with innocent self-deception, but also with vulgar sham; when it is realized that under the shelter of such a system men and women all over our land are daily and hourly preying upon the credulity of simple-minded folk, and obtaining a livelihood by means for which the law provides punishment,--the moral indignation following upon this realization will impart vigor to the protest against such practices, which a mere sense of their irrationality would fail to incite. The moral and æsthetic aversion which many of the practices and tenets of Spiritualism arouses in those whose ideals are sound and steadfast may prove to be a more serious menace to the spread of the belief, a more potent source of its decay, than even its inherent inconsistencies and improbabilities. FOOTNOTES: [6] _Preliminary Report of the Commission appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to investigate Modern Spiritualism_, Philadelphia, 1887, Lippincott, p. 159. The members of the commission were: Dr. William Pepper, Dr. Joseph Leidy, Dr. G. S. Koenig, Prof. R. E. Thompson, Prof. G. S. Fullerton, Dr. H. H. Furness, Mr. Coleman Sellers, Dr. J. W. White, Dr. C. B. Knerr, and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. [7] _Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol. viii. 253. [8] I desire not to seem to overlook the fact that there are manifestations presented by Spiritualism of a different character from those above considered. There are, for example, the inspirational messages revealed through the medium when in a trance-like condition, and which are supposed to rest for their proof of supernatural origin on the testimony of the medium or upon their internal content. The psychological status of these and similar mediumistic phenomena must be interpreted in the light of our knowledge of hypnotic and allied conditions, of automatic writing, of modifications of conscious and subconscious personality. I do not consider that the evidence which these phenomena contribute towards the establishment of the probability of the truth of the spiritualistic hypothesis at all affects the estimate arrived at in the main discussion. That there are other than the physical phenomena of Spiritualism should, however, not be overlooked.