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164 upon which his conclusions are based to be either incredible or impossible. With those who may hold this latter opinion I am entirely in accord.

Many of the so-called manifestations, such as the spirit visitants, the visions and the voices, can be as fitly claimed to be illusions and hallucinations as affirmed to be due to the action of the psychic element or astral body. The tricks of the senses are innumerable. The imagination, stimulated and intensified, can effect strange things in sensitive subjects; while, on the other hand, the powers of self-deception are almost beyond belief, as the experience of any physician will attest. Belief in the supernatural and the miraculous has a fascination for many minds, and especially for minds of not too stable an order. Such persons seem to prefer a transcendental explanation to one that is commonplace. Apparitions are not apt to appear to those who are healthy both in body and in mind. Dreams, it will be admitted by all, are more often due to indigestion than to a supernatural or a spiritual agency. Voices are heard and non-existing things are seen by those whose minds are deranged, and it must be allowed that not a few of the men and women upon whose evidence M. Flammarion