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manifestations of a medium's secondary self?

The messages which we receive from clairvoyant experiments with entranced or controlled mediums, tabletiltings, planchette, ouija boards, present a bewildering congeries of good sense and stupidity, relevancy and irrelevancy, truth and falsehood, sobriety and flippancy. Such communications possess two marked characteristics: they display intelligence, however low the level of that intelligence may sink; and they invariably claim to proceed from the surviving minds of dead men and women, or at any rate from discarnate beings or spirits.

These messages fall into two classes; in the first place, the most important of them, those which offer evidential matter, either spontaneously or in compliance with a sitter's request. In such dark and unaccustomed paths the thoughtful researcher must walk warily. Suffice it to say that persons of real ability and calm judgment are to be found who are intellectually convinced that in certain instances the agencies which have communicated with them through mediums are actually what they claim to be, the surviving personalities of dead friends or relatives. I found it difficult during some sittings under an assumed name with Mrs. Piper to resist the belief that I was being addressed by two lost friends, so amazing was the relevancy of a single message in the one case, and the force of accumulated details in the other. Of a communication through the same medium given to his sisterin-law for transmission to himself, Professor William James of Harvard writes as follows:

"The point is that the message is an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but me-not possibly either to the medium or to my sister-in-law; and an allusion so pertinent and intimate, and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly knowledge on any one's part, that it quite astounds as well as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had been conceivably in my sister-in-law's mind, it would have been an interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but, as I say, it could not possibly have been, and she only transmits it to me after the fact, not even understanding it."

The second group of messages possess little or no evidential value with regard to the personal survival of individuals, though they too always claim to proceed from spirits of some kind. Trivial, vulgar, and unworthy as they often are, these communications cannot be ignored by the student of psychical research. When we have eliminated trickery, collusion, and self-deception from our experiments, there remains a residuum of communications, more or less intelligent, which obviously do not proceed from the normal consciousness of either sitter or medium; in many cases, indeed, there is no medium involved, for the messages are spelled out through movements of a table or an instrument of the planchette type.

Many of these messages are of a perplexing character. Some show indications of a rather colorless good-will; others are freakish and deceptive with a flavor of feeble practical joking. Occasionally they

are blasphemous or indecent. Very common is the giving of addresses connected with the sitter or with the former life of the alleged spirit communicator. Nevertheless in nearly every instance it is found that the facts as given are partially or entirely inaccurate.

Nor, indeed, if the subliminal consciousness be accepted as the source of such perplexing messages, can we feel altogether happy in the possession of such a secondary self. This inner intelligence is admittedly guilty in many instances of trickery, evasion, flippancy, deliberate and often cruel deception. Any clouds of glory that such a self may trail behind it are at times sadly tarnished, nor is the conviction either agreeable or inspiring that we harbor within us a force capable of preternatural knowledge and amazing achieve ment and yet characterized at times by conduct which any decent everyday mind would utterly condemn; that such a secondary self is frequently exhibited as "repressed, conative, infantile, unreasoning, predominantly sexual," and, one may add, sometimes fraudulent and usually non-moral. So many difficulties indeed appear to be involved in connecting these messages with any conscious mental activity that some investigators take refuge in the view that they consist only of the stuff that dreams are made of, proceeding from the lumber-room of the mind, and no more fraudulent or immoral than the elusive vagaries and incongruities of some fantastic dream.

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for our consideration. There is, as we have said, a feature common to them all: they invariably claim to proceed from disembodied personalities.

If the devotees of the subliminal self hypothesis persist in bringing these agencies also within the broad compass of the human mind, conscious or unconscious, it may, I suppose, be urged that the claim to discarnate existence put forward by these animula vagula, blandulæ, is a delusion built on the accumulated mental experience of the human race, always trying to believe in a life beyond the grave. From the dim recesses of our racial history this pathetic protest against annihilation has become a stereotyped portion of the human mind, so that while the normal self may reject a personal survival, faint and fleeting echoes of the primeval faith still rise from the depths of the unconscious self.

