It is certainly unfortunate that mediums such as these, often revealed in upper class families, are absolutely lost for close study and thorough observation.

A society woman does not care to subject herself to systematic and disparaging attacks of professionals, as that class has no other weapon save insult. It is also very unfortunate that many persons with weak powers of clairvoyance and of small education have the strongest mania for acting as mediums and exhibiting their powers.

Especially in the practice of automatic handwriting this passion rages. Yet the abuse of table seances on account of their extreme simplicity - because everyone is able to obtain results - is also much to be regretted. It is because too great haste is made to enter into conversation with the simple animistic forces that so many sittings, badly directed, end only in confusion.

Therefore once again must the distinction be made between that which comes from without and that which comes from within: between the true and the fraudulent message.

It is absolutely impossible to confound certain messages which come from a known source with the automatic handwriting of a medium who deceives himself.

If it is a matter of raps, or of automatism of the motive centers of writing or speaking, there are always three explanations to offer for these phenomena: 1st, Automatism due to the organic disorders of a medium whose organs are mechanically relaxed: 2nd, Automatism caused by the thought of a distant agent: 3rd, Automatism behind which an intelligence reveals itself, which can be neither that of the medium, nor that of any other living person.

It is this third case which constitutes the decisive proof of the Beyond. But the second has a decisive experimental value, since it confutes the skeptics who would maintain against every evidence, that all manifestations come from the medium. We have already cited the case of Mrs. Kirby for the table, that of Sophie Swoboda for writing, and the experimental counter-proof that was made with Mr. and Mrs. Newnham.

It has been proved by these cases that the cellular activity of the motive organs may be released by the thought of an outsider: that is to say, the muscular agent is sensitive to telepathic action, and it is through this that the phenomena of the table, of handwriting and of all other automatic manifestations, are related to the general phenomenon which produces these manifestations. A remark which may surprise people who have never reflected upon it is that messages of a high order, those which are presented under telepathic forms such as inspiration, presentiments, prophetic visions, are necessarily too vague and uncertain to constitute a proof. The popular phenomena, however, which are derived indirectly from inferior activities, those which manifest themselves under an exterior material form such as raps, automatisms, etc., are the only ones which appear on the physical plane in a definite form and confirmed by a certain degree of evidence.

This is why the proof of survival, or simply the proof of the existence of supernormal intelligences can be obtained only in this way, a way so often ridiculed. This explains sufficiently all the difficulties and obscurities that one meets in the practice of psychic study.

A great number of manifestations reveal many things which could not be within the knowledge of the medium nor within the consciousness of any person in the gathering. It is therefore necessary to suppose that a supernormal intelligence, an entity from the Beyond, a witness of the revealed fact, has set in motion, according to the ordinary process, the automatism which operates the transmission of the message. This supposed agent may act more or less after the manner of an unconscious mirror. Example:1

"Lady Mabel Howard was particularly gifted in automatic handwriting. One day some friends asked her if she could designate, by the aid of her powers as a medium, the location of some stolen jewels. Lady Mabel took a pen and wrote automatically, 'In the river below the bridge Tebay.' There had been no reason to suspect this, and the knowledge of the experimenters was limited to the account of the theft in various newspapers. It developed, however, that the thieves had just been arrested at Tebay, but this circumstance was utterly unknown at the time of the communication. The jewels were recovered a month later under the bridge."

1 Proceedings of the Society for Psychic Research, Vol. IX, p. 44.

Camille Flammarion gives a series of facts of the same class, communicated by Mr. Castex-Des-granges.1 Since they are of great interest, we suggest that the reader have recourse to them, as we are unable here to quote fully. To these communications which reveal things outside the consciousness of those present it would be well to add those which concern special consciousness, and which the medium would find it impossible to draw from himself. Thus a series of experiments conducted by Mr. J. P. Barkas with Madame d'Esperance as a medium, shows us that the motive agent, tracing automatically, was able to answer the most difficult scientific questions, dealing with heat, light, electricity and magnetism, etc.2 Even though these answers to difficult problems appear quite satisfactory, it behooves us to notice that the criticism would be of little value if it failed to discuss the intrinsic worth of the solutions proposed. The inhabitants from the other world are like us - beings in the process of evolution: they do not at all possess the infallibility which by hypothesis is attributed to them by the incredulous. The value of the phenomenon consists wholly in the fact that an educated man may converse with the foreign entity on subjects concerning which the medium has no idea whatsoever.

1 Les Forces Naturelles Inconnues, 1907, pp. 513-521.

2 Consult the Accounts given in Psychical Review, 878 Vol. I, p. 215: Animism and Spiritism, Aksakof p. 882. In Shadow-land. Mme. d'Esperance, p. 188.