"That as regards spirit photographs, he 'obtained many striking pictures of this character, under good test conditions, and attended by circumstances yielding unique and exceptionally valuable evidence.... The evidence in favour of some of these psychic pictures is as good as it is ever likely to be, and, respecting some of these obtained by the present writer, expert photographic authorities have expressed their verdict. Sir William Crookes has obtained them in his own house under personally imposed conditions, and many private experimenters in different parts of the world have been equally successful." This from an avowed opponent is striking testimony to some kind of manifestation which is not, in intent, at least, fraudulent. CHAPTER XIII CLAIRVOYANCE It was natural that out of all these mystic practices--those I have already indicated and the others I am about to indicate--a cult or religion should have been moulded. To this cult has been given the name of spiritualism (or spiritism, as some of the newer devotees prefer to call it). Its great outstanding feature and essential mystery is, of course, physical mediumship. The creed of the believer in disembodied spirits is that the medium acts as the passive agent for certain physical and intellectual manifestations which do not belong to the rôle of the visible, tangible world in which we live. One of the forms of those manifestations is clairvoyance; others are materialisation--_i.e._ the actual incarnation of spiritual forms--physical manifestations such as table rapping, levitation, slate writing, etc., trance utterances and spirit photography. From the physical phenomena to the intellectual phenomena of clairvoyance. Clairvoyance literally means clear seeing; but in spiritualism it has a technical meaning, and may be either objective or subjective. In the terminology of the cult, objective clairvoyance is described as "that psychic power or function of seeing, objectively, by and through the spiritualism sensorium of sight which pervades the physical mechanism of vision, spiritual beings and things. A few persons are born with this power; in some it is developed, and in others it has but a casual quickening. Its extent is governed by the rate of vibration under which it operates; thus, one clairvoyant may see spiritual things which to another may be invisible because of the degree of difference in the intensity of the powers." Further, "subjective clairvoyance is that psychic condition of a person which enables spirit intelligences to impress or photograph upon the brain of that person, at will, pictures and images which are seen as visions by that person, without the aid of the physical eye. These pictures and images may be of things spiritual or material, past or present, remote or near, hidden or uncovered, or they may have their existence simply in the conception or imagination of the spirit communicating them."