VIII. MOTOR AUTOMATISM…

VIII. MOTOR AUTOMATISM

[Greek: Mêketi monon sumpnein tô periechonti aeri, all' hêdê kai sumphronoin tô periechonti panta noerô.]

--MARCUS AURELIUS.

At this point, one may broadly say, we reach the end of the phenomena whose existence is vaguely familiar to popular talk. And here, too, I might fairly claim, the evidence for my primary thesis,--namely, that the analysis of man's personality reveals him as a spirit, surviving death,--has attained an amplitude which would justify the reader in accepting that view as the provisional hypothesis which comes nearest to a comprehensive co-ordination of the actual facts. What we have already recounted seems, indeed, impossible to explain except by supposing that our inner vision has widened or deepened its purview so far as to attain some glimpses of a spiritual world in which the individualities of our departed friends still actually subsist.

The reader, however, who has followed me thus far must be well aware that a large class of phenomena, of high importance, is still awaiting discussion. Motor automatisms,--though less familiar to the general public than the phantasms which I have classed as sensory automatisms,--are in fact even commoner, and even more significant.

Motor automatisms, as I define them, are phenomena of very wide range. We have encountered them already many times in this book. We met them in the first place in a highly developed form in connection with multiplex personality in Chapter II. Numerous instances were there given of motor effects, initiated by secondary selves without the knowledge of the primary selves, or sometimes in spite of their actual resistance. All motor action of a secondary self is an automatism in this sense, in relation to the primary self. And of course we might by analogy extend the use of the word still further, and might call not only post-epileptic acts, but also maniacal acts, automatic; since they are performed without the initiation of the presumedly sane primary personality. Those degenerative phenomena, indeed, are not to be discussed in this chapter. Yet it will be well to pause here long enough to make it clear to the reader just what motor automatisms I am about to discuss as evolutive phenomena, and as therefore falling within the scope of this treatise;--and what kind of relation they bear to the dissolutive motor phenomena which occupy so much larger a place in popular knowledge.

In order to meet this last question, I must here give more distinct formulation to a thesis which has already suggested itself more than once in dealing with special groups of our phenomena.

It may be expected that supernormal vital phenomena will manifest themselves as far as possible through the same channels as abnormal or morbid vital phenomena, when the same centres or the same synergies are involved.

To illustrate the meaning of this theorem, I may refer to a remark long ago made by Edmund Gurney and myself in dealing with "Phantasms of the Living," or veridical hallucinations, generated (as we maintained), not by a morbid state of the percipient's brain, but by a telepathic impact from an agent at a distance. We observed that if a hallucination--a subjective image--is to be excited by this distant energy, it will probably be most readily excited in somewhat the same manner as the morbid hallucination which follows on a cerebral injury. We urged that this is likely to be the case--we showed ground for supposing that it is the case--both as regards the mode of evolution of the phantasm in the percipient's brain, and the mode in which it seems to present itself to his senses.

And here I should wish to give a much wider generality to this principle, and to argue that if there be within us a secondary self aiming at manifestation by physiological means, it seems probable that its readiest path of externalisation--its readiest outlet of visible action--may often lie along some track which has already been shown to be a line of low resistance by the disintegrating processes of disease. Or, varying the metaphor, we may anticipate that the partition of the primary and the secondary self will lie along some plane of cleavage which the morbid dissociations of our psychical synergies have already shown themselves disposed to follow. If epilepsy, madness, etc., tend to split up our faculties in certain ways, automatism is likely to split them up in ways somewhat resembling these.

But in what way then, it will be asked, do you distinguish the supernormal from the merely abnormal? Why assume that in these aberrant states there is anything besides hysteria, besides epilepsy, besides insanity?

The answer to this question has virtually been given in previous chapters of this book. The reader is already accustomed to the point of view which regards all psychical as well as all physiological activities as necessarily either developmental or degenerative, tending to evolution or to dissolution. And now, whilst altogether waiving any teleological speculation, I will ask him hypothetically to suppose that an evolutionary nisus, something which we may represent as an effort towards self-development, self-adaptation, self-renewal, is discernible especially on the psychical side of at any rate the higher forms of life. Our question, Supernormal or abnormal?--may then be phrased, Evolutive or dissolutive? And in studying each psychical phenomenon in turn we shall have to inquire whether it indicates a mere degeneration of powers already acquired, or, on the other hand, the "promise and potency," if not the actual possession, of powers as yet unrecognised or unknown.

Thus, for instance, Telepathy is surely a step in evolution.[160] To learn the thoughts of other minds without the mediation of the special senses, manifestly indicates the possibility of a vast extension of psychical powers. And any knowledge which we can amass as to the conditions under which telepathic action takes place will form a valuable starting-point for an inquiry as to the evolutive or dissolutive character of unfamiliar psychical states.[161]

For example, we may learn from our knowledge of telepathy that the superficial aspect of certain stages of psychical evolution, like the superficial aspect of certain stages of physiological evolution, may resemble mere inhibition, or mere perturbation. But the inhibition may involve latent dynamogeny, and the perturbation may mask evolution. The hypnotised subject may pass through a lethargic stage before he wakes into a state in which he has gained community of sensation with the operator; somewhat as the silkworm (to use the oldest and the most suggestive of all illustrations) passes through the apparent torpor of the cocoon-stage before evolving into the moth. Again, the automatist's hand (as we shall presently see) is apt to pass through a stage of inco-ordinated movements, which might almost be taken for choreic, before it acquires the power of ready and intelligent writing. Similarly the development, for instance, of a tooth may be preceded by a stage of indefinite aching, which might be ascribed to the formation of an abscess, did not the new tooth ultimately show itself. And still more striking cases of a perturbation which masks evolution might be drawn from the history of the human organism as it develops into its own maturity, or prepares for the appearance of the fresh human organism which is to succeed it.

Analogy, therefore, both physiological and psychical, warns us not to conclude that any given psychosis is merely degenerative until we have examined its results closely enough to satisfy ourselves whether they tend to bring about any enlargement of human powers, to open any new inlet to the reception of objective truth. If such there prove to be, then, with whatever morbid activities the psychosis may have been intertwined, it contains indications of an evolutionary nisus as well.

These remarks, I hope, may have sufficiently cleared the ground to admit of our starting afresh on the consideration of such motor automatisms as are at any rate not morbid in their effect on the organism, and which I now have to show to be evolutive in character. I maintain that we have no valid ground for assuming that the movements which are not due to our conscious will must be less important, and less significant, than those that are. We observe, of course, that in the organic region the movements which are not due to conscious will are really the most important of all, though the voluntary movements by which a man seeks food and protects himself against enemies are also of great practical importance--he must first live and multiply if he is to learn and know. But we must guard against confusing importance for immediate practical life with importance for science--on which even practical life ultimately depends. As soon as the task of living and multiplying is no longer all-engrossing, we begin to change our relative estimate of values, and to find that it is not the broad and obvious phenomena, but the residual and elusive phenomena, which are oftenest likely to introduce us to new avenues of knowledge. I wish to persuade my readers that this is quite as truly the case in psychology as in physics.

As a first step in our analysis, we may point out certain main characters which unite in a true class all the automatisms which we are here considering--greatly though these may differ among themselves in external form.

In the first place, then, our automatisms are independent phenomena; they are what the physician calls idiognomonic. That is to say, they are not merely symptomatic of some other affection, or incidental to some profounder change. The mere fact, for instance, that a man writes messages which he does not consciously originate will not, when taken alone, prove anything beyond this fact itself as to the writer's condition. He may be perfectly sane, in normal health, and with nothing unusual observable about him. This characteristic--provable by actual observation and experiment--distinguishes our automatisms from various seemingly kindred phenomena. Thus we may have to include in our class the occasional automatic utterance of words or sentences. But the continuous exhausting vociferation of acute mania does not fall within our province; for those shouts are merely symptomatic; nor, again, does the cri hydrocéphalique (or spontaneous meaningless noise which sometimes accompanies water on the brain); for that, too, is no independent phenomenon, but the direct consequence of a definite lesion. Furthermore, we shall have to include in our class certain simple movements of the hands, co-ordinated into the act of writing. But here, also, our definition will lead us to exclude choreic movements, which are merely symptomatic of nervous malnutrition; or which we may, if we choose, call idiopathic, as constituting an independent malady. But our automatisms are not idiopathic but idiognomonic; they may indeed be associated with or facilitated by certain states of the organism, but they are neither a symptom of any other malady, nor are they a malady in themselves.

Agreeing, then, that our peculiar class consists of automatisms which are idiognomonic,--whose existence does not necessarily imply the existence of some profounder affection already known as producing them,--we have still to look for some more positive bond of connection between them, some quality common to all of them, and which makes them worth our prolonged investigation.

This we shall find in the fact that they are all of them message-bearing or nunciative automatisms. I do not, of course, mean that they all of them bring messages from sources external to the automatist's own mind. In some cases they probably do this; but as a rule the so-called messages seem more probably to originate within the automatist's own personality. Why, then, it may be asked, do I call them messages? We do not usually speak of a man as sending a message to himself. The answer to this question involves, as we shall presently see, the profoundest conception of these automatisms to which we can as yet attain. They present themselves to us as messages communicated from one stratum to another stratum of the same personality. Originating in some deeper zone of a man's being, they float up into superficial consciousness, as deeds, visions, words, ready-made and full-blown, without any accompanying perception of the elaborative process which has made them what they are.

Can we then (we may next ask) in any way predict the possible range of these motor automatisms? Have we any limit assignable a priori, outside which it would be useless to look for any externalisation of an impulse emanating from sub-conscious strata of our being?

The answer to this must be that no such limit can be with any confidence suggested. We have not yet learnt with any distinctness even how far the wave from a consciously-perceived stimulus will spread, or what changes its motion will assume. Still less can we predict the limitations which the resistance of the organism will impose on the radiation of a stimulus originated within itself. We are learning to consider the human organism as a practically infinite complex of interacting vibrations; and each year adds many new facts to our knowledge of the various transformations which these vibrations may undergo, and of the unexpected artifices by which we may learn to cognise some stimulus which is not directly felt.

A few concrete instances will make my meaning plainer. And my first example shall be taken from those experiments in muscle-reading--less correctly termed mind-reading--with which the readers of the Proceedings of the S.P.R. are already familiar. Let us suppose that I am to hide a pin, and that some accomplished muscle-reader is to take my hand and find the pin by noting my muscular indications.[162] I first hide the pin in the hearth-rug; then I change my mind and hide it in the bookshelf. I fix my mind on the bookshelf, but resolve to make no guiding movement. The muscle-reader takes my hand, leads me first to the rug, then to the bookshelf, and finds the pin. Now, what has happened in this case? What movements have I made?

Firstly, I have made no voluntary movement; and secondly, I have made no conscious involuntary movement. But, thirdly, I have made an unconscious involuntary movement which directly depended on conscious ideation. I strongly thought of the bookshelf, and when the bookshelf was reached in our vague career about the room I made a movement--say rather a tremor occurred--in my hand, which, although beyond both my knowledge and my control, was enough to supply to the muscle-reader's delicate sensibility all the indication required. All this is now admitted, and, in a sense, understood; we formulate it by saying that my conscious ideation contained a motor element; and that this motor element, though inhibited from any conscious manifestation, did yet inevitably externalise itself in a peripheral tremor.

But, fourthly, something more than this has clearly taken place. Before the muscle-reader stopped at the bookshelf he stopped at the rug. I was no longer consciously thinking of the rug; but the idea of the pin in the rug must still have been reverberating, so to say, in my sub-conscious region; and this unconscious memory, this unnoted reverberation, revealed itself in a peripheral tremor nearly as distinct as that which (when the bookshelf was reached) corresponded to the strain of conscious thought.

This tremor, then, was in a certain sense a message-bearing automatism. It was the externalisation of an idea which, once conscious, had become unconscious, though in the slightest conceivable degree--namely, by a mere slight escape from the field of direct attention.

Having, then, considered an instance where the automatic message passes only between two closely-adjacent strata of consciousness, externalising an impulse derived from an idea which has only recently sunk out of consciousness and which could easily be summoned back again;--let us find our next illustration in a case where the line of demarcation between the strata of consciousness through which the automatic message pierces is distinct and impassable by any effort of will.

Let us take a case of post-hypnotic suggestion;--say, for instance, an experiment of Edmund Gurney's (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 319). The subject had been trained to write with planchette, after he had been awakened, the statements which had been made to him when in the hypnotic trance. He wrote the desired words, or something like them, but while he wrote them his waking self was entirely unaware of what his hand was writing. Thus, having been told in the trance, "It has begun snowing again," he wrote, after waking, "It begun snowing," while he read aloud, with waking intelligence, from a book of stories, and was quite unconscious of what his hand (placed on a planchette behind a screen) was at the same time writing.

Here we have an automatic message of traceable origin; a message implanted in the hypnotic stratum of the subject's self, and cropping up--like a fault--in the waking stratum,--externalised in automatic movements which the waking self could neither predict nor guide.

Yet once more. In the discussion which will follow we shall have various instances of the transformation (as I shall regard it) of psychical shock into definite muscular energy of apparently a quite alien kind. Such transformations of so-called psychical into physical force--of will into motion--do of course perpetually occur within us.

For example, I take a child to a circus; he sits by me holding my hand; there is a discharge of musketry and his grip tightens. Now in this case we should call the child's tightened grip automatic. But suppose that, instead of merely holding my hand, he is trying with all his might to squeeze the dynamometer, and that the sudden excitation enables him to squeeze it harder--are we then to describe that extra squeeze as automatic? or as voluntary?

However phrased, it is the fact (as amply established by M. Féré and others[163]) that excitations of almost any kind--whether sudden and startling or agreeable and prolonged--do tend to increase the subject's dynamometrical power. In the first place, and this is in itself an important fact, the average of squeezing-power is found to be greater among educated students than among robust labouring men, thus showing that it is not so much developed muscle as active brain which renders possible a sudden concentration of muscular force. But more than this; M. Féré finds that with himself and his friends the mere listening to an interesting lecture, or the mere stress of thought in solitude, or still more the act of writing or of speech, produces a decided increase of strength in the grip, especially of the right hand. The same effect of dynamogeny is produced with hypnotic subjects, by musical sounds, by coloured light, especially red light, and even by a hallucinatory suggestion of red light. "All our sensations," says M. Féré in conclusion, "are accompanied by a development of potential energy, which passes into a kinetic state, and externalises itself in motor manifestations which even so rough a method as dynamometry is able to observe and record."

I would beg the reader to keep these words in mind. We shall presently find that a method apparently even rougher than dynamographic tracings may be able to interpret, with far greater delicacy, the automatic tremors which are coursing to and fro within us. If once we can get a spy into the citadel of our own being, his rudest signalling will tell us more than our subtlest inferences from outside of what is being planned and done within.

And now having to deal with what I define as messages conveyed by one stratum in man to another stratum, I must first consider in what general ways human messages can be conveyed. Writing and speech have become predominant in the intercourse of civilised men, and it is to writing and speech that we look with most interest among the communications of the subliminal self. But it does not follow that the subliminal self will always have such complex methods at its command. We have seen already that it often finds it hard to manage the delicate co-ordinations of muscular movement required for writing,--that the attempt at automatic script ends in a thump and a scrawl.

The subliminal self like the telegraphist begins its effort with full knowledge, indeed, of the alphabet, but with only weak and rude command over our muscular adjustments. It is therefore a priori likely that its easiest mode of communication will be through a repetition of simple movements, so arranged as to correspond to letters of the alphabet.

And here, I think, we have attained to a conception of the mysterious and much-derided phenomenon of "table-tilting" which enables us to correlate it with known phenomena, and to start at least from an intelligible basis, and on a definite line of inquiry.

A few words are needed to explain what are the verifiable phenomena, and the less verifiable hypotheses, connoted by such words as "table-turning," "spirit-rapping," and the like.

If one or more persons of a special type--at present definable only by the question-begging and barbarous term "mediumistic"--remain quietly for some time with hands in contact with some easily movable object, and desiring its movement, that object will sometimes begin to move. If, further, they desire it to indicate letters of the alphabet by its movements,--as by tilting once for a, twice for b, etc., it will often do so, and answers unexpected by any one present will be obtained.

Thus far, whatever our interpretation, we are in the region of easily reproducible facts, which many of my readers may confirm for themselves if they please.

But beyond the simple movements--or table-turning--and the intelligible responses--or table-tilting--both of which are at least primâ facie physically explicable by the sitters' unconscious pressure, without postulating any unknown physical force at all,--it is alleged by many persons that further physical phenomena occur; namely, that the table moves in a direction, or with a violence, which no unconscious pressure can explain; and also that percussive sounds or "raps" occur, which no unconscious action, or indeed no agency known to us, could produce. These raps communicate messages like the tilts, and it is to them that the name of "spirit-rapping" is properly given. But spiritualists generally draw little distinction between these four phenomena--mere table-turning, responsive table-tilting, movements of inexplicable vehemence, and responsive raps--attributing all alike to the agency of departed spirits of men and women, or at any rate to disembodied intelligences of some kind or other.

I am not at present discussing the physical phenomena of Spiritualism, and I shall therefore leave on one side all the alleged movements and noises of this kind for which unconscious pressure will not account. I do not prejudge the question as to their real occurrence; but assuming that such disturbances of the physical order do occur, there is at least no primâ facie need to refer them to disembodied spirits. If a table moves when no one is touching it; this is not obviously more likely to have been effected by my deceased grandfather than by myself. We cannot tell how I could move it; but then we cannot tell how he could move it either. The question must be argued on its merits in each case; and our present argument is not therefore vitiated by our postponement of this further problem.

M. Richet[164] was, I believe, the first writer, outside the Spiritualistic group, who so much as showed any practical knowledge of this phenomenon, still less endeavoured to explain it. Faraday's well-known explanation of table-turning as the result of the summation of many unconscious movements--obviously true as it is for some of the simplest cases of table-movement--does not touch this far more difficult question of the origination of these intelligent messages, conveyed by distinct and repeated movements of some object admitting of ready displacement. The ordinary explanation--I am speaking, of course, of cases where fraud is not in question--is that the sitter unconsciously sets going and stops the movements so as to shape the word in accordance with his expectation. Now that he unconsciously sets going and stops the movements is part of my own present contention, but that the word is thereby shaped in accordance with his expectation is often far indeed from being the case. To those indeed who are familiar with automatic written messages, this question as to the unexpectedness of the tilted messages will present itself in a new light. If the written messages originate in a source beyond the automatist's supraliminal self, so too may the tilted messages;--even though we admit that the tilts are caused by his hand's pressure of the table just as directly as the script by his hand's manipulation of the pen.

One piece of evidence showing that written messages are not always the mere echo of expectation is a case[165] where anagrams were automatically written, which their writer was not at once able to decipher. Following this hint, I have occasionally succeeded in getting anagrams tilted out for myself by movements of a small table which I alone touched.

This is a kind of experiment which might with advantage be oftener repeated; for the extreme incoherence and silliness of the responses thus obtained does not prevent the process itself from being in a high degree instructive. Here, again (as in automatic writing), a man may hold colloquy with his own dream--may note in actual juxtaposition two separate strata of his own intelligence.

I shall not at present pursue the discussion of these tilted responses beyond this their very lowest and most rudimentary stage. They almost immediately suggest another problem, for which our discussion is hardly ripe, the participation, namely, of several minds in the production of the same automatic message. There is something of this difficulty even in the explanation of messages given when the hands of two persons are touching a planchette; but when the instrument of response is large, and the method of response simple, as with table-tilting, we find this question of the influence of more minds than one imperatively recurring.

Our immediate object, however, is rather to correlate the different attainable modes of automatic response in some intelligible scheme than to pursue any one of them through all its phases. We regarded the table-tilting process as in one sense the simplest, the least differentiated form of motor response. It is a kind of gesture merely, though a gesture implying knowledge of the alphabet. Let us see in what directions the movement of response becomes more specialised,--as gesture parts into pictorial art and articulate speech. We find, in fact, that a just similar divergence of impulses takes place in automatic response. On the one hand the motor impulse specialises itself into drawing; on the other hand it specialises itself into speech. Of automatic drawing I have already said something (Chapter III.). Automatic speech will receive detailed treatment in Chapter IX. At present I shall only briefly indicate the position of each form of movement among cognate automatisms.

