Chapter VII MESSAGES FROM THE SPIRIT-WORLD

Clairvoyance, strictly speaking, is supposed to be an abnormal power of the medium: a range of vision, a fineness of sense, that we less gifted beings do not possess. But the performance is very apt to resolve itself into a claim that the medium sees invisible spirits and is communicating with them. Of real clairvoyance—of a power to read a closed book or a folded paper or see a distant spot—no instance has ever yet been recorded that will pass scrutiny. Many scientific men, as I said, who do not believe in spirits do believe in the abnormal powers of mediums. They would like to get a proof of clairvoyance, but they are unable to offer us one. The wonderful stories told of the gift in Spiritualist circles vanish, like the stories about Home and Moses, the moment the critical lamp is turned upon them.

We are therefore reduced to the Spiritualist claim that a medium really receives information from spirits, and we have to see on what sort of evidence this is based. Now there is an aspect of this question which even the leading Spiritualists do not face very candidly. More than twenty years ago it was felt, and rightly felt, by Spiritualists that at least a long step forward would be made if they left sealed or cipher-messages at death, and communicated the contents or the key of these from "beyond." It is well known how Myers left with Sir Oliver Lodge a sealed message of this description. A month after his death he "got into touch" with Lodge through the medium Mrs. Thompson. Unhappily he had forgotten all about the message, and even about the Society for Psychical Research! Next the supremely gifted Mrs. Verrall got into touch with Myers. By this time—it was the end of 1904—Myers had had time to get adjusted, and was talking more or less rationally through Mrs. Verrall. If there had not been a very material test in reserve, Sir O. Lodge and his friends would have sworn that the messages were from the spirit of Myers. As it was, they were so confident that on December 13, 1904, they solemnly opened the precious envelope. They were struck dumb when there was not the least correspondence between Mrs. Verrall's message from Myers and the message he had left in the envelope.

Miss Dallas tries, in her Mors Janua Vitæ, to soften the blow, but her pleas are useless. The final failure utterly stultifies all the days and months of supposed messages. And this is not the only case. Hodgson had adopted a similar test, and it was a ghastly failure. Other Spiritualists left sealed messages when they died, and not a syllable of one of them has been read. Our Spiritualists do not get into communication with the dead. This is negative evidence, but it is far more impressive than any of the rhetorical and inaccurate accounts of experiences which they give us. It is precise and unmistakable. Every Spiritualist who dies now knows that this is the supremely desired test, yet we have twenty years of complete, unmitigated failure. Men like Sir O. Lodge tell us that they recognize the personality of Hodgson beyond mistake in the messages they get through mediums; but the one sure test, the getting of the key to the cipher-messages which Hodgson left behind, is an absolute failure. It would become our Spiritualists to strike a more modest note, and not assure the ignorant public, as Sir A. C. Doyle does, that the time for proof has gone by and it is for their opponents now to justify themselves. The experience of the last twenty years has been deadly to Spiritualist pretensions.

The truth is that here again Spiritualists had been led into their belief, that messages from the spirit-world were easy and common, by a vast amount of mediumistic trickery. The earliest method was by raps, and we have seen that since 1848 this performance has been a matter of trickery. The next way was to rap out messages with a leg of the table, which was merely a variation of the table-lifting we have studied. These forms are so often used by amateur mediums that it is necessary to recall our warning that the distinction between paid and unpaid mediums is not of the least use. Carrington, Maxwell, Podmore, and Flammarion give numbers of instances of cheating by men and women of good social position. Carrington tells of an American lawyer who deliberately—not as a joke—made his friends believe that he could make a poker stand upright and do similar abnormal phenomena. He did his tricks by means of black threads. Podmore gives a similar case in England. Flammarion tells us of a Parisian doctor's wife who cheated flagrantly in order to get credit for abnormal powers. This sort of prestige has as much fascination for some people as money has for others.

The professional mediums, however, early developed in America the trick of receiving messages from spirits on slates, and this is fraud from beginning to end. The supreme artist in this field was Henry Slade, whom Sir A. C. Doyle regards as a genuine intermediary between the lofty spirits of the other world and ourselves. As Truesdell's account of the way in which he unmasked Slade as early as 1872 contains one of the richest stories in the whole collection of Spiritualist anecdotes, one would have thought that a story-teller like Sir A. C. Doyle could not possibly have forgotten it. From it we learn that Slade was from the outset of his career an adroit and brazen and confessed impostor.

Truesdell paid the customary five dollars, and received pretty and edifying, but inconclusive, messages from the spirits. Incidentally he detected that the spirit-touches on his arms were done by Slade's foot, to distract his attention; but he could not see the method of the slate-trick. However, as the main theme of the messages was an exhortation to persevere in his inquiries (at five dollars a sitting to the medium), he made another appointment. It was on this occasion that he left a misleading letter in his overcoat in Slade's hall, and found the spirits assuming that he was "Samuel Johnson, Rome, N.Y." But before Slade entered the room, or while Slade was going through his overcoat-pockets, he rapidly overhauled Slade's room. He found a slate with a pious message from the spirits already written on it, signed (as was usual) by the spirit of Slade's dead wife, Alcinda. Beneath the message Truesdell wrote "Henry, look out for this fellow—he is up to snuff! Alcinda," and replaced the slate. Slade came in, and gave a most dramatic performance. In his contortions, under the spirit-influence, he drew the table near to the hidden slate, and "accidentally" knocked the clean slate off the table. Of course, he picked up the prepared slate. His emotions can be imagined when he read the words which Truesdell had written on it. After a little bluster, however, he laughingly acknowledged that he was a mere conjurer, and he told Truesdell many tricks of his profession.[14]

This was in 1872. Four years later Slade came to London, where Sir E. Ray Lankester and Sir Bryan Donkin again exposed him. Sir E. Ray Lankester snatched the slate before the message was supposed to be written on it, and the message was already there. He prosecuted Slade, who was sentenced to three months' hard labour. He had charged a guinea a sitter. But a few words had been omitted from the antiquated form of the charge (which I have previously given in the case of Craddock), and before Slade could be again prosecuted he fled to the continent. There, we saw, he duped a group of purblind professors, and he returned to America in higher repute than ever. In 1882 an inspector of police at Belleville, in Canada, snatched the slate just as Sir E. Ray Lankester had done, and exposed him again. He escaped arrest only by a maudlin appeal for mercy; and on his return to the States he succeeded in persuading the Spiritualists—who solemnly stated this in their organ, the Banner of Light—that the man exposed at Belleville was an impostor making use of his name! In 1884 he faced the Seybert Committee, and its sharp-eyed members saw and exposed every step in his trickery. Eventually, as I have said, he lived in drink and misery, developed Bright's disease, and died in the common asylum. Such was the man whom Sir A. C. Doyle seriously regards as the chosen instrument of his spiritual powers.

