret to say) and post-mortem dissection.  But non-experimental psychology reposes on the self-examination of the student, and on the statements of psychological experiences made to him by persons whom he thinks he can trust.  The psychologist, however, if he be, as Mr. Galton says, ’unimaginative in the strict but unusual sense of that ambiguous word,’ needs Mr. Galton’s ’word of warning.’  He is asked ’to resist a too frequent tendency to assume that the minds of every other sane and healthy person must be like his own.  The psychologist should inquire into the minds of others as he should into those of animals of different races, and be prepared to find much to which his own experience can afford little if any clue.’[5] Mr. Galton had to warn the unimaginative psychologist in this way, because he was about to unfold his discovery of the faculty which presents numbers to some minds as visualised coloured numerals, ’so vivid as to be undistinguishable from reality, except by the aid of accidental circumstances.’