power of self-materialization. This consideration throws some
light upon the famous case, so often used by our opponents, where Myers
failed to give some word or phrase which had been left behind in a
sealed box. Apparently he could not see this document from his present
position, and if his memory failed him he would be very likely to go
wrong about it.

Many mistakes may, I think, be explained in this fashion. It has been
asserted from the other side, and the assertion seems to me reasonable,
that when they speak of their own conditions they are speaking of what
they know and can readily and surely discuss; but that when we insist
(as we must sometimes insist) upon earthly tests, it drags them back to
another plane of things, and puts them in a position which is far more
difficult, and liable to error.

Another point which is capable of being used against us is this: The
spirits have the greatest difficulty in getting names through to us,
and it is this which makes many of their communications so vague and
unsatisfactory. They will talk all round a thing, and yet never get
the name which would clinch the matter. There is an example of the
point in a recent communication in Light, which describes how a young
officer, recently dead, endeavoured to get a message through the direct
voice method of Mrs. Susannah Harris to his father. He could not get
his name through. He was able, however, to make it clear that his
father was a member of the Kildare Street Club in Dublin. Inquiry
found the father, and it was then learned that the father had already
received an independent message in Dublin to say that an inquiry was
coming through from London. I do not know if the earth name is a
merely ephemeral thing, quite disconnected from the personality, and
perhaps the very first thing to be thrown aside. That is, of course,
possible. Or it may be that some law regulates our intercourse from
the other side by which it shall not be too direct, and shall leave
something to our own intelligence.

This idea, that there is some law which makes an indirect speech more
easy than a direct one, is greatly borne out by the
cross-correspondences, where circumlocution continually takes the place
of assertion. Thus, in the St. Paul correspondence, which is treated
in the July pamphlet of the S.P.R., the idea of St. Paul was to be
conveyed from one automatic writer to two others, both of whom were at
a distance, one of them in Ind