s a
curious part of it, that the result was attained by a process very much
shorter than any he had tried. He had covered three or four sheets of
paper in his attempts, and this was all worked out on one page, and
correctly worked, as the result proved. He inquired of the woman who
attended to his room, and she said that she was certain no one had
entered it during the night. It was perfectly clear that this had been
worked out by himself."

Instances of this kind are certainly very curious, and seem to show that
the mind, when set in any train of thought by intense concentration, may
pursue it after consciousness has been withdrawn. And the result
indicates that the mind acts with innate logic when not disturbed by
distracting considerations, and can be trusted to do more correct work
when thus set going and left to run of itself than when consciously held
to its work. Yet an examination of every recorded instance of this kind
strongly indicates that no such unconscious mental action ever takes
place except when the consciousness has been earnestly directed to the
subject in advance, that no marked instances of this activity ever occur
except in the unconsciousness of sleep or trance, and that it ceases
when the mental excitement that started it has gradually subsided. There
is not an instance on record to show that the mind ever originates
unconscious action, or that any of its remote stores or powers ever
spring into activity without being aroused by sensation or conscious
thought. Thus the doctrine of _unconscious cerebration_ has been carried
much further than the facts warrant. It need hardly be said that it is
utterly inapplicable as a theory to many of the facts adduced by the
Society for Psychic Research.

In the year 1869 the London Dialectical Society, an association of
cultured liberals, embracing many well-known personages, appointed a
committee to examine "the asserted phenomena of Spiritualism." The
committee divided itself into six sub-committees, each of which
submitted a report, and according to a general report, published in
1871, "these reports substantially corroborated each other." We may
therefore quote the more interesting points from the report of one of
the sub-committees:

"All of these meetings were held at the private residences of members of
the committee, purposely to preclude the possibility of prearranged
mechanism or contrivance. The furniture of the room in which the
experiments we