We will consider, for this purpose, the case of a medium who develops no physical phenomena, but who simply receives his visitor, tells him of the events of his past life, describes his spirit-friends, conveys oral communications from them, and occasionally drops into prophecy. The visitor may or may not be a professed believer in spiritism; but the fact that he is there to consult a medium shows a faith sufficient for the purpose in view, and propinquity places his subjective mind _en rapport_ with that of the medium. We will suppose that this is the first time that the two have met, and that the medium is entirely unacquainted with the character, the antecedents, or the deceased friends of the sitter. The first thing that the medium does is to become wholly or partially self-hypnotized. He may go into the state only partially, and appear to the visitor to be in his normal condition. He may, and probably does, believe that his "control" takes possession of his body and talks through him; he has, as we have already seen, every reason for this belief. He is taken possession of by some unseen force, is guided by some unseen intelligence which possesses powers and attributes of which he is not conscious in his normal condition. He has no other hypothesis to account for the extraordinary manifestations of which that intelligence is the source. To make assurance doubly sure, the intelligence tells him that it is the spirit of some deceased person, and gives him a detailed and very plausible account of itself. He is forced to believe the statements of his subjective entity, for he knows no reason for believing otherwise, and it, in turn, is compelled by the laws of its being to believe itself to be what it represents; for the suggestion has been made to it that it is the spirit of a deceased person. That suggestion having been made in a general way, to begin with, his subjective mind will proceed to fill in the details in some way with marvellous acumen, and with such logical circumstantiality of detail as to deceive "the very elect." It is just as it is in the case of a hypnotized person, who, in pursuance of a post-hypnotic suggestion, having done some absurd act, when questioned as to why he did it, will, on the instant, invent some reason so plausible that the act will seem perfectly natural to one who does not know its origin.