And, as I have said, the result has been that the apparently impossible has been proved to be possible--_the facts have beaten me_, and I accept them whole-heartedly, admitting that our working hypothesis has been proved beyond any possibility of doubt, and that these materialized entities can manifest themselves to-day to any person who will provide the conditions necessary for such a demonstration.
Who they are, what they are, whence they come, and whither they go, each investigator must determine for himself, but of their actual existence in a sphere just outside our own there can no longer be any room for doubt. As a busy man, theories have little or no attraction for me. What I demand, and what other busy men and women demand in an investigation of this kind is that there should be a reasonable possibility of getting hold of _facts_, good solid facts which can be demonstrated as such to any open-minded inquirer, otherwise it would be useless to commence such an investigation. And we have now got these facts, and can prove them on purely scientific lines.
The meaning of the word materialization, so far at least as it concerns our investigation, I understand to be this: the taking on by an entity from a sphere outside our own, an entity representing a man, woman, or child (or even a beast or bird), of a temporary body built up from material drawn partially from the inhabitants of earth, consolidated through the agency of certain persons of both sexes, termed sensitives, and moulded by the entity into a semblance of the body which (it alleges) it inhabited during its existence on earth. In other words, a materialization is the appearance of an entity in bodily, tangible form, i.e., one which we can touch, thus differing from an astralization, etherealization, or apparition, which is, of course, one which cannot be touched, although it may be clearly visible to any one possessing only normal sight.
Let me, then, endeavor to describe to the best of my ability, and in very simple language, how I believe these materializations to be produced, and the conditions which I have proved to be necessary in order that the finest results may be obtained.
I will deal first with the question of _the conditions_, as without conditions of some kind no materialization can be produced, any more than a scientific experiment--such as mixing various chemicals together, in order to produce a certain result--can be carried out successfully without proper conditions being provided by the experimenter. What, then, do we mean by this word "conditions"?