On the other hand, it says much for the courage and open mindedness of
Crookes that he refused to be held back from what was for him the only
possible way of extending the boundaries of science beyond the given
physical world. Moreover, it was only natural that in his search for a
world of a higher order than the physical he should, as a man of his
time, first turn his attention to spiritistic occurrences, for
spiritism, as it had come over to Europe from America in the middle of
the nineteenth century, was nothing but an attempt by the
onlooker-consciousness to learn something in its own way about the
supersensible world. The spiritist expects the spirit to reveal itself
in outwardly perceptible phenomena as if it were part of the physical
world. Towards the end of his life Crookes confessed that if he were
able to begin again he would prefer to study telepathic phenomena - the
direct transference of thought from one person to another - rather than
the purely mechanical, or so-called telekinetic, expressions of psychic
forces. But although his interest was thus turning towards a more
interior field of psychic investigation, he remained true to his times
in still assuming that knowledge about the world, whatever it might be,
could be won only by placing oneself as a mere onlooker outside the
object of research.

*

The stream of new discoveries which followed Crookes's work justified
his conviction that in cathode ray phenomena we have to do with a
frontier region of physical nature. Still, the land that lies on the
other side of this frontier is not the one Crookes had been looking for
throughout his life. For, instead of finding the way into the land
whither man's soul disappears at death, Crookes had inadvertently
crossed the border into another land - a land which the