of the previous year. So indelibly has this event written itself upon my mind that I have often mentioned that fact to friends and acquaintances.

Chapter VII, of "Phantasms of the Living," presents a number of examples in which the premonition is always of some calamity, similar in this respect to the prophetic premonitions.

Other examples from many sources might well be cited, but unnecessarily, I believe, for it is patent from what has already been said, that premonition is a fact of psychic life, not only with the prophets of Israel, but with countless men and women not prophets. Not the premonition, however, we must bear in mind, but the awakened spiritual life of so profound a nature that we call it a unique example in the history of mankind was the fact that stamps the Hebrew geniuses as Prophets.

PSYCHOLOGY OF PREMONITION

The results of modern psychological studies show us that we are but now beginning to understand something of the infinite mystery of human mind. No one has as yet been able to grasp, or in any way clearly perceive, "mind-substance," nor has any one been so presumptuous as to say what are the limits of mind phenomena. Even that greatest of all mind certainties, namely, "the ego, I think, therefore I am, is slipping away, as I believe, when we contemplate double and multiple personalities as presented with scholarly force by1 Binet in his "Alterations of Personality." We can no longer say I think, I am, I perceive, I am immortal; for well might we pause to ask, which is the I in the several equally real and potent egos of double, triple or multiple personalities in physically one human being? Why is it my friend listens attentively to the sweet sounds of the distant music while

1 Binet, Alfred: "Alterations of Personality," New York, Appleton, 1896.

I perceive nothing? Why is it that I see yonder mountain clearly and distinctly, while my friend wonders what there can be out yonder beyond the range of his vision that I see? It is simply that one mind may be better adjusted than another to catch the vibrations of the universe. Every one knows that the dog barks at the approach of a stranger long before a human being becomes conscious of such approach. One man says: "It will rain to-day because my corns hurt me." I laugh at him because I am conscious of no approaching rain, and yet his pain is real to him, and whenever the changes in atmospheric pressure are such as they are before approaching rain, he feels it in the pain of his corn. I say again there is an adjustment of the individual mind to the universal conditions

which I possess not. A very excellent example of finer adjustment of individual consciousness to universal conditions I have culled from an article of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, in the Literary Digest of March 17, 1906.

"A perfectly normal lad I once saw possessed of the power of distinguishing by smell the handkerchiefs of the family after they had been washed and ironed. I made a personal test of this lad's power to pick out by their odor from a heap of clean handkerchiefs mine and those of others, the latter belonging to his father and mother.

"I have seen a woman who can distinguish by mere odor the gloves worn by relatives or friends. This lady, who likes cats as pets, is able to detect by its odor the presence of a cat when I and others cannot.

"These remarks prepare us to consider the means by which certain persons are aware of the nearness of unseen cats and are thus thrown into a state of agitation and general nervousness. They are usually not conscious of the unseen cat as odorous.

"It seems to me possible that either they smell the cat too slightly to be able to define the odor or else receive an olfactory impression of which they are not conscious as an odor, but only in the form of such symptoms as the visible cat would also evoke.

"To be influenced by an olfactory impression, of which (as odor) the subject rests unconscious, may seem a hypothesis worthy of small respect and beyond power of proof. Nevertheless, it seems to me reasonable. There are sounds beyond the hearing of certain persons. If they ever cause effects we do not know. There are rays of which we are not

conscious, as light or heat or except through the other effects to which they give rise. There may be olfactory emanations distinguished by some as odors and by others felt, not as odors, but only in their influential results on nervous systems unusually susceptible. No other explanation seems to me available."

Premonition, therefore, as I conceive it, is simply an intuition, an instinctive cognition of future events. As everything happens by law, through cause and effect, premonition is simply the finer adjustment of the individual mind to the universal mind or universal conditions or universal cause and effect. The rudimentary form of premonition I find to be in all the simplest instinctive knowings and adjustment of present conditions to future conditions, as when the dog and the fox " exhibit a wellmarked anticipation of future events, in hiding food to be eaten hereafter":1 more clearly even, and more intuitively and instinctively, when some animals, as is said, grow a heavier fur before the approach of a heavy winter. Call you this instinct, nature? I shall not deny it; I have no intention of calling a premonition of the highest kind, such as those of the prophets and others cited above, contra-natural, they are in every sense natural, the unexplained, yet vaguely comprehensible phenomena of the human mind. In view of the nescience of science as to the limits of mind phenomena, and in view of the knowledge of finer, more delicate adjustments of some minds to infinite mind, who will say what are the limits and the possibilities of human mind for catching the vibrations of infinite mind? As Brinton has well put it: "Who dare measure the height and the depth of the subconscious intelligence? It draws its knowledge from sources which elude scientific search, from the strange powers which we perceive in insects and other animals, almost, but not wholly, obliterated in the human line of organic descent;

1 Fiske, John: "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," Boston, Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1903, V. 2, p. 84.

and from others, now merely nascent or embryonic, new senses, destined in some far off æon to endow our posterity with faculties as wondrous to us as would be sight to the sightless.

"More than this: the teachings of the severest science tell us that matter is, in its last analysis, motion, and that motion is naught less than mind; and who dare deny that in their unconscious functions our minds may catch some overtones, as it were, from the harmonies of the Universal Intelligence thus demonstrated by inductive research, and vibrate in unison therewith?"

I repeat, therefore, that premonition is the delicate intuitive adjustment of human mind for catching the distant vibrations, or overtones," of the operations of the universe.

CHAPTER III

REVELATION. THE WORD OF GOD.

REVELATION, we must remember, is a fact believed in by all peoples, from the lowest to the highest. The cornerstone of every creed on earth is the corollary, "to wit, the direct communion between the human and the divine mind, between man and God." Brinton continues: "Prophets and shamans, evangelists and Indian medicine-men, all claim, and all claim with honesty, to be moved by the god within, the deus in nobis, and to speak the word of the Lord." There is no other element in them in which all join with like unanimity.

From the rudest to the ripest they echo the verse of the evangelist philosopher when he wrote: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word is God."

The highest teachings of them all are expressed in the formula: "And the word of the Lord came saying: " "We may go back to the earliest forms of the ancient Egyptian religion, and we find the doctrine that the man who had learned and could pronounce the divine words revealed by the god Throth (Thought, Mind) by their utterances would be elevated to the god, and be blended with him, as one inseparable."

"The Word of God' as understood by the worshipers, is the kernel and core of every faith on earth. Every religion is, to its votaries, a revelation. None is so material, none so primitive, as to claim any other foundation than the expressed will of divinity. None is so devoid of ritual as to lack some means of ascertaining this will."