manifestations obtained by the agency of mediums, whether induced apparitions, which we will put aside for the moment because of their frequently questionable character, or communications with the dead by word of mouth or automatic writing. Those extraordinary communications have been studied at length by such men as F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the philosopher William James, the father of the new pragmatism. They profoundly impressed and almost convinced these men, and they therefore deserve to arrest our attention. It appears, therefore, to be as well established as a fact can be that a spiritual or nervous shape, an image, a belated reflection of life, is capable of subsisting for some time, of releasing itself from the body, or surviving it, of traversing enormous distances in the twinkling of an eye, of manifesting itself to the living and, sometimes, of communicating with them. For the rest, we have to recognize that these apparitions are very brief. They take place only at the precise moment of death, or follow very shortly after. They do not seem to have the least consciousness of a new or superterrestrial life, differing from that of the body whence they issue. On the contrary, their spiritual energy, at a time when it ought to be absolutely pure, because it is rid of matter, seems greatly inferior to what it was when matter surrounded it. These more or less uneasy phantasms, often tormented with trivial cares, although they come from another world, have never brought us one single revelation of topical interest concerning that world whose prodigious threshold they have crossed. Soon they fade away and disappear forever. Are they the first glimmers of a new existence or the final glimmers of the old? Do the dead thus use, for want of a better, the last link that binds them and makes them perceptible to our senses? Do they afterward go on living around us, without again succeeding, despite their endeavors, to make themselves known or to give us an idea of their presence, because we have not the organ that is necessary to perceive them, even as all our endeavors would not succeed in giving a man who was blind from birth the least notion of light and color? We do not know at all; nor can we tell whether it is permissible to draw any conclusion from all these incontestable phenomena. Meanwhile, it is interesting to observe that there really are ghosts, specters, and phantoms. Once again, science steps in to confirm a general belief of mankind, and to teach us that a belief of this sort, however absurd it may at first seem, still deserves careful examination. THE DILEMMA OF THE TRUTH-SEEKER