The Seybert Committee found two different kinds of writing on Slade's slates. Some messages were short and badly written, and they concluded that these were written by him with one finger while he held the slate under the table (as the custom was) to receive a spirit-message. Other messages were relatively long, well written, and dignified; and they regarded these as prepared in advance. Both points were fully verified. At one sitting they noticed two slates resting suspiciously against the leg of the table. These doubtless had messages written on them, and were to be substituted for the blank slate when this was supposed to be put under the table. Slade would then produce the sound of the spirits writing by scraping with his nail on the edge of the slate. On this occasion, however, Slade saw that they had their eyes on the slates and he dare not use them. But one of the members of the committee, determined to do his work thoroughly, carelessly knocked the two slates over with his foot, and the messages were exposed.

The reception of messages from the spirits on slates may linger in rural or suburban districts, but it has lent itself to such trickery, and been exposed so thoroughly, that mediums have generally abandoned it. For whole decades it was the chief way of communicating with the spirits, and weird and wonderful were the artifices by which the medium defeated the growing sense of caution of the sitters. In spite of the exposures of Slade, the English medium Eglinton adopted and improved his methods, and he was one of the bright stars of the Spiritualist world for twenty years. He was detected in fraud as early as 1876. At that time he gave materialization-séances, at which the ghostly form of "Abdullah" appeared. Archdeacon Colley found the beard and draperies of Abdullah in his trunk. But exposure never ruins a medium in the Spiritualist world, and ten years later Eglinton was the most successful and respected medium in England, especially for slate-messages.

Hodgson more than suspected him, and he at last found a man, Mr. S. J. Davey, who was able to reproduce all his tricks. He wrote messages while he held the slates under the table, and he substituted prepared slates for clean slates under the noses of his sitters. Perhaps the most valuable part of his experience was this substitution, which is one of the fundamental elements of mediumistic trickery. Spiritualists—indeed, inquirers generally—honestly flatter themselves that they have taken care that there was no deception of this kind. Such confidence is foolish, as the professional conjurer does this kind of substitution under our eyes habitually, and we never see him do it. In order to make people more cautious Davey, with Dr. Hodgson's connivance, set up as a medium and gave sittings to Spiritualists. They afterwards sent accounts of their experiences to the Society for Psychical Research. They were, as usual, certain that there was no trickery, and that the messages were genuine. Davey then wrote correct accounts of what he had done, and it was seen that the accounts of the sitters were inaccurate and their observation faulty. Some of them indignantly retorted that Davey was a genuine medium, but found it more profitable to pose as a conjurer and exposer of mediums!

In a work specially devoted to this subject (Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena, 1899) Mr. W. E. Robinson gives about thirty different fraudulent ways of getting spirit-messages. Indeed, many of these may be sub-divided, and you get scores of methods. One method, for instance, is to write a message with invisible fluid on paper, seal the apparently blank paper in an envelope, and then let the message appear and pretend that the spirits wrote it. Mr. Robinson gives thirty-seven different recipes for the "invisible ink," and sixteen of these require only heat, which is easily applied, to develop them. In other cases the inside of the envelope has been moistened with a chemical solution which develops the hidden writing. One medium used to put an apparently blank sheet of paper in a clear bottle and seal it. Here trickery seemed impossible, and the sitter was greatly impressed at receiving a pious message on the paper. But the message had been written in advance with a weak solution of copper sulphate, and the bottle had been washed out with ammonia, which develops it.

In slate-messages much use is made of a false flap, or a loose sheet of slate which fits imperceptibly on one side of the framed slate. It conceals the message written on the slate, and is removed under the table or under cover of a newspaper. A sheet of slate-coloured silk or cloth is sometimes fitted on the slate, and it is drawn up the medium's sleeve or rolled into the frame of the slate. Invisible messages may be written on the slate with onion or lemon juice, and developed by lightly passing over them a cloth containing powdered chalk. Double-frame slates lend themselves to infinite trickery. Slates are provided by "the trade" with false hinges and all kinds of mechanism. But even when the sitter brings his own slates, as Zöllner did, and ties them up and seals them, the medium is not baffled. They are laid aside, for the spirits to write on at their leisure. At the first convenient opportunity the medium removes the wax, without spoiling the seal, by passing a heated knife-blade or fine wire beneath it, and, after untying the strings, heats the under-surface of the wax and sticks it on again.

Mediums found that sitters were greatly impressed if they heard the sound of the spirits writing on the slate. This was easily done by scraping with the finger nail, and cautious people wanted to have a security against fraud. One medium gave them adequate security. He held both hands above the table, yet writing was distinctly heard underneath it. The man had attached to the table a clamp holding a bit of slate-pencil, and against this he rubbed a pencil which was fastened to his trousers by loops of black silk. Others can use a pencil with their toes—I have seen an armless Bulgar girl use a pen with her toes as neatly as a good writer uses his fingers—and hold both hands above the table.

This trick is often used when a message is wanted in answer to a question and cannot be written in advance. The usual method is, however, to hold the slate under the table-top and write on it while it is held there. At first this was done by means of a tiny bit of slate-pencil slipped under the nail of the big finger. Slade soon found that this was suspected, and he made a point of keeping his nails short. The trade which is at the back of mediums then supplied thimbles with bits of pencil attached, which the medium could slip on to his finger as he put the slate under the table. Even thimbles with three differently coloured chalks were made, and the innocent sitter would be invited to select his own colour for the spirits to write in. The most amazing tricks were developed. Robinson tells of a man who would let you bring your own slate and hold it against your own breast, and the message then appeared on it. He "tried" your slate when you brought it by writing on it with his pencil. But, of course, he sponged out all his writing before he handed the slate back to you, as you could see. He had a double pencil—slate at one end and silver nitrate at the other—and what he wrote with the latter was invisible until it was damped with salt-water. Well, the sponging (or damping) had been done with salt-water, and so the message (in silver nitrate) appeared as the slate dried against your breast.

