Still a word concerning Leopold: he possesses complete independence, and when he announces to the mesmerist that he is the master, suggestion can change nothing.

I have presented the personality of Leopold because he is of a general type. All mediums have thus a familiar spirit which intervenes in phenomena. But I am not concerned with this role and pass on to facts of regression.

The phenomenal condition of Miss Smith tends to reconstruct two fragments of her past lives. The medium, or her guide, attributes to Marie Antoinette the most recent reminiscences, and the other incarnation, whose very incomplete fragments reappear intermittently, carries us back to a much more distant period, to the 15th Century, in India, when the subject was incarnated as a Hindu Princess.

For M. Flournoy, these facts are psychic neoplasms: he states this in the beginning:

"In pathology," he says, "neoplasms have for their point of departure certain cells remaining embryonic which suddenly become prolific by differentiation. Similarly, in psychology, it seems that certain remote and primitive elements of the individual, strata of infancy, still endowed with plasticity and mobility, are peculiarly fitted to engender these strange subconscious growths, a sort of psychic tumors or excrescences, that we call second personalities."

Is it necessary to assert that such an analogy is fantastic? The pathological neoplasm does not develop: it remains a monstrosity of a lower order. The second personality, upon the contrary, has perceptive faculties superior to those of the intelligent being of whom it is but a fraction. And then, to be precise, M. Flournoy should not have rested upon the vague terms of psychology. These neoplasms which detach themselves from the principal personality cannot detach themselves save as they borrow an organ in order to manifest themselves. Each successive personality must thus be represented, in the time in which it acts, by bundles of motive and sensitive fibers: these neoplasms, absolutely foreign to the principal being, must have their localization somewhere. The author realized this and wrote:

"It should be agreed upon, once for all, that this cerebral mechanism is always understood: but one should never speak of it so long as there is nothing definite to be said concerning it."

On the contrary, we should speak of it, in order to understand how grotesque, as applied to the given facts, such a localization would become. I should like to be shown, even by hypothesis, the different places that would be occupied in the organism by several intelligences, writing the same hand without mingling their memories nor their writing, without confusing their roles, each of which requires a special spelling and a different speech: finally, without tangling the skein of the complex creations whose memories they hold since they take up the thread without ever severing its connection.

Flournoy tells us of the delicacy of choice, of the refined sensibility, the consummate though instinctive art, which guide the selection and storing of subconscious memories. I should greatly like to see the substratum of these things and know what was the primitive core of these formations. . . . What happy dilation of our spleen! if once you begin translating into physiological language. I should like to have some one tell me about the consummate art of a spinal ganglion, employing all its skill against the finesse of the glosso-pharyngeal, which would be the dupe of the refined sensibility of a solar plexus. I should love to see the implacable logic of a quad-rigeminal combated by the rhetoric of the medulla oblongata. For, seriously, that is what we must come to. It is with nonsense of this kind that we should find ourselves confronted did we undertake to define the theory of the neoplasm. Scholars admit that these things elude positive science. "Ideal science," declares Berthelot, "varies ceaselessly and will always vary." And the psychologist Myers exclaims in a moment of frankness: "We shall always find ourselves at last face to face with the inexplicable, and the most Lamarckian reply is in reality as mystic as the most Platonic."

The truth is that we cannot conceive of the presence in us of intelligences superior to our own unless we regard man as a concretion of all the psychic elements pertaining to his previous lives. This, therefore, would constitute the reserve - a purely psychic reserve - of all that is sub-conscious within us.

Our individuality is only the partly conscious elaboration of a far more extended organism which represents the synthesis of all our former personalities in the process of higher integration, which is immortality.

Helen Smith thus revives the fragments of her past. In the role of Marie Antoinette, she attains remarkable perfection if we may believe M. Flournoy.

"When the royal trance is complete, one should see the grace, elegance, distinction, even majesty sometimes, which transfigures the pose and gesture of Helen. She has truly the carriage of a queen (p. 326). . . . The unconstrained movement with which she never forgets to fling back her imaginary train at every turn: all that which cannot be described is perfect in its naturalness and ease.

This perfection of acting, which no actress could attain without much study, does not stop there. Old spelling flows as naturally from her pen: Instans, enfants, j'etois, etc., for instant, enfant, j'etais. Change of voice also takes place naturally and, when in this state, she is unaware of Miss Smith."

From this it may be seen with what superior qualities a neoplasm would have to be endowed, while an automatic regression towards fragments of the past requires no transcendant faculty since, in place of a miracle of artfulness and clever lying, a natural mechanism suffices similar to the regressions obtained by M. Janet with Leonie and Rose, and those obtained by M. de Rochas.