Then there are those who build up from the unconscious a fantastic world of imaginings, and, knowing nothing of the source, attribute them to outside intelligences or beings like themselves. To these belong the seers and mystics and their present-day representatives, the mediums, clairvoyants, and other believers in their own fantasies.
The counterpart of the medium is the ready believer, and each is reciprocally the victim of the other.
The medium has his dissociated stream with its hyperæsthesia and receptivity--alert to pick up the slightest hint and cast it back as a spirit revelation, and ready, moreover, to use more material trickery if needful. On the side of the believer is a logic-tight compartment containing his readiness to seize upon the feeblest evidence of the supernatural. How far he progresses into a dissociation one cannot tell, but when two Dissociates apparently bearing the stamp of honesty--one the medium and one the believer--work into each other's hands results may well be such as to defy explanation.
The study of the unconscious is legitimate, and if one chooses knowingly to tap its stores by a method of dissociation some increase of knowledge (not about the supernatural, but about the ways of the human mind) may be expected.
But whoever hands himself over to a belief that the products of a dissociation--whether of his own consciousness or of another's--are manifestations of the Spirit World, may come to say--
'Had I seen, perhaps, what hand was holding mine, Leading me whither, I had died of fright.'
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Spiritualism and the New Psychology, by Millais Culpin