For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the “man who knows.” There was a trace of pity in his voice⁠—contempt he never showed⁠—when he spoke of their methods.

“This classification of results is uninspired work at best,” he said once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years. “It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it would be, to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily slip into place and explain themselves. For the sources are accessible, and open to all who have the courage to lead the life that alone makes practical investigation safe and possible.”

And towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was significantly sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power was, and that what is commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than a keen power of visualising.