Some of my readers may have seen these so-called "spirit-drawings,"--designs, sometimes in colour, whose author asserts that he drew them without any plan, or even knowledge of what his hand was going to do. This assertion may be quite true, and the person making it may be perfectly sane.[166] The drawings so made will be found curiously accordant with what the view which I am explaining would lead us to expect. For they exhibit a fusion of arabesque with ideography; that is to say, they partly resemble the forms of ornamentation into which the artistic hand strays when, as it were, dreaming on the paper without definite plan; and partly they afford a parallel to the early attempts at symbolic self-expression of savages who have not yet learnt an alphabet. Like savage writing, they pass by insensible transitions from direct pictorial symbolism to an abbreviated ideography, mingled in its turn with writing of a fantastic or of an ordinary kind.

And here, before we enter on the study of automatic writing, I must refer to two great historic cases of automatism, which may serve as a kind of prologue to what is to follow. One case, that of Socrates, is a case of monitory inhibition; the other, that of Jeanne d'Arc, of monitory impulse.

The Founder of Science himself--the permanent type of sanity, shrewdness, physical robustness, and moral balance--was guided in all the affairs of life by a monitory Voice,--by "the Dæmon of Socrates." This is a case which can never lose its interest, a case which has been vouched for by the most practical, and discussed by the loftiest intellect of Greece,--both of them intimate friends of the illustrious subject;--a case, therefore, which one who endeavours to throw new light on hallucination and automatism is bound, even at this distance of time, to endeavour to explain.[167] And this is the more needful, since a treatise was actually written, a generation ago, as "a specimen of the application of the science of psychology to the science of history," arguing from the records of the [Greek: daimónion] in Xenophon and Plato that Socrates was in fact insane.[168]

I believe that it is now possible to give a truer explanation; to place these old records in juxtaposition with more instructive parallels; and to show that the messages which Socrates received were only advanced examples of a process which, if supernormal, is not abnormal, and which characterises that form of intelligence which we describe as genius.

The story of Socrates I take as a signal example of wise automatism; of the possibility that the messages which are conveyed to the supraliminal mind from subliminal strata of the personality,--whether as sounds, as sights, or as movements,--may sometimes come from far beneath the realm of dream and confusion,--from some self whose monitions convey to us a wisdom profounder than we know.

Similarly in the case of Joan of Arc, I believe that only now, with the comprehension which we are gradually gaining of the possibility of an impulse from the mind's deeper strata which is so far from madness that it is wiser than our sanity itself,--only now, I repeat, can we understand aright that familiar story.

Joan's condemnation was based on her own admissions; and the Latin procès-verbal still exists, and was published from the MS. by M. Quicherat, 1841-9, for the French Historical Society.[169] Joan, like Socrates, was condemned mainly on the ground, or at least on the pretext of her monitory voices: and her Apology remarkably resembles his, in its resolute insistence on the truth of the very phenomena which were being used to destroy her. Her answers are clear and self-consistent, and seem to have been little, if at all, distorted by the recorder. Few pieces of history so remote as this can be so accurately known.

Fortunately for our purpose, her inquisitors asked her many questions as to her voices and visions; and her answers enable us to give a pretty full analysis of the phenomena which concern us.

I. The voices do not begin with the summons to fight for France. Joan heard them first at thirteen years of age,--as with Socrates also the voice began in childhood. The first command consisted of nothing more surprising than that "she was to be a good girl, and go often to church." After this the voice--as in the case of Socrates--intervened frequently, and on trivial occasions.

II. The voice was accompanied at first by a light, and sometimes afterwards by figures of saints, who appeared to speak, and whom Joan appears to have both seen and felt as dearly as though they had been living persons. But here there is some obscurity; and Michelet thinks that on one occasion the Maid was tricked by the courtiers for political ends. For she asserted (apparently without contradiction) that several persons, including the Archbishop of Rheims, as well as herself, had seen an angel bringing to the King a material crown.[170]

III. The voices came mainly when she was awake, but also sometimes roused her from sleep; a phenomenon often observed in our cases of "veridical hallucination." "Ipsa dormiebat, et vox excitabat eam." (Quicherat, i., p. 62.)

IV. The voice was not always fully intelligible (especially if she was half awake);--in this respect again resembling some of our recorded cases, both visual and auditory, where, on the view taken in Phantasms of the Living, the externalisation has been incomplete. "Vox dixit aliqua, sed non omnia intellexit." (Quicherat, i., p. 62.)

V. The predictions of the voice, so far as stated, were mainly fulfilled; viz., that the siege of Orleans would be raised; that Charles VII. would be crowned at Rheims; that she herself would be wounded; but the prediction that there would be a great victory over the English within seven years was not fulfilled in any exact way, although the English continued to lose ground. In short, about so much was fulfilled as an ardent self-devoted mind might have anticipated; much indeed that might have seemed irrational to ordinary observers, but nothing which actually needed a definite prophetic power. Here, again, we are reminded of the general character of the monitions of Socrates. And yet in Joan's case, more probably than in the case of Socrates, there may have been one singular exception to this general rule. She knew by monition that there was a sword "retro altare"--somewhere behind the altar--in the Church of St. Catherine of Fierbois. "Scivit ipsum ibi esse per voces":--she sent for it, nothing doubting, and it was found and given to her. This was a unique incident in her career. Her judges asked whether she had not once found a cup, and a missing priest, by help of similar monitions, but this she denied; and it is remarkable that no serious attempt was made either to show that she had claimed this clairvoyant power habitually, or, on the other hand, to invalidate the one instance of it which she did in effect claim. It would be absurd to cite the alleged discovery of the sword as in itself affording a proof of clairvoyance, any more than Socrates' alleged intimation of the approaching herd of swine.[171] But when we are considering monitions given in more recent times it will be well to remember that it is in this direction that some supernormal extension of knowledge seems possibly traceable.

The cases of Socrates and of Joan of Arc, on which I have just dwelt, might with almost equal fitness have been introduced at certain other points of my discussion. At first sight, at any rate, they appear rather like sensory than like motor automatisms,--like hallucinations of hearing rather than like the motor impulses which we are now about to study. Each case, however, approaches motor automatism in a special way.

In the case of Socrates the "sign" seems to have been not so much a definite voice as a sense of inhibition. In the case of Joan of Arc the voices were definite enough, but they were accompanied--as such voices sometimes are, but sometimes are not--with an overmastering impulse to act in obedience to them. These are, I may say, palmary cases of inhibition and of impulse: and inhibition and impulse are at the very root of motor phenomena.

They show moreover the furthest extent of the claim that can be made for the agency of the subliminal self, apart from any external influence,--apart from telepathy from the living, or possession by the departed. Each of those other hypotheses will claim its own group of cases; but we must not invoke them until the resources of subliminal wisdom are manifestly overtaxed.

These two famous cases, then, have launched us on our subject in the stress of a twofold difficulty in logical arrangement. We cannot always answer these primary questions, Is the subliminal impulse sensory or motor? is it originated in the automatist's own mind, or in some mind external to him?

In the first place, we must reflect that, if the subliminal self really possesses that profound power over the organism with which I have credited it, we may expect that its "messages" will sometimes express themselves in the form of deep organic modifications--of changes in the vaso-motor, the circulatory, the respiratory systems. Such phenomena are likely to be less noted or remembered as coincidental, from their very indefiniteness, as compared, for instance, with a phantasmal appearance; but we have, nevertheless, records of various telepathic cases of deep coenesthetic disturbance, of a profound malaise which must, one would think, have involved some unusual condition of the viscera.[172]

In cases, too, where the telepathic impression has ultimately assumed a definite sensory form, some organic or emotional phenomena have been noted, being perhaps the first effects of the telepathic impact, whether from the living or from the dead.[173]

And here I may mention an experience of Lady de Vesci's, who described to me in conversation a feeling of malaise, defining itself into the urgent need of definite action--namely, the despatch of a telegram to a friend who was in fact then dying at the other side of the world.[174] Such an impulse had one only parallel in her experience, which also was telepathic in a similar way.

Similar sensory disturbances are sometimes reported in connection with an important form of motor automatism,--that of "dowsing" or discovering water by means of the movement of a rod held in the hands of the automatist,--already treated of in Appendix V. A.

A small group of cases may naturally be mentioned here. From two different points of view they stand for the most part at the entrance of our subject. I speak of motor inhibitions, prompted at first by subliminal memory, or by subliminal hyperæsthesia, but merging into telæsthesia or telepathy. Inhibitions--sudden arrests or incapacities of action--(more or less of the Socratic type)--form a simple, almost rudimentary, type of motor automatisms. And an inhibition--a sudden check on action of this kind--will be a natural way in which a strong but obscure impression will work itself out. Such an impression, for instance, is that of alarm, suggested by some vague sound or odour which is only subliminally perceived. And thus in this series of motor automatisms, just as in our series of dreams, or in our series of sensory automatisms, we find ourselves beginning with cases where the subliminal self merely shows some slight extension of memory or of sensory perception,--and thence pass insensibly to cases where no "cryptomnesia" will explain the facts known in the past, and no hyperæsthesia will explain the facts discerned in the present.

We may most of us have observed that if we perform any small action to which there are objections, which we have once known but which have altogether passed from our minds, we are apt to perform it in a hesitating, inefficient way.

Similarly there are cases where some sudden muscular impulse or inhibition has probably depended on a subliminal perception or interpretation of a sound which had not reached the supraliminal attention. For instance, two friends walking together along a street in a storm just evade by sudden movements a falling mass of masonry. Each thinks that he has received some monition of the fall; each asserting that he heard no noise whatever to warn him. Here is an instance where subliminal perception may have been slightly quicker and more delicate than supraliminal, and may have warned them just in time.

In the case which I now quote (from Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 416) there may have been some subliminal hyperæsthesia of hearing which dimly warned Mr. Wyman of the approach of the extra train.[175]

Mr. Wm. H. Wyman writes to the Editor of the Arena as follows:--

DUNKIRK, N. Y., June 26th, 1891.

Some years ago my brother was employed and had charge as conductor and engineer of a working train on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, running between Buffalo and Erie, which passes through this city (Dunkirk, N. Y.). I often went with him to the Grave Bank, where he had his headquarters, and returned on his train with him. On one occasion I was with him, and after the train of cars was loaded, we went together to the telegraph office to see if there were any orders, and to find out if the trains were on time, as he had to keep out of the way of all regular trains. After looking over the train reports and finding them all on time, we started for Buffalo. As we approached near Westfield Station, running about 12 miles per hour, and when within about one mile of a long curve in the line, my brother all of a sudden shut off the steam, and quickly stepping over to the fireman's side of the engine, he looked out of the cab window, and then to the rear of his train to see if there was anything the matter with either. Not discovering anything wrong, he stopped and put on steam, but almost immediately again shut it off and gave the signal for breaks and stopped. After inspecting the engine and train and finding nothing wrong, he seemed very much excited, and for a short time he acted as if he did not know where he was or what to do. I asked what was the matter. He replied that he did not know, when, after looking at his watch and orders, he said that he felt that there was some trouble on the line of the road. I suggested that he had better run his train to the station and find out. He then ordered his flagman with his flag to go ahead around the curve, which was just ahead of us, and he would follow with the train. The flagman started and had just time to flag an extra express train, with the General Superintendent and others on board, coming full 40 [forty] miles per hour. The Superintendent inquired what he was doing there, and if he did not receive orders to keep out of the way of the extra. My brother told him that he had not received orders and did not know of any extra train coming; that we had both examined the train reports before leaving the station. The train then backed to the station, where it was found that no orders had been given. The train despatcher was at once discharged from the road, and from that time to this both my brother and myself are unable to account for his stopping the train as he did. I consider it quite a mystery, and cannot give or find any intelligent reason for it. Can you suggest any?

The above is true and correct in every particular.

In other cases again some subliminal sense of smell may be conjectured.[176]

Tactile sensibility, too, must be carefully allowed for. The sense of varying resistance in the air may reach in some seeing persons, as well as in the blind, a high degree of acuteness.[177]

But there are cases of sudden motor inhibition where no warning can well have been received from hyperæsthetic sensation, where we come, as it seems, to telæsthesia or to spirit guardianship.

(From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 459.)

Four years ago, I made arrangements with my nephew, John W. Parsons, to go to my office after supper to investigate a case. We walked along together, both fully determined to go up into the office, but just as I stepped upon the door sill of the drug store, in which my office was situated, some invisible influence stopped me instantly. I was much surprised, felt like I was almost dazed, the influence was so strong, almost like a blow, I felt like I could not make another step. I said to my nephew, "John, I do not feel like going into the office now; you go and read Flint and Aitken on the subject." He went, lighted the lamp, took off his hat, and just as he was reaching for a book the report of a large pistol was heard. The ball entered the window near where he was standing, passed near to and over his head, struck the wall and fell to the floor. Had I been standing where he was, I would have been killed, as I am much taller than he. The pistol was fired by a man who had an old grudge against me, and had secreted himself in a vacant house near by to assassinate me.

This impression was unlike any that I ever had before. All my former impressions were slow in their development, grew stronger and stronger, until the maximum was reached. I did not feel that I was in any danger, and could not understand what the strong impression meant. The fellow was drunk, had been drinking for two weeks. If my system had been in a different condition--I had just eaten supper--I think I would have received along with the impression some knowledge of the character of the danger, and would have prevented my nephew from going into the office.

I am fully satisfied that the invisible and unknown intelligence did the best that could have been done, under the circumstances, to save us from harm.

D. J. PARSONS, M.D., Sweet Springs, Mo.

(The above account was received in a letter from Dr. D. J. Parsons, dated December 15th, 1891.)

Statement of Dr. J. W. PARSONS.

About four years ago my uncle, Dr. D. J. Parsons, and I were going to supper, when a man halted us and expressed a desire for medical advice. My uncle requested him to call the next morning, and as we walked along he said the case was a bad one and that we would come back after supper and go to the office and examine the authorities on the subject. After supper we returned, walked along together on our way to the office, but just as we reached the door of the drug store he very unexpectedly, to me, stopped suddenly, which caused me to stop too; we stood there together a few seconds, and he remarked to me that he did not feel like going into the office then, or words to that effect, and told me to go and examine Flint and Aitken. I went, lit the lamp, and just as I was getting a book, a pistol was fired into the office, the ball passing close to my head, struck the east wall, then the north, and fell to the floor.

This 5th day of July, 1891.

JOHN W. PARSONS [Ladonia, Texas.]

In the next group of cases, we reach a class of massive motor impulses which are almost entirely free from any sensory admixture.

Take for instance the case of Mr. Garrison, who left a religious meeting in the evening, and walked eighteen miles under the strong impulse to see his mother, and found her dead. The account is given in the Journal S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 125 [§ 825].

In another case, that of Major Kobbé (given in Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 288), the percipient was prompted to visit a distant cemetery, without any conscious reason, and there found his father, who had, in fact, for certain unexpected reasons, sent to his son, Major Kobbé, a request (accidentally not received) to meet him at that place and hour.

In a third case, Mr. Skirving (see Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 285 [825 A]) was irresistibly compelled to leave his work and go home--why, he knew not--at the moment when his wife was in fact calling for him in the distress of a serious accident. See also a case given in Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 377, where a bricklayer has a sudden impulse to run home, and arrives just in time to save the life of his little boy, who had set himself on fire.

This special sensibility to the motor element in an impulse recalls to us the special susceptibilities to different forms of hallucination or suggestion shown by different hypnotic subjects. Some can be made to see, some to hear, some to act out the conception proposed to them. Dr. Bérillon[178] has even shown that certain subjects who seem at first quite refractory to hypnotisation are nevertheless at once obedient, even in the waking state, to a motor suggestion. This was the case both with a very strong man, with weak men and women, and with at least one subject actually suffering from locomotor ataxy. Thus the loss of supraliminal motor control over certain muscular combinations may actually lead to motor suggestibility as regards those combinations; just as the loss of supraliminal sensation in some anæsthetic patch may lead to a special subliminal sensitiveness in the very directions where the superficial sensibility has sunk away. On the other hand, a specially well-developed motor control may predispose in a similar way;--as for instance, the subject who can sing already is more easily made to sing by suggestion. We must, then, await further observations before we can pretend to say beforehand with which automatist the messages will take a sensory, and with which a motor form.

Still less can we explain the special predisposition of each experimenter to one or more of the common kinds of motor automatism--as automatic speech, automatic writing, table movements, raps, and so forth. These forms of messages may themselves be variously combined; and the contents of a message of any one of these kinds may be purely dream-like and fantastic, or may be veridical in various ways.

Let us enumerate the modes of subliminal motor message as nearly as we can in order of their increasing specialisation.

1. We may place first the massive motor impulses (like Mr. Garrison's) which mark a kind of transition between coenesthetic affections and motor impulses proper. There was here no impulse to special movement of any limb; but an impulse to reach a certain place by ordinary methods.

2. Next, perhaps, in order of specialisation come the simple subliminal muscular impulses which give rise to table-tilting and similar phenomena.

3. Musical execution, subliminally initiated, might theoretically be placed next; although definite evidence of this is hard to obtain, since the threshold of consciousness with musical performers is notoriously apt to be shifting and indefinite. ("When in doubt, play with your fingers, and not with your head.")

4. Next we may place automatic drawing and painting. This curious group of messages has but seldom a telepathic content, and, as was suggested in Chapter III., is more akin to genius and similar non-telepathic forms of subliminal faculty.[179]

5. Next comes automatic writing, on which much remains to be said in this chapter.

6. Automatic speech, which would not seem to be per se a more developed form of motor message than automatic script, is often accompanied by profound changes of memory or of personality which raise the question of "inspiration" or "possession";--for the two words, however different their theological import, mean much the same thing from the standpoint of experimental psychology.

7. I must conclude my list with a class of motor phenomena which I shall here merely record in passing, without attempting any explanation. I allude to raps, and to those telekinetic movements of objects whose real existence is still matter of controversy.

Comparing this list of motor automatisms with the sensory automatisms enumerated in Chapter VI., we shall find a certain general tendency running through each alike. The sensory automatisms began with vague unspecialised sensations. They then passed through a phase of definition, of specialisation on the lines of the known senses. And finally they reached a stage beyond these habitual forms of specialisation: beyond them, as of wider reach, and including in an apparently unanalysable act of perception a completer truth than any of our specialised forms of perception could by itself convey. With motor messages, too, we begin with something of similar vagueness. They, too, develop from modifications of the percipient's general organic condition, or coenesthesia; and the first dim telepathic impulse apparently hesitates between several channels of expression. They then pass through various definitely specialised forms; and finally, as we shall see when automatic script is considered, they, too, merge into an unanalysable act of cognition in which the motor element of the message has disappeared. But these motor messages point also in another even more perplexing direction. They lead, as I have said above, towards the old idea of possession;--using the word simply as an expression for some form of temporary manifestation of some veritably distinct and alien personality through the physical organism of some man or woman, as is well exemplified in many cases of automatic writing. In Europe and America the phenomenon of automatic writing first came into notice as an element in so-called "modern spiritualism" about the middle of the nineteenth century; but the writings of W. Stainton Moses--about 1870-80--were perhaps the first continuous series of such messages which could be regarded as worthy of serious attention. Mr. Moses--a man whose statements could not be lightly set aside--claimed for them that they were the direct utterances of departed persons, some of them lately dead, some dead long ago. However they were really to be explained, they strongly impressed Edmund Gurney and myself and added to our desire to work at the subject in as many ways as we could.

It was plain that these writings could not be judged aright without a wide analysis of similar scripts,--without an experimental inquiry into what the human mind, in states of somnambulism or the like, could furnish of written messages, apart from the main stream of consciousness. By his experiments on writing obtained in different stages of hypnotic trance, Gurney acted as the pioneer of a long series of researches which, independently set on foot by Professor Pierre Janet in France, have become of high psychological, and even medical, importance. What is here of prime interest is the indubitable fact that fresh personalities can be artificially and temporarily created, which will write down matter quite alien from the first personality's character, and even matter which the first personality never knew. That matter may consist merely of reminiscences of previous periods when the second personality has been in control. But, nevertheless, if these writings are shown to the primary personality, he will absolutely repudiate their authorship--alleging not only that he has no recollection of writing them, but also that they contain allusions to facts which he never knew. Some of these messages, indeed, although their source is so perfectly well defined--although we know the very moment when the secondary personality which wrote them was called into existence--do certainly look more alien from the automatist in his normal state than many of the messages which claim to come from spirits of lofty type. It is noticeable, moreover, that these manufactured personalities sometimes cling obstinately to their fictitious names, and refuse to admit that they are in reality only aspects or portions of the automatist himself. This must be remembered when the persistent claim to some spiritual identity--say Napoleon--is urged as an argument for attributing a series of messages to that special person.

What has now been said may suffice as regards the varieties of mechanism--the different forms of motor automatism--which the messages employ. I shall pass on to consider the contents of the messages, and shall endeavour to classify them according to their apparent sources.

