oofa* bp fcenrp fcolt 
 
 CALMIRE, Man and Nature. Sixth edition 
 
 revised. 
 STURMSEE Man and Man. Third edition 
 
 revised. 
 
 THE COSMIC RELATIONS AND IMMORTAL- 
 ITY, second edition, 2 vols. 
 
 ON THE Civic RELATIONS. Being a third 
 edition of " Talks on Civics" rewritten 
 from the catechetical into the expository 
 form, and revised and enlarged. 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK
 
 THE COSMIC RELATIONS 
 AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES 
 VOL. I
 
 THE COSMIC RELATIONS 
 AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 r 
 HENRY HOLT 
 
 Bting a second edition eftbt author" i treatise 
 
 "ON THE COSMIC RELATIONS" 
 VOLUME I 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 *br filter* iDe prr*< CambnDgr 
 1919
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY HKNRY HOLT 
 COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY HENRY HOLT 
 
 Published November, igu 
 
 Reprinted. March, igis 
 
 Second edition, enlarged, November, 1919
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 
 
 OP course no one could sanely undertake an exhaustive 
 treatment of the subject indicated by the title of this book. 
 What I have attempted is an outline of the evolution of the 
 relations between the soul and the external universe, and 
 a summary of the recognized relations that are still so im- 
 maturely evolved as to be little understood. 
 
 With the latest philosophy, I have assumed a germ of 
 consciousness in each particle of the star dust, recognizing 
 the consciousness when it becomes obvious in the recoil of 
 protoplasm from contact, and following the evolution up 
 through primitive life into the soul as we know it to-day. 
 I have made this sketch with a special view to showing that 
 the existence of an unknown universe is a corollary of the 
 evolution of knowledge. This has often been expressed in 
 a sentence, but not often systematically expounded and illus- 
 trated. 
 
 After this hasty sketch of the a priori indications of an 
 unknown universe, I have gone at once into the a posteriori 
 indications, giving an account of the mysterious relations 
 that have been carefully studied only for a generation, between 
 the human forces now termed telekinetic and the better 
 known modes of force; and also of the psychical relations 
 termed telepathic, following them up to those which some 
 consider spiritistic. 
 
 That these phenomena are of great interest, and the study 
 of them of the very first importance, has been the belief of 
 some of the first minds of our time, including minds so 
 diverse as those of Mr. Gladstone and Professor James. 
 
 These things upon the borders of our Cosmic Relations 
 have been most notably studied by the Society for Psychical 
 Research, and earliest perhaps among the motives for under- 
 taking this book, was the desire to present, so far as I could 
 in the limits, and in such organic shape as I could, the most 
 
 2033194
 
 vi Preface 
 
 important of the accounts of phenomena and comments upon 
 them scattered through the forty odd volumes so far pub- 
 lished by that Society. My compilation has naturally ac- 
 creted with itself considerable material from kindred sources, 
 including some from the observations of my friends and 
 myself; and I have ventured to accompany it with many 
 guesses and comments of my own as to causes and implica- 
 tions of the phenomena. Where all is so vague, there can be 
 no immodesty in any earnest student hazarding his guesses. 
 The only immodesty conspicuous in the connection is that 
 frequently shown by those who pooh-pooh the facts without 
 knowing anything about them. 
 
 Many of the facts presented are very nebulous, and the 
 guesses are naturally more nebulous still. This has led to 
 a great deal of deliberate repetition, of views from various 
 angles, so much that I fear it will tax the patience of the 
 readers whose approval I most desire. I trust, however, that 
 they will bear with the repetitions better from knowing that, 
 although there is probably a full share of those which 
 result from imperfection in the author's grasp, there are 
 many others which are of set purpose. 
 
 I beg farther indulgence for some inconsistencies. For 
 instance, in dealing with the most tremendous subjects that 
 tempt our intellects, at one moment one is conscious of their 
 immensity, and uses the habitual symbols for the feeling, 
 and at the next moment, in a different connection, the word 
 that he has just capitalized arises in some matter-of-fact 
 connection without any emotional content, and slips off the 
 pencil as free from emphasis as any other word. I let them 
 stay as they fell, and hope that their inconsistencies will not 
 bother the reader as much as they have bothered the proof 
 readers. Those good (and sometimes very bad) people have 
 also been greatly bothered by the extracts of heteromatic 
 writing : for I left them to be printed just as I found them, 
 and they are often superior to the rules of rhyme and reason, 
 let alone rhetoric and proof reading. Moreover, there are 
 folks who don't like being bound by rule : if there never had 
 been such, this book would not have been possible or perhaps 
 any other. 
 
 In addition to the sins for which I have already sought
 
 Preface vii 
 
 absolution, I have contradicted myself with a freedom per- 
 haps not quite Emersonian, but also, alas! not quite with 
 Emersonian excuse ; and perhaps the worst thing I have done, 
 but a thing which I suspect has been done by more than 
 one other author, even by as great a one as I have just 
 named, is letting stand two or three sentences written in 
 good faith, whose meaning is so elusive that, by the time of 
 revision, it has escaped even the author. It may come back, 
 though, when sought under different circumstances, even by 
 a different person. 
 
 To crown all the paradoxical treatment of a paradoxical 
 subject, there is matter on pages 373-4 and 395-6 that perhaps 
 ought to be in the preface, but it could not be understood 
 without a knowledge of much that precedes it. 
 
 I have not made so much apology without a vivid con- 
 sciousness that qui s'excuse s'accuse. But is there not suf- 
 ficient sanction in antique usage, for a preface being " The 
 Author's Apology " ? And surely in these days of unrelent- 
 ing book production, he has more need of apology than 
 ever before. I do not envy the man, or have much 
 hope for the work of the man, who can write on these vague 
 subjects without painfully mistrusting himself. But there 
 is at least one good reason for any aspirant setting out with 
 a good heart though he may receive, and deserve, no atten- 
 tion, or even contemptuous attention, he is at least essaying 
 needed work: for our age takes too little interest in these 
 subjects, even if some ages have taken too much. 
 
 My obligations to many friends are great to Mr. Dorr, 
 Professor Kellogg, and Professor Newbold they are beyond 
 expression. That two of them have sometimes talked all 
 night with me is but a faint indication. Professor Kellogg 
 has read some of the proof, and Professor Newbold the whole 
 of it So has Mr. Bartlett, the biographer of Foster. So 
 also have several other friends, some of them at almost as 
 great sacrifice of peace of mind as the proof readers. 
 
 I have also to express my thanks to the Society for Psy- 
 chical Research for permitting the publication of some of the 
 matter in Professor Newbold's hands which is under their
 
 viii Preface 
 
 control. It is given in Chapter XXXVI, and also in the 
 Baker case on pp. 8591 
 
 Some passages have been printed in The Unpopular Re- 
 view. As it is usual to acknowledge such facts, partly per- 
 haps to warn off readers, so slight a circumstance as my 
 being the editor ought not to prevent the acknowledgment 
 here. 
 
 H. H. 
 
 FAIBHOLT, BURLINGTON, Vr. 
 September 26, 1914. 
 
 PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 
 
 THE interest in Psychical Eesearch which has sprung from 
 the bereavements of the war, has brought a sudden demand 
 for a new edition of this work. The title of the first edition 
 was simply "On the Cosmic Relations." Sir William Bar- 
 rett, in a notice approving of its contents, expressed dissatis- 
 faction with its title, and made its inadequacy for the first 
 time apparent to the author. Although the principal purpose 
 of the book was to tell what had been done in Psychical 
 Eesearch, the title came from a desire to show that the new 
 phenomena under research were as legitimate a part of our 
 relations to the cosmos as those which had preceded them, 
 and thus to establish the scientific basis for the new knowledge 
 by correlating it with the old. I also hoped thereby to lessen 
 the opposition with which the new knowledge, so contrary to 
 old prejudices, is generally received. 
 
 But Sir William's comment opened my eyes to the fact that 
 the book's title failed in what, to a person not of the Euskinian 
 type of mind, is really the first object of a title to indicate 
 the main purpose of the book ; and thereby incidentally facili- 
 tate its circulation. I trust that the expansion of the title in 
 this edition will remedy the defect, and excuse this long 
 explanation. 
 
 Since the first edition was published in 1914 " mediums " as 
 gifted as their predecessors, and with a great variety of gifts, 
 have cropped up everywhere and in all social positions, and
 
 Preface to the Second Edition ix 
 
 there has been an enormous amount of involuntary writing 
 by ouija board or pencil. Seldom has there been such a flood 
 of literature, good and bad, contributed in an equal time to 
 any other department of knowledge. This suggests that this 
 book should be rewritten, but that would involve withholding 
 it at a time when the demand is pressing and perhaps impor- 
 tant. And rewriting is not really worth while : for there has 
 been no such change in the aspect of the matters treated, as 
 cannot readily be disposed of in a supplement. Yet not only 
 has the general literature of the subject vastly increased, but 
 my personal knowledge of the phenomena has increased also, 
 and it may be worth while to give some idea of the new 
 aggregate. This I have attempted in some supplementary 
 chapters, and I have also made some modifications in the 
 final summary of the first edition. 
 
 I have added nothing to speak of about " materialization." 
 Before Dr. Crawford's discoveries, summarized in Chapter 
 LVI, I was so skeptical about it that I had not even studied 
 the subject ; and I am still ignorant of it except at second hand. 
 But Dr. Crawford's evidence, and some that has reached me 
 privately, make me think that the topic is probably worthy 
 of attention. I can not, however, hold back this edition to 
 study it farther. 
 
 When the first edition was published, there was compara- 
 tively little information outside the Proceedings of the S. 
 P. R., and as they were not easily accessible to readers gen- 
 erally, I quoted from them very freely. But the English 
 S. P. R. has not been as active as before the war, and has 
 confined its reports more and more to studies deeper than the 
 average lay student's interests go. But, on the other hand, 
 there are now many good books within reach of everybody. 
 Yet with the exception of Dr. Crawford's, they do little more 
 than confirm what I have given already. 
 
 All the additions I have found practicable are, in Chapter 
 LVI some brief accounts of what appear to be the revolu- 
 tionary discoveries in Telekinesis announced by Dr. Craw- 
 ford ; in Chapters LVII and LVIII, some account of my own 
 experiences with two remarkable new sensitives, touching 
 whom nothing has yet been published except my own articles 
 in The Unpopular (now the Unpartizan) Review, from which
 
 i Preface to the Second Edition 
 
 I quote freely; and in Chapter LIX, I give some comments 
 on the current flood of involuntary writing, and a brief ac- 
 count of a few of the most remarkable and novel recent 
 miscellaneous cases. 
 
 Because of the progress of Psychical Eesearch since the 
 first edition, the supplementary chapters (LVI-LIX) and the 
 slightly modified final summary composing Chapter LX, are 
 of course somewhat at variance with the first edition. Espe- 
 cially are Chapters LVII, on my experiences with Mr. T. 
 and LVIII, on my experiences with " Mrs. Vernon," at vari- 
 ance with the statement, after my seance with Mrs. Piper, in 
 Chapter XXVIII, that I had not been near a medium since, 
 nor cared to go. But I did not go then, and have not gone 
 since, to seek communication with my own departed ones (in 
 fact I willed it away in the Piper sitting) but I have gone 
 merely to study the subject; and I strenuously counsel 
 against the habit of going for any other purpose. Notice 
 Mrs. Travers- Smith's opinions on that point in Chapter 
 LIX. 
 
 To avoid making an entirely new index, a short sup- 
 plementary index of the new matter has been printed after 
 the original index. But introducing that new matter between 
 the last two chapters of the first edition, has involved renum- 
 bering the pages, and consequently the references after page 
 930 in the original index are seventy pages too small. They 
 can be corrected by adding that number, or the corrected ones 
 can be found in the supplementary index. 
 
 In the investigation of the subject, probably the greatest 
 need now obvious is the comparative study of the immense 
 mass of alleged evidence already accumulated a search for 
 generalizations regarding which sensitives generally agree; 
 and that is needed whether the study leads to the discovery 
 of underlying principles, or "busts up" the whole thing. 
 I, for one, don't think it will. If I were younger and less 
 committed to other work, I might attempt that study, but 
 even then there would be no justification to keep this book 
 out of print until the work should be done. There are others 
 to do the work, and I earnestly commend it to them. 
 
 What little comparative study has already been done has
 
 Preface to the Second Edition xi 
 
 brought out some important uniformities which it may not 
 be premature to call laws. The best summary of them that I 
 know has been made by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The New 
 Revelation. I give a brief but very significant quotation from 
 it in Chapter LIX. 
 
 Since the first edition appeared, we have had the terrible 
 privilege of living through, or at least into, the greatest 
 period of revolution the world has known. On its physical 
 side the revolution has probably been no greater than on its 
 psychical side. The accelerated weakening of old dogmas has 
 greatly increased the interest in Psychical Research; but, of 
 course, a stronger influence has been the hope of reunion 
 with those whom the war has so cruelly torn away. Ex- 
 travagant as the suggestion may appear, perhaps this interest 
 may yet more than compensate all the suffering of the war. 
 The least that can be expected from it is a better correlation 
 of psychic phenomena with our previous knowledge, while as 
 much can be hoped for as a clearer demonstration of the 
 survival of death, a regenerated religion, and expectation of 
 a rational heaven. 
 
 An eminent scientific man casually remarked to me the 
 other day : " I see that now Lodge and Conan Doyle have 
 had their heads turned." I asked him if he had read their 
 books, and when he told me he had not, I had my pleasure 
 usual in such cases, of telling him that I knew he had not, 
 when he made his remark. 
 
 The splendid labors of the S. P. R. have been, especially 
 lately, largely devoted to search for what James used to call 
 " knock-down evidence." I don't expect it much more than 
 I expect the exact squaring of the circle : what with telepathy, 
 teloteropathy, and the possibility of verification only from 
 incarnate minds, not to speak of the inevitable difference 
 between the conditions of incarnate existence and postcarnate 
 existence, if there is any, the conditions of the question, 
 outside of Telekinesis, do not seem to admit of knock-down 
 evidence. Yet evidence may be convincing without being con- 
 clusive, and there does seem a visible chance that as people 
 learn more and more of the facts that have already convinced
 
 xii Preface to the Second Edition 
 
 most of the investigators that have " turned the heads " of 
 Swedenborg, Lincoln, Myers, Hodgson, Lodge, Crookes, Bar- 
 rett and the Balfours, and attracted the profound attention 
 of Gladstone, Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, MacDougall, Schiller, 
 Bergson, Gilbert Murray, James, and Lord Eayliegh as peo- 
 ple learn more of these things, and as the fashion of involun- 
 tary writing spreads, there will gradually spread a belief in 
 immortality based on such evidence as we may have. Men 
 have gone to the stake for convictions whose evidence was no 
 stronger. With that conviction we may hope for a great 
 increase in right reason, in morality, in hopefulness, and 
 consequently in happiness. 
 
 H. H. 
 
 FAIRHOLT, BURLINGTON, VT. 
 October 23, 1919.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK I 
 CORRELATED KNOWLEDGE 
 
 BAPTER FAOB 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION 1 
 
 II. SKETCH OF HUMAN EVOLUTION BODY . . 13 
 
 III. SKETCH OP HUMAN EVOLUTION SOUL . . 29 
 
 IV. EVOLUTION OF THE UNIVEBSE .... 50 
 V. THE KNOWN UNIVERSE AND THE UNKNOWN . 55 
 
 VI. SOME ETHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION . . 67 
 
 BOOK II 
 
 UNCORRELATED KNOWLEDGE 
 VII. INTRODUCTION 81 
 
 PART I 
 TELEKINESIS 
 
 VIII. MOLAR TELEKINESIS 91 
 
 IX. MOLAR TELEKINESIS (Continued) DOWSING 123 
 
 X. MOLECULAR TELEKINESIS 142 
 
 XI. MOLAR TELEPSYCHIC TELEKINESIS . . . 167 
 
 XII. MOLECULAR TELEPSYCHIC TELEKINESIS . . 181 
 
 PART II 
 
 XIII. AUTOKINESIS 197 
 
 PART III 
 
 XIV. PSYCHOKINESIS . 216 
 
 ziii
 
 XIV 
 
 Contents 
 
 PART IV 
 TELEPSYCHOSIS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XV. '.INTRODUCTION 218 
 
 XVI. TELEPATHY BETWEEN FOSTER AND THE AU- 
 THOR 221 
 
 XVII. EARLY TELEPATHIC SENSITIVES . . . 228 
 
 XVIII. EECENT TELEPATHIC SENSITIVES . . . 240 
 
 XIX. SUGGESTED CORRELATIONS OF TELEPATHY . 276 
 
 XX. THE COSMIC SOUL 294 
 
 XXI. THE COSMIC SOUL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 SOUL 305 
 
 XXII. MIND AND BRAIN AGAIN .... 314 
 
 XXIII. THE IDEA 321 
 
 XXIV. POSSESSION IN GENERAL . . . .329 
 XXV. POSSESSION IN HETEROMATIC WRITING . 339 
 
 XXVI. DRAMATIC POSSESSION. EARLY CASES . 364 
 
 XXVII. PRELIMINARY EEGARDING THE S. P. B. 
 
 SITTINGS ....... 368 
 
 XXVIII. MRS. PIPER : AUTHOR'S EXPERIENCE . . 380 
 
 XXIX. HODGSON'S FIRST PIPER EEPORT, 1888-91 . 400 
 
 XXX. MRS. PIPER'S ENGLISH SITTINGS, 1889-90 . 426 
 XXXI. HODGSON'S SECOND PIPER EEPORT, 1892-5 
 
 GEORGE " PELHAM " . . . . .460 
 
 XXXII. HODGSON'S SECOND PIPER EEPORT (Con- 
 tinued) MISCELLANEOUS SITTINGS . 479 
 
 XXXIII. HODGSON'S SECOND PIPER EEPORT (Con- 
 
 tinued) THE THAW SITTINGS . . 496 
 
 XXXIV. HODGSON'S SECOND PIPER EEPORT (Con- 
 
 cluded) HODGSON'S CONCLUSIONS . . 513 
 
 XXXV. PROFESSOR NEWBOLD'S EEPORT . . .531 
 
 XXXVI. FARTHER NEWBOLD NOTES . 552
 
 Contents xv 
 
 CHAPTER PAOK 
 
 XXXVII. PROFESSOR HYSLOP'S REPORT . . .597 
 XXXVIII. MR. PIDDINGTON'S REPORT ON MRS. 
 
 THOMPSON . . . . . . 602 
 
 XXXIX. THE THOMPSON-PIPER-JOSEPH MARBLE 
 
 SERIES . . . . . . . .629 
 
 XL. THE THOMPSON-MYERS CONTROL . . 637 
 XLI. HETEROMATIC SCRIPT: MRS. HOLLAND . 647 
 XLJI. HETEROMATIC SCRIPT: MRS. VERRALL . 672 
 XUII. THE PIPER-HODGSON IN AMERICA . . 685 
 XLIV. THE PIPER-HODGSON IN AMERICA (Con- 
 tinued) 713 
 
 XLV. THE HODGSON CONTROL IN ENGLAND . 737 
 
 XLVI. THE ISAAC THOMPSON SERIES IN 1906 . 749 
 
 XLVII. CROSS-CORRESPONDENCES .... 761 
 
 XLVIII. THE PIPER-MYERS AND THE CLASSICS . 774 
 
 XLIX. THE PIPER- JUNOT SITTINGS . . .785 
 
 BOOK HI 
 ATTEMPTS AT CORRELATION 
 
 L. RELATIONS OF THE MEDIUM'S DREAMS 
 
 WITH OTHER DREAMS .... 830 
 LI. THE MAKING OF A MEDIUM . . .848 
 LJI. FINAL GUESSES REGARDING POSSESSION . 864 
 LIII. PROS AND CONS OF THE SPIRITISTIC HY- 
 POTHESIS 870 
 
 LIV. THE DREAM LIFE 881 
 
 LV. DREAMS INDICATING SURVIVAL OF DEATH 914
 
 xvi Contents 
 
 BOOK IV 
 SUPPLEMENT FOR SECOND EDITION 
 
 LVI. RECENT PROGRESS. DR. CRAWFORD'S AN- 
 NOUNCEMENTS 931 
 
 LVII. THE MEDIUMSHIP OF MR. T. 945 
 
 LVIII. THE MEDIDMSHIP OP " MRS. VERNON " . . 962 
 
 LIX. THE INVOLUNTARY WRITERS . . . .982 
 
 LX. FINAL SUMMARY 1000 
 
 LIST OF BOOKS 1063
 
 THE COSMIC RELATIONS AND 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 CORRELATED KNOWLEDGE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THERE is something more than resemblances of words to 
 make this age of wireless telegraphs, horseless carriages, and 
 tuneless music, an age of lawless laws and creditlcss creeds. 
 When new things replace old ones, new conceptions must 
 follow; and during the transitions, men's convictions are 
 suspended. Accordingly the comparatively recent realization 
 that the Cosmos is governed by law, uniform, just, and merci- 
 less, has dethroned the god whom prayer influences to dis- 
 turb the order of Nature. With such a god, goes most that 
 such a god implies ; and until we assimilate new conceptions 
 of the power behind the universe, we are getting along with 
 a short supply of faiths, and in some respects not getting 
 along at all well. It may not be hard for instance to trace 
 the connection of the lawless laws and creditless creeds with 
 the tuneless music, or with any other art which has parted 
 with inspiration. The old views of our Cosmic Relations 
 being gone, these conditions cry out for new ones. 
 
 It is a commonplace, but a very true one, that we are apt 
 to attribute too much of mankind's well-being to recent dis- 
 coveries. Telephones and wireless telegraphs are useful as 
 transmitters of words only if the words say something worth 
 saying; and there has not been said as much worth saying 
 since the invention of the telephone as there was during an 
 equal period before that invention. The wealth developed 
 by man's recently increased control of nature has put the
 
 2 Introduction [Bk. I 
 
 search for wealth in front of the searching of the spirit: 
 neither in production nor in appreciation have literature, 
 philosophy, or the arts, the place they had about the middle 
 of the nineteenth century, and science has been turning more 
 and more from the discovery of Nature's inspiring laws to 
 the production of wealth. The relation between man and 
 the universe outside him has been growing more mechanical 
 and less emotional. True, the city dweller seeks Nature more 
 than he did, but it is for his body's sake rather than his soul's 
 sake, and he feels a responsive soul behind Nature less than 
 he did. The fervors, thrills, and longings of the philosopher 
 are gone with those of the devotee. With them have dis- 
 appeared the inspirations of the poet and the artist. If they 
 come back, they must come under new forms: the old ones 
 are like worn-out garments. Of what the new ones may be 
 we are about to search for some hints. 
 
 Men have always had some sort of realization of the 
 ineffable mystery surrounding what they know. From the 
 savage's propitiation of the unknown Power behind every 
 known thing, up to Spencer's predication of an Unknowable 
 beside which all we know shrinks toward nothingness, that 
 mystery has been the source of many of our best emotions, 
 and often of our dominant ones. For long periods and over 
 wide spaces, religion has been both an inspiration and a con- 
 trol. Although it was behind the cruelties of the Inquisition 
 and the asceticisms of the Thebaid, it was no less behind the 
 sculpture of Greece, the painting of the Kenaissance, the 
 poetry of the Divina Commedia and the Paradise Lost, and 
 the music of the Twelfth Mass and the Stabat Mater. What 
 perhaps is more, it filled the ages in which lived makers of 
 other great works, who, while showing no consciousness that 
 they were affected by religion, even while contemning it, 
 unconsciously owed to it much of their inspiration. This is 
 realized by most of the few living men who experienced and 
 hated the Puritan education that survived beyond the first 
 half of the last century. At college they may have hated to 
 go to chapel, especially when compelled to it before daylight 
 in winter, and in the shortened holidays of June afternoons; 
 they may have despised many of the dogmas taught, and 
 even many of the good teachers who were too stupid to see the
 
 Ch. I] Inspirations. Puritanism. Infidelity 3 
 
 new revolutions rushing through thought; but despite all the 
 hatred and contempt, some of them feel yet the thrill from 
 the old hymns sung in the slanting sunlight of the shortened 
 holidays, and realize that those thrills were akin to those which 
 made that an age of great music and great literature great- 
 ness whose dwindling makes this age comparatively barren. 
 
 Yet the inspirations of Rossini and Verdi and Abt and 
 Lachner and our own Foster, and those of Tennyson and 
 Emerson came from precisely the same universe that we have 
 before us now nay, from a much narrower one; but the 
 interpretations of it were different, were generally accepted 
 and were embodied in a set of enthusiasms common to all men, 
 and therefore doubly inspiring to all men, even to the few 
 whose emotions affirmed when their intellects ignored or 
 denied. 
 
 The Calvinistic theology, with its outcrop of Puritanism, 
 had made God a tyrant to whom all joy in his creatures 
 was displeasing. This made morality consist in self-suppres- 
 sion. The master of my preparatory school, though educated 
 as a physician, counseled his boys against drinking water in 
 hot weather : so far did the conviction go that all our desires 
 inclined toward evil ; even in fevers, water was not permitted ; 
 and at Yale in my time, not only were the students forced 
 to go to chapel in the dark mornings and winter storms, but 
 an offer to cushion the benches of the chapel was rejected be- 
 cause it was feared the cushions would promote effeminacy. 
 At the same time, in defiance of all consistency regarding the 
 effeminacy, but most consistently regarding the asceticism, 
 athletics were not encouraged, partly, whether so realized or 
 not, because they gave pleasure. 
 
 But the reaction against those monstrous opinions, in 
 dethroning the monstrous god the opinions propitiated, de- 
 throned the only god there was, and, to the minds of many, 
 introduced a purely material universe one without malevo- 
 lence but equally without benevolence a Cosmos, it is true, 
 because orderly and governed by law, but with its emotional 
 elements ignored, and even its beauty dissected away in the 
 search for causes. 
 
 These arid views were of course possible only during the 
 passing of an intense emotional reaction. While the relations
 
 4 Introduction [Bk. I 
 
 of the Soul to God became abstractions too tenuous to con- 
 sider, the interactions between the Soul and the rest of the 
 Cosmos, were more distinctly recognized and investigated, and 
 it became generally realized that of those interactions, hap- 
 piness is, despite exceptions, the natural result: indeed, the 
 Cosmos has come to appear an apparatus for the production 
 of happiness, and, on the whole, despite many failures, a very 
 successful one. At least in our corner of it, Nature has been 
 at work longer than we can intelligently realize, in making 
 man "from the dust of the earth" in evolving responsive 
 matter from irresponsive, and in building up organisms of 
 responsive matter for no other apparent reason than that the 
 responses may produce happiness. 
 
 All sane action is undertaken for the sake of happiness. 
 Other reasons have been given, but they do not bear examina- 
 tion. Action may be sane, however, and yet mistaken, or 
 may even be deliberately counter to the happiness of the 
 actor, in which case, as in self-sacrifice for another's sake, 
 it will be intended for the happiness of someone other than 
 the actor it may be even for the happiness of God, as in 
 the Juggernaut sacrifices no less than in the Roman incense 
 or the musical tributes of the rural New England melodeon 
 and choir. Or the action may be counter to the happiness 
 of someone else, in which case it will be for the happiness 
 of the actor, as in robbery; or of some third person, as in 
 removing a friend's enemy; or again even of God, as in 
 persecuting those who deny him. 
 
 Or, once more, the action may be against the immediate 
 happiness of the actor, but for his at-least-supposed ultimate 
 happiness, as in asceticism for the soul's sake; or it may be 
 against the immediate happiness of another, but for his sup- 
 posed ultimate happiness, as in religious persecution. But 
 in whatever complexities the purpose of action may be dis- 
 guised, it is, if sane, ultimately intended for happiness of 
 somebody somewhere. Counter theories have been main- 
 tained, but they have been demonstrated fallacious, both in 
 logic and in practice. 
 
 The proposition that, so far as we can see, happiness is 
 the only known justification for the existence of either soul 
 or universe, has probably been the object of more attack
 
 Ch. I] Happiness, Duty, Cosmic Law 5 
 
 than any other proposition in philosophy. The opposition, 
 however, has been mainly against low definitions of the term 
 happiness, which the critics have made for themselves. But 
 that proposition is supported even by their suggestion that 
 God made both soul and universe to amuse himself that 
 his eyes might be delighted by human sacrifices, and his 
 palate by their flesh; or that his ears might be tickled by 
 melodeons, and his nose by incense such was one idea of 
 Divine happiness entertained by some of those who made the 
 suggestion. 
 
 If happiness means the satisfaction of poor taste, or vanity, 
 or sensuality, or means even mere amusement, the proposition 
 is well founded. But where does happiness bulk larger in 
 poor taste, or good taste; in vanity, or modesty; in excess, 
 or temperance; in selfishness, or generosity; in laziness 
 or activity? If happiness is most effectively sought in good 
 work relieved by the recreation essential to its best efficiency, 
 and directed to the greatest aggregate happiness regarding 
 the happiness of the individual only as a component of that; 
 in love of the beautiful universe and of the arts we generate 
 from it ; in love of beautiful bodies and beautiful souls, and 
 the beautiful moral law; and in grateful, hopeful, filial, 
 intimate reverence for the Power and Beneficence obvious 
 behind it all if happiness comes mainly from these 
 things, who shall say that its production is not the main 
 result, and the best result, of all the legitimate activities we 
 know ? And yet it is but a by-product of duty. 
 
 With this view that the cosmic relations are normally 
 productive of happiness has come the realization that the 
 substitution, in the control of the universe, of law for 
 anthropomorphic volitions, has not done away with morality; 
 and that discrediting the testimony on which, in our branch 
 of the race, the hopes of immortality had mainly rested, did 
 not destroy all bases for the hopes, especially as there began 
 to appear new bases, which even conquered the skepticism 
 of many investigators to whom the old ones appealed in vain. 
 
 These new mental attitudes have resulted from much dis- 
 cussion, but they are still so new that discussion can hardly 
 yet have become superfluous, and that any earnest writer may 
 hope to present some aspects worth noticing. In this hope
 
 6 Introduction [Bk. I 
 
 I venture one more consideration of our Cosmic Eelations 
 one by no means exhaustive, even of our present knowledge, 
 but only of some salient features of it. 
 
 Our " Cosmic Eelations " is a brief term for the interactions 
 between Soul and Universe. For those interactions to be 
 successful which means for them to be productive of hap- 
 piness, the actions on one side must of course be in conformity 
 with the actions on the other. There are actions on both 
 sides not controlled by our wills on one side, many of our 
 own thoughts and feelings; and on the other, most of the 
 processes of Nature. But we have always found the actions 
 we do not control, consistent with each other in conformity 
 with Nature's laws, as we phrase it; and when the actions 
 we do control are also in such conformity, the actions we do 
 not control always co-operate with us, and insure our success ; 
 when our actions are not in conformity, the other actions op- 
 pose us, and insure our failure. Conformity is what we call 
 morality. 
 
 With some of the reactions we are very familiar, some 
 we know vaguely, there may be others at which we merely 
 guess, and probably the vast majority we do not even guess 
 about. The changes in our bodies on which our mental and 
 physical well-being depends, are but very imperfectly known 
 to us, and many not known at all. The same is true of con- 
 ditions in our environment. We can yet foresee but im- 
 perfectly the daily and seasonal changes of temperature and 
 moisture on which our health and fortunes so largely depend ; 
 and we guess but faintly that there are around us changes 
 of magnetic and electrical tension which materially affect our 
 vigor and spirits, and yet which we recognize but slowly and 
 vaguely, and cannot anticipate, much less control. Such, 
 however, as already hinted, is the obvious consistency of the 
 universe, that there is every reason to believe that if we 
 deduce correct principles of conduct regarding what we know, 
 we will comport ourselves wisely regarding what we do not 
 know. The vast majority of wise people have even carried 
 this principle so far as to believe that if there is a life beyond 
 the one we are leading, the full use of this one is the best 
 possible preparation for that one. Some ascetics, however,
 
 Ch. I] Philosophy and Conduct. Soul and Universe 7 
 
 have advocated the subordination of this one to certain fancies 
 which they have entertained regarding that one. 
 
 To guard against such extremes, it is well to know the 
 general laws of the happiness-producing Cosmos: for they 
 indicate the right uses of less general knowledge. That is 
 the reason for traditionally applying the term The Guide of 
 Life to the general laws, embraced under the name Philoso- 
 phy, and is why masters of special arts have always come 
 to learn from masters of philosophy, and why widespread 
 errors of philosophy have led to disastrous blunders in re- 
 ligion, statecraft, economics, criminology, physical science, 
 and invention blunders all the way from attempting to 
 govern heterogeneous peoples by homogeneous suffrage, and 
 attempting to cure laziness by fostering it, down to astrology 
 and perpetual motion. 
 
 As any treatment, however modest, of the widest generali- 
 ties, must here and there touch the outlines of all we know, 
 to make some sort of consistent whole it must include many 
 things with which most readers are already familiar. But 
 that is an infirmity of nearly all exposition: often the best 
 that one can hope to reach, is putting old facts in new lights. 
 
 Our study, like all others, needs a classification of subject- 
 matter and a terminology, and our classification, like all 
 others, cannot escape being a little arbitrary, with some 
 overlapping at the lines of division. 
 
 As already intimated, we will consider the Cosmos as con- 
 sisting of the soul and the universe external to it. Yet some 
 wise people deny any such duality part of them declaring 
 that there is nothing outside the mind, and others declaring 
 that mind is only a function of matter. Very well, we will 
 consider this later; at present, for the first class of persons, 
 let us divide the contents of the mind into what it does not 
 project as seemingly outside itself, and what it does; and 
 for the second class of persons, let us divide the functions 
 of matter into those taking place in the nervous system, and 
 those taking place outside of it. As said before, no classifica- 
 tion is faultless, but any one of these will do to work with,
 
 8 Introduction [Bk. I 
 
 and the three are nearly enough identical to permit the terms 
 of any one to apply to the others at least closely enough 
 for our purposes. The terms in each case may well be cov- 
 ered by the old-fashioned words subjective and objective. 
 
 This is our first illustration of something that will come 
 before us often and with which the reader is probably 
 already only too familiar the absence in Nature of lines of 
 demarcation, and the frequent necessity of assuming them 
 for purposes of study. As with body and soul, so with animal 
 and vegetable, chemical and physical, and hosts of other 
 pairs of categories. Of most of the items under any pair, 
 we can say: This comes under one of the pair, and this 
 under the other; but there are some which we find it so 
 difficult to place that we are tempted to say : This comes under 
 both. Even to-day certain of the simplest organisms will 
 be found included in both zoological and botanical text-books. 
 
