If it is a case of collective suggestion, we should have to admit
that it is a subconscious suggestion emitted without the
knowledge of the participants, which indeed is quite possible.

Though they belong to the same order, I will not here mention the
exploits of what the Germans call the Poltergeist, which take the
form of flinging stones, ringing bells, turning mattresses,
upsetting furniture and so forth. These matters are always open
to suspicion and really appear to be nothing but quaint frolics
of hysterical subjects or of mediums indulging their sense of
humour. The manifestations of the Poltergeist are fairly numerous
and the reader will find several instances in the Proceedings and
especially in the Journal of the S. P. R.

As for communications with the dead, I devoted a whole chapter to
these in my own essay entitled Our Eternity and will not return
to them now. It will be enough to recall and recapitulate my
general impression, that probably the dead did not enter into any
of these conversations. We are here concerned with purely
mediumistic phenomena, more curious and mere subtle than those of
table-rapping, but of the same character; and these
manifestations, however astonishing they may be, do not pierce
the terrestrial sphere wherein we are imprisoned.

3

Setting aside the religious hypotheses, which we are not
examining here, for they belong to a different order of ideas,[1]
we find, as an explanation of the Majority of these phenomena, or
at least as a means of avoiding an absolute and depressing