This, if you like, is simply shifting the question. Let it be the medium or myself that discovers the unknown personality in the object or tracks it across time and space: all that we do is to widen the scope of our riddle, while leaving it no less obscure. Nevertheless, there is some interest in knowing whether we have to do with a general faculty latent in all men or an inexplicable privilege reserved to rare individuals. The exceptional should always be eliminated, if possible, and not left to hang over the abyss like an unfinished bridge leading to nothing. I am well aware that the compulsory intervention of the medium implies that, in spite of all, we recognize his possession of abnormal faculties; but at any rate we reduce their power and their extent appreciably and we return sooner and more easily to the ordinary laws of the great human mystery. And it is of importance that we should be ever coming back to that mystery and ever bringing all things back to it. But, unfortunately, actual experience does not admit of this generalization. It is clearly a case of a special faculty, one peculiar to the medium, one which is wholly unknown to our latent intuition. We can easily assure ourselves of this by causing the medium to receive through a third party and enclosed in a series of three envelopes, as in the experiment described above, a letter of which we know the writer, but of which both the source and the contents are absolutely unknown to the messenger. These unusual circumstances, in which all subconscious communications between consultant and consulted are strictly cut off, will in no way hamper the medium's clairvoyance; and we may fairly conclude that it is actually the medium himself who discovers directly, without any intermediary, without "relays," to use M. Duchatel's expression, all that the object holds concealed. It, therefore, seems certain that there is, at least in psychometry, something more than the mere mirror of which Dr. Osty speaks. 10