 Using our terms Soul and Universe, we place the body 
 outside of the soul. But inside the soul we recognize a 
 Something which says my body, my sensations, my thoughts, 
 my feelings, my soul. This something we know only as 
 making such remarks, and claiming such possessions ; but we 
 at least give it a name Consciousness. But we call even it, 
 my consciousness. What calls it so ? Another consciousness ? 
 If so, that too must be "mine," and so on ad infinitum. 
 Thus consciousness, like everything else, is ultimately a 
 mystery beyond our faculties. Yet we include it with the 
 mass of sensations, thoughts, and feelings, under the con- 
 ception which, pace the quarrels of the psychologists, we 
 call Soul. 
 
 Outside of the soul,, too, are other souls, which, in relation 
 to it, we are to include not in Soul, but in Universe: for 
 as happiness is mainly produced by the interactions between 
 one soul and other souls, unless we did include objective soul 
 in universe, there would be but a sorry foundation for our 
 fundamental proposition that the interactions between soul 
 and universe are the cause of happiness. 
 
 To this proposition it may be objected (How hard it is 
 to make a proposition to which " it may be objected " never 
 applies!) that the soul derives happiness from its own func- 
 tions from studying its own processes, contemplating its
 
 Ch. I] Knowledge, Experience, Forecast 9 
 
 memories and imaginations, and constructing its interpreta- 
 tions, theories, and schemes. True, but all these seem to have 
 their origin in reactions between Soul and Universe. 
 
 We will regard the universe as consisting of, first, the 
 portion known to us; second, the portion partly known, or 
 on the borderland between the known and the unknown; 
 and third, the portion unknown, which is presumably im- 
 measurably the largest. This classification, too, is like all 
 others, very vague at the dividing lines so vague indeed 
 that we have to begin by admitting the first portion to be, 
 from one point of view, identical with the second; but we 
 will find another point of view. 
 
 What shall we understand by the known universe? It is 
 really a sequence of phenomena. Until lately it was believed, 
 and is still generally believed, that we can perceive, think, and 
 feel only through vibrations in the objective universe, includ- 
 ing nerve matter, and we may as well proceed provisionally 
 on this belief until we reach the reasons that may point to 
 supplementing it. Supplementing belief seems, in this genera- 
 tion, to have been one of our most important functions. 
 
 Knowledge is the recognition of uniformities and differ- 
 ences in the aforesaid vibrations, and it is really knowledge, 
 only as it can prophesy uniformities and differences in new 
 vibrations. 
 
 The ability thus to prophesy depends of course upon uni- 
 formity and breadth of experience. Certainty varies as these 
 vary, and as there is no final experience as the sun may 
 not rise to-morrow morning; as next winter may be hot, 
 and next summer cold ; as anything and everything may turn 
 out differently from what it always has; there is of course 
 no absolute certainty. Or looking at it from another angle : 
 if certainty means demonstration not open to any possible 
 doubt, absolute certainty is impossible to the human mind: 
 for, as has often been said, absolute certainty would need 
 infinite evidence, whose accumulation would require infinite 
 time. Meanwhile " absolute " and " infinite " are words which 
 are merely confessions of ignorance, and therefore " absolute 
 certainty" is not only unattainable, but unthinkable; and 
 over all this, some diseased minds have made a great pother.
 
 10 Introduction [Bk. I 
 
 But it is a far cry from such considerations, to the in- 
 ference of the pessimists that as human knowledge is not 
 certain, it is useless. We have found practical certainty, in 
 the vast majority of instances, as reliable as absolute certainty 
 could have been ; and our uncertain knowledge is not only the 
 best knowledge we have, but it is good enough. Our degree 
 of certainty that the sun will rise to-morrow morning, and 
 that things will go as they have gone, except as their totality 
 improves, has been a guide to all human effort, and a basis for 
 all human happiness. Though the disasters that have come 
 from mistakes have been many and serious, they have not 
 been enough to prevent life being generally worth while to 
 sane people not given to pessimism if any sane people are. 
 There are those for whom the only certainty possible to men is 
 not enough. Their trouble, however, is not with their mental 
 food, but with their mental digestion. They need the help 
 of the alienist rather than the philosopher. 
 
 One often meets a general statement that the fact of evolu- 
 tion of our faculties and of our knowledge of the Cosmos up 
 to the present stages, demonstrates that the evolution of both 
 will continue, and that therefore there must be not only a uni- 
 verse, astronomical and microscopical, outside the one we 
 know, but also an unknown universe within the one we partly 
 know, and that this is as true of mind as it is of matter. 
 But I have never seen an attempt to make this abstract state- 
 ment more realizable more like the fruitful knowledge we 
 have of visible and tangible things, by a sketch of evolution 
 contrasting our universe with the universe of our primitive 
 ancestors, and drawing from the contrast the legitimate in- 
 ferences regarding the wider capacities and wider universe 
 unknown to us, presumably infinitely vaster than those we 
 know, and presumably to be enjoyed by our descendants, and 
 possibly by ourselves in some other plane of being. 
 
 The mysteries of that unknown universe of mind and matter 
 have always been contemplated with awe, alike by the primi- 
 tive savage and the most advanced saint and mystic, and 
 this awe has been the parent of most of the religious emotions. 
 But the developments in the universe of our daily experience 
 during the past century, have been so much greater than 
 ever before have so increased our control over the powers
 
 Ch. I] Consciousness of the Unknown. Plan of this Work 11 
 
 of Nature, and with it our wealth, that never perhaps, cer- 
 tainly never since the luxurious days of Rome, have men's 
 thoughts been so diverted from the mysteries and emotions 
 which have marked the great religious ages. Those ages 
 have had their extremes, but ours is in the opposite extreme, 
 and sadly needs to have a portion of its interests lifted from 
 Lombard Street and Wall Street, not to speak of the Savoy 
 and the Waldorf-Astoria. 
 
 Without a large consciousness of the universe beyond our 
 knowledge, few men, if any, have done great things. The 
 consciousness may have been mingled with dark and cruel 
 superstitions, but it has been effective in spite of them. Even 
 poor Napoleon had it, and if his age had not been enough like 
 ours to afford him but a niggard supply, he might not have 
 been the pitiable failure he was. 
 
 The task I have set myself is, first, to attempt (in Book I) 
 some such sketch of evolution as may impress, more than 
 abstract statements can, a living consciousness of the exist- 
 ence of the universe beyond our knowledge. For such a 
 sketch the facts are yet meager, and have to be pieced together 
 by not a little guesswork. Moreover, they largely relate to 
 primitive and uninteresting things, and I fear my sketch 
 will be dull, especially in the early stages, where its relation 
 to its object cannot be very obvious. Moreover, as it must 
 deal largely with commonplaces of knowledge, you may be 
 impatient unless I am fortunate enough to lead you constantly 
 to regard them as links in a chain of demonstration which, 
 when completed, may possibly repay your attention. 
 
 As soon as you find yourself bored, which I greatly fear 
 you will, it may still be worth while to turn to Chapter V. 
 There, after you skip what I fear may be some " fine writing " 
 that I have been betrayed into, you will find the gist of every- 
 thing between here and there ; and in Chapter VIII you will 
 find the beginning of some things that may not have to de- 
 pend on any powers of mine to make you " sit up and take 
 notice." 
 
 Having done what I can to arouse an interest in the 
 Unknown, I shall proceed (in Book II) to give some account 
 of a mass of phenomena which of late have fitfully emerged
 
 12 Introduction [Bk. I 
 
 from the Unknown, and which although they seem to have 
 always been more or less a part of man's reactions with the 
 Universe of both mind and matter, have been so small a part 
 that, while they raise questions of the highest importance, they 
 have been little explained that is to say: little correlated 
 ' with the mass of verified and usable knowledge. 
 
 Incidentally, and especially in conclusion (in Book III), 
 I shall offer the leading guesses, and some of my own, as to 
 the possible correlations and implications of these uncorrelated 
 phenomena, and the answers they offer to the questions they 
 raise. 
 
 The last two books I trust will not tax the reader's patience 
 as severely as the first one. 
 
 We proceed now to the threatened sketch of evolution with 
 reference to its demonstration of a universe beyond our 
 knowledge.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 SKETCH OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 
 
 The Body 
 
 FIRST for a rough survey of the apparatus through which 
 the Soul maintains its reactions with the Universe. As this 
 apparatus is evolved, its presumptive farther evolution involves 
 a farther evolution of its functions, which means an increase 
 of the reactions between Soul and Universe; and that means 
 an increase of happiness. At the outset, the survey of the 
 evolution of the apparatus may seem going over too familiar 
 ground, but it will contain some implications that are not 
 very familiar, and that are ancillary to our main purpose. 
 It will also help some more specific work later. Moreover 
 generally, probably always, the best way to study things and 
 their relations is to begin with their evolution. 
 
 Evolution began anterior to our knowledge, but it is now 
 going on in things so much like any one we may wish to 
 study, that we can generally get a fair notion of that thing's 
 evolution, through the similar evolutions going on around us. 
 For instance, from hints we get from other suns and systems, 
 and from the action of mechanical laws that we know, we 
 have made a history of the evolution of our solar system; 
 and although no man ever saw that evolution, our history 
 of it is probably more reliable than many histories of human 
 events that profess to be made from the reports of witnesses. 
 Similarly regarding the evolution of plants and animals and 
 intelligence : we have primitive protoplasm and many primi- 
 tive organisms with us now, and by watching them, and seeds 
 and embryos which repeat their own ancestral evolution, we 
 have learned much of the past biological evolution of which 
 we are the summit. 
 
 As we know (in the sense of "knowing" already ex- 
 plained), the evolution of the human body took its start, if 
 18
 
 14 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 we wish to assume a start anywhere, an immeasurable time 
 ago, in a cell of protoplasm. 
 
 The most primitive individual creature that we know is 
 the amoeba. It is little more than a nucleated cell of 
 protoplasm, and yet it does queer things. But first let us 
 see if we can get behind it to a connection with inorganic 
 nature: for inorganic objects do queer things too. 
 
 Professor Holmes says (Evolution of Animal Intelligence, 
 p. 67) : 
 
 " There are various ways of imitating the movements of 
 Amoeba by drops of oil or other fluids subjected to changes 
 of surface tension. If a drop of mercury is placed in dilute 
 nitric acid and a piece of potassium bichromate placed near 
 it the drop of mercury will bulge out toward the bichromate 
 and may surround it. The bichromate as it diffuses against 
 the mercury causes a diminution of surface tension at the 
 region of contact. The stronger contraction of the rest of 
 the surface film forces the mercury to protrude at the weakest 
 point, producing an outpushing resembling the pseudopod " 
 [false foot] " of the Amoeba. It has been contended that varia- 
 tions in surface tension account in great measure for the 
 movements of Amoeba and other Khizopods much as in inor- 
 ganic fluids. There is certainly a striking analogy between 
 the phenomena in the two cases, but the studies of Jennings 
 have shown that explanation of the phenomena is not quite 
 so simple." 
 
 Elsewhere Professor Holmes tells us that a drop of water 
 will swallow a fine splinter of glass, and that a drop of 
 chloroform will also, if the splinter is covered with shellac, 
 and will eject it after the shellac is dissolved and becomes 
 part of the drop. A drop of protoplasm with a nucleus, which 
 we call an amoeba, will swallow pretty much anything it can 
 manage to flow around, and after treating it, so far as con- 
 ditions permit, as the drop of chloroform treats the shel- 
 lac, will eject what remains, as the chloroform does the 
 
 In view of such facts, one is almost tempted to ask whether 
 the desire to draw an arbitrary line between "physical and 
 chemical processes," on the one hand; and on the other the 
 " super-physical agency . . . vital principle, or entelechy of 
 some sort/' may not be simply the old theological prejudice,
 
 Ch. II] Origin of Life. Protozoa 15 
 
 and whether organic and inorganic are not simply two aspects 
 of the same thing. 
 
 To determine where, in the three performances above de- 
 scribed, life begins, certainly will give material for debate to 
 those fond of the exercise. Perhaps the question can be 
 settled by the fact that you and I can be pretty closely proved 
 to be descended from drops of protoplasm, and nobody yet 
 heard from can be nearly as closely proved to be descended 
 from drops of water or even drops of mercury or chloroform 
 or oil, though the chloroform is complex matter, and the oil is 
 organic matter. 
 
 Professor Holmes (op. cit.) is my principal authority 
 for the statements immediately following: 
 
 In the material of amcebae and other low forms, various 
 chemical reagents inserted in the water they inhabit, awaken 
 reactions which lead to changes in form, sometimes enough 
 to produce motion of the organism, and lead it to or away 
 from the reagent It is thus difficult, if not impossible, in 
 the simpler creatures, to draw the line between chemical 
 reaction and animal motion, and even purposeful motion in 
 creatures a little higher still. 
 
 So with the effects of gravity some of these creatures 
 find their way to the bottom of the receptacle, and others 
 to the top. Chemical reactions, especially variations in the 
 amount of oxygen, combine with gravity in producing these 
 motions. 
 
 Light, too, is an agent; and when the spectrum has been 
 thrown on the water, there has been a marked clustering of 
 some creatures toward the red end. Often clusters form in 
 response to the conditions for instance around a drop of 
 some reagent, sometimes to their destruction, though oftener 
 to their betterment. If an electric current is sent through a 
 mass of amoebae, it will move itself, or part of itself, toward 
 the cathode. All may go, or, if the current is very strong, 
 the point near the anode may contract and disintegrate. 
 
 Paramecia, worms and mollusks generally react to elec- 
 tricity negatively, and crustaceans positively. 
 
 Masses of amabse elongate themselves toward favoring 
 objects throw out pseudopods and attach themselves. We 
 envy the crab who, if he happens to lose a limb, develops a
 
 16 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 new one, but the crab may envy the amoeba who makes his 
 limbs as he needs them extrudes a pseudopod in the direction 
 where his reactions send him, and flows the rest of himself 
 up into the pseudopod. Then he will do it again, and so 
 travel. 
 
 Amoebae also get (make themselves?) top-heavy, and roll 
 over, and keep it up till they have traveled an appreciable 
 distance. Creatures a degree higher have more or less per- 
 manent cilia which they use similarly, and by which they 
 regulate their motions. A grade farther on, these cilia become 
 a swimming apparatus in later evolution, the tentacles of 
 the octopus; or the creatures may evolve, instead of cilia or 
 tentacles, a curtain like that of the jelly-fish. 
 
 The cell of protoplasm has, in a sense, no interior organiza- 
 tion: it gets all its nutriment and sensations (if it has any) 
 from its surface from outside. But its descendants tend 
 to evolve into sacs or tubes, and the water flowing through 
 the opening of the sac or tube supplies some nutriment and 
 sensations inside. This differentiation soon becomes marked, 
 the nutriment being taken up more and more from the 
 inside, and distributed through a system of minor tubes which 
 become evolved throughout the material composing the prin- 
 cipal one. 
 
 In time, the central tube evolves a bulge which acts as a 
 stomach, a gland shows up alongside it, and that pestilent 
 organ a liver is introduced into the world, perhaps con- 
 temporaneously with original sin. 
 
 In time the lower end of the tube differentiates into various 
 sorts of intestines, and appendicitis becomes a fashionable 
 possibility. The upper end differentiates into a mouth, and 
 when the mouth becomes human, not only do its lips and 
 teeth become beautiful, but eating itself becomes a fine art, 
 and a well-managed dinner table becomes a great educational 
 and political influence. 
 
 The subsidiary apparatus for circulating the blood also 
 develops into a pumping engine and system of intakes 
 arteries, and one of outlets veins, for the waste left after 
 the nutritive matter has parted with its force. This waste 
 is deposited in reservoirs from which it is discharged period-
 
 Ch. II] Digestive Organs, Limbs, Nerves 17 
 
 ically. Were it discharged constantly, as it is made, all re- 
 finement of life, and present attractions of human beings for 
 each other, would be non-existent. The circulatory and ex- 
 cretory system also does its share for the aesthetic, in supply- 
 ing red lips and pink cheeks and the flushes of emotion, 
 and Cleopatra's " bluest vein." 
 
 Meantime is evolved a parallel tube for gaseous food and 
 waste. It opens into the mouth, and below ramifies into 
 lungs, and, like the other tubes, in time makes its contribution 
 to intelligence and beauty: for it contains the apparatus for 
 the voices of Patti and Caruso, and an extension of it was 
 covered by that same Cleopatra's nose upon whose dimensions 
 Pascal rested the fortunes of the world. 
 
 On the way up to all this, parts of the body surrounding 
 the original tube have differentiated, as already partly in- 
 timated, into the curtain of the jelly-fish, the radiates of the 
 star-fish, the feelers of the octopus, the fins and tail of the 
 vertebrate fish, the paddles of the amphibious lizard, the 
 wings and legs of the bird, the legs of the quadruped; and 
 at length the arms and legs from which are modeled those 
 of the Apollos and Venuses. 
 
 To receive the sensations which all these pieces of appa- 
 ratus pick up (including the aches announcing that they 
 need attention), and to direct their consequent activities, 
 there is gradually evolved throughout the body a nervous 
 system. It begins at the surface, where it gets its sensations 
 from the external universe. 
 
 A very primitive nervous system is an afferent nerve near 
 the surface, bringing sensation to a ganglion, and from the 
 ganglion an efferent nerve going to some sort of contractile 
 tissue near the surface. The surfaces of some primitive 
 animals are covered with such rudimentary systems the 
 earliest distinguishable ones being little more than ganglia 
 alone, which, in addition to producing contractions, in some 
 way influence the surface nutrition and, in time, the tem- 
 perature. 
 
 But by and by these rudimentary systems get integrated 
 into higher systems; two ganglia may be connected by a 
 nerve, or each connected with a third ganglion, and by the
 
 18 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 intervention of the third ganglion the afferent nerve to the 
 first ganglion may provoke an answer through the efferent 
 nerve from the second: so that a message that a surface spot 
 itches, is not offset by a mere message from the ganglion to 
 the spot to contract, but by a message through a different 
 ganglion to a beak or a claw or a hand, to scratch it. 
 
 Farther, two of such systems of three ganglia each, may 
 be connected through each third ganglion with a seventh. 
 And in this system, of seven, an afferent bringing a report 
 from any of the six, may start, by way of the seventh, an 
 afferent from any other of the six, or perhaps all of them. 
 There may be a scratch ordered from one, a cry from another, 
 a reflection on the cussedness of fleas from another, and so on. 
 
 Two such sets of seven ganglia may both, by connection 
 with a fifteenth ganglion, be incorporated into a set of fifteen, 
 and then there will probably be some philosophizing, perhaps 
 not only regarding the cussedness of fleas, but possibly re- 
 garding a universe where fleas are possible, or even a god who 
 permits them. 
 
 These incorporations are not as systematic as described, 
 but take place in all conceivable fashions. Moreover they 
 need not be between ganglia connected by lines of nerves, 
 but in most cases they actually are between adjacent cells 
 connected in all sorts of ways by prolongations from globular 
 or oval centers. Masses of cells so connected by many varying 
 affixes, make up still larger ganglia; and in the higher ani- 
 mals, the largest of these is the brain. 
 
 Meanwhile the nerves at the surface have multiplied until, 
 as any pin-prick will prove, they are as close together as 
 some of the early casuists supposed the angels were on the 
 needle's point. 
 
 The ends of the afferent nerves all over the surface, includ- 
 ing the sense organs, get intelligence from the external world, 
 and transmit it to the first point where something is done 
 about it at least to the first point where the nerve carrying 
 intelligence in, meets, in a nerve-bunch or ganglion, a nerve 
 carrying orders out. This meeting may be in a ganglion on 
 the way to the brain, or in the brain itself. 
 
 In the first case, the return message goes to the muscles 
 near the affected spot, before the nerve from the spot affects
 
 Ch. II] Sympathetic Nervous System 19 
 
 the intelligence at all ; and the muscle gives some involuntary 
 jerk. Or possibly the afferent nerve current will pass on, 
 perhaps through sundry ganglia, to the brain itself. In this 
 case, before any efferent message goes back, the situation may 
 be thought over it may be concluded, for instance, that 
 scratching is more trouble than it's worth, and no orders are 
 issued, except sometimes a very imperative order to keep 
 still, if the itching, or the impulse to sneeze, or perhaps the 
 impulse to say something questionable, should be dangerously 
 strong. 
 
 Mingled with the lacework of afferent nerves to carry sen- 
 sations from the surface of the body, but preponderantly 
 behind them, is the network of efferent nerves leading to the 
 muscles. Then, mainly well below the surface, both the 
 afferent nerves and the efferent nerves begin to join each 
 other, not only in ganglia, as stated, but also in "cables" 
 going to other ganglia, the cables uniting into larger ones 
 until these last go to the backbone, and one of them passes 
 in on each side between each pair of vertebrae, and there 
 unites with the principal cable of all, and passes up into 
 the brain. 
 
 A preparation of a human nervous system in the Jardin 
 des Plantes looks like a statue of lace: so here again, as in 
 every piece of apparatus or every function we have been con- 
 sidering, evolution has been toward beauty, even though hid- 
 den beauty. 
 
 This is a rough sketch of the apparatus for the soul's 
 voluntary reaction with the universe, whether the soul be a 
 mere capacity to react to touch, or a capacity to receive im- 
 pressions and ideas, and issue directions and ideas, with the 
 power of a Bismarck or a Shakespere. 
 
 In addition to the apparatus for voluntary reaction, is 
 one in some respects more interesting still, and, as will become 
 plainer as we proceed, more related to our present task. In 
 fact the sketch of the nervous system already given, serves 
 our immediate purpose only as contributing to an under- 
 standing of the sketch we are about to give. In ffont of 
 the spinal column, and on its respective sides, are two other 
 cables which do not go to the brain, and into which enter
 
 20 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 nerves from all the organs that act independently, or partly 
 independently, of the will the heart, the lungs, the digestive 
 organs, even the sweat pores on the skin, which help to regu- 
 late the temperature of the body. These cables have several 
 ganglia which act like subsidiary brains in regulating the 
 actions of the connecting organs. 
 
 The two nervous systems may be probably often have 
 been, respectively called voluntary and involuntary, though 
 they connect with each other so that, regarding respiration, 
 for instance, they are both voluntary and involuntary; and, 
 as in walking, playing music, or in some tricks of legerdemain, 
 the voluntary one may be trained into almost involuntary 
 action. Our wills control the first system, being limited only 
 by our powers and whatever unresponsiveness there may be 
 in the environment. With the other system (generally called 
 the sympathetic) our wills have little to do, except so far 
 as our knowledge and discretion affect the body's health. 
 
 If the conscious purposeful human soul controls the nerves 
 or most of them, which center in the brain, what controls 
 the nerves centering in the sympathetic system, where the 
 human will does not enter? There are overwhelming reasons 
 for recognizing it as the same power that makes and vitalizes 
 the flowers and the sequoia, the unthinking monad and the 
 scarcely-more-thinking whale; causes the sun to lift moisture 
 and to gild the clouds in which it floats; causes the air to 
 float them, and the shifting wind to send them back to earth 
 in storms and with lightnings the same power that causes 
 the sun to burn, that rolls us away from him by night, that 
 swings the other planets around him, and all the planets of 
 other systems around their suns, and all (the word begins to 
 lose meaning here) the suns around each other ; and still the 
 same power that has evolved and sustains the mind of man 
 to learn these things the power for which we may as well, 
 perhaps, use the old name God, with all its reverend associa- 
 tions, and despite all its besmirchings. The name can often 
 save a lot of circumlocution, and we need not confine it 
 to the anthropomorphic conceptions generally associated 
 with it. 
 
 Our limitations being what they are, it is fortunate that 
 we do not have to take entire care of ourselves, and that so
 
 Ch. II] The Power not Ourselves 21 
 
 much care of us is taken by that " Power not ourselves.'* 
 If we had to take thought to pump our own hearts and 
 lungs, digest our food, secrete our bile, and perform the other 
 functions essential to keep us in condition, we would forget, 
 keep constantly ailing, or be letting something stop; and if 
 it were the heart, we should die. In fact, if we had to 
 attend to these functions from the beginning, we cannot 
 conceive of our growing up at all; we cannot even conceive 
 of our existence starting at all, if "God" had not started 
 it for us. " He " sets the little apparatus going, and brings 
 it to maturity, but allowing us, as it goes on, to do for 
 ourselves as much as we can do well, and more. 
 
 Where and how did the apparatus start? Nobody knows. 
 Nobody knows where anything started even a train of cars. 
 Did it start at the station, or in the factories, or in the ore 
 beds, or in the star dust, or in the previous system smashed 
 into star dust, or in the star dust that made that system, 
 or where? In all our classifications, we have to assume a 
 starting-point with reference to the inquiry at hand. Whether 
 we begin man, as we have done, in primitive protoplasm, 
 or in the cell differentiated from the male parent, the will 
 and the power that assimilate and integrate and differentiate 
 him, are both his own and not his own. If the soul creates 
 the body (for which proposition Dr. William H. Thomson, 
 in his new book on Brain and Personality, makes the latest 
 argument and one of the best), the soul must be both the 
 spark of life in the parent cell, and the power working outside 
 of the independent volition of that cell, even when matured. 
 There will be significant things to say about this later. 
 
 The Senses 
 
 So much in general for the apparatus through which the 
 reactions between soul and universe take place. Now let us 
 proceed to the more specific reactions. This will involve a 
 more specific consideration of some portions of the apparatus. 
 Here too we have to choose our starting-point Star dust may 
 be a little too primitive, though I confess that I, for one, 
 cannot conceive of anything physical or spiritual without 
 its start at least that eirly. But let us start with as primitive 
 a thing as we are familiar with.
 
 22 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 A bit of rock reacts to gravity. Is there any sign of soul 
 versus universe there? Hardly. 
 
 Non-magnetic ore reacts to magnetic ore. Any sign there? 
 Not yet probably. 
 
 A bit of protoplasm, or the sensitive plant, expands to 
 heat, or contracts to cold. The puzzle begins: there is life 
 indeed, but expansion and contraction with heat and cold 
 are no evidence of life : inanimate things show that. But 
 when an animate thing does it, may it not mark a transition 
 toward consciousness? 
 
 The bit of protoplasm, or the sensitive plant, contracts to 
 touch, and restores itself; the puzzle thickens: a rubber ball 
 will do that, but the ball's contraction is only in proportion 
 to the degree of the pressure, while the protoplasm's or the 
 plant's contraction may be much greater or less than the 
 degree of pressure. 
 
 We have no doubt about that being a vital reaction some- 
 thing that no inorganic thing will do; or if we find it done 
 by anything before called inorganic, we will, I suppose, at 
 once call that thing organic. 
 
 Such primitive responses, although there were, strictly 
 speaking, no nerves, were the first germs of nervous reaction. 
 As evolution went on, however, portions of the primitive homo- 
 geneous substance were more and more differentiated into 
 nerve, and nerve differentiated and integrated into brain. 
 
 Touch, as distinct from the special senses, is hardly differ- 
 entiated at all. Very early in the scale of being, any portion 
 of the surface contracts when touched. Some portions are 
 more sensitive than other portions. Gradually from the sur- 
 face with its one sense of touch, were differentiated, from the 
 more sensitive portions, organs of special sense: response to 
 contact with material objects being gradually refined into 
 response to objects so nearly immaterial as odors, as air 
 in vibration appealing to a gradually developed sense of 
 hearing, and as (we assume) ether in vibration appealing to 
 a gradually developed sense of sight. 
 
 Light produces all sorts of changes in inorganic matter, 
 find organic matter is less stable than even inorganic. Light 
 has been impinging upon organic matter a long time: it is 
 inconceivable that no changes should result, and that sus-
 
 Ch. II] Evolution of Sight 23 
 
 ceptibility to the touch of .rays of light should not appear 
 stronger in some spots than in others. (For the reasons, 
 read a hundred or two pages of Spencer's First Principles.) 
 In the course of generations, perhaps as the result of chemical 
 changes, such spots have become discolored by some sort of 
 pigment, and the dark color increases the amount of light 
 absorbed. Farther differentiations take place until we find 
 features that we deliberate about calling eyes; and a few 
 thousand generations farther on, we unhesitatingly call them 
 eyes. 
 
 The conception of the evolution of the senses thus becomes 
 easy, and the placing of its evidences in sequence in the labor- 
 atory, has been but a matter of detail. It has been easy to 
 find the points where primitive eyes, or pigment patches, which 
 would respond to white light, grow responsive to blue light 
 or to red or orange or yellow or green or indigo or violet; 
 and similar points regarding response by other senses. If 
 receptacles of different colors are offered to mosquitoes, they 
 avoid the yellow ones. This has led some recent investigators 
 in mosquito regions to dress themselves and cover their shel- 
 ters with yellow. 
 
 When pigment first appears, it is generally flat behind 
 the light-receiving tissues, and so can receive light from 
 but one direction ; but later it and the receiving cells curve, 
 and so become capable of receiving light from more direc- 
 tions, and finally the curvature becomes, as in most seeing 
 animals, the lining of a globe. 
 
 The stained skin gradually develops into a crystal-clear 
 lens on the outer surface of a ball filled with clear jelly, and 
 on the back of its interior, the nerve, which first reported 
 only the difference between light and dark, becomes spread 
 out into the sensitive plate of a camera, and reports the 
 images thrown upon it through the lens, with all the colors 
 we know. 
 
 The evolution goes from a fixed rudimentary lens to a 
 developed lens up to fixed eyes of many lenses, as in the 
 fly, or perhaps by a different route to the moving eye with 
 a single lens. 
 
 Eyes appear early in various parts of the body, on the 
 back, belly, sides, legs, even the tail ; and in special prolonga-
 
 24: Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 tions that can be moved in various directions, as if we had 
 eyes in our hands. 
 
 In the human embryo, the first trace of the eye is a line 
 in the skin, which develops into a fold, and thence by slow 
 stages up to the eye as we know it; and in contemporary 
 animals we find eyes all the way from mere localized sensi- 
 bility to light, up to the optical instrument in the head 
 of man. 
 
 Before leaving the eye, it may be worth while to quote, 
 with a comment or two, a remarkable account of its varieties, 
 by Dr. Edward A. Ayers (Harper's Magazine, September, 
 1908) : 
 
 " The snake has no use for tears, nor the goose for parallel 
 vision. The spider can spin the warp and woof of his destiny 
 without gazing at the stars, and the sand-burrowing eel would 
 soon starve with sensitive cornese. Nature holds to her excep- 
 tionless law that the talent unused by the sire shall be with- 
 held from the son. But simplicity has its compensations. If 
 the spider cannot bend his neckless head nor move his socket- 
 fixed eyes, he gets one for each point of the compass, whereby 
 he can keep one eye on his struggling menu fly, and as many 
 as needed upon the straining halyards and guys of his gum 
 thread web. And each eye is set high, like a lantern on a 
 hill, so its wide range of vision makes eye-rolling useless. But 
 he can only focus four or five inches, and can be easily fooled 
 with an imitation fly. Why are his eyes so beautiful for 
 many are like rubies set in gold if the only creatures that 
 can see them well have no sense of beauty ? 
 
 " The rock-clinging starfish with his penta rays jeweled with 
 eyes; and the wood-louse called a millepede with twenty- 
 eight eyes, set in rows of sevens, as if his ancestors had gath- 
 ered maternal impressions of navy-yard cannon-ball decora- 
 tions; and the blood specialist leech, with ten little eyes 
 surrounding his mouth to guard against tainted food; and 
 the dozen-eyed silkworm with eyes single to spinneret output 
 and market quotation each; and the caterpillar sticking his 
 nose into an octagon crowned yoke of eye-gems, whence no 
 salad leaf may escape his view. 
 
 " A goose's eyes are larger than his brain. Man's eyes are 
 the best all around yet evolved, though they can see less than 
 the owl's in the dark; less keenly than the eagle's afar; change 
 focus less quickly than the hawk's; cannot sweep clear the 
 cornea without briefly hiding the view; cannot focus as near 
 as the fish; nor glow back like the cat's in the dark; they
 
 'Ch. II] Senses of Touch and Hearing 25 
 
 cannot see opposite points at one time like the chicken's, nor 
 stare all day long like the snake's; they cannot self -gaze like 
 the snail's, nor behold as small creatures as can the fly." 
 
 Yet they can do vastly more things than can the eyes of 
 any creature who surpasses them in some one capacity. 
 
 The matured eye is in itself a thing of beauty and moral 
 expression, and yet its functions have been evolved from 
 reporting mere mechanical contact, up to reporting everything 
 from the sun-studded- night to the dotted plate under the 
 microscope from the menace of the storm-cloud to the love 
 in eyes that answer. 
 
 While senses responding to light and sound have been de- 
 veloping, so of course has susceptibility to contact with hard 
 bodies been developing into susceptibility to contact with soft 
 bodies. Very primitive organisms, without definite sense- 
 organs beyond those for mere contact, have been seen to con- 
 tract and expand at contact with fluid as well as with air, 
 light, sound. 
 
 As the eye has grown from mere reflex action from mechan- 
 ical contact, to reporting Nature and art, so has the ear 
 from a mere sense of vibration, up to that of the songs of 
 the birds and loved voices and the other forms of what we 
 call music. 
 
 Organs of hearing have generally been differentiated from 
 the skin, but not always. In some animals far from the 
 surface, even inside a chitin shell, are strings which are 
 supposed to be organs of hearing, and which are evolved 
 from muscles. In such positions these chorodontal organs 
 could of course only be affected by vibrations heavy enough 
 through water to affect the solid body imbedding the organs, 
 but such organs have been found in a later stage associated 
 with tympanous membranes which could transmit vibrations 
 through the air. 
 
 The Greenland whale hears well through the water, but 
 does not appear to be affected by sounds through the air.* 
 
 Insects often can hear only sounds of a certain pitch and 
 quality generally those made by the opposite sex, as by the 
 
 *K. Sajo, Scientific American Supplement, April 13, 1809. (Appar- 
 ently quoted from "Prometheus"?.)
 
 26 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 female mosquito. So sounds, as well as sights and smells, 
 are emissaries of love. 
 
 But for that matter, so can we hear only " sounds of a 
 certain pitch," but about ten octaves in all, and probably only 
 of a certain " quality," i.e., there are probably sounds of a 
 pitch we can hear, whose quality prevents our hearing them. 
 
 In insects, the ears, or what appear to be such, are pretty 
 much anywhere, but generally in the antennae, feet, and 
 abdomen. 
 
 Mark Twain's famous biological statement that clams will 
 lie perfectly still if you play slow music to them, is probably 
 not strictly accurate: for many organisms not so high have 
 visibly responded to sounds. 
 
 The same that is true of the organs responding to touch, 
 temperature, light, and vibrating air, is, mutatis mutandis, 
 true of the organs of taste and smell. 
 
