they are many--the question still forces itself upon us: Are these all,
or are there indications of any residual forces acting on the subject
from beyond, or of any "meta-psychic" faculty (to use Richet's useful
term) exerted by him? This is the problem that requires real
expertness, and this is where the simple sentimentalisms of the
spiritist and scientist leave us in the lurch completely.

"Psychics" form indeed a special branch of education, in which experts
are only gradually becoming developed. The phenomena are as massive
and wide-spread as is anything in Nature, and the study of them is as
tedious, repellent and undignified. To reject it for its unromantic
character is like rejecting bacteriology because _penicillium glaucum_
grows on horse-dung and _bacterium termo_ lives in putrefaction.
Scientific men have long ago ceased to think of the dignity of the
materials they work in. When imposture has been checked off as far as
possible, when chance coincidence has been allowed for, when
opportunities for normal knowledge on the part of the subject have been
noted, and skill in "fishing" and following clues unwittingly furnished
by the voice or face of bystanders have been counted in, those who have
the fullest acquaintance with the phenomena admit that in good mediums
_there is a residuum of knowledge displayed_ that can only be called
supernormal: the medium taps some source of information not open to
ordinary people. Myers used the word "telepathy" to indicate that the
sitter's own thoughts or feelings may be thus directly tapped. Mrs.
Sidgwick has suggested that if living minds can be thus tapped
telepathically, so possibly may the minds of spirits be similarly
tapped--if spirits there be. On this view we should have one distinct
theory of the performances of a typical test-medium. They would be all
originally due to an odd _tendency to personate_, found in her dream
life as it expresses itself in trance. [Most of us reveal such a
tendency whenever we handle a "ouija-board" or a "planchet," or let
ourselves write automatically with a pencil.] The result is a
"control," who purports to be speaking; and all the resources of the
automatist, including his or her trance-faculty of telepathy are called
into play in building this fictitious personage out plausibly. On such
a view of the control, the medium's _will to personate_ runs the whole
show; and if spirits be involved in it at all, they are passive bei