Experimenters have maintained that communications obtained from the so-called spirits through mediums never show more intellectual capacity than is possessed by the most intelligent person among the sitters. This assertion is generally justified, but it is not absolute.
I will mention, in connection with this point, some séances which took place at my house. The medium was Mme. G., whose life I had been familiar with for twenty-seven years, day by day, and consequently had an intimate acquaintance with her character, her manners, temperament and education.
The communications which were obtained through mediumistic writing in these séances extended over a period of more than fifteen months.
Mme. G. had the sense of a kind of mental, rather than auricular, psychical rather than physical, audition which dictated to her what she had to write in bits of sentences one after another; and this impression was accompanied by a strong desire to write, somewhat like the intense longing that a woman with child experiences.
If this medium gave her attention to the sense of the writing during the composition, the current of power was shut off, and everything resumed the state of ordinary composition. Her condition was that of a clerk writing unconcernedly and mechanically under the dictation of a superior. It resulted from this that the writings, executed at the maximum speed of the subject, and generally without retardation or stoppage after the questions, were in one long string, without punctuation or paragraphs, and full of mistakes in spelling, resulting from the fact that the medium was acquainted with the sense of the writing only when she had read it over, at least in the case of rather long communications.
The gist or substance of the writings seems very frequently to be drawn from our ideas, our conversation, our reading, or our thoughts; but there are certain plainly marked exceptions.
While Mme. G. was writing, I applied myself to other occupations,—calculations, music, etc., or I walked up and down in the room; but I only examined the replies when she had stopped writing.
Nothing indicated that the physical and physiological condition of the medium during these writings was in any way different from that of her ordinary condition. Mme. G. could interrupt her writing at will and apply herself to other occupations or make responses about things unconnected with the séance, and it never happened that she found herself short of an answer.
There is no parallelism between these writings and the mental endowments of Mme. G., either in promptness of repartee, in breadth of view, or in philosophic depth.
In 1890 I bought Flammarion's Uranie, which Mme. G. did not read until 1891. I found in it doctrines absolutely similar to those which I had deduced from my experiments and from our communications. Any one who should compare these mediumistic writings with the philosophical works of the French astronomer would be led to believe that Mme. G. had previously read them.