is the
suggestion, already strongly established, that whatever is experienced
during the trance will be due to spirit intervention or revelation. This
introduces the element of expectant attention. We know on the physical
side of what expectant attention is capable. It becomes a real factor in
all faith healing; it may produce, either for the better or the worse,
far-reaching changes in physical states and it is perfectly possible for
such an expectant attention once fully in action in the trance--given of
course, to begin with, the attitude and interests of the medium in a
waking state--to create all the machinery of controls, revelation and
the like, which characterize trance mediumship.

[Footnote 82: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future," p. 271.]

Boirac finds, therefore, in spiritism a complex determined by certain
particular nervous and mental states into which there enter, in one form
or another, almost all the facts of abnormal psychology and he believes
that science, faithful to the principle of economy, should consider the
alleged phenomena of spiritism, until proved to the contrary, reducible
to facts of the preceding orders. He does not call the spiritistic
hypothesis impossible; he does believe it ought not to be called in
until every other explanation has been examined and found inadequate and
he is not inclined to believe that we have as yet exhausted other
possible explanations.

One man's authority here is by no means final. F.W.H. Myers has taken
into consideration many of the facts upon which Boirac dwells and on the
whole has reached a different conclusion. But, in general, the more
deeply we advance into the region of abnormal personality and the
phenomena of hypnotic and related states, the more reason there seems to
be for believing that there are resident in human personality powers
which, if at once evoked and released, are sufficient to account for all
mediumistic revelations without assuming that they come from the
discarnate.

_Geley's Conclusions_

Geley has gone much farther in some directions here than any one else.
He is more concerned with the physical phenomena. He has a striking
series of photographs of materialization, the authenticity of which it
is difficult to doubt. He finds an ascending series in abnormal
psychology from neuropathic states to mediumship with gradations which
intensify the abnormal or the supernormal, but in which the continuity
of development is never b