But while there is much fraud even in automatic writing, there are certainly hundreds of mediums of this description who quite honestly believe that they are spirit-controlled. Mr. G. B. Shaw's mother was an automatic artist of that class. I have seen some of her spirit drawings. A high-minded medical man of my acquaintance was a medium of the same type. The class is very numerous. Psychologically, it is not very difficult to understand. A pianist can play quite complicated pieces unconsciously or subconsciously. A writer, who cannot normally write decent fiction, may have wonderful flights of imagination in a dream. An expert worker can do quite complicated things without attention. Something of the same faculty seems to come in time to the automatic writer or artist. Consciousness is more or less--never entirely, perhaps--switched off from its usual connection with the hand, and the part of the brain-machine which is not lit by consciousness takes over the connection. That this can be done in perfect honesty will be clear to every reader of Flammarion's book, _Les forces naturelles inconnues_. Flammarion never became a Spiritualist, but he was quite a fluent automatic writer in his youth. Victorien Sardou, the great dramatist, belonged to the same circle, and was an automatic draughtsman. Flammarion gives specimens of the work of both. Quite without a deliberate intention, he signed his automatic writing (on science) "Galileo." I have no doubt that at the time both these distinguished men were strongly tempted to embrace the Spiritualist theory. These experiences, and the experiences of the séance, can be exceedingly impressive and dramatic. The man who has never been there is too apt to think that all Spiritualists are fools. I have been to séances, and I do not admit that. I am quarrelling with Spiritualists because they will not realize the possibilities and the actual abundance of fraud. But the séance is undoubtedly very impressive at times. I have held a serious conversation, in German and Latin, through an amateur medium of my own acquaintance, with the supposed spirit of a certain German theologian of the last century whose name (as given) was well known to me. I do not at all wonder that many succumb in sittings of this sort. But I found invariably that, if one resolutely kept one's head and devised crucial tests, the claim broke down. So it is with Flammarion and Sardou. What "Galileo" wrote in 1870 was just the astronomy of that time; and much of it is totally wrong to-day. Sardou, on the other hand, drew remarkable sketches of life on Jupiter; and we know to-day that Jupiter is red-hot!