I can sustain the comedy no longer. These "revelations" are the most childish twaddle that has been put before our race since the Middle Ages. They are the meanderings of imaginations on a level with that of a fifteen-year-old school-girl. One really begins to wonder if our generation is _not_ in a state of senile decay, when tens of thousands of us acclaim this sort of thing as an outcome of superhuman intelligence. It is on a level with the "happy hunting grounds" of the Amerind. It is a dreamy parson's idea of the kind of world he would like to retire to, and continue to "do good" without getting tired. It is a flimsy, irresponsible, juvenile thing of paint and tinsel and gold-foil: the kind of transformation-scene in which we revelled, at the Christmas pantomime, when we were young. Our generation needs guidance if ever any generation of men did. Another great war would wreck the planet. The social soil heaves with underground movements. The stars are hidden from view. And people come before us with this kind of insipid puerility, and tell us it is "the greatest message ever offered to man." Seriously, what it is can be told in few words. It is partly a fresh attempt to bring our generation back to religion. It is partly an attempt to divert working people from the politics and economics of _this_ world. And it is partly a fresh outbreak of the unlimited credulity which every epidemic of Spiritualism has developed since 1848. There was such a phase in the fifties of the nineteenth century, when Spiritualism swept over the world. There was a second such phase in the seventies, when materializations began. This was checked by exposures everywhere in the early eighties, and not until our time has Spiritualism partly recovered. Now the vast and lamentable emotional disturbance of the War has given it a fresh opportunity, and for a time the flame of credulity has soared up again. To come back to the question which forms the title of this book, the reader may supply the answer, but I will venture to offer him a few summary reflections. We do well to distinguish two classes of phenomena. Broadly, but by no means exactly, this is the distinction between psychical and physical phenomena. Messages on slates or paper from the spirit-world I would class with the physical phenomena. We have seen that they reek with fraud, and there is no serious claim that any of them are genuine. The nearest we can get to a useful division is to set on one side a small class of mediums of high character who claim that, in trance and script, they are spirit-controlled.