‘It has not been the practice of the Society for Psychical Research to direct attention to the performances of any so-called “medium” who has been proved guilty of systematic fraud. Now, the investigation at Cambridge, of which the results are given in the _Journal_ for November 1895, taken in connection with an article by Professor Richet in the _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_, for January-February 1893, placed beyond reasonable doubt the facts that the frauds discovered (_sic_) by Dr. Hodgson at Cambridge, had been systematically practised by Eusapia Paladino for years. In accordance, therefore, with our established custom, I propose to ignore her performances for the future, as I ignore those of other persons engaged in the same mischievous trade.’ Such a judgment made a considerable and lamentable stir: if it were exact, it was just to pronounce it; if it were not thoroughly exact, Sidgwick should have suspended his verdict. This is what Myers advised—this is what Lodge and Richet advised. But the experimenters who followed Hodgson’s impulse did not do this. They made a mistake, and subsequent events have proved they were wrong. I have said that their judgment was not quite accurate. Professor Sidgwick said, addressing a general meeting of the Society for Psychical Research on the 11th October 1895 (_Journal S. P. R._, vii. 131):— ‘I consider it to be proved beyond a doubt that the medium used systematic trickery throughout this series of sittings. Her _modus operandi_ I will leave to Dr. Hodgson to describe, who—though only present during a part of the sittings—has had better opportunities for personally observing the actual process of fraud. When this trickery was discovered, the greater part of the phenomena offered as supernormal at these sittings were at once explained; and, this being so, I think it, in the circumstances, unreasonable to attribute—even hypothetically—to supernormal agency the residuum that was not so easily explicable. And considering the great general resemblance between the performances of the medium at these sittings and those I witnessed last year, I am now disposed to think that my earlier experiences are to be similarly explained; I therefore wish to withdraw altogether the limited and guarded support which I gave last year to the supernormal pretensions of Eusapia Paladino.’ So Sidgwick declares that his former experiments were null and void, as everything could be explained by trickery!