When you thus allow the medium to use his own apparatus in his own room you need not be surprised at any result whatever. The sensible man will remember that behind the mediums is the same ingenious industry which supplies conjuring outfits. Mr. Selbit showed Mr. Moseley a typewriter, on an ordinary-looking table, which spelt out, by invisible fingers, a message in reply to your question. There was an electrical mechanism in the table, and an electrician in the next room controlling it by a wire through the hollow table-leg. But even without such elaborate mechanism mediums can baffle quite vigilant sitters. There was one who would allow you to examine his nails, yet he got slate-messages without putting the slate under the table. He had ground slate-pencil to dust, mixed it with gum, and then cut the mixture into little cubes or pellets. He simply stuck these on his trousers, and, after you had examined his nails, helped himself to one.

When the answers are given on paper a hundred other tricks are employed. First the medium must learn the question you are putting to the spirits. If you put it mentally, you will never get more than a lucky or unlucky guess, unless you happen to be one of those sitters for whom the medium was prepared. You need not fear telepathy. It must be admitted to-day that the evidence for telepathy or thought-transference is in as parlous a condition as the evidence for Spiritualism. After all the challenges and discussions not a single serious claim lies before us. Sir A. C. Doyle, it is true, tells (Debate, p. 28) quite confidently of Mr. Lethem getting an answer to his unspoken questions. But Sir Arthur, as usual, does not tell all the facts. The unspoken questions to which Mrs. Lethem, as a medium, gave "correct answers" were precisely the two test questions which Mr. Lethem had put to a medium some time before! We may surely presume that he had confided that wonderful experience to the wife of his bosom.

No, there is no clear case of telepathy, or answers to unspoken questions, on record. The medium gets you to write your questions. Spirits are supposed to be more at home in reading such spiritual things as thoughts than in reading material scribbles; but your medium is not a spirit, and you will get no answer unless he knows the question. If you write your question on the pad which he kindly offers, it is easy. There is a carbon paper underneath, which gives him a duplicate. In one very elaborate case the carbon and duplicate were under the cloth, and were drawn off, when you had finished writing, through a hollow leg of the table into the next room. One medium developed the art of reading what you wrote from the movements of the top of your pencil. Others, like Foster, artfully stole your bit of paper and substituted dummies. But I will quote from Mr. Carrington a last trick which will give the reader a sufficiently large idea of the wonderful ingenuity which mediums use in these spirit messages.

He tells in his Personal Experiences of Spiritualism of a pair of Chicago mediums—the same Misses Bangs who painted spirit pictures before your eyes, as I have previously described—whose method was extraordinarily difficult to detect. You wrote a letter to a deceased person. You folded a blank sheet with this letter, and sealed them yourself in an envelope. This letter you handed to Miss Bangs as she sat at the table opposite you. After a long delay, but without her leaving the room, she restored the envelope (which had lain on the table under a blotter) to you intact, and you found a letter to you from your spirit friend written on the blank sheet you had enclosed.

Mr. Carrington admits that he can only guess the way in which this striking performance was done, but the reader who cares to read his full and interesting account will feel that his conjecture is right. The letter did not remain on the table. Under cover of the blotting pad and various nervous movements it was conveyed to the medium's lap, and from there to a shallow tray on the floor under the table. The medium, he noticed, sat close to a door which led into an adjoining room, and he believes that the tray was pulled by a string from under the table into the next room. An expert whom he afterwards sent to examine the house, under cover of a sitting, verified his conjecture that there was space enough at the bottom of the door to pull a shallow tray through. In the next room it was easy for Miss Bangs No. 2 to open the letter, write the reply, and seal the envelope again. Even wax seals offer no difficulty to mediums. The letter was re-conducted to the table in the same furtive way. A desperate Spiritualist may say that his hypothesis is simpler than this. But there is one little difficulty. No such person had ever existed as the supposed dead relative to whom Mr. Carrington addressed his letter! He had hoaxed the hoaxer.

Here were two quiet and inoffensive-looking spinsters earning a good living by deceptive practices (this and the spirit-painting trick) which they had themselves, apparently, originated, and which taxed the ingenuity of an expert conjurer to discover. What chance has the ordinary inquirer, much less the eager Spiritualist, against guile of this description? A boy of sixteen can buy a box of conjuring apparatus for a guinea. It contains only tricks which have been scattered over the country for years. Yet in your own drawing-room he can, after a little practice, cheat your eyes every time, although you know that there is trickery, and are keenly on the look-out for it. What chance have you, then, against a man or woman who has been conjuring for twenty years? What chance have you in a poor light? What earthly chance have you in the dark? It is amazing how inquirers and Spiritualists forget this elementary truism. They tell you repeatedly, with the air of supreme experts in conjuring, that "there was no possibility of fraud." That is sheer self-deception. Even expert conjurers have been completely deceived by mediums, as Bellachini was with Slade (a confessed impostor) and Carrington was with Eusapia Palladino. The man who tells you that there was no fraud because he saw none is as foolish as the man who expects you either to explain where the fraud was or else embrace Spiritualism.

There is one other method of receiving messages which we must briefly notice. It is, to Spiritualists, the most impressive of all. The ghost of the dead talks directly to you. A "direct voice" medium is, of course, required, and some kind of trumpet is provided by the medium through which the spirit speaks to you. If you are known to the medium, or if you have a good imagination and are very eager, you can recognize the very accents of your dead wife or mother-in-law. But there is one disadvantage of this impressive phenomenon. It must take place in complete darkness; and we remember the warning of that high and experienced psychic authority, Dr. Maxwell, that the man who seeks any kind of phenomena in complete darkness is wasting his time.

Spiritualist writers are amusing when they try to reconcile us to the conditions which their mediums have imposed on them. Are there not certain conditions for the appearance of all scientific phenomena, they ask us? Most assuredly. You cannot grow carrots without soil, and so on. Is not darkness a condition of certain scientific processes? Again, most certainly. The photographic plate must be prepared in the dark, or in a dull red light. Therefore.... That is just where the Spiritualist fails. If the darkness under cover of which the photographic chemist prepares his plates lent itself equally to cover fraud or to protect his operations, there would be a parallel. As it is, there is no parallel.

The red light of the photographer can serve only one purpose. When the medium uses it, there are two purposes conceivable. One is, on the Spiritualist theory, that white light may interfere with the "magnetism," or the "psychic force," or whatever the latest jargon is. The other conceivable purpose is that it may cover fraud. Everybody admits that the darkening of the planet since 1848 has covered "a vast amount of fraud," to use the words of Baron Schrenck. Few people admit that it has favoured real phenomena. It is therefore quite absurd to attempt to reconcile us to the darkness by the analogy of photographic operations. There is no analogy at all. In the one case the poor light certainly favours fraud, and does not certainly do anything else. In the other case the red light never covers fraud, but has a single clear purpose.

