Impartial students of the literature--a growing mass of documentary evidence--are impressed (1) by the triviality of the messages. Punsters would seem to carry on their jokes from the other side. A message which was presumed to come to Mrs. Holland from Myers contained a mysterious allusion to “a peck of pickled pepper.” In the opinion of the best S.P.R. critics the words conveyed a punning allusion to Mrs. Piper. Is there not something pitiable in the thought that the great writer who gave us “St. Paul” and the “Classical” and “Modern” Essays should be occupied in the unseen life in trying to transmit to earth punning references to the name of a medium? Professor William James remarked on the extreme triviality of the supposed communications. “What real spirit,” he wrote, “at last able to revisit his wife on this earth, but would find something better to say than that she had changed the place of his photograph? And yet that is the sort of remark to which the spirits introduced by the mysterious Phinuit are apt to confine themselves.” A woman writer passed away not long ago in early middle life. Her mother tried to get in touch through a medium with the departed spirit, and received a message to the effect that some valuable old lace had been forgotten in the top drawer of a tallboy, and that it ought to be taken out and washed! In a recent newspaper article by an eminent Spiritualist, reference was made to a supposed authentic communication lately received from the other side. It concerned a pair of grey suède shoes and a fountain pen. Spiritualists tell us that such “trivial fond records” as we find, for instance, in “Raymond,” are of more value as evidence than graver talk of a general kind. Sir Oliver Lodge says, for instance, “The idea that a departed friend ought to be occupied wholly and entirely with grave matters, and ought not to remember jokes and fun, is a gratuitous claim which has to be abandoned. Humour does not cease with earth life. Why should it?”[41] With the utmost respect, we reply that Sir Oliver misses the point. The solemn platitudes of “Imperator” are, if possible, even less convincing than the descriptions of life in the unseen world given in “Raymond,” over which Mr. Wells makes merry in “The Undying Fire.” Why is it that the outpourings of Spiritualism almost invariably, as Dr. Barnes points out, “reflect the commonplace thoughts of commonplace minds”?