bsolutely no means of distinguishing the true from
the false, since the extent to which a being having all the resources
of the astral plane at his command can delude a person on the physical
plane is so great that no reliance can be placed even on what seems
the most convincing proof. If something manifests which announces
itself as a man's long-lost brother, he can have no certainty that its
claim is a just one; if it tells him of some fact known only to that
brother and to himself, he remains unconvinced, for he knows that it
might easily have read the information from his own mind, or from his
surroundings in the astral light; even if it goes still further and
tells him something connected with his brother, of which he himself is
unaware, but which he afterwards verifies, he still realizes that even
this may have been read from the astral record, or that what he sees
before him may be only the shade of his brother, and so possess his
memory without in any way being himself. It is not for one moment
denied that important communications have sometimes been made at
_seances_ by entities who in such cases have been precisely what they
said they were; all that is claimed is that it is quite impossible
for the ordinary person who visits a _seance_ ever to be certain that
he is not being cruelly deceived in one or other of half a dozen
different ways.

There have been a few cases in which members of the lodge of
occultists referred to above as originating the spiritualistic
movement have themselves given, through a medium, a series of valuable
teachings on deeply interesting subjects, but this has invariably been
at strictly private family _seances_, not at public performances for
which money has been paid.

[Sidenote: Astral Resources.]

To understand the methods by which a large class of physical phenomena
are produced, it is necessary to have some comprehension of the
various resources mentioned above, which a person functioning on the
astral plane finds at his command; and this is a branch of the subject
which it is by no means easy to make clear, especially as it is hedged
about with certain obviously necessary restrictions. It may perhaps
help us if we remember that the astral plane may be regarded as in
many ways only an extension of the physical, and the idea that matter
may assume the etheric state (in which, though intangible to us, it is
yet purely physical) may serve to show us how the one melts into the
ot