is a question of fact, not of understanding. The modern question is an evidential one, and less an explanatory problem. "Explanation" has various forms and we cannot pick out one of them, after the analogy of the conservation of energy, and neglect others. It is this equivocal import of the term that has led to the emphasis of evidential problems, or at least encouraged it. In any case, science is primarily interested in the evidence for the genuineness of facts and explanation is secondary in importance. It does not seek how anything takes place until it proves that it does occur. The first problem of philosophical materialism is the evidence that consciousness is so associated with the organism as to create a presumption or proof that it is a function of that organism, and once that is established evidentially, it awaits refutation. It does not require to understand all the mysteries of mind before defending its thesis as a fact. Its maxim is not, "How can I understand the relation of consciousness to the brain?" but "What is it as a fact." It relies upon a simple set of facts to support its claims. It finds that consciousness is always associated with physical structure and organism and that, when this structure disappears, all evidence in normal life that a particular individual consciousness still exists disappears with it. Barring the consideration of psychic phenomena there is no escape from its contention. You may think and say all you please about the failure to "explain" consciousness. That is not its task or at least not its first task.

Evidence is the first duty of every sane intellectual effort and all philosophic speculations about the nature of consciousness have passed into the limbo of the imagination and illusion. Science has come to dictate terms to philosophy in that respect. It demands that any hope of a surviving consciousness must base itself on facts which prove that the standard of philosophic

materialism is not final in its conclusions. It is right in insisting on the correctness of its method, and this is the uniformity of coexistence and sequence as determinative of what hypothesis shall be entertained in regard to the relation of consciousness and the organism. If you wish to refute philosophical materialism you must isolate an individual consciousness and have evidence that it can act independently of the organism with which it had normally been associated. This is the method of difference or isolation as distinct from that of agreement or association.

All that philosophical materialism can do is to ignore supernormal phenomena-or disprove them-and concentrate the emphasis upon the normal facts of experience which show the association of consciousness with the organism and the absence of normal evidence of its continuity when that association is interrupted by death. It thus conforms to the maxim that regulates all convictions in normal life about everyday affairs, and if it cannot employ the method of difference, or isolation, there is no appeal from its verdict. But psychic research comes in with the proposal to apply the method of collecting facts which prove that this consciousness has continued in existence in a state of dissociation from the physical organism. These facts attest or favor the hypothesis that we get into some form of communication with discarnate consciousness, and while that communication is not the object of the research, it is a part of the conclusion from the facts which can be proved to be indubitably supernormal. But the main point is that philosophical materialism can be challenged only from the point of view of evidence, not from that of explanation.

This evidence consists summarily in supernormal information that constitutes facts in support of the personal identity of the dead. It may require more or less to establish this fact, but it is the type of fact

that I am defining here. The necessity of doing this is that we no longer take the medieval point of view that the existence of soul guarantees the survival of personal identity. Instances of secondary personality among the living, or even ordinary amnesia in normal life, tend to raise the question whether a soul might not survive and yet not retain any memory of its personal identity. The theosophist who accepts reincarnation defends this point of view universally. Hence it is important to ascertain whether the same stream of consciousness with its terrestrial memories survives as determining the only practical interest which any one can have regarding immortality or survival.

It is to this issue that psychic research is devoted, and it challenges philosophical materialism, not in regard to any contention about the nature of either the soul or consciousness, but in regard to the fact of supernormal knowledge and survival. It does not dispute the fact that the evidence in normal life is predominantly for materialism. It only contests its sufficiency. Naive materialism it can ignore, as that is either harmless or has to be transformed into the philosophic type before it can have any interest for intelligent men. That is only a convenient foil to one's cowardice, ignorance, or hypocrisy. It is the basis of ethical materialism which does not dispute survival, though it may dispute the ideals that are supposed to determine salvation in any world whatever, material or spiritual. It is philosophic materialism that constitutes the enemy of spiritualism, and science has so fully determined the method of solving all problems of fact that it demands and must have the evidential problem solved first.

I have said that circumstances make this problem one of personal identity, not the nature or the dignity of consciousness. That personal identity can be proved only by the most trivial facts. It is not to be proved

by learned revelations or fine literature, either really or apparently coming from a transcendental world, but by trivial memories of the discarnate. The case is like evidence in a civil court. It is not a man's style in literary productions that are invoked to prove a crime, but his boot tracks or some mark on his body. The more trivial and exceptional the fact, the better the evidence. It is the same in the proof of survival. We must have the most trivial facts in a man's memory to prove his personal identity, and they must either not coincide with similar facts in the lives of others or they must articulate with a large number of incidents in the life of the individual so that the collective mass of them cannot be duplicated in the life of any other person.

The problem, then, is not the nature of matter nor the nature of consciousness. We may assume consciousness to be anything, if we desire. While we can hardly conceive it to be a mode of motion, we are too ignorant of its nature to deny that possibility, as we cannot conceive such motion in matter as is assumed in the undulatory and corpuscular theories of light, heat and electrical phenomena, though the evidence points to its being a fact. Any attempt to prove a spiritual interpretation of life by appeals to the nature of consciousness is doomed to failure, not because we know that consciousness is something distinct from physical phenomena, but because we have no means of proving that distinction beyond the most superficial appearances. There is no doubt that consciousness does not appear to be a mode of motion and that it does appear to be very different from it, but the naive mind cannot see superficially that sound is a mere mode of motion and this is still more true of light, heat and electricity.

In science we are constantly forced to go beyond appearances and are as constantly in the supersensible world for determining the nature of phenomena and

seek for the explanation of them. For all that we know consciousness may be one of the "occult" physical forces, so that we have to seek the solution of our problem independently of all theories about the nature of it. The problem has become wholly one of its connections, and not of its nature. It is evidential, not explanatory primarily in terms of its antecedents. What we know in normal experience is that consciousness is always associated with physical organism and when that physical organism perishes, we lack the evidence in normal experience of its survival or existence independently of the body. The evidence proves connections of a uniform kind and if consciousness is not a function of the body with which it is connected there must be evidence of its dissociation and continued existence, or we must stand by the agnostic doctrine that we do not know, or accept the materialistic hypothesis as the only one on which there is any positive scientific evidence.

The materialism that is based upon sensation and the view that the nature of reality is represented in that sensory phenomenon is totally irrelevant to this issue. In all science and philosophy we transcend sense perception as the criterion of reality, though it is necessarily an intermediary in the determination of it. Hence philosophical materialism may hold good even when sensory materialism is denied, and that is the position under consideration. Philosophical materialism is based upon the connections of consciousness regardless both of its nature and of the theory that sensory experience is the measure of reality. The issue has gone far beyond the problems of the nature of anything and rests upon the scientific demand for concrete evidence of a fact. Any phenomena that are provably supernormal and representative of the personal identity of the dead will justify the hypothesis of survival of an individual consciousness, and it is