In fine, what impresses any man who reads much of all the volumes of "revelation" which have been vouchsafed to us is the entirely _earthly_ character of it all. The Spiritualist theory is that men grow rapidly wiser after death. Plato is two thousand years wiser than he was when he lived. Ptah-hotep is six thousand years older and wiser. Neither these, nor Buddha nor Christ nor any other moralist, has a word of wisdom for us. In fact, a theory has had to be invented which supposes that they move away from the earth to distant regions of the spirit-world as they grow older, and so cannot communicate. It is a pity they are not "permitted" to do so for propaganda purposes. But even those who remain in communication have learned nothing since they left the earth. No discovery has ever yet been communicated to us. In Spiritualist literature, it is true, there is a claim that certain unknown facts about the satellites of Uranus were revealed; but Flammarion makes short work of the claim. The communications _never_ rise above the level of the thought and knowledge of living humanity: never even above the level of the knowledge available to the mediums. It is scarcely an "insanity of incredulity" to suppose that they originated there. CHAPTER IX GHOST-LAND AND ITS CITIZENS About twenty years ago a writing medium, a sober professional man whose character would not be questioned, showed me a pile of his automatic "script." He sincerely believed that he had for several years been in communication with the dead. I glanced over many sheets of platitude and familiar moralizing, and then asked him to tell me how they described the new world in which the dead lived. He hesitated, and tried to convince me that this point, which seemed to me the most interesting of all, was unimportant. When I pressed, he said that it was a world so different from ours that the spirits could hardly convey a coherent description of it in our language. They had to be content with such vague phrases as that they "lived in houses of flowers."