f the medium's mind, through
lines of association of which the medium is utterly unconscious, than to
represent the personalities so named. In Raymond the control is one
Moonstone, or a little Indian girl called Freda or Feda, who speaks of
herself in the third person and who reports a great many silly things in
a very silly way.

It is possible, of course, to say that these thus named are spirit
mediums as necessary for the transfer of suggestion from the discarnate
order as mediums seem to be in the incarnate order, and that abnormal
personalities are as much needed on one side as the other through the
abnormality of the whole process. But this is patently to beg the
question. There is room in the whole process for the trivial, even the
inconsequential. As the advocates of spiritism have urged,
identification very often turns on apparently trivial things but it is
difficult to justify the very great element of the capricious and
actually foolish which enters so largely into the records of all
sittings. It would seem as if death robbed grave personalities of their
gravity, the strong of their force and the wise of their wisdom, and
this is so hard to believe as to make us wonder whether we are not
really dealing with something which belongs to an entirely different
region and is open to an entirely different line of explanation.

But beyond such considerations as these, which may or may not have
force, there remains the graver question still--the question of the
identification of the sources from which the intelligible residue of
communications is received. If we fall back upon suggestion there are
always two general sources of suggestion--the incarnate and the
discarnate, and among the incarnate themselves there are manifold
sources of suggestion. The sitter may be unconsciously supplying the
material which the medium is receiving, recasting and giving back again,
or the medium may be reporting what is received from other incarnate
sources than the sitter. (This, of course, when we have eliminated all
that might possibly be contributed by the medium.)

_The Dilemma of Spiritism_

Anything, therefore, which is known to the living may be the source of
the medium's information. Only those things, therefore, which are
utterly unknown to the living anywhere, which cannot possibly have been
known by the medium himself or herself, can be finally and conclusively
a testimony to communications from the dead. But unless t