2. That another medium heroically refrained from reading up any classical dictionaries or works on the subject, and reserved her mind strictly for whatever information the spirits might give her. One can scarcely be called hypercritical if one has doubts about these suppositions. There does not seem to be any room for the theory either of telepathy or of spirit communication. The two experiences I have just analysed are selected by Sir A. C. Doyle as the most convincing in the whole of the work of the more modern and more refined Spiritualists. I need not linger over other experiences of these automatic writers. For the most part, automatic writing provides only vapid or inaccurate stuff which is its own refutation. In the early years, when Franklin, Shakespeare, Plato, and all the most illustrious dead wrote nonsense of the most vapoury description, the situation was quite grotesque. Nor is this kind of thing yet extinct. There are mediums practising in London to-day who put the sitter in communication with the sages and poets of ancient times. In the very best of these cases there is a certain silliness about the communications which makes them difficult to read. Even the spirits of Myers and Verrall seem to be in a perpetual Bank-Holiday mood, making naive little puns and jokes, and talking in the rambling, incoherent way that scholars do only in hours of domestic dissipation. There is a world thirsting (it is said) for proof that the dead still live. Here are (it is said) men like W. T. Stead, Myers, Hodgson, Verrall, Sidgwick, Vice-Admiral Moore, Robert Owen, etc., at the "other end of the wire," as William James used to say. Yet, apparently, nothing can be said or done that quite clearly goes beyond the power of the mediums. The arrogance of the Spiritualists in the circumstances is amazing.