The experiments are still in their early stages, and the most recent volumes of the “Proceedings” are devoted to them. Although the accumulated mass of evidence is already considerable, no conclusion can yet be drawn from it. In any case, whatever the spiritualists may say, the suspicion of telepathy seems to me to be in no way removed. The experiments form a rather fantastic literary exercise, one intellectually much superior to the ordinary manifestations of the mediums; but up to the present there is no reason for placing their mystery in the other world rather than in this. Men have tried to see in them a proof that somewhere in time or space, or else beyond both, there is a sort of immense cosmic reserve of knowledge upon which the spirits go and draw freely. But if the reserve exist, which is very possible, nothing tells us that it is not the living rather than the dead who repair to it. It is very strange that the dead, if they really have access to the immeasurable treasure, should bring back nothing from it but a kind of ingenious child’s puzzle, although it ought to contain myriads of lost or forgotten notions and acquirements, heaped up during thousands and thousands of years in abysses which our mind, weighed down by the body, can no longer penetrate, but which nothing seems to close against the investigations of freer and more subtle activities. They are evidently surrounded by innumerable mysteries, by unsuspected and formidable truths that loom large on every side. The smallest astronomical or biological revelation, the least secret of olden time, such as that of the temper of copper, an archæological detail, a poem, a statue, a recovered remedy, a shred of one of those unknown sciences which flourished in Egypt or Atlantis--any of these would form a much more decisive argument than hundreds of more or less literary reminiscences. Why do they speak to us so seldom of the future? And for what reason, when they do venture upon it, are they mistaken with such disheartening regularity? One would think that, in the sight of a being delivered from the trammels of the body and of time, the years, whether past or future, ought all to lie outspread on one and the same plane.[3] We may therefore say that the ingenuity of the proof turns against it. All things considered, as in other attempts, and notably in those of the famous medium Stainton Moses, there is the same characteristic inability to bring us the veriest particle of truth or knowledge of which no vestige can be found in a living brain or in a book written on this earth. And yet it is inconceivable that there should not somewhere exist a knowledge that is not as ours and truths other than those which we possess here below. A LACK OF VITAL COMMUNICATIONS