A. In the first place, the message may come from the percipient's own mind; its contents being supplied from the resources of his ordinary memory, or of his more extensive subliminal memory; while the dramatisation of the message--its assumption of some other mind as its source--will resemble the dramatisations of dream or of hypnotic trance.

Of course the absence of facts unknown to the writer is not in itself a proof that the message does not come from some other mind. We cannot be sure that other minds, if they can communicate, will always be at the pains to fill their messages with evidential facts. But, equally of course, a message devoid of such facts must not, on the strength of its mere assertions, be claimed as the product of any but the writer's own mind.

B. Next above the motor messages whose content the automatist's own mental resources might supply, we may place the messages whose content seems to be derived telepathically from the mind of some other person still living on earth; that person being either conscious or unconscious of transmitting the suggestion.

C. Next comes the possibility that the message may emanate from some unembodied intelligence of unknown type--other, at any rate, than the intelligence of the alleged agent. Under this heading come the views which ascribe the messages on the one hand to "elementaries," or even devils, and on the other hand to "guides" or "guardians" of superhuman goodness and wisdom.

D. Finally we have the possibility that the message may be derived, in a more or less direct manner, from the mind of the agent--the departed friend--from whom the communication does actually claim to come.

My main effort has naturally been thus far directed to the proof that there are messages which do not fall into the lowest class, A--in which class most psychologists would still place them all. And I myself--while reserving a certain small portion of the messages for my other classes--do not only admit but assert that the great majority of such communications represent the subliminal workings of the automatist's mind alone. It does not, however, follow that such messages have for us no interest or novelty. On the contrary, they form an instructive, an indispensable transition from psychological introspection of the old-fashioned kind to the bolder methods on whose validity I am anxious to insist. The mind's subliminal action, as thus revealed, differs from the supraliminal in ways which no one anticipated, and which no one can explain. There seem to be subliminal tendencies setting steadily in certain obscure directions, and bearing as little relation to the individual characteristics of the person to the deeps of whose being we have somehow penetrated as profound ocean-currents bear to waves and winds on the surface of the sea.[180]

Another point also, of fundamental importance, connected with the powers of the subliminal self, will be better deferred until a later chapter. I have said that a message containing only facts normally known to the automatist must not, on the strength of its mere assertions, be regarded as proceeding from any mind but his own. This seems evident; but the converse proposition is not equally indisputable. We must not take for granted that a message which does contain facts not normally known to the automatist must therefore come from some mind other than his own. If the subliminal self can acquire supernormal knowledge at all, it may obtain such knowledge by means other than telepathic impressions from other minds. It may assimilate its supernormal nutriment also by a directer process--it may devour it not only cooked but raw. Parallel with the possibilities of reception of such knowledge from the influence of other embodied or disembodied minds lies the possibility of its own clairvoyant perception, or active absorption of some kind, of facts lying indefinitely beyond its supraliminal purview.

Now, as I have said, the great majority of the nunciative or message-bearing motor automatisms originate in the automatist's own mind, and do not involve the exercise of telepathy or telæsthesia, or any other supernormal faculty; but they illustrate in various ways the coexistence of the subliminal with the supraliminal self, its wider memory, and its independent intelligence.

I need not here multiply instances of the simpler and commoner forms of this type, and I will merely quote in illustration one short case recounted by Mr. H. Arthur Smith (author of The Principles of Equity, and a member of the Council of the Society for Psychical Research) who has had the patience to analyse many communications through "Planchette."

(From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. ii. p. 233.)[181] Mr. Smith and his nephew placed their hands on the Planchette, and a purely fantastic name was given as that of the communicating agency.

Q. "Where did you live?" A. "Wem." This name was quite unknown to any of us. I am sure it was to myself, and as sure of the word of the others as of that of any one I know.

Q. "Is it decided who is to be Archbishop of Canterbury?" A. "Yes."

Q. "Who?" A. "Durham." As none of us remembered his name, we asked.

"What is his name?" A. "Lightfoot." Of course, how far the main statement is correct, I don't know. The curiosity at the time rested in the fact that the name was given which none of us could recall, but was found, to be right.

Now, this is just one of the cases which a less wary observer might have brought forward as evidence of spirit agency. An identity, it would be said, manifested itself, and gave an address which none present had ever heard. But I venture to say that there cannot be any real proof that an educated person has never heard of Wem. A permanent recorded fact, like the name of a town which is to be found (for instance) in Bradshaw's Guide, may at any moment have been presented to Mr. Smith's eye, and have found a lodgment in his subliminal memory.

Similarly in the answers "Durham" and "Lightfoot" we are reminded of cases where in a dream we ask a question with vivid curiosity, and are astonished at the reply; which nevertheless proceeds from ourselves as undoubtedly as does the inquiry. The prediction in this case was wrong.

What we have been shown is an independent activity of the subliminal self holding colloquies with the supraliminal, and nothing more. Yet we shall find, if we go on accumulating instances of the same general type, that traces of telæsthesia and telepathy begin insensibly to show themselves; not at first with a distinctness or a persistence sufficient for actual proof, but just in the same gradual way in which indications of supernormal faculty stole in amid the disintegration of split personalities; or in which indications of some clairvoyant outlook stole in amid the incoherence of dream. Many of these faint indications, valueless, as I have said, for purely evidential purposes, are nevertheless of much theoretical interest, as showing how near is the subliminal self to that region of supernormal knowledge which for the supraliminal is so definitely closed.[182]

Mr. Schiller's case (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iv. pp. 216-224) [832 A] is a good example of these obscure transitions between normal and supernormal, and introduces us to several phenomena which we shall afterwards find recurring again and again in independent quarters. Dramatisation of fictitious personalities, for instance, which forms so marked a feature in Professor Flournoy's celebrated case (to be discussed later), begins in this series of experiments, conducted throughout with a purely scientific aim, and with no sort of belief in the imaginary "Irktomar" and the rest. It seems as though this "objectivation of types" were part of a romance which some inscrutable but childish humorist was bent on making up. The "cryptomnesia" shown in this case through the reproduction of scraps of old French with which the automatist had no conscious acquaintance, reached a point at which (as again in Professor Flournoy's case) one is almost driven to suspect that it was aided by some slight clairvoyance on the part of the subliminal self.

Indeed as the cases become increasingly complex, one wonders to what extent this strange manufacture of inward romances can be carried. There is, I may say, a great deal more of it in the world than is commonly suspected. I have myself received so many cases of these dramatised utterances--as though a number of different spirits were writing in turn through some automatist's hand--that I have come to recognise the operation of some law of dreams, so to call it, as yet but obscurely understood. The alleged personalities are for the most part not only unidentified, but purposely unidentifiable; they give themselves romantic or ludicrous names, and they are produced and disappear as lightly as puppets on a mimic stage. The main curiosity of such cases lies in their very persistence and complexity; it would be a waste of space to quote any of the longer ones in such a way as to do them justice. And, fortunately, there is no need for me to give any of my own cases; since a specially good case has been specially well observed and reported in a book with which many of my readers are probably already acquainted,--Professor Flournoy's Des Indes à la planète Mars: Etude sur un cas de Somnambulisme avec Glossolalie (Paris and Geneva, 1900). I shall here make some comments on that striking record, which all students of these subjects ought to study in detail.

It happens, no doubt, to any group which pursues for many years a somewhat unfamiliar line of inquiry, that those of their points which are first assailed get gradually admitted, so that as they become interested in new points they may scarcely observe what change has taken place in the reception of the old. The reader of early volumes of the Proceedings S.P.R. will often observe this kind of progress of opinion. And now Professor Flournoy's book indicates in a remarkable way how things have moved in the psychology of the last twenty years. The book--a model of fairness throughout--is indeed, for the most part, critically destructive in its treatment of the quasi-supernormal phenomena with which it deals. But what a mass of conceptions a competent psychologist now takes for granted in this realm, which the official science of twenty years ago would scarcely stomach our hinting at!

One important point may be noticed at once as decisively corroborating a contention of my own made long ago, and at a time when it probably seemed fantastic to many readers. Arguing for the potential continuity of subliminal mentation (as against those who urged that there were only occasional flashes of submerged thought, like scattered dreams), I said that it would soon be found needful to press this notion of a continuous subliminal self to the utmost, if we were not prepared to admit a continuous spiritual guidance or possession. Now, in fact, with Professor Flournoy's subject the whole discussion turns on this very point. There is unquestionably a continuous and complex series of thoughts and feelings going on beneath the threshold of consciousness of Mlle. "Hélène Smith." Is this submerged mentation due in any degree or in any manner to the operation of spirits other than Mlle. Smith's own? That is the broad question; but it is complicated here by a subsidiary question: whether, namely, any previous incarnations of Mlle. Smith's--other phases of her own spiritual history, now involving complex relationship with the past--have any part in the crowd of personalities which seem struggling to express themselves through her quite healthy organism.

Mlle. Smith, I should at once say, is not,[183] and never has been, a paid medium. At the date of M. Flournoy's book, she occupied a leading post on the staff of a large maison de commerce at Geneva, and gave séances to her friends simply because she enjoyed the exercise of her mediumistic faculties, and was herself interested in their explanation.

Her organism, I repeat, is regarded, both by herself and by others, as a quite healthy one. Mlle. Smith, says Professor Flournoy, declares distinctly that she is perfectly sound in body and mind--in no way lacking in equilibrium--and indignantly repudiates the idea that there is any hurtful anomaly or the slightest danger in mediumship as she practises it.

"It is far from being demonstrated," he continues, "that mediumship is a pathological phenomenon. It is abnormal, no doubt, in the sense of being rare, exceptional; but rarity is not morbidity. The few years during which these phenomena have been seriously and scientifically studied have not been enough to allow us to pronounce on their true nature. It is interesting to note that in the countries where these studies have been pushed the furthest, in England and America, the dominant view among the savants who have gone deepest into the matter is not at all unfavourable to mediumship; and that, far from regarding it as a special case of hysteria, they see in it a faculty superior, advantageous, healthy, of which hysteria is a form of degenerescence, a pathological parody, a morbid caricature."

The phenomena which this sensitive presents (Hélène Smith is Professor Flournoy's pseudonym for her) cover a range which looks at first very wide, although a clearer analysis shows that these varieties are more apparent than real, and that self-suggestion will perhaps account for all of them.

There is, to begin with, every kind of automatic irruption of subliminal into supraliminal life. As Professor Flournoy says (p. 45): "Phenomena of hypermnesia, divinations, mysterious findings of lost objects, happy inspirations, exact presentiments, just intuitions, teleological (purposive or helpful) automatisms, in short, of every kind; she possesses in a high degree this small change of genius--which constitutes a more than sufficient compensation for the inconvenience resulting from those distractions and moments of absence of mind which accompany her visions; and which, moreover, generally pass unobserved."

At séances--where the deeper change has no inconveniences--Hélène undergoes a sort of self-hypnotisation which produces various lethargic and somnambulistic states. And when she is alone and safe from interruption she has spontaneous visions, during which there may be some approach to ecstasy. At the séances she experiences positive hallucinations, and also negative hallucinations, or systematised anæsthesiæ, so that, for instance, she will cease to see some person present, especially one who is to be the recipient of messages in the course of the séance. "It seems as though a dream-like incoherence presided over this preliminary work of disaggregation, in which the normal perceptions are arbitrarily split up or absorbed by the subconscious personality--eager for materials with which to compose the hallucinations which it is preparing." Then, when the séance begins, the main actor is Hélène's guide Léopold (a pseudonym for Cagliostro) who speaks and writes through her, and is, in fact, either her leading spirit-control or (much more probably) her most developed form of secondary personality.

"Leopold," says Professor Flournoy (p. 134), "certainly manifests a very honourable and amiable side of Mlle. Smith's character, and in taking him as her 'guide' she has followed inspirations which are doubtless among the highest in her nature."

The high moral quality of these automatic communications, on which Professor Flournoy thus insists, is a phenomenon worth consideration.

I do not mean that it is specially strange in the case of Mlle. Smith. But the almost universally high moral tone of genuinely automatic utterances has not, I think, been sufficiently noticed or adequately explained.

In evidential messages--where there is real reason to believe that an identified spirit is communicating--there is a marked and independent consensus on such matters as these spirits profess themselves able to discuss.

And again in non-evidential messages--in communications which probably proceed from the automatist's subliminal self--I hold that there is a remarkable and undesigned concordance in high moral tone, and also in avoidance of certain prevalent tenets, which many of the automatists do supraliminally hold as true. But I also insist that these subliminal messages, even when not incoherent, are generally dream-like, and often involve tenets which (though never in my experience base or immoral) are unsupported by evidence, and are probably to be referred to mere self-suggestion.

Prominent among such tenets is one which forms a large part of Mlle. Smith's communications; namely, the doctrine of reincarnation, or of successive lives spent by each soul upon this planet.

The simple fact that such was probably the opinion both of Plato and of Virgil shows that there is nothing here which is alien to the best reason or to the highest instincts of men. Nor, indeed, is it easy to realise any theory of the direct creation of spirits at such different stages of advancement as those which enter upon the earth in the guise of mortal man. There must, one feels, be some kind of continuity--some form of spiritual Past. Yet for reincarnation there is at present no valid evidence; and it must be my duty to show how its assertion in any given instance--Mlle. Smith's included--constitutes in itself a strong argument in favour of self-suggestion rather than extraneous inspiration as the source of the messages in which it appears.

Whenever civilised men have received what they have regarded as a revelation (which has generally been somewhat fragmentary in its first delivery) they have naturally endeavoured to complete and systematise it as well as they could. In so doing they have mostly aimed at three objects: (1) to understand as much as possible of the secrets of the universe; (2) to justify as far as possible Heaven's dealings with men; and (3) to appropriate as far as possible the favour or benefit which the revelation may show as possibly accruing to believers. For all these purposes the doctrine of reincarnation has proved useful in many countries and times. But in no case could it seem more appropriate than in this last revelation (so to term it) through automatic messages and the like. And as a matter of history, a certain vigorous preacher of the new faith, known under the name of Allan Kardec, took up reincarnationist tenets, enforced them (as there is reason to believe) by strong suggestion upon the minds of various automatic writers, and set them forth in dogmatic works which have had much influence, especially among Latin nations, from their clarity, symmetry, and intrinsic reasonableness. Yet the data thus collected were absolutely insufficient, and the Livre des Esprits must simply rank as the premature formulation of a new religion--the premature systematisation of a nascent science.

I follow Professor Flournoy in believing that the teaching of that work must have directly or indirectly influenced the mind of Mlle. Smith, and is therefore responsible for her claim to these incarnations previous to that which she now undergoes or enjoys.

On the general scheme here followed, each incarnation, if the last has been used aright, ought to represent some advance in the scale of being. If one earth-life has been misused, the next earth-life ought to afford opportunity for expiation--or for further practice in the special virtue which has been imperfectly acquired. Thus Mlle. Smith's present life in a humble position may be thought to atone for her overmuch pride in her last incarnation--as Marie Antoinette.

But the mention of Marie Antoinette suggests the risk which this theory fosters--of assuming that one is the issue of a distinguished line of spiritual progenitors; insomuch that, with whatever temporary sets-back, one is sure in the end to find oneself in a leading position.

Pythagoras, indeed, was content with the secondary hero Euphorbus as his bygone self. But in our days Dr. Anna Kingsford and Mr. Edward Maitland must needs have been the Virgin Mary and St. John the Divine. And Victor Hugo, who was naturally well to the front in these self-multiplications, took possession of most of the leading personages of antiquity whom he could manage to string together in chronological sequence. It is obvious that any number of re-born souls can play at this game; but where no one adduces any evidence it seems hardly worth while to go on. Even Pythagoras does not appear to have adduced any evidence beyond his ipse dixit for his assertion that the alleged shield of Euphorbus had in reality been borne by that mythical hero. Meantime the question as to reincarnation has actually been put to a very few spirits who have given some real evidence of their identity. So far as I know, no one of these has claimed to know anything personally of such an incident; although all have united in saying that their knowledge was too limited to allow them to generalise on the matter.

Hélène's controls and previous incarnations--to return to our subject--do perhaps suffer from the general fault of aiming too high. She has to her credit a control from the planet Mars; one pre-incarnation as an Indian Princess; and a second (as I have said) as Marie Antoinette.

In each case there are certain impressive features in the impersonation; but in each case also careful analysis negatives the idea that we can be dealing with a personality really revived from a former epoch, or from a distant planet;--and leaves us inclined to explain everything by "cryptomnesia" (as Professor Flournoy calls submerged memory), and that subliminal inventiveness of which we already know so much.

The Martian control was naturally the most striking at first sight. Its reality was supported by a Martian language, written in a Martian alphabet, spoken with fluency, and sufficiently interpreted into French to show that such part of it, at any rate, as could be committed to writing was actually a grammatical and coherent form of speech.

And here I reach an appropriate point at which to remark that this book of Professor Flournoy's is not the first account which has been published of Mlle. Hélène. Professor Lemaître, of Geneva, printed two papers about her in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques: first, a long article in the number for March-April, 1897--then a reply to M. Lefébure in the number for May-June, 1897. In these papers he distinctly claims supernormal powers for Mlle. Hélène, implying a belief in her genuine possession by spirits, and even in her previous incarnations, and in the extra-terrene or ostensibly Martian language. I read these papers at the time, but put them aside as inconclusive, mainly because that very language, on which M. Lemaître seemed most to rely, appeared to me so obviously factitious as to throw doubt on all the evidence presented by an observer who could believe that denizens of another planet talked to each other in a language corresponding in every particular with simple French idioms, and including such words as quisa for quel, quisé for quelle, vétèche for voir, vèche for vu;--the fantastic locutions of the nursery. M. Lemaître remarks, as a proof of the consistency and reality of the extra-terrene tongue, "L'un des premiers mots que nous ayons eus, métiche, signifiant monsieur, se retrouve plus tard avec le sens de homme." That is to say, having transmogrified monsieur into métiche, Hélène further transmutes les messieurs into cée métiché;--in naïve imitation of ordinary French usage. And this tongue is supposed to have sprung up independently of all the influences which have shaped terrene grammar in general or the French idiom in particular! And even after Professor Flournoy's analysis of this absurdity I see newspapers speaking of this Martian language as an impressive phenomenon! They seem willing to believe that the evolution of another planet, if it has culminated in conscious life at all, can have culminated in a conscious life into which we could all of us enter affably, with a suitable Ollendorff's phrase-book under our arms;--"eni cée métiché oné qudé,"--"ici les hommes (messieurs) sont bons,"--"here the men are good";--and the rest of it.

To the student of automatisms, of course, all this irresistibly suggests the automatist's own subliminal handiwork. It is a case of "glossolaly," or "speaking with tongues"; and we have no modern case--no case later than the half-mythical Miracles of the Cevennes--where such utterance has proved to be other than gibberish. I have had various automatic hieroglyphics shown to me, with the suggestion that they may be cursive Japanese, or perhaps an old dialect of Northern China; but I confess that I have grown tired of showing these fragments to the irresponsive expert, who suggests that they may also be vague reminiscences of the scrolls in an Oriental tea-tray.

It seems indeed to be a most difficult thing to get telepathically into any brain even fragments of a language which it has not learnt. A few simple Italian, and even Hawaiian, words occur in Mrs. Piper's utterances, coming apparently from departed spirits (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 337 and 384 [960 A and § 961]), but these, with some Kaffir and Chinese words given through Miss Browne (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. ix. pp. 124-127 [871 A]), form, I think, almost the only instances which I know. And, speaking generally, whatever is elaborate, finished, pretentious, is likely to be of subliminal facture; while only things scrappy, perplexed, and tentative, have floated to us veritably from afar.

I need not here go into the details of the Hindow preincarnation or of the more modern and accessible characterisation of Marie Antoinette, but will pass on to certain minor, but interesting phenomena, which Professor Flournoy calls teleological automatisms. These are small acts of helpfulness--beneficent synergies, as we might term them, in contrast with the injurious synergies, or combined groups of hurtful actions, with which hysteria has made us familiar.[184]

"One day," says Professor Flournoy (p. 35), "Miss Smith, when desiring to lift down a large and heavy object which lay on a high shelf, was prevented from doing so because her raised arm remained for some seconds as though petrified in the air and incapable of movement. She took this as a warning, and gave up the attempt. At a subsequent séance Leopold stated that it was he who had thus fixed Hélène's arm to prevent her from grasping this object, which was much too heavy for her and would have caused her some accident.

"Another time, a shopman, who had been looking in vain for a certain pattern, asked Hélène if by chance she knew what had become of it. Hélène answered mechanically and without reflection--'Yes, it has been sent to Mr. J.' (a client of the house). At the same time she saw before her the number 18 in large black figures a few feet from the ground, and added instinctively, 'It was sent eighteen days ago.' [This was in the highest degree improbable, but was found to be absolutely correct.] Leopold had no recollection of this, and does not seem to have been the author of this cryptomnesic automatism."

