we have to ask, Is there any other supposition which will explain the facts, and which is easier to believe than the spirit theory?

These "spirits" apparently desire to convince us of their reality, and they tell us many things which are expected to convince us; they tell us things which we ourselves do not know, and which spirits might know. But here again we run up against the problem of the subconsciousness, with its infinite mass of "forgotten" knowledge. It is not so easy for the "spirits" to tell us things which we can be sure our subconscious mind could not possibly contain. Also, there comes the additional element of telepathy. It appears to be a fact that under trance conditions, or under any especially exciting conditions of the consciousness, one mind can reach out and take something out of another mind, or one mind can cause something to be passed over to another mind; and so information can be communicated to the mind of a medium, and can appear in automatic writing, or in clairvoyance, or in crystal gazing.

One of the most conscientious and earnest of all the investigators of this subject was the late Professor Hyslop, who many years ago sought to teach me "practical morality' (from the bourgeois point of view) in Columbia University. Professor Hyslop worked for fifteen years with a medium by the name of Mrs. Piper, who was apparently sincere and was never exposed in any kind of fraud. In Professor Hyslop's books you will find innumerable instances of amazing facts brought out in Mrs. Piper's trances. You will find Professor Hyslop arguing that the only way telepathy can account for these facts is by the supposition that there is a universal subconscious mind, or that the subconscious mind of the medium possesses the power to reach into the subconscious mind of every other living person and take out anything from it. But for my part, I cannot see that the case is quite so difficult. Professor Hyslop recites, for example, how Mrs. Piper would tell him facts about some long dead relative-facts which he did not know, but was later able to verify. But that proves simply nothing at all, because there could be no possible way for Professor Hyslop to be sure that he had never known these facts about his relatives. The facts might have been in his subconscious mind without having ever been in his conscious mind at all; he might have

heard people talking about these matters while he was reading a book, or playing as a boy, paying no attention to what was said.

And then came Sir Oliver Lodge with his investigations. I will say this for his work-he was the first person who was able to make real to my mind the startling idea that perhaps after all the dead might be alive and able to communicate with us. You will find what he has to say in his book, "The Survival of Man," and it seems fair that a great scientist and a great man should have a chance to convince you of what seem to him the most important facts in the world.

Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in the war, and it is claimed that he began at once to communicate with his family. Among other things, he told them of the existence of a picture, which none of them had ever seen or heard of, a group photograph which he described in detail. But, of course, other people in this group knew of the existence of the photograph, and so we have again the possibility that some member of Sir Oliver's family may have taken into his subconscious mind without knowing it an impression or description of that picture. If you care to experiment, you will find that you can frequently play a part in the dreams of a child by talking to it in its sleep; and that is only one of a thousand different ways by which some member of a family might acquire, without knowing it, information of the existence of a photograph.

There is another possibility to be considered-that a portion of the consciousness may survive, and not necessarily forever. We are accustomed when death takes place to see the body before us, and we know that we can preserve the body for thousands of years if we wish. Why is it not possible that when conscious life is brought to a sudden end, there may remain some portion of the consciousness, or of the subconsciousness, cut off from the body, and slowly fading back into the universal mind energy, whatever we please to call it? There is a hard part of the body, the skeleton, which survives for some time; why might there not be a central core of the mind which is similarly tough and enduring? Of course, if consciousness is a function of the brain, it must decay as the brain decays; but how would it be if the brain were a function of the consciousness-which is, so far as I can see, quite as likely a guess.

I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility of this idea. I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits of those recently dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. Of course, you can go to any seance in the "white light" district of your city and receive communications from the souls of Cæsar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary, you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles; but you will not find much reality about any of these people, they will not tell you very much about the everyday details of their lives. This fact that so much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our own time tends to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever. How simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles would come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to find copies of his lost tragedies! You would think that the soul of Sophocles, seeing our great need of beauty and wisdom, would be interested to give us his works! From genius, operating under the guidance of the conscious mind, we get sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums give us suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the operation of the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, for example, from dissociated personalities.

There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, produced by the automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who tells us in evident good faith that her conscious personality is entirely innocent of Patience, and al! her thought and doings. Patience writes long novels and dramas in a quaint kind of old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing about this language. But does she positively know that when she was a child, she never happened to be in the room with someone who was reading old English aloud? Nothing seems more likely than that her subconscious mind heard some quaint, strange language, and took possession of it, and built up a personality around it, and even made a new language and a new literature from that starting point.

That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subconscious revels. It creates new characters, with an imagination infinite and inexhaustible. Who has not waked up and been astounded at the variety and reality of a dream? Who has not told his dreams and laughed over them? The subconscious will play at games, it will act and rehearse elaborate rôles;

it will put on costumes, and delight in being Cæsar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will even play at being "spirits"! It will be mischievous and impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of its own importance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. It will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a griefstricken family; it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," and cause an earnest professor of "practical morality" to give up a respectable position in Columbia University and write books to convince the world that the dead are sending him messages.

Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss Beauchamp. Remember that here we are not dealing with any guess work about "spirits"; here we have half a dozen different "controls," none of them the least bit dead, but all of them a part of the consciousness of one entirely alive young lady. A specialist has spent some six years investigating the case, day after day, week after week, writing down the minute details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant known as "Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom you ever held in your arms. Sally has love and hate, fear and hope, pain and delight-and Sally is a little demon, created entirely out of the subconsciousness of a highly refined and conscientious young college graduate of Boston. Sally spends Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally pawns Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; Sally uses Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about Miss Beauchamp; Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or makes her hear exactly the opposite of what is spoken to her. Yes, and Sally pleads and fights frantically for her life; Sally enters into intrigues with other parts of Miss Beauchamp, and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who is her Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge!

And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a grieving mother, and made that mother think she was talking to the ghost of a long lost child? Can anybody doubt that Sally could and would play the part of any person she had ever known, or of any historic character she had ever read about? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the criscious Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this,

and was horrified when she was told about it. So here you have the following situation, no matter of guesswork, but definitely established: your dearest friend may act as a medium, and in all good faith may bring to the surface some part of his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in a hundred different rôles, and plays upon you with deliberate malice the most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks.

And how much worse the situation becomes when to this there is added the possibility of conscious fraud! When the medium is a person who is taking your money, and thrives by making you believe in the "spirits" she produces! You may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of the Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, and in row after row of tents you may hear, and even see, every kind of spirit you ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs. And you may see poor farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their cheeks, listening to the endearments of their dead children, and to wisdom from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a Bowery accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years ago by Will Irwin in a book called "The Medium Game"; and then-after traveling from one kind of medium to another, and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he went into a "parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most intimate secrets of his life!

It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is at work upon a device to enable spirits to communicate with the living, if there really are spirits seeking to do this. It is Edison's idea that spirits may inhabit some kind of infinitely rarefied astral body, and he proposes to manufacture an instrument which is sensitive to an impression many millions of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This should make it easier for the spirits, and should constitute a fairer test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is perfected and put to work by scientific men, I wish to suggest a few tests which will convince me that there really are spirits, and that the results are not to be explained by telepathy.

First, assuming that the spirits live forever, there are some useful things which were known to the people of ancient time, and are not known to anyone living now. For example, let one of the Egyptian craftsmen come forward and tell us