Since the writer does not stress the supernatural, and allows me to credit to his unconscious the poetical imaginings produced in the script and the 'veridical passages' concerning the discoveries of the Edgar Chapel, I have no need to criticise them, especially as he is scrupulous in giving credit to the conscious predictions of others when they hit the mark. The book is a record of an experiment--successful from the psychological point of view--carried out by two Dissociates who _knew what they were doing_; the dissociated streams were entirely out of their control, and although I must, from the psychological standpoint, class the experiment with the other dissociations described in this book, yet it is far from my purpose to class the experimenters with 'Feda' and others of her kind. The earlier chapters of this book were written before I read _The Gate of Remembrance_, but whoever reads the conclusion in the latter book will find many opinions in agreement with those in my chapter on the unconscious. Table-turning, water-divining, automatic writing, thought-reading, and the use of the pendulum are examples of a psychological automatism in which the agent is conscious neither of the muscular movements concerned nor, what is more important, of the mental processes producing them. They can be cultivated to provide amazing results in tapping the memories of the unconscious, and if the agents remain in ignorance of their true mechanism a systematised delusion is built up and accepted as proof of the supernatural. CHAPTER XI ABOUT MEDIUMS Just as any one believing all actions to be the result of fully conscious motives may regard the hysteric as a simple fraud, so he may dismiss the medium and the clairvoyant in the same easy way and consider the matter settled. But we find men in positions which lend authority not only vouching for the honesty of the medium but sometimes taking an active part in the production of the phenomena for which the explanation of fraud is regarded as sufficient; as a result this explanation fails to convince and we meet many people who believe there must be 'something in it'. So there is: there is the same graduated series, from the simple cheat to the complete Dissociate, that we saw in the consideration of hysteria, but in addition there is a fervent desire to believe, and the Dissociate, instead of being regarded as a victim of disease, is treated as a person gifted with supernatural powers.