medium or myself that discovers the unknown personality in the
object or tracks it across time and space: all that we do is to
widen the scope of our riddle, while leaving it no less obscure.
Nevertheless, there is some interest in knowing whether we have
to do with a general faculty latent in all men or an inexplicable
privilege reserved to rare individuals. The exceptional should
always be eliminated, if possible, and not left to hang over the
abyss like an unfinished bridge leading to nothing. I am well
aware that the compulsory intervention of the medium implies
that, in spite of all, we recognize his possession of abnormal
faculties; but at any rate we reduce their power and their extent
appreciably and we return sooner and more easily to the ordinary
laws of the great human mystery. And it is of importance that we
should be ever coming back to that mystery and ever bringing all
things back to it. But, unfortunately, actual experience does not
admit of this generalization. It is clearly a case of a special
faculty, one peculiar to the medium, one which is wholly unknown
to our latent intuition. We can easily assure ourselves of this
by causing the medium to receive through a third party and
enclosed in a series of three envelopes, as in the experiment
described above, a letter of which we know the writer, but of
which both the source and the contents are absolutely unknown to
the messenger. These unusual circumstances, in which all
subconscious communications between consultant and consulted are
strictly cut off, will in no way hamper the medium's
clairvoyance; and we may fairly conclude that it is actually the
medium himself who discovers directly, without any intermediary,
without "relays," to use M. Duchatel's expression, all that the
object holds concealed. It, therefore, seems certain that there
is, at least in psychometry, something more than the mere mirror