Red light, as I have said, is the most tiring for the eye of all kinds of light. The man who thinks that he can control the hands and feet of seven mediums in such a light cannot expect to be taken seriously. He can expect only to be taken in. But the man who pays any attention to phenomena for which the medium requires pitch darkness is even worse. Why not simply imagine that the dead still live, and save the guinea? You have not the slightest guarantee of the genuineness of the phenomena. Imagining that you can recognize the voice or the features is one of the oldest of illusions.

In the summer of 1912 our Spiritualists were elated by the discovery of a new medium of the most powerful type. Mrs. Ebba Wriedt came from that perennial breeding-ground of great mediums, the United States, where she had long been known. In 1912 she illumined London. Through her W. T. Stead was able once more to address Spiritualists viva voce. One recognized the familiar voice unmistakably. Scepticism was ludicrous. Did not a Serbian diplomatist talk to the spirit in Serb, which Mrs. Wriedt did not know, and answer for the genuineness of the phenomena? Light had wonderful columns on Mrs. Wriedt's marvels. She was, the editor of a psychic journal said, "the pride and the most convincing argument of the whole Spiritualist and Theosophical world." In admiring her powers, even the mutual hostility of Spiritualist and Theosophist was laid aside, it seems.

Norwegian Spiritualists were eager to avail themselves of this rare gift, and they asked if Norwegian spirits could speak through the great medium. After consulting the spirits—a cynic would say, after practising a word or two of Norwegian—Mrs. Wriedt replied in the affirmative, and boldly crossed the sea.

There is, of course, no intrinsic reason, on the Spiritualist theory, why spirits should be confined to the language of the medium. In "direct voice" they do not even have to use her vocal organs. A trumpet lies on the ground or the table, and the spirits lift it up and megaphone (very softly) through it. It is quite inexplicable to those of us who are mere inquirers why the spirits must always talk English in England, American in America, and so on. Even when they try, as in the case of the Thomas brothers, to talk their native American to us in England, the result is half bad American and half Welsh-English. It would be much more impressive to our hesitating generation if a half-dozen foreigners were brought to the sitting, and each had a real conversation—not a word or two—with a ghost of his own nationality. Somehow the spirits insist on speaking the language, and even the dialect, of the medium. We shall consider in the next chapter a few supposed variations from this unfortunate rule of spirit-intercourse.

Well, Mrs. Wriedt went to Norway, and confronted her new inquirers with all the solidity and confidence of the well-built American matron. Somehow, the vocabulary of the Norwegian dead, who came along, was very limited. They could say only "Yes" or "No" in Norwegian. Otherwise the first séance was very good. To make up for their culpable ignorance of their native tongue the Norwegian ghosts scattered flowers about the dark room, gave ghostly music, and did other marvellous things. But there were two ladies and a professor—Frau Nielsen and Frau Anker and Professor Birkeland—who did not like this "Yes" and "No" business. It was scriptural, but not ladylike. So the professor held Mrs. Wriedt's hands very firmly at the second séance, and for twenty minutes the spirits were dumb. They always resent such things, as every Spiritualist knows. The trumpets lay on the floor, neglected and silent.

At length Professor Birkeland heard some very faint explosive sounds which his ears located in the trumpets or horns (in shape something like the old coach-horn). He looked steadily and saw them move slightly, a phosphorescent light in them making the movements clear. A good Spiritualist would have seen that this was the beginning of manifestations, and he would have paid close attention to the trumpets and relaxed his hard control of Mrs. Wriedt. The professor was, however, of the type which mediums call "brutal." He jumped up, switched on the electric light, and, before the Spiritualists could interfere, had snatched the two trumpets from the floor and bolted to the nearest analytic chemist. So the curtain fell on one more glorious act in the Spiritualist drama. Mrs. Wriedt had put in the trumpet particles of metallic potassium which, meeting the moisture she had also thoughtfully provided, explained the "psychic movements." Close examination disclosed that on other occasions she had used Lycopodium seeds to produce the same effect.

Professor Birkeland did not discover how the voices were produced, but they offer no difficulty. The trumpets were, he found, telescopic. Each consisted of three parts, and could stretch to nearly three feet. When some guileless lady, who is controlling the medium, allows a hand to stray in the usual way, the trumpet is seized, and it will give a "direct voice" over the heads of the sitters or close to any one of them. When the trumpet remains on the ground during the ghostly message, the medium has a rubber speaking-tube fitted to it. When no trumpet is provided at all, it makes no difference. The medium has thoughtfully brought one of these telescopic aluminium tubes in his trousers. It folds up to less than a foot. In some of the earlier cases, possibly still in some cases, the medium's little daughter, who sits demure and mildly interested on the couch before the light is switched off, mounts the furniture in the dark, and obligingly impersonates the ghost.

No one would accuse Mr. Crawford, of Belfast, of being ultra-critical, yet his experience confirms my conclusions. His marvellous experiences with the pious Kathleen drew the attention of the Spiritualist world, and all sorts of mediums came to help. First he tried the clairvoyants. But they saw such weird and contradictory things that he was worried. None of them saw the wonderful "psychic cantilever" which he thought the spirits made to lift the table, but they all saw ghostly hands where he did not want them; and the worst of it was that the same spirits which had confirmed his theory of a cantilever, and even allowed him to take a photograph (which he has meanly refused to publish) of it, now joyously confirmed the quite different theory of the Spiritualist clairvoyants.

