150. Spirits produce not only noises and rappings, but cries of every kind, and
vocal sounds imitating the human voice, in rooms, and in the open air; phenomena
which we designate as pneumatophony, or spirit-sounds. Our experience of the nature
of spirits has led us to think that some of them, of an inferior order, delude themselves
into the belief that they are talking, as when in the flesh. (See the Revue Spirite,
February 1858 ; History of Mademoiselle Clairon's Ghost.)
We must be careful not to take all sounds, the cause of which we know not, or
mere tingling of the ears, for occult voices, any more than to share the silly fancy that,
when our ears tingle, some one is talking about us. Those tinglings, which have a
purely physiological cause, are without meaning; while pneumatophonic sounds
express thoughts, and thereby prove themselves to be due to an intelligent cause, and
not to accident. We may lay it down as a rule that spirit-intervention is only proved by
intelligent manifestations, in all other cases, there are a hundred chances to one that
what are taken for such are really due to fortuitous causes.
