If it really be the case, however, as suggested above, that no activity of the human mind, whether normal or subliminal, can furnish an adequate explanation of the communications in question, we are left to face the facts and ask ourselves whether, after all, the claim put forward by the agencies involved may not be a valid one, viz., that they are what they invariably allege themselves to be, the product of discarnate intelligences. It is easy for those unacquainted with the accumulated phenomena of automatic writing, the planchette and ouija boards, and so on, to sneer at such an interpretation of the facts. But sneers have often dogged the earlier footsteps of scientific enterprise, and in any case――sneers or no sneers――the scientific researcher must, if he can, provide a solution of the phenomena which in this department of his work are so abundant and so easily repeated, that nothing else is needed beyond a careful sifting of the material, and above all, a mind as free as possible from any conscious bias towards either a normal or supernormal explanation. Once it is accepted that modern science does not necessarily preclude the existence of intelligences independent of those associated with the functions of the human brain, we may frankly admit that the theory of spirit-agencies in the case of these erratic messages does at least fit the facts. The existence would seem to be suggested of those alleged unseen entities, sometimes described as “elementals,” an order of low-grade spirits, able and apparently eager to communicate with us. The presence of such beings around us has, in earlier centuries, been widely accepted by a veritable _consensus gentium_; and the general characteristics of the communications in many a table-tilting or planchette experiment would seem to correspond closely to those of the fairies, efrits, demons, gnomes, “little folk,” _et hoc genus omne_――an intermixture of good humour and mischief coupled with a limited intelligence and the almost complete absence of any moral standard.