 The antennae serve also as organs of smell. They, like 
 organs of taste, are naturally near the orifice receiving the 
 food. 
 
 But the reports of the senses are not restricted to the 
 organs specially differentiated for each. Lombroso (After 
 Death What?, pp. 2, 3) gives the following case from his 
 own experience, and there are many others well attested. 
 
 "A certain C. S., daughter of one of the most active and 
 intelligent men of all Italy . . . had lost the power of vision 
 with her eyes, as a compensation she saw with the same 
 degree of acuteness (7 in the scale of Jaeger) at the point 
 of the nose and the left lobe of the ear. In this way she read 
 a letter which had just come to me from the post-office, although 
 I had blindfolded her eyes, and was able to distinguish the 
 figures on a dynamometer. Curious, also, was the new mimicry 
 with which she reacted to the stimuli brought to bear on what 
 we will call improvised and transposed eyes. For instance, 
 when I approached a finger to her ear or to her nose, or made 
 as if I were going to touch it, or, better still, when I caused 
 a ray of light to flash upon it from a distance with a lens, 
 were it only for the merest fraction of a second, she was 
 keenly sensitive to this and irritated by it. ' You want to 
 blind me ! ' she cried, her face making a sudden movement like 
 one who is menaced. Then with an instinctive simulation 
 entirely new, as the phenomenon itself was new, she lifted 
 her forearm to protect the lobe of the ear and the point of 
 the nose, and remained thus for ten or twelve minutes.
 
 Ch. II] Transferred Senses 27 
 
 " Her sense of smell was also transposed ; for ammonia or 
 asafctida, when thrust under her nose, did not excite the 
 slightest reaction, while, on the other hand, a substance pos- 
 sessing the merest trace of odor, if held under the chin, made 
 a vivid impression on it and excited a quite special simulation 
 (mimica). Thus, if the odor was pleasing, she smiled, winked 
 her eyes, and breathed more rapidly; if it was distasteful, she 
 quickly put her hands up to that part of the chin that had 
 become the seat of the sensation and rapidly shook her head. 
 
 " Later the sense of smell became transferred to the back 
 of the foot; and then, when any odor displeased her, she 
 would thrust her legs to right and to left, at the same time 
 writhing her whole body; when an odor pleased her, she would 
 remain motionless, smiling and breathing quickly." 
 
 He farther says (op. cit., 5-7) : 
 
 " As early as 1808 Petetin cited the cases of eight cataleptic 
 women in whom the external senses had been transferred to 
 the epigastric region and into the fingers of the hand and the 
 toes of the feet (Electricite Animale, Lyons, 1808). 
 
 " In 1840 Carmagnole, in the Giornale dell' Accademia di 
 Medicina, describes a case quite analogous to ours. It con- 
 cerned a girl fourteen years old " . . . who had " true fits of 
 somnambulism during which she saw distinctly with the hand, 
 selected ribbons, identified colors, and read even in the dark." 
 
 " Despine tells us of a certain Estella of Neuchatel, eleven 
 years old, who . . . was found to have suffered transposition of 
 the sense of hearing to various parts of the body, the hand, 
 the elbow, the shoulder, and (during her lethargic crisis) the 
 epigastrium 
 
 " Frank (Praxeos Mediae, Univ. Torino. 1821) publishes 
 an account of a person named Baerkmann in whom the sense 
 of hearing was transposed to the epigastrium, the frontal bone, 
 or the occiput." 
 
 The literature abounds in such cases, but I cited the first 
 I happened upon, and there are hosts of illustrations, as we 
 shall see later, of cosmic relations independent of any senses 
 yet known. 
 
 The implications of these facts we will touch upon later. 
 
 The evolution of the different sense organs received another 
 interesting suggestion and perhaps confirmation, from the 
 experience, reported in the Revue Philosophique in 1887 (and 
 by me got from the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical 
 Research), of a French sailor who came home from Mada- 
 gascar with hysteria, sense-paralysis of the left side, but part 
 of his right side so sensitive as to throw him into attacks
 
 28 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 of hysteria. These abnormal conditions could be temporarily 
 relieved by hypnotism, and, despite some skepticism at the 
 time, appear to have been ultimately cured by the magnet. 
 The point in his case which is of interest here, however, is 
 that under hypnotization, the nerves of ordinary feeling ap- 
 peared to act as nerves of special sense. When his ears were 
 closed, he would repeat words spoken close to his fingers, 
 and with his eyes bandaged, he would sort various colored 
 wools. All this might be accounted for by telepathy instead 
 of by interchange of nerve function, but how account for his 
 picking out all the blue wools in the dark ? 
 
 It was once the fashion in dealing with somnambulic 
 patients to address the pit of the stomach instead of the 
 ears, apparently with reference to the sympathetic nervous 
 system. I don't know whether the fashion prevails yet.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 SKETCH OF HUMAN EVOLUTION (Continual) 
 
 The Soul 
 
 (a) Sources 
 
 IN proceeding to consider soul, I use the term in the 
 popular sense, without any reference to the technical sense 
 over which the psychologists are constantly quarreling. I 
 take the word rather than mind, in order to cover the emo- 
 tions and the will, as well as the mere intelligence. Yet it 
 will often be natural to use the term mind interchangeably. 
 
 In considering the evolution of soul, we are met at the 
 outset by the question : Is there a primary something a mind- 
 potential, from which thought and emotion are evolved, just 
 as body is evolved from force and matter? 
 
 At first sight it seems easy to find the raw material of 
 soul in consciousness, and to assume a starting-point for what 
 we now know as mind, when the matter in an amoeba con- 
 tracts at a touch: for then there must be some sort of con- 
 sciousness; but consciousness is not dynamic: so how can it 
 be the raw material of thought, not to speak of emotion and 
 will ? It is merely aware of them, as it is of sensation. 
 
 Telesio " argued . . . from the human consciousness to the 
 feeling of [in?] inorganic matter." Somewhere I have seen 
 Weismann credited with the question : " Why should we not 
 return to the idea of matter endowed with soul ? " It is 
 probably as old as the other great guesses. The present aspect 
 of it, however, could not have antedated the verification of the 
 old guess of evolution, and that verification cannot be set 
 before Darwin. Bergson says (C.eative Evolution, p. 199) : 
 "An incidental process must have cut out matter and the 
 intellect, at the same time, from a stuff that contained both." 
 For myself, long before I knew the opinion as anybody's else, 
 29
 
 30 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 I could not imagine mind existing in Shakespere without its 
 germs existing in the star dust. And long after I first realized 
 my incapacity to separate consciousness from the star dust, I 
 found (italics mine) in James's Psychology (I, 149) : 
 
 "// evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some 
 shape must have been present at the very origin of things. 
 Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary 
 philosophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of 
 the nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom 
 of consciousness linked with it; and, just as the material atoms 
 have formed bodies and brains by massing themselves together, 
 so the mental atoms, by an analogous process of aggregation, 
 have fused into those larger consciousnesses which we know 
 in ourselves and suppose to exist in our fellow-animals. Some 
 such doctrine of atomistic hylozoism as this is an indispensable 
 part of a thorough-going philosophy of evolution. According 
 to it there must be an infinite number of degrees of conscious- 
 ness, following the degrees of complication and aggregation 
 of the primordial mind-dust. To prove the separate existence 
 of these degrees of consciousness by indirect evidence, since 
 direct intuition of them is not to be had, becomes therefore 
 the first duty of psychological evolutionism." 
 
 Mind, then, would appear to be as much a general element 
 of the universe as Motion is, and not only to enter the body, 
 as already said, with each unit of matter, but also in more 
 complex forms through our perceptive organs as raw sen- 
 sation, and in predigested shape from the memory of each 
 mind and other minds. All this psychic material from any 
 source, after it enters the organism is modified into a specific 
 stream of thoughts and feelings, which we call the mind or 
 soul, just as Motion (or Matter, if that is the more convenient 
 phrase) is modified into a specific stream of molecular changes 
 which we call the body. But however mind may enter the 
 system, in passing through it is modified into a more complex 
 form, as thread is modified into fabric as it passes through 
 the loom ; but thought is no more made of brain-matter than 
 cloth is made of loom matter. 
 
 But if mind-potential is inextricably associated with matter, 
 how can mind exist independently of matter what becomes 
 of the idea of a soul surviving the body in which it was de-
 
 Ch. Ill] Force and Matter Limited, Mind Unlimited 31 
 
 veloped ? Mind is not limited in place or quantity, as appar- 
 ently matter is. With our present knowledge we cannot 
 imagine matter greater or less in amount than earlier or later 
 forms of the same matter. But we can imagine one little flash 
 of thought pervading the psychic universe. 
 
 If all mind inhered in the star dust from which our world 
 was evolved, no more mind was in the brain of Newton than 
 in any other brain of the same weight, yet from New- 
 ton's brain, mind spread over the world and over all suc- 
 ceeding time, while from the other brain it spread no far- 
 ther than the owner's interlocutors, and no longer than his 
 life. 
 
 The fact seems to be that mind outgrows matter as soon as 
 perceptive organs are evolved that it comes to be not merely 
 the presumed primitive mind-potential associated with matter, 
 but more in amount and complexity, and in some degree in- 
 dependent. Soon the star dust mind-potential becomes a rel- 
 atively insignificant portion of the developed soul, and if the 
 soul is to survive the body, apparently it can well afford to 
 let the congeries of atoms, or whatever you call them, that 
 have constituted the body, go their way to dissolution from 
 each other, and carry with them their negligible portion of 
 the original mind-potential. 
 
 It is a world-old speculation regarding immortality, that 
 after-existence cannot be conceived without pre-existence. I 
 never saw any sense in the speculation, except as I have indi- 
 cated regarding mind-potential in the star dust. But won't 
 that, up through the life of protoplasm to that of the imme- 
 diate parent germ, do well enough for pre-existence ? In light 
 of this very simple knowledge, we cannot conceive of the soul 
 at all without attributing to it a pre-existence, and I confess 
 that I cannot conceive it then, without going back not only to 
 the star dust, but to the hypothetical ( if we are not hypothet- 
 ical enough already) system where the hypothetical smash-up 
 furnished the hypothetical star dust; and so back through evo- 
 lution and dissolution " time without end." 
 
 These ideas of course are somewnat vague and paradoxical. 
 But they are definiteness itself compared with some that we 
 will be led into. How often may I be indulged in repeating 
 the truism that our ideas of the universe beyond the little we
 
 32 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 know must always be vague and paradoxical ? But it is only 
 by starting with such ideas and reshaping them as we go along, 
 that we come to know more. 
 
 The idea that there is cosmic mind-potential just as there 
 is cosmic matter and cosmic force, and that, like them, it 
 flows into us, helping to evolve us, is fraught with some 
 very important implications, and may help us to some in- 
 teresting conjectures regarding some mysteries which we 
 shall meet later. Meanwhile we will consider a few facts 
 which go to support the idea, and will later consider in its 
 light some of the salient phenomena of the evolution of soul, 
 and see if the idea is consistent with them. 
 
 The only alternative to the theory that the mind comes 
 from outside, is that it is evolved inside that, in Cabanis' 
 celebrated phrase, the brain secretes thought, as the liver 
 secretes bile. 
 
 This famous analogy, however, is but a very partial one: 
 for bile is limited and sensizable (I don't know whether that 
 word is in the dictionaries, but it's time it were), while 
 thought is neither. And at least the most valuable por- 
 tion of thought enters the brain as thought, thought 
 already evolved from sensation, and supplied by memory 
 or other minds, while bile does not enter the liver as bile. 
 True, while thought generally enters the brain as thought, 
 it sometimes, perhaps always, undergoes modification there; 
 but it is not modified into something other than thought, 
 as in the liver blood is modified into something other than 
 blood. Cabanis' analogy is not even good as an analogy: to 
 make it so, the brain would have to secrete thought from blood. 
 What it does with the blood is not to secrete or transform 
 thought, but merely to build itself up, and send away its 
 waste. 
 
 Those who hold the view that man is " one and indivisible " 
 that the stream of thought is not from outside, but is 
 secreted by the brain, only put the question a stage back, 
 not asking themselves what runs the brain not considering 
 that the fact that man eats potatoes and exudes heat, belongs 
 in this connection. In holding their view, they are believers 
 in perpetual motion. 
 
 The entire being, body as well as mind, is but a fleeting
 
 Ch. Ill] The Stream of Consciousness 33 
 
 mass of physical vibrations and psychical experiences, and 
 often has been well likened to a fountain: though it has 
 a definite shape, it consists but of particles changing con- 
 stantly and with varying degrees of rapidity those concerned 
 in respiration, for instance, probably changing fastest; those 
 in arterial and venous circulation, next ; and so on, in lessen- 
 ing degree, until we get to those constituting bone or tooth- 
 enamel, which probably abide in the body from five to ten 
 years. At death so much of its energy as is in the form 
 of heat, rapidly rushes back into the cosmic reservoir, and 
 so much as is in the forms which we generalize as matter, 
 begins to return immediately but more slowly. Most mani- 
 festations of the psychic stream also cease to appear, but by 
 no means all. It persists not only in memories and influences, 
 but we shall see indications of it difficult to attribute to 
 either. 
 
 While force and matter seem to be limited constant in 
 amount throughout the universe, and before and after their 
 service in an individuality are in service elsewhere, we have 
 a good deal of evidence, the best being very recent, that, 
 at worst, revolutionizes all our previous experience of the 
 reach of mind; and, at best, would indicate that even the 
 individual mind, not to speak of mind in general, has no 
 permanent limits in time or space. 
 
 One school of philosophers reason that as force and matter, 
 through all their variations, are both persistent and constant 
 in amount, so mind must be. Perhaps none of them ever 
 stated it exactly in this form: the proposition may be too 
 evidently ludicrous. But hosts of them have stated it in 
 hosts of other forms, regardless of the plain fact that mind 
 is increasing every day: not only are there new thoughts, 
 but what thoughts there are, are being disseminated indefi- 
 nitely. 
 
 An orator's mind pervades an audience, and next morning 
 through the papers pervades his city and country, and in a 
 few hours more, through the cables, pervades the civilized 
 world. So far as the orator said new things, or old things 
 in a new way, there is that much more mind in the world. 
 It is not, as would be the case with matter or force, a mere 
 substitution of a new form : for no mind to speak of has
 
 34 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 disappeared : virtually all that there was before is still stored 
 up in men's memories and in libraries ; and perhaps elsewhere, 
 as we shall see later. 
 
 Moreover, when matter takes any one of its transitory and 
 limited forms, it arouses new ideas which are not transitory. 
 This is of itself no argument against Cabanis' assertion 
 that the brain secretes thought, but the men who produce 
 the mind-things that last, say they don't come that way. 
 Probably Cabanis himself, and each man who independently 
 reaches Cabanis' conclusion, would call his apparently im- 
 mortal and equally incorrect phrase, an inspiration some- 
 thing breathed in from outside. This is, however, a denial 
 of his own proposition. 
 
 The theory that psychic phenomena are simply a result 
 of nervous function, beginning with it, running parallel with 
 it, and ending with it, is generally called parallelism, but 
 parallelism does not prove beginning or ending together : for 
 the soul could be entirely independent of the body, and yet 
 act in exact correspondence with nervous function, the two 
 being like instruments in the same orchestra. Nay, the body 
 could even condition the soul without the soul being evolved 
 from it, as a pipe conditions water running through it; or 
 a channel conditions a river. 
 
 Total parallelism is at best an assumption. M. Bergson is 
 credited with being the last St. George effectually to dispose 
 of it. Even on the assumption that all mind does run parallel 
 with brain changes during all the brain's life, as parts of mind 
 certainly do during parts of carnate life, it is no more proved 
 that they start together and end together, than the same is 
 proved of a railroad and river that somewhere keep each other 
 company. The question soon ends in paradox, as questions on 
 the borderland of knowledge always do: for the germ of the 
 mind was in parent and parent's parent, back at least to pro- 
 toplasm, and probably to star dust and beyond. 
 
 Huxley suggested the name epiphenomenalism. But either 
 name might apply to the opposite theory, of animism, that 
 the soul is independent of the body: for if that is true, it 
 is still true that during the limited period of the brain's 
 activity, there is some approach, though apparently an irreg-
 
 Ch. Ill] Parallelism 35 
 
 ular approach, to parallelism or epiphenomenalism between 
 its actions and those of the soul. 
 
 But we shall meet later, serious, though not necessarily 
 fatal, objections to believing that this approach is constant 
 that all operations of what we call the individual mind are 
 even accompanied by transmutation of brain tissue. 
 
 Moreover, we shall meet reasons very strong recent 
 reasons for believing that soul and body, though very closely 
 identified during mortal life, may be so fundamentally in- 
 dependent of each other, that when the body stops work and 
 enters upon dissolution, the soul may " leave the body " and 
 continue to exist independently, and instead of suffering by 
 the disconnection, be merely relieved of certain trammels 
 and limitations, notably those of time and space and matter. 
 
 It looks a good deal as if the degree of parallelism may 
 vary inversely as the grade of the psychic process, because 
 (a) Low psychic processes like fear and anger use up force 
 and tissue at a tremendous rate. On the other hand high 
 processes courage, joy, sympathy, even artistic production, 
 are stimulating and invigorating. It is true, however, that 
 even the advent of a poem is sometimes attended by birth- 
 throes. Lowell wrote the 1 " Commemoration Ode" almost at 
 a one-night sitting, and he said that it " took the virtue out 
 of " him fearfully. But undue deprivation of sleep did that, 
 and if he had had a night of fear or sorrow, probably " the 
 virtue " would have gone vastly worse. 
 
 (b) Take another case which long puzzled me, until I 
 found a provisional key. At a dinner well constituted socially 
 and gastronomically, the brain and the stomach each can 
 be doing its very best without at all interfering with the 
 other. We are taught that either, to do its best, needs all 
 the blood it can get, yet here both do their best at once! 
 This makes it look more and more as if the higher sort of 
 psychical function (and is it too much to call that normal 
 psychical function?) involved very little transmutation of 
 brain matter as if it were somehow largely independent 
 of brain function. 
 
 (c) But the main consideration is yet to come. A man 
 can dream the most tremendous dreams, provided only they
 
 36 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 be happy ones, and awake in better trim than if he had not 
 dreamed at all not only without the slightest indication of 
 fatigue or hunger, but stimulated and invigorated. This has 
 been noticed after some of the mediumistic phenomena that 
 would have been expected to be most exhausting. 
 
 Now doesn't all this suggest strong probabilities that, as 
 said, parallelism or epiphenomenalism and all that sort of 
 thing, vary inversely as what we will call, until we know more, 
 the dignity of the psychosis in other words, that there's 
 no parallelism at all, but merely propinquity only while the 
 streams that started at identity in the protoplasm have not 
 yet definitely branched into the physical and psychical, and 
 especially that after they branch, the psychical runs parallel 
 with the physical only in so far as the psychical does not 
 throw off branches of higher thought, and, especially, is not 
 concerned with what we must so far regard as somewhat 
 transcendental psychosis, as experienced in dreams and vari- 
 ous extraordinary dream states in short, that the dream states 
 are largely independent of the body that even when we lose 
 strength in bad dreams and nightmares, it is because of the 
 physical conditions which give rise to the psychoses, and not 
 because of the psychoses themselves ? But there are other 
 dreams of a happier and higher order, not traceable to physical 
 conditions, and apparently involving no waste, but rather 
 bringing recuperation. 
 
 Now here for a page or two back, I have been asserting 
 and denying both monism and dualism. The possibility 
 the inevitability of so doing, seems to prove both true rather 
 than both false. I have the very moderate grace to admit 
 all this to appear very much like nonsense. As just said, we 
 never get very far from everyday experience without reaching 
 the land of paradox: what is generally called philosophy is 
 mostly made up of it ; and at best consists of fumbling. This 
 present piece of fumbling, however, seems to suggest a recon- 
 ciliation in the greater including the less. 
 
 Now let us fumble a little more at the relations of soul 
 and body. 
 
 Get all the mechanics and chemistry that are behind a
 
 Ch. Ill] Differences between Thoughts and Things 37 
 
 thought, and you haven't got the thought. A violinist's 
 brain, the nerves leading to his arms and fingers, the muscles 
 moving them, his violin and its bow, the vibrations in the 
 air, the vibrations in the ear, the transfer of them to the 
 hearer's brain, the changes in the brain : I've probably named 
 everything mechanical that takes place, and yet I haven't 
 even named the music. 
 
 A big pile of rock, over it a lot of fog banks, behind both 
 the setting sun; vibrations eastward from the whole affair; 
 a poet's eyes receiving them and reporting them to his brain, 
 and changes in his brain resulting : that's all of the mechan- 
 ical : the poem is no part of them. The chasm between the 
 instrument and the music, or the sunset and the poem, is 
 absolutely impassable a chasm whose bottom never can be 
 reached for crossing. 
 
 Even if, as seems growing more and more reasonable to 
 fancy, the sunset is merely a vehicle for the expressions of 
 the cosmic mind, as a blush or a smile are expressions of the 
 individual mind, the sunset is not the poem ; or the violin, 
 the tune; any more than the blood in the maiden's cheek, 
 or the smile of her mouth, are the joy in the lover's heart 
 
 But here we are again on the edge of a swamp of paradox, 
 as we were when we followed the track of monism and dualism 
 to the limits of our circumscribed knowledge. But for vari- 
 ety, let us start from the same center on still a third track. 
 
 A lot of little lines and dots representing a poem, ether 
 waves from them into an eye, transfers and changes in a 
 brain. The same poem has reached its goal through an en- 
 tirely different set of mechanical vehicles another illustration 
 of the absolute separateness of thoughts and things. 
 
 As does the poet, so the composer of the music puts down 
 a lot of little prosy dots and lines, the violinist gets im- 
 pressions from them into his mechanical eye and brain that 
 you wouldn't finger for something pretty, and passes them 
 along through his mechanical nerves and muscles to prosy 
 catgut and horsehair ; and behold ! the heavenly music, and 
 into many minds joy and inspiration ! And yet some philos- 
 ophers would have us believe that the tune and the poem 
 are so nearly of the nature of the signs on paper, and the
 
 38 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 horsehair, and the catgut, and the brain, that when all these 
 are gone, the tune and poem are gone. We know better, 
 not as a speculation but as a fact. Mind, then, I for one 
 cannot help regarding as distinct from Matter and Force a 
 third fundamental element in the constitution of man. 
 
 This apparently disproportionate attention to the nature 
 of mind especially its source in mind-potential, may be 
 justified in our later study of some mysterious psychical 
 phenomena. Meanwhile let us see if the hypothesis that 
 mind comes from outside is supported by a brief survey 
 of its evolution. 
 
 (&) The Perceptions and the Intellect 
 
 Of course in sketching a few indications of the evolution 
 of the senses, I incidentally touched some of the germs 
 in the evolution of mind. 
 
 The first reaction of organic life to anything in the en- 
 vironment, would appear to be the first reaction between soul 
 and universe. 
 
 A primitive cell's experiences consist in expanding to heat 
 and contracting to cold or touch, and, most of the time, in 
 freedom from perceptible touch or change of temperature. 
 It has probably some consciousness of at least the active 
 conditions the changes, and possibly "late in life" some 
 recognition of them as having been experienced before. With- 
 out some sort of recognition of difference of condition, there 
 could not be the reflex action to touch, which we generally 
 regard as the most primitive response of organism to environ- 
 ment, or, as I have chosen to phrase it, of soul to universe. 
 Whether the response be what we would call conscious or 
 not, there is some recognition of changed conditions, or 
 there could be no response to them. There is Force, in the 
 contraction; there is Matter transmuted, as in every physical 
 change. These have come from outside to become part of the 
 organism. We have seen that probably there also came with 
 them something else that brought about the reaction, and the 
 gradations are gradual and coherent from it to Newton's re- 
 actions to the fall of the apple, or Darwin's to biological 
 phenomena, or Spencer's to the phenomena of mind and
 
 Ch. Ill] Evolution of Perceptions 39 
 
 society, or Rembrandt's to lights and shadows, or Beethoven's 
 to the bird's song and the thunder. 
 
 Professor Whitman in Animal Behavior said: "The pri- 
 mary roots of instincts reach back to the constitutional prop- 
 erties of protoplasm." 
 
 Professor Holmes says (op. cit., 180f.) : 
 
 " Along whatever line organization reaches a certain degree 
 of development intelligence appears on the scene. . . . In- 
 telligence is not an entirely new power unrelated to the 
 other activities of organic life, but a process growing out 
 of " [The present writer would say accompanying] " other 
 organic functions and having the same end as these other 
 functions; it is, as Spencer has so well emphasized, but a 
 higher phase of those processes of adjustment and regulation 
 which make up the life of the animal." 
 
 The simplest knowledge is of a single fact, yet the first 
 consciousness, whether it appears in protoplasm or higher 
 in the scale of life, it seems necessary to think, is not abso- 
 lutely simple, but must contain in itself some sense of differ- 
 ence from an immediately preceding state, and as soon as 
 this sense of difference appears, an idea is evolved. When, 
 for instance, a change of temperature passes, it is succeeded 
 by a condition similar to that which preceded it, and when 
 the experience takes place in a consciousness sufficiently 
 evolved to associate the two conditions, a second grade of 
 knowledge arises consciousness of likeness. 
 
 The experience, say of heat, takes place in an organism 
 high enough to recognize the antecedent and subsequent con- 
 ditions as similar. A general idea is evolved. Countless 
 generations later it gets a name cold; or vice versa, if the 
 experience is of a fall of temperature, the earlier and later 
 experiences correspond to what we give the name of heat; 
 but the first conception of either cold or heat must be so 
 foggy that it would probably not be noticed at all among 
 the vastly clearer ideas of the vastly higher organism that 
 gives it a name. 
 
 The sun's heat is accompanied by light, and when a 
 creature is evolved with some notion of heat, that is inevitably 
 soon followed by an association with light; and a new idea is 
 born. This too must be such a vague conception that it would
 
 40 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 not be thought of in our own more mature experience, unless 
 special attention were directed to it; but there it is in the 
 primitive creature a general idea, faint and rudimentary as 
 you please, but a general idea, as distinct from a specific 
 experience. Imagination and the laboratory can both follow 
 these little sensations and ideas. 
 
 Suppose a primitive nervous system, with two centers con- 
 nected, one experiencing the difference which we call rise of 
 temperature, the other experiencing the difference which we 
 call increase of light some such sense of it as we feel with 
 our eyes shut: these senses of difference are associated by 
 the nerve-fiber connecting the two centers which feel them. 
 This makes possible some psychical change consequent upon 
 the simultaneous experience of light and heat, there arises in 
 that being something that would not have arisen but for 
 association of heat and light something different from the 
 single association of heat with heat or cold with cold, or 
 either with the other something perhaps unnoticed the first 
 time it appears, but something that in the course of genera- 
 tions is going to lead the creature's evolved descendant, when 
 it wants heat, to seek light, and when it wants coolness, to 
 seek shade. This something, as has been said, is not a mere 
 sensation it is a coupling of sensations, and that coupling 
 is the germ of a thought of a concept that heat and light 
 are associated. From that it is but a step to another con- 
 cept that heat and light are not always associated; and 
 many, but actual, steps to the concept that the change of 
 condition meaning heat, generally takes place when there 
 is a reddish or yellowish round light thing up above; and 
 a step farther, that the change meaning heat does not take 
 place when the round light thing up above is whitish. But 
 all this involves the evolution and connection of several nerve 
 centers; and of several more to notice that the two balls 
 seldom appear in the sky at the same time. 
 
 Thousands, perhaps millions, of generations later, those 
 primitive concepts have grown into a generalization, and in 
 time words have been found for it, which mean: fire burns. 
 It takes thousands of generations more for fire to imply the 
 combination of atoms of carbon with atoms of oxygen and 
 indeed it means that to comparatively few people, even yet.
 
 Ch. Ill] Thought based on Likeness and Difference 41 
 
 The first word, whatever it was, which meant fire (whatever 
 that then meant) came into existence only by virtue of vastly 
 more nervous centers being evolved, and connected with the 
 first two which had already made possible some change con- 
 sequent upon the simultaneous experience of light and heat. 
 
 Meanwhile, much earlier, and of preliminary necessity, 
 arises a discrimination between good-to-eat and not-good- 
 to-eat, and in time is made a distinction between likely-to-eat- 
 me and not-likely-to-eat-me. The recognition of good-to-eat 
 as distinct from not-good-to-eat, probably waits for the 
 evolution of some sense of soft and hard, or even is pre- 
 ceded by it in the rejection of, say, a grain of sand as 
 contrasted with a thing soft enough to assimilate. But crea- 
 tures are seen to feed long before any distinction is made. 
 To the earlier forms, all is grist that comes to the mill : they 
 let the water flow into the opening that is the precursor of 
 the smiling mouth, and let it bring what it will " they eats 
 'em skins and all "; assimilable matter is assimilated, and the 
 rest passes on. 
 
 But despite the complexity of high types, let us keep well 
 in mind that the elements of all thought are sensation, and 
 consciousness of likeness and difference. The combination 
 of these three elements, remembered in relation to various 
 phenomena, make up the mental life of a Newton or a 
 Spencer. 
 
 Thought, then, is simply the arrangement of items of 
 knowledge into classes, according to the test of likeness or 
 difference. The most primitive thoughts that we have dealt 
 with put the sensation of heat to-day into the class with 
 the like sensation of yesterday, and the sensation of cold into 
 a different class. So with the sensations of light and dark, 
 and those of resistance, associated with floating bodies and 
 the shore, and comparative non-resistance associated with the 
 water. 
 
 Let us farther illustrate the process of mind-building, from 
 thoughts of a higher order. 
 
 A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. 
 This is but a perception of unlikeness all other lines between 
 two points are found to be unlike straight. The shortest
 
 42 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 one, wherever we find it, we class with others like it, and 
 call it straight. 
 
 A straight line is one whose direction never varies. All 
 lines whose directions vary we find are different from straight. 
 We classify accordingly. Lines which are not straight we 
 classify as zigzag or curved. We now recognize three kinds 
 by the differences of each from the others, and the likenesses 
 of those in each group to each other. 
 
 Now for something more subtle: a line has direction, but 
 no dimensions. This is a recognition of differences. As 
 soon as we imagine breadth or thickness of a line, we recog- 
 nize that we can divide such breadth or thickness, and still 
 preserve the line that consequently breadth and thickness 
 are different from the line; and we can cut these different 
 things in two endlessly, and still retain something which is 
 different from the line : we cannot reach the line until we 
 imagine the something which differs from it all split away. 
 
 Let us take a little course of thought less abstract than 
 our recent mathematical one. First recognize that the whole 
 material of mental action consists of thoughts and things. 
 Each of these two sets, the mind groups because of their 
 likeness, and separates the two sets because of their unlike- 
 ness. Then follow down " things " (as the simpler group) 
 by new recognitions of likeness and difference into animal, 
 vegetable, and mineral; then follow down animals, still by 
 recognitions of likeness and difference, into mammals, birds, 
 reptiles, fishes, and articulates; then mammals, still by 
 recognitions of likeness and difference, into any of the well- 
 known classifications, and you will recognize how the whole 
 vast department of thought called Natural History, has grown 
 up by recognition of likeness and difference, from (if you will 
 fix a provisional point) the early recognition by eater and 
 eaten of a difference between them. 
 
 Similarly, simply by classifications of likenesses and 
 differences, you can roughly trace the growth of any other 
 department of knowledge, or thought, or even emotion, from 
 mathematics or chemistry up to poetry or the most ethereal 
 charms of sex. 
 
 Take a fair approximation to all the material of language, 
 say Eoget's Thesaurus. You will find but classified lists of
 
 Ch. Ill] Thought and Language 43 
 
 words according to their likenesses, which face opposing lists 
 of differing words which are also classified according to their 
 likenesses. Now all these words represent thoughts and shades 
 of thought that have been evolved by the discovery or evolu- 
 tion of newer and finer shades of likeness or difference. 
 
 And in fact, without going to all this trouble, you might, 
 perhaps, seize the gist of the whole matter by reflecting a 
 little on the fact that a definition, if a good one, is very apt 
 to state what a thing or a thought is, and then what it is not. 
 
 Now by similarly rejecting one thing as unlike, and accept- 
 ing another as like, the world has gradually built up all its 
 thinking. Some very good illlustrations are in Fiske's Cosmic 
 Philosophy. 
 
 Great efforts have been made, even by men among the 
 first to declare that " there are no hard-and-fast lines in 
 Nature," to split off mental evolution by a hard-and-fast 
 line between man and beast. 
 
 Thinkers have long found it comfortable to call a con- 
 sciousness of sensation a percept, and the mental association 
 of two or more percepts, a concept. Some affect to find the 
 hard and fast line in concepts, declaring that there is no con- 
 cept that is not embodied in a word, and that as beasts have 
 no words, they can have no concepts. Some try to draw the 
 line at instincts. 
 
 All the time I care to spend over these discussions is to 
 state their existence, and to state that many beasts have 
 concepts and have words too, and to depend for readers upon 
 people that recognize that they have. The concepts of the 
 creatures below man are rudimentary, and so is their lan- 
 guage. But if they do not possess both concepts and language, 
 such as they are, and with them arts and sciences and even 
 philosophies, such as they are, evolution covers less ground 
 and covers it in a more halting way, and is, on the whole, 
 a cheaper conception, than it appears to me. There are 
 minds fond of trying to discover where things start. Ap- 
 parently wider minds go beyond any conception that they 
 started at all, and hold that any point for beginning their 
 treatment is, like all classifications, merely a question of con- 
 venience, and often a very difficult and profound one.
 
 44 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 (c) The Emotions and the Will 
 
 The evolution of the emotions is inextricably contempo- 
 raneous with that of the perceptions and the intelligence, 
 and necessarily has been somewhat anticipated in what has 
 already been said. 
 
 For purposes of discussion, the best point to assume for 
 their start is probably, as with the thoughts, the first reaction. 
 As all mind is built up of simple recognitions of likeness 
 and difference, so all emotion is built up of likes and dislikes. 
 The complexities of both are merely the complexities of their 
 objects. 
 
 Probably amoebae hate being poked or chilled, as wiser 
 people do, only in greater degree. A time comes when the 
 sensation of contact with a smooth surface turns into the 
 very different sense of contact with a needle's point where 
 mere sense of contact expands into sense of pain; and a time 
 comes where sense of contact also expands into sense of 
 pleasure. 
 
 With the earliest sensations of touch or density or temper- 
 ature or light, must come feelings of like or dislike: for, 
 as easily tested in the laboratory, very early creatures show 
 their preferences between heat and cold, and light and dark- 
 ness, and even between different-colored lights. Light and 
 heat and good-to-eat have a common quality which is felt 
 many generations before it gets the name agreeable, and the 
 converse is true of dark and cold and inedible. In time, 
 to the good-to-eat class is added the quality sapid and other 
 details constituting good-to-eat ; and if the creature during 
 this "thinking" had language, he would be capable of a 
 remark quite up to the intellectual small-change of ball-rooms, 
 in : / float into pleasant bright warm places and find there soft 
 things good to eat. 
 