So he gave it up, and next tried a "direct voice" medium. He is fairly polite about the result. He got plenty of voices from all quarters—in total darkness. Not only did a voice come from the ceiling, but a mark was made on it. The medium's silk coat was frivolously taken off her by the ghosts, and flung on the lap of one of the sitters. Strangely, these things do not impress him as much as the raising of a two-pound stool to a height of four feet does. He drops dark hints that things were said about this "direct voice" medium. She was a big woman, and she was not searched; and telescopic aluminium tubes take up little room. Mr. Crawford put his little electrical register near her feet, and she was "annoyed and nervous." In short, Mr. Crawford seems to have formed the same opinion as any sensible person would in the circumstances.[15]

We have still to examine the claims of the automatic writers; but, after all this, the reader will not expect much. Never yet was a message received which could not have been learned by the medium in a normal way. The overwhelming mass of the messages which are delivered daily in every country are fraudulent. In an amusing recent work (The Road to En-Dor) two officers have shown us how easy it was to dupe even educated men by these professions of marvellous powers. The advantage is on the side of the conjurer every time, and the sitter has little chance. Let the mediums come before a competent tribunal. All sorts of inducements have been offered to them to do so, but they are very shy of competent investigators. In 1911 an advertisement in the Times offered £1,000 to any medium who would merely give proof of possessing telepathic power, and there was not a single offer. This year Mr. Joseph Rinn, a former member of the American Society for Psychical Research and a life-long inquirer, has deposited with that Society a sum of £1,000 for any evidence of communication with the dead under proper conditions. There will again be no application. Mediums prefer a simpler and more reverent audience, even if the fees be smaller. But those who consult them under their own conditions, knowing that fraud has been practised under those conditions from San Francisco to Petrograd ever since 1848, must not talk to us about "evidence."

Chapter VIII AUTOMATIC WRITING

The Spiritualist—if any Spiritualist reader has persevered thus far—will be surprised to hear that many Rationalists censure me because I decline to admit that his movement is "all fraud." For heaven's sake, he will exclaim, let us hear something about our honesty for a change! Even the impartial outsider will possibly welcome such a change. How is it possible, he will ask, that so many distinguished men have given their names to the movement if it is all fraudulent?

Now let us have a word first on these supposed distinguished Spiritualists. During the debate with me Sir A. C. Doyle produced a tiny red book and told the audience that it contained "the names of 160 people of high distinction, many of them of great eminence, including over forty professors" (p. 19). He said expressly that "these 160 people ... have announced themselves as Spiritualists" (p. 20). The book was handed to me, and it will be understood that I could not very well read it and attend to my opponent's speech, to which I had to reply. But I saw at a glance several utterly destructive weaknesses. Several men were described as "professor" who had no right to the title. Several men were included who were certainly not Spiritualists (Richet, Ochorowicz, Schiaparelli, Flammarion, Maxwell, etc.). And in not one single case is a precise reference given for the words which are attributed to these men. My opponent regretted that chapter and verse were not "always" (this word is omitted from the printed Debate) quoted in his little book. As a matter of fact, "chapter and verse" (book and page) are never given, in any instance; and in the vast majority of the 160 cases not even words are quoted to justify the inclusion. He further said that he quite admitted that some of the "forty professors" in the book did not go so far as Spiritualists. But I have already quoted his words to the effect that they had "announced themselves as Spiritualists," and the same impression is undoubtedly conveyed by the book itself, the title of which is Who Are These Spiritualists?

I have the book before me, and any reader who cares to glance at the printed Debate and see what Sir A. C. Doyle said about it will be astonished when I describe it. The printed text gives 126 names, and 32 further names (many illegible) are written on the margins in Sir A. C. Doyle's hand. Only in 53 cases out of the 158 is any quotation given from the person named, and in not one of these cases are we told where the quotation may be verified. There are 27 (not 49, as Sir Arthur said) men described as "professors"; and of these several never were professors, and very few ever were Spiritualists. Sir A. C. Doyle has himself included Professor Morselli, who calls Spiritualism "childish and immoral." There are men included who died before Spiritualism was born, and there are twenty or thirty Agnostics included. Men like "Lord Dunraven, Lord Adare, and Alexander Wilder" are described, with the most amazing effrontery, as "some of the world's greatest authors." Padre Secchi, the pious Roman Catholic, is included. Thackeray, Sir E. Arnold, Professor de Morgan, Thiers, Lord Brougham, Forbes Winslow, Longfellow, Ruskin, Abraham Lincoln, and other distinguished sceptics are dragged in. For sloppy, slovenly, loose, and worthless work—and I have in twenty years of controversy had to handle a good deal—this little book would be hard to beat.

A list of distinguished Spiritualists could be accommodated on a single page of this book. A list of distinguished Rationalists in the same period (1848-1920) would take twenty pages. The truth is that in the earlier days of Spiritualism, when less was known than we now know about mediumistic fraud, a number of distinguished men were "converted." They were in every case converted by the impostors I have exposed in the course of this work—by Home, Florrie Cook, Mrs. Guppy, Eglinton, Slade, Morse, Holmes, etc. What is the value of such conversions? Who are the "distinguished" Spiritualists to-day? Sir A. C. Doyle, Sir O. Lodge, Sir W. Barrett, Mr. Gerald Balfour.... The reader will be astonished to know that those are the only names of living men of any distinction that Sir A. C. Doyle dares to give, either in the text or on the margins of his book. What their opinion is worth the reader may judge for himself.

Let us pass on. I wrote recently in the Literary Guide that "there are hundreds of honest mediums." Some of my readers resented this as over-generous. Possibly they have only a vague idea of Spiritualism, and it is advisable for us to reflect clearly on the point. In the eyes of Spiritualists every man or woman, paid or unpaid, who is supposed to be in any way in communication with spirits is a "medium." The word does not simply apply to men and women who, for payment, sit in cabinets or in a circle, and lift tables, play guitars, write on slates, produce ghosts, pull furniture about, tug the beards of sitters, and so on. I should agree with the reader that these people, paid or unpaid, and all mediums who operate in the dark or in red light, are probably frauds. That is a fair conclusion from the preceding chapters, in which I have exposed every variety of their manifestations, and from the history of Spiritualism.

This rules out all professional mediums and a large proportion of the amateurs. Perhaps the reader does not know, and would like to know, what a séance is like. As far as the "more powerful" (and more certainly fraudulent) mediums are concerned, I have already given a sufficient description. A cloth-covered frame or "cabinet" is raised at one end of the room, or a curtain is drawn across an alcove or corner. In this the medium generally (not always) sits, and the curtains are closed until the medium thinks fit to have them opened. The medium is sometimes hypnotized, and sometimes falls into a natural trance; it matters little, for the trance is invariably a sham, and the medium is wide awake all the time, though he simulates the appearance of a trance. The lights are lowered or extinguished. Generally a red-glass lantern or bulb (sometimes several) is lit. Then, after a time, which is occupied by singing or music (to drown the noise of the medium's movements), the ghost appears, or the tambourine is played, or the table is lifted, and so on.