If it really be the case, however, that no activity of the human mind, normal or subliminal, can furnish an adequate explanation of the communications in question, we are left to face the facts and ask ourselves whether, after all, the claim put forward by the agencies involved may not be a valid one. It is easy for those unacquainted with the accumulated phenomena of automatic writing, the planchette and ouija boards, and so on, to sneer at such an interpretation of the facts, but sneers have always dogged the earlier footsteps of scientific enterprise. Once it is accepted that modern science does not necessarily preclude the existence of intelligences independent of those associated with the functions

of the human brain, we may frankly admit that the theory of spirit agencies in the case of these erratic messages does at least fit the facts. The existence would seem to be suggested of those alleged unseen entities, sometimes described as elementals, an order of low-grade spirits, able and apparently eager to communicate with us. The presence of such beings around us has, in earlier centuries, been widely accepted by a veritable consensus gentium; and the general characteristics of the communications in many a table-tilting or planchette experiment seem to correspond closely to those of the alleged activities of the fairies, afrits, demons, gnomes, little folk, and so on; an intermixture of good humor and mischief, coupled with a limited intelligence and an almost complete absence of moral standards.

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Before leaving the subject of telepathy, one more reference to this force as the origin of psychic phenomena must be briefly considered. The well known census of hallucinations conducted by the Society for Psychical Research revealed the facts that (a) 9.9 per cent of the seventeen thousand persons questioned declared that they had at one time or another seen an apparition, (b) very few recognizable phantasms were seen after the lapse of one year from the day of death, (c) of the veridical cases the vast majority coincided more or less accurately with the moment of death. Modern research has also revealed a fact never before established, that phantasms of the living are far more frequent and generally far better attested than those of the dead. In summary, it

may be contended that men and women with sound minds in sound bodies do occasionally see phantasms of both living and dead persons under circumstances which entirely preclude malobservation or deception. No fact could indeed be better established than that ghosts are seen now, as they have been seen all down the ages. What, however, is new in respect to this interesting phenomenon is the modern explanation that a ghost is a subjective impression conveyed to the mind of one person by a conscious or unconscious suggestion from the mind of another. Deeply interesting as are the well established and comparatively numerous telepathic images conveyed from the living to the living, these do not lead us outside the range of ordinary telepathic activity. "There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave

To shew us this."

But what are we to say to similar phantasms when the person they represent has passed through the gates of Death? With the special significance of these cases we shall deal later.

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It seems clear then that the student of psychic phenomena will find many promising lines of research in the ample field covered by telepathy, clairvoyance, and the varied activities of motor automatism. Fresh facts must be accumulated and sifted, fresh efforts made to coördinate such facts and discover the laws through which they work. Nevertheless there remains another area of supernormal activities which cannot be neglected: the physical phenomena alleged to occur from time to

time, almost invariably in the presence and apparently through the mediumship of certain individuals. In this obscure region, however, the opportunities for fraud have been so great, the detections of trickery so frequent, and the general character of the mediums often so indifferent, that even with the experiences of a quarter of a century behind them, many careful and able researchers find it difficult to give any definite opinion either for or against the existence of such startling phenomena as materialization, ectoplastic extrusions from the body, or the movement of material objects without physical contact (telekinesis). The only excuse for offering my own personal views is the fact that I have over a long period of years had sittings with some of the world's best known "physical" mediums, including Mrs. Corner (Florence Cook), Eusapia Palladino, Eva C., Frau Silbert, and Willi Schneider, and I am unable to indorse the opinion recently suggested by a body of able and experienced German investigators, that "all physical phenomena are fraudulent." In the case of Mrs. Corner I have witnessed the production of a complete, visible, and tangible figure which certainly was not the medium herself; that it was not a confederate, the only other possibility, was ruled out by elaborate and convincing precautions. Despite the open readiness of Eusapia Palladino to cheat when left without control, many of the positive results secured through the mediumship of this Neapolitan peasant woman under test conditions appear to defy any normal explanation.

