Sir Conan Doyle asks in all innocence, “Is it really scientific to deny and at the same time refuse to investigate?” My answer is most emphatically “no.” Nevertheless, they absolutely oppose all honest efforts at investigation, and justify the mediums in refusing to work when the conditions are not just as they want them. When one is invited to a dark seance for the purpose of investigation and finds the conditions so fixed as to bar him from enquiring too closely and compel him to be content with merely looking on he stands a poor chance of getting at the facts, and should he dare to disregard the “rules of the circle” and the seance results in a blank, the investigator is charged with having brought an atmosphere of incredulity to bear which prevents manifestation. I do not affirm that the claims of Spiritualism are disproved by such failures but I do say that if under such circumstances one dared to investigate properly and sanely, and to cross-examine, as he most certainly would do in any other form of investigation, scientific, or in the other walks of life, Spiritualism would not be so generously accepted. In justification the psychic says that darkness or excessively dim light is perfectly legitimate and that tangible investigation might result in _injury_ or even _death_ to the medium. The folly of any such fear has been proven time and again by the unexpected play of a flash light. Even the ardent supporters who lay emphasis on such an absurdity have, according to their own confession, made, or had made, flashlight photographs and there has never been a single case of harm or disaster reported. This necessity for darkness seems but the grossest invention of the medium to divert, even to the point of intimidation, the attention of the sitters. Such a necessity cannot be accorded a logical reason for existing under test conditions to demonstrate a scientific subject. It can be supported only as a visionary, speculative superstition; an instrument to foster hallucinatory illusion and as an admirable subterfuge to cover fraud. Sir Arthur says: “If you want to send a telegram you must go to a telegraph office. If you want to telephone you must first pick up the receiver and give your message to either an operator or a waiting automaton.” Very well, I have gone to the operator between the Beyond and this earthly sphere, I have gone to the telegraph office that receives the message in code, to the so-called _medium_. What would be more wonderful to me than to be able to converse with my beloved mother? Surely there is no love in this world like a mother’s love, no closeness of spirit, no other heart throbs that beat alike; but I have not heard from my blessed Mother, except through the dictates of the inmost recesses of my heart, the thoughts which fill my brain and the memory of her teachings.