 These emotions of like and dislike, this sense of agreeable 
 and disagreeable, are the germs of confidence and fear, love 
 and hate, worship and exorcism, praying and cursing of the 
 emotions of Job, Cleopatra, Paracelsus, and Hildebrand. 
 
 Just where, in the ascending scale of being, inclination, 
 disinclination, purpose, come in, cannot be determined. The 
 lowest creatures give evidence of hardly anything more than
 
 Ch. IIIJ Likes and Dislikes 45 
 
 such reactions as take place in inorganic matter. The worm 
 and the mosquito, however, seem to have something like a 
 definite idea where they are going, and what they are going 
 for. Professor Holmes makes a very just remark to the 
 effect that though a contact reaction by an amoeba's pseudopod 
 differs very materially from one by the heels of a mule, the 
 two have an element in common. That element is self-de- 
 termination, proverbially prominent in the mule, but only a 
 foreshadowing in the amoeba. But even there, it is interesting 
 in many ways. It is the germ of an independent soul. As 
 we have said, the body's production and nutrition are largely 
 independent of any symptom of its volition are largely de- 
 pendent on " God," meaning by that venerable term at least 
 all the power we know which is not subject to animal volition 
 even to the extent Kipling goes in " McAndrews's Hymn." 
 But the contraction and restoration of the protoplasm, while 
 we call it involuntary, nevertheless has an element out of 
 proportion to any outside force, and with a germ of inde- 
 pendence which later evolves into self-control or voluntary 
 action. It is individual betokens an individuality, and lies 
 away back of Descartes' " Cogito, ergo sum." 
 
 With like and dislike, comes in preference ; and with prefer- 
 ence, will, purpose, and behavior. Distinct purpose seems to 
 come in later than the amceba and protozoa generally. The 
 restless wandering about of the earliest forms capable of real 
 activity serves to throw them in the way of whatever food 
 is within reach, but it is apparently unconscious. 
 
 Professor Holmes says, however (op. cit. f pp. 64-65) : 
 
 " Instinct, memory, fear, and a certain degree of intelligence 
 are among the psychic endowments with which Binet credits 
 the protozoa. A good sample of his interpretation of protozoan 
 behavior is the following : ' The Bodo caudatus is a voracious 
 Flagellate possessed of extraordinary audacity; it combines in 
 troops to attack animalcule one hundred times as large as 
 itself, as the Colpods, for instance, which are veritable giants 
 when placed alongside of the Bodo. Like a horse attacked by 
 a pack of wolves, the Colpod is soon rendered powerless; 
 twenty, thirty, forty Bodos throw themselves upon him, eviscer- 
 ate and devour him completely (Stein). 
 
 " ' All these faots are of primary importance and interest, 
 but it is plain that their interpretation presents difficulties.
 
 46 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 It may be asked whether the Bodos combine designedly in 
 groups of ten or twenty, understanding that they are more 
 powerful when united than when divided. But it is more 
 probable that voluntary combinations for purposes of attack 
 do not take place among these organisms; that would be to 
 grant them a high mental capacity. We may more readily 
 admit that the meeting of a number of Bodos happens by 
 chance; when one of them begins an attack upon a Colpod, 
 the other animalcule lurking in the vicinity dash into the 
 combat to profit by a favorable opportunity.' 
 
 " More recent investigations have shown that the behavior 
 of protozoa gives no evidence of the high psychic development 
 assumed by Binet. There has been a strong tendency on the 
 part of certain investigators to explain the behavior of these 
 low forms as due in large measure to comparatively simple 
 physical and chemical factors. Others contend that the phe- 
 nomena are much more complex and at present defy analysis 
 into physical and chemical processes, while a few go further 
 and maintain that we must assume some super-physical agency, 
 a vital principle, or entelechy of some sort, to explain the 
 results." 
 
 Let us now look at some of the indications of the dawn 
 of other qualities, and I will venture on some suggestions 
 more serious than at first they may seem, of the lines of 
 evolution they point to. 
 
 As we search the examples which Professor Holmes has 
 collected, we seem to get within sight of the first prodigal, 
 the first conservative, the first radical, the first coquette, and 
 the first of many other types. 
 
 The first prodigal perhaps we find in Nereis, who loves 
 narrow places, and to whom sunlight is death. Yet give 
 him some nice little glass tubes in sunlight, and he will 
 crawl into them and stay there and die for it. Earwigs are 
 very similarly constituted : they don't thrive in light, and do 
 like crevices so much that they will leave an open space 
 in shadow, and crawl under a glass plate, though it exposes 
 them to full light. 
 
 And where does fear begin? In creatures who similarly 
 early avoid everything new ? Are these the first conservatives ? 
 Or are they the first of the skeptics ? Probably both : it's not 
 inconceivable that long ago some amoeba split into parts, 
 one of which was the ancestor of lions and the other of 
 lambs. That is: it would not be inconceivable if the cross
 
 Ch. Ill] Primitive Conduct 47 
 
 pairing on the way down did not make so many remote beings, 
 ancestors of each present being. 
 
 Where does the monkey's (and our) imitativeness begin? 
 Soon after creatures show any reaction to light, some are 
 apt to follow, so far as they can, objects or shadows which 
 cross their range of vision. 
 
 Eughna viridis has a red eye spot, but not at the end that 
 goes first. It seeks soft light and follows it, but avoids strong 
 light. Many protozoa show the same reaction, and others its 
 reverse. Perhaps coquettishness starts in some of those which 
 (or who?) love the light but swim toward it backwards. 
 Higher organisms larval lobsters for instance, do the same 
 thing. Fiddler crabs take it perhaps more coquettishly still 
 sideways. 
 
 Among the amoebae we find a suggestion of the first drama. 
 Holmes says (op. cit. t p. 69) : 
 
 " Amoeba, like higher animals, may follow its food. Jennings 
 describes an Amoeba attempting to engulf a spherical cyst of 
 Euglena. As the Amoeba came in contact with it the cyst 
 rolled away; the Amoeba followed; the cyst continued to be 
 pushed ahead, now one way and now another, and the Amoeba 
 changed its course accordingly. After the cyst had been 
 rolled against an obstacle and the Amoeba was about to suc- 
 ceed in capturing it, a large infusorian appeared on the scene 
 and swept it away." 
 
 When we come to the question of the origin of Ethics, 
 we find the biologists constantly speaking of the "be- 
 havior " of primitive organisms. The word implies standards 
 of conduct, and where there's a standard of conduct, there's 
 ethics, though the standard may be no higher than "what is 
 usual " ; and in that sense, the physicists and chemists and 
 geologists apply the word " behavior " to inanimate matter. 
 But is not " the usual thing " also a standard too much of 
 a standard, in high society? 
 
 The right search for happiness, and avoidance of unhappi- 
 ness, are the fundamental causes of development; and the 
 wrong searches, of destruction. Ethics begin in self-preserva- 
 tion: that's a duty: and many steps up in insects, we see 
 the start of altruism, in helping the preservation of others
 
 48 Sketch of Human Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 helping each other out of scrapes, and co-operation in 
 various enterprises. 
 
 Nobody can draw a line between the self-conserving re- 
 flexes of the most primitive creatures, and the poet's fine 
 frenzy or the policies of popes and emperors. The genealogy 
 of Napoleon has not been traced back to the myriad drops 
 of protoplasm which marked one stage of his evolution, and 
 still less has it to the transition from inorganic matter to 
 organic matter which probably was a stage in the evolution 
 of the protoplasm. But beginning with the drops of mercury 
 and chloroform that we considered in Chapter II, a set of 
 specimens from them to Napoleon could be arranged with 
 much more gradual differences than those in Marsh's line, 
 in the Yale Museum, of horses, from the little five-toe up 
 to Dexter, or in his famous " infant class " from monkey 
 to man. Of course with our present knowledge, there would 
 not be a strict hereditary line along the series, but the series 
 could be made to look as if there were; and as knowledge 
 advances, an actual line can be more and more approxi- 
 mated. 
 
 It may be interesting to dwell a moment on the evolution 
 most involving emotions and ethics that of sex. It be- 
 gan, as it persists, in division of the personality. The cell 
 of amosba gradually divides itself into two; and the latest 
 great romancer makes his hero, the morning after his union 
 with his beloved, ask himself : " Am I two ? " Through all 
 evolution, the mere physical reproduction has consisted of 
 the parent organism giving up part of itself; and when the 
 emotional stage becomes pronounced, the male and the female 
 begin to give up, not only their tissue, but their rest and 
 comfort, for each other and for the child. The evolution 
 of monogamy seems, in a rough way, to accompany the 
 evolution of beauty, intelligence, and character: among the 
 leaders in these respects, in the lower creatures, as well as 
 in mankind, monogamy is most frequently found ; the most 
 noticeable instances being the birds generally, in their pairing 
 season, and the swans for life; and the lions till the cubs 
 are reared, and in some instances, it is believed, longer. 
 
 With the ants and the bees, the overgrown intelligence
 
 Ch. Ill] Monogamy a Test of Progress 49 
 
 seems to have shut love out of the general experience, and 
 evolved polyandry with a vengeance. 
 
 With mankind, the prevalence of monogamy is the most 
 distinct test of progress, not only as a characteristic of na- 
 tions, but even of social sets. At the two extremes of life, 
 among those debased by low nutrition and impoverished sen- 
 sation, and among those at the other extreme, debased by 
 excess of nutrition and sensation, monogamy languishes. 
 Where bodies are healthiest, sensations and habits nearest 
 normal, intelligence broadest, morals highest, and sensibilities 
 keenest and most catholic, love in its whole blessed range, 
 from parents to each other and to offspring, is deepest and 
 most enduring; there monogamy has been the chief cause of 
 the peculiar evolution, and is itself most thoroughly evolved ; 
 and the family, as the foundation for the development of the 
 individual and the state, is nearest intact. This development 
 simply means the enlargement of the Cosmic Relations. 
 
 Thus we have marked a few of the steps from the lowest 
 manifestations to the highest, of the soul which reacts with 
 the universe. Now let us turn our taper light upon a few 
 fragmentary aspects nearest related to our purpose, of the 
 universe.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 EVOLUTION OP THE UNIVERSE 
 
 As comprehensive a word as universe is sure to be used 
 in many senses. When I write here of the evolution of the 
 universe, I do not mean the cosmogony the process that 
 we generally assume to have begun when our bunch of 
 the star dust began gravitating toward centers, and which 
 has prepared the apparatus through which the Cause now 
 manifests the objective half of the phenomena appreciable 
 to-day. I mean the evolution of the soul's knowledge of 
 these phenomena. Here again classification is arbitrary. The 
 senses, intellect, and emotions all three respond to, and work 
 upon, vibrations flowing in from an outside something. In 
 this relation, it is really not the outside something, but the 
 vibrations flowing from it, that the soul works upon; and 
 in this sense, the sensations are the Universe; and it is this 
 mass of sensations (and the memory of them), that, for the 
 purposes of this treatise, I mean by the universe. 
 
 As a plain matter of fact, what have we in mind as 
 universe, when we speak of the interactions between the soul 
 and the universe? Obviously that portion of the totality of 
 things with which the soul interacts. Each soul then has 
 its own universe, which is plainly that soul's portion of a 
 greater universe; but souls of the same general development 
 have much in common, and, roughly speaking, the knowledge 
 of phenomena, and deductions from them, which are held 
 in common by civilized people, is what is generally meant 
 by the term "The Universe." 
 
 But probably the soul reacts with more of the universe 
 than it is aware of. This, however, need not affect our 
 reasonings : they will, except by acknowledged inference, re- 
 late only to what we know, though it is obvious that if they 
 do that with fair success, they will probably be correct 
 regarding the uncertain fringe on the outer edge of what 
 we know. 
 
 50
 
 Ch. IV] Each Consciousness has its own Universe 51 
 
 I don't propose to go into the evolution or the working 
 laws of the objective universe. For those, read Spencer. 
 The " universal " phenomena that have been discovered since 
 he wrote the wider range of wave motion and radiation, 
 follow the " universal " laws that he indicated, and no genius 
 has shown us any new ones since. 
 
 And I shall speculate very little regarding the universe 
 in the sense of the totality of things. What I have read 
 of such speculations has been mainly nonsense made up of 
 words which are mere confessions of ignorance, and much 
 of this nonsense has come from misdirected efforts of abler 
 minds than mine. I only want to call attention to some 
 of the Cosmic Relations between universe as we know it, 
 whatever its laws, and soul as we know it. 
 
 Plainly, as already hinted, the objective universe is not 
 the same to any two people or any two organisms. Each 
 organism has its own. The arnu-ba has its, and Humboldt 
 has his, and we have every reason to believe that outside 
 of the one that anybody has, or those that everybody has, 
 is still left more universe than our imaginations can in any 
 way compass. Its spaces range beyond our telescopes, and 
 even the qualities of the little space we thoughtlessly claim 
 to know, range far beyond our microscopes and our specu- 
 lations. 
 
 The dimensions and other characteristics of each creature's 
 universe, are of course determined primarily by the sense 
 organs, and secondarily by the nervous structures which 
 register, accumulate, and compare the impressions received 
 by the organs. At one end of our living world is a universe 
 of only a few elements, or rather the difference between 
 degrees of one element, of resistance and non-resistance, 
 or of penetrability and impenetrability of water that the 
 creature can float through, or of earth or log that it cannot : 
 or possibly the difference is one of heat and cold water that 
 is warm, or water that is cold; or of light and dark places 
 that have a glow, or places that have not. At the other end 
 are the universes of Newton, Humboldt, Helmholtz, Michel- 
 angelo, and Shakspere. 
 
 Each individual's universe is evolved with his mind, but
 
 52 Evolution of the Universe [Bk. I 
 
 don't let that make us, with some philosophers, " believe " 
 that the mind and the universe are the same. More than one 
 philosopher is deemed to have won a claim to undying fame 
 by demonstrating that there is a universe external to the mind. 
 Anybody can find a simpler demonstration than theirs, by 
 going toward an open door in the dark, with his arms stretched 
 out parallel to guard against it, and so moving that his arms 
 will pass on the respective sides of the door, and leave him to 
 strike it with his face. 
 
 Yet, despite such demonstrations, this external universe 
 seems to be losing its old contracted character of " matter," 
 and becoming simply another mind; but there is not much 
 question now, even among those given to that questioning of 
 obvious facts which they call philosophy, that it has an 
 existence outside of our minds. 
 
 We know it only by its phenomena, and they are constantly 
 in both our minds and the something external. A phenomenon 
 results only from an interaction between an object and a 
 perceiving subject. We will find reason as we go on, for get- 
 ting as clear an idea of this as we can. I will attempt a 
 simple demonstration. 
 
 A boy goes into the pantry after a pie. There something 
 gives him a sight-sensation of a round flat object, and an 
 odor-sensation of an agreeable something proceeding from 
 the object. If he pursues his investigation farther, he gets 
 sensations of touch, of sound, as he cuts or breaks the pie, 
 and then happily of taste. All he knows of the pie is these 
 sensations. They constitute the complex phenomenon pie. 
 They are, so far as concerns him (or us), the pie, and without 
 them, there would be, at least for him and us, no pie. Some 
 philosophers go so far as to say that there would be no pie 
 at all that the pie exists only when, and as, somebody ex- 
 periences these sensations. If they are right, the conclusion 
 is a saddening one for the boy: for if he went away leaving 
 half of the pie, there could be no half for him to come back 
 to. The truth is that while he is away, there do not remain 
 in the pantry any of the sensations which we call pie, but 
 something remains which, when he comes back, can again 
 arouse the sensations we agreed to call pie; and the happy
 
 Ch. IV] Realism and Idealism 53 
 
 fact that that something remains, proves that there is a 
 universe outside of the mind. 
 
 On the other hand, if a log of wood be shoved into the 
 room, but no boy, there are still in the room none of the 
 sensations which we agree to call pie. To arouse those sen- 
 sations, the bit of the objective universe still there must be 
 visited by a bit of the subjective universe. The boy comes 
 in with that bit of the subjective universe eagerly acting in 
 his brain and on his salivary glands, and again are created 
 the sensations we call pie. 
 
 The bearing of this disquisition on pie (a subject for which 
 I have an Emersonian fondness) upon the wider questions of 
 our Cosmic Relations, will be more obvious as your patience 
 holds out 
 
 I shall never forget my feeling when the extreme idealistic 
 theory was first presented to me. As a boy I had just re- 
 turned from my first trip to the Adirondacks. Probably 
 not three hundred people a year went into those mountains 
 then, and probably not three hundred lived in them. The 
 impressions left in my mind were nearly all of glorious 
 solitudes where I had been alone watching the runways of 
 the deer. The memory of those solitudes, and the hope of 
 being again amid them, were very precious to me. When 
 I first was indoctrinated with the theory that the external 
 universe has no existence except as seen by an intelligent 
 mind, I said to myself: As, then, no one sees those lakes 
 and mountains now, they no longer exist they are not there. 
 The feeling was horrible. Even under the happy inspirations 
 the lakes and mountains had brought, there always had been 
 a heavy oppressive undertone of loneliness, which the rec- 
 ollection of them revived; and it had not been free from 
 some of the sense of terror of the supernatural fostered in 
 those superstitious days. But this suggestion that those 
 beautiful yet awful solitudes had disappeared when we dis- 
 appeared, had in it something more eerie and terrible than 
 could come to a boy from the cry of loon or owl or panther, 
 or even from the silence and the loneliness that, in occa- 
 sional moments of perverse imaginings, became more dreadful 
 still. 
 
 Against the unholy magic suggested by the doctrine, the
 
 54 Evolution of the Universe [Bk. I 
 
 boy's reason made little headway, and the philosophic diffi- 
 culty did not take its place among clearly settled things 
 until, to the old man musing on the boy's perplexities, came 
 the suggestion of the pie, which, very wrongly, seems not 
 to have occupied as large a space in the boy's horizon as 
 the Adirondacks did.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE KNOWN UNIVERSE AND THE UNKNOWN UNIVERSE 
 
 THE Adirondacks existed after I left them, and before I 
 saw them : so the whole universe visible to us must have ex- 
 isted essentially the same as now, though different in some 
 details, before there was an eye to see it ; and it has been slowly, 
 slowly revealing itself to us as eyes have been evolved, and 
 seems to have been evolving eyes for that express purpose. 
 
 Let us imagine ourselves living in darkness relieved at 
 times by just enough suggestion of light to make the darkness 
 more visible, with no more sense of sound than an occasional 
 vibration somewhere in our interior economy; about the 
 same satisfaction from food and drink as has the patient 
 who is nourished by anointing his surface with an odorless 
 oil, and with no sensations beyond these, except a faint con- 
 sciousness of contact with objects, and support from earth 
 or water. Such experiences constituted the universe of most 
 of our ancestors, and still constitute that of most of our 
 contemporaries. 
 
 Next assume a distinct sense of shadow between the rudi- 
 mentary eye and the source of light. What an immense 
 resource this is in seeking food and avoiding danger, not 
 to speak of variety of life and of pleasure, as compared with 
 the creature who has only the sense of touch! How im- 
 mensely larger and more interesting is the universe of the 
 later creature! To get some realization of this, recall even 
 your own feeling at some time over the mere simple ex- 
 perience of light after darkness, and yet you have so many 
 more complex feelings, that this one appears by contrast 
 insignificant. 
 
 Very early comes in a sense of different kinds of light 
 of color. Think of the contrast between engravings and oil- 
 paintings. Imagine the landscape of the moon-lit night 
 shifting to that of noon. But even in the senses of sight 
 55
 
 56 The Known Universe and the Unknown [Bk. I 
 
 alone, not to speak of other senses, this is but the beginning. 
 With each sense evolved, a new universe is known. 
 
 And now, for contrast (for which, through all my tedious 
 exposition I have had a motive that will appear later), let us 
 jump to the universe of to-day as I see it at this moment. 
 
 As I look North, between the beautiful pillars of a Doric 
 summer-house, two immense pines, light green with dark 
 shadows, are in the panel at the left, soughing in the summer 
 breeze. A mass of lower foliage is this side of them, con- 
 spicuously a great round laburnum, above and beyond which 
 a narrow sharp arbor-vitas shoots up, in lighter green against 
 the darker pines. Above all, blue sky with white clouds. I 
 would like to have it all painted. At the right are two 
 more panels, of lawn and distant wood, with my distant neigh- 
 bor's beautiful buildings with their peaked turrets, brownstone 
 against the green, and then in another panel, where I could 
 toss my pencil, rises a pretty little spruce, on whose spire a 
 pretty little bird has been chattering at me a pretty little song 
 nearly all the time I have been writing, and the pines have 
 soughed their accompaniment. Then at the left of all I have 
 described, as I now look West, comes the massive square corner 
 pillar of the summer-house, and next it a fluted Doric column. 
 They shut out the left edge of the left pine ; and on their other 
 side opens a picture of absolutely different character, whose 
 limit is, instead of a hundred feet, some sixty miles. The 
 lower quarter of the panel is foreground my hill sloping 
 rapidly in light green to where the men with horses, bay 
 against the green, are turning the pretty cow-pond among 
 the trees into a swimming-hole for my young people and 
 their mother and me; then, above in the perspective, a field 
 of buckwheat still green, then one of yellow stubble from 
 the oats just cut. In the perspective, these fields appear al- 
 most wooded with small locusts along some roads, and a few 
 great maples and pines; then my woods so beautiful, the 
 rolling light green deciduous trees making the jagged pines 
 shooting up here and there in front and above, look almost 
 black. Beyond, over the woods, stretches the pearly surface of 
 Lake Champlain, with long faint blue lines of current. At 
 the right, just above the trees, a low dark green island,
 
 Ch. V] Protozoan and Human Universes Contrasted 57 
 
 with a white lighthouse and keeper's home, reaches across 
 about a quarter of the picture. A little higher in the per- 
 spective, touching the left edge, is a smaller island. Beyond, 
 far off, comes the other side of the lake in what the fore- 
 shortening makes a virtually straight line across the picture ; 
 and above it rise in faint misty blue, fold upon fold, miles 
 upon miles until we come to rounded and peaked summits, 
 the Adirondacks. Above them, white clouds with bluish gray 
 shadows, the upper edges broken with the dark blue of a 
 clear sky. One more panel between the pillars, to the left, 
 is a beautiful variant of the one I have just described. 
 
 Where I turn South, there rise from the plain two of 
 those picturesque mountains of tilted strata that slope on one 
 side and are precipitous on the other ; and as I turn farther 
 to the East I come to the Green Mountains first, the 
 beautiful reposeful gently-three-peaked Lincoln; next, the 
 unsurpassed gracefulness of the Couching Lion, not the 
 biggest mountain I know, but the one with the most uplift; 
 then after a few lower summits to (though fast becoming 
 shut-out by growing trees) Mansfield, with an outline that 
 seems really ingeniously bulky, sometimes looks bigger than 
 the Jungfrau, and yet in winter, in that strange green twilight 
 that now and then comes over the snow, makes one think 
 of fairies. 
 
 Now contrast these lovely things open to my eyes and ears, 
 with our ancestor's universe of darkness and silence. Then 
 suppose that he had varied the monotony of his existence by 
 splitting himself into a family, and contrast his experience 
 of it with mine if my little daughter should happen to get 
 off her pony and be chased down here by my six-foot boys. 
 
 To emphasize once more the emotional contrast (for all 
 of the contrasts, a reason will appear presently) : this beauti- 
 ful universe, of which I have tried to give you some faint 
 notion, is mine mine mine, even the miles and miles of 
 mountains are as much mine to all significant intents, as if 
 I owned them in fee simple. Compare this joy with the 
 protozoon's right, title, and interest in his puddle. And then 
 with all he can do, compare my privilege of making roads to 
 all this loveliness, which was not accessible before, and leav- 
 ing my gate open to all who care to come.
 
 58 The Known Universe and the Unknown [Bk. I 
 
 Then think of the joy of doing, however badly, what amid 
 all this, I am trying to do with my pencil (among my joys 
 I prize that of not writing with a pen), which has nothing 
 in the primitive universe even to contrast with it. 
 
 Then reflect that the scene before me is but a small part of 
 the universe open to-day Niagara and the Grand Canyon 
 and the Yosemite and the wonderful Pacific coast, and the 
 Canadian Eockies, and the Alps, the Mediterranean, the 
 Himalayas the whole wonderful world, and the ocean and 
 the night. Then the great architecture and sculpture and 
 pictures; beautiful men and women; the drama spoken and 
 danced and sung; and Liszt's Preludes and the Pilgerchor 
 and Beethoven's last quartets. Then, on the more intellectual 
 side, the great books, long talks with great people, and with 
 others who, like not a few of the great ones, are better 
 than great. 
 
 Keflect that beyond the joy of contemplating our universe, 
 men have had the higher joy of creating no little of it all 
 the art and thought and love. Nature supplied the material 
 and gave the hints, but the production was our own. 
 
 So I might go on for many pages more, describing the 
 universe of the modern man, and contrasting it with the 
 universe of the primitive animal; but perhaps I have taxed 
 your patience even more than my purpose requires. 
 
 And now for my purpose in trying to awaken some feeling 
 of the contrast. It is to impress that, as our universe has been 
 a gradual revelation, up step by step from the protozoon's, ours 
 is presumably only a part of one as much beyond ours, as ours 
 is beyond the protozoon's. The amphioxus must have vague 
 feelings of something beyond what it can sense; and far 
 more certainly do we. As the early creatures must have in 
 their sight, faint presages of what we call color, or in their 
 hearing faint presages of what we call timbre, we certainly 
 have presages far wider. Are we not constantly feeling fore- 
 tastes of we know not what, except that it seems high and 
 good? 
 
 There was certainly something prophetic, though not nec- 
 essarily prophetic of my personal experience, in the exaltation 
 brought me before sunrise this morning in the pearl-gray
 
 h. V] Enjoyment of Nature. Compensation 59 
 
 sky holding one throbbing planet over dark Mount Mansfield 
 there was something beyond my eyes, as surely as there 
 was beyond those of the tadpole in my pond. 
 
 After I saw this, I found " something beyond " in another 
 sense, but still in the same sense. I could not sleep, and 
 so I wrote what happened. The dawn, which is seldom 
 reported in words or pictures, is, other things even, more 
 interesting than the sunset certainly more cheering, as com- 
 ing light is more cheering than coming darkness. But there 
 is a difference in the other direction too, as the night is poetry, 
 and the daylight prose. 
 
 As I watch, above the mountains the gray turns to yellow; 
 the yellow to pink, the blue higher up growing more intense, 
 and the mountains growing blue with it; and then the blue 
 far up in the sky gradually comes down and absorbs the 
 lighter colors. 
 
 Across the wide valley below the deep blue mountains, the 
 black trees rise here and there above the mists. The mist* 
 spread over the swamps and the lines of streams. 
 
 The cattle in the pastures begin lowing, and the dog barks, 
 as he herds them for their milking. 
 
 Now the mists have grown so that, beyond the low foothills, 
 they make, over the Winooski River, a gray line against the 
 great blue mountains. This side of the foothills, in the 
 fields, the light greens and yellows of different crops begin 
 to show all offset by gray in the pastures, and by the 
 nearer mists with the black trees jutting from them. 
 
 The sky over the mountains is very light now, but shades 
 fast into the dark blue of the zenith. The planet has climbed 
 far up into that, and is still bright there. 
 
 The scene began to take on its everyday look before the 
 sun came. I did not wait for him, but went to bed. 
 
 But how richly I had been compensated for a restless 
 night, and even for the mischief it is going to raise in an 
 exacting day! And I must illustrate one of the truths for 
 the sake of which I am writing this book, by saying that 
 much as the slight infirmity which causes me restless nights 
 and early wakings, has eaten into working power much even 
 as it may eat into the fag-end of old age, I have, in ways 
 similar to last night's, and in many widely different ways,
 
 60 The Known Universe and the Unknown [Bk. I 
 
 been richly paid. He is a wise man who knows unerringly 
 what to call a misfortune. 
 
 But to return to our demonstration. In the first place, 
 the difference between the tadpole's sight and mine having 
 come by a slow evolution, is there any reason whatever to 
 believe that the evolution is finished at just the colors my 
 sight responds to now? There are plenty of existing eyes 
 otherwise normal that do not respond to all the colors to 
 which most eyes already do : even to-day some people see 
 only brown where others see red or green, and a daylight 
 landscape appears to them only much as an extra-bright 
 moonlight one. Still such defective eyes do respond better 
 than, probably within historic times, eyes in general did. 
 
 This point has had a very interesting but, as we shall see, 
 somewhat questionable treatment by Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Con- 
 sciousness: Philadelphia, 1901 and 1905). He first quotes on 
 p. 28, Max Miiller (Science of Thought, I, 229) : 
 
 " It is well known that the distinction of color is of late date ; 
 that Xenophanes knew of three colors of the rainbow only 
 purple, red, and yellow; that even Aristotle spoke of the tri- 
 colored rainbow; and that Democritus knew of no more than 
 four colors black, white, red, and yellow." 
 
 Then Dr. Bucke goes on to say: 
 
 " Geiger (Contributions to the History of the Development of 
 the Human Race. Translated by David Asher, London, 1880, 
 p. 48) points out that it can be proved by examination of lan- 
 guage that as late in the life of the race as the time of the primi- 
 tive Aryans, perhaps not more than fifteen or twenty thousand 
 years ago, man was only conscious of, only perceived, one color. 
 That is to say, he did not distinguish any difference in tint be- 
 tween the blue sky, the green trees and grass, the brown or gray 
 earth, and the golden and purple clouds of sunrise and sunset. 
 So Pictet (Les Origines Indo-Europeennes, Paris, 1877, II) finds 
 no names of colors in primitive Indo-European speech. And 
 Max Miiller (op. cit., II, 616) finds no Sanskrit root whose mean- 
 ing has any reference to color." 
 
 Then Dr. Bucke continues, without specific references : 
 
 " At a later period, but still before the time of the oldest lit- 
 erary compositions now extant, the color sense was so far de- 
 veloped beyond this primitive condition that red and black were
 
 Ch. V] Evolution of Sight 61 
 
 recognized as distinct. Still later, at the time when the bulk of 
 the Rig Veda was composed, red, yellow, and black were recog- 
 nized as three separate shades, but these three included all color 
 that man at that age was capable of appreciating. Still later 
 white was added to the list and then green; but throughout the 
 Rig Veda, the Zend Avesta, the Homeric poems, and the Bible 
 the color of the sky is not once mentioned, therefore, apparently, 
 was not recognized. For the omission can hardly be attributed 
 to accident; the ten thousand lines of the Rig Veda are largely 
 occupied with descriptions of the sky ; and all its features sun, 
 moon, stars, clouds, lightning, sunrise, and sunset are men- 
 tioned hundreds of times. So also the Zend Avesta, to the 
 writers of which light and fire, both terrestrial and heavenly, 
 are sacred objects, could hardly have omitted by chance all 
 mention of the blue sky. In the Bible the sky and heaven are 
 mentioned more than four hundred and thirty times, and still 
 no mention is made of the color of the former. In no part of the 
 world is the blue of the sky more intense than in Greece and 
 Asia Minor, where the Homeric poems were composed. Is it 
 possible to conceive that a poet (or the poets) who saw this as 
 we see it now could write the forty-eight long books of the 
 Iliad and Odyssey and never once either mention or refer to itf 
 But were it possible to believe that all the poets of the Rig Veda, 
 Zend Avesta, Iliad, Odyssey, and Bible could have omitted the 
 mention of the blue color of the sky by mere accident, etymology 
 would step in and assure us that four thousand years ago, or, 
 perhaps, three, blue was unknown, for at that time the subse- 
 quent names for blue were all merged in the names for black. 
 
 " The English word Hue and the German blau descend from 
 a word that meant black. The Chinese hi-u-an, which now 
 means sky-blue, formerly meant black. The word nil, which now 
 in Persian and Arabic means blue, is derived from the name 
 Nile, that is, the black river, of which same word the Latin 
 Niger is a form." 
 
 Homer certainly had a word for blue, though he may not 
 have applied it to the sky. 
 
 This last statement that I ever got transformed into g 
 makes me prick up my ears, but perhaps it would not if I 
 knew more; and we need not let it fatally affect the whole 
 paragraph, or the statements (op. tit., 30, 31) : 
 
 " As the sensations red and black came into existence by the 
 division of an original unital color sensation, so in process of 
 time these divided. First red divided into red-yellow, then that 
 red into red-white. Black divided into black-green, then black 
 again into black-blue, and during the last twenty-five hundred 
 years these six (or rather these four red, yellow, green, blue)
 
 62 The Known Universe and the Unknown [Bk. I 
 
 have split up into the enormous number of shades of color which 
 
 are now recognized and named 
 
 " The power of exciting vision of the red rays is several 
 thousand times as great as the energy of the violet, and there is 
 a regular and rapid decrease of energy as we pass down the 
 spectrum from red to violet. It is plain that if there has been 
 such a thing as a growing perfection in the sense of vision in 
 virtue of which, from being insensible to color the eye became 
 gradually sensible of it, red would necessarily be the first color 
 perceived, then yellow, then green, and so on to violet; and this 
 is exactly what both ancient literature and etymology tell us 
 took place." 
 
 But in the face of all this pretty demonstration and these 
 great authorities, stand the facts that the Egyptians used 
 color very well four or five thousand years before Christ, and 
 that the people in the Dordogne caves used it as much, prob- 
 ably, as twenty thousand years before. Moreover, recent 
 savages in a state presumably far behind that of the peoples 
 whose writings are quoted by Dr. Bucke and his authorities, 
 use many colors, and often with skill that puts civilized man 
 to his trumps. Among them, however, we should be slow to 
 put our wampum-making Indians: for they used the colored 
 beads which we gave them. But we found them with their 
 senses far enough evolved to appreciate those beads, as good 
 William Penn knew to his profit. 
 
 Yet although Dr. Bucke may claim too much, what he 
 gives us is interesting and suggestive and in the general line 
 of evolution; and as we go on, we shall meet growing reason 
 to look for truth on both sides in most conflicts between 
 theories, and even between theories and facts. 
 
