The Spirit does not shine as a Conversationalist.

I feel an equal dissatisfaction with the spirits who are supposed to return to us and communicate with us through the medium of three-legged tables.  I do not deny the possibility that spirits exist.  I am even willing to allow them their three-legged tables.  It must be confessed it is a clumsy method.  One cannot help regretting that during all the ages they have not evolved a more dignified system.  One feels that the three-legged table must hamper them.  One can imagine an impatient spirit getting tired of spelling out a lengthy story on a three-legged table.  But, as I have said, I am willing to assume that, for some spiritual reason unfathomable to my mere human intelligence, that three-legged table is essential.  I am willing also to accept the human medium.  She is generally an unprepossessing lady running somewhat to bulk.  If a gentleman, he so often has dirty finger-nails, and smells of stale beer.  I think myself it would be so much simpler if the spirit would talk to me direct; we could get on quicker.  But there is that about the medium, I am told, which appeals to a spirit.  Well, it is his affair, not mine, and I waive the argument.  My real stumbling-block is the spirit himself—the sort of conversation that, when he does talk, he indulges in.  I cannot help feeling that his conversation is not worth the paraphernalia.  I can talk better than that myself.

The late Professor Huxley, who took some trouble over this matter, attended some half-dozen séances, and then determined to attend no more.

“I have,” he said, “for my sins to submit occasionally to the society of live bores.  I refuse to go out of my way to spend an evening in the dark with dead bores.”

The spiritualists themselves admit that their table-rapping spooks are precious dull dogs; it would be difficult, in face of the communications recorded, for them to deny it.  They explain to us that they have not yet achieved communication with the higher spiritual Intelligences.  The more intelligent spirits—for some reason that the spiritualists themselves are unable to explain—do not want to talk to them, appear to have something else to do.  At present—so I am told, and can believe—it is only the spirits of lower intelligence that care to turn up on these evenings.  The spiritualists argue that, by continuing, the higher-class spirits will later on be induced to “come in.”  I fail to follow the argument.  It seems to me that we are frightening them away.  Anyhow, myself I shall wait awhile.

When the spirit comes along that can talk sense, that can tell me something I don’t know, I shall be glad to meet him.  The class of spirit that we are getting just at present does not appeal to me.  The thought of him—the reflection that I shall die and spend the rest of eternity in his company—does not comfort me.