And I have seen the demonstration by science that this visible and tangible world in its final analysis is both invisible and intangible--a phantasm of the senses.
I may be allowed perhaps to recall the incident which first set me to follow this clue.
One day, when he was deep in his studies of Radiant Matter, Sir William Crookes touched a little table which stood between our two chairs, and said to me, "We shall announce to the world in a year or two, perhaps sooner, that the atoms of which this table is composed are made up of tiny charges of electricity, and we shall prove that each one of those tiny electrons, relative to its size, is farther away from its nearest neighbour than our earth from the nearest star." I have lived to see this prophecy fulfilled, though its implications are not yet understood.
The Church does not yet realise that physical science, hitherto regarded as the enemy of religion and the mocker of philosophy, presents us now with the world of the transcendentalists, the world of the metaphysicians, the world of religious seers--a world which is real and visible only to our limited senses, but a world which disappears from all vision and definition directly we bring to its investigation those ingenious instruments of science which act as extensions of our senses.
Every schoolboy is now aware that a door is solid only to his eyes and touch; that with the aid of X-rays it becomes transparent, the light passing through it as water passes through network, revealing what is on the other side.

Every schoolboy also knows that his own body can be so photographed as to reveal its skeleton.
But the Church has yet to learn from M.Bergson the alphabet of this new knowledge, namely, that our senses and our reason are what they are because of a long evolution in _action_--not in pure thought.

We have got our sight by looking for prey or for enemies, and our hearing by listening for the movement of prey or of enemies.

Our reason, too, is fashioned out of a long heredity of action, that is to say an immemorial discipline in an existence purely animal.

So powerful is the influence of this heredity, so real seems to us a physical world which is not real, so infallible seem to us the senses by which we fail to live successfully even as animals, that, as Christ said, a man must be born again before he can enter the Kingdom of God--that is to say, before he can behold and inhabit Reality.
At the head of this chapter I have set a quotation from a leading article in _The Times_ on the recent lectures of M.Coue.It is now eighteen years ago, treading in the footsteps of Frederic Myers, that I discussed with some of the chief medical hypnotists in London and Paris the phenomena of mental suggestion.