letter," or "the owner of this article," as the case may be.

Forthwith the medium not only perceives the person in question, his
physical appearance, his character, his habits, his interests, his
state of health, but also, in a series of swift and changing visions
that follow one another like the pictures of a cinematograph, sees and
describes exactly that person's environment, the surrounding country,
the rooms in which he lives, the people who live with him and who wish
him well or ill, the mentality and the most secret and unexpected
intentions of all the various characters that figure in his existence.
If by means of your questions you direct her towards the past, she
traces the whole course of the subject's history. If you turn her
towards the future, she seems often to discover it as clearly as the
past.

But here we must make certain reservations. We are entering upon
forbidden tracts; errors are almost the rule and proper supervision is
all but impossible. It is better therefore not to venture into those
dangerous regions. Pending fuller investigation of the question, we
may say that the foretelling of the future, when it claims to cover a
definite space of time, is nearly always illusory. There is scarcely
any accuracy of vision, except when the events concerned are very near
at hand, already developing or actually being consummated; and it then
becomes difficult to distinguish it from presentiments, which in their
turn are rarely true except where the immediate future is concerned.
To sum up, in the present state of our experience, we observe that
what the psychometers and clairvoyants foretell us possesses a certain
value and some chance of proving correct only in so far as they put
into words our own forebodings, forebodings which again may be quite
unknown to us and which they discover deep down in our subconsciousness.