 It is an interesting question whether the eye as we 
 know it, is to be farther differentiated to report more colors, 
 or whether we must depend for farther knowledge of the 
 invisible ends of the spectrum, upon instruments of our 
 own devising. Somehow phenomena for which we have to 
 depend on instruments, do not seem as really parts of our 
 very own universe, as phenomena reported directly by our 
 senses. It seems more in accord with the beneficence so 
 prominent throughout previous evolution, that our senses 
 shall be expanded. Yet on the other hand, while that would 
 be more joy, it would not exercise our new and ineffably
 
 Ch. V] Senses still Evolving 63 
 
 valuable power of inventing instruments and hypotheses, and 
 finding laws for ourselves. 
 
 As with the eye, so with the ear. Is it going to stop 
 at ten octaves, when even some insects appear to hear higher 
 tones than we can, and the whale lower? 
 
 So with the other senses. All are of course, like sight and 
 hearing, the products of an evolution in response to the en- 
 vironment. Almost equally of course, then, they are yet but 
 small parts of a possible even probable development. 
 
 In dreams, when separated from the activities of the body, 
 consciousness approaches such experience of new faculties 
 the surmounting of time and space and gravitation; and we 
 cannot declare it impossible that consciousness separated alto- 
 gether from the body should have such experiences, even to 
 a degree compared with which the difference between a 
 creature with one sense and a creature with six senses, is 
 trifling. 
 
 Men now living have seen striking evidence that such 
 development is going on. Some very competent observers 
 think they are now watching the most tremendous of all 
 evolutions yet known in the faculties themselves, of which 
 more later. 
 
 As with the faculties, so, as already intimated, with the 
 universe. As nearly all the universe we know is outside the 
 protozob'n's, are not the indications virtually conclusive that, 
 outside of the one we know, there is more, bearing to ours 
 a ratio greater than ours bears to the protozoon's? What 
 reason have we to believe that all the universe revealable 
 to a possible sense of sight, is revealed to ours? We have 
 excellent reason to believe that it is not. By photography and 
 the Roentgen apparatus, we can now find at the ends of the 
 spectrum, rays from which our eyes as yet get no direct 
 sensation whatever. Instruments show us longer and shorter, 
 and slower and quicker vibrations than those of which our 
 senses take direct cognizance. And even between the two 
 extremes that we do cognize, there seem to be gaps that we do 
 not. This amounts to an almost mathematical reinforcement 
 of the demonstration already given that the sensizable uni- 
 verse, with its bounteous gifts to the intellect and the emo-
 
 64 The Known Universe and the Unknown [Bk. I 
 
 tions, with the numberless avenues for exploration that it 
 offers the adventurous soul, and with the numberless new 
 gifts it undoubtedly holds at the ends of those avenues, is, 
 after all, but a mere foretaste of a universe waiting for the 
 enjoyment of eyes evolved beyond ours, and containing intel- 
 lectual and emotional exaltations that our blind gropings 
 even now touch without understanding. 
 
 Truths similar to those illustrated regarding the visible 
 universe, must hold even more strongly regarding the audible 
 universe, because music is far the youngest of the arts: it 
 has no masterpiece two hundred years old, while all the other 
 arts have masterpieces over two thousand. 
 
 And yet are degrees between fragments so small in com- 
 parison with the probable wholes, worth considering? The 
 phraseology, however, assumes that the wholes are open to 
 human conception a weakness haunting the phraseology of 
 philosophic speculation. 
 
 The evidence, then, seems conclusive from the evolution 
 of the recognized faculties, not to speak of the vague new 
 ones now the objects of so much research, that in proportion 
 to our senses, we know virtually as little of the universe around 
 us, as, in proportion to his senses, does the jelly-fish floating 
 in the dancing sunlit water among the yachts and the bathers, 
 and touching the loveliest of them with the same sensation 
 as if she were a floating log. 
 
 And yet the myriad particulars, objective and subjective, 
 which make our universe so different from the jelly-fish's, 
 would probably, when compared with the whole universe (so 
 far as our minds can grasp the idea of a " whole " universe) 
 show a ratio smaller than does the jelly-fish's universe when 
 compared with ours. 
 
 In a word, evolution has demonstrated the existence of a 
 Heaven, and instead of being up above us (which meant 
 something before Copernicus and Newton) it is all around 
 us and in us, only waiting for faculty to recognize it. Nay, 
 we have been living in it all the time. If to the Heaven I 
 tried to describe from my summer-house and my east window, 
 could be added reunion with those I have lost, and gratifica- 
 tion of divine curiosities just fast enough to prevent dulling 
 them, I, for one, don't want any better Heaven.
 
 Ch. V] Senses Reveal but Parts of Reality 65 
 
 Or from another point of view, did human imagination 
 ever devise an entrance into Heaven, to be compared with 
 the experience of a person born blind, suddenly restored to 
 sight in presence of a beautiful landscape, or better still, of 
 a beautiful and beloved person? Yet experiences of the 
 same nature, but immeasurably greater, cannot be held im- 
 possible to a creature without a sense, or with only one, 
 or two, or five, or any number. Whatever the number, we 
 cannot conceive the impossibility of another sense being added 
 to the organism, or another field of response existing in the 
 objective universe. 
 
 But while the universe of the higher organism is a heaven 
 compared with the universe of the lower organism, it is not 
 generally appreciated as such: for in only exceptional cases 
 has it had the benefit of the immediate contrast between blind- 
 ness and sight, or deafness and hearing. 
 
 However, each appearance has been only an appearance a 
 quality : the " thing in itself " is unknown to us, and appar- 
 ently must remain unknown to us, except so far as its 
 phenomena are revealed. Put yourself on Lake Champlain or 
 one of the few lakes to compare with it, or in the Yosemite, 
 or by the Grand Canyon, or at Zermatt, realize that the 
 immeasurable source of strong, beautiful, beneficent (is it too 
 much to say benevolent?) Power, is revealing itself to you in 
 the vibrations entering your eyes; regard the scene as simply 
 a lovely aspect of an infinite source of loveliness partially re- 
 vealing itself to you, and probably to reveal to our descendants 
 immeasurably more of itself in ways that beggar our imagina- 
 tion; or go and listen to great music, and realize it as a 
 revelation, through the composer, of the same Power; 
 saturate your soul with such revelations, and then, that 
 you may appreciate them all the better, contrast them with 
 the gross and fantastic and often hideous pictures with 
 which, under the name of revelations, barbarous priests 
 have imposed the awful power of mystery on barbarous 
 peoples. 
 
 But the powers of mystery are lovely as well as awful. 
 The mists and mountains and dark shadows opposite me as 
 I write, are both. I do not read their meaning, as I read 
 the meaning of a 2 -f 2ab + b 2 , but they lift and expand
 
 66 The Known Universe and the Unknown [Bk. I 
 
 and deepen the soul as do no meanings that I can read ; and 
 while they raise the most terrible questions, they answer 
 them with : " Peace ! Wait ! Work ! Earn the rest that you 
 feel is in Us! All will be well!"
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 SOME ETHICAL ASPECTS OP EVOLUTION 
 
 WITH suggestion of the Beneficence which has been breed- 
 ing from our deaf and blind ancestors a progeny that enjoys 
 the universe open to us, comes the question: What need 
 of the ancestors' being deaf and blind? Perhaps an answer 
 whose consistency with the fact would not be its sole merit 
 would be : " None of your business." 
 
 But really it is no detraction from the Beneficence (or 
 any other name that you may see fit to spell with a capital) 
 doing the evolution, that the evolution did not begin higher 
 up. We cannot conceive its doing so, any more than we can 
 really conceive a creation. Just at what point would our 
 wisdom have the evolution begin, and what reason have we to 
 believe that it could begin in any other way than it did, or 
 that the inflow of the Cosmic Soul into us can be attained 
 in any other way than through just that evolution? The 
 Power does not seem to have been able to make the universe 
 perfect, and yet we assume the power to be unlimited what- 
 ever that may mean, in spite of all the evidence indicating 
 that it is not Here comes in the inconsistency that we allege 
 between an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful God, and the 
 existence of suffering. What do we know about " all," except 
 all of some limited thing? The very phrase is part of that 
 nonsense-jabbering that we always fall into when we use words 
 greater than our actual conceptions. We merely assume such 
 a God, despite the facts that we cannot conceive one, and we 
 never saw any evidence of the existence of one. 
 
 We simply see the greatest power we know, but a power 
 we know to be imperfect, evolving the greatest universe we 
 know, but a universe we know to be imperfect. We have 
 much reason to believe that we are to see more ; but to juggle 
 with words that imply having seen all, or having seen what 
 we have not, is to babble idiocy. 
 67
 
 68 Some Ethical Aspects of Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 All this suggested to Mill a deputy god of inferior powers 
 a queer suggestion for a man of his ability to entertain: 
 for the need of a deputy arises only from the principal's 
 limitations : so why not admit them at once, without lugging 
 in the deputy, or bothering ourselves to reconcile them with 
 the gratuitous pseud-ideas of an almighty and all-benevolent 
 cause and regulator of the universe? For our purposes, the 
 Cause is just powerful enough and just benevolent enough 
 to produce, so far, the universe as we know it, no more and 
 no less; and if we are not satisfied with that amount of 
 power and benevolence, after we have watched life long 
 enough to realize the good evolved from its evils, and to 
 catch glimpses of the possibilities of vastly greater future 
 good, we are pretty hard to please. 
 
 The real indications are of the obvious fact that our powers 
 of apprehension are not unlimited. We are even so stupid 
 that we are in the habit of saying that the universe is full 
 of imperfections and suffering and death, when it is no such 
 thing: it does contain imperfections, suffering, and death, 
 but anybody who says it is " full of " them, simply has 
 diseased perceptions. The sad facts play a very minor part. 
 As I write this in my summer-house, the sheep are bleating 
 as they feed in the sunlight down the hill, sleek and happy. 
 All summer I've enjoyed watching them enjoy themselves. 
 During that time half a dozen have been killed by dogs. 
 There are scores of them left. Shall I say that their universe 
 is "full of" dogs and death? More of them have been 
 killed for my table. Am I proved capable of nothing but 
 ruthless murder? 
 
 Despite the misery in the universe, the joy is there, and 
 immensely preponderant; and we constantly see the misery 
 working out good. 
 
 This is a fact apt to be denied by the inexperienced and 
 unreflecting, and realized only as life grows longer and 
 richer. Yet assertions of it abound in the utterances of 
 those whose thought is wisest and deepest. For proofs of 
 it, however, one is generally thrown back on his own ex- 
 perience: because such proofs are most frequent and con- 
 vincing in the things locked in each one's own breast. They
 
 Ch. VI] Detailed Reach of Natural Law 69 
 
 are seldom known to the biographers, and still more seldom 
 given by the autobiographers and when the fundamental 
 facts are known, their relations are seldom realized. Pious 
 souls and many souls have been made pious by such ex- 
 perience often delight in pouring out their convictions of 
 the beneficence of God in bringing good from evil, but 
 where their convictions rest on their actual experiences of 
 real life, and not on mere religious ecstasy, they are natu- 
 rally slow to expose the experiences to the world, espe- 
 cially as the secrets of others are so often interwoven with 
 them. 
 
 Many must have wondered if it was not a duty to do 
 violence to their own feelings, and give the world the benefit 
 of such experience ; but if, as an extreme instance, the prema- 
 ture death of someone useful and admirable and loved, has 
 been demonstrated in the course of many years to have 
 made possible for the survivors, shifts in the kaleidoscope of 
 life so good that the lost one would gladly have died to 
 effect them, to proclaim the particulars might not only expose 
 to the cold world the tenderest feelings of many survivors, 
 but might appear an underestimate of the life that is lost, 
 and a lack of affection for the memory. And yet there is 
 probably nobody of much experience and reflection, who does 
 not know of just such instances. 
 
 Moreover, in many such cases, the preponderance of good 
 rests on the assumption that the life is continued beyond: I 
 do not mean the easy general assumption that the lost one 
 has entered into a state of bliss beside which the agonies of 
 illness and death, and the sufferings of survivors, are as 
 nothing ; but I mean a set of very obvious consequences which 
 would be rational in the extreme if there is a future existence 
 very much like this one to round them out, while without the 
 possibility of such consequences in an after life, the present 
 life often seems like chaos. 
 
 And yet even that chaos can often be resolved by bravely 
 and candidly offsetting life's joys against its sorrows, finding 
 it as good as it generally is, and assuming the peace of 
 oblivion at the end. 
 
 That, however, is not the whole matter: for the educating 
 influence of suffering in life here, as we know it, is highly
 
 70 Some Ethical Aspects of Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 valued by the best souls, and its recognition is so general as to 
 be almost a commonplace. 
 
 Yet when one realizes that the universe is governed by 
 law, it is hard to realize a law comprehensive enough to 
 reach down into the details of each life, and make its reverses 
 what the character needs to pick out among all the apparent 
 jumble of microbes and snakes and tigers and bad machines 
 and explosions, just the one and at just the time, that each 
 human being needs it to do him or his survivors good. 
 
 Equally hard is it to imagine a law which much oftener 
 sends the apparent " accidents " of happiness in the same 
 way. And yet some of the wisest of earth very strongly and 
 deliberately suspect not a few of them hold as a belief 
 founded on frequent verification, that the Law and the Power 
 great enough to swing the stars, is also delicate enough to do 
 just those little things. It has often been found worth while 
 to search life and conscience closely for the evidences. 
 
 Among the things hard to realize a generation ago and 
 much harder the generations ago when the litanies were com- 
 posed, would have been the attitude now growing more general 
 toward one more hard subject. *We know now that among 
 the greatest humbugs ever imposed upon humanity by human- 
 ity, or inhumanity, has been the horror of death. As the views 
 inculcated by the priest for his revenue's sake are gradually 
 disappearing, we are gradually realizing that death is a much- 
 maligned institution, and that, except in its apparent incon- 
 gruities with the useful and hopeful, it has, everything 
 considered, much to commend it. As evolution is making 
 life more normal, death becomes more normal nearer a 
 mere long-awaited and welcome release from weariness and 
 ennui. Weariness and ennui are inevitable under limited 
 conditions: the wider the conditions, however, the longer it 
 takes to get tired of them; but the time must come. The 
 question therefore is really : Why are our conditions limited ? 
 and our answer is: Whatever impressions like the worm's 
 impressions of scenery and music, we may get outside of 
 time, space, matter, motion, and force, while we are subject 
 to them, no mortal mind can really conceive of unlimited 
 conditions. It seems to follow, absurd as it may at first
 
 Ch. VI] Legitimacy of Speculation 71 
 
 appear, that no mortal mind can conceive of conditions under 
 which death must not in time be a blessing. That now it 
 o often comes prematurely as to seem, and probably to 
 be, a curse, is a corollary of imperfect evolution. But if, in 
 our erring judgments, we must regard it as worse or better 
 than it is, what have we to gain by regarding it as worse? 
 There is a rapidly reviving impression that we don't know 
 much about it anyhow, and that the little we do know is 
 the worst there is to know. 
 
 Part of the bad is the apparent fact that the universe 
 beyond our senses must remain unenjoyed by us if death 
 ends all. This tends to make the faith in such a universe 
 more tantalizing than inspiring; but as we proceed, we may 
 find some reasons why it should not be tantalizing. 
 
 We have now been through such a summary as conditions 
 permit of the reactions between soul and universe covered by 
 our present knowledge by our recognized faculties on one 
 side, and such phenomena as we have been able to correlate, 
 on the other. 
 
 But it is a plain corollary of evolution that there should 
 at times appear germs of faculty but faintly and rarely 
 apprehended, giving rise to phenomena new, strange, doubt- 
 ful. In this vague field lie many, perhaps most, of our future 
 possibilities, and it would be a very chary review of our 
 cosmic relations that should leave it out, or that even should 
 refrain from any inferences regarding the unknown that 
 our faint glimpses of it may legitimately suggest. It is 
 even true that as the old forms of belief regarding the cause 
 and fate of the universe and the soul, are nearly all gone, 
 the old fervors and the old despairs are nearly all gone too; 
 and with them seem gone nearly all great productive powers 
 of the spirit; and the world, with its great new mechanical 
 inventions, is absorbed as never before since Rome fell, in the 
 luxuries of material things. 
 
 The making of inferences regarding the unsensed universe, 
 notwithstanding their inevitable uncertainty and unverifia- 
 bility, has been, the vast majority think, of great benefit 
 to mankind: for the universe we do not know is presumably 
 far more important possibly even to us in ways dimly sensed
 
 72 Some Ethical Aspects of Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 than the universe we do know, and the vague borderland 
 between the known and the unknown is the field of much 
 of poetry and the other arts. 
 
 Every good strong emotion and possibly every bad strong 
 emotion (which must be a misapplication or an excess of a 
 good one) brings the soul to the borders of the unknown 
 to the frame of mind where one is very apt to cry out: 
 " God ! " and sometimes as apt to cry it out in oath as in 
 prayer. De Quincey speaks of literature as giving " exercise 
 and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with 
 the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a 
 step upwards, a step ascending as upon a Jacob's ladder 
 from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth/' This 
 is at least equally the effect of great music, painting, sculp- 
 ture, even architecture of beauty in all its forms, most 
 perhaps of the great aspects of Nature, including humanity. 
 
 Certain it is that without an abiding consciousness that 
 the known mass of phenomena is not all, and that behind 
 them is a cause transcending our imaginations, life loses some 
 of its best emotions, the imagination grows arid, and the 
 moral impulses shrink. While what we know, and the in- 
 creasing of it, can more than occupy all our working powers, 
 they work all the better for an occasional dream of greater 
 and less troubled things. 
 
 When imaginations of the unknown world have most filled 
 the consciousness, mankind has done its greatest creative 
 work. For three thousand years, under both classical mythol- 
 ogy and Christianity, the great outpourings of genius sprang 
 from a consciousness saturated with relationships assumed, 
 whether truly or falsely, to personal gods and immortal life. 
 That consciousness built the Greek temples and the Gothic 
 cathedrals; it carved the Apollo Belvedere and painted the 
 Sistine Madonna; it wrote the Iliad and the Inferno and 
 the Paradise Lost; it composed the masses of Haydn and 
 Beethoven and the Stabat Mater; and it has done more to 
 shape the conduct of mankind than all the science, all the 
 codes, and all the armies: for though it has not shaped 
 the sciences, it has inspired the codes, and impelled most of 
 the armies. 
 
 These relations to the unknown have often been lost sight
 
 Ch. VI] Inspiring Interest in the Unknown 73 
 
 of and ignored, but yet so generally and persistently have 
 they been felt that until lately they constituted most of the 
 atmosphere in which even the skeptic led his moral and 
 emotional life; their fervors and their terrors made virtually 
 all of man's existence vibrant: whatever may have been his 
 speculations, ambitions, lusts, there was no escaping the con- 
 sciousness of the mysteries of the universe and the obligations 
 of the moral law, with all their power to terrify or inspire. 
 The robber baron built a church, the Sicilian brigand prayed 
 for the success of his expeditions, and even yet the " criminal 
 rich," as well as the rich not criminal, give freely for re- 
 ligious uses. These emotions have probably been the greatest 
 of world-influences since men began to take the universe 
 seriously. When, in the rhythmic course of Nature, great 
 waves of them have rolled up, they have generally come 
 nearly at the same time with great epochs of literature and 
 art. The struggles of the early church were followed by 
 the literary inspirations of St. Augustine. Baphael and 
 Luther were born the same year, and Michelangelo only 
 eight years before. The harrowing of the English Church 
 by Henry VIII was the precursor of Shakespere and his 
 companions; the Huguenot persecutions brought the age 
 of the great French dramatists and pulpit orators; the wars 
 of the Cavaliers and Puritans bred Milton, and presaged 
 the literature of Queen Anne; the great school of American 
 writers was born of the struggle of the free spirit against 
 Puritanism; the Victorian age in Literature was the age of 
 conflict between Moses on the one hand, and Lyell, Darwin, 
 and Spencer on the other. 
 
 Be it noted in passing that, very often, these outbursts of 
 literary and artistic genius did not take place in the times 
 of greatest agitation, but a generation later. This, as I have 
 suggested before (Outlook for Nov. 24, 1906), may go a long 
 way to account for genius : it seems to be born not made by 
 its own experiences, but by fervors experienced by its pro- 
 genitors. 
 
 During all these birth-throes of the spirit, whatever differ- 
 ences of opinion there were regarding the nature of God 
 and of immortality, both were believed in, and enough things 
 believed regarding both, to keep most of the world's active
 
 74 Some Ethical Aspects of Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 minds busy ; and to accompany the good results of such beliefs 
 with a terrible amount of bad ones, including some of the 
 worst tragedies in history. Conflicting assertions regarding 
 the supra-phenomenal unsheathed the sword of Islam, and 
 gave western Europe the most terrible wars and persecutions 
 in history; for hundreds of years such assertions turned 
 friend against friend, brother against brother, parent against 
 child. As a typical instance so recently as John Fiske's youth 
 in the late fifties, in a small Connecticut city, his denial of 
 orthodox Christianity ostracized him from social intercourse. 
 
 But the reaction from all these extremes has been only less 
 deplorable than the extremes themselves. After so many 
 bad experiences from speculations regarding the unknown, 
 it was not a strange reaction to deny such speculations any 
 legitimacy at all. 
 
 As knowledge widens, men depend more upon knowledge, 
 and tend to believe that absorption in the Beyond, where we 
 have no knowledge, is the deepest folly, because it is founding 
 our greatest interests in our ignorance. The systems of 
 belief reared regarding the Beyond have taxed so many of 
 the best powers of the race, and have so generally come to 
 nothing, that at last many of their most ardent admirers, 
 while insisting that their building has the highest value, have 
 come to admit that the value is not in what is built, but 
 in the act of building just as it was generally held, a couple 
 of generations ago, that the highest value of education is 
 not in what is learned, but in the act of learning. To say 
 that there is not a grain of truth in these positions would 
 be fatuous as fatuous perhaps as the claim that the pre- 
 ponderance of truth is in them. 
 
 The best known expression of this attitude is of course 
 Lessing's preference of "search for truth" to truth itself. 
 No sane man really accepts this, yet it has been made famous 
 by the unquestionable poetry of its expression, and notorious 
 by the passion of mankind for the intellectual titillation given 
 by epigrams with a spice of truth and a sharper spice of 
 contradiction of what is known to be true. The acceptance 
 of such an epigram makes the vulgar feel wiser than the 
 acceptance of a plain truth that everybody can see. Yet the
 
 Ch. VI] Reactions from such Interests 75 
 
 innate stupidity of the epigram in question is entirely in 
 keeping with the denouement of the masterwork in which 
 it occurs. Despite all the poets have done for us, and no men 
 have done more, many of them have a terrible amount to 
 answer for. 
 
 But it is almost superfluous to reiterate that, wasted and 
 worse-than-wasted poetry and philosophy have been but a 
 small part of the negative effects of absorption in the Beyond. 
 Dogmatic statements regarding it have clashed; and quarrels 
 when neither side can be proved wrong are interminable, and 
 their passions illimitable. 
 
 In reaction against all this, a little after the middle of the 
 last century, arose a school led by perhaps the most powerful 
 mechanical intellect yet known one the immensity of whose 
 processes touched poetry. This school declared : " This uni- 
 verse, so far as we know it, can all be expressed in mechanical 
 terms, and we have found the terms or at least enough of 
 them to show that in time the rest may be found; we are 
 plainly on the track of principles that cover all we know, 
 or can know with our tools for knowing. Those tools will 
 never carry us beyond phenomena. Most of the wasted 
 strength of historic ages has been in speculating beyond phe- 
 nomena, and most of their miseries have come from conflict 
 of opinions on alleged questions beyond phenomena. Now 
 as truth there if not attainable, agreement is impossible. 
 Let us stop all this waste and worry, and busy ourselves 
 with the correlation of phenomena by the mighty new engine 
 of truth we have just discovered after guessing at it for three 
 thousand years in Evolution." 
 
 This reaction differed from those led by Copernicus and 
 Luther. That of Copernicus related primarily to the question 
 of the earth's place and man's place, at the center of the 
 universe. That led by Luther related mainly to the abuses 
 in the church. Neither revolution materially disturbed philo- 
 sophic opinions regarding man's origin, daily duties, or des- 
 tiny, or the universe beyond phenomena, and neither offered 
 an engine like evolution for the revision of opinions. 
 
 Since Luther's day the course of thought had vastly 
 widened, and yet it had been so dammed back in the churches, 
 in the schools, and even in social relations, that when the
 
 76 Some Ethical Aspects of Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 dams were finally thrown down by Lyell, Darwin, Spencer, 
 Huxley, and their friends, the flood of associations on which 
 the old faiths depended, swept the faiths along with them, 
 and the absurdities, abuses, persecutions, and horrors which, 
 in the Christian and Moslem worlds, had attended speculation 
 regarding God and Immortality, were so intensely reacted 
 from, that for half a century some of the strongest minds 
 have regarded such speculation as subversive of Philosophy, 
 Morals, and general well-being. 
 
 Nevertheless, the intellectual habits which had bred those 
 speculations were so deep-seated that most of our contempo- 
 rary philosophers have inherited more of them than they 
 realize, and affect to ignore Spencer even while they habitually 
 use his terms, and test all things by principles which, though 
 faintly appearing as guesses from the beginning of philosophy, 
 were first demonstrated as facts in mind, morals and society by 
 him : indeed so much of his work has got into the very air that 
 everybody, according to capacity, breathes in his principles, 
 often without realizing whence they came. 
 
 This ignorant, not to say ungrateful, attitude of many 
 contemporaries regarding Spencer, is partly due to the brain 
 evolved on the old philosophy being in many ways imperme- 
 able to the new. But it is also due, and perhaps in a greater 
 degree, to Spencer having poured out the child with the 
 bath; while insisting on the consciousness of the Beyond, and 
 not denying, though not asserting, the Hereafter, he rigidly 
 refrains from any speculation regarding the details of eithei; 
 and what little light he flashes toward both, is brief and cold 
 and dry. Though his daily walk and conversation were very 
 much informed by the esthetic side of Nature, his philosophy 
 was very little ; and as it offers none of the beautiful assump- 
 tions in which men have so long delighted, and deals very 
 little in poetry, except as its immensities are poetic, people 
 who cannot supply its poetical implications for themselves, 
 are apt to reject it as bare and arid. But now comes along 
 M. Bergson and covers the colossal structure with flowers a 
 task for which the giant who reared it was not fitted. When 
 I said this to M. Bergson, he supplemented it with one of his
 
 Ch. VI] Unknown and Unknowable 77 
 
 inimitable touches "I try to show how flowers inevitably 
 grow out of it." 
 
 It is the proverbial fate of genius to have to make its own 
 constituency ; and while, in our day, that fate is not as heavy 
 as it was in the days of Socrates and Christ, the work against 
 habit and heredity is still hard and slow. It must be rhythmic 
 too, as Spencer was the first clearly to demonstrate. All these 
 things make it easy to understand how, in spite of the revolu- 
 tion wrought in philosophy by him, in spite of the contempo- 
 rary spread of his doctrines over Europe, America, India, and 
 Japan, there has been a reaction since his death a reaction 
 even among men who have for their main stock in trade, how- 
 ever unconsciously accumulated and assorted, the principles 
 that Spencer first clearly established, and even the terminology 
 that he mainly created. 
 
 While the principal cause of this superficial and ignorant 
 unconsciousness of Spencer's influence has undoubtedly been 
 his refusal to pander to the appetite for transcendental spec- 
 ulation, he yet provided the word Unknowable with a capital 
 U, which lifted it from a negation into an assertion, and 
 gave us a new word for something beyond the little contents 
 of our consciousness, to believe in and lift our emotions 
 toward. 
 
 But why doesn't the word Unknown answer the same pur- 
 pose? As a negation, Unknowable is nothing but a truism: 
 it cannot mean more than unknowable in the present state 
 of our knowledge, and that is a matter of course: for when 
 any item of the unknown becomes known, the state of our 
 knowledge is changed. And to assert that no matter how 
 many items become known, there will still remain an unknown 
 residuum, and therefore that there must ever be an Un- 
 knowable, is to make one of those assertions involving the 
 pseud-idea of "infinity," in which the pre-Spencerian phil- 
 osophy did its reasonings in circles, and which it is one of 
 the first principles of scientific philosophy to avoid. If, 
 again, the word means that the number of things not now 
 known is greater than can be learned while our race lasts, 
 it rises from a truism or a pseud-idea, into a guess, but 
 only a guess, even if one with which most men would agree.
 
 78 Some Ethical Aspects of Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 But to assert that beyond our experience and knowledge 
 there is presumably an immensity of truth and beauty and 
 happiness, beside which our knowledge is as nothing, is only 
 to assert what we have almost as much reason to believe 
 from our experience, as we have to believe the experience 
 itself. And we have nearly the same reason to believe also 
 that we, or at least our descendants, will have an increasing 
 share in that transcendent beatitude. Regarding our own 
 chances, some guesses will be ventured in later pages. I 
 say guesses : for when, as was the fashion with our ancestors, 
 such speculations assume the certainty that we now seldom 
 attribute to anything but hypothesis checked by verification, 
 they have their dangers. 
 
 To the universe which transcends phenomena, the name 
 transcendent naturally has been applied. Of course more 
 nonsense has been talked about it than any other subject; 
 and in spite of the best intentions, I probably have talked 
 my share, and shall probably talk some more. 
 
 The term connotes two ideas (a) the unknown residuum of 
 cause, etc., behind phenomena; (6) the portion of the universe 
 whence we have as yet received no phenomena. Despite 
 Transcendentalism being a jaw-breaking term, it cut a great 
 figure on Boston Sundays a couple of generations ago ; but for 
 everyday use in our time, The Unknown might serve better. 
 
 The Spiritual World is of course another term for the 
 same thing, at least for its psychic side, if you wish to 
 draw a distinction which to me grows more and more shadowy 
 every day. When savages have had anything come to them 
 from their Unknown, even if it were but a bullet from a 
 musket, they have called it the work of spirits, and a large 
 portion of civilized mankind does not materially differ from 
 them to-day. That world, being Unknown, however, does 
 not quite justify Spencer in calling it Unknowable, though 
 we may be justified in spelling both with capitals. And 
 our limited intellects are apt to get on high horses and 
 say that, in any event, it must be Unknowable in its totality, 
 just as if the word totality in the connection were an idea, 
 instead of a pseud-idea. 
 
 As to the universe which transcends our knowledge, the
 
 Ch. VI] No Magic Keys. Uses of Speculation 79 
 
 world's records abound in confident expectations of finding 
 "keys" and "passwords" that shall at a flash make all 
 the unknown, known ; and no end of " systems " of " know- 
 ledge " of it have been built, which were, of course, nothing 
 but card-houses with words on the cards. The only stable 
 knowledge has been built of classified phenomena; and the 
 only progress into the transcendent universe has been step 
 by step. Thus only has some of the universe which was at 
 first all transcendent to our ancestors, become known to us, 
 and thus only, so far as we can see, will some of the universe 
 which is transcendent to us, become known to our de- 
 scendants. 
 
 But speculation concerning the transcendent universe, when 
 honestly regarded as speculation, is justified by several con- 
 siderations : 
 
 I. We never know when a speculation on the transcendent 
 universe is going to bring a valuable slice of it into or 
 Universe into the Known (capitals have their uses). The 
 speculation of to-day points the way to the demonstration 
 of to-morrow sometimes. 
 
 II. Characteristics pervade phenomena which may be held 
 to justify, though they may not strictly verify, some classes 
 of conclusions regarding their cause. For instance, the general 
 prevalence of beauty and happiness obvious to a healthy mind, 
 prove the cause beneficent, and therefore give much reason to 
 believe that it is benevolent. Such beliefs, however, must be 
 held and enforced only in proportion to their verifiability. 
 
 III. Some speculations beyond phenomena have verifiable 
 advantages they unquestionably enlarge and intensify our 
 interests; and beyond possible waste of time, which they 
 share with all speculation and even all experiment, their only 
 disadvantages arise when they impose rules of conduct whose 
 advantages are unverifiable. 
 
 IV. What is more, we must speculate, at least on the re- 
 lations of the uncorrelated phenomena that are constantly 
 coming from the transcendental universe toward the universe 
 of knowledge that constitute the borderland of knowledge. 
 
 But while science has been in the very act of demonstrating 
 the legitimacy of guarded speculation, many have said that
 
 80 Some Ethical Aspects of Evolution [Bk. I 
 
 science was killing the imagination. Others, however, insist 
 that science has been the healthiest stimulus of the imagina- 
 tion, not only in hypothesis, but even in poetry : certainly it 
 gave a new and very deep note to the poetry of Tennyson. But 
 equally certainly, it has diverted the imagination into new 
 channels, and these have not yet become so familiar so much 
 a part of the general consciousness which responds to poetry, 
 as to inspire it habitually and powerfully. Poetry does not 
 come from, or appeal to, deep learning or high ingenuity, 
 but to the common emotions of mankind. True there is 
 poetry in the spectroscope showing us the composition of 
 the farthest visible star, there is poetry in the fact that what 
 we call that star may be only light that has reached us from 
 the star since it was burnt out and dead; but such facts, 
 although science is pouring them upon the poet in profusion, 
 are as yet so unfamiliar that he responds not so much by 
 feeling their emotional implications and turning them into 
 poetry, as by efforts to comprehend them. 
 
 Poetry does not go hand in hand with knowledge, but skips 
 all along the way, sometimes following in the paths which 
 knowledge has opened and smoothed, sometimes going ahead, 
 and throwing its vague lights into mysteries yet to be 
 explored.
 
 BOOK II 
 UNCORHELATED KNOWLEDGE 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 WHAT do we mean when we say we know a thing? That 
 we recollect enough of its qualities to be sure that when we 
 find an object possessing those we recollect, and no others 
 inconsistent with them, it will be the thing we know, or 
 one like it one in the class of things with which our recol- 
 lections correlate it. Far off at the edge of the woods I 
 see a moving object. I cannot make out another quality. I 
 simply correlate it with the class moving objects. Otherwise 
 I don't know what it is. It emerges from the shadow, and 
 I see that I can correlate it with the smaller class of dark 
 moving objects. A little nearer, and I am able to correlate 
 it with the still smaller class of brown moving objects, but 
 I don't know how high the grass around it is, and don't know 
 whether to correlate it with cattle or deer or dogs. It begins 
 to run toward me, and its motion correlates it with dogs. 
 Its coming toward the house tends to correlate it with my 
 dogs. That, taken in connection with its color, narrows the 
 correlation down to collies: the color excludes it from the 
 class Scottish terriers to which my third dog belongs. But 
 among collies, I can't tell before it draws nearer whether 
 it is Laddie or his son Shep; but as he runs up to me, his 
 very long hair and comparative lack of white, and large 
 head, and affection for me, correlate him with my recollections 
 of Laddie, and I "know" him. Now here are successively 
 the qualities visibility, motion, color, brown color, the addi- 
 tional mass of visible qualities that go to make up dog, 
 the invisible one of tendency to come to my home, which 
 81
 
 82 Introduction to Boole II [Bk. II 
 
 marks it as my dog, the specific colors which mark it as my 
 collie dog, and the long hair and preponderance of brown 
 and big head, which mark it as Laddie. 
 