A similar phenomenon has also been noted (p. 87) when warning is conveyed by an actual phantasmal figure. Mlle. Smith has seen an apparition of Leopold, barring a particular road, under circumstances which make it probable that Mlle. Smith would on that day have had cause to regret taking that route.

This case of Professor Flournoy's, then--this classical case, as it may already be fairly termed--may serve here as our culminant example of the free scope and dominant activity of the unassisted subliminal self. The telepathic element in this case, if it exists, is relatively small; what we are watching in Mlle. Hélène Smith resembles, as I have said, a kind of exaggeration of the submerged constructive faculty,--a hypertrophy of genius--without the innate originality of mind which made even the dreams of R. L. Stevenson a source of pleasure to thousands of readers.

In reference to the main purpose of this work, such cases as these, however curious, can be only introductory to automatisms of deeper moment. In our attempt to trace an evolutive series of phenomena indicating ever higher human faculty, the smallest telepathic incident,--the most trivial proof, if proof it be, of communication received without sensory intermediation from either an incarnate or a discarnate mind outweighs in importance the most complex ramifications and burgeonings of the automatist's own submerged intelligence.

I pass on, then, to evidence which points, through motor automatisms, to supernormal faculty; and I shall begin by referring the reader to certain experiments (due to Professor Richet) in the simplest of all forms of motor automatism, viz., table-tilting, with results which only telepathy can explain. (See Appendix VIII. A.)

Trivial though they seem, such experiments may with a little care be made absolutely conclusive. Had Professor Richet's friends, for example, been willing to prolong this series, we might have had a standing demonstration of telepathy, reproducible at will.[185]

And now I pass on to some experiments with Planchette, in which an element of telepathy was shown. The following account from Mrs. Alfred Moberly, Tynwald, Hythe, Kent, is corroborated, with some additional examples, by two other ladies present at the time.

(From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. ii. p. 235.)

May 9th, 1884.

The operators were placed out of sight of the rest of the company, who selected--in silence--a photograph, one of an albumful, and fixed their attention on it. We--the operators--were requested to keep our minds a blank as far as possible and follow the first involuntary motion of the Planchette. In three out of five cases it wrote the name or initial or some word descriptive of the selected portrait. We also obtained the signatures to letters selected in the same manner. We both knew perfectly well that we were writing--not the spirits, as the rest of the company persist to this day in believing--but had only the slightest idea what the words might prove to be.

We have tried it since, and generally with some curious result. A crucial test was offered by two gentlemen in the form of a question to which we couldn't possibly guess the answer. "Where's Toosey?" The answer came, "In Vauxhall Road." "Toosey," they explained, was a pet terrier who had disappeared; suspicion attaching to a plumber living in the road mentioned, who had been working at the house and whose departure coincided with Toosey's.

Of course, in the case of the inquiry after the lost dog, we may suppose that the answer given came from the questioner's own mind. Mrs. Moberly and her friends seem to have been quite aware of this; and were little likely to fall into the not uncommon error of asking Planchette, for instance, what horse will win the Derby, and staking, perhaps, some pecuniary consideration on the extremely illusory reply.[186]

And now we come to the palmary case of the late Rev. P. H. Newnham, Vicar of Maker, Devonport, who was personally known to Edmund Gurney and myself, and was a man in all ways worthy of high respect. The long series of communications between Mr. Newnham and his wife, which date back to 1871, and whose contemporaneous written record is preserved in the archives of the S.P.R., must, I think, always retain their primacy as early and trustworthy examples of a telepathic transference where the percipient's automatic script answers questions penned by the agent in such a position that the percipient could not in any normal manner discern what those questions were. No part of our evidence seems to me more worthy of study than this.[187]

It must be distinctly understood that Mrs. Newnham did not see or hear the questions which Mr. Newnham wrote down.[188] The fact, therefore, that her answers bore any relation to the questions shows that the sense of the questions was telepathically conveyed to her. This is the leading and important fact. The substance of the replies written is also interesting, and Mr. Newnham has some good comments thereon. But even had the replies contained no facts which Mrs. Newnham could not have known, this would not detract from the main value of the evidence, which consists in the fact that Mrs. Newnham's hand wrote replies clearly and repeatedly answering questions which she neither heard nor saw.

In this case we have the advantage of seeing before us the entire series of questions and answers, and thus of satisfying ourselves that the misses (which in that case are very few) are marked as well as the hits, and consequently that the coincidences between question and answer are at any rate not the result of chance. In several other cases which I have known, where the good faith of the informants has been equally above question, the possibility of an explanation by chance alone has been a more important element in the problem. All our evidence has tended to show that the telepathic power itself is a variable thing; that it shows itself in flashes, for the most part spontaneously, and seldom persists through a series of deliberate experiments. And if an automatist possessing power of this uncertain kind has exercised it at irregular moments and with no scientific aim;--and has kept, moreover, no steady record of success and failure;--then it becomes difficult to say that even some brilliant coincidences afford cogent proof of telepathic action.[189]

I pass on to a small group of cases which form a curious transition from these communications inter vivos to communications which I shall class as coming from the dead. These are cases where the message professes to come from a deceased person, but shows internal evidence of having come, telepathically, from the mind of some one present, or, indeed, from some living person at a distance. (See the case given in Appendix VIII. B.)

But this, although a real risk, is by no means the only risk of deception which such messages involve. The communication may conceivably come from some unembodied spirit indeed, but not from the spirit who is claimed as its author.

The reader who wishes to acquaint himself with this new range of problems cannot do better than study the record of the varied experiences of automatic writing which have been intermingled with Miss A.'s crystal-visions, etc.[190]

There is no case that I have watched longer than Miss A.'s;--none where I have more absolute assurance of the scrupulous probity of the principal sensitive herself and of the group who share the experiments;--but none also which leaves me more often baffled as to the unseen source of the information given. There is a knowledge both of the past and of the future, which seems capriciously limited, and is mingled with mistakes, yet on the other hand is of a nature which it is difficult to refer to any individual human mind, incarnate or discarnate. We meet here some of the first indications of a possibility that discarnate spirits communicating with us have occasional access to certain sources of knowledge which even to themselves are inscrutably remote and obscure.

The written diagnoses and prognoses given by the so-called "Semirus," often without Miss A.'s even seeing the patient or hearing the nature of his malady, have become more and more remarkable. Miss A. and her friends do not wish these private matters to be printed, and I cannot therefore insist upon the phenomena here. Yet in view of the amount of telæsthesia which Miss A.'s various automatisms reveal, it should first be noted that human organisms seem especially pervious to such vue à distance. "Semirus," "Gelalius," etc., are obvious pseudonyms; and neither Semirus' prescriptions nor Gelalius' cosmogony contain enough of indication to enable us to grasp their origin.[191]

From the communications of these remote personages I go on to certain messages avowedly coming from persons more recently departed, and into which something more of definite personality seems to enter. One element of this kind is handwriting; there are many cases where resemblance of handwriting is one of the evidential points alleged. Now proof of identity from resemblance of handwriting may conceivably be very strong. But in estimating it we must bear two points in mind. The first is that (like the resemblances of so-called "spirit-photographs" to deceased friends) it is often very loosely asserted. One needs, if not an expert's opinion, at least a careful personal scrutiny of the three scripts--the automatist's voluntary and his automatic script, and the deceased person's script--before one can feel sure that the resemblance is in more than some general scrawliness. This refers to the cases where the automatist has provably never seen the deceased person's handwriting. Where he has seen that handwriting, we have to remember (in the second place) that a hypnotised subject can frequently imitate any known handwriting far more closely than in his waking state; and that consequently we are bound to credit the subliminal self with a mimetic faculty which may come out in these messages without any supraliminal guidance whatever on the automatist's part. In Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 549-65 [864 A], is an account of a series of experiments by Professor Rossi-Pagnoni at Pesaro, into which the question of handwriting enters. The account illustrates automatic utterance as well as other forms of motor automatism, and possibly also telekinetic phenomena. The critical discussion of the evidence by Mr. H. Babington Smith, to whom we are indebted for the account, shows with what complex considerations we have to deal in the questions now before us.

I now cite a few cases where the point of central interest is the announcement of a death unknown to the sitters.[192]

In Appendix VIII. C is given a case which we received from Dr. Liébeault, of Nancy, and which was first published in Phantasms of the Living (vol. i. p. 293), where it was regarded as an example of a spontaneous telepathic impulse proceeding directly from a dying person. I now regard it as more probably due to the action of the spirit after bodily death.

I shall next give a résumé of a case of curious complexity received from M. Aksakof;--an automatic message written by a Mdlle. Stramm, informing her of the death of a M. Duvanel. The principal incidents may here be disentangled as follows:--

Duvanel dies by his own hand on January 15th, 1887, in a Swiss village, where he lives alone, having no relations except a brother living at a distance, whom Mdlle. Stramm had never seen (as the principal witness, M. Kaigorodoff, informs us in a letter of May 1890).

Mdlle. Stramm's father does not hear of Duvanel's death till two days later, and sends her the news in a letter dated January 18th, 1887.

Five hours after Duvanel's death an automatic message announcing it is written at the house of M. Kaigorodoff, at Wilna in Russia, by Mdlle. Stramm, who had certainly at that time received no news of the event.

From what mind are we to suppose that this information came?

(1) We may first attempt to account for Mdlle. Stramm's message on the theory of latency. We may suppose that the telepathic message came from the dying man, but did not rise into consciousness until an opportunity was afforded by Mdlle. Stramm's sitting down to write automatically.

But to this interpretation there is an objection of a very curious kind. The message written by Mdlle. Stramm was not precisely accurate. Instead of ascribing Duvanel's death to suicide, it ascribed it to a stoppage of blood, "un engorgement de sang."

And when M. Stramm, three days after the death, wrote to his daughter in Russia to tell her of it, he also used the same expression, "un engorgement de sang," thus disguising the actual truth in order to spare the feelings of his daughter, who had formerly refused to marry Duvanel, and who (as her father feared) might receive a painful shock if she learnt the tragic nature of his end. There was, therefore, a singular coincidence between the automatic and the normally-written message as to the death;--a coincidence which looks as though the same mind had been at work in each instance. But that mind cannot have been M. Stramm's ordinary mind, as he was not supraliminally aware of Duvanel's death at the time when the first message was written. It may, however, be supposed that his subliminal self had received the information of the death telepathically, had transmitted it in a deliberately modified form to his daughter, while it remained latent in himself, and had afterwards influenced his supraliminal self to modify the information in the same way when writing to her.

(2) But we must also consider the explanation of the coincidence given by the intelligence which controlled the automatic writing. That intelligence asserted itself to be a brother of Mdlle. Stramm's, who died some years before. And this "Louis" further asserted that he had himself influenced M. Stramm to make use of the same euphemistic phrase, with the object of avoiding a shock to Mdlle. Stramm; for which purpose it was needful that the two messages should agree in ascribing the death to the same form of sudden illness.

Now if this be true, and the message did indeed come from the deceased "Louis," we have an indication of continued existence, and continued knowledge of earthly affairs, on the part of a person long dead.

But if we consider that the case, as presented to us, contains no proof of "Louis'" identity, so that "Louis" may be merely one of those arbitrary names which the automatist's subliminal intelligence seems so prone to assume; then we must suppose that Duvanel was actually operative on two occasions after death, first inspiring in Mdlle. Stramm the automatic message, and then modifying in M. Stramm the message which the father might otherwise have sent.

I next quote a case in Appendix VIII. D which illustrates the continued terrene knowledge on the part of the dead of which other instances were given in the last chapter.

And lastly, I give in Appendix VIII. E a case which in one respect stands alone. It narrates the success of a direct experiment,--a test-message planned before death, and communicated after death, by a man who held that the hope of an assurance of continued existence was worth at least a resolute effort, whatever its result might be. His tests, indeed, were two, and both were successful. One was the revealing of the place where, before death, he hid a piece of brick marked and broken for special recognition, and the other was the communication of the contents of a short letter which he wrote and sealed before death. We may say that the information was certainly not possessed supraliminally by any living person. There are two other cases (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 353-355, and op. cit. vol viii. pp. 238-242 [876 A and B]) where information given through automatists may hypothetically be explicable by telepathy from the living, although, indeed, in my own view, it probably emanated from the deceased as alleged. In one of these cases the place where a missing will had been hidden was revealed to the automatist, but it is not clear whether the will was actually discovered or not before the automatic writing was obtained (although the automatist was unaware of its discovery), and in any case, apparently, its whereabouts was known to some living person who had hidden it, and may not have been known to the deceased before death.

In the other case the whereabouts of a missing note of hand was revealed to the automatists, and even if this could be regarded as absolutely unknown supraliminally to any living person, it is not by any means certain that the fact was known before death to the deceased person from whom the message purported to come.

These cases, therefore, are not such strong evidence for personal identity as the one to which I have referred above, and which I have given, as recording what purports to be the successful accomplishment of an experiment which every one may make;--which every one ought to make;--for, small as may be the chances of success, a few score of distinct successes would establish a presumption of man's survival which the common sense of mankind would refuse to explain away.

Here, then, let us pause and consider to what point the evidence contained in this chapter has gradually led us. We shall perceive that the motor phenomena have confirmed, and have also greatly extended, the results to which the cognate sensory phenomena had already pointed. We have already noted, in each of the two states of sleep and of waking, the variously expanding capacities of the subliminal self. We have watched a hyperæsthetic intensification of ordinary faculty,--leading up to telæsthesia, and to telepathy, from the living and from the departed. Along with these powers, which, on the hypothesis of the soul's independent existence, are at least within our range of analogical conception, we have noted also a precognitive capacity of a type which no fact as yet known to science will help us to explain.

Proceeding to the study of motor automatisms, we have found a third group of cases which independently confirm in each of these lines in turn the results of our analysis of sensory automatisms both in sleep and in waking. Evidence thus convergent will already need no ordinary boldness of negative assumption if it is to be set aside. But motor automatisms have taught us much more than this. At once more energetic and more persistent than the sensory, they oblige us to face certain problems which the lightness and fugitiveness of sensory impressions allowed us in some measure to evade. Thus when we discussed the mechanism (so to call it) of visual and auditory phantasms, two competing conceptions presented themselves for our choice,--the conception of telepathic impact, and the conception of psychical invasion. Either (we said) there was an influence exerted by the agent on the percipient's mind, which so stimulated the sensory tracts of his brain that he externalised that impression as a quasi-percept, or else the agent in some way modified an actual portion of space where (say) an apparition was discerned, perhaps by several percipients at once.

Phrased in this manner, the telepathic impact seemed the less startling, the less extreme hypothesis of the two,--mainly, perhaps, because the picture which it called up was left so vague and obscure. But now instead of a fleeting hallucination we have to deal with a strong and lasting impulse--such, for instance, as the girl's impulse to write, in Dr. Liébeault's case (Appendix VIII. C):--an impulse which seems to come from the depths of the being, and which (like a post-hypnotic suggestion) may override even strong disinclination, and keep the automatist uncomfortable until it has worked itself out. We may still call this a telepathic impact, if we will, but we shall find it hard to distinguish that term from a psychical invasion. This strong, yet apparently alien, motor innervation corresponds in fact as closely as possible to our idea of an invasion--an invasion no longer of the room only in which the percipient is sitting, but of his own body and his own powers. It is an invasion which, if sufficiently prolonged, would become a possession; and it both unites and intensifies those two earlier conjectures;--of telepathic impact on the percipient's mind, and of "phantasmogenetic presence" in the percipient's surroundings. What seemed at first a mere impact is tending to become a persistent control; what seemed an incursion merely into the percipient's environment has become an incursion into his organism itself.

As has been usual in this inquiry, this slight forward step from vagueness to comparative clearness of conception introduces us at once to a whole series of novel problems. Yet, as we have also learnt to expect, some of our earlier phenomena may have to be called in with advantage to illustrate phenomena more advanced.

In cases of split personality, to begin with, we have seen just the same phenomena occurring where certainly no personality was concerned save the percipient's own. We have seen a section of the subliminal self partially or temporarily dominating the organism; perhaps controlling permanently one arm alone;[193] or perhaps controlling intermittently the whole nervous system;--and all this with varying degrees of displacement of the primary personality.

Similarly with post-hypnotic suggestion. We have seen the subliminal self ordered to write (say) "It has left off raining"--and thereupon writing the words without the conscious will of the automatist--and again with varying degrees of displacement of the waking self. The step hence to such a case as Mrs. Newnham's is thus not a very long one. Mrs. Newnham's subliminal self, exercising supernormal faculty, and by some effort of its own, acquires certain facts from Mr. Newnham's mind, and uses her hand to write them down automatically. The great problem here introduced is how the subliminal self acquires the facts, rather than how it succeeds in writing them down when it has once acquired them.

But as we go further we can no longer limit the problem in this way,--to the activities of the automatist's subliminal self. We cannot always assume that some portion of the automatist's personality gets at the supernormal knowledge by some effort of its own. Our evidence, as we know, has pointed decisively to telepathic impacts or influences from without. What, then, is the mechanism here? Are we still to suppose that the automatist's subliminal self executes the movements--obeying somehow the bidding of the impulse from without? or does the external agent, who sends the telepathic message, himself execute the movements also, directly using the automatist's arm? And if telekinetic movements accompany the message (a subject thus far deferred, but of prime importance), are we to suppose that these also are effected by the percipient's subliminal self, under the guidance of some external spirit, incarnate or discarnate? or are they effected directly by that external spirit?

We cannot really say which of these two is the easier hypothesis.

From one point of view it may seem simpler to keep as long as we can to that acknowledged vera causa, the automatist's subliminal self; and to collect such observations as may indicate any power on its part of producing physical effects outside the organism. Such scattered observations occur at every stage, and even Mrs. Newnham (I may briefly observe in passing) thought that her pencil, when writing down the messages telepathically derived from her husband, was moved by something other than the ordinary muscular action of the fingers which held it. On the other hand, there seems something very forced in attributing to an external spirit's agency impulses and impressions which seem intimately the automatist's own, and at the same time refusing to ascribe to that external agency phenomena which take place outside the automatist's organism, and which present themselves to him as objective facts, as much outside his own being as the fall of the apple to the ground.

Reflecting on such points--and once admitting this kind of interaction between the automatist's own spirit and an external spirit, incarnate or discarnate--we find the possible combinations presenting themselves in perplexing variety;--a variety both of agencies on the part of the invading spirit, and of effects on the part of the invaded spirit and organism.

What is that which invades? and what is that which is displaced or superseded by this invasion? In what ways may two spirits co-operate in the possession and control of the same organism?

These last words--control and possession--remind us of the great mass of vague tradition and belief to the effect that spirits of the departed may exercise such possession or control over the living. To those ancient and vague beliefs it will be our task in the next chapter to give a form as exact and stable as we can. And observe with how entirely novel a preparation of mind we now enter on that task. The examination of "possession" is no longer to us, as to the ordinary civilised inquirer, a merely antiquarian or anthropological research into forms of superstition lying wholly apart from any valid or systematic thought. On the contrary, it is an inquiry directly growing out of previous evidence; directly needed for the full comprehension of known facts as well as for the discovery of facts unknown. We need, (so to say), to analyse the spectrum of helium, as detected in the sun, in order to check and correct our spectrum of helium as detected in the Bath waters. We are obliged to seek for certain definite phenomena in the spiritual world in order to explain certain definite phenomena of the world of matter.

IX. TRANCE, POSSESSION, AND ECSTASY

Vicit iter durum pietas.

--VIRGIL.

Possession, to define it for the moment in the narrowest way, is a more developed form of Motor Automatism. The difference broadly is, that in Possession the automatist's own personality does for the time altogether disappear, while there is a more or less complete substitution of personality; writing or speech being given by a spirit through the entranced organism. The change which has come over this branch of evidence since the present work was first projected, in 1888, is most significant. There existed indeed, at that date, a good deal of evidence which pointed in this direction,[194] but for various reasons most of that evidence was still possibly explicable in other ways. Even the phenomena of Mr. W. S. Moses left it possible to argue that the main "controls" under which he wrote or spoke when entranced were self-suggestions of his own mind, or phases of his own deeper personality. I had not then had the opportunity, which the kindness of his executors after his death afforded to me, of studying the whole series of his original note-books, and forming at first-hand my present conviction that spiritual agency was an actual and important element in that long sequence of communications. On the whole, I did not then anticipate that the theory of possession could be presented as more than a plausible speculation, or as a supplement to other lines of proof of man's survival of death.