These are the heavier and more expensive performances, and are constantly being exposed. The medium has apparatus in the false seat of his chair or concealed about his person. But the common, daily séance is quite different. You sit round a table or in a circle, or (if you will rise to the price) sit alone with the lady. The light may be good. The medium "sees" and describes spirit forms hovering about you. If you are one of the people whom the medium has, through an intermediary, attracted to the circle, you get some accurate details. If not, the medium begins with generalities and, studying your expression, feels her way to details. It is generally a waste of time. Friends of mine have gone from one to another medium in London, and they tell me that it is simply a tedious and most irritating way of convincing oneself that these people are all frauds.

But beyond these are hundreds, or thousands, of private individuals who discover that they are mediums. They take a pencil in their hands, fall into a passive, dreamy state, and presently the pencil "automatically" writes messages from the spirit world. Others use the planchette (a pencil fixed in a heart-shaped board which, when the medium's fingers are on it, writes on a sheet of paper) or the ouija board (in which the apex of the heart spells out messages by pointing rapidly to the letters of the alphabet painted on a larger board over which it travels). I have studied all three forms, and may take them together as "automatic writing."

The first question is whether this can be done unconsciously. If such messages are consciously spelt or written by the medium, it is, of course, fraud, because the messages purport to come from the dead. My own experience convinces me that even here there is a vast amount of fraud. The social status and general character of the medium do not seem to matter at all, as we have repeatedly seen. People get into the attitude of the child. "I can do what you can't do," you constantly hear the child say to its fellows. There is a good deal of the child in all of us. Prestige, distinction, credit for a rare or original power, is as much sought as money; and this motive grows stronger when the medium already has money. Everybody knows, or ought to know, the perfectly authentic story of Mozart's Requiem. A wealthy amateur, Count Walsegg, secretly paid Mozart to compose that famous Mass, and it was to be passed off by Walsegg as his own.

But while there is much fraud even in automatic writing, there are certainly hundreds of mediums of this description who quite honestly believe that they are spirit-controlled. Mr. G. B. Shaw's mother was an automatic artist of that class. I have seen some of her spirit drawings. A high-minded medical man of my acquaintance was a medium of the same type. The class is very numerous. Psychologically, it is not very difficult to understand. A pianist can play quite complicated pieces unconsciously or subconsciously. A writer, who cannot normally write decent fiction, may have wonderful flights of imagination in a dream. An expert worker can do quite complicated things without attention. Something of the same faculty seems to come in time to the automatic writer or artist. Consciousness is more or less—never entirely, perhaps—switched off from its usual connection with the hand, and the part of the brain-machine which is not lit by consciousness takes over the connection.

That this can be done in perfect honesty will be clear to every reader of Flammarion's book, Les forces naturelles inconnues. Flammarion never became a Spiritualist, but he was quite a fluent automatic writer in his youth. Victorien Sardou, the great dramatist, belonged to the same circle, and was an automatic draughtsman. Flammarion gives specimens of the work of both. Quite without a deliberate intention, he signed his automatic writing (on science) "Galileo."

I have no doubt that at the time both these distinguished men were strongly tempted to embrace the Spiritualist theory. These experiences, and the experiences of the séance, can be exceedingly impressive and dramatic. The man who has never been there is too apt to think that all Spiritualists are fools. I have been to séances, and I do not admit that. I am quarrelling with Spiritualists because they will not realize the possibilities and the actual abundance of fraud. But the séance is undoubtedly very impressive at times. I have held a serious conversation, in German and Latin, through an amateur medium of my own acquaintance, with the supposed spirit of a certain German theologian of the last century whose name (as given) was well known to me. I do not at all wonder that many succumb in sittings of this sort. But I found invariably that, if one resolutely kept one's head and devised crucial tests, the claim broke down. So it is with Flammarion and Sardou. What "Galileo" wrote in 1870 was just the astronomy of that time; and much of it is totally wrong to-day. Sardou, on the other hand, drew remarkable sketches of life on Jupiter; and we know to-day that Jupiter is red-hot!

This is a broad characteristic of automatic writing since it began in the fifties of the nineteenth century. At its best it merely reflected the culture of the time, which was often wrong. Stainton Moses, for instance, wrote reams of edifying revelation. But I find among his wonderful utterances about ancient history certain statements concerning the early Hindus and Persians which recent discoveries have completely falsified. He had been reading certain books which were just passable (though already a little out of date) fifty years ago. Among other things the spirits told him that Manu lived 3,000 B.C., and that there was a high "Brahminical lore" long before that date! So with Andrew Jackson Davis, the first of these marvellous bringers of wisdom from the spirit world. He had probably read R. Chambers's Vestiges of Creation, and he gave out weird and wonderful revelations about evolution. In the beginning was a clam, which begot a tadpole, which begot a quadruped, and so on. Davis certainly lied hard when he used to deny that he had read the books to which his "revelations" were traced, but no one can deny his originality.

Then there was Fowler, an American medical student and pious amateur medium, who was regarded with reverence by the American Spiritualists. I invite the reader's particular attention to this man, as he is one of those unpaid individuals who are supposed (by Spiritualists) to have no conceivable motive for cheating. Yet he lied and cheated in the most original fashion. He told his friends that ghostly men entered his bedroom at nights, produced ghostly pens and ink, and left messages in Hebrew on his table. An expert in Hebrew found that the message was a very bad copy of a passage from the Hebrew text of Daniel. This did not affect the faith of Spiritualists, who put a piece of parchment in Fowler's room for a further message. They had a rich reward. They found next day a spiritual manifesto signed by no less than fifty-six spirits, including some of the statesmen who had signed the Declaration of Independence.

The frauds were very gross in those early decades. Franklin, Washington, even Thomas Paine, sent hundreds of messages from the "Summerland." As time went on, Socrates, Plato, Sir I. Newton, Milton, Galileo, Aristotle, and nearly everybody whose name was in an encyclopædia, guided the automatic writers. When one reads the inane twaddle signed with their names, one wonders that even simple people could be deceived. Dante dictated a poem of three thousand lines in the richest provincial American. One automatic writer wrote, under inspiration, a book of a hundred thousand words. It is estimated that there were two thousand writing mediums in the United States alone four years after the foundation of the movement.

