Mlle Smith, I should at once say, is not,1 and never has been, a paid medium. At the date of M. Flournoy's book, she occupied a leading post on the staff of a large maison de commerce at Geneva, and gave seances to her friends simply because she enjoyed the exercise of her mediumistic faculties, and was herself interested in their explanation.

Her organism, I repeat, is regarded, both by herself and by others, as a quite healthy one. Mlle Smith, says Professor Flournoy, declares distinctly that she is perfectly sound in body and mind, - in no way lacking in equilibrium, - and indignantly repudiates the idea that there is any hurtful anomaly or the slightest danger in mediumship as she practises it.

"I am so far from being abnormal," she writes, "that I have never been so clear-sighted, so lucid, so capable of judging rapidly on all points, as since I have been developed as a medium." No one appears to dispute this estimate, which the facts of Mlle Smith's progress in her line of business distinctly confirm.

"It is in fact incontestable" (continues Professor Flournoy, p. 41), "that Helene has a head extremely well organised; and that from a business point of view she manages admirably the very important and complicated department of which she is at the head in this large shop where she is employed; so that to accuse her of being morbid simply because she is a medium is to say the least an inadmissible petitio principii so long as the very nature of mediumship remains a thing so obscure and open to discussion as is still the case. . . .

"It is clear that there exist amid the ranks of the learned faculty certain spirits narrow and limited, strong in their own specialities, but ready to cast their anathemas at whatever does not fit in with their preconceived ideas, and to treat as morbid, pathological, insane, everything which differs from the normal type of human nature, such as they have conceived it on the model of their own small personalities. . . .

1 For Mlle Smith's later history, see Professor Flournoy's Nouveltes Observations sur un cas de Somnambulisme, Geneva, 1902. - Editors.

"But in the first place the essential criterion in judging of a human being's value is not the question whether he is in good or bad health, like or unlike other people, but whether he fulfils adequately his special task - how he acquits himself of the functions incumbent on him, and what may be expected or hoped from him. I am not aware that Miss Smith's psychical faculties have ever interfered with her accomplishment of any of her duties; rather they have helped her therein; for her normal and conscious activity has often found an unexpected assistance - which non-mediums lack! - in her subliminal inspirations and her automatisms, which effect a useful end.

"In the second place, it is far from being demonstrated that medium-ship is a pathological phenomenon. It is abnormal, no doubt, in the sense of being rare, exceptional; but rarity is not morbidity. The few years during which these phenomena have been seriously and scientifically studied have not been enough to allow us to pronounce on their true nature. It is interesting to note that in the countries where these studies have been pushed the furthest, in England and America, the dominant view among the savants who have gone deepest into the matter is not at all unfavourable to mediumship; and that, far from regarding it as a special case of hysteria, they see in it a faculty superior, advantageous, healthy, of which hysteria is a form of degenerescence, a pathological parody, a morbid caricature".

The phenomena which this sensitive presents (Helene Smith is Professor Flournoy's pseudonym for her) cover a range which looks at first very wide, although a clearer analysis shows that these varieties are more apparent than real, and that self-suggestion will perhaps account for all of them.

There is, to begin with, every kind of automatic irruption of subliminal into supraliminal life. As Professor Flournoy says (p. 45): "Phenomena of hypermnesia, divinations, mysterious findings of lost objects, happy inspirations, exact presentiments, just intuitions, teleological (purposive or helpful) automatisms, in short, of every kind; she possesses in a high degree this small change of genius - which constitutes a more than sufficient compensation for the inconvenience resulting from those distractions and moments of absence of mind which accompany her visions; and which, moreover, generally pass unobserved".

At seances - where the deeper change has no inconveniences - Helene undergoes a sort of self-hypnotisation which produces various lethargic and somnambulistic states. And when she is alone and safe from interruption she has spontaneous visions, during which there may be some approach to ecstasy. At the seances she experiences positive hallucinations, and also negative hallucinations, or systematised anaesthesiae, so that, for instance, she will cease to see some person present, especially one who is to be the recipient of messages in the course of the stance. "It seems as though a dream-like incoherence presided over this preliminary work of disaggregation, in which the normal perceptions are arbitrarily split up or absorbed by the subconscious personality - eager for materials with which to compose the hallucinations which it is preparing." Then, when the seance begins, the main actor is Helene's guide Leopold (a pseudonym for Cagliostro) who speaks and writes through her, and is, in fact, either her leading spirit-control or (much more probably) her most developed form of secondary personality.

Helene, indeed, has sometimes the impression of becoming Leopold for a moment (p. 117). Professor Flournoy compares this sensation with the experience of Mr. Hill Tout (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 309), who feels himself becoming his own father, who is manifesting through him. It should be added that, although somewhat pompous, Leopold always appears both sensible and dignified. "Leopold," says Professor Flournoy (p. 134) "certainly manifests a very honourable and amiable side of Mlle Smith's character, and in taking him as her 'guide' she has followed inspirations which are doubtless among the highest in her nature".

The high moral quality of these automatic communications, on which Professor Flournoy thus insists, is a phenomenon worth consideration. I do not mean that it is specially strange in the case of Mlle Smith. She appears to be (if the phrase is thought permissible in describing a medium) a person of remarkably well-regulated mind. One is not surprised that her subliminal self should be as blameless as her supraliminal. But in reality the remark here made by Professor Flournoy has a much wider application. The almost universally high moral tone of genuinely automatic utterances - whether claimed as spirit communications or proceeding obviously from the automatist himself - has not, I think, been sufficiently noticed, or adequately explained. I will mention two points which have struck me as specially noticeable. In the first place I have read many pulpit and other attacks on "spiritualism," under which name all automatic utterance is commonly included, and I cannot remember any instance in which such an attack has been made effective by the quotation of passages of immoral tendency - base, cruel, or impure. The attack, so far as I know, has always been of a kind which, in the eye of the philosopher, is rather complimentary to the writings attacked.

For it seems (and this is the second point to which I wished to call attention here) that no one of the various conflicting Churches has been able to claim the general drift of automatic messages as making for its special tenets. The various controversialists, where they have been candid, have admitted moral elevation, but, - from their various opposing points of view, - have agreed in deploring theological laxity.

I must indeed confess myself unable to explain why it is that beneath the frequent incoherence, frequent commonplaceness, frequent pomposity of these messages there should almost always be a substratum of better sense, of truer catholicity, than is usually to be heard except from the leading minds of the generation. It is possible that in some hidden way the Zeit-Geist affects the subliminal strata even of persons superficially narrow and bigoted by an influence urging them all in somewhat the same direction; - so that the best available thought of the age is inspiring the age more profoundly than we know. And it is possible also that these utterances may bear in reality some obscure relation to truths profounder than we have as yet normally acquired. What is omitted, indeed, from current beliefs is as significant as what is added thereto, and the general product looks more like a very poor account of something which in itself is great and new, but dimly apprehended, than like a compromise between conflicting dogmas, or a selection from familiar hortatory themes.