Not only have we failed to prove conclusively the existence or determine the activities of an entity so improbable _a priori_ as a second self, but this popular hypothesis cannot always justify itself by fitting the facts, unless indeed we are prepared to assign to such an additional human mind a considerable measure of omniscience. How much further do we get by declaring that such intelligences as Phinuit, George Pelham, or Feda are mere manifestations of a medium’s “secondary self”? The messages which we receive from clairvoyant experiments with entranced or controlled mediums, table tiltings, planchette, ouija boards, etc., present a bewildering congeries of good sense and stupidity, relevancy and irrelevancy, truth and falsehood, sobriety and flippancy. Such communications possess two marked characteristics. They display intelligence, however low the level of that intelligence may sink; and they invariably claim to proceed from the surviving minds of dead men and women, or at any rate from discarnate beings or “spirits”. These messages fall into two classes; in the first place, the most important of them, which offer evidential matter either spontaneously or in compliance with a sitter’s request. In such dark and unaccustomed paths the thoughtful researcher must walk warily and form his judgments dispassionately. Suffice it to say that persons of real ability and calm judgment are to be found who are intellectually convinced that in certain instances the agencies which have communicated with them through mediums are actually what they claim to be, the surviving personalities of dead friends or relatives. I found it difficult during some sittings under an assumed name with Mrs Piper to resist the belief that I was being addressed by two lost friends, so amazing was the relevancy of a single message in the one case, and the force of accumulated details in the other. Of a communication through the same medium given to his sister-in-law for transmission to himself Professor William James of Harvard writes as follows: “The point is that the message is an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but me――not possibly either to the medium or to my sister-in-law; and an allusion so pertinent and intimate, and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly knowledge on anyone’s part, that it quite astounds as well as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had been conceivably in my sister-in-law’s mind, it would have been an interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but as I say it could not possibly have been, and she only transmits it to me after the fact not even understanding it.”