 Dear old fellow ! He was literally old, and within a month 
 of my writing that passage, he fell miserably and incurably 
 ill, and we had to chloroform him, which is more than we 
 would do for each other under similar circumstances. Let 
 the passage stand as a monument, however perishable, to 
 as loving and constant a friend as I ever had. 
 
 Now when I say I " knew " this dear dog, it is because 
 the whole mass of qualities enumerated were correlated with 
 my recollections of a corresponding mass of qualities which 
 constituted Laddie. Had they not been, I should have had 
 to say, if asked : " I don't know the dog." All the knowledge 
 up to that point would have been uncorrelated with the 
 knowledge essential to my knowing him. 
 
 Now when certain people are present, there are crackings 
 and tappings going on around the room. There is nothing 
 visible or discoverable to account for them ; so we can't safely 
 correlate them with mechanically caused noises. They are 
 too frequent to be correlated with the shrinkage of wood- 
 work. Jones, who has heard similar noises before, correlates 
 them with certain qualities he has experienced before, and 
 says he "knows" them that they are noises caused by 
 spirits. I on the other hand having never heard anything of 
 the kind, and having nothing to correlate the noises with, don't 
 " know " what they are : to me it is uncorrelated knowledge. 
 And as, so far, Jones and the rest of us know precious, 
 little, if anything, about " spirits," I suspect that in some 
 important respects it is really uncorrelated knowledge with 
 him. Similarly I see tables move in presence of certain 
 people who touch them very lightly or not at all : so I cannot 
 correlate the moving power with muscular force. Nor can 
 I correlate it with electricity: for electricity doesn't act 
 on wood; or with anything else I know. So for me, the 
 little knowledge I have of it is correlated with so little of 
 what I know about modes of force, that I can't say that I 
 "know" it. We say we know things, when what we know 
 about them is correlated with what else we know, and the
 
 Ch. VII] How Knowledge Takes Shape 83 
 
 wider and closer the correlation, the better we know the 
 things. 
 
 Now as Jones thinks he knows all about spirits, and that 
 what he knows about this force correlates itself with what 
 he knows about spirits, and that therefore the force comes 
 from spirits, there is no use in my telling him that it comes 
 from the medium because the medium is as tired as if he had 
 done the work with his muscles. 
 
 Because the noise takes place only when the medium is 
 present, I can only correlate it with human forces, though 
 with none I had known before. Jones prefers spirits. 
 
 Well, we have a good deal of such uncorrelated or half- 
 correlated or miscorrelated knowledge it makes the border- 
 land between knowledge and conjecture, and consists largely 
 of both. 
 
 As to knowledge and possible knowledge, we are each in 
 the midst of two concentric spheres not perfect ones, but 
 with irregular surfaces. Of course the spheres of no two 
 men are alike. Each lives in one consisting of what he knows, 
 or thinks he knows of his sensed and correlated knowledge. 
 This shades into an including sphere made up of scraps 
 of uncorrelated knowledge but partly sensed, of intuitions 
 and impressions some of them little more than emotions 
 many of them, however, undoubtedly the germs of knowledge 
 yet to mature. Then, we have every reason to believe, beyond 
 this sphere must be a measureless infinity outside of not only 
 our sensed and partly-sensed knowledge, but of our intuitions 
 and emotions. 
 
 Most of the rest of our book will relate to the including 
 sphere, and will consist largely of suggestions for correlating 
 its vague knowledge with that of the sphere of things we know. 
 
 The borders of the sphere of knowledge and the sphere 
 surrounding knowledge, overlap in both experience and feel- 
 ing, or intuition, or whatever you see fit to call it. When 
 some of our ancestors attained a general sense of light, they 
 must have had some vague impressions which have developed 
 into our sense of color; so when they got as far as a clear 
 general impression of sound, they must have had vague im- 
 pressions of what are to us pitch and timbre and even har-
 
 '84 Introduction to Book II [Bk. II 
 
 mony and discord. Now we, in experiences that exercise 
 our present faculties to the full before great aspects of 
 Nature, or great pictures, statuary, or music, are filled with 
 exaltations of "we know not what" beyond our distinct 
 sensations. Similarly in the laboratory, the workshop, the 
 study, the forum, even the market-place, something just be- 
 yond always invites us, and in overtaking it, we become 
 vaguely and tantalizingly conscious of yet more beyond. 
 
 This "beyond" presents itself partly in open questions 
 solvable by our present clearly-evolved faculties, and partly 
 through faculties but little evolved and little understood. 
 The groups of course merge into each other, as we have so 
 often had occasion to notice that subdivisions do. In the 
 first group are the phenomena whose genuineness nobody 
 doubts, but that are not yet correlated, like the Aurora 
 Borealis ; or phenomena not yet actually witnessed, but clearly 
 ascertained, like the Pole before Peary, or Neptune when 
 Adams and Leverrier had told where it was, but no man had 
 seen it. At these questions explorers and scientific men in 
 general are working, with faculties like those of other men, 
 though often superior in degree. 
 
 In addition to this physical group of uncorrelated know- 
 ledge, there is a similarly uncorrelated psychical group of 
 phenomena considerably known and accepted, which includes 
 visions sleeping and waking somnambulism, and both the 
 foregoing under hypnotism and suggestion. 
 
 But beyond that group of phenomena well known but 
 poorly correlated, is a mass of phenomena newly and rarely 
 observed which are as yet so strange that they are generally 
 attributed to illusion or deceit. These phenomena are in 
 the borderland of faculty, as well as in the borderland of 
 knowledge. They depend upon human powers whose exist- 
 ence is but lately suspected, and still generally doubted, and 
 which, if they exist, are the very latest and rarest fruits 
 of evolution. 
 
 The fact that people vary enormously in their powers, is 
 obvious to all but the immense majority having inferior 
 powers. That great ability of any kind is rare, is probably 
 a corollary of evolution (though I have not yet happened
 
 Ch. VII] Differences in Men's Sensibilities 85 
 
 on any demonstration of such a connection) : so it is to be 
 expected that new powers should be manifested by but few 
 people. That such is the case regarding certain powers to 
 be described later, has been used as an argument against 
 their genuineness. There may be other arguments against 
 it that are good, but this one, as far as it goes, is certainly 
 for it. 
 
 Intellectually and emotionally men differ among themselves 
 more widely than any other genus of animals. I don't mean 
 merely the difference between ordinary men and Beethovens 
 and Shaksperes, who have faculties in high degree which 
 almost everybody has in perceptible degree, but I mean that 
 some men seem to possess faculties which most men seem 
 not to possess at all. One of these most marked differences 
 is in the premonitions of the unsensed universe. Even on 
 the emotional side, some men have virtually no such pre- 
 monitions, while they illumine the faces of others so that 
 you can often pick out such men on the street. Such premo- 
 nitions are of course vague, and tend to become fantastic 
 "such stuff as dreams are made of," and in the efforts to 
 give them precision, many systems have been built; and 
 too often those not built in the laboratories, have fallen to 
 pieces with great destruction to the reasonable faiths that 
 were built in with unreasonable ones, and to the accompany- 
 ing systems of morality. In truth, so far, the laboratory, 
 the observatory, and their kindred have been the only places 
 of permanently successful effort to increase our knowledge 
 of the Beyond. 
 
 But in the laboratory and the study, feeling the Beyond 
 is greatly " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 
 Yet not only is the recognition of its existence a commonplace 
 of healthy mental function, but emotional relations with it 
 often seem essential to a worthy and symmetrical personality. 
 It may well be questioned whether, even in the most common- 
 place and humble people who command our respect, this feel- 
 ing is not always very definite. Certainly the vast majority 
 of them, even many of them who scoff at the ordinary mani- 
 festations of religion, are religious in their way, having a 
 fidelity to such ideals as they have, that rises to the mystical. 
 
 There are indeed few human beings who are not some-
 
 86 Introduction to Book 11 [Bk. II 
 
 where, somehow, sometime, exalted by this mystical com- 
 munion. It may be in a Gothic cathedral or a Methodist 
 meeting-house, or in the chapel where the brigand prays for 
 success in his expedition; it may be before the Matterhorn 
 or the Sistine Madonna ; before McAndrews's engine or " a 
 weed's plain heart." The person experiencing it may be a 
 Saint Francis or an Uncle Tom; the occasions may be few 
 in a life-time, or they may include almost every conscious 
 moment; they may drive out of life almost every duty and 
 responsibility, or they may overcrowd it with them, and in- 
 tensify and sanctify them all, the humblest as truly as the 
 greatest. But where, when, how, to whom, the feeling comes, 
 it comes some time to nearly all; and whatever its name, it 
 is a recognition of something beyond what we know, and 
 greater than we know. 
 
 And yet, while he who has not intensely felt his oneness 
 with all conscious being, has not felt the Best, the attempt 
 to live entirely in this feeling has on the whole been counter 
 to the best uses of life narrowing, enervating, and even 
 bestializing. While mysticism includes the roses of Saint 
 Elizabeth, it also includes the filth of Stylites, and the un- 
 natural ecstasies of the celestial marriage. 
 
 But by no means all the persons who have had this mystic 
 sense have been vagabonds and parasites. Some of them have 
 left work of inestimable value, though of the value of much 
 of it there have been enormous differences of opinion. 
 
 James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, quotes with 
 approval from Dr. Bucke's book which I have already cited. 
 It contains some interesting theories, and quite interesting 
 accounts of a couple of dozen people, from the prophet 
 Moses to Walt Whitman, who have attained the Cosmic Con- 
 sciousness, which Dr. Bucke places as the third plane in 
 terrestrial experience, the first being mere consciousness of the 
 environment, which beasts share with us ; the second, the ordi- 
 nary human subjective consciousness, the name of which in 
 our translation from German philosophy is very unfortunate 
 " self consciousness " being well established as signifying awk- 
 ward feelings in society. 
 
 Dr. Bucke seems to think that Cosmic Consciousness the 
 feeling of oneness with Nature our forces, its forces; our
 
 Ch. VII] Cosmic Consciousness 87 
 
 thoughts, its thoughts; our life, its life, universal and eter- 
 nal ; our consciousness, all consciousness is the endowment of 
 but a few favored beings, and that they generally get it at the 
 culminating time of life, between thirty-five and forty-five, by 
 some such knock-down experience as St. Paul's, and gener- 
 ally accompanied with an apparent blaze of glory, subjective 
 at least. I suspect that more people are* blest with it than he 
 supposes. He says himself that it is not necessarily accom- 
 panied with any extraordinary general capacities. I (anybody 
 writing of these things, ought to contribute what he can to 
 the sum of experience) I cannot remember when I did not 
 have the rudiments of it before great scenery and great music, 
 and it culminated in me ten years before the usual period he 
 assigns. It came with the blaze of light, but the light was 
 from the natural sunset which, however, seemed that evening 
 not confined to the far-off clouds, but to pervade the whole 
 atmosphere and all other things, including me, and to be per- 
 vaded by energy and mind and sympathy. Dr. Bucke says, 
 rightly, I think, that the influence lasts in its fullness but 
 minutes, seldom hours, but is never lost, and is sometimes 
 renewed and reinforced. But I wouldn't advise anybody 
 wishing to retain it vividly, to plunge into the competition of 
 American business ; and even into studies of practical affairs 
 economics, politics, and the like: I suspect one has to keep 
 his eyes pretty wide open to be fairly conscious of any 
 Cosmic Relations that may inhere in such interests. 
 
 It is not during the comparatively brief period covered by 
 human records, that most of the impressions that have been 
 in advance of knowledge during all evolution, have oeen 
 overtaken by the understanding. With the exception of 
 some indication that the color sense has developed some- 
 what since Homer, our recognized senses and physical powers 
 generally seem about the same in number and quality that 
 they were at the earliest period we know of. Yet the pro- 
 gress of mankind as we generally know it, has been some- 
 what in the development of them. Everybody who sees much 
 of ordinary laborers, knows that the best class of mankind 
 has gone past the vast majority even in the ordinary senses of 
 sight and hearing.
 
 88 Introduction to Boole II [Bk. II 
 
 But in the nineteenth century, especially late in it, began 
 to appear indications that, in a few exceptional individuals, 
 evolution had brought the human organism to a point where 
 it exercises modes of force before little known, if at all; 
 manifests a complexity of personality and relations to other 
 personalities, before unsuspected ; and receives knowledge not 
 only through new channels, but of a new kind. Yet these 
 new faculties seem to belong in an old range beginning in 
 knowing good people from bad " by instinct/' or knowing when 
 there's an unseen cat in the room, and now extending up to 
 seeing things without using eyes, hearing things without using 
 ears, and getting, in other ways we don't know, impressions of 
 the unsensed universe, including what appear to be innumerable 
 personalities. These impressions may come from the recollec- 
 tions (often unexpressed and even unconscious, so far as we 
 know) of other people, or from discarnate intelligences, or in 
 some other way that we cannot conjecture much more than 
 a worm with only color pigments can conjecture the visions 
 of Turner. 
 
 In the presence of the latest of these phenomena, a man is 
 like such a worm exposing his pigment-spot to the reflected 
 lights which make our visible universe ; or like an insect with 
 a rudimentary sense of hearing, fluttering in a hall where an 
 orchestra is playing. They must have some stirrings which 
 hold about the same place in their interests and sensations, 
 that our wonderings do before these matters of which our 
 senses give us such faint inklings, and among which our 
 curiosities do such clumsy fumblings. 
 
 In proceeding to the study of the borderland of knowledge, 
 and to some conjectures of what may lie beyond the border- 
 land, I shall attempt nothing but the study of phenomena, and 
 a few cautious inferences from them. I lack the inclination 
 and, I suspect, the capacity, to take a lot of words like 
 "infinite," "eternal," "absolute," which are simply denials 
 of knowledge, or " omniscience," " omnipresence," " omnipo- 
 tence," which are assertions of something the human mind 
 cannot grasp, and by keeping such words a long time in the 
 air, as jugglers do their balls, construct a system of Philoso- 
 phy. Previous to Spencer, and to some extent since, thinkers
 
 Ch. VII] Guesswork and Philosophy 89 
 
 have done so much of this that, despite suggestions like Kant's 
 of the cosmogony, most of their work simply doubled on itself 
 in circles, its predicates being merely its subjects in different 
 phraseology; and its conclusions, like its premises, pseud- 
 ideas with no possibilities of forecast in them. 
 
 And yet for three thousand years the imagination has been 
 the main instrument of philosophy, and curiosity beyond 
 phenomena its main motive both to such an extent that 
 minds devoted to the subject have, both by habit and sur- 
 vival, been so shaped for such vaporings, that it is still rare 
 to find a mind inclined to philosophy which does not habitu- 
 ally seek those mists. And it is equally rare to find a mind 
 so open to the implications of evolution as to be guided 
 by them in all its speculations, and thus saved from clueless 
 wandering in the fog. 
 
 The more I read of philosophy and histories of philosophy, 
 the harder I find it to understand why men now trouble 
 themselves with the guesses that were made on the material 
 thinkers had before the recent knowledge of the physiology of 
 the senses, and the persistence of force, and its relations to 
 nerve function. Until those discoveries, men certainly knew 
 nothing worth considering regarding the fundamental question 
 of the relations of mind and matter: so there could be no 
 enduring basis for psychological speculation, nor the elements 
 of a substantial organic body of doctrine to bear the name 
 Philosophy. There was nothing but a chaotic fluttering mass 
 of contradictions, without a single established principle on 
 which to base a rule of conduct, much less any coherent 
 body of ethics founded on what is, for us, universal law. 
 Fragmentary rules of conduct had been derived from ex- 
 perience, and embodied by men of genius in immortal phrases ; 
 and those rules had been in various degrees wrought into 
 sporadic and usually fleeting systems ; but the foundation for 
 any universal and universally acknowledged systems of psy- 
 chology, philosophy, or ethics, was unknown. 
 
 I shall therefore not follow fashions still too current, by 
 encumbering what I have to say with many citations of 
 guesses that were .made before our recent knowledge. Among 
 the good reasons why I don't cite them, is that I know, and 
 care to know, very little about them. Even many guesses
 
 90 Introduction to Book II [Bk. II 
 
 that were made so recently as just before the accumulation 
 and verification of facts by the Society for Psychical Re- 
 search, are often too antiquated for our present purpose. 
 
 I shall try, therefore, to make my examination of the 
 subjects which tempt to the old-fashioned philosophy as 
 free from it as I can. But that is no easy task : for everything 
 we know each science into which we have classified it, shades 
 off somewhere into the unknown, and much that we have to 
 deal with has hardly emerged from it. The new questions 
 are tangled up with questions older than our records, but 
 which have had little scientific consideration until some thirty 
 years ago, and have not had as much since as their importance 
 may be found to justify. They have, however, to some ex- 
 tent, been named and classified, which is the beginning of 
 science, and are, some of them at least, being slowly cor- 
 related with our present knowledge. 
 
 Certainties have a tendency to grow commonplace. Even 
 mountains and oceans satisfy for but a time : so the flights of 
 great and venturesome souls tend to the shifting skies of un- 
 verified beliefs. These are sometimes misleading, but often 
 inspiring, and it is one of the highest of intellectual delights 
 to watch them through history, gradually becoming brighter 
 and more definite; and helping make them so is perhaps the 
 highest of intellectual functions.
 
 BOOK II PART I 
 TELEKINESIS 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 MOLAR TELEKINESIS 
 
 WHILE the past half-century seems to have shown us more 
 of our Cosmic Relations, and to have widened them more, 
 than all preceding time since man was far enough evolved 
 to write his history, most attention has been attracted by 
 the revolutionary discoveries affecting transportation of mat- 
 ter, and the communication of ordinary intelligence by 
 molecular forces of which we had long had some sort of con- 
 ception. Of late, however, much attention has been devoted 
 to new faculties and new means of communication. 
 
 Included with the phenomena out of which knowledge is 
 built, is the evolution of the senses which take cognizance 
 of those phenomena ; and during the last half-century much 
 attention has been drawn to indications of an evolution of 
 senses, or sensibilities, that take cognizance of phenomena 
 before unknown, and that may perhaps surpass in importance 
 (if comparisons can reasonably be made) any of the avenues 
 of knowledge previously known. 
 
 But in passing to the consideration of these matters, let 
 it be distinctly understood that we are to consider only phe- 
 nomena, and not mere speculations on assumptions regard- 
 ing the transcendent world, which have made the bulk of 
 what has been called philosophy. I shall deal freely in pro- 
 visional assumptions, but only regarding phenomena, and 
 I shall not use such words as infinite and eternal and un- 
 conditioned, in any other sense than as indicating directions, 
 regarding whose goals I shall not even knowingly make as- 
 sumptions. To cut it short : beyond this point, this book, so 
 91
 
 92 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 far as it is not record of fact, is mainly candid guesswork 
 regarding fact. 
 
 Yet in being so, it admits no affiliation with the famous 
 masses of guesswork which announce themselves as established 
 truth. 
 
 On the borderland of our knowledge, we shall meet many 
 strange and startling statements, among which there is un- 
 doubtedly a substantial mass of fact, but just what that mass 
 is, we shall find hard to determine, and after we have done 
 our best to separate it, we shall find it equally hard to cor- 
 relate it with our established knowledge. To the statements, 
 the winnowing, and the correlation, we will now apply our- 
 selves. And let us do so with the hope that we may find some 
 new inspirations to lift us, if not back to our outworn creeds, 
 at least to all in them which promoted our higher interests, 
 and perhaps to more enlightened creeds promoting interests 
 higher still. 
 
 Early writings and traditions abound in accounts of magical 
 control of nature, mysterious visions, and spiritual communi- 
 cations and possessions, which may have been partly the 
 results of some rudimentary senses or susceptibilities akin 
 to those which, about the middle of the last century, were 
 manifested in America, and since have appeared sporadically 
 through Europe. 
 
 At first persons occupying the two extremes of mental habit 
 theologians and scientists, alike generally scouted these 
 alleged phenomena as fraudulent, and refused even to investi- 
 gate them. But the genuineness of some of them may now 
 be considered established in the scientific world, and that of 
 several others held fairly open to consideration. 
 
 The phenomena are both physical and psychical, though 
 with some mysterious connection between them: for most 
 persons, though not all, manifesting one group, have mani- 
 fested the other. 
 
 The physical group is in the powers (I) to move material 
 objects by some extra-muscular force, and often without con- 
 tact; (II) to pass matter through matter without disintegrat- 
 ing either mass; (III) to cause motion in the air without any 
 obvious agency. The aforesaid changes effected by the mys- 
 terious force or forces are molar. It is claimed that there are
 
 Ch. VIII] Kinds of Telekinesis 93 
 
 powers to produce also the following which are molecular: 
 (IV) when near to certain objects notably running water and 
 gold, and probably some others yet to be ascertained to 
 establish involuntarily between the operator and the object, 
 some sort of current not yet named, but apparently akin to 
 magnetism, which not only makes the operator aware of the 
 nearness of the object, but causes in him nervous and mus- 
 cular reactions; (V) to produce sounds from tangible objects 
 and from the air, by some agency as yet unknown; (VI) sim- 
 ilarly to produce lights; (VII) also changes of the air's tem- 
 perature; (VIII) also evanescent unmaterial semblances of 
 material objects. 
 
 To the first of these powers is now generally applied the 
 name telekinesis. The tele, however, is not to be regarded in 
 the frequent sense of distant from, but merely as not in contact 
 with. And as the objects concerned in all of the eight cate- 
 gories are not in contact with the operator's body, we may 
 tentatively consider all these modes of force as telekinetic, 
 though as more is known about them, such of them as survive 
 scrutiny may receive separate names. 
 
 The first of these alleged modes of force I have seen in 
 action, and know to be genuine. There is plenty of honest 
 testimony to the rest ; the only questions arise over the possi- 
 bilities of illusion. The testimony to the fourth (" dowsing ") 
 and fifth (sound) is strong enough to have convinced me. 
 That to the sixth (light) I consider in some cases very good, 
 but in most not yet convincing. For the rest, the testimony 
 does not seem to me convincing, perhaps because the allega- 
 tions are so improbable, but the testimony is too strong to be 
 ignored. 
 
 The telekinetic forces ex vi termini act outside the body. 
 The following forces are alleged to have acted through the 
 will upon the body itself. I venture to suggest the name 
 autokinetic. They are said (I) to lift the body independently 
 of any known agency; (II) to resist the effects of heat; (III) 
 to produce stigmata and blisters. The testimony to the third 
 seems convincing, also that to one class of incidents of the 
 second ; to the first, as to some sorts of telekinesis, it is not as 
 strong as the great improbability requires, and yet too strong 
 to be ignored.
 
 94 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 There is another new force of which we see evidences in 
 the activities of the alleged spiritual mediums. I call it 
 psychokinesis. It will be described in due course. 
 
 The uncorrelated psychical phenomena we will consider in 
 Part III of this Book II. 
 
 I am fortunate in being able to begin an account of teleki- 
 nesis from my own experience one which, in boyhood, in- 
 augurated an interest in these subjects that has endured 
 through a long life. 
 
 In the winter of 1856-7 or the spring of 1857, on a Sunday 
 afternoon, I was one of a dozen or so of the pupils of General 
 Russell's school in New Haven who were loafing in one of 
 the recitation rooms, when one of them said to P : 
 
 " Ghost, show us the spirits ! " 
 
 The boy addressed was a delicate-looking chap of medium 
 height, some sixteen or seventeen years old, whose gentle and 
 truthful nature had made him a favorite with us all to a 
 greater degree perhaps than any other boy in the school. 
 The subject once opened, there was a quite general talk 
 about raps being heard about his bed, and similar stories. 
 It was news to me. I had previously supposed that his nick- 
 name of " Ghost " was the result of his comparatively shadowy 
 appearance, but I was to learn better. 
 
 He objected to giving the exhibition because, he said, it 
 tired him so ; but at last he was persuaded. 
 
 There were some music-stands in the room, probably two 
 or three, over which we did our fluting and fiddling. Cer- 
 tainly they contained no hidden batteries and connections. 
 Each consisted of a wooden slab some two inches thick, and 
 some fifteen by eighteen in width and length, resting on 
 the floor ; then from this a stick some two by three, rising to 
 the height required by the average player; and on top of the 
 stick, an inclined piece about the size of the base, but much 
 thinner, serving as a desk for the music. The whole thing was 
 made, probably, of white pine, and unpainted. 
 
 P stood before one of these stands, placing his fingers 
 
 and thumbs lightly on the desk, which sloped with the top 
 away from him. Soon, he said : " If there are any spirits pres- 
 ent, will they please tip the stand?" No response. After
 
 Ch. VIII] P '* Music-Stand 95 
 
 several repetitions of the question, the stand tipped gently o- 
 ward him. Now, as the desk sloped away from him, its tipping 
 toward him by his muscular force was absolutely impossible. 
 
 After a time the stand would tip in response to all sorts of 
 questions, and spell words in response to letters as the 
 alphabet was repeated. Later knowledge leads me to believe 
 
 that these tippings were in response to P 's unconscious 
 
 volition. 
 
 Soon P *s arms began to jerk convulsively, so that his 
 
 hands ceased their permanent contact with the stand, and 
 began to tap it with increasing frequency and strength. Soon 
 the stand ceased to fall back into its natural position of stand- 
 ing on the floor, but even in the intervals between the tap- 
 pings, while his hands did not touch it, remained tipping 
 toward him, not rising and falling as his hands rose and 
 fell, but tipped permanently. The force produced this sus- 
 pension without contact literally was telekinesis. 
 
 The jerkings increased in frequency and violence to 
 a rapid tattoo of his fingers on the stand, the distances 
 away from it between the beats increasing to nearly or quite 
 a foot, and the stand steadily tipping more and more toward 
 him until, probably, the top had passed the center of gravity, 
 and yet it did not fall toward him or back toward its natural 
 position, but was virtually held in what all previous knowledge 
 would have declared an impossible position. 
 
 Then he said : " Try to pull it down," and the strongest 
 boy among us on one side of the base, and I, who was perhaps 
 the heaviest, on the other, tried to turn the base back to 
 the floor. We could not. We spread ourselves on the floor, 
 throwing our hands and the weight of our bodies over the 
 raised bottom of the stand, but we could only sway it a little, 
 while his hands continued playing their tattoo both hands 
 irregularly, not systematically relieving each other so as to 
 exercise a continuous pressure, but leaving the stand, at in- 
 tervals of perhaps a quarter of a second each, alternately with 
 and without contact with him. The contest between the mus- 
 cular force of the strong boys at the base, and P 's mysteri- 
 ous force at the desk, continued for a minute or two, until the 
 base of the structure was broken off or the nails drawn out, and 
 P sank into a chair exhausted. The frail fellow had
 
 96 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 put forth more force of some kind than the muscular force 
 of two boys, each of much more than his weight and many 
 times his muscular strength. We were out of breath and 
 
 tired too. I don't remember whether P held the upper 
 
 part suspended in the air, or whether a mysterious circuit 
 with the earth was broken when we broke off the base. 
 
 Fatigue like P 's is generally mentioned as following 
 
 experiences like his, and the other manifestations of tele- 
 kinesis. There are a few instances, however, where appar- 
 ently no fatigue is experienced. 
 
 I remember realizing at the time that his force could not 
 be electrical, as it acted through wood. 
 
 There was no cabinet, no subdued light, no machinery but 
 a commonplace piece of furniture familiar to all of us, no 
 money paid for the show, nothing but an honest and kindly 
 boy sacrificing himself for the entertainment of his mates. 
 
 The broken stand remained there as evidence that we had 
 not been hypnotized, and I seem to remember some incon- 
 venience from being unable to use it before it was mended. 
 
 Now if I have not told those things exactly as they 
 occurred, I never told any other concatenation of as many 
 things exactly as they occurred. The fact of his putting 
 forth more of his mysterious force than we did of our mus- 
 cular force, is as indubitable as any fact in my experience. 
 The manifestation was so simple and coherent that not only 
 was room for error conspicuously lacking at the time, but 
 room for failure or distortion of memory has been conspicu- 
 ously lacking since. 
 
 A decade ago, Podmore would probably have urged against 
 this testimony that it has no confirmation; that the parties 
 were all boys ; that the only witness was convicted during his 
 youth of writing verses, and has since written fiction; that 
 the testimony is nearly sixty years after the event, and that 
 it was given when the witness was presumably in his dotage. 
 Regarding the last objection I am not entitled to an opinion, 
 
 and the others are all facts. The other witnesses of P 's 
 
 phenomena I have entirely lost sight of, and indeed forgotten 
 who they were, except the boy who helped me break the 
 stand. He was a Spanish-American, and went back to his own 
 people.
 
 Ch. VIII] Another Amateur Table Tipper 97 
 
 For anybody, however, who, in spite of all that, is rash 
 enough to accept the testimony, telekinesis is proved. 
 
 If I doubt that occurrence, I must doubt every other ex- 
 perience I ever had. My certainty regarding those phenomena 
 cannot be increased. But if it could be, it of course would be 
 by the vast accumulation since then, of evidence of similar 
 phenomena. 
 
 There have been many ludicrous efforts to account for such 
 things by mechanical means, and regarding my experience 
 
 with P , I have been asked in many polite ways if I am 
 
 a fool. But all this was long ago: of late the evidence for 
 telekinesis is so strong as to have put an end to skepticism 
 in a large part of the educated world. 
 
 Manifestations of telekinesis have been known to come from 
 many persons, and whatever the supplementary tricks of 
 Eusapia Palladino the " medium " most noted at present 
 there seems no extravagance in assuming that this mode of 
 force is sometimes manifested by her, and is the foundation 
 of anything genuine in her performances. 
 
 Here is an account furnished by one of my sisters of an 
 occurrence somewhat similar to mine, witnessed by her : 
 
 " The remarkable ' table tipping ' of which I have told you 
 occurred many years ago in the home of one of my school 
 friends. She had an older, invalid sister, a charming, mag- 
 netic woman, whose room was the center of all the life and 
 gaiety of the family. One day a number of us girls were 
 seated, as was our wont, around her bed an old-fashioned 
 'four-poster' (for it was an old-fashioned home), when the 
 conversation drifted to ' spiritual rappings,' ghosts, etc. One 
 of our number (Miss A.), who had recently displayed remark- 
 able powers in moving and tipping furniture, was challenged 
 to make a small but very heavy oval marble-topped table, 
 probably three or three-and-a-half feet in its long diameter, 
 move over to the bed and mount it. She accepted the chal- 
 lenge, while we all watched with laughing incredulity. She 
 simply rested the tips of the fingers of both hands on the 
 table, and in a short time it began to move, she following. 
 When it reached the foot of the bed it began at once slowly 
 to wriggle up the side I can describe its motion in no better 
 way until it lay on its side at the feet of the startled 
 invalid.
 
 98 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 " On inquiring of Miss A. what her sensations were while 
 the table was moving, we were told that she felt as if a 
 stream of cold water were running from her finger tips up 
 her arms, and she now felt quite exhausted. 
 
 "Not one of us could have lifted the table onto the bed, 
 using all the strength we possessed. She was soon after for- 
 bidden to make such experiments on account of the exhaustion 
 which followed." 
 
 The other witnesses of Miss A/s phenomena are all 
 dead. But since that day so much well-authenticated evidence 
 of similar phenomena has accumulated, that one witness is 
 worth more now than a dozen were then. 
 
 I have been somewhat surprised at the number of private 
 persons free from all suspicion of deceit, and not working 
 for money, who have manifested such phenomena. While I 
 have been busy at this book, the conversation around the sup- 
 per-table at the Authors' Club has more than once turned on 
 experiences which have not yet been correlated with estab- 
 lished knowledge, and probably half the men present have 
 related some. 
 
 The next case will be taken from the Proceedings of the 
 Society for Psychical Research, but before giving it, it will 
 be well to give some idea of that society and its publications, 
 citations from which will constitute a large part of the 
 remainder of this work. 
 
 Of course, like all other phenomena, these we are con- 
 sidering have their recurrent waves (Professor Newbold says 
 at intervals of about six centuries) of frequency and scarcity, 
 as required by the law of vibration, or " rhythm of motion " 
 as Spencer calls it; and probably the only new thing about 
 them is that the latest wave happened, as already stated, 
 to start up in the middle of the last century, and roll into 
 the ken of modern science. Under the present faith in facts, 
 there has been accumulated a vast array of those connected 
 with these subjects. But apparently unlike most other matters 
 of wide curiosity, until comparatively lately few systematic 
 attempts were made to " explain " them to correlate them 
 with established knowledge. 
 
 About 1880, a group of friends connected with the Uni- 
 versities of Cambridge and Dublin, met for the investigation
 
 Ch. VIII] The Society for Psychical Research 99 
 
 of obscure phenomena. It will not be surprising if the 
 future regards the gathering of these friends as epoch-making. 
 In 1882 they founded the Society for Psychical Research. 
 The name Psychical was too narrow : for physical phenomena 
 have also been examined and reported upon. Up to that time, 
 so far as I know, neither class of phenomena uncorrelated 
 with existing science had received the attention of any organ- 
 ized body of workers. In October, 1882, the society issued 
 the first " Part " of its " Proceedings," to be hereafter alluded 
 to in these pages so frequently as to require the abbreviation 
 " Pr. S. P. R.," and later merely Pr. The first volume was 
 completed in December, 1883. The twenty-sixth volume was 
 completed in 1913.* The Society has also issued a " Journal " 
 exclusively for its members, of which the fifteenth volume was 
 completed in 1912. 
 
 The general intellectual culture concentrated in the Society 
 has seldom been equalled in any learned organization. The 
 reports almost without exception are models of reasoning and 
 diction. For their cultural effect alone most of them are 
 well worth reading. The idea of vulgar and ignorant credulity 
 in connection with the authors is ludicrous. Nor is it possible 
 to feel regarding the reports as a mass, the misgivings ger- 
 mane to the conclusions of purely literary persons regarding 
 practical affairs : for though Frederic Myers, for instance, held 
 a high position in literature ; Henry Sidgwick held one equally 
 
 * The 8. P. R. was singularly fortunate in its founders. They were 
 all remarkable persons. Among them, in addition to Professor (now 
 Sir William) Barrett of the University of Dublin, who called them to- 
 gether, were Professor Henry Bidpwick of the University of Cambridge, 
 and Messrs. F. W. H. Mvers and Edmund Gurney, ex-fellows of Cam- 
 bridge. 
 
