As for the impossibility of Miss Smith's having been able to study Marles' text, M. Flournoy calls that a negative objection. Only two copies of this work are known, both hidden in the dust of libraries, one in a private association with which no member or friend of the Smith family had ever been connected. The other was in the Public Library, where one must have lost his mind in order to consult it among the thousands of more interesting and more modern books. (From the Indies, ... p. 283.) "But," declares the professor, "Extravagance for extravagance, I still prefer the hypothesis that only requires natural probabilities to that which draws upon occult causes."

Ah! here is the real word let out. . . . An occult cause! But I can assure M. Flournoy that his explanation of a psychic wart would be an occult cause no less than is regression. We see the occult in the fact of ancient reminiscences appearing in a new organism: yet that is the sole explanation that official science is willing to give us concerning certain phenomena of a purely biological nature. If you accept the theory that physical aptitudes are manifested in us by reason of ancestral inheritance, I see few obstacles to believing that latent memories have the same origin.

Helen denies vigorously that she could have known Marles' work and we know what resources hypnotism offers for the discovery of falsehood. Miss Smith elaborated a dream while in the hynotic state and it was easy to learn its source. This did not escape the professor who spoke of it frankly.

"It would seem," he declared, "that the simplest course would be to profit by the hypnotic state of the seances to cause Helen's subconscious memory to confess, and lead her to tell her secrets: but my trials in this direction have not yet been successful."

In short, M. Flournoy's explanation is the neoplasm, that is, the fact of a psychic monstrosity, of several monstrosities, spontaneously generated, whose faculties far surpass the mother-intelligence which has given them birth. Indeed, he declares, "whatever conscious and reflective work is able to accomplish, the subliminal faculties can execute to a far higher degree of perfection in subjects possessing automatic tendencies." (From the Indies ... p. 273.)

Here is in truth the intelligent wart!

If the book of Marles had been the source of the romance, the medium would have borrowed more fully: automatic memory being infallible, she would have written Tchandragari, as in Marles'; secondary elements, such as the residence of Mangalore, are not cited in the book. But what the medium could not have borrowed therefrom is the knowledge of Sanscrit. Helen spoke a Sanscrit that was, indeed, imperfect but that carried an extraordinary stamp of truth.

M. Flournoy seized upon this imperfection, but perhaps it is excessive to ask that a somnambulistic memory, having passed the threshold of death, should remain unaltered. With the same exaction one might modify the Darwinian theory as applied to man, defying Darwin, or rather Huxley, to bring to light his anthropological recollections. That which may remain in the subconsciousness of the medium cannot be but a ruin, a distant trace. The Sanscrit language of Helen is only a jargon, and must be so of necessity.

It seems, moreover, that the text submitted to the Orientalists may have been gathered by ear and written, I think, under the dictation of an Englishman who did not know the language. Be that as it may, and despite everything, there are some authentic words: sometimes Helen writes, and Leopold translates, a phrase - although, as he declares, he does not know Sanscrit. But he deciphers the thought of Helen to whom it comes intuitively in a state of trance. An Orientalist, M. deSaussure, was asked to examine the text, thus interpreted, and discovered several fragments having quite the sense indicated by Leopold. There were barbarisms, but some words were recognized as being wholly correct.

In short, these are remnants of Sanscrit, among which some intelligible words nevertheless preserve their character. Thus the vowel a abounds, because the proportion of a's in Sanscrit as compared with French, is 4 to 1. The consonant f never appears, although so frequent in French, because it is foreign to Sanscrit. Is that not truly remarkable?

The Hindu princess, if she really existed, has no longer any special individuality. She is only a young Swiss girl who, by a phenomenon of hypnotic regression, finds again fragments of ancient impressions among which some words, incompletely effaced from the memory, reappear mechanically.

But if Helen does not give to this language a clear reconstruction, its elements, at least, are correct. It is a structure in ruins, of which there remain a few bricks, or fragments of sculpture that do not belie the style of their period.