The position of things, as the reader of the S.P.R. Proceedings knows, has since that time undergone a complete change. The trance-phenomena of Mrs. Piper--so long and so carefully watched by Dr. Hodgson and others--formed, I think, by far the most remarkable mass of psychical evidence till then adduced in any quarter. And more recently other series of trance-phenomena with other "mediums"--though still incomplete--have added materially to the evidence obtained through Mrs. Piper. The result broadly is that these phenomena of possession are now the most amply attested, as well as intrinsically the most advanced, in our whole repertory.

Nor, again, is the mere increment of direct evidence, important though that is, the sole factor in the changed situation. Not only has direct evidence grown, but indirect evidence, so to say, has moved to meet it. The notion of personality--of the control of organism by spirit--has gradually been so modified that Possession, which passed till the other day as a mere survival of savage thought, is now seen to be the consummation, the furthest development of many lines of experiment, observation, reflection, which the preceding chapters have opened to our view.

Let us then at once consider what the notion of possession does actually claim. It will be better to face that claim in its full extent at once, as it will be seen that the evidence, while rising through various stages, does in the end insist on all that the ancient term implies. The leading modern cases, of which Stainton Moses and Mrs. Piper may be taken as types, are closely analogous, presenting many undesigned coincidences, some of which come out only on close examination.

The claim, then, is that the automatist, in the first place, falls into a trance, during which his spirit partially "quits his body:" enters at any rate into a state in which the spiritual world is more or less open to its perception; and in which also--and this is the novelty--it so far ceases to occupy the organism as to leave room for an invading spirit to use it in somewhat the same fashion as its owner is accustomed to use it.

The brain being thus left temporarily and partially uncontrolled, a disembodied spirit sometimes, but not always, succeeds in occupying it; and occupies it with varying degrees of control. In some cases (Mrs. Piper) two or more spirits may simultaneously control different portions of the same organism.

The controlling spirit proves his identity mainly by reproducing, in speech or writing, facts which belong to his memory and not to the automatist's memory. He may also give evidence of supernormal perception of other kinds.

His manifestations may differ very considerably from the automatist's normal personality. Yet in one sense it is a process of selection rather than of addition; the spirit selects what parts of the brain-machinery he will use, but he cannot get out of that machinery more than it is constructed to perform. The spirit can indeed produce facts and names unknown to the automatist; but they must be, as a rule, such facts and names as the automatist could easily have repeated, had they been known to him:--not, for instance, mathematical formulæ or Chinese sentences, if the automatist is ignorant of mathematics or of Chinese.

After a time the control gives way, and the automatist's spirit returns. The automatist, awaking, may or may not remember his experiences in the spiritual world during the trance. In some cases (Swedenborg) there is this memory of the spiritual world, but no possession of the organism by an external spirit. In others (Cahagnet's subject) there is utterance during the trance as to what is being discerned by the automatist, yet no memory thereof on waking. In others (Mrs. Piper) there is neither utterance as a rule, or at least no prolonged utterance, by the automatist's own spirit, nor subsequent memory; but there is writing or utterance during the trance by controlling spirits.

Now this seems a strange doctrine to have reached after so much disputation. For it simply brings us back to the creeds of the Stone Age. We have come round again to the primitive practices of the shaman and the medicine-man;--to a doctrine of spiritual intercourse which was once oecumenical, but has now taken refuge in African swamps and Siberian tundras and the snow-clad wastes of the Red Indian and the Esquimaux. If, as is sometimes advised, we judge of the worth of ideas by tracing their origins, no conception could start from a lower level of humanity. It might be put out of court at once as unworthy of civilised men.

Fortunately, however, our previous discussions have supplied us with a somewhat more searching criterion. Instead of asking in what age a doctrine originated--with the implied assumption that the more recent it is, the better--we can now ask how far it is in accord or in discord with a great mass of actual recent evidence which comes into contact, in one way or another, with nearly every belief as to an unseen world which has been held at least by western men. Submitted to this test, the theory of possession gives a remarkable result. It cannot be said to be inconsistent with any of our proved facts. We know absolutely nothing which negatives its possibility.

Nay, more than this. The theory of possession actually supplies us with a powerful method of co-ordinating and explaining many earlier groups of phenomena, if only we will consent to explain them in a way which at first sight seemed extreme in its assumptions--seemed unduly prodigal of the marvellous. Yet as to that difficulty we have learnt by this time that no explanation of psychical phenomena is really simple, and that our best clue is to get hold of some group which seems to admit of one interpretation only, and then to use that group as a point de repère from which to attack more complex problems.

Now I think that the Moses-Piper group of trance-phenomena cannot be intelligently explained on any theory except that of possession. And I therefore think it important to consider in what way earlier phenomena have led up to possession, and in what way the facts of possession, in their turn, affect our view of these earlier phenomena.

If we analyse our observations of possession, we find two main factors--the central operation, which is the control by a spirit of the sensitive's organism; and the indispensable prerequisite, which is the partial and temporary desertion of that organism by the percipient's own spirit.

Let us consider first how far this withdrawal of the living man's spirit from his organism has been rendered conceivable by evidence already obtained.

First of all, the splits, and substitutions of phases of personality with which our second chapter made us familiar have great significance for possession also.

We have there seen some secondary personality, beginning with slight and isolated sensory and motor manifestations, yet going on gradually to complete predominance,--complete control of all supraliminal manifestation.

The mere collection and description of such phenomena has up till now savoured of a certain boldness. The idea of tracing the possible mechanism involved in these transitions has scarcely arisen.

Yet it is manifest that there must be a complex set of laws concerned with such alternating use of brain-centres;--developments, one may suppose, of those unknown physical laws underlying ordinary memory, of which no one has formed as yet even a first rough conception.

An ordinary case of ecmnesia may present problems as insoluble in their way as those offered by spirit-possession itself. There may be in ecmnesia periods of life absolutely and permanently extruded from memory; and there may be also periods which are only temporarily thus extruded. Thus on Wednesday and Thursday I may be unaware of what I learnt and did on Monday and Tuesday; and then on Friday I may recover Monday's and Tuesday's knowledge, as well as retaining Wednesday's and Thursday's, so that my brain-cells have taken on, so to say, two separate lines of education since Sunday--that which began on Monday, and that which began on Wednesday. These intercurrent educations may have been naturally discordant, and may be fused in all kinds of ways in the ultimate synthesis.

These processes are completely obscure; and all that can be said is that their mechanism probably belongs to the same unknown series of operations which ultimately lead to that completest break in the history of the brain-cells which consists in their intercalary occupation by an external spirit.

Passing on to genius, which I discussed in my third chapter, it is noticeable that there also there is a certain degree of temporary substitution of one control for another over important brain-centres. We must here regard the subliminal self as an entity partially distinct from the supraliminal, and its occupation of these brain-centres habitually devoted to supraliminal work is a kind of possession, which illustrates in yet another way the rapid metastasis of psychical product (so to term it) of which these highest centres are capable. The highest genius would thus be the completest self-possession,--the occupation and dominance of the whole organism by those profoundest elements of the self which act from the fullest knowledge, and in the wisest way.

The next main subject which fell under our description was sleep. And this state--the normal state which most resembles trance--has long ago suggested the question which first hints at the possibility of ecstasy, namely, What becomes of the soul during sleep? I think that our evidence has shown that sometimes during apparent ordinary sleep the spirit may travel away from the body, and may bring back a memory, more or less confused, of what it has seen in this clairvoyant excursion. This may indeed happen for brief flashes during waking moments also. But ordinary sleep seems to help the process; and deeper states of sleep--spontaneous or induced--seem still further to facilitate it. In the coma preceding death, or during that "suspended animation" which is sometimes taken for death, this travelling faculty has seemed to reach its highest point.

I have spoken of deeper states of sleep, "spontaneous or induced," and here the reader will naturally recall much that has been said of ordinary somnambulism, much that has been said of hypnotic trance. Hypnotic trance has created for us, with perfect facility, situations externally indistinguishable from what I shall presently claim as true possession. A quasi-personality, arbitrarily created, may occupy the organism, responding to speech or sign in some characteristic fashion, although without producing any fresh verifiable facts as evidence to the alleged identity. Nay, sometimes, as in a few of the Pesaro experiments (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 563-565), there may be indications that something of a new personality is there. And on the other hand, the sensitive's own spirit often claims to have been absent elsewhere,--much in the fashion in which it sometimes imagines itself to have been absent during ordinary sleep, but with greater persistence and lucidity.

Our inquiry into the nature of what is thus alleged to be seen in sleep and cognate states has proved instructive. Sometimes known earthly scenes appear to be revisited--with only such alteration as may have taken place since the sleeper last visited them in waking hours. But sometimes also there is an admixture of an apparently symbolical element. The earthly scene includes some element of human action, which is presented in a selected or abbreviated fashion, as though some mind had been concerned to bring out a special significance from the complex story. Sometimes this element becomes quite dominant; phantasmal figures are seen; or there may be a prolonged symbolical representation of an entry into the spiritual world.

Cases like these do of course apparently support that primitive doctrine of the spirit's actual wandering in space. On the other hand, this notion has become unwelcome to modern thought, which is less unwilling to believe in some telepathic intercourse between mind and mind in which space is not involved. For my own part, I have already explained that I think that the evidence to an at least apparent movement of some kind in space must outweigh any mere speculative presumption against it. And I hold that these new experiences of possession fall on this controversy with decisive force. It is so strongly claimed, in every instance of possession, that the sensitive's own spirit must in some sense vacate the organism, in order to allow another spirit to enter,--and the evidence for the reality of possession is at the same time so strong,--that I think that we must argue back from this spatial change as a relatively certain fact, and must place a corresponding interpretation on earlier phenomena. Such an interpretation, if once admitted, does certainly meet the phenomena in the way most accordant with the subjective impressions of the various percipients.

As we have already repeatedly found, it is the bold evolutionary hypothesis which best fixes and colligates the scattered facts. We encounter in these studies phenomena of degeneration and phenomena of evolution. The degenerative phenomena are explicable singly and in detail as declensions in divergent directions from an existing level. The evolutive phenomena point, on the other hand, to new generalisations;--to powers previously unrecognised towards which our evidence converges along constantly multiplying lines.

This matter of psychical excursion from the organism ultimately involves the extremest claim to novel faculty which has ever been advanced for men. For it involves, as we shall see, the claim to ecstasy:--to a wandering vision which is not confined to this earth or this material world alone, but introduces the seer into the spiritual world and among communities higher than any which this planet knows. The discussion of this transportation, however, will be better deferred until after the evidence for possession has been laid before the reader at some length.

Continuing, then, for the present our analysis of the idea of possession, we come now to its specific feature,--the occupation by a spiritual agency of the entranced and partially vacated organism. Here it is that our previous studies will do most to clear our conceptions. Instead of at once leaping to the question of what spirits in their essence are,--of what they can do and cannot do,--of the antecedent possibility of their re-entry into matter, and the like,--we must begin by simply carrying the idea of telepathy to its furthest point. We must imagine telepathy becoming as central and as intense as possible;--and we shall find that of two diverging types of telepathic intercourse which will thus present themselves, the one will gradually correspond to possession, and the other to ecstasy.

But here let us pause, and consider what is the truest conception which we are by this time able to form of telepathy. The word has been a convenient one; the central notion--of communication beyond this range of sense--can at any rate thus be expressed in simple terms. But nevertheless there has been nothing to assure us that our real comprehension of telepathic processes has got much deeper than that verbal definition. Our conception of telepathy, indeed, to say nothing of telæsthesia, has needed to be broadened with each fresh stage of our evidence. That evidence at first revealed to us certain transmissions of thoughts and images which suggested the passage of actual etherial vibrations from brain to brain. Nor indeed can any one say at any point of our evidence that etherial vibrations are demonstrably not concerned in the phenomena. We cannot tell how far from the material world (to use a crude phrase) some etherial agency may possibly extend. But telepathic phenomena are in fact soon seen to overpass any development which imaginative analogy can give to the conception of etherial radiation from one material point to another.

For from the mere transmission of isolated ideas or pictures there is, as my readers know, a continuous progression to impressions and apparitions far more persistent and complex. We encounter an influence which suggests no mere impact of etherial waves, but an intelligent and responsive presence, resembling nothing so much as the ordinary human intercourse of persons in bodily nearness. Such visions or auditions, inward or externalised, are indeed sometimes felt to involve an even closer contact of spirits than the common intercourse of earth allows. One could hardly assign etherial undulations as their cause without assigning that same mechanism to all our emotions felt towards each other, or even to our control over our own organisms.

Nay, more. There is--as I have striven to show--a further progression from these telepathic intercommunications between living men to intercommunications between living men and discarnate spirits. And this new thesis,--in every way of vital importance,--while practically solving one problem on which I have already dwelt, opens also a possibility of the determination of another problem, nowise accessible until now. In the first place, we may now rest assured that telepathic communication is not necessarily propagated by vibrations proceeding from an ordinary material brain. For the discarnate spirit at any rate has no such brain from which to start them.

So much, in the first place, for the agent's end of the communication.

And in the second place, we now discern a possibility of getting at the percipient's end; of determining whether the telepathic impact is received by the brain or by the spirit of the living man, or by both inseparably, or sometimes by one and sometimes by the other.

On this problem, I say, the phenomena of automatic script, of trance-utterance, of spirit-possession, throw more of light than we could have ventured to hope.

Stated broadly, our trance-phenomena show us to begin with that several currents of communication can pass at once from discarnate spirits to a living man;--and can pass in very varying ways. For clearness' sake I will put aside for the present all cases where the telepathic impact takes an externalised or sensory form, and will speak only of intellectual impressions and motor automatisms.

Now these may pass through all grades of apparent centrality. If a man, awake and in other respects fully self-controlled, feels his hand impelled to scrawl words on a piece of paper, without consciousness of motor effort of his own, the impulse does not seem to him a central one, although some part of his brain is presumably involved. On the other hand, a much less conspicuous invasion of his personality may feel much more central;--as, for instance, a premonition of evil,--an inward heaviness which he can scarcely define. And so the motor automatism goes on until it reaches the point of possession;--that is to say, until the man's own consciousness is absolutely in abeyance, and every part of his body is utilised by the invading spirit or spirits. What happens in such conditions to the man's ruling principle--to his own spirit--we must consider presently. But so far as his organism is concerned, the invasion seems complete: and it indicates a power which is indeed telepathic in a true sense;--yet not quite in the sense which we originally attached to the word. We first thought of telepathy as of a communication between two minds, whereas what we have here looks more like a communication between a mind and a body,--an external mind, in place of the mind which is accustomed to rule that particular body.

There is in such a case no apparent communication between the discarnate mind and the mind of the automatist. Rather there is a kind of contact between the discarnate mind and the brain of the automatist, in so far that the discarnate mind, pursuing its own ends, is helped up to a certain point by the accumulated capacities of the automatist's brain;--and similarly is hindered by its incapacities.

Yet here the most characteristic element of telepathy, I repeat, seems to have dropped out altogether. There is no perceptible communion between the mind of the entranced person and any other mind whatever. He is possessed, but is kept in unconsciousness, and never regains memory of what his lips have uttered during his trance.

But let us see whether we have thus grasped all the trance-phenomena;--whether something else may not be going on, which is more truly, more centrally telepathic.

To go back to the earliest stage of telepathic experience, we can see well enough that the experimental process might quite possibly involve two different factors. The percipient's mind must somehow receive the telepathic impression;--and to this reception we can assign no definite physical correlative;--and also the percipient's motor or sensory centres must receive an excitation;--which excitation may be communicated, for aught we know, either by his own mind in the ordinary way, or by the agent's mind in some direct way,--which I may call telergic, thus giving a more precise sense to a word which I long ago suggested as a kind of correlative to telepathic. That is to say, there may even in these apparently simple cases be first a transmission from agent to percipient in the spiritual world, and then an action on the percipient's physical brain, of the same type as spirit-possession. This action on the physical brain may be due either to the percipient's own spirit, or subliminal self, or else directly to the agent's spirit. For I must repeat that the phenomena of possession seem to indicate that the extraneous spirit acts on a man's organism in very much the same way as the man's own spirit habitually acts on it. One must thus practically regard the body as an instrument upon which a spirit plays;--an ancient metaphor which now seems actually our nearest approximation to truth.

Proceeding to the case of telepathic or veridical apparitions, we see the same hints of a double nature in the process;--traces of two elements mingling in various degrees. At the spiritual end there may be what we have called "clairvoyant visions,"--pictures manifestly symbolical, and not located by the observer in ordinary three-dimensional space. These seem analogous to the views of the spiritual world which the sensitive enjoys during entrancement. Then comes that larger class of veridical apparitions where the figure seems to be externalised from the percipient's mind, some stimulus having actually been applied,--whether by agent's or percipient's spirit,--to the appropriate brain-centre. These cases of "sensory automatism" resemble those experimental transferences of pictures of cards, etc. And beyond these again, on the physical or rather the ultra-physical side, come those collective apparitions which in my view involve some unknown kind of modification of a certain portion of space not occupied by any organism,--as opposed to a modification of centres in one special brain. Here comes in, as I hold, the gradual transition from subjective to objective, as the portion of space in question is modified in a manner to affect a larger and larger number of percipient minds.

Now when we proceed from these apparitions of the living to apparitions of the departed, we find very much the same types persisting still. We find symbolical visions of departed persons, and of scenes among which they seem to dwell. We find externalised apparitions or phantasms of departed persons,--indicating that some point in the percipient's brain has been stimulated by his own or by some other spirit. And finally, as has already been said, we find that in certain cases of possession these two kinds of influence are simultaneously carried to an extreme. The percipient automatist of earlier stages becomes no longer a percipient but an automatist pure and simple,--so far as his body is concerned,--for his whole brain--not one point alone--seems now to be stimulated and controlled by an extraneous spirit, and he is not himself aware of what his body writes or utters. And meantime his spirit, partially set free from the body, may be purely percipient;--may be enjoying that other spiritual form of communication more completely than in any type of vision which our description had hitherto reached.

This point attained, another analogy, already mentioned, will be at once recalled. There is another class of phenomena, besides telepathy, of which this definition of possession at once reminds us. We have dealt much with secondary personalities,--with severances and alternations affecting a man's own spirit, in varying relation with his organism. Félida X.'s developed secondary personality, for instance (Appendix II. C), might be defined as another fragment--or another synthesis--of Félida's spirit acting upon her organism in much the same way as the original fragment--or the primary synthesis--of her spirit was wont to act upon it.

Plainly, this analogy is close enough to be likely to lead to practical confusion. On what grounds can we base our distinctions? What justifies us in saying that Félida X.'s organism was controlled only by another modification of her own personality, but that Mrs. Piper's is controlled by George Pelham (see page 330 et seq.)? May there not be any amount of self-suggestion, colouring with the fictitious hue of all kinds of identities what is in reality no more than an allotropic form of the entranced person himself? Is even the possession by the new personality of some fragments of fresh knowledge any proof of spirit-control? May not that knowledge be gained clairvoyantly or telepathically, with no intervention of any spirit other than of living men?

Yes, indeed, we must reply, there is here a danger of confusion, there is a lack of any well-defined dividing line. While we must decide on general rules, we must also keep our minds open to possible exceptions.

On the negative side, indeed, general rules will carry us a good way. We must not allow ourselves to ascribe to spirit-control cases where no new knowledge is shown in the trance state. And this rule has at once an important consequence,--a consequence which profoundly modifies the antique idea of possession. I know of no evidence,--reaching in any way our habitual standard,--either for angelic, for diabolical, or for hostile possession.

And here comes the question: What attitude are we to assume to savage cases of possession? Are we to accept as genuine the possession of the Esquimaux, the Chinaman,--nay, of the Hebrew of old days?

Chinese possession is a good example, as described in Dr. Nevius' book (on Demon Possession and Allied Themes, an account of which by Professor Newbold is given in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xiii. p. 602 [912 A]). I agree with Professor Newbold in holding that no proof has been shown that there is more in the Chinese cases than that hysterical duplication of personality with which we are so familiar in France and elsewhere.

A devil is not a creature whose existence is independently known to science; and from the accounts the behaviour of the invading devils seems due to mere self-suggestion. With uncivilised races, even more than among our own friends, we are bound to insist on the rule that there must be some supernormal knowledge shown before we may assume an external influence. It may of course be replied that the character shown by the "devils" was fiendish and actually hostile to the possessed person. Can we suppose that the tormentor was actually a fraction of the tormented?

I reply that such a supposition, so far from being absurd, is supported by well-known phenomena both in insanity and in mere hysteria.