 Soon after the start, the Cambridge group was increased by Mrs. 
 Sidgwickand Professor and Mrs. Verrall. all of whom, especially the 
 ladies, contributed important matter to the Proceedings. Mrs. Verrall's 
 are quite voluminous, and their scientific value is illuminated by rare 
 literary charm 
 
 Closely associated with those already named soon became America's 
 greatest psychologist, Professor William James, and Dr. Richard 
 Hodgson, who in many respects surpassed any of those named earlier, 
 yet he did not, like some of them, leave an important book as A monu- 
 ment, or, like others, attain fame in sciences outside of "Psychical Re- 
 search." But in devotion to the cause, in acuteness of the intelligence 
 which he brought to it. especially in the detection of fraud : and in 
 grasp of the indications of general principle scattered among its bewil- 
 dering phenomena, he was perhaps 3 first of all. James said that he
 
 100 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 high in the sciences of mind and society; Sir William 
 Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Sir William Barrett have 
 all received knighthood for their eminence in the physical 
 sciences, and the position in psychology of Professors James, 
 Royce, and Morton Prince I almost feel like asking the 
 reader's pardon for naming in an American book. That such 
 a society should have spent its time over trifling or unverified 
 stories would be ridiculous to presume. 
 
 The twenty-six volumes of the society's Proceedings, and 
 its Journal, contain also pretty much everything of great con- 
 sequence on the subject that has been reported elsewhere. 
 There is also a similar single volume of reports of a very 
 eminent American society that existed from 1885 to 1889, 
 and several volumes of reports of a later American society. 
 So much of these later American reports is duplicated or sum- 
 marized in the English reports, that I have not made a thor- 
 ough study of them. In addition to these various reports, the 
 literature of the subject in English is already considerable, 
 though until the last fifth of the last century, with the excep- 
 tion of a few books on Mesmerism (or Hypnotism) and Som- 
 nambulism, and the usual quack mystical works, it was mainly 
 restricted to the general treatises on Psychology. The con- 
 tinental reports and literature are worth attention, though 
 until lately most continental investigators reported through 
 the S. P. R. 
 
 knew no handling of a large mass of elusive matter to surpass Hodg- 
 son's report in Pr. XIII. Hodgson began as the hardest-headed of the 
 skeptics, exposed more frauds than any other man, and eventually be- 
 came an enthusiastic spiritist. The last dozen years or so of his life 
 were spent in America as Secretary of the American Branch of the 
 S. P. R 
 
 Other officers and members hare been Lord Rayleigh ; Professors 
 Bowditch. Cope, Crookes, Fullerton, L. P. Jacks, Langley, Lodge, 
 Gilbert Murray, Newbold, Newcomb, Purapelly, Royce ; Drs. W. T. 
 Harris, L. Emmett Holt, and Morton Prince ; and Messrs. Thomas Da- 
 vidson, W. E. Gladstone, J. G. Piddington, Frank Podmore, and A. 
 R. Wallace. 
 
 Of the active members: Sidgwick, Podmore, Gurney, Myers, Hodg- 
 son, and James have gone from earth perhaps into the deepest of the 
 mysteries which absorbed so much of their interest. 
 
 Professors Lodge, Crookes, and Barrett, who were all of the early 
 group, and have contributed much to the Proceedings, still survive with 
 years and honors thick upon them. Sir Oliver Lodge, approaching the 
 subject with the usual scientific skepticism, became a convinced 
 spiritist, and has written a volume on The Survival of Man.
 
 Ch. VIII] As to the Evidence 101 
 
 That large portion of the scientific world which has refused 
 to study the phenomena, of course scouts the questions alto- 
 gether. 
 
 Professor Sidgwick, in his inaugural address as first Pres- 
 ident of the Society, said (Pr. I, 8) : 
 
 "It is a scandal that the dispute as to the reality of these 
 phenomena should still be going on, that so many competent 
 witnesses should have declared their belief in them, that so 
 many others should be profoundly interested in having the 
 question determined, and yet that the educated world, as a 
 body, should still be simply in the attitude of incredulity." 
 
 Probably no equal authority would find it worth while to 
 express himself to that effect now. 
 
 Throughout the early volumes of the Pr. S. P. R. a great 
 deal of attention was given to questions of intentional fraud, 
 and an enormous deal of it was unearthed. But gradually 
 enough unquestionable phenomena and reliable " mediums " 
 were found to leave the society little time or temptation to 
 bother with others. 
 
 The day for extreme skepticism regarding the actuality 
 of most of the phenomena is now past. To doubt it is now, 
 as in the oft-quoted phrase of Schopenhauer regarding 
 telopsis, not skepticism, but ignorance. I shall not waste 
 much space in attempts to authenticate them. Men have been 
 very properly and profitably hung on the unsupported evidence 
 of children, the only additional requirement being confirmative 
 circumstances. Such circumstances, the existence of parallel 
 verified cases, the character of the witness, and consistency 
 of the general conditions, I shall try to regard in giving 
 unsupported evidence. Yet the principle illustrated is the 
 essential thing, and if it is so well supported as to deserve 
 illustrating at all, it might sometimes be better illustrated 
 for the general reader by even an impressive fictitious narra- 
 tive, than by a squalid or malodorous fact. 
 
 It is often impossible within the limits to give a fair ex- 
 position of evidence on both sides. Persons caring for that 
 must go to originals. I will give only what appear to me 
 the points worth considering, with as fair an exhibition of 
 the tendency of evidence as the space and my capacities 
 permit.
 
 102 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 We now proceed to some other cases of telekinesis taken 
 from the Proceedings. I shall occasionally obtrude a query 
 or suggestion or explanation in square brackets with my 
 initials [thus: H. H.]. 
 
 The first account is virtually identical with my experience 
 
 with P and the music-stand. It is by Mr. George Allman 
 
 Armstrong, of 8, Leesonplace, Dublin, and Ardnacarrig, 
 Bandon . . . June 1, 1887. (Pr. VII, 158-9) : 
 
 " This manifestation . . . required a great amount of concen- 
 trated will power, and when successful the results were startling, 
 
 and the apparent physical force developed really wonderful 
 
 The table slowly swayed from side to side like a pendulum, 
 stopped completely, and then, as if imbued with life, and quite 
 suddenly, rose completely off the floor to a height of a foot or 
 fourteen inches at least, and nearly always came down with 
 immense force, which ... on several occasions proved destructive 
 to itself, as the broken limbs of the table we used . . . could 
 testify. This table, I may add, was a round, rather heavy, 
 walnut one, with a central column, standing on three claw legs, 
 and it would have been impossible for us unaided to have de- 
 veloped the force (by muscular energy) required to produce this 
 
 manifestation On several occasions I have succeeded in 
 
 raising the table without contact, the latter rising to our 
 fingers held over it at a height of several inches, like the 
 keeper to a strong electro-magnet; in these instances the 
 table swayed slowly in mid-air for many seconds before 
 
 coming down with a crash Frequently . . . the table would 
 
 rise on one leg, in which position I willed it to remain, 
 the united efforts of the rest to press it down to its normal 
 position being utterly fruitless, and often resulting in a 
 fracture." 
 
 In Pr. S. P. R. and elsewhere are given scores, probably 
 hundreds, of authenticated accounts of phenomena similar 
 to those just described, and due to both non-professional and 
 professional mediums. There are two specially good ones 
 in Pr. IV, 29, and IX, 259. 
 
 The presumption for the genuineness of such phenomena 
 is of course greater where the mediums are persons least 
 likely to deceive, such as children, and my young friend 
 
 P . There are many such cases. The two following 
 
 accounts are furnished by Professor Alexander of the Uni- 
 versity of Rio Janeiro (Pr. VII, 175f.) :
 
 Ch. VIII] The Davis Children 103 
 
 " At tea the dining-room table, round which were seated Mr. 
 Davis, Mrs. Davis, their five little daughters, Mrs. Z., and I, 
 swayed backward and forward, or rose at one end in sudden 
 emphatic movements." 
 
 A very homogeneous party! It will often be seen later that 
 these phenomena are generally better as the sitters are more 
 homogeneous. Professor Alexander's account continues: 
 
 " I requested C., who was seated two places from me, her 
 little sister D. being between us, to place her hand on the 
 back of my chair, which she did, touching it with apparent 
 lightness. The chair began at once to sway from side to side, 
 and continued to do so after I had taken my feet from the 
 
 ground. There was an application of great power All 
 
 this while C. sat immovable; and it was very manifest that 
 she made not the slightest effort. The next evening Mr. X., 
 who is very muscular, took C.'s seat, while I retained my own; 
 and he then tried" [By muscular force. H. H.} "to produce 
 the same effect under exactly the same conditions, with the 
 result that his chair slid back, while mine remained immov- 
 able. My weight, which I suppose has not changed to any 
 considerable degree since then, I find to be 13st." [182 Ibs. 
 H. H.] " The high chair in which Amy, a child then thirteen 
 months old, was seated was moved backwards and forwards 
 about 10 or 12 inches, between the table and the wall, this 
 being done so abruptly that the chair was sometimes forced 
 partly under the table and threatened to fall backwards. The 
 child, instead of being alarmed, chuckled and laughed, though 
 we older people were sometimes rather anxious lest she should 
 
 be hurt On the right hand of the child was seated Mrs. Z., 
 
 on the left A. The chair, while moving, . . . was not twisted 
 round as would be the case if it were drawn forward on one 
 
 side only by the foot of either of the neighbors 1 have tried 
 
 moving the same chair myself, when seated beside Amy, and 
 find that, although I have rather more than the average strength 
 in my lower limbs, the push can be given only with considerable 
 difficulty, and has the effect of turning the chair half round." 
 
 In the following case (Pr. VII, 160f.) this force apparently 
 acted in the absence of a medium; but the last three para- 
 graphs seem to indicate a medium after all. 
 
 The word medium is a handy one if it is not taken to mean 
 too much. Here of course it means only the medium prob- 
 ably the generator of an unknown force. Later it will mean 
 other things. 
 
 " Our informant is a gentleman occupying a responsible 
 position; his name may be given to inquirers.
 
 104 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 " On Friday, September 23d, I took my four pupils to a 
 
 circus, . . . leaving my two servants at home All but myself 
 
 returned at about 5:30, and found the two servants on the 
 doorstep, telling the boys not to go in by the area door . . . and 
 explaining that all the bells were ringing violently, no one 
 touching them, and they had been doing so almost ever since we 
 left. I left home, I think, at about 7 o'clock. At about 9 :30 . . . 
 the cook came over ... to say that we must come back, as there 
 
 were such dreadful knockings going on in the house It 
 
 sounded like a mallet on a wooden floor, speaking loosely. The 
 laundryman came in soon after it began and was, I believe, 
 
 quite scared A teacher in the board school was so scared by 
 
 the knocking that he would not stay in the house, but went 
 
 on the doorstep When I came back I found the same 
 
 state of things; the servants almost in hysterics, and the 
 bells ringing. The bells hang all in one row, just inside the 
 
 area door and opposite the kitchen door, nine of them As 
 
 to the possibility of cats or rats doing it: this is a new house. 
 . . . We have never seen or heard the slightest trace of a rat, nor 
 have we ever to our knowledge had a strange cat in ; nor, indeed, 
 
 could one, as far as I know, get into the floor anywhere The 
 
 bell hanger entirely agreed with me that it would be an im- 
 possibility for any animal, or even animals, to ring them all 
 
 as they were rung 1 ought to say that the wires of the bells 
 
 distinctly pulled it was not only the bells or clappers moving; 
 indeed, in one or two cases they could be heard grating under 
 the floor. The bell-handles were not moved 
 
 "Next day Mrs. K. took the boys to service, and when they 
 came back . . . the cook told her (and I believe she is perfectly 
 trustworthy, as far as truthfulness goes) that soon after they 
 left the bells had begun to ring; two of them, at least, and so 
 violently that at last she got the steps and got two of the bells 
 off After that they heard the wires pulled in the floor, &c. 
 
 " Then they went upstairs to do the bedrooms, Mary (the 
 housemaid) clinging to her, as she did all the time, being 
 too scared to go about by herself. When they had got half- 
 way up the ' knocking ' began, just as on the previous occa- 
 sion, and as I had heard it, in sets of two and three quickly 
 repeated raps, or, rather, blows. They ran downstairs directly, 
 in a fright. At last they summoned courage enough to go 
 up, and going into the bedroom where two of the boys sleep 
 they found the hairbrush belonging to one of them on the 
 floor by the fireplace, smashed in half 
 
 " I cannot help now connecting the occurrences with the 
 
 housemaid 1 am, as I have said, perfectly certain that she 
 
 had nothing to do voluntarily with the bell ringing ; indeed, . . . 
 it would be literally impossible for her to ring the bells as they 
 were rung, even apart from any necessity to conceal the method 
 of doing so.
 
 Ch. VIII] Daniel Dunglas Home 105 
 
 " If any further proof of her freedom from complicity were 
 needed, her state on the Saturday night would be enough. 
 ...She was delirious all night... till 4 in the morning;... 
 clearly asleep, though most of the time her eyes were wide open, 
 I suppose in the ordinary ' somnambulist ' state. She talked 
 incessantly all night, very much about the bells, &c., and in such 
 a way as to show she was completely alarmed and terrified at 
 it. ... The occurrences have taken place almost always, if not 
 always, when she has been in a state of nervous excitement ; . . . 
 she had been upset in her nerves for some days previously." 
 
 The phenomena so far cited have had nothing to do with 
 professional mediums or persons who could have had any 
 possible motive to deceive. There are on record hundreds 
 of cases from similar agents, but to quote more would tend 
 toward monotony: so let us proceed to allegations of even 
 more remarkable manifestations, from persons so unusually 
 endowed as to make them notorious, and not only objects of 
 legitimate curiosity, but important in the relation their per- 
 sonal qualities bear to the qualities of the phenomena. There- 
 fore I will give some account of the principal ones as we 
 meet them. 
 
 Perhaps the most numerous and remarkable exhibitions of 
 queer things during the present cycle of them in America 
 and Europe, were given by Daniel Dunglas Home. 
 
 He was born in Scotland in 1833, brought to America 
 when nine years old, lived for some time in Norwich, Conn., 
 and is alleged to have exhibited in many places in America 
 and Europe pretty much everything of the marvelous that 
 has been exhibited by anybody. In addition to such phe- 
 nomena as those already described, he is credited, or charged, 
 with telepathy, telopsis (clairvoyance), prophecy, seeing and 
 conversing with spirits, spirit possession, healing, and a habit 
 of getting himself married and adopted by rich women. He 
 also had a remarkable power of ingratiating himself with 
 important people, even being a favorite at the courts of France 
 and Russia. 
 
 Many of the claims made for and by him seem so ex- 
 travagant, and one side of his life, as hinted toward the end 
 of the last paragraph, is so open to suspicion, that persons 
 who directly know nothing of superusual phenomena, are 
 tempted to dismiss all connected with him as humbug.
 
 106 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Ft. I 
 
 Before I read his autobiography (Incidents in My Life) 
 I thought of him as a modern Cagliostro, but even Cagliostro, 
 like pretty much everybody else, has lately been whitewashed; 
 and after carefully reading Home's book, which quotes from 
 competent sitters many accounts ranging from skepticism to 
 enthusiasm, I am inclined to think that he was about as 
 honest as a half-educated, anaemic, neurotic, woman-hunted 
 sentimentalist is able to be, and this opinion is concurred in 
 by nearly all the most able investigators, although Robert 
 Browning, for instance, who certainly was not one of them, 
 based " Sludge the Medium " on Home. As my own observa- 
 tion forces me to accept some of these wonders, I do not 
 find it easy to determine where to draw the line at the 
 others. Some accounts of Home's are so full of gush as 
 to seem on their face worthless; but they are supported by 
 others from calm lawyers and men of science, which testify 
 to things just as marvelous as those recounted by the gushers. 
 
 Here is a description of Home's personality from Stainton 
 Moses (Pr. IX, 295) of whom an account will be given a few- 
 pages further on. 
 
 " Mr. D. D. Home is a striking-looking man. His head is 
 a good one. He shaves his face with the exception of a 
 moustache, and his hair is bushy and curly. He gives me 
 the impression of an honest, good person, whose intellect is 
 
 not of a high order He resolutely refuses to believe in 
 
 anything that he has not seen for himself. For instance, 
 he refuses to believe in the passage of matter through matter, 
 and when pressed concludes the argument by saying, ' I have 
 never seen it.' . . . He accepts the theory of the return in 
 rare instances of the departed, but believes with me that 
 most of the manifestations proceed from a low order of spirits 
 who hover near the earth sphere. He does not believe in Mrs. 
 Guppy's passage through matter, nor in her honesty. He 
 thinks that regular manifestations are not possible. Conse- 
 quently, he disbelieves public mediums generally He said 
 
 be was thankful to know that his mantle had fallen on me, 
 and urged me to prosecute the inquiry and defend the faith. 
 Altogether he made quite an Elijah and Elisha business of 
 my reception. He plays and sings very nicely, and recites 
 well. He wore several handsome diamonds, gifts from royal 
 and distinguished persons. He is a thoroughly good, honest, 
 weak, and very vain man, with but little intellect, and no ability 
 to argue or defend his faith."
 
 Ch. VIII] Sir William Crookes on Home 107 
 
 There is a very interesting account of Home's personal 
 character in Jour. S. P. R., VI, 107. 
 
 Sir William Crookes says (Researches in the Phenomena 
 of Spiritualism, p. 99) : 
 
 " Mr. Home has frequently been searched before and after 
 the seances, and he always offers to allow it. During the most 
 remarkable occurrences I have occasionally held both his hands, 
 and placed my feet on his feet. On no single occasion hare 
 I proposed a modification of arrangements for the purpose of 
 rendering trickery less possible, which he has not at once 
 assented to, and frequently he has himself drawn attention to 
 tests which might be tried. 
 
 " I speak chiefly of Mr. Home, as he is so much more power- 
 ful than most of the other mediums I have experimented with. 
 But with all I have taken such precautions as to place trickery 
 out of the list of possible explanations." 
 
 The best evidential accounts of Home's phenomena, though 
 there have been many others, are those by Sir William Crookes. 
 On page 85 he gives the following instances of telekinetic 
 molar effects produced by Home. But before I quote them, 
 let me say that Sir William does not attribute them to 
 " spirits." His " researches " were into what others called 
 " spiritualism," not what he did. He says : 
 
 P. 85 : " Tables, chairs, sofas, etc., have been moved when the 
 
 medium has not been touching them 1 have had several 
 
 repetitions of the experiment considered by the Committee 
 of the Dialectical Society to be conclusive, viz., the movement 
 of a heavy table in full light, the chairs turned with their 
 backs on the table, about a foot off, and each person kneeling 
 on his chair, with hands resting over the backs of the chair, 
 but not touching the table. On one occasion this took place 
 when I was moving about so as to see how every one was 
 placed 
 
 P. 88 : " On five separate occasions, a heavy dining-table 
 rose between a few inches and one and a half feet off the floor, 
 under special circumstances, which rendered trickery impos- 
 sible. On another occasion, a heavy table rose from the floor 
 in full light, while I was holding the medium's hands and 
 feet On another occasion, the table rose from the floor, not 
 only when no person was touching it, but under conditions 
 which I had prearranged so as to assure unquestionable proof 
 of the fact." 
 
 P. 90 : "A medium, walking into my dining-room, cannot, 
 while seated in one part of the room with a number of persons
 
 108 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 keenly watching him, by trickery make an accordion play in 
 my own hand when I hold it key downwards, or cause the same 
 accordion to float about the room playing all the time." [The 
 character of the playing will be described later. H. H.] " He 
 cannot introduce machinery which will wave window-curtains 
 or pull up Venetian blinds eight feet off, tie a knot in a hand- 
 kerchief and place it in a far corner of the room, sound notes 
 on a distant piano, cause a card-plate to float about the room, 
 raise a water-bottle and tumbler from the table, make a coral 
 necklace rise on end, cause a fan to move about and fan the 
 company, or set in motion a pendulum when enclosed in a 
 glass case firmly cemented to the wall." 
 
 Here are the particulars about the necklace, etc. (Pr. 
 VI, 113.) Miss Bird writes : 
 
 " I remember the circumstances stated in this seance. I 
 had noticed that the necklace worn by Mrs. William Crookes 
 looked green. I asked her why her beads were green. She 
 assured me they were her corals, and to convince me the neck- 
 lace was passed into my hands. Instead of passing the neck- 
 lace back I simply put it opposite me in the middle of the 
 table. Almost as soon as I had placed the necklace it rose 
 in a spiral shape. I called out eagerly to my brother, Dr. 
 Bird, to look at the extraordinary conduct of the threaded 
 corals, and whilst I was endeavoring to get his attention the 
 erect necklace quietly subsided in a coil on the table. I have 
 often recalled the incident, and although a skeptic by instinct, 
 this one strange experience has made it impossible for me to 
 doubt the assertions of others whose judgment is clear and 
 whose uprightness is above suspicion. 
 
 " ALICE L. BIRD." 
 
 To this Dr. Bird adds: 
 
 "I recollect my sister calling out to me: 'Look, look, at 
 the necklace,' but at that moment my attention was directed 
 elsewhere, and I did not actually see the phenomenon in 
 question. " GEORGE BIRD." 
 
 (C.) [I preface this paragraph with Sir William Crookes's 
 initial, and shall frequently preface other paragraphs similarly, 
 to indicate where the principal narrator takes up an interrupted 
 theme. H. H.] " At the moment this occurred I was writing 
 my notes and only caught sight of the necklace as it was set- 
 tling down from its first movement. It made one or two slight 
 movements afterwards, and, as I state, it seemed to me as if 
 it had been moved from below. I mentioned this at the time 
 and was then told by Miss Bird and others that the necklace 
 had behaved as is now described by her. Not having seen it 
 myself, I did not alter the statement in my note-book."
 
 Ch. VIII] Home in the Crookes Laboratory 109 
 
 Sir William published in the Quarterly Journal for Science 
 for July 1, 1871, an account of some experiments carefully and 
 frequently repeated in his laboratory, which demonstrated that 
 Home could greatly increase or decrease the weight of a body 
 by touching it. He later describes an experiment in which 
 Home conveyed pressure not by touching the object moved, 
 but merely by touching water that was in contact with the 
 object, and later still without any contact whatever with any- 
 thing related to the object moved, unless with the air and 
 the ether. A description of the apparatus is given, but is not 
 easy for the non-technical reader to understand. It can be 
 found by the few who would study it, in the Journal for 
 Science or in Mr. (as he was then) Crookes's book, the 
 Researches, already cited. 
 
 His dealings with his opponents, especially on pp. 46-8, 
 are almost as interesting perhaps to the average reader 
 more interesting, than his accounts of his experiments. 
 
 He offered no explanation of the phenomena, simply at- 
 tributed them to a mode of force previously unknown, which 
 he suggested should be termed Psychic, and called upon his 
 scientific brethren and all persons interested to assist in its 
 investigation. 
 
 The accounts, though they were subsequently confirmed 
 by Mr. Huggins, the astronomer royal, and Mr. E. W. Cox, 
 an eminent sergeant at law, were received with much de- 
 rision. The author was called a spiritualist; explanations 
 more improbable than the facts were offered by various per- 
 sons, scientific and non-scientific; the author's farther papers 
 on the subject were rejected by the Royal Society; sundry 
 proceedings were taken by members of the Society for which 
 the Society later passed a formal resolution of regret; and 
 the whole affair was one of the most discreditable in the 
 annals of science, except where science has been identified with 
 theology. 
 
 Sir William gave very full details of all the experiments 
 and their reception. He said (Researches, p. 40) : 
 
 "In the case of Mr. Home, the development of this force 
 varies enormously, not only from week to week, but from hour 
 to hour; on some occasions the force is unappreciable by my 
 tests for an hour or more, and then suddenly reappears in
 
 110 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Ft. I 
 
 great strength. It is capable of acting at a distance from 
 Mr. Home (not infrequently as far as two or three feet), but 
 is always strongest close to him." 
 
 (Op. cit., 10): "It has but seldom happened that a result 
 obtained on one occasion could be subsequently confirmed and 
 tested with apparatus especially contrived for the purpose. 
 
 (Op. cit., 16-17): "A committee of scientific men met Mr. 
 Home some months ago at St. Petersburg. They had one 
 meeting only, which was attended with negative results; and 
 on the strength of this they published a report highly unfavor- 
 able to Mr. Home. The explanation of this failure, which 
 is all they have accused him of, appears to me quite simple. 
 Whatever the nature of Mr. Home's power, it is very variable, 
 and at times entirely absent. It is obvious that the Russian 
 experiment was tried when the force was at a minimum. The 
 same thing has frequently happened within my own experi- 
 ence. A party of scientific men met Mr. Home at my house, 
 and the results were as negative as those at St. Petersburg. 
 Instead, however, of throwing up the inquiry, we patiently 
 repeated the trial a second and a third time, when we met 
 with results which were positive. 
 
 " To witness exhibitions of this force it is not necessary 
 to have access to known psychics. The force itself is prob- 
 ably possessed by all human beings, although the individuals 
 endowed with an extraordinary amount of it are doubtless 
 few. Within the last twelve months I have met in private 
 families five or six persons possessing a sufficiently vigorous 
 development to make me feel confident that similar results 
 might be produced through their means to those here recorded, 
 provided the experimentalist worked with more delicate ap- 
 paratus, capable of indicating a fraction of a grain instead 
 of recording pounds and ounces only. 
 
 " Being firmly convinced that there could be no manifesta- 
 tion of one form of force without the corresponding expendi- 
 ture of some other form of force, I for a long time searched 
 in vain for evidence of any force or power being used up in 
 the production of these results. 
 
 " Now, however, . . . after witnessing the painful state of 
 nervous and bodily prostration in which some of these ex- 
 periments have left Mr. Home after seeing him lying in 
 an almost fainting condition on the floor, pale and speechless 
 I could scarcely doubt that the evolution of psychic force is 
 accompanied by a corresponding drain on vital force." [The 
 reader will remember the similar cases already given. H.H.] 
 " I have ventured to give this new force the name of Psychic 
 Force, because of its manifest relationship to certain psycho- 
 logical conditions." 
 
 He farther quoted several eminent men of science as
 
 Ch. VIII] Bartldt's Life of Foster 111 
 
 having reached by experiment conclusions similar to his own, 
 of whom one, 31. Thury, Professor at the Academy of Geneva, 
 had, as early as 1855, proposed for the newly manifested force 
 the name ectenic, because it acted in ezterno at a distance, 
 without contact. 
 
 Since then, however, the name telekinetic seems to have 
 been settled upon by common use, though it is far from a 
 fortunate name: for several forces already correlated are 
 telekinetic. 
 
 At the dispersal of the library of my late friend Dr. Richard 
 Hodgson, Secretary of the American Branch of the Society 
 for Psychical Research, there came into my possession a little 
 book now out of print, called "The Salem Seer. Reminis- 
 cences of Charles H. Foster, by George C. Bartlett." The 
 subject of this book was very well known from about 1865 
 to 1880. He traveled freely in America, England, and 
 Australia, received all comers, and had a business agent 
 the author of the little book referred to. 
 
 Thirty years ago I should have hesitated to quote from 
 this book, because few of its accounts have the standard of 
 authenticity then considered essential. Of most of the events 
 Mr. Bartlett, the author, who was generally present, is the 
 only known witness, the other witnesses generally being news- 
 paper reporters whose names are not given; but of course 
 the presumption is that they saw what they reported, so that 
 the testimony approaches very close to the standard two 
 mutually confirmatory witnesses, and some of it is highly 
 intelligent. Few of the witnesses were professed spiritualists, 
 and nearly all of them began by doubting. Mr. Bartlett also 
 quotes not a few who continued to doubt, and gives other 
 evidence of his own sincerity. His book was probably not 
 composed in awe of literary criticism, but is ingenuous to a 
 degree that encourages confidence not the most " scientific " 
 of evidence; but the skepticism regarding the phenomena 
 to-day is rather regarding their alleged spiritistic source 
 than their genuineness. 
 
 In regard to Mr. Bartlett's testimony, moreover, it is to 
 be said that he is still living at Tolland, Connecticut, where 
 he enjoys the confidence and respect of his neighbors, and
 
 112 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 where, though he has about reached his threescore years and ten, 
 he is much given to playing tennis. We have exchanged several 
 letters, and he called upon me during a recent visit to New 
 York. I do not often meet a man who inspires me with as 
 much confidence in his sincerity. It does not detract from 
 the weight of his evidence that, notwithstanding the marvels 
 it contains, he does not accept the spiritistic solution. 
 
 But even assuming the accounts given and quoted by him 
 to be unreliable, they describe occurrences so much like many 
 later ones which have been abundantly verified, that they are 
 almost as safe to reason or guess from. 
 
 It is further to be said that the evidence now necessary 
 to make one of these stories worth attention, is small beside 
 what was necessary before the S. P. E. had accumulated such 
 overwhelming evidence of similar occurrences. Now the bur- 
 den of proof is rather on those who deny than on those who 
 assert. I find that those who deny are almost invariably 
 those who never saw the phenomena at all. So true is this, 
 that now when I find anybody vociferously denying the pos- 
 sibility of such things, and ask him if he ever saw any 
 manifestation of them from accredited agents, I expect a 
 negative answer, and am seldom disappointed. I have met 
 people who say : " Oh, Foster is entirely discredited," and 
 so far, not one of them had ever seen a manifestation of the 
 strange powers from him or anybody else. 
 
 Mr. Bartlett says that Foster spent a long time with 
 Bulwer, and was the original of " Margrane " in A Strange 
 Story. 
 
 Bartlett says (op. cit., 24, 38, 49) : 
 
 " Mediums who can easily become entranced, or be controlled 
 successfully by this mysterious influence, can as easily be con- 
 trolled by their associates in this life If their associations are 
 
 in the higher and better walks of life, their lives will average 
 well. On the contrary, if they are associated with the immoral, 
 they are easily led down the stream. It has been my observation 
 that when a man or woman has been controlled by these peculiar 
 influences, they are inclined to be weak, dissipated, and im- 
 moral. They are almost invariably kind-hearted, generous, and 
 childlike." 
 
 Those of sufficient importance to be investigated by the 
 S. P. K. have been very decent people, perhaps partly from
 
 Ch. VIII] Fosters Character and Heredity 113 
 
 being in such good company, and some of the heteromatic 
 writers of the very highest character and attainments. Bart- 
 lett goes on : 
 
 " It has been said, ' Money flowed into his coffers like water, 
 and as freely flowed out, leaving nothing behind.' I wish to 
 state most emphatically that not a dollar did Mr. Foster squan- 
 der in gambling While he had many faults, gambling was 
 
 not one of them. He did not even know the Ace of Spades from 
 the Queen of Hearts " [which is much more than can be said of 
 the researchers into Thought Transference or of the present 
 writer on these profundities. H.H.]. 
 
 Bartlett continues: 
 
 " Foster stood apart from all men While he was like others 
 
 he was also peculiarly unlike all others. He was extravagantly 
 dual. He was not only Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he repre- 
 sented half-a-dozen different Jekylls and Hydes He was an 
 
 unbalanced genius, and at times, I should say, insane. He had 
 a heart so large indeed that it took in the world : tears for the 
 afflicted; money for the poor; the chords of his heart were 
 touched by every sigh. At other times, his heart shrunk up 
 until it disappeared. He would . . . with the petulance of a child 
 . . . abuse his best friends. He wore out many of his friends. . . . 
 He was not vicious, but absolutely uncontrollable. He would 
 go his own way, which way was often the wrong way. Like a 
 child he seemed to have no forethought. He seemed to live for 
 
 to-day, caring nothing for to-morrow He seemed impervious 
 
 to the opinions of others, and apparently yielded to every desire; 
 but after all he did not abuse himself much, as he continued in 
 perfect health until the final breaking up." 
 
 The sort of stock he came of is interestingly indicated by 
 Bartlett (op. cit., 44-5) : 
 
 " The next day we left for Salem. Mr. Foster's father was 
 a particularly kind and pleasing man, without guile, and in 
 his younger days followed the sea. We were sitting together 
 one morning . . . [when] he remarked that he had passed a 
 bad night. ...I inquired what was the matter? He replied 
 that Aunt Bessie had annoyed him and mother (his wife) 
 all night. I replied that I had heard Charles speak frequently 
 of Aunt Bessie, but I had supposed she had died some years 
 ago. ' Oh, yes,' he said, ' but she keeps coming back at night ; 
 goes in and out of our room, pulls open the bureau drawers, 
 and fusses over her old things.' He continued, 'We have 
 asked her repeatedly to keep away, and not disturb us while 
 we were sleeping, but every little while she comes back and 
 makes a night of it.' Very innocently he said to me, ' Do you
 
 114 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 not see spirits?' 'Why no,' I said, 'certainly not.' He re- 
 plied that he did, and that he supposed every one did. That 
 his family had ever since he could remember, and that he did 
 not suppose his family differed in that respect from other 
 families. I certainly think he was perfectly sincere, and that 
 he saw visions. His wife, Mrs. Foster, mother of Charles, 
 told me she had talked with spirits all her life, and that her 
 mother and father also conversed with them. She said when 
 Charles was a baby that she was too poor to hire a girl, and 
 having to do her own work her spirit friends often came to 
 her assistance, and that they had often rocked Charlie's cradle 
 ~by the hour. To hear them speak of the other life, and of 
 their communications with those who had passed to the other 
 shore, made the intercourse between the two worlds seem as 
 real as between Europe and America." 
 
 This is telekinesis with a vengeance. I incline to assume 
 that Mrs. Foster supplied the force. That assumption may 
 not appear so strange later, as it does now. 
 
 I had a seance with Foster in the early seventies, which 
 will be described later under Telepathy. At that seance there 
 were no phenomena of the mysterious force that had been ex- 
 hibited before me by P , but there were other phenomena 
 
 even more remarkable, and I was impressed that Foster was 
 honest, and had powers beyond the recognized normal. 
 
 Of virtually all the strange kinds of phenomena that we 
 shall meet, there are many well authenticated instances on 
 record. In selecting typical ones, I shall sometimes venture 
 to select Foster's, so far as they cover the ground, despite 
 his being a " paid medium " (as, for that matter, is Mrs. 
 Piper), and despite his manifestations having transpired too 
 early to be passed upon by the S. P. R., or any other authori- 
 tative body. At the same time, I don't ask anybody to believe 
 everything in them : even regarding some of the very passages 
 I quote, my own judgment is certainly very much in reserve. 
 
 I shall take more illustrations from Foster than I otherwise 
 would, for the additional reason that the testimony regard- 
 ing other leading " mediums " is easily accessible elsewhere, 
 while that regarding Foster is not ; also because I know from 
 personal observation, if I know anything, that he showed to 
 me some of the powers as yet called supernormal; I wish 
 anybody disposed to scout my quoting a book perhaps pur- 
 posely neglected by more competent writers, might read it.
 
