There is one test here which, if it were really made under absolutely dependable conditions, conditions, that is, in no wise open to suspicion or misunderstanding, might be final. If a message written before death and so sealed as to be unknown to any one save the one who wrote it, could be correctly reported, it would have, everything else being right, an immense force. (Though even here clairvoyance--for which, on the whole, there is a pretty dependable evidence--might afford the true explanation.) F.W.H. Myers left such a message as this. In January, 1891, he sent Sir Oliver Lodge a "sealed envelope, in the hope that after his death the communication contained in the envelope would be able to be given by means of a medium. Many different messages obtained by a well-known medium, Madame Verrall, and coming supposedly from Frederick Myers, led them to believe that they represented this communication. The envelope was opened in December, 1904, and 'it was found that there was no resemblance between its actual contents and what was alleged by the script to be contained in it.'"[80] If there is any authentic case of this final test being successfully maintained, the writer does not know it. There are instances of hidden articles discovered, but these tests by no means possess the same force of testimony. [Footnote 80: Boirac, "The Psychology of the Future," p. 278.] We may assume, then, that we have no absolute demonstration of spirit communication. We have only a very complex group of phenomena capable of varying explanations. Any fair-minded student of the whole subject must recognize that men who have had ample opportunity for first hand investigation, not hasty in their conclusions and in some instances of very great intellectual force, have taken an opposite view. They have felt the testimony to be both sound and sufficient. There is an unescapable personal equation here which probably finally determines divergent attitudes. As has been said before, those generally who have accepted the spiritistic explanation have been led to do so through communications in which they discovered some personal note or touch, to which they themselves would be hospitably susceptible and which would have far less weight with those whose affections and previous associations were not thus involved. This does not necessarily prove their conclusions to have been false. Perhaps just this personal element is necessary to give final meaning to what otherwise is so perplexing and even contradictory. The dogmatism which shuts the door squarely in the face of spiritism is as unreasonable, as unscientific, as the credulity which opens the door wide and accepts everything which comes through. _The Influence of Spiritism Upon Its Adherents_