The faith-curer of the grotto strengthens the weaker individuality. He plays upon the spring of self-suggestion. The patient is told to believe that he will be cured, to wish it fervently and he shall be cured. So far as he is cured, he returns to his home perhaps a better and a stronger man, and his cure is quite as real and likely to be quite as lasting as if he had become the puppet of a hypnotiser. The experiments of the Sal-pdtriAre have served to enable us to analyse more clearly the nature of faith cures generally, and they have thrown a ray of light on a series of phenomena of human automatism never before studied so clearly or philosophically, but they have added practically little, if anything, to our curative resources. It is hardly to be set down to their discredit that they have incidentally favoured the reign of the platform hypnotiser or the vagaries of the subjects at La Charite; that result is their misfortune rather than their fault, though it is a grave misfortune. But the intervention of authority might now, and I hope will, cut short the absurdities of these practices, and put an end to some social mischiefs which have fastened on to them and hang on to their skirts. Thus much as to the medical question.

To the student of' psychological phenomena' it is of great interest to note how successive functions may be separately abolished as the brain is partially set to sleep, and in what exaggerated forms the remaining activities may be brought into action when restraining self-consciousness is stilled. The vulgar, too, may find an ignoble amusement in the antics of these drinkers of petroleum and vinegar, of these seers of visions and in the semi-idiotic postures and proceedings of the hypnotised mannikin, just as they do in a fantocohini show. But against such philosophic satisfactions and vulgar amusements must be set the avowed as well as the unconfessed mischiefs wrought by hypnotic experiments, and who can doubt that these outbalance any apparent good result?

There have always been persons who claimed the gift or distinction of conversing with spirits. Science, with its rigorous analysis and its exact methods of proof, has made an end of many imaginary beings. Nymphs, fauns, river gods, fairies, brownies, kelpies, and spirits of every kind have fallen out of belief; but communications from the unseen world, it is alleged, still reach our world, adapting themselves to the new methods of experimental philosophy. Ghosts now write letters, and are beginning to show a disposition to suffer themselves to be photographed. We should be loth to deride such gropings after the supernatural. Human curiosity cannot be repelled from trying to peer through the curtain which covers the world beyond the grave. Those who have thrown off a belief in the traditional views of religion are sometimes moved to seek a confirmation of the spirit world through experiments pursued in a quasi-scientific manner. We do not say that all those who take to spiritualism are sceptics, but the tendency generally indicates a decaying faith in revealed religion.

Paris - long the capital of religions scepticism-seems to be at present the head-quarters of the clairvoyants, spiritualists, and other mystics, who endeavour to establish a familiar intercourse between the living and the dead. A well-known journalist (Mr. Stead) has recently confided to the public some visitations which he has had from the spirits. 'Julia,' the shade of a defunct American journalist (whom we should much desire to interview, and who might with advantage be subjected to ' test,' as were the subjects of La Charite), has imparted to him not only information about business matters, of which the dead might be expected to take little care, but also details about the spiritual condition after death, and Mr. Stead has communicated them to some English bishops, who are presumably experts in such matters. These dignitaries, we are told, consider ' Julia's' revelations to be worthy of attention. Apparently none of these interesting confidences have been as yet printed for the edification of the profane vulgar.

Mr. Stead has been visited by what may be called spiritual influxes. His hand is moved involuntarily to write things new even to himself. He has a Mend whom he has got to write involuntarily a confession ,of some events which a man of ordinary reticence would have left untold. Mr. Stead is disposed to think that a murderer might, under the promptings of his better self, reveal the crimes which he had committed; but then some criminals, he naively observes, have no better self. We agree with Mr. Maskelyne that there is no use laying down a test for the spiritualists any more than for the clairvoyants. To begin with they always object to it, and when the tests are rigidly enforced by men of a scientic cast of mind, the wonderworkers always fail. How often, for example, have the clairvoyants or ghost-seers been asked to read some document or tell the number of a bank note carefully locked up, and always in vain? Sometimes they offer the excuse that spirits cannot, or will not, tell everything. Very likely, it is said, the shades do not, care whether physiologists believe in them or not, and will not condescend to answer impertinent questions, or to suffer cross-examinations of a detective strain. You must take what they tell you in the way they tell it to you.

The spiritualists have never told us anything worth knowing, and, what is worse, they are in hopeless disagreement with one another. Will common sense not teach people that, if there really were a channel of intercourse between the living and the dead, many a message would come from friends gone before, of serious and weighty import instead of trifles and ineptitudes which have a suspicious resemblance to the echoes of the thoughts of the living?

Swedenborg, the prince of visionaries, whose accounts of the unseen world are circumstantial enough, manages to exclude rivals, for he declares that the spirits of the dead cannot converse with the living, and he himself was, by the special ordination of God, made an exception to this rule. Occasionally the Swedish mystic allowed spirits to see through his eyes, and he tells us that the spirits of fraudulent tradespeople moved his hand to make him steal articles in the shops. Scientific psychologists treat these as subjective feelings, dependent upon deranged conditions of the nervous system, in most cases accompanied by other symptoms of disease. Mr. Stead can only explain his own abnormal sensations, mental impulses, and involuntary muscular actions as the result of the influx of spirits. Accepting this as 'a working hypothesis,' he assures us he is acting in an honest and, he hopes, a scientific manner. But there are many things, both in disease and health, which are not yet fully explicable by any hypothesis. An impatient desire to have a hypothesis has led science into countless errors. A literary man, whose mind has had no training in physiology, is liable to go astray in such inquiries.

We venture to advise Mr. Stead to subject all his symptoms to the analysis of a skilful physician, instead of hurriedly reducing vague nervous sensations into copy for periodical publications.