r from being an evidence of anything like
intelligence," protested Fowler. "It seems very trivial to me."

"It does not seem trivial to me," I answered; "but I will admit that is
has nothing like the value of a series of sittings I held last spring
with a psychic in a mid-Western city."

IX

The reader will have observed that up to the present moment I have not
emphasized in any way the question of the identity of the
"intelligences" that have manifested themselves. The reason for this
lies in the fact that I was still seeking evidence concerning the
processes of mediumship. However, being convinced (by reason of my own
experiments, supported by those of Lombroso, Morselli, and Bottazzi)
that the facts of mediumship exist, it is my purpose to take up
definitely the question of identity, which is the final and most elusive
part of the problem--it may turn out to be the insoluble part of the
problem.

If you ask why it should be insoluble, I reply, because it concerns the
mystery of death, and it may be that it is not well for us to penetrate
the ultimate shadow. Among all the men of the highest rank who admit the
reality of apparitions and voices, there are but few as yet who are
willing to assert that the dead manifest themselves. By this I mean that
though some of them, like Crookes, for example, believe in "the
intervention of discarnate intelligences," they are not ready to grant
that these intelligences are their grandfathers returning to the scene
of their earthly labors.

I said something like this to Miller and Fowler, when we met at the club
one afternoon not long after the final meeting of Cameron's Amateur
Psychical Society, and I added: "I must confess that most of the spirits
I have met seem to me merely parasitic or secondary personalities (to
use Maxwell's term), drawn from the psychic or from myself. Nearly every
one of the mediums I have studied has had at least one guide, whose
voice and habit of thought were perilously similar to her own. This, in
some cases, has been laughable, as when 'Rolling Thunder,' a Sioux chief
(Indians are all chiefs in the spirit world), appears and says: 'Goot
efening, friends; id iss a nice night alretty.' And yet I have seen a
whole roomful of people receive communications from a spirit of this
kind with solemn awe. I burn with shame for the sitters and psychic when
this kind of thing is going on."

"You visit the wrong mediums," said Fowler. "Such psychics