"There are more things in heaven and earth,

Horatio, Than are dream'd of in our philosophy."

Shakespeare.

It is indispensable that a distinction be made between the psychic faculties with which we may experiment, and the phenomena of the Beyond, which we may observe only when they are produced spontaneously. We often confuse the two things. A certain scholar who has seen different subjects taken from a hospital automatically trace letters and strokes, flatters himself that he has found the key to mechanical handwriting. When he puts his subject to sleep, transmits to him the suggestion to write in his dream, giving to this suggestion the form of a spiritual communication, and then claims to have demonstrated the great error of the spiritualists, he is, without realizing it, proving by this very experiment, that a person may write under the influence of another person, and that it is precisely in this that transmission from the Beyond in the form of the spirit message consists.

It is very true that he has produced a fallacious communication, but he would have been able by the same procedure to have given an authentic message.

This is why we have given the history of these phenomena by citing them at first from the experimental side only, and by showing that all the phenomena wrongly characterized as supernatural may be produced, not at will, but under such conditions as enable us to determine their origin. It has been proved that they all may have their source in the thought of a living person.

Theoretically, we have no difference to make between the suggestion that a living person is capable of exercising and that which, by hypothesis, could be exercised by a disincarnated spirit.

Thus the most rudimentary manifestation from the Beyond is produced by means of knocks. It should not be concluded that every medium whose presence makes it possible to obtain these remarkable phenomena, may send you a message. This is, however, the first objection that the skeptics make: they say: "I have seen Eusapia produce her knocks. There are no spirits in that."

In truth, experiment tends simply to put beyond a doubt the reality of a fact in which we have hitherto refused to believe - a fact which proves the existence of a method of physiology previously unsuspected. These knocks which seem to proceed from material agents having all the attributes of compactness, coming from invisible agents represent something which is absolutely beyond natural physics and inexplicable to us. We have perhaps not noted this sufficiently, and the disdain which certain experimental scholars affect before a fact which is not linked to any known experience is not always sincere. The old magnetisers have observed these facts.

The clairvoyant de Prevort, reports the Baron de Potet, without interference, knocked at the house of whoever she wished and said that it was not with her soul, but with her spirit and by the medium of the air that she thus knocked. She asserted that outside of the soul and intelligence there was a nervous force, and that this remains the envelope of the soul when the soul leaves the body.1

The great physicist, William Crookes, who subjected all the manifestation of spirit matter to a most rigorous examination, speaks in these terms of raps:

". . . With the full knowledge of the numerous theories which have been brought forward, especially in America, to explain these sounds, I have tested them in every imaginable manner, until it was absolutely impossible for me to escape the conviction that they were indeed real, and that they were not produced by fraud or by mechanical means."

An important question claims our attention here. Are these movements and these noises governed by an intelligence? From the beginning of my research, I have insisted that the power which produced these phenomena was not merely a blind force but that an intelligence directed it, or at least was associated with it. Thus the noises of which I have just spoken, were repeated a determined number of times: they became loud or soft at my demand: they resounded in different places. By a code of certain fixed signs which I had arranged in advance, the spirit answered my questions and the messages were given with more or less exactitude.

1 Baron de Potet, Traite complet du Magnetisme, 5th Edition, p. 240.

The intelligence which governs these phenomena is sometimes greatly inferior to that of the medium and oftentimes in direct opposition to her desires.

When a determination has been made to perform an act which does not appear rational, I have seen most urgent messages sent out to cause the medium to reconsider.

This intelligence is sometimes of such a character that one is forced to believe that it does not emanate from any of those who are present.1 Around these real mediums who lend themselves to an unlimited control, as did D. D. Home, Kate Fox or Eusapia Paladino, every searcher may, be it by observation or by control, succeed in establishing the truth concerning the fact which to him seemed improbable. But it is necessary to push the investigation much further in order to attest that, if these facts occur outside of all intervention or, rather, as says the clairvoyant of Prevort, if they are produced by the mind of the medium, there are many other cases for which this explanation is insufficient, cases in which the same effects are produced even in the absence of any clairvoyant. Such are those which take place spontaneously and which co-incide always with death.

The repetition of these sounds which aim to attract attention and which cease as soon as that end is attained, permits us to believe that there is a relation of cause and effect between death and the audible manifestation. This is the more convincing since so many of these cases have occurred as the result of a pact or particular promise, and the manifestation has been received by those interested, even before they knew of the death of the mani-festant.

1New Experiments on Psychic Force, by William Crookes.