Especially in the Middle Ages,--amid powerful self-suggestions of evil and terror,--did these quasi-possessions reach an intensity and violence which the calm and sceptical atmosphere of the modern hospital checks and discredits. The devils with terrifying names which possessed Soeur Angélique of Loudun[195] would at the Salpêtrière under Charcot in our days have figured merely as stages of "clounisme" and "attitudes passionelles."

And even now these splits of personality seem occasionally to destroy all sympathy between the normal individual and a divergent fraction. No great sympathy was felt by Léonie II. for Léonie I.[196] And Dr. Morton Prince's case[197] shows us the deepest and ablest of the personalities of his "Miss Beauchamp" positively spiteful in its relation to her main identity.

Bizarre though a house thus divided against itself may seem, the moral dissidence is merely an exaggeration of the moral discontinuity observable in the typical case of Mrs. Newnham.[198] There the secondary intelligence was merely tricky, not malevolent. But its trickiness was wholly alien from Mrs. Newnham's character,--was something, indeed, which she would have energetically repudiated.

It seems, therefore,--and the analogy of dreams points in this direction also,--that our moral nature is as easily split up as our intellectual nature, and that we cannot be any more certain that the minor current of personality which is diverted into some new channel will retain moral than that it will retain intellectual coherence.

To return once more to the Chinese devil-possessions. Dr. Nevius asserts, though without adducing definite proof, that the possessing devils sometimes showed supernormal knowledge. This is a better argument for their separate existence than their fiendish temper is; but it is not in itself enough. The knowledge does not seem to have been specially appropriate to the supposed informing spirit. It seems as though it may have depended upon heightened memory, with possibly some slight telepathic or telæsthetic perception. Heightened memory is thoroughly characteristic of some hysterical phases; and even the possible traces of telepathy (although far the most important feature of the phenomena, if they really occurred) are, as we have seen, not unknown in trance states (like Léonie's) where there is no indication of an invading spirit.

Temporary control of the organism by a widely divergent fragment of the personality, self-suggested in some dream-like manner into hostility to the main mass of the personality, and perhaps better able than that normal personality to reach and manipulate certain stored impressions,--or even certain supernormal influences,--such will be the formula to which we shall reduce the invading Chinese devil, as described by Dr. Nevius,--and probably the great majority of supposed devil-possessions of similar type.

The great majority, no doubt, but perhaps not all. It would indeed be matter for surprise if such trance-phenomena as those of Mrs. Piper and other modern cases had appeared in the world without previous parallel. Much more probable is it that similar phenomena have occurred sporadically from the earliest times,--although men have not had enough of training to analyse them.

And, in fact, among the endless descriptions of trance-phenomena with which travellers furnish us, there are many which include points so concordant with our recent observations that we cannot but attach some weight to coincidences so wholly undesigned.[199] But although this may be admitted, I still maintain that the only invaders of the organism who have as yet made good their title have been human, and have been friendly; and with this clearance should, I think, vanish the somewhat grim associations which have gathered around the word possession.

Assuming, then, as I think we at present may assume, that we have to deal only with spirits who have been men like ourselves, and who are still animated by much the same motives as those which influence us, we may briefly consider, on similar analogical grounds, what range of spirits are likely to be able to affect us, and what difficulties they are likely to find in doing so. Of course, actual experience alone can decide this; but nevertheless our expectations may be usefully modified if we reflect beforehand how far such changes of personality as we already know can suggest to us the limits of these profounder substitutions.

What, to begin with, do we find to be the case as to addition of faculty in alternating states? How far do such changes bring with them unfamiliar powers?

Reference to the recorded cases will show us that existing faculty may be greatly quickened and exalted. There may be an increase both in actual perception and in power of remembering or reproducing what has once been perceived. There may be increased control over muscular action,--as shown, for instance, in improved billiard-playing,--in the secondary state. But there is little evidence of the acquisition--telepathy apart--of any actual mass of fresh knowledge,--such as a new language, or a stage of mathematical knowledge unreached before. We shall not therefore be justified by analogy in expecting that an external spirit controlling an organism will be able easily to modify it in such a way as to produce speech in a language previously unknown. The brain is used as something between a typewriter and a calculating machine. German words, for instance, are not mere combinations of letters, but specific formulæ; they can only seldom and with great difficulty be got out of a machine which has not been previously fashioned for their production.

Consider, again, the analogies as to memory. In the case of alternations of personality, memory fails and changes in what seems a quite capricious way. The gaps which then occur recall (as I have said) the ecmnesia or blank unrecollected spaces which follow upon accidents to the head, or upon crises of fever, when all memories that belong to a particular person or to a particular period of life are clean wiped out, other memories remaining intact. Compare, again, the memory of waking life which we retain in dream. This too is absolutely capricious;--I may forget my own name in a dream, and yet remember perfectly the kind of chairs in my dining-room. Or I may remember the chairs, but locate them in some one else's house. No one can predict the kind of confusion which may occur.

We have also the parallel of somnambulic utterance. In talking with a somnambulist, be the somnambulism natural or induced, we find it hard to get into continuous colloquy on our own subjects. To begin with, he probably will not speak continuously for long together. He drops back into a state in which he cannot express himself at all. And when he does talk, he is apt to talk only on his own subjects;--to follow out his own train of ideas,--interrupted rather than influenced by what we say to him. The difference of state between waking and sleep is in many ways hard to bridge over.

We have thus three parallelisms which may guide and limit our expectations. From the parallelism of possession with split personalities we may infer that a possessing spirit is not likely to be able to inspire into the recipient brain ideas or words of very unfamiliar type. From the parallelism of possession with dream we may infer that the memory of the possessing spirit may be subject to strange omissions and confusions. From the parallelism with somnambulism we may infer that colloquy between a human observer and the possessing spirit is not likely to be full or free, but rather to be hampered by difference of state, and abbreviated by the difficulty of maintaining psychical contact for long together.

These remarks will, I hope, prepare the reader to consider the problems of possession with the same open-mindedness which has been needed for the study of previous problems attacked in the present work.

But before we can proceed to the actual evidence there is another aspect of possession which must be explained. A group of phenomena are involved which have in various ways done much to confuse and even to retard our main inquiry, but which, when properly placed and understood, are seen to form an inevitable part of any scheme which strives to discover the influence of unseen agencies in the world we know.

In our discussion of all telepathic and other supernormal influence I have thus far regarded it mainly from the psychological and not from the physical side. I have spoken as though the field of supernormal action has been always the metetherial world. Yet true as this dictum may be in its deepest sense, it cannot represent the whole truth "for beings such as we are, in a world like the present." For us every psychological fact has (so far as we know) a physical side; and metetherial events, to be perceptible to us, must somehow affect the world of matter.

In sensory and motor automatisms, then, we see effects, supernormally initiated, upon the world of matter.

Imprimis, of course, and in ordinary life our own spirits (their existence once granted) affect our own bodies and are our standing examples of spirit affecting matter. Next, if a man receives a telepathic impact from another incarnate spirit which causes him to see a phantasmal figure, that man's brain has, we may suppose, been directly affected by his own spirit rather than by the spirit of the distant friend. But it may not always be true even in the case of sensory automatisms that the distant spirit has made a suggestion merely to the percipient's spirit which the percipient's own spirit carries out; and in motor automatisms, as they develop into possession, there are indications, as I have already pointed out, that the influence of the agent's spirit is telergic rather than telepathic, and that we have extraneous spirits influencing the human brain or organism. That is to say, they are producing movements in matter;--even though that matter be organised matter and those movements molecular.

So soon as this fact is grasped,--and it has not always been grasped by those who have striven to establish a fundamental difference between spiritual influence on our spirits and spiritual influence on the material world,--we shall naturally be prompted to inquire whether inorganic matter as well as organic ever shows the agency of extraneous spirits upon it. The reply which first suggests itself is, of course, in the negative. We are constantly dealing with inorganic matter, and no hypothesis of spiritual influence exerted on such matter is needed to explain our experiments. But this is a rough general statement, hardly likely to cover phenomena so rare and fugitive as many of those with which in this inquiry we deal. Let us begin, so to say, at the other end; not with the broad experience of life, but with the delicate and exceptional cases of possession of which we have lately been speaking.

Suppose that a discarnate spirit, in temporary possession of a living organism, is impelling it to motor automatisms. Can we say a priori what the limits of such automatic movements of that organism are likely to be, in the same way as we can say what the limits of any of its voluntary movements are likely to be? May not this extraneous spirit get more motor power out of the organism than the waking man himself can get out of it? It would not surprise us, for example, if the movements in trance showed increased concentration; if a dynamometer (for instance) was more forcibly squeezed by the spirit acting through the man than by the man himself. Is there any other way in which one would imagine that a spirit possessing me could use my vital force more skilfully than I could use it myself?

I do not know how my will moves my arm; but I know by experience that my will generally moves only my arm and what my arm can touch;--whatever objects are actually in contact with the "protoplasmic skeleton" which represents the life of my organism. Yet I can sometimes move objects not in actual contact, as by melting them with the heat or (in the dry air of Colorado) kindling them with the electricity, which my fingers emit. I see no very definite limit to this power. I do not know all the forms of energy which my fingers might, under suitable training, emit.

And now suppose that a possessing spirit can use my organism more skilfully than I can. May he not manage to emit from that organism some energy which can visibly move ponderable objects not actually in contact with my flesh? That would be a phenomenon of possession not very unlike its other phenomena;--and it would be telekinesis.

By that word (due to M. Aksakoff) it is convenient to describe what have been called "the physical phenomena of spiritualism," as to whose existence as a reality, and not as a system of fraudulent pretences, fierce controversy has raged for half a century, and is still raging.

The interest excited in the ordinary public by these phenomena has, as is well known, fostered much fraud, to expose and guard against which has been one of the main tasks of the S.P.R.[200]

Indeed, the persistent simulation of telekinesis has, naturally enough, inspired persistent doubt as to its genuine occurrence even in cases where simulation has been carefully guarded against, or is antecedently improbable. And thus while believing absolutely in the occurrence of telekinetic phenomena, I yet hold that it would be premature to press them upon my readers' belief, or to introduce them as an integral part of my general expository scheme. From one point of view, their detailed establishment, as against the theory of fraud, demands an expert knowledge of conjuring and other arts which I cannot claim to possess. From another point of view, their right comprehension must depend upon a knowledge of the relations between matter and ether such as is now only dimly adumbrated by the most recent discoveries;--for instance, discoveries as to previously unsuspected forms of radiation.

In a long Appendix, viz., "Scheme of Vital Faculty"[201]--originally written with reference to the manifestations through Mr. Stainton Moses--I have tried to prepare the way for future inquiries; to indicate in what directions a better equipped exploration may hereafter reap rich reward. Even that tentative sketch, perhaps, may have been too ambitious for my powers in the present state not only of my own, but of human knowledge; and in this chapter I shall allude to telekinetic phenomena only where unavoidable,--owing to their inmixture into phenomena more directly psychological,--and in the tone of the historian rather than of the scientific critic.

* * * * *[202]

The way has now been so far cleared for our cases of Possession that at least the principal phenomena claimed have been (I hope) made intelligible, and shown to be concordant with other phenomena already described and attested. It will be best, however, to consider first some of the more rudimentary cases before going on to our own special instances of possession,--those of Mr. Stainton Moses or Mrs. Piper.

We have already seen that there is no great gulf between the sudden incursions, the rapid messages of the dead, with which we are already familiar, and incursions so intimate, messages so prolonged, as to lay claim to a name more descriptive than that of motor automatisms.

And similarly no line of absolute separation can be drawn between the brief psychical excursions previously described, and those more prolonged excursions of the spirit which I would group under the name of ecstasy.

In the earlier part of this book I have naturally dwelt rather on the evidence for supernormal acquisition of knowledge than on the methods of such acquisition, and my present discussion must needs be restricted to a certain extent in the same way. We must, however, attempt some provisional scheme of classification, though recognising that the difficulties of interpretation which I pointed out in Chapter IV., when endeavouring to distinguish between telepathy and telæsthesia, meet us again in dealing with possession and ecstasy. We may not, that is, be able to say, as regards a particular manifestation, whether it is an instance of incipient possession, or incipient ecstasy, or even whether the organism is being "controlled" directly by some extraneous spirit or by its own incarnate spirit. It is from the extreme cases that we form our categories. But now that we have reached some conception of what is involved in ecstasy and possession, we can interpret some earlier cases in this new light. Such experiences, for instance, as those of Mr. Mamtchitch (Appendix VII. A) and Miss Conley (Appendix VII. D), suggest a close kinship to the more developed cases of Mr. Moses and Mrs. Piper.

In other cases it may be clear that no control of any discarnate spirit is involved, but there seems to be something like incipient possession by the subliminal self or incarnate spirit. From this point of view the first case given in Appendix IX. B is of undoubted psychological interest. If it is not a case of thought-transference from Miss C. to Mrs. Luther (possibly between their subliminal selves during sleep), we must assume that a very remarkable recrudescence of latent memory occurred to the latter independently, at the same time that a similar though less remarkable revival of memory occurred to the former. But I introduce the case here simply as suggestive of the momentary domination of the subliminal over the supraliminal self.

In Professor Thoulet's case[203] we find a fuller control by the subliminal self, with a manifestation of knowledge suggesting some spiritual excursion; in Mr. Goodall's case there seems to be a telepathic conversation between his subliminal self controlling his utterance and some perhaps discarnate spirit; and finally, in Mr. Wilkie's case, there is the definite superposition, as it were, of a discarnate spirit's message upon the automatist in such a way that we are led to wonder whether it was the mind or the brain of the automatist that received the message. The first step apparently is the abeyance of the supraliminal self and the dominance of the subliminal self, which may lead in rare cases to a form of trance (or of what we have hitherto called secondary personality) where the whole body of the automatist is controlled by his own subliminal self, or incarnate spirit, but where there is no indication of any relation with discarnate spirits. The next form of trance is where the incarnate spirit, whether or not maintaining control of the whole body, makes excursions into or holds telepathic intercourse with the spiritual world. And, lastly, there is the trance of possession by another, a discarnate spirit. We cannot, of course, always distinguish between these three main types of trance--which, as we shall see later, themselves admit of different degrees and varieties.

The most striking case known to me of the first form of trance--possession by the subliminal self--is that of the Rev. C. B. Sanders,[204] whose trance-personality has always called itself by the name of "X + Y = Z." The life of the normal Mr. Sanders has apparently been passed in the environment of a special form of Presbyterian doctrine, and there seems to have been a fear on the part of Mr. Sanders himself lest the trance manifestations of which he was the subject should conflict with the theological position which he held as a minister; and indeed for several years of his early suffering "he was inclined to regard his peculiar case of affliction as the result of Satanic agency." On the part of some of his friends also there seems to be a special desire to show that "X + Y = Z" was not heterodox. Under these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that we find so much reticence in "X + Y = Z" concerning his own relations to the normal Mr. Sanders, whom he calls "his casket." What little explanation is offered seems to be in singular harmony with one of the main tenets advanced in this book, since the claim made by "X + Y = Z" is obviously that he represents the incarnate spirit of Mr. Sanders exercising the higher faculties which naturally pertain to it, but which can be manifested to the full only when it is freed from its fleshly barriers. This frequently occurs, he says, in dying persons, who describe scenes in the spiritual world, and in his own experience when "his casket" is similarly affected, and the bodily obstructions to spiritual vision are removed.

In this case, then, the subliminal self seems to take complete control of the organism, exercising its own powers of telepathy and telæsthesia, but showing no evidence of direct communication with discarnate spirits. We must now pass on to the most notable recent case where such communication has been claimed,--that of Swedenborg,--to whose exceptional trance-history and attempt to give some scientific system to his experiences of ecstasy I referred in Chapter I.

The evidential matter which Swedenborg has left behind him is singularly scanty in comparison with his pretensions to a communion of many years with so many spirits of the departed. But I think that the half-dozen "evidential cases" scattered through his memoirs are stamped with the impress of truth,--and I think, also, that without some true experience of the spiritual world Swedenborg could not have entered into that atmosphere of truth in which even his worst errors are held in solution. Swedenborg's writings on the world of spirits fall in the main into two classes,--albeit classes not easily divided. There are experiential writings and there are dogmatic writings. The first of these classes contains accounts of what he saw and felt in that world, and of such inferences with regard to its laws as his actual experience suggested. Now, speaking broadly, all this mass of matter, covering some hundreds of propositions, is in substantial accord with what has been given through the most trustworthy sensitives since Swedenborg's time. It is indeed usual to suppose that they have all been influenced by Swedenborg; and although I feel sure that this was not so in any direct manner in the case of the sensitives best known to myself, it is probable that Swedenborg's alleged experiences have affected modern thought more deeply than most modern thinkers know.

On the other hand, the second or purely dogmatic class of Swedenborg's writings,--the records of instruction alleged to have been given to him by spirits on the inner meaning of the Scriptures, etc.,--these have more and more appeared to be mere arbitrary fancies;--mere projections and repercussions of his own preconceived ideas.

On the whole, then,--with some stretching, yet no contravention, of conclusions independently reached,--I may say that Swedenborg's story,--one of the strangest lives yet lived by mortal men,--is corroborative rather than destructive of the slowly rising fabric of knowledge of which he was the uniquely gifted, but uniquely dangerous, precursor.

It seemed desirable here to refer thus briefly to the doctrinal teachings of Swedenborg, but I shall deal later with the general question how much or how little of the statements of "sensitives" about the spiritual world--whether based on their own visions or on the allegations of their "controlling spirits"--are worthy of credence. In the case of Swedenborg there was at least some evidence, of the kind to which we can here appeal, of his actual communication with discarnate spirits;[205] but in most other cases of alleged ecstasy there is little or nothing to show that the supposed revelations are not purely subjective. (See, e.g., the revelations of Alphonse Cahagnet's sensitives, described in his Arcanes de la vie future dévoilées.)[206] At most, these visions must be regarded as a kind of symbolical representation of the unseen world.[207]

Among Cahagnet's subjects, however, there was one young woman, Adèle Maginot, who not only saw heavenly visions of the usual post-Swedenborgian kind, but also obtained evidential communications--not unlike those of Mrs. Piper--purporting to come from discarnate spirits. Fortunately these were recorded with unusual care and thoroughness by Cahagnet, and the case thus becomes one of considerable importance for our inquiries. A general account of Cahagnet's work has recently been given in the Proceedings S.P.R. (vol. xiv. p. 50) by Mr. Podmore, who, though finding it "almost impossible to doubt that Adèle's success was due to some kind of supernormal faculty," thinks it might be accounted for by telepathy from living persons. It appears that in all her trances Adèle--like Mr. Sanders--was controlled by her own subliminal self--that is to say, her supraliminal self became dormant, under "magnetism" by Cahagnet, while her subliminal self in trance-utterance manifested a knowledge which was, as I incline to think from its analogies with more developed cases, obtained from the spiritual world. That this knowledge should be mixed with much that was erroneous or unverifiable is not surprising.

It is also interesting to note the occurrence in this case of circumstances which in their general character have become so habitual in trances of "mediumistic" type that they are not only found in genuine subjects, but are continually being simulated by the fraudulent. I refer to the so-called "taking on of the death conditions" of a communicating spirit, who, as Adèle stated, died of suffocation. "Adèle chokes as this man choked, and coughed as he did.... I was obliged to release her by passes; she suffered terribly."

I need scarcely say that this suggests incipient possession. There were occasional analogous instances in the early trances of Mrs. Piper, when Phinuit was the controlling influence (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 98, Professor Barrett Wendell's account; and vol. xiii. p. 384). Other points of similarity between the accounts of the entranced Adèle and the utterances of Phinuit will be apparent to the student of the records.

The next case to be considered, and so far one of the most important, is that of D. D. Home.

The study of such records as are available of Home's psychical phenomena leaves me with the conviction that,--apart altogether from the telekinetic phenomena with which they were associated,--his trance-utterances belong to the same natural order as those, for instance, of Mr. Moses and Mrs. Piper. There are, however, important differences between these cases,--differences which should be of special instruction to us in endeavouring to comprehend the possession that completely excludes the subliminal self, and to appreciate the difficulty of obtaining this complete possession.

Thus in Home's case the subliminal self seems, throughout the longest series of séances of which we have a record, to have been the spirit chiefly controlling him during the trance and acting as intermediary for other spirits, who occasionally, however, took complete possession.

In Mrs. Piper's case, as we shall see, the subliminal self is very little in direct evidence; its manifestations form a fleeting interlude between her waking state and her possession by a discarnate spirit. In Mr. Moses' case, the subliminal self was rarely in direct evidence at all when he was entranced; but we infer from these other cases that it was probably dominant at some stage of his trance, even if at other times it was excluded or became completely dormant.

