The spiritualists communicate or think that they communicate with the dead by means of what they call automatic speech and writing. These are obtained by the agency of a medium[6] in a state of ecstasy or rather of “trance,” to employ the vocabulary of the new science. This condition is not one of hypnotic sleep, nor does it seem to be an hysterical manifestation; it is often associated, as in the case of the medium Mrs. Piper, with perfect health and complete intellectual and physical balance. It is rather the more or less voluntary emergence of a second or subliminal personality or consciousness of the medium; or, if we admit the spiritualistic hypothesis, his occupation, his “psychic invasion,” as Myers calls it, by forces from another world. In the “entranced” subject, the normal consciousness and personality are entirely done away with; and he replies “automatically,” sometimes by word of mouth, more often in writing, to the questions put to him. It has happened that he speaks and writes simultaneously, his voice being occupied by one spirit and his hand by another, who thus carry on two independent conversations. More rarely, the voice and the two hands are “possessed” at one and the same time; and we receive three different communications. Obviously, manifestations of this sort lend themselves to frauds and impostures of every kind; and the distrust aroused is at first invincible. But there are some that make their appearance encompassed with such guarantees of good faith and sincerity, so often, so long and so rigorously checked by scientific men of unimpeachable character and authority and of originally inflexible scepticism that it becomes difficult to maintain a suspicion at the finish.[7] Unfortunately, I am not able to enter here into the details of some of these purely scientific sittings, those for instance of Mrs. Piper, the famous medium with whom F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Professor Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, Sir Oliver Lodge and William James worked during a number of years. On the other hand, it is precisely the accumulation and coincidences of these abnormal details which gradually produce and confirm the conviction that we are in the presence of an entirely new, improbable, but genuine phenomenon, which is sometimes difficult of classification among exclusively terrestrial phenomena. I should have to devote to these “communications” a special study which would exceed the limits of this essay; and I will therefore content myself with referring those who care to know more of the subject to Sir Oliver Lodge’s book, _The Survival of Man_, recently translated into French under the title of _La Survivance humaine_; and, above all, to the twenty-five bulky volumes of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R., notably to the report and comments of William James on the Piper-Hodgson sittings in Vol. XXIII. and to Vol. XIII., where Hodgson examines the