Mrs. Piper was chiefly an automatic writer in the latter part of her famous career as a medium, but we need scarcely discuss further her accomplishments. In her later years she said that she did not claim to be controlled by spirits, and this is sometimes wrongly described as a confession of fraud. What she directly meant was that she did not profess any opinion as to the source of the knowledge she gave to sitters. She seemed to favour the theory of telepathy. When, however, we remember that she spoke constantly in the name of spirits (Longfellow, Phinuit, Pelham, Myers, etc.), the plea seems curious. Those who believe that she was really in a sort of trance-state, and knew not what she was doing, may be disposed to accept Podmore's theory, that her subconscious personality dramatized these various spirits or supposed spirits. Some of us do not like this idea of trance. In the hundreds of exact records of proceedings with mediums that I have read, I have not seen a page that suggested a genuine "trance," but I have noted scores and scores of passages which showed that the medium feigned to be in a trance, but was very wide awake.

Mrs. Thompson is another clairvoyant and automatic writer who has been much appreciated by modern Spiritualists. It is well to recall that before 1898 she was a medium for "physical phenomena." She even brought about materializations. Then she met Mr. Myers, and her powers assumed a more refined form. Dr. Hodgson, that quaint mixture of blunt criticism and occasional credulity, had six sittings with her, and roundly stated that she was a fraud. The correct information which she gave him was, he said, taken from letters to which she had access, or from works of reference like Who's Who. In one case, which made a great impression, she gave some remarkably abstruse and correct information. It was afterwards found that the facts were stated in an old diary which had belonged to her husband. She herself produced the diary, and said that she had never read it; so, of course, everybody believed her. When Professor Sidgwick died, in 1900, his "spirit" used to communicate through her. She reproduced his manner, and even his writing (which she said she had never seen), very fairly; but she could give no communication from him of "evidential" value.

The impersonation of dead people by the "entranced" medium makes a great impression on Spiritualists. It is difficult to understand why. One medium quite convinced a friend of mine by such a performance. She sat, in the circle, in a trance one day, when she suddenly rose from her chair, stroked an imaginary moustache, and began to speak in a gruff voice. "He"—the young lady had become a cavalry man—explained in a dazed way that he had died at Knightsbridge Barracks on the previous day, and gave his name. Great was the joy of the elect on finding afterwards that a soldier of the name had died at Knightsbridge on the previous day.

It was quite childish. It is just by learning such out-of-the-way facts, as they easily can, and making use of them, that the mediums keep up their reputations. There was no reason whatever why the medium should not have learned of the death and made so profitable a use of it. Stainton Moses often did such things. One day he was possessed by the spirit of a cabman who said that he had been killed on the streets of London that very afternoon. By an unusual oversight the spirit did not give his name. It was afterwards found that the accident was reported in an evening paper which Stainton Moses might have seen just before the séance; and, by a curious coincidence, the reporter had not given the cabman's name. In other cases, where mediums had been invited to districts with which they were not familiar, yet they gave quite accurate details about local dead, it was found on inquiry that the information might have been gathered from the stones in the local cemetery.

A common retort of the Spiritualist, when you point out the possibility of the medium impersonating the dead, is that, "if she did so, she must be one of the cleverest actresses in England." You are asked, triumphantly, why the lady should be content with a few pounds a week as a despised medium, when she might be making five thousand a year on a stage. Any person who has seen these "trances" will know the value of their "dramatic" art. Almost anybody could do it. The medium makes from three to five pounds a week by such things, but if she tried the stage she would have, at the most, a minor part with fifty or sixty pounds a year. Spiritualists get their judgments weirdly distorted by their bias. I need only quote the extravagant language in which Sir A. C. Doyle refers to Mr. Vale Owen's trash or Mrs. Spencer's picture of Christ. He makes the miracle in which he wishes to believe.

Two particular cases of spirit messages by automatic writing have lately been pressed upon us, and we must briefly examine them. One is given in a book by Mr. F. Bligh Bond, called The Gate of Remembrance, which is recommended to us by Sir A. C. Doyle as one of the five particularly convincing works which he would have us read. He again fails to tell his readers that Mr. Bligh Bond draws a very different conclusion than his own from the facts. He has a mystical theory of a universal memory or consciousness, a sort of ocean into which the memories of the dead have flowed. He does not believe that the individual spirits of the dead monks of pre-Reformation days came along and dictated their views through his automatic-writing friend.

Any person, however, who reads the book impartially will see no need for either the Spiritualist view or Mr. Bond's. The main point is that, through Mr. Bond's friend, Mr. John Alleyne, what purported to be the ghosts of the old monks of Glastonbury Abbey wrote quite vivid sketches of their medieval life in the Abbey and, particularly, suggested the position and general features of a chapel that was at the time unknown. As to the character or impersonation of the monks, which seems to Spiritualists so impressive, we are told by experts on medieval language that it will not sustain criticism. The language is quaint and pleasant to read, but it is not consistent either in old English or Latin. It is the language of a man who is familiar with medieval English and Latin, but does not speak it as his own language, and so often trips. It is, in other words, Mr. John Alleyne writing old English and medieval Latin, and stumbling occasionally.

As to the indication of a buried chapel, both this and the general impersonation of the old monks are intelligible to any man who has read the book itself, not Spiritualist accounts of it. Mr. Bond, an architect and archæologist, expected to be appointed to the charge of the ruins, and he and his friend Mr. Alleyne steeped themselves, all through the year 1907, in the literature of the subject. They read all that was known about Glastonbury, and lived for months in the medieval atmosphere. Then Mr. Alleyne took his pencil and began to write automatically. The general result is not strange; nor is it at all supernatural that he should have formed a theory about the lost chapel and conveyed this to paper in the guise of a message from one of the old monks.

The next work recommended to us is a short paper by Mr. Gerald Balfour called "The Ear of Dionysius" (published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. xxix, March, 1917). The writing medium, Mrs. Verrall, a Cambridge lady of a highly cultivated and refined type and an excellent classical scholar, found in her automatic "script" on August 26, 1910, a reference to "the Ear of Dionysius." Three years and a-half later another writing medium, Mrs. Willett, got one of those rambling and incoherent messages, which are customary, in reference to "the Ear of Dionysius." This seemed to be more than a coincidence, as Mrs. Willett is no classical scholar. But Mr. Balfour candidly warns us that Mrs. Willett said that she had heard nothing about the earlier reference to the Ear of Dionysius in Mrs. Verrall's case. It would be remarkable if the fact had been kept entirely secret for three and a-half years, as some importance was attached to it in psychic circles, and we may prefer to trust Mr. Balfour's memory rather than Mrs. Willett's. He says that he feels sure that one day, in the long interval, Mrs. Willett asked him what the Ear of Dionysius was.