On the 6th of March, 1885, our medium welcomes the professor with a Hindu salutation: Atieya Ganapatinama - this form of address to the name of the elephant-headed god, which in the Hindu Pantheon symbolizes science and wisdom, is an intelligent greeting addressed particularly to the professor and scholar, but M. Flournoy is pitiless. "No conjecture," he states, "is too trivial or foolish when it is a question of phenomena which are essentially of the dream order."1

And here is the explanation. Since when one sneezes, a "God bless you" is said, the author relates the word atieya to the imitative sound "atiou" which, according to him, children use to imitate sneezing. If I understand rightly, this would mean that Helen's somnambulistic consciousness, before exclaiming "God bless you!" was struck by the idea of sneezing: this association of ideas would have brought the word atieya, and fortune aiding, the rest came of itself. What exegesis, good heavens, what exegesis!

As for the other fragments, the professor awaits their explanation from some happy chance, like that which caused him to find Marles' text, which he persists in considering as the original source of the dream.

The imitation of the person depicted attains an

1Once more the affirmation precedes the examination of the fact astonishing force of expression, but this is the inherent characteristic of every hypnotic state. Only, these states, always unknown to the principal consciousness, are ordinarily incapable of producing that which has never been part of the subject.

We cannot believe in the subconscious formation of a language which contains certain elements of truth, and whose origin hypnotic sleep refuses to disclose. Miss Smith, although very intelligent, possessed no linguistic abilities. She always disliked the study of languages and rebelled against German, which her father spoke fluently, and in which she was forced to take lessons for three years. Therefore, if these famous psychic excrescences swell only through elements brought in since childhood, it would be fragments of German which would be manifested in her vocabulary.

But let us not forget, this subject has never been studied from the point of view of regression - the preconceived hypothesis being always that of the psychic neoplasm, and this hypothesis serving as a pivot for the investigators. Nor did they guard against confusion: hypnotic states present many phases and degrees and they were not always careful to put the medium in the profound state necessary to the reconstruction of the more distant images. If they suggested the Hindu dream at an inopportune moment, for example, when Miss Smith was in a state of superficial somnambulism, or when she had just manifested oneirocritic creations, it is evident that the results would be distorted. Former lives do not revive themselves in order to overwhelm us with their proof: it is for ingenious observers to discover them by subtler means.

As I said in reference to Miss Beauchamp, it requires great temerity to break this ancient philosophic conception of the unity of the ego in order to admit spontaneous creations which have no support. Auto-hypnotism, hyperamnesia are only words: unconscious cerebration implies two contradictory terms - subliminal creations generated without the aid of the ego . . . teleological hallucinations: that is, illusions tending toward a real end, subconscious strata . . . infantile strata . . . neoplasms . . . excresences . . . psychic warts . . . vain hypotheses.

These are fatherless children whose power surpasses human faculties: there would be no longer one consciousness, but four, five or six centers of subconsciousnes, which would play as complex a farce, each having its own manner of seeing, writing, speaking, of crossing the t's or pronouncing the u's, without ever becoming confused, or omitting the archaic forms of the past century, without forgetting the nationality of the figurant or his accent or spelling. Strange to say, these factitious beings would elude hypnotic suggestion; they take the reins from the mesmerist and it is they themselves who hypnotize the subject, rectifying by means of auditory suggestions the error of the subject when he has wrongly interpreted a visual suggestion. A human intelligence is incapable of managing so many impostures at once.

To the activity of these factitious personalities one would have to add many phenomena of recognized lucidity, valuable interventions and exact previsions. Thus one must needs divide phenomena into two parts: one, in the domain of facts that may be verified, would be sincere and truthful: and under subliminal impostures would be classed the same influence when they were exercised in the doubtful domain.

All this would be done with the avowed determination not to believe in manifestations, nor in the action of the past upon our psychic sphere, nor in the action upon our nervous system of an invisible hypnotist.

Before imposing upon us this belief in neoplasms of genius, it would have been well to show us some evidence of this ego cut in pieces to prove that Leopold is a division of Helen, and that he, divided in turn, produces the new personalities that come out one from another, like the sections of a telescope !

Where have these spontaneous generations acquired learning? How have they knowledge of idioms? For the proof new hypotheses are demanded: there is not even a justification of this physiology of the soul which allows a division wherein each part would be greater than the whole.

Spiritualism, in default of absolute proofs, presents, at least, an explaining hypothesis. And this explanation becomes simple and normal when we admit the relations of the soul to its past.