There exists another weakness of the human mind against which the psychical researcher must always be on his guard. Those perverse tendencies which are covered by the term ‘megalomania’ form a sinister factor which serves continually to warp the judgment and even, in some cases, the moral sense of those who lay claim to the possession of supernormal powers. It is doubtful whether this form of mental perversity, appearing often as a kind of kink in otherwise normal and regular minds, has ever been adequately recognized by those whose task it has been to collate the facts and estimate the validity of alleged psychic phenomena. Megalomaniac impulses, indeed, would appear to provide at any rate a partial explanation of many declarations about strange and startling occurrences outside the actual area of the _séance_ room. The writer, from personal experiences in several modern wars, including the last, and a careful study of war psychology and war-literature, has come to the conclusion that of the large number of atrocities which are alleged to disfigure the record of all civilized armies only a very small percentage ever occur at all. Some of these stories are certainly invented by Propaganda Departments, civil and military, whose members, in some instances, do not scruple to disseminate falsehoods in order to blacken the good name of an enemy people and so increase the ferocity and fighting efficiency of their own troops. But the bulk of these atrocity tales are due to the megalomaniac desire on the part of soldiers or civilians to recount thrilling and terrible events or pose as the actual participants in some gruesome episode. A civilian refugee or a wounded soldier in hospital (a normally truthful person) will sometimes invent in detail an atrocity story in order to impress an interrogator or a nurse and so secure for himself an amount of megalomaniac satisfaction. It is presumably the same curious impulse which brings to famous criminals in the dock offers of marriage from ordinarily decent and respectable women, or leads an obscure tourist to carve his initials on the Parthenon, or stimulates people to frenzied social effort in order to shake the hand of a royal personage, however commonplace his character or feeble his achievement. But if this form of mental perversion finds so many outlets in the course of everyday life, we may well expect it to flourish even more abundantly in the environment of psychic happenings. After all, what ordinary experience, however desirable, could vie in value and interest with the power to receive or convey actual messages from the dead? What ordinary scientific achievement could equal the exercise of a power which could secure the passage of matter through matter, bring about the levitation of a table without personal contact in defiance of the laws of gravitation, or cause the appearance of a materialized hand or even a full-length figure?