And if, in Home's case, as there seems reason to suppose, the subliminal self may have participated with discarnate spirits in the production of telekinetic phenomena, as well as in the communication of tests of personal identity, it is not improbable that the subliminal self of Mr. Moses may also have been actively concerned in both these classes of phenomena.

But, although I attribute much value to what evidence exists in the case of Home, it cannot but be deplored that the inestimable chance for experiment and record which this case afforded was almost entirely thrown away by the scientific world. Unfortunately the record is especially inadequate in reference to Home's trances and the evidence for the personal identity of the communicating spirits. His name is known to the world chiefly in connection with the telekinetic phenomena which are said to have occurred in his presence, and the best accounts of which we owe to Sir William Crookes. It is not my intention, as I have already explained, to deal with these, but it must be understood that they form an integral part of the manifestations in this case, as in the case of Stainton Moses. For detailed accounts of them the reader should consult the history of Home's life and experiences.[208]

To the history of William Stainton Moses I now turn. Here the evidence for the telekinetic phenomena is comparatively slight, since they occurred almost exclusively in the presence of a small group of intimate personal friends, and were never scrutinised and examined by outside witnesses as were Home's manifestations. On the other hand, we have detailed records of Mr. Moses' whole series of experiences, while in the case of Home, as I have said, the record is very imperfect. As to the telekinetic phenomena, Mr. Moses himself regarded them as a mere means to an end, in accordance with the view urged on him by his "controls,"--that they were intended as proofs of the power and authority of these latter, while the real message lay in the religious teaching imparted to him.

It was on May 9th, 1874, that Edmund Gurney and I met Stainton Moses for the first time, through the kindness of Mrs. Cowper-Temple (afterwards Lady Mount-Temple), who knew that we had become interested in "psychical" problems, and wished to introduce us to a man of honour who had recently experienced phenomena, due wholly to some gift of his own, which had profoundly changed his conception of life.

Here was a man of University education, of manifest sanity and probity, who vouched to us for a series of phenomena,--occurring to himself, and with no doubtful or venal aid,--which seemed at least to prove, in confusedly intermingled form, three main theses unknown to Science. These were (1) the existence in the human spirit of hidden powers of insight and of communication; (2) the personal survival and near presence of the departed; and (3) interference, due to unknown agencies, with the ponderable world. He spoke frankly and fully; he showed his note-books; he referred us to his friends; he inspired a belief which was at once sufficient, and which is still sufficient, to prompt to action.

The experiences which Stainton Moses had undergone had changed his views, but not his character. He was already set in the mould of the hard-working, conscientious, dogmatic clergyman, with a strong desire to do good, and a strong belief in preaching as the best way to do it. For himself the essential part of what I have called his "message" lay in the actual words automatically uttered or written,--not in the accompanying phenomena which really gave their uniqueness and importance to the automatic processes. In a book called Spirit Teachings he collected what he regarded as the real fruits of those years of mysterious listening in the vestibule of a world unknown.

My original impressions as regards Mr. Moses were strengthened by the opportunity which I had of examining his unpublished MSS. after his death on September 5th, 1892. These consist of thirty-one note-books--twenty-four of automatic script, four of records of physical phenomena, and three of retrospect and summary. In addition to these, the material available for a knowledge of Mr. Moses' experiences consists of his own printed works, and the written and printed statements of witnesses to his phenomena.

Of this available material a detailed account will be found in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. ix. pp. 245-352, and vol. xi. pp. 24-113, together with a brief record of Mr. Moses' life.

With the even tenor of this straightforward and reputable life was inwoven a chain of mysteries which, as I think, in what way soever they be explained, make it one of the most extraordinary which our century has seen. For its true history lies in that series of physical manifestations which began in 1872 and lasted for some eight years, and that series of automatic writings and trance-utterances which began in 1873, received a record for some ten years, and did not, as is believed, cease altogether until the earthly end was near.

These two series were intimately connected; the physical phenomena being avowedly designed to give authority to the speeches and writings which professed to emanate from the same source. There is no ground for separating the two groups, except the obvious one that the automatic phenomena are less difficult of credence than the physical; but, for reasons already stated, it has seemed to me desirable to exclude the latter from detailed treatment in this work. They included the apparent production of such phenomena as intelligent raps, movements of objects untouched, levitation, disappearance and reappearance of objects, passage of matter through matter, direct writing, sounds supernormally made on instruments, direct sounds, scents, lights, objects materialised, hands materialised (touched or seen). Mr. Moses was sometimes, but not always, entranced while these physical phenomena were occurring. Sometimes he was entranced and the trance-utterance purported to be that of a discarnate spirit. At other times, especially when alone, he wrote automatically, retaining his own ordinary consciousness meanwhile, and carrying on lengthy discussions with the "spirit influence" controlling his hand and answering his questions, etc. As a general rule the same alleged spirits both manifested themselves by raps, etc., at Mr. Moses' sittings with his friends, and also wrote through his hand when he was alone. In this, as in other respects, Mr. Moses' two series of writings--when alone and in company--were concordant, and, so to say, complementary;--explanations being given by the writing of what had happened at the séances. When "direct writing" was given at the séances the handwriting of each alleged spirit was the same as that which the same spirit was in the habit of employing in the automatic script. The claim to individuality was thus in all cases decisively made.

Now the personages thus claiming to appear may be divided roughly into three classes:--

A.--First and most important are a group of persons recently deceased, and sometimes manifesting themselves at the séances before their decease was known through any ordinary channel to any of the persons present. These spirits in many instances give tests of identity, mentioning facts connected with their earth-lives which are afterwards found to be correct.

B.--Next comes a group of personages belonging to generations more remote, and generally of some distinction in their day. Grocyn, the friend of Erasmus, may be taken as a type of these. Many of these also contribute facts as a proof of identity, which facts are sometimes more correct than the conscious or admitted knowledge of any of the sitters could supply. In such cases, however, the difficulty of proving identity is increased by the fact that most of the correct statements are readily accessible in print, and may conceivably have either been read and forgotten by Mr. Moses, or have become known to him by some kind of clairvoyance.

C.--A third group consists of spirits who give such names as Rector, Doctor, Theophilus, and, above all, Imperator. These from time to time reveal the names which they assert to have been theirs in earth-life. These concealed names are for the most part both more illustrious, and more remote, than the names in Class B,--and were withheld by Mr. Moses himself, who justly felt that the assumption of great names is likely to diminish rather than to increase the weight of the communication.

I now pass on to consider briefly the nature of the evidence that the alleged spirits were what they purported to be, as described, in the first place, in Mr. Moses' books of automatic writing. The contents of these books consist partly of messages tending to prove the identity of communicating spirits; partly of discussions or explanations of the physical phenomena; and partly of religious and moral disquisitions.

These automatic messages were almost wholly written by Mr. Moses' own hand, while he was in a normal waking state. The exceptions are of two kinds. (1) There is one long passage, alleged by Mr. Moses to have been written by himself while in a state of trance. (2) There are, here and there, a few words alleged to be in "direct writing";--written, that is to say, by invisible hands, but in Mr. Moses' presence; as several times described in the notes of séances where other persons were present.

Putting these exceptional instances aside, we find that the writings generally take the form of a dialogue, Mr. Moses proposing a question in his ordinary thick, black handwriting. An answer is then generally, though not always, given; written also by Mr. Moses, and with the same pen, but in some one of various scripts which differ more or less widely from his own. Mr. Moses' own description of the process, as given in the preface to Spirit Teachings, may be studied with advantage.

A prolonged study of the MS. books has revealed nothing inconsistent with this description. I have myself, of course, searched them carefully for any sign of confusion or alteration, but without finding any; and I have shown parts of them to various friends, who have seen no points of suspicion. It seems plain, moreover, that the various entries were made at or about the dates to which they are ascribed. They contain constant references to the séances which went on concurrently, and whose dates are independently known; and in the later books, records of some of these séances are interspersed in their due places amongst other matter. The MSS. contain also a number of allusions to other contemporaneous facts, many of which are independently known to myself.

I think, moreover, that no one who had studied these entries throughout would doubt the originally private and intimate character of many of them. The tone of the spirits towards Mr. Moses himself is habitually courteous and respectful. But occasionally they have some criticism which pierces to the quick, and which goes far to explain to me Mr. Moses' unwillingness to have the books fully inspected during his lifetime. He did, no doubt, contemplate their being at least read by friends after his death; and there are indications that there may have been a still more private book, now doubtless destroyed, to which messages of an intimate character were sometimes consigned.

Indeed, the questions at issue, as to these messages, refer not so much to their genuineness as to their authenticity, in the proper sense of those words. That they were written down in good faith by Mr. Moses as proceeding from the personages whose names are signed to them, there can be little doubt. But as to whether they did really proceed from those personages or no there may in many cases be very great doubt;--a doubt which I, at least, shall be quite unable to remove. By the very conditions of the communication they cannot show commanding intellect, or teach entirely new truths, since their manifestations are ex hypothesi limited by the capacity--not by the previous knowledge, but by the previous capacity--of the medium. And if they give facts not consciously known to the medium--facts however elaborate--it may, of course, be suggested that these facts have been subliminally acquired by the medium through some unconscious passage of the eye over a printed page, or else that they are clairvoyantly learnt, without the agency of any but the medium's own mind, though acting in a supernormal fashion.

The case of Hélène Smith has shown us how far-reaching may be the faculties of hyperæsthesia and hypermnesia in the subliminal self; but in view of the then general ignorance of the scientific world on this subject, it is not surprising that both Mr. Moses and his friends absolutely rejected this explanation of his phenomena, and that the evidence appeared to them more conclusive than it possibly can to us. Whether or not the alleged spirits were concerned,--as may sometimes, of course, have been the case,--we can hardly avoid thinking that the subliminal self of the medium played at least a considerable part in the communications.

In two cases the announcement of a death was made to Mr. Moses, when the news was apparently not known to him by any normal means. One of these is the case of President Garfield (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 100). The other (see my article in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 96 et seq.) is in some ways the most remarkable of all, from the series of chances which have been needful in order to establish its veracity. Specially noticeable in this case is the resemblance of the handwriting of the script to that of the alleged control, a lady whose writing was almost certainly unknown to Mr. Moses. Both to the lady's son and to myself the resemblance appeared incontestable, and our opinion was confirmed by Dr. Hodgson, who was an expert in such matters.

And now we must briefly go through the points which make such messages as were received by Mr. Moses primâ facie evidential, which indicate, that is to say, that they actually do come in some way from their alleged source. A brief recapitulation of the main stages of evidential quality in messages given by automatic writing or by trance-utterances is all that will be needed here.

(1) Evidentially lowest comes the class of messages which is by far the most common; messages, namely, in which, although some special identity may be claimed, all the facts given have been consciously known to the automatist. Here we may well suppose that his own personality alone is concerned, and that the messages have a subliminal, but not an external source.

(2) Next above these come messages containing facts likely to be known to the alleged spirit, and not consciously known to the automatist; but which facts may nevertheless have some time been noted by the automatist, even unwittingly, and may have thus obtained lodgment in his subliminal memory.

(3) Next come facts which can be proved,--with such varying degrees of certainty as such negative proof allows,--never to have been in any way known to the automatist; but which nevertheless are easily to be found in books; so that they may have been learnt clairvoyantly by the automatist himself, or learnt and communicated to him by some mind other than that of the alleged spirit.

(4) Next come facts which can be proved, with similar varying degrees of certainty according to the circumstances, never to have been known to the automatist, or recorded in print; but which were known to the alleged spirit and can be verified by the memories of living persons.

(5) Above this again would come that class of experimental messages, or posthumous letters, of which we have as yet very few good examples, where the departed person has before death arranged some special test--some fact or sentence known only to himself, which he is to transmit after death, if possible, as a token of his return.

(6) Thus much for the various kinds of verbal messages, which can be kept and analysed at leisure. We must now turn to evidence of a different and not precisely comparable kind. In point of fact it is not these inferences from written matter which have commonly been most efficacious in compelling the survivor's belief in the reality of the friend's return. Whether logically or no, it is not so much the written message that he trusts, but some phantom of face and voice that he knew so well. It is this familiar convincing presence,--[Greek: eikto de theskelon autô],--on which the percipient has always insisted, since Achilles strove in vain to embrace Patroclus' shade.

How far such a phantasm is in fact a proof of any real action on the part of the spirit thus recognised is a problem which has been dealt with already in Chapter VII. The upshot of our evidence to my mind is that although the apparition of a departed person cannot per se rank as evidence of his presence, yet this is not a shape which purely hallucinatory phantasms seem often to assume; and if there be any corroborative evidence, as, for instance, writing which claims to come from the same person, the chance that he is really operative is considerable. In Mr. Moses' case almost all the figures which he saw brought with them some corroboration by writing, trance-utterance, gesture-messages (as where a figure makes signs of assent or dissent), or raps.

(7) And this brings us to a class largely represented in Mr. Moses' series, where writings professing to come from a certain spirit are supported by physical phenomena of which that spirit claims also to be the author. Whether such a line of proof can ever be made logically complete or no, one can imagine many cases where it would be practically convincing to almost all minds. Materialisations of hands, or direct writing in the script of the departed, have much of actual cogency; and these methods, with others like them, are employed by Mr. Moses' "controls" in their efforts to establish their own identities. Physical phenomena in themselves, however, carry no proof of an intelligence outside that of the sensitive himself, and, as I have said, may in many cases be a mere extension of his own ordinary muscular powers, and not due to any external agency at all.

If we confine ourselves to the verbal messages, we find that the cases most fully represented in the records of Mr. Moses are limited to the first three classes mentioned above, and those which come under the fourth class--verifiable facts of which there is no printed record and which it is practically certain that the medium could never have known--are comparatively few. This may partly be accounted for by the small number of sitters with Mr. Moses and the fact that they were his personal friends. The records of Mrs. Piper, on the other hand, to which we now turn, are especially rich in incidents that fall under the fourth heading, and the evidential value of the verbal messages in this case is, therefore, much greater than in the case of Mr. Moses. Whereas for Mr. Moses the identity of many of his communicators rested largely upon their being guaranteed by Imperator and his group of helpers,--in the case of Mrs. Piper the spirits of some recently-departed friends who have given much evidence of their identity appear to maintain the independent reality and guiding control over Mrs. Piper of these same intelligences--Imperator, Rector, Doctor, and others--that Mr. Moses claimed as ruling in his own experience.

The case of Mrs. Piper differs in two important respects from that of W. Stainton Moses or D. D. Home. In the first place no telekinetic phenomena have occurred in connection with her trance-manifestations; and in the second place her supraliminal self shows no traces of any supernormal faculty whatsoever. She presents an instance of automatism of the extreme type where the "possession" is not merely local or partial, but affects, so to say, the whole psychical area,--where the supraliminal self is for a time completely displaced, and the whole personality appears to suffer intermittent change. In other words, she passes into a trance, during which her organs of speech or writing are "controlled" by other personalities than the normal waking one. Occasionally, either just before or just after the trance, the subliminal self appears to take some control of the organism for a brief interval; but with this exception the personalities that speak or write during her trance claim to be discarnate spirits.

Mrs. Piper's trances may be divided into three stages: (1) Where the dominant controlling personality was known as "Dr. Phinuit" and used the vocal organs almost exclusively, communicating by trance-utterance, 1884-91.

(2) Where the communications were made chiefly by automatic writing in the trance under the supervision more particularly of the control known as "George Pelham," or "G. P.," although "Dr. Phinuit" usually communicated also by speech during this period, 1892-96.

(3) Where supervision is alleged to be exercised by Imperator, Doctor, Rector, and others already mentioned in connection with the experiences of Mr. Moses, and where the communications have been mainly by writing, but occasionally also by speech. This last stage, which began early in 1897, still continues, and the final outcome remains to be seen.

I proceed now to indicate in further detail the nature of the evidence and the character of the manifestations themselves, and begin by quoting from Dr. Hodgson (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 367-68) a brief statement of some of the historical facts of the case.

Mrs. Piper has been giving sittings for a period extending over thirteen [now, 1901, seventeen] years. Very early in her trance history she came under the attention of Professor James, who sent many persons to her as strangers, in most cases making the appointments himself, and in no case giving their names. She came to some extent under my own supervision in 1887, and I also sent many persons to her, in many cases accompanying them and recording the statements made at their sittings, and taking all the care that I could to prevent Mrs. Piper's obtaining any knowledge beforehand of who the sitters were to be. In 1889-90 Mrs. Piper gave a series of sittings in England under the supervision of Dr. Walter Leaf and Mr. Myers and Professor Lodge, where also the most careful precautions possible were taken to ensure that the sitters went as strangers to Mrs. Piper. Further sittings were supervised by myself in 1890-91 after Mrs. Piper's return to America. Many persons who had sittings in the course of these earlier investigations were convinced that they were actually receiving communications from their "deceased" friends through Mrs. Piper's trance, but although the special investigators were satisfied, from their study of the trance-phenomena themselves and a careful analysis of the detailed records of the sittings, that some supernormal power was involved, there was no definite agreement as to their precise significance. And to myself it seemed that any hypothesis that was offered presented formidable difficulties in the way of its acceptance. In the course of these earlier investigations the communications were given almost entirely through the speech-utterance of the trance-personality known as Phinuit, and even the best of them were apt to include much matter that was irrelevant and unlike the alleged communicators, while there were many indications that Phinuit himself was far from being the kind of person in whom we should be disposed to place implicit credence.

During the years 1892-96 inclusive, I exercised a yet closer supervision of Mrs. Piper's trances than I had done in previous years, continuing to take all the precautions that I could as regards the introduction of persons as strangers. This period was marked by a notable evolution in the quality of the trance results, beginning early in 1892. The character of the manifestations changed with the development of automatic writing in the trance, and with what was alleged to be the continual rendering of active assistance by the communicator whom I have called G. P. [George Pelham]. As a result of this it appeared that communicators were able to express their thoughts directly through the writing by Mrs. Piper's hand, instead of conveying them more dimly and partially through Phinuit as intermediary; and the advice and guidance which they, apparently, received from G. P. enabled them to avoid much of the confusion and irrelevancy so characteristic of the earlier manifestations.

I do not propose here to discuss the hypothesis of fraud in this case, since it has been fully discussed by Dr. Hodgson, Professor William James, Professor Newbold of Pennsylvania University, Dr. Walter Leaf, and Sir Oliver Lodge.[209] I merely quote, as a summary of the argument, a few words of Professor James, from The Psychological Review, July, 1898, pp. 421-22:--

Dr. Hodgson considers that the hypothesis of fraud cannot be seriously maintained. I agree with him absolutely. The medium has been under observation, much of the time under close observation, as to most of the conditions of her life, by a large number of persons, eager, many of them, to pounce upon any suspicious circumstance for [nearly] fifteen years. During that time, not only has there not been one single suspicious circumstance remarked, but not one suggestion has ever been made from any quarter which might tend positively to explain how the medium, living the apparent life she leads, could possibly collect information about so many sitters by natural means. The scientist who is confident of "fraud" here, must remember that in science as much as in common life a hypothesis must receive some positive specification and determination before it can be profitably discussed, and a fraud which is no assigned kind of fraud, but simply "fraud" at large, fraud in abstracto, can hardly be regarded as a specially scientific explanation of concrete facts.

Unfortunately we have no contemporary records of what occurred during Mrs. Piper's earliest trances; nor practically any information as to the first manifestations of the Phinuit personality. It seems clear at least that the name Phinuit was the result of suggestion at these earliest trances (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 46-58), and many may think it most probable that the Phinuit "control" was nothing more than a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper. But, according to the statements (for which there is of course no evidence) made by "Imperator," Phinuit was an "earth-bound" or inferior spirit, who had become confused and bewildered in his first attempts at communication, and had, as we say, "lost his consciousness of personal identity." That such an occurrence is not uncommon in this life is plain from the cases to which I have drawn attention in Chapter II. of this book, and we cannot prove it to be impossible that profound memory disturbances should be produced in an inexperienced discarnate spirit when first attempting to communicate with us through a material organism. Be that as it may, the Phinuit personality has not manifested either directly or indirectly since January 1897, when "Imperator" claimed the supervision of Mrs. Piper's trances.

There were various cases of alleged direct "control" by spirits other than Phinuit during the first stage of Mrs. Piper's trance history. But such cases were not usual, and on the whole, although there seemed to be abundant proof of some supernormal faculty which demanded at least the hypothesis of thought-transference from living persons both near and distant, and suggested occasionally some power of telæsthesia or perhaps even of premonition, yet the main question with which we are now concerned,--whether Mrs. Piper's organism was controlled, directly or indirectly, by discarnate spirits who could give satisfactory evidence of their identity,--remained undecided.

