Who of us is always master of his impressions and of his faculties? writes Dr. Dariex in this connection.[43] Who of us can at will put himself into such and such a physical condition and such and such a moral state? Is the composer of music master of his inspiration? Does a poet always write verses of equal worth? Is a man of genius always a man of genius? Now, what is there less normal, more impressionable, and more capricious than a sensitive, a medium, especially when she is away from home, thrown out of the routine of her daily life, and staying with those with whom she is unacquainted or knows very slightly, who are to be her judges and who expect from her the rare and abnormal phenomenon the production of which is not under the constant and complete control of her will? A sensitive placed in such a situation, will have a fatal propensity to feign the phenomenon which does not spontaneously materialize or to heighten by deceit the intensity of a partially successful experiment. This feigning is of course a very vexatious and regrettable thing. It throws suspicion upon the experiments, renders them much more difficult and less within the reach of the investigator. But this is only an impediment, and ought not to fetch us up short and lead us to give a premature decision. All of us who have experimented with and handled these sensitives know that at every step we run foul of fraud, conscious or unconscious, and that all mediums--or almost all--are used to the thing. We know that we must, unfortunately, take our share, for the moment, of this regrettable weakness, and be perspicacious enough to hinder, or at least to unearth the trickery, and to disentangle the true from the false. More than one of those who have engaged perseveringly in psychic experiments, can say that he has been sometimes enervated and irritated while waiting for a phenomenon which does not take place, and that he has felt something like a desire to put an end to this waiting by himself giving the extra twist or decisive touch.[44] Such experimenters can understand that if, in place of being conscientious workers, always masters of themselves, incapable of deceiving, and engaged solely in the search for scientific truth, they were, on the contrary, somewhat dreamy and impulsive persons who were susceptible to suggestion and whose _amour propre_ was active, and in whose minds scientific probity did not hold the first and pre-eminent place, they would undoubtedly engage, more or less involuntarily, in the artificial production of phenomena which refused to take place in smooth and natural order.