That word, which will instantly leap to the lips of too many of my readers, strikes me as merely an evidence of two of our great modern improvements; the love of long words and the loss of common sense.

It may have been telepathy, whatever that is; but a man must be almost stunned with stupidity if he is satisfied to say telepathy as if he were saying telegraphy.

If everybody is satisfied about how it is done, why does not everybody do it?
Why does not a cultivated clergyman in Cornwall make a casual remark to an old friend of his at the University of Aberdeen?
Why does not a harassed commercial traveller in Barcelona settle a question by merely thinking about his business partner in Berlin?
The common sense of it is, of course, that the name makes no sort of difference; the mystery is why some people can do it and others cannot; and why it seems to be easy in one place and impossible in another.
In other words it comes back to that very mystery which of all mysteries the modern world thinks most superstitious and senseless; the mystery of locality.

It works back at last to the hardest of all the hard sayings of supernaturalism; that there is such a thing as holy or unholy ground, as divinely or diabolically inspired people; that there may be such things as sacred sites or even sacred stones; in short that the airy nothing of spiritual essence, evil or good, can have quite literally a local habitation and a name.
It may be said in passing that this _genius loci_ is here very much the presiding genius.

It is true that everywhere to-day a parade of the theory of pantheism goes with a considerable practice of particularism; and that people everywhere are beginning to wish they were somewhere.
And even where it is not true of men, it seems to be true of the mysterious forces which men are once more studying.