s, are important, if
they result in irresistible proof of the fact that there exist outside
of us and around us intelligent beings resembling ourselves.

But when we are dealing with developed spirits, who have begun by giving
proofs of their identity, it is not true that the messages are always
trivial. They often contain ideas of much breadth of view and elevation.
The form is generally defective, but those who have studied Mrs Piper's
phenomena will be indulgent to the form, and sometimes even to the
matter. The spirit in contact with the medium's organism suffers, as I
have said several times, from a kind of delirium; besides which the
organism only responds to his efforts imperfectly. "My dear friends,"
says George Pelham, "do not look at me too critically; to try to
transmit your thoughts through the organism of a medium is like trying
to crawl through a hollow log." In short, the difficulties are enormous.

It may very well be that great spirits have really been the authors of
very poor messages. It has happened to each of us to make poetical or
other compositions in our dreams which we have thought admirable; we say
in delight, "What a pity I shall not be able to remember that when I
wake!" But sometimes we do remember, and then we smile with contempt at
what had delighted us during sleep. Now the communicators constantly
repeat that they are dreaming while they are in the atmosphere of the
medium. "Everything seems so clear to me," says Robert Hyslop to his
son, "and when I try to tell you, James, I cannot."

These considerations prove that we must not hasten to conclude, with
Professor Flournoy, that if there is a future life it is one of
wretched degeneration, one more misery added to all the others which
overwhelm us in this miserable universe.

No; as Professor James says, in this world we live only at the surface
of our being; if death is not annihilation, then it is an awakening. It
does not follow that the life of the other world is not higher and more
intense than this, because communication with it is difficult.

Another serious objection to the spiritualist hypothesis is the
philosophy with which certain too eager persons have connected it.
Spiritualism, which should at present be but the mere beginning of a
science, is, according to them, already a philosophy for which the
universe holds no secrets. How should such puny creatures as ourselves
hope to solve the problems of the universe by _a prior