165. These mediums hear the voice of spirits: sometimes, as we have observed when speaking of pneumatophony, it is an inner voice that speaks to the interior consciousness; sometimes it is an exterior voice, clear and distinct as that of a person in the flesh. Hearing mediums are thus enabled to enter into conversation with spirits. When they are in the habit of communicating with certain spirits, they recognise them immediately by the character of their voice. Persons who are not endowed with this faculty can communicate with spirits through the intermediacy of a bearing medium, who thus plays the part of an interpreter.

This faculty is a very agreeable one when the medium hears only good spirits, or those whom he evokes; but it is not so when, as sometimes happens, he is violently assailed by some hostile spirit, or forced, by some backward and troublesome persecutor, to listen to unpleasant or unseemly remarks. In all such cases, it is necessary to get rid of the obsessing spirit by the means which we shall point out in our chapter on Obsession.