More important, as regards this question of personal identity, is the series of sittings which formed the second stage of Mrs. Piper's trance history, in the years 1892-96, (of which a detailed account is given in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 284-582, and vol. xiv. pp. 6-49), where the chief communicator or intermediary was G. P. This G. P., whose name (although, of course, well known to many persons) has been altered for publication into "George Pelham," was a young man of great ability, mainly occupied in literary pursuits. Although born an American citizen, he was a member of a noble English family. I never met him, but I have the good fortune to include a number of his friends among my own, and with several of these I have been privileged to hold intimate conversation on the nature of the communications which they received. I have thus heard of many significant utterances of G. P.'s, which are held too private for print; and I have myself been present at sittings where G. P. manifested. For the full discussion of the evidence tending to prove the identity of G. P., I refer my readers to the original report in the Proceedings S.P.R. I quote here a general summary, given by Dr. Hodgson several years later, of the whole series of his manifestations. (From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 328-330.)

On the first appearance of the communicating G. P. to Mr. Hart in March 1892, he gave not only his own name and that of the sitter, but also the names of several of their most intimate common friends, and referred specifically to the most important private matters connected with them. At the same sitting reference was made to other incidents unknown to the sitters, such as the account of Mrs. Pelham's taking the studs from the body of G. P. and giving them to Mr. Pelham to be sent to Mr. Hart, and the reproduction of a notable remembrance of a conversation which G. P. living had with Katharine, the daughter of his most intimate friends, the Howards. These were primary examples of two kinds of knowledge concerning matters unknown to the sitters, of which various other instances were afterwards given; knowledge of events connected with G. P. which had occurred since his death, and knowledge of special memories pertaining to the G. P. personality before death. A week later, at the sitting of Mr. Vance, he made an appropriate inquiry after the sitter's son, and in reply to inquiries rightly specified that the sitter's son had been at college with him, and further correctly gave a correct description of the sitter's summer home as the place of a special visit. This, again, was paralleled by many later instances where appropriate inquiries were made and remembrances recalled concerning other personal friends of G. P. Nearly two weeks later came his most intimate friends, the Howards, and to these, using the voice directly, he showed such a fulness of private remembrance and specific knowledge and characteristic intellectual and emotional quality pertaining to G. P. that, though they had previously taken no interest in any branch of psychical research, they were unable to resist the conviction that they were actually conversing with their old friend G. P. And this conviction was strengthened by their later experiences. Not least important, at that time, was his anxiety about the disposal of a certain book and about certain specified letters which concern matters too private for publication. He was particularly desirous of convincing his father, who lived in Washington, that it was indeed G. P. who was communicating, and he soon afterwards stated that his father had taken his photograph to be copied, as was the case, though Mr. Pelham had not informed even his wife of this fact. Later on he reproduced a series of incidents, unknown to the sitters, in which Mrs. Howard had been engaged in her own home. Later still, at a sitting with his father and mother in New York, a further intimate knowledge was shown of private family circumstances, and at the following sitting, at which his father and mother were not present, he gave the details of certain private actions which they had done in the interim. At their sitting, and at various sittings of the Howards, appropriate comments were made concerning different articles presented which had belonged to G. P. living, or had been familiar to him; he inquired after other personal articles which were not presented at the sittings, and showed intimate and detailed recollections of incidents in connection with them. In points connected with the recognition of articles with their related associations of a personal sort, the G. P. communicating, so far as I know, has never failed. Nor has he failed in the recognition of personal friends. I may say generally that out of a large number of sitters who went as strangers to Mrs. Piper, the communicating G. P. has picked out the friends of G. P. living, precisely as the G. P. living might have been expected to do [thirty cases of recognition out of at least one hundred and fifty persons who have had sittings with Mrs. Piper since the first appearance of G. P., and no case of false recognition], and has exhibited memories in connection with these and other friends which are such as would naturally be associated as part of the G. P. personality, which certainly do not suggest in themselves that they originate otherwise, and which are accompanied by the emotional relations which were connected with such friends in the mind of G. P. living. At one of his early communications G. P. expressly undertook the task of rendering all the assistance in his power towards establishing the continued existence of himself and other communicators, in pursuance of a promise of which he himself reminded me, made some two years or more before his death, that if he died before me and found himself "still existing," he would devote himself to prove the fact; and in the persistence of his endeavour to overcome the difficulties in communicating as far as possible, in his constant readiness to act as amanuensis at the sittings, in the effect which he has produced by his counsels,--to myself as investigator, and to numerous other sitters and communicators,--he has, in so far as I can form a judgment in a problem so complex and still presenting so much obscurity, displayed all the keenness and pertinacity which were eminently characteristic of G. P. living.

Finally the manifestations of this G. P. communicating have not been of a fitful and spasmodic nature, they have exhibited the marks of a continuous living and persistent personality, manifesting itself through a course of years, and showing the same characteristics of an independent intelligence whether friends of G. P. were present at the sittings or not. I learned of various cases where in my absence active assistance was rendered by G. P. to sitters who had never previously heard of him, and from time to time he would make brief pertinent reference to matters with which G. P. living was acquainted, though I was not, and sometimes in ways which indicated that he could to some extent see what was happening in our world to persons in whose welfare G. P. living would have been specially interested.

The sitter called Mr. Hart, to whom G. P. first manifested, died at Naples three years afterwards, and communicated, with the help of G. P., on the second day after his death. An account of his communications is given in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 353-57.

There are numerous instances in the reports in the Proceedings (see vol. vi. pp. 647-50; vol. viii. pp. 15-26; vol. xiii., passim; and vol. xvi. pp. 131-3), of the giving of information unknown to the sitters and afterwards verified. A striking illustration of this occurred in the case of the lady called "Elisa Mannors," whose near relatives and friends concerned in the communications were known to myself. On the morning after the death of her uncle, called F. in the report, she described an incident in connection with the appearance of herself to her uncle on his death-bed. I quote Dr. Hodgson's account of this (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xiii. p. 378, footnote).

The notice of his [F.'s] death was in a Boston morning paper, and I happened to see it on my way to the sitting. The first writing of the sitting came from Madame Elisa, without my expecting it. She wrote clearly and strongly, explaining that F. was there with her, but unable to speak directly, that she wished to give me an account of how she had helped F. to reach her. She said that she had been present at his death-bed, and had spoken to him, and she repeated what she had said, an unusual form of expression, and indicated that he had heard and recognised her. This was confirmed in detail in the only way possible at that time, by a very intimate friend of Madame Elisa and myself, and also of the nearest surviving relative of F. I showed my friend the account of the sitting, and to this friend, a day or two later, the relative, who was present at the death-bed, stated spontaneously that F. when dying said that he saw Madame Elisa who was speaking to him, and he repeated what she was saying. The expression so repeated, which the relative quoted to my friend, was that which I had received from Madame Elisa through Mrs. Piper's trance, when the death-bed incident was of course entirely unknown to me.

Rare are the "Peak in Darien" cases (see page 233), but cases like this are rarer still.

With regard to the last of the three periods of Mrs. Piper's trance-history, the only detailed published accounts are contained in Professor Hyslop's report of his sittings in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xvi.[210] But neither his records nor the manuscript records which I have seen contain any proof of the personal identity of the alleged spirits called "Imperator," "Doctor," "Rector," etc., or any proof of the identity of these intelligences with those claimed by Mr. Moses. (See Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 408-9.) Whether any such proof will be forthcoming in the future remains to be seen,--or indeed, whether proof or disproof for us at present is even possible.

We must now try to form some more definite idea--based not on preconceived theories but on our actual observation of trances--of the processes of possession.

Let us try to realise what kind of feat it is which we are expecting the disembodied spirit to achieve. Such language, I know, again suggests the medicine-man's wigwam rather than the study of the white philosopher. Yet can we feel sure that the process in our own minds which has (as we think) refined and spiritualised man's early conceptions of an unseen world has been based upon any observed facts?

In dealing with matters which lie outside human experience, our only clue is some attempt at continuity with what we already know. We cannot, for instance, form independently a reliable conception of life in an unseen world. That conception has never yet been fairly faced from the standpoint of our modern ideas of continuity, conservation, evolution. The main notions that have been framed of such survival have been framed first by savages and then by a priori philosophers.

The savage made his own picture first. And he at any rate dimly felt after a principle of continuity; although he applied it in the crudest fashion. Yet the happy hunting-ground and the faithful dog were conceptions not more arbitrary and unscientific than that eternal and unimaginable worship in vacuo which more accredited teachers have proclaimed. And, passing on to modern philosophic conceptions, one may say that where the savage assumed too little difference between the material and the spiritual world the philosopher has assumed too much. He has regarded the gulf as too unbridgeable; he has taken for granted too clean a sweep of earthly modes of thought. Trying to shake off time, space, and definite form, he has attempted to transport himself too magically to what may be in reality an immensely distant goal.

What, then, is to be our conception of identity prolonged beyond the tomb? In earth-life the actual body, in itself but a subordinate element in our thought of our friend, did yet by its physical continuity override as a symbol of identity all lapses of memory, all changes of the character within. Yet it was memory and character,--the stored impressions upon which he reacted, and his specific mode of reaction,--which made our veritable friend. How much of memory, how much of character, must he preserve for our recognition?

Do we ask that either he or we should remember always, or should remember all? Do we ask that his memory should be expanded into omniscience and his character elevated into divinity? And, whatever heights he may attain, do we demand that he should reveal to us? Are the limitations of our material world no barrier to him?

It is safest to fall back for the present upon the few points which these communications do seem to indicate. The spirit, then, is holding converse with a living man, located in a certain place at a certain moment, and animated by certain thoughts and emotions. The spirit (to which I must give a neuter pronoun for greater clearness) in some cases can find and follow the man as it pleases. It is therefore in some way cognizant of space, although not conditioned by space. Its mastery of space may perhaps bear somewhat the same relation to our eyesight as our eyesight bears to the gropings of the blind. Similarly, the spirit appears to be partly cognizant of our time, although not wholly conditioned thereby. It is apt to see as present both certain things which appear to us as past and certain things which appear to us as future.

Once more, the spirit is at least partly conscious of the thought and emotions of its earthly friend, so far as directed towards itself; and this not only when the friend is in the presence of the sensitive, but also (as G. P. has repeatedly shown) when the friend is at home and living his ordinary life.

Lastly, it seems as though the spirit had some occasional glimpses of material fact upon the earth (as the contents of drawers and the like), not manifestly proceeding through any living mind. I do not, however, recall any clear evidence of a spirit's perception of material facts which provably have never been known to any incarnate mind whatever.

Accepting this, then, for argument's sake, as the normal condition of a spirit in reference to human things, what process must it attempt if it wishes to communicate with living men? That it will wish to communicate seems probable enough, if it retains not only memory of the loves of earth, but actual fresh consciousness of loving emotion directed towards it after death.

Seeking then for some open avenue, it discerns something which corresponds (in G. P.'s phrase) to a light--a glimmer of translucency in the confused darkness of our material world. This "light" indicates a sensitive--a human organism so constituted that a spirit can temporarily inform or control it, not necessarily interrupting the stream of the sensitive's ordinary consciousness; perhaps using a hand only, or perhaps, as in Mrs. Piper's case, using voice as well as hand, and occupying all the sensitive's channels of self-manifestation. The difficulties which must be inherent in such an act of control are thus described by Dr. Hodgson:--

"If, indeed, each one of us is a 'spirit' that survives the death of the fleshly organism, there are certain suppositions that I think we may not unreasonably make concerning the ability of the discarnate 'spirit' to communicate with those yet incarnate. Even under the best of conditions for communication--which I am supposing for the nonce to be possible--it may well be that the aptitude for communicating clearly may be as rare as the gifts that make a great artist, or a great mathematician, or a great philosopher. Again, it may well be that, owing to the change connected with death itself, the 'spirit' may at first be much confused, and such confusion may last for a long time; and even after the 'spirit' has become accustomed to its new environment, it is not an unreasonable supposition that if it came into some such relation to another living human organism as it once maintained with its own former organism, it would find itself confused by that relation. The state might be like that of awaking from a prolonged period of unconsciousness into strange surroundings. If my own ordinary body could be preserved in its present state, and I could absent myself from it for days or months or years, and continue my existence under another set of conditions altogether, and if I could then return to my own body, it might well be that I should be very confused and incoherent at first in my manifestations by means of it. How much more would this be the case were I to return to another human body. I might be troubled with various forms of aphasia and agraphia, might be particularly liable to failures of inhibition, might find the conditions oppressive and exhausting, and my state of mind would probably be of an automatic and dreamlike character. Now, the communicators through Mrs. Piper's trance exhibit precisely the kind of confusion and incoherence which it seems to me we have some reason a priori to expect if they are actually what they claim to be."

At the outset of this chapter I compared the phenomena of possession with those of alternating personalities, of dreams, and of somnambulism. Now it seems probable that the thesis of multiplex personality--namely, that no known current of man's consciousness exhausts his whole consciousness, and no known self-manifestation expresses man's whole potential being--may hold good both for embodied and for unembodied men, and this would lead us to expect that the manifestations of the departed,--through the sensory automatisms dealt with in Chapter VII., and the motor automatisms considered in Chapter VIII., up to the completer form of possession illustrated in the present chapter,--would resemble those fugitive and unstable communications between widely different strata of personality of which embodied minds offer us examples. G. P. himself appears to be well aware of the dreamlike character of the communications, which, indeed, his own style often exemplifies. Thus he wrote on February 15th, 1894:--

"Remember we share and always shall have our friends in the dream-life, i.e. your life so to speak, which will attract us for ever and ever, and so long as we have any friends sleeping in the material world; you to us are more like as we understand sleep, you look shut up as one in prison, and in order for us to get into communication with you, we have to enter into your sphere, as one like yourself, asleep. This is just why we make mistakes, as you call them, or get confused and muddled."

Yet even this very difficulty and fragmentariness of communication ought in the end to be for us full of an instruction of its own. We are here actually witnessing the central mystery of human life, unrolling itself under novel conditions, and open to closer observation than ever before. We are seeing a mind use a brain. The human brain is in its last analysis an arrangement of matter expressly adapted to being acted upon by a spirit; but so long as the accustomed spirit acts upon it the working is generally too smooth to allow us a glimpse of the mechanism. Now, however, we can watch an unaccustomed spirit, new to the instrument, installing itself and feeling its way. The lessons thus learnt are likely to be more penetrating than any which mere morbid interruptions of the accustomed spirit's work can teach us. In aphasia, for instance, we can watch with instruction special difficulties of utterance, supervening on special injuries to the brain. But in possession we perceive the controlling spirit actually engaged in overcoming somewhat similar difficulties--writing or uttering the wrong word, and then getting hold of the right one--and sometimes even finding power to explain to us something of the minute verbal mechanism (so to term it) through whose blocking or dislocation the mistake has arisen.

And we may hope, indeed, that as our investigations proceed, and as we on this side of the fateful gulf, and the discarnate spirits on the other, learn more of the conditions necessary for perfect control of the brain and nervous system of intermediaries,--the communications will grow fuller and more coherent, and reach a higher level of unitary consciousness.

Among the cases of trance discussed in this chapter, we have found intimately interwoven with the phenomena of possession many instances of its correlative,--ecstasy. Mrs. Piper's fragmentary utterances and visions during her passage from trance to waking life,--utterances and visions that fade away and leave no remembrance in her waking self; Stainton Moses' occasional visions, his journeys in the "spirit world" which he recorded on returning to his ordinary consciousness; Home's entrancement and converse with the various controls whose messages he gave;--all these suggest actual excursions of the incarnate spirit from its organism. The theoretical importance of these spiritual excursions is, of course, very great. It is, indeed, so great that most men will hesitate to accept a thesis which carries us straight into the inmost sanctuary of mysticism; which preaches "a precursory entrance into the most holy place, as by divine transportation."

Yet I think that this belief, although extreme, is not, at the point to which our evidence has carried us, in any real way improbable. To put the matter briefly, if a spirit from outside can enter the organism, the spirit from inside can go out, can change its centre of perception and action, in a way less complete and irrevocable than the change of death. Ecstasy would thus be simply the complementary or correlative aspect of spirit-control. Such a change need not be a spatial change, any more than there need be any spatial change for the spirit which invades the deserted organism. Nay, further: if the incarnate spirit can in this manner change its centre of perception in response (so to say) to a discarnate spirit's invasion of the organism, there is no obvious reason why it should not do so on other occasions as well. We are already familiar with "travelling clairvoyance," a spirit's change of centre of perception among the scenes of the material world. May there not be an extension of travelling clairvoyance to the spiritual world? a spontaneous transfer of the centre of perception into that region from whence discarnate spirits seem now to be able, on their side, to communicate with growing freedom?

The conception of ecstasy--at once in its most literal and in its most lofty sense--has thus developed itself, almost insensibly, from several concurrent lines of actual modern evidence. It must still, of course, be long before we can at all adequately separate,--I can hardly say the objective from the subjective element in the experience, for we have got beyond the region where the meaning of those words is clear,--but the element in the experience which is recognised and responded to by spirits other than the ecstatic's, from the element which belongs to his own spirit alone.

In the meantime, however, the fact that this kind of communion of ecstasy has been, in preliminary fashion, rendered probable is of the highest importance for our whole inquiry. We thus come directly into relation with the highest form which the various religions known to men have assumed in the past.

It is hardly a paradox to say that the evidence for ecstasy is stronger than the evidence for any other religious belief. Of all the subjective experiences of religion, ecstasy is that which has been most urgently, perhaps to the psychologist most convincingly, asserted; and it is not confined to any one religion. From a psychological point of view, one main indication of the importance of a subjective phenomenon found in religious experience will be the fact that it is common to all religions. I doubt whether there is any phenomenon, except ecstasy, of which this can be said. From the medicine-man of the lowest savages up to St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul, with Buddha, Mahomet and Swedenborg on the way, we find records which, though morally and intellectually much differing, are in psychological essence the same.

At all stages alike we find that the spirit is conceived as quitting the body; or, if not quitting it, at least as greatly expanding its range of perception in some state resembling trance. Observe, moreover, that on this view all genuine recorded forms of ecstasy are akin, and all of them represent a real fact.

To our embodied souls the matter round us seems real and self-existent; to souls emancipated it is but the sign of the degree which we have reached, and thus the highest task of science must be to link and co-ordinate the symbols appropriate to our terrene state with the symbols appropriate to the state immediately above us. Nay, one might push this truth to paradox, and maintain that of all earth's inspired spirits it has been the least divinised, the least lovable, who has opened the surest path for men. Religions have risen and die again; philosophy, poetry, heroism, answer only indirectly the prime need of men. Plotinus, "the eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato," is lost to sight in the heavens. Conquering and to conquer, the Maid rides on through other worlds than ours. Virgil himself, "light among the vanished ages, star that gildest yet this earthly shore," sustains our spirit, as I have said, but indirectly, by filling still our fountain of purest intellectual joy. But the prosaic Swede,--his stiff mind prickly with dogma,--the opaque cell-walls of his intelligence flooded cloudily by the irradiant day,--this man as by the very limitations of his faculty, by the practical humility of a spirit trained to acquire but not to generate truth,--has awkwardly laid the corner-stone, grotesquely sketched the elevation of a temple which our remotest posterity will be upbuilding and adorning still. For he dimly felt that man's true passage and intuition from state to state depends not upon individual ecstasy, but upon comprehensive law; while yet all law is in fact but symbol; adaptation of truth timeless and infinite to intelligences of lower or higher range.

Beyond us still is mystery; but it is mystery lit and mellowed with an infinite hope. We ride in darkness at the haven's mouth; but sometimes through rifted clouds we see the desires and needs of many generations floating and melting upwards into a distant glow, "up through the light of the seas by the moon's long-silvering ray."

The high possibilities that lie before us should be grasped once for all, in order that the dignity of the quest may help to carry the inquirer through many disappointments, deceptions, delays. But he must remember that this inquiry must be extended over many generations; nor must he allow himself to be persuaded that there are byways to mastery. I will not say that there cannot possibly be any such thing as occult wisdom, or dominion over the secrets of nature ascetically or magically acquired. But I will say that every claim of this kind which my colleagues or I have been able to examine has proved deserving of complete mistrust; and that we have no confidence here any more than elsewhere in any methods except the open, candid, straightforward methods which the spirit of modern science demands.

All omens point towards the steady continuance of just such labour as has already taught us all we know. Perhaps, indeed, in this complex of interpenetrating spirits our own effort is no individual, no transitory thing. That which lies at the root of each of us lies at the root of the Cosmos too. Our struggle is the struggle of the Universe itself; and the very Godhead finds fulfilment through our upward-striving souls.