The usual machinery of a seance creates suspicion. Most mediums have controls. Nothing is more capricious than these controls. They may be people who really never existed at all. The genesis of Mrs. Piper's control, Dr. Phinuit, is suggestive. "It would appear that Mrs. Piper in 1884 had visited for advice a professional clairvoyant whose leading control claimed to be a Frenchman named Finne, or Finnett."[79] When Mrs. Piper was later seen by William James, a French doctor had succeeded in obtaining almost exclusive control and his name was reported to be Phinuit. Beyond debate, as far as name goes, here is a kind of transmuted suggestion. The Finnett of the French clairvoyant, who may or may not have really lived, becomes the Phinuit of Mrs. Piper, for whose existence there is apparently no testimony at all. [Footnote 79: Podmore's "Modern Spiritualism," Vol. II, p. 333.] The controls have sometimes been Indians and indeed almost any one may appear as a control--Longfellow, for example, or Mrs. Siddons, or Bach or Vanderbilt. In a region where disproof and proof are equally impossible this element of capricious control is suspicious. It is much more likely to be some obscure casting up of the medium's mind, through lines of association of which the medium is utterly unconscious, than to represent the personalities so named. In Raymond the control is one Moonstone, or a little Indian girl called Freda or Feda, who speaks of herself in the third person and who reports a great many silly things in a very silly way. It is possible, of course, to say that these thus named are spirit mediums as necessary for the transfer of suggestion from the discarnate order as mediums seem to be in the incarnate order, and that abnormal personalities are as much needed on one side as the other through the abnormality of the whole process. But this is patently to beg the question. There is room in the whole process for the trivial, even the inconsequential. As the advocates of spiritism have urged, identification very often turns on apparently trivial things but it is difficult to justify the very great element of the capricious and actually foolish which enters so largely into the records of all sittings. It would seem as if death robbed grave personalities of their gravity, the strong of their force and the wise of their wisdom, and this is so hard to believe as to make us wonder whether we are not really dealing with something which belongs to an entirely different region and is open to an entirely different line of explanation.