ence and caution. For all his rather fervid utterances,
he keeps his head and goes on patiently investigating. He has had more
experience than even Crookes or Lombroso. For forty years he has been
searching the dark for these strange forces, and yet he says: 'We create
in these seances an imaginary being; we speak to it, and in its replies
it almost always reflects the mentality of the experimenter. Spirits
have taught us nothing. They have not led science forward a single
step.... I must say that if there are spirits, or beings independent of
us, in action, they know no more than we do about the other world's.'
And yet as regards the physical facts of mediumship, he sustains all the
investigators. 'These phenomena exist,' he says."

"Candidly, Garland, what is your own belief?" asked Miller, a few
moment's later.

I evaded him. "I have seen enough to make me believe in Zoellner's
fourth dimension, but I don't. My mind is so constructed that such
wonders as we have seen to-night produce very little effect on me. They
are as normal to me now as the popping of corn or the roasting of
potatoes. As I say, I have demonstrated certain of these physical
doings. But as for belief--well, that is not a matter of the will, but
of evidence, and the evidence is not yet sufficient to bring me to any
definite conclusion; in fact, in the broad day, and especially the
second day after I have been through one of these astounding
experiences, I begin to doubt my senses. Richet speaks of this curious
recession of belief, and admits his own inability to retain the
conviction that, at the moment of the phenomenon, was complete. 'No
sooner is the sitting over than my doubts come swarming back upon me,'
he says. 'The real world which surrounds us, with its prejudices, its
schemes of habitual opinions, holds us in so strong a grasp that we can
scarcely free ourselves completely. Certainty does not follow on
demonstration, but on habit.' And in that saying you have my own mental
limitations admirably put."

Miller plodded along by my side in silence for a few minutes, and then
asked, abruptly: "What is the real reason that you keep up the fiction
of the 'guide' when you don't believe in him?"

"For the reason that I think Mrs. Smiley honest in her faith, and that
to be polite to the 'guides' is one of the first requisites of a
successful sitting. Suppose the whole action to be terrestrial. Suppose
each successful sitting to be, as Flammarion