There is one other method of receiving messages which we must briefly notice. It is, to Spiritualists, the most impressive of all. The ghost of the dead _talks directly to you_. A "direct voice" medium is, of course, required, and some kind of trumpet is provided by the medium through which the spirit speaks to you. If you are known to the medium, or if you have a good imagination and are very eager, you can recognize the very accents of your dead wife or mother-in-law. But there is one disadvantage of this impressive phenomenon. It must take place in complete darkness; and we remember the warning of that high and experienced psychic authority, Dr. Maxwell, that the man who seeks any kind of phenomena in complete darkness is wasting his time. Spiritualist writers are amusing when they try to reconcile us to the conditions which their mediums have imposed on them. Are there not certain conditions for the appearance of all scientific phenomena, they ask us? Most assuredly. You cannot grow carrots without soil, and so on. Is not darkness a condition of certain scientific processes? Again, most certainly. The photographic plate must be prepared in the dark, or in a dull red light. Therefore.... That is just where the Spiritualist fails. If the darkness under cover of which the photographic chemist prepares his plates lent itself equally to cover fraud or to protect his operations, there would be a parallel. As it is, there is no parallel. The red light of the photographer can serve only one purpose. When the medium uses it, there are two purposes conceivable. One is, on the Spiritualist theory, that white light may interfere with the "magnetism," or the "psychic force," or whatever the latest jargon is. The other conceivable purpose is that it may cover fraud. Everybody admits that the darkening of the planet since 1848 has covered "a vast amount of fraud," to use the words of Baron Schrenck. Few people admit that it has favoured real phenomena. It is therefore quite absurd to attempt to reconcile us to the darkness by the analogy of photographic operations. There is no analogy at all. In the one case the poor light certainly favours fraud, and does not certainly do anything else. In the other case the red light never covers fraud, but has a single clear purpose. Red light, as I have said, is the most tiring for the eye of all kinds of light. The man who thinks that he can control the hands and feet of seven mediums in such a light cannot expect to be taken seriously. He can expect only to be taken in. But the man who pays any attention to phenomena for which the medium requires pitch darkness is even worse. Why not simply _imagine_ that the dead still live, and save the guinea? You have not the slightest guarantee of the genuineness of the phenomena. Imagining that you can recognize the voice or the features is one of the oldest of illusions.