Mr. Balfour, however, believes that in the sequel we have fair evidence of spirit communication. The reader who is not familiar with these matters should know that a new test had been devised for controlling the origin of these messages. It was felt that if the "spirit" of one of the dead psychical researchers (who could no longer read or remember the sealed messages they had left) were to give an unintelligible message to one medium, a second unintelligible message to a second medium, and then the key to both to either or to a third medium, and if the contents of these messages were strictly withheld from the mediums (each knowing only her own part), a very definite proof of spirit origin would be afforded. Thus the ghost of Mr. Verrall or Mr. Myers might take a line of an obscure Greek poet, give one word of it to Mrs. Thompson, another to Mrs. Willett, and then point out the connection through Mrs. Verrall. Mr. Balfour claims that this was done in connection with the Ear of Dionysius. Mrs. Willett, who does not know Latin or Greek, got messages containing a number of classical allusions. Among them was one which no one could understand, and the key to this was some time afterwards given in the automatic writing of Mrs. Verrall.

The reader will now begin to understand the serious and respectable part of modern Spiritualism. I presume that these cultivated Spiritualists regard the "physical phenomena" of the movement and the ordinary mediums with the same contempt that I do. They know that fraud is being perpetrated daily, and that the history of the movement, since its beginning in 1848, has reeked with fraud. It is on these refined messages and cross-references that they would stake their faith.

But, while we readily grant that these things offer an arguable case and must not be dismissed with the disdain which we have shown in the previous chapters, we feel that the new basis is altogether insecure and inadequate. Two mediums get a reference to so remote and unlikely a thing as "the Ear of Dionysius." When you put it in this simple form it sounds impressive; but we saw that there was an interval of three and a-half years, and we do not feel at all sure that people so profoundly interested, so religiously eager, in these matters would succeed in keeping the first communication entirely from the ears of medium No. 2. In point of fact, Mr. Balfour tells us that he has a distinct recollection of being asked by Mrs. Willett, during the interval, what the Ear of Dionysius was. Mrs. Willett denies it. We shall probably prefer the disinterested memory of Mr. Balfour. Now, the very same weakness is found even in the second part of the story. For any evidential value it rests on two very large suppositions:—

1. That one medium knew absolutely nothing about the most interesting and promising development which was for months agitating the minds of her own friends.

2. That another medium heroically refrained from reading up any classical dictionaries or works on the subject, and reserved her mind strictly for whatever information the spirits might give her.

One can scarcely be called hypercritical if one has doubts about these suppositions. There does not seem to be any room for the theory either of telepathy or of spirit communication.

The two experiences I have just analysed are selected by Sir A. C. Doyle as the most convincing in the whole of the work of the more modern and more refined Spiritualists. I need not linger over other experiences of these automatic writers. For the most part, automatic writing provides only vapid or inaccurate stuff which is its own refutation. In the early years, when Franklin, Shakespeare, Plato, and all the most illustrious dead wrote nonsense of the most vapoury description, the situation was quite grotesque. Nor is this kind of thing yet extinct. There are mediums practising in London to-day who put the sitter in communication with the sages and poets of ancient times. In the very best of these cases there is a certain silliness about the communications which makes them difficult to read. Even the spirits of Myers and Verrall seem to be in a perpetual Bank-Holiday mood, making naive little puns and jokes, and talking in the rambling, incoherent way that scholars do only in hours of domestic dissipation. There is a world thirsting (it is said) for proof that the dead still live. Here are (it is said) men like W. T. Stead, Myers, Hodgson, Verrall, Sidgwick, Vice-Admiral Moore, Robert Owen, etc., at the "other end of the wire," as William James used to say. Yet, apparently, nothing can be said or done that quite clearly goes beyond the power of the mediums. The arrogance of the Spiritualists in the circumstances is amazing.

There are a dozen ways in which the theory could be rigorously tested. One has been tried and completely failed: the communication of messages which were left in proper custody before death. We shall, of course, presently have an announcement that such a message has been read. Some zealous Spiritualist will leave a sealed message, and will take care that some medium or other is able to read it. We may be prepared for such things. The fact is that half-a-dozen serious and reliable Spiritualists have tried this test, and it has hopelessly miscarried. Another test was that devised by Dr. Hodgson—to leave messages in cipher, though not sealed. This also has completely failed. A third test would be for one of these ghosts of learned Cambridge men, who are so fluent on things that do not matter, to dictate a passage from an obscure Greek poet through a medium who does not know Greek at the request of a sitter. It is a familiar and ancient trick for a medium to recite or write a passage in a foreign language. It has been learned beforehand. But let a scholar ask the spirit of a dead scholar to spell out through the ignorant medium there and then a specified line or passage within his knowledge. I have tried the experiment. It never succeeds. Another test would be for one of these ghostly scholars to dictate a word of a line of some obscure Greek poet (chosen by the sitter) to one medium (ignorant of Greek), and another word of the same line to another medium immediately afterwards, before there was the remotest possibility of communication.

A score of such tests could be devised. Three of the best writing mediums the Society for Psychical Research cares to indicate could be accommodated, under proper observation, in different rooms of the same building, and these tests carried out. We could invite the spirit to pass from medium to medium and repeat the message to all three, or give a part to each. Until some such rigorous inquiry is carried out, we may decline to be interested. I have before me several volumes of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Candidly, they are full of trash and padding. There is very little that merits serious consideration, and nothing that is not weakened by uncertainties, suppressions, and over-zealous eagerness.

In fine, what impresses any man who reads much of all the volumes of "revelation" which have been vouchsafed to us is the entirely earthly character of it all. The Spiritualist theory is that men grow rapidly wiser after death. Plato is two thousand years wiser than he was when he lived. Ptah-hotep is six thousand years older and wiser. Neither these, nor Buddha nor Christ nor any other moralist, has a word of wisdom for us. In fact, a theory has had to be invented which supposes that they move away from the earth to distant regions of the spirit-world as they grow older, and so cannot communicate. It is a pity they are not "permitted" to do so for propaganda purposes. But even those who remain in communication have learned nothing since they left the earth. No discovery has ever yet been communicated to us. In Spiritualist literature, it is true, there is a claim that certain unknown facts about the satellites of Uranus were revealed; but Flammarion makes short work of the claim. The communications never rise above the level of the thought and knowledge of living humanity: never even above the level of the knowledge available to the mediums. It is scarcely an "insanity of incredulity" to suppose that they originated there.