Telekinesis (the movement of material objects without personal contact), in full light, has been attested by men of unimpeachable honesty and acknowledged ability, like Professors William James, Lombroso, Schiaparelli, and Richet. It is childish and unscientific to ignore such testimony and regard every account which comes to hand of supernormal physical phenomena as little else than the tale of an idiot, signifying nothing. If mental suggestion can, to go no further, produce stigmata in or remove a wart from the physical tissue of a human hand, there seems to be no ground for any a priori refusal to consider any apparently valid evidence for the supernormal movement of a chair or a table.

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We have sketched the main lines upon which the psychic student of to-day is working, and the question which remains is simply: what is the practical or even theoretical value of our research?

The results secured by psychic research in Great Britain and various other countries possess, first of all, a real historical value. The attested phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance, and physical mediumship throw a clear light on many dark corners of the past.

The sibylline and other oracles uttered by the entranced priestesses of old, and many of the features of medieval magic, have their unmistakable counterparts in the experiences of modern mediumship.

The appalling records of the most devilish machinery ever devised for the torture of mankind, the witchcraft persecutions (not of the Dark Ages, but of the Renaissance), pos

sess an added horror when one realizes that the offenses alleged against the nine million persons burned to death in two centuries were to a large extent the outcome of psychic forces whose character was totally unknown to either the victims or their tormentors.

The sacred books of Christianity and other religions speak of visible and audible phenomena of supernormal character which have their obvious analogues in the psychic experiences of our own days. The messages revealed in the shining urim and thummim, the quaint telepathy of Jacob's sheep-farming, the phantasm and the voice at Endor-these things appear no longer as the isolated happenings of a remote and dissimilar past or of a special dispensation. In the pages of the New Testament, too, the healing touch for the sick, the rescue of the possessed, the experiences of the first Eastertide on the way to Emmaus or on the Galilean beach, the testimony of the "five hundred brethren at once," the sudden conversion on the Damascus road-such records are indeed "worthier of all men to be believed" because they are no longer relegated to a far-off age of miracles but are repeated and exemplified in the phenomena of modern research.

Apart, however, from the question of historical interest, is it too much to hope that we may sooner or later succeed in controlling and utilizing to a vastly greater degree than at present those new forces which our researches have brought to light? Mr. H. G. Mr. H. G. Wells, in a prophetic page of "When the Sleeper Wakes," pictures a pictures a Harley Street of the future occupied

by the consulting-rooms of telepathic specialists; and there can be little doubt that the valuable work even now accomplished in cases of nervous derangements and mental pathology by suggestion, hypnotic or otherwise, is capable of almost indefinite expansion as fuller information accumulates and earlier prejudices subside.

The employment of suggestion in the education of the young is a field at present almost unexplored, although suggestion is so obvious a factor in the "endless imitation" of childhood. The increased application of psychoanalytic methods may in the future not only relieve to an infinitely greater extent the maladies and distresses of the ordinary individual but revolutionize our attitude toward the criminal. Just as the treatment of hysteria has already advanced far beyond the beatings and cold douches of our grandparents' days, so do our methods of handling the criminal become ever more curative than penal.

In another direction psychical research may stretch out a helping hand to reinvigorate the failing forces of religion. The structure of organized Christianity to-day exhibits all the signs of gradual but inevitable decay. Of those who may be willing to render lip-service to the formulæ of medieval orthodoxy, only a few ever enter a church. While the religion of Christ can still guide His faithful followers in life and cheer them in the hour of death, the despairing cry of the Saxon chronicler might well be uttered over the masses of "Christian" mankind today: "God and His saints sleep." Thoughtful men Thoughtful men are beginning to

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