It may very well be that great spirits have really been the authors of very poor messages. It has happened to each of us to make poetical or other compositions in our dreams which we have thought admirable; we say in delight, "What a pity I shall not be able to remember that when I wake!" But sometimes we do remember, and then we smile with contempt at what had delighted us during sleep. Now the communicators constantly repeat that they are dreaming while they are in the atmosphere of the medium. "Everything seems so clear to me," says Robert Hyslop to his son, "and when I try to tell you, James, I cannot." These considerations prove that we must not hasten to conclude, with Professor Flournoy, that if there is a future life it is one of wretched degeneration, one more misery added to all the others which overwhelm us in this miserable universe. No; as Professor James says, in this world we live only at the surface of our being; if death is not annihilation, then it is an awakening. It does not follow that the life of the other world is not higher and more intense than this, because communication with it is difficult. Another serious objection to the spiritualist hypothesis is the philosophy with which certain too eager persons have connected it. Spiritualism, which should at present be but the mere beginning of a science, is, according to them, already a philosophy for which the universe holds no secrets. How should such puny creatures as ourselves hope to solve the problems of the universe by _a priori_ reasoning? All that we can reasonably hope, is to wrench from nature some of the secrets nearest to us, surrounding ourselves with a thousand precautions in order not grossly to deceive ourselves. I rank the spiritualistic philosophy with other philosophies. Perhaps some of its dicta proceed from spirits, if spirits exist, but the system as a whole most surely does not. But then, it will be said, the people who have elaborated this philosophy must have been impostors. No, not inevitably; I will even venture to say that imposture is unlikely. The key to the mystery may be found in other characteristics of humanity.