 Ch. VIII] Foster's Molar TeleUnesis 115 
 
 This is quoted by Bartlett (op. cit, p. 112) from Ash- 
 burner's Notes and Studies in the Philosophy of Animal 
 Magnetism and Spiritualism, in which are many references 
 to Foster. The phenomena took place without Foster being 
 in contact with the objects. 
 
 " The table was lifted into the air, and remained there for 
 some seconds. Then, it gently descended into the place it had 
 before occupied, with the difference that the top was turned 
 
 downwards, and rested on the carpet Some busts, as large 
 
 as life, resting upon book-cupboards seven feet high, were taken 
 from their places. One was suddenly put upon Mrs. W. C.'s lap; 
 others, on my obtaining a light, were found on the table." 
 
 The very simple molar phenomena already described are 
 among the first of a series which merge, as do all things 
 in nature, by insensible degrees into something very different 
 in this case into psychical phenomena. The course of this 
 merging which I shall try to follow in the treatment (though 
 the topics are so mixed with each other that so doing 
 is not always possible) is molar-physical; molecular-physical 
 including materialization and levitation; molar-psychical, 
 including alleged communications by moving heavy ob- 
 jects; molecular-psychical, including alleged communications 
 through raps, lights, and sounds. 
 
 This will eventually bring us into the psychic universe, 
 where we will unroll a fresh chart. 
 
 First a few more cases of molar telekinesis: 
 
 From Bartlett (op. cit., 112) : 
 
 " About 12 o'clock one summer night we met Oregon Wilson 
 and one or two friends on Broadway. Mr. Wilson, as usual, 
 was in a lively frame of mind, and insisted upon our going 
 to his studio to look at some new curios. . . . This, however, 
 was only a pretext, as his real object was to induce Mr. 
 
 Foster to give some physical manifestations He had often 
 
 tried to persuade Mr. Foster to give him and his friends 
 a dark seance; but Mr. Foster had always refused. We had 
 been in the studio a few moments only when Mr. Wilson 
 turned off the gas without giving any warning, and we were 
 in utter darkness. What occurred that night will not be for- 
 gotten by any of us, for it seemed for a few moments as 
 though the world had come to an end; that the building had 
 been blown up by dynamite, or that an earthquake was upon 
 us! It seemed as though everything in the studio would be 
 broken and ruined. Even I was frightened, for it seemed as
 
 116 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 though there was danger of being hurt. We simultaneously 
 said, ' Wilson, light the gas/ and when the gas was lighted, 
 we found only a few things disarranged; and it is a mystery 
 to this day how to account for the hurlubrelu. Poor Foster 
 was faint. He could hardly stand, was pale as death, and 
 there was a cold perspiration on his forehead." [Compare 
 this with P 's and Miss A.'s exhaustion after their mani- 
 festation. We shall meet many similar experiences. H. H.] 
 ..." I know positively that no amount of money would induce 
 Mr. Foster to sit in the dark for the purpose of producing 
 physical manifestations. He did not wish to stand the pressure, 
 and while we might say his reason was not afraid, his heart 
 
 This matter of the light may be of much importance. / 
 do not recall another case where darkness has caused the 
 medium suffering, but on the other hand, all through the 
 literature of the subject there seems some incompatibility 
 between light and the phenomena. The incompatibility is 
 obvious where fraud is attempted, but many experiences be- 
 sides Foster's look as if there were some reason better than 
 fraud. Light is by no means always inimical: it was not 
 in my experience or my sister's, or in many, perhaps most, 
 of those connected with the supposedly honest "mediums." 
 
 Sir William Crookes says (op. cit., p. 85) : 
 
 "It is a well-ascertained fact that when the force is weak, 
 a bright light exerts an interfering action on some of the 
 phenomena. The power possessed by Mr. Home is sufficiently 
 strong to withstand this antagonistic influence; consequently, 
 he always objects to darkness at his seances. Indeed, except 
 on two occasions, when, for some particular experiments of 
 my own, light was excluded, everything which I have witnessed 
 with him has taken place in the light. I have had many 
 opportunities of testing the action of light of different sources 
 and colors, such as sunlight, diffused daylight, moonlight, 
 gas, lamp, and candle light, electric light from a vacuum 
 tube, homogeneous yellow light, etc. The interfering rays 
 appear to be those at the extreme end of the spectrum." 
 
 Bartlett gives another astounding account of telekinesis 
 (op. tit., 44) : 
 
 " The day before Mr. Foster left for his summer home in 
 Salem, Mass., he purchased two empty champagne baskets for 
 the purpose of packing therein his extra luggage. We were 
 both awakened that night . . . there was a terrible commotion.
 
 Ch. VIII] Podmore. Poltergeists 11? 
 
 The champagne baskets commenced running around the room. 
 They flew up in the air, crashing against each other, . . . and 
 in shorter time than it takes to relate it, all the chairs 'were 
 piled upon our bed. No harm was done, however." 
 
 The bell-ringing on page 104 and Foster's champagne 
 baskets and the racket in Wilson's studio remind one of the 
 alleged performances of the poltergeists (riotous ghosts) of 
 which the literature of the subject is full. An interesting 
 collection, with criticisms, is given by Mr. Podmore in Pr. 
 XII, 45ff.* 
 
 Poltergeists have been regarded with much skepticism, but 
 as the phenomena attributed to them are more and more 
 noticed to happen only when certain individuals (mediums?) 
 are present, the doings are likely to find a place under 
 recognized telekinetic phenomena. It may even be granted 
 
 that my friend P was a "polterer" when he (or we?) 
 
 broke the music-stand, and Foster certainly was when he had 
 the rackets just recounted. In fact, telekinetic manifesta- 
 tions shade off from simple table-tippings to those alleged 
 wild riots of flying objects of all sorts. There is, however, a 
 pretty definite class of these latter occurring generally in the 
 
 * And here let me introduce Mr. Podmore. He was among the most 
 active of the 8. P. It., and from the first till his death in 1911 the skep- 
 tical critic. His principal works are Modern Spiritualitm (1902) and 
 The Newer Spiritualitm (1911), largely a repetition of the former. But, 
 despite their titles, the author was no spiritualist. 
 
 Like Myers' great book, to be described later, these digest the Pr. 8. 
 P. R., but not nearly so completely, and they go farther into the early 
 phenomena kindred to those there recounted. He also published 
 8t'tdit in Psychical Hetenrch. Apparition* and Thought Trantference, 
 and Naturalization of the Supernatural, and contributed very volumi- 
 nously to the Pr. 8. P. R. In the consistories where attempts have been 
 made to give the sanctity of spiritualism to our phenomena, he steadily 
 bore the part of devil's advocate, and be performed it with rare labori- 
 ousness, conscientiousness, and skill. Being human, he did not entirely 
 rise superior to bias. Up to his death, however, his skepticism was 
 gradually giving way. his last noteworthy expression, near the end of 
 The Newer Spiritualitm, beintr : "If we reject, for the present, at any 
 rate, the explanation ... of communication from the dead . . . there 
 remains only the agency which has been provisionally named tele- 
 pathy." He puts telekinesis and telepsychosis in the same boat, as the 
 work of alleged spirits, while in my opinion the indications that tele- 
 kinesis has anything to do with spirits, except as all consciousness and 
 all force may be one, are not worth considering, while the indications 
 that some telepsychoses have to do with postcarnate intelligence, are 
 well worth considering.
 
 118 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 presence of the uneducated, starting with the pranks of 
 children or servants, and upsetting the judgment and exciting 
 the imagination of superstitious and excitable people who 
 tell wondrous stories, and whose excitement reacts upon and 
 stimulates the original perpetrators. 
 
 The next medium from whom I shall draw some illustra- 
 tions possessed, of all yet known, the greatest combination of 
 high gifts with high privileges of education, social opportunity, 
 and social endorsement. I refer to William Stainton Moses. 
 I go into considerable detail regarding him, as he will appear 
 in our investigations more frequently and, on the whole, with 
 perhaps more importance, than either Foster or Home. And 
 yet by an irony of fate, the testimony to his manifestations is 
 perhaps less satisfactory than in the case of the others. He led 
 a very retired life and had few sitters, though they were of high 
 character. The accounts of his experiences are mainly in his 
 own note-books, and are so marvelous, but at the same time 
 so apparently honest, and so well vouched for, that one is 
 sometimes tempted to think: Perhaps he dreamt it. And yet 
 his part in the Pr. S. P. R., whether for or against spiritism, 
 is too important to ignore. The following particulars are 
 condensed from an account by F. W. H. Myers * : 
 
 * Myers was perhaps, up to his death in 1901. the most active con- 
 tributor to the Pr. 8. P. R., and his alleged spirit has been very active 
 since. He left a work which many regard as monumental, called 
 Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. This work di- 
 gested the fourteen volumes of Proceedings which had then accumu- 
 lated. Its interpretations are frankly spiritistic, and it is constructive 
 rather than critical: in fact, the author is often charged with having, in 
 matters of evidence, entirely subordinated the critical sense to his spirit- 
 istic convictions. He must at least have felt a temptation that I have 
 felt in the present work, and sometimes yielded to, to admit question- 
 able evidence pretty freely when it accords with established evidence, 
 but keeping the reader fairly apprised of its nature, and letting him 
 judge it for himself. Myers was no mean scholar and poet, and the 
 beautiful style of his magnum opus often breeds a concurrence that 
 its unassisted arguments might not always sustain. 
 
 This book is much the most thorough and elaborate of all the text 
 writings from the S. P. R evidence. It so arranges all the matter as 
 to build up a systematic argument for the survival of the personality. 
 Podmore's works constitute a running commentary upon the Pr. S. P. 
 R.. with extracts from the beginning through Vol. XXIV, which was 
 the last published before his death. Myers' book goes only through 
 Vol. XIV.
 
 Ch. VIII] W. Stainton Moses 119 
 
 Moses was born in England in 1839, of an old Lincolnshire 
 family (not, as the name suggests, a Jewish one). His 
 father had been headmaster of a grammar school. The boy 
 was given to sleep-walking and writing essays good ones for 
 a boy in his sleep. Though fairly robust, he broke down 
 in health at Oxford, and left without graduating. During 
 some time of wandering he spent six months in a monastery 
 on Mount Athos. He regained his health, returned to Oxfor'd, 
 took his degree, was ordained, and at twenty-four became a 
 curate on the Isle of Man. From '63 to '70 he was a good 
 and self-sacrificing clergyman, beloved by his people, when 
 an attack of whooping cough interfered with his preaching, 
 which he relinquished permanently. He took a mastership 
 in University College School and held it for nearly twenty 
 years till his health broke down finally about 1889. He 
 died in 1892. 
 
 Myers says (Pr. IX, 250 et seq.) : 
 
 " The physical phenomena about to be described began in 
 1872, and continued with gradually lessening frequency until 
 1881. The automatic script began in 1873, and finally died out, 
 so far as we know, in 1883. During these later years Mr. 
 Hoses was active in contributing to, and afterwards in edit- 
 ing, the weekly newspaper Light; and he took a leading part 
 in several spiritistic organizations. Of one of these the Lon- 
 don Spiritualist Alliance he was president at the time of his 
 death. In 1882 he aided in the foundation of the Society for 
 Psychical Research; but he left that body in 1886, on account 
 of its attitude towards Spiritualism, which he regarded as 
 unduly critical. It is worth remarking that although, as the 
 fact of his withdrawal shows, many members of the Society 
 held an intellectual position widely differing from that of 
 Mr. Moses, and although his own published records were of 
 a kind not easily credible, no suspicion as to his personal 
 probity and veracity was ever, so far as I know, either expressed 
 or entertained. 
 
 " Mr. Moses never married, and went very little into general 
 society. His personal appearance offered no indication of his 
 peculiar gift. He was of middle stature, strongly made, with 
 
 somewhat heavy features, and thick dark hair and beard 
 
 His expression of countenance was honest, manly, and reso- 
 lute "
 
 120 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 " Dr. Johnson, of Bedford, writes to me : 
 
 "68, High-street, Bedford. 
 
 "March 24th, 1893. 
 
 " Dear Sir, As the intimate friend and medical adviser 
 of the late Stainton Moses I have had ample opportunities of 
 thoroughly knowing his character and his mental state. 
 
 " He was a man even in temper, painstaking and methodi- 
 cal, of exceptional ability, and utterly free from any halluci- 
 nation or anything to indicate other than a well-ordered 
 
 brain 
 
 "I have attended him in several very severe illnesses, but 
 never, in sickness or at other times, has his brain shown the 
 slightest cloudiness or suffered from any delusion. 
 
 "WM. G. JOHNSON." 
 
 " University College School, Gower-street, London, W. C. 
 
 "May 16th, 1893. 
 
 " Dear Sir, ... He always impressed me with the idea that 
 he was thoroughly earnest and conscientious, and I believe that 
 perfect reliance can be placed on all his statements. Yours 
 faithfully, " F. W. LEVANDER." 
 
 Myers says elsewhere (Pr. IX, 253) : 
 
 " I have heard him described as lacking in the grace of humil- 
 ity, and in that spirituality of tastes and character which 
 should seem appropriate to one living much in the commerce 
 of the Unseen. But I have never heard anyone who had even 
 the slightest acquaintance with Mr. Moses impugn his sanity 
 or his sincerity, his veracity or his honor 
 
 " With the even tenor of this straightforward and reputable 
 life was inwoven a chain of mysteries which, as I have before 
 said, in what way soever they be explained, make that life one 
 of the most extraordinary which our century has seen 
 
 " For almost all the sittings which -he describes, and for 
 some which he does not describe, there is ... a second de- 
 tailed, independent, contemporary record, by Mrs. Stanhope 
 Speer, and for many of the sittings a third record, also 
 independent and contemporaneous, although very brief, 
 by Dr. Speer. For some few of them there is also a sim- 
 ilar record by Mr. Percival, whose memory also confirms 
 the other accounts. Parts of Mr. Moses' own record, indeed, 
 are avowedly derived from the other sitters, since he depended 
 upon them for information as to what went on when he was 
 in trance. But he has always, I think, made this distinction 
 clear in his notes. 
 
 " The evidence for all the incidents is practically the same ; 
 the whole group of witnesses are as fully pledged, say to the 
 falling of pearls from the air as to the automatic script or the 
 trance-phenomena., I at least can see no via media which can
 
 Ch. V1I1J Evidence regarding Moses. His Character 121 
 
 be plausibly taken. The permanent fraud of the whole group, 
 or the substantial accuracy of all the records, are the only 
 hypotheses which seem to me capable of covering the facts. 
 
 * Some dozen other persons, who cannot plausibly be held 
 to be all in the fraud, witnessed the phenomena. It is true 
 that some of these witnesses are now dead or inaccessible. 
 But Serjeant Cox left a printed statement; Dr. Thomson, of 
 Clifton, proved his belief by continued collaboration; Mr. 
 Percival, Mrs. Garratt, Miss Collins, and Mrs. Honeywood 
 are still living, and cannot with any plausibility be treated 
 as accomplices. Mr. Percival's evidence, in particular, is that 
 of an outside and occasional member of the group, who is 
 honorably known in academic and official life, and who would 
 have had everything to lose and nothing to gain by complicity 
 in such a fraud. 
 
 " [Moses] was very reticent about exhibiting his powers, 
 
 and consequently almost the only records are his own and 
 those of his physician, Dr. Stanhope Speer, Mrs. Speer, and 
 their son, Mr. Charlton T. Speer, Associate of the Royal Acad- 
 emy of Music all persons of undoubted capacity and pro- 
 bity 
 
 " Dr. Speer's cast of mind was thoroughly materialistic, and 
 it is remarkable that his interest in Mr. Moses' phenomena 
 was from first to last of a purely scientific, as contrasted with 
 an emotional or religious nature." 
 
 In another place, however, Myers says of Moses (Pr. VIII, 
 599) : 
 
 " He lacked and he readily and repeatedly admitted to me 
 that he lacked all vestige of scientific, or even of legal, instinct. 
 The very words ' first-hand evidence,' ' contemporary record,' 
 ' corroborative testimony,' were to him as a weariness to the 
 flesh. His attitude was that of the preacher who is already 
 so thoroughly persuaded in his own mind that he treats any 
 alleged fact which falls in with his views as the uncriticised 
 
 text for fresh exhortation Having watched his conduct at 
 
 critical moments, I see much ground for impugning his judg- 
 ment, but no ground whatever for doubting that he has narrated 
 with absolute good faith the story of his experience." 
 
 (Pr.IX,258) : " The phenomena here to be described, strange 
 ... as they often seem, cannot be called meaningless. The alleged 
 operators are at pains throughout to describe what they re- 
 garded as the end, and what merely as the means to that end. 
 Their constantly avowed object was the promulgation through 
 Mr. Moses of certain religious and philosophical views; and 
 the physical manifestations are throughout described as de- 
 signed merely as a proof of power, and a basis for the 
 authority claimed for the serious teachings."
 
 122 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Ft. I 
 
 In some of the molecular phenomena, especially those of 
 light, as will be seen later, the claims made for and by 
 Moses, surpass those made for or by Foster and Home. But 
 the molar telekinetic phenomena were not as prominent with 
 Moses as with the others, or as his molecular phenomena; 
 in fact he records his dislike " to violent physical manifesta- 
 tions." More on this subject will appear later. 
 
 Detailed accounts of all classes are given by Myers in 
 Pr. IX and XI. I will give but a line to the molar in the 
 following scraps from Moses' note-books (quoted in Pr. XI, 
 34 and 266) : 
 
 " As soon as the gas was put out, a book from a closed 
 cupboard at the corner farthest from me, and immediately 
 behind Dr. Speer, was brought out and struck him on the 
 shoulder, and fell near Mrs. S. This is the first attempt to 
 bring an object from behind a sitter opposite to me. Usually 
 
 the power seems to be behind me The objects come over 
 
 my head when brought into the room, and movements of 
 articles occur behind and near me. [Sounds occur] behind 
 and near me usually, though at times . . . far away. 
 
 " My records of seances during the latter half of the month 
 of August show over fifty instances in which objects from 
 different parts of the house were placed upon the table round 
 which we were sitting. They were invariably small, and were 
 generally thrown on the table." 
 
 The records of Stainton Moses in Pr. IX, 269-72 contain 
 accounts of his having, without any muscular action, brought 
 from unknown sources into his seance rooms, and there scat- 
 tered, bits of coral, seed pearls, powdered musk, and some 
 aerial perfumes. This was done in dim light and sometimes 
 with the " cabinet " of the fake mediums. But the character 
 of Moses and of his witnesses makes it difficult to believe the 
 phenomena fraudulent, and that they were not illusory is 
 proved, I understand, by some of the articles being kept by 
 persons present. 
 
 Moses quotes Judge Edmunds in his book on Spiritualism, 
 as bearing witness to odors being brought into " spiritual " 
 seances, without any visible mechanical agency. 
 
 Breezes are very frequently alleged to accompany other tele- 
 kinetic phenomena.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 MOLAR TELEKINESIS (Continued) 
 Dowsing 
 
 UNDER Molar Telekinesis I venture tentatively to include 
 another strange mode of force that has long been known, but 
 manifested, so far as I know, by none of the " mediums " of 
 other modes so far treated, and indeed by so few people as to 
 be little credited. It appears to have some telekinetic qualities. 
 
 To the modern mind, it may seem to find one pole in the 
 system of an occasional human being, and the other in one 
 of sundry inorganic substances, including especially running 
 water. The passing of the current between the two poles 
 is not always dependent on any intermediate conductor, any 
 more than when ordinary magnetism passes between two 
 separated pieces of iron, or telekinesis between a medium 
 (using the word merely as medium of a force, not of any 
 alleged spiritual communication) and an untouched object. 
 But these alleged manifestations are said to be sometimes 
 facilitated by a rod of wood or metal between the poles; 
 and indeed to be with some " mediums " sometimes possible 
 with that intermediary, and impossible without it. 
 
 Note here the fact that the recognized telekinetic force 
 seems sometimes to have its non-human pole in wood, as in 
 
 P 's case, and wooden-table-tipping generally; or in 
 
 mineral, as in Miss A.'s marble-topped table and others. We 
 shall later apparently find one in metal. 
 
 Where rods of wood have served as conductors, the force 
 has deflected them sometimes strongly enough to crack or 
 break them. To the person participating, the flow of the 
 current has generally, but not always, been accompanied 
 by fatigue, as in other exercises of the telekinetic power, and 
 frequently by nausea and other physical discomforts, appar- 
 ently more than in the other manifestations of the power. 
 
 Most readers have anticipated that the foregoing para- 
 graphs are an attempt to put into "scientific" shape the 
 128
 
 124 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 performances of the " dowsers " who for centuries have been 
 alleged to discover springs and metals underground. 
 
 My guess at the kinship of the phenomena with those of 
 telekinesis is, however, as will be explained later, at variance 
 with the guesses of some of the theorists, but not with the 
 impressions of nearly, if not quite all, of the actors and most 
 of the observers; and I suspect that the discoveries reported 
 in the Pr. S. P. E. have materially affected the later guesses 
 of the theorists. 
 
 Now the above allegations, like nearly all allegations of 
 things unknown to general experience, have very properly 
 been flouted by the vast majority of laymen who have not wit- 
 nessed the occurrences, and accounted for by some scientists 
 who have, on various hypotheses less probable than that the 
 phenomena really indicate something new. But that fashion 
 of accounting for things has been losing popularity since 
 Edison, Bell, and Marconi. Dowsing, however, happens to 
 have been certified to by, among others, so eminent a physicist 
 as Professor (now Sir William) Barrett, after a very thorough 
 investigation, which he reported in Pr. XIII and XV, and 
 by other eminent men of science, among them Dr. Rossiter 
 Raymond, Secretary of the American Institute of Mining 
 Engineers, and several Fellows of the Royal and Geographical 
 Societies of England. 
 
 Professor Barrett says (Pr. XIII, 2f.) : 
 
 " At first sight few subjects appear to be so unworthy of 
 serious notice and so utterly beneath scientific investigation. 
 . . . Nevertheless, it is impossible to read the voluminous evi- 
 dence, . . . without coming to the conclusion . . . that the evidence 
 for the success of ' dowsing ' as a practical art is very strong 
 and there seems to be an unexplained residuum when all possible 
 deductions have been made. 
 
 "In 1814, Dr. C. Hutton, F. R. S., after examining the 
 then accessible evidence . . . and witnessing Lady Milbanke's 
 success with the rod, published a statement of his own be- 
 lief in the practical value of the divining rod, though un- 
 able to explain its behavior. And recently, in 1883, Dr. R. 
 Raymond read a paper before the American Institute of Min- 
 ing Engineers in which, after considerable investigation, the 
 conclusion is arrived at : ' That there is a residuum of scientific 
 value, after making all necessary deductions for exaggeration, 
 self-deception, and fraud.'
 
 Ch. IX] Sir William Barrett on Dowsing 125 
 
 "In like manner, it is impossible to study this subject 
 historically without being impressed by the number of those 
 who have accepted as indisputable the practical value of the 
 rod, during the four centuries it has been in use. . . . Among 
 them were some of the most learned writers and the most 
 painstaking investigators of their day, together with an array 
 of practical miners and well-sinkers, men who ought to have 
 known what they were talking about 
 
 " At the present day, as in the past, those who have had 
 the opportunity of examining most closely the practical use 
 of the ' dowser's art ' are not to be found among the scoffers. 
 The opinion expressed to me by many well-informed and 
 critical observers who live in that region of the southwest of 
 England where the ' rod ' has been longest in use, ... is by no 
 
 means contemptuous or even unfavorable With some, like 
 
 the late John Mullins, the number of failures seems to have been 
 very few ; with others, . . . far more frequent. This is what might 
 be expected if there be a peculiar instinct or faculty in certain 
 persons which is not common to all. Moreover, as an easy way 
 of earning a living without the trouble of any education, the 
 class of professional dowsers is sure to be recruited by a number 
 of rogues and charlatans It will also be noticed that a ' dows- 
 ing faculty,' if such there be, is not confined to any particular 
 age, sex, or class of society. Thus in case No. 1," [as num- 
 bered in Prof. Barrett's article. H.H.] "the dowser was a 
 clergyman; in No. 2, a judge; in No. 3, a local manufacturer; 
 in Nos. 4, 13, 14, 18, and 19, a lady; in Nos. 5 and 9, a gar- 
 dener; in No. 6, a deputy-lieutenant; in No. 8, a respected 
 member of the Society of Friends; in No. 12, a miller; in 
 No. 10, a little girl; in Nos. 11 and 15, a boy; in No. 20, a 
 
 French count, etc In the lengthy list of those who have 
 
 employed him [Mullins] to find water, and have been led by 
 actual experience to have faith in the dowsing rod, will be 
 found nearly a score of distinguished noblemen, more than a 
 dozen owners of breweries and distilleries, or of paper and 
 cloth mills and print works; town commissioners, and clergy- 
 men; and landlords and their agents by the dozen." 
 
 Professor Barrett's second paper says (Pr. XV, 136) : 
 
 "Upwards of 200 cases of water-finding by dowsers in 
 recent years have been investigated; in each case the inde- 
 pendent evidence of disinterested persons . . . was sought. Gen- 
 erally speaking, such evidence was obtained, the witnesses 
 allowing their names and addresses to be given. . . . Omitting 
 a remarkably successful series of cases by an American dowser, 
 which Dr. Hodgson kindly investigated, 105 cases of British 
 professional dowsers were given in my former paper; of these 
 95 were successful and 10 were failures "
 
 126 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 Pr. II also contains confirmatory papers on the same sub- 
 ject by Professor W. J. Sollas and Messrs. Edward R. Pease 
 and E. Vaughan Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins collected in eighteen 
 months twenty-two well authenticated cases of successful 
 dowsing. 
 
 "In an article published in Light for August 4th, 1S83, p. 
 349, it is stated that Professor Lochman, of the University of 
 Christiania, who is described as a distinguished physiologist, 
 recently read a paper on the divining rod before a scientific 
 society in Christiania, in which he stated that his skepticism 
 on this subject had lately been overcome by the discovery 
 that he himself could use the rod successfully " 
 
 From a letter to Professor Barrett by Mr. H. W. Whitaker, 
 a well-known geologist, whom Professor Barrett calls "an 
 utter disbeliever in the dowsing-rod, or in any practical good 
 resulting from its use" (Pr. XIII, 75) : 
 
 " John Mullins, ... if allowed to follow the indication of 
 his rod, agreed, I understood, to receive no payment for sink- 
 ing a well if a good supply of water were not obtained. When 
 one remembers the heavy outlay involved in making a well, 
 often through solid rock to a depth of 70 to 100 feet, or more, 
 this agreement is a forcible illustration of the faith Mullins 
 had in his divining rod " 
 
 I will now give some typical cases. The Hon. M. E. G. 
 Finch Hatton, M.P., writes thus of an experience with Mullins 
 (Pr. II, 101) : 
 
 "23 Ennismore Gardens, S. W., February 29th, 1884. 
 
 "First he cut a forked twig from a living tree, and 
 held it between his hands, the center point downwards and 
 the two ends protruding between the fingers of each hand: He 
 then stooped forward and walked over the ground to be tried. 
 Suddenly he would stop and the central point would revolve 
 in a half-circle until it pointed the reverse way. This he 
 stated to be owing to the presence of a subterranean spring, 
 and further that by the strength of the movement he could 
 gage the approximate depth. 
 
 " My brother, Hon. Harold Finch Hatton, and I each took 
 hold of one of the ends, protruding as stated above, and held 
 them fast while the phenomenon took place, to make sure that 
 it was not caused by a movement, voluntary or otherwise, of 
 the man's own hand or fingers. The tendency to twist itself, 
 on the twig's part, was so great that, on our holding firmly
 
 Ch. IX] John and H. W. Mullins, Dowsers 127 
 
 on to the ends, the twig split and finally broke off. The same 
 thing occurred when standing on a bridge over a running 
 stream. 
 
 " Stagnant water, he states, has no effect on the twig 
 
 " On our way to the kitchen garden Mullins discovered a 
 spring on the open lawn, whose existence was unknown to 
 me, it had been closed in so long, but was subsequently 
 attested by an old laborer on the place who remembered it 
 as a well, and had seen it bricked in many years before. On 
 reaching the kitchen garden I knew that a lead pipe, leading 
 water to a tap outside the wall, crossed the gravel path at 
 a certain spot. On crossing it the twig made no sign. I was 
 astonished at first, till I remembered what Mullins had said 
 about stagnant water, and that the tap was not running, I 
 sent to have it turned on, reconducted Mullins over the 
 ground, when the twig immediately indicated the spot. 
 
 " When Mullins had passed on, I carefully marked the exact 
 spot indicated by the twig. When he had left the garden, I 
 said, 'Now, Mullins, may we blindfold you and let you try?' 
 He said, ' Oh yes, if you don't lead me into a pond or any- 
 thing of that sort.' We promised. Several skeptical persons 
 were present who took care the blindfolding was thoroughly 
 done. 
 
 " I then reconducted him, blindfold, to the marked spot by 
 a different route, leaving the tap running, with the result 
 that the stick indicated with mathematic exactness the same 
 spot. At first he slightly overran it a foot or so, and then 
 felt round, as it were, and seemed to be led back into the 
 exact center of influence by the twig. All present considered 
 the trial entirely conclusive of two things: First, of the man's 
 perfect good faith. Secondly, that the effect produced on the 
 twig emanated from an agency outside of himself, and ap- 
 peared due to the presence of running water. 
 
 " My brother, Mr. Harold Finch Hatton, is present as I 
 write, and confirms what I say one of the Misses Words- 
 worth tried the twig, and was surprised to find that an influence 
 of a similar nature, though not so strong, was imparted to 
 it 
 
 (Pr. XIII, 89) : " The Lincolnshire Chronicle of June 8th, 
 1895, contains a long report of a visit of Mr. H. W. Mullins, 
 the son of John Mullins, to Catley Abbey. The newspaper 
 report, which I have abridged, is as follows : 
 
 " ' It was told to Mullins that his father asserted the seltzer 
 spring flowed under a hedge on the other side of the field, in 
 which we were then standing, and he was asked to indicate 
 
 the place He had gone about 100 yards when the twig 
 
 began to play, and digging his heel in the ground, he thus 
 marked the spot. Mr. Allen, who was present when Mullins, Sr., 
 also located the spring, sent a man for a spade, and a stake
 
 128 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 was dug up, which eight years ago was driven in by Mr. Allen 
 to mark the place. Mullins, Jr., had touched the spot exactly.' " 
 
 From Mr. E. Vaughan Jenkins (Pr. II, 106) : 
 
 " October 7th, 1882. 
 
 " About thirty years ago I purchased a plot of land on a 
 hill slope two acres in extent whereon to erect a residence 
 of considerable value 
 
 " The ' knowing ones '. . . did not consider there was the least 
 possible chance of water being obtained on the plot of land any- 
 where. In this dilemma, the foreman of the masons, a native 
 of Devon or Cornwall I forget which exclaimed, ' Why don't 
 you try the divining rod? '. . .He said his little boy, eleven years 
 
 old, possessed the power in a remarkable degree The lad, an 
 
 honest, innocent, and nice-looking little fellow, . . . placing the 
 ends of the rod between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, 
 bending it slightly and holding it before him at a short distance 
 from the ground, started on his expedition, I and others follow- 
 ing him and watching every movement closely. After going up 
 and down, crossing and re-crossing the ground several times, 
 but never on the same lines, the lad stopped, and, to our 
 great surprise, we saw the rod exhibit signs of motion, the 
 fingers and thumbs being perfectly motionless. The motion 
 or trembling of the rod increasing, it slowly began to revolve, 
 then at an accelerated pace, fairly twisting itself to such an 
 extent that the lad, although he tried his best to retain it, 
 
 was obliged to let it go, and it fled to some distance The next 
 
 day . . . the well-sinkers . . . had the gratification of striking on a 
 strong spring of pure and beautiful water coming in so fast as 
 
 to cause them to make a hurried exit The father stated that 
 
 when he was a boy he possessed the same power, but entirely 
 
 lost it at sixteen years of age 1 was then, and I am now, 
 
 fully convinced ... of the full integrity of the whole transac- 
 tion, no fee or reward being asked for or expected, and I there- 
 fore cannot avoid entertaining the opinion that there must 
 be ' something in it,' that something being dependent upon 
 some peculiar magnetic or other condition of the human 
 agent employed " 
 
 Mr. John Wood thus wrote to Mr. Vaughan Jenkins 
 (Pr. XIII, 34) : 
 
 " Whitfield Estate Office, February 4th, 1890. 
 
 " The next thing was for each of the company to try 
 
 with the rod, but not one of us had the ' faculty/ excepting my 
 little daughter May. Subsequently the rod indicated water 
 in several places, both in the hands of May and Mullins 
 May finding it first sometimes and at other times Mullins. 
 . . . May is now thirteen years of age. She has proved successful
 
 Ch. IX] Lady Milbanke and Bleton, Dowsers 129 
 
 in numerous cases; four wells have been sunk where she said 
 there was water, and each one was a success n 
 
 Here is the testimony of Dr. Hutton alluded to on page 124 
 regarding his experience with the divining-rod as used by 
 Lady Milbanke (Pr. XIII, 42) : 
 
 " Lady Milbanke showed the experiment several times 
 
 in different places In the places where I had good reason 
 
 to know that no water was to be found the rod was always 
 quiescent, but in other places, where I knew there was water 
 below the surface, the rods turned slowly and regularly . . . till 
 the twigs twisted themselves off below the fingers, which were 
 considerably indented by so forcibly holding the rod between 
 them. 
 
 " All the company stood close to Lady M., with all eyes 
 intensely fixed on her hands and the rods to watch if any 
 particular motion might be made by the fingers, but in vain; 
 nothing of the kind was perceived, and all the company could 
 observe no cause or reason why the rods should move in the 
 manner they were seen to do." 
 
 The capacity of Bleton, the celebrated French dowser of 
 the eighteenth century, was discovered when he was a child", 
 by his having " la fievre " when seated by a certain rock 
 under which later a spring was found, and there are many 
 similar cases (Pr. XIII, 272 et seq.). 
 
 (Pr. XV, 265) : " The Chevalier de M. describes in detail 
 one of several tests he made; he brought Bleton to his own 
 house, arriving after dark; in passing through the village, 
 which Bleton had not visited before, Bleton suddenly stopped 
 and said water was there; he followed it in the darkness and 
 arrived at a spot where he declared the spring existed; he 
 was right; it was, in fact, the source of the fountain of the 
 castle. Other tests are also given: altogether a remarkable 
 and weighty testimony." 
 
 Dr. Thouvenal (Pr. XV, 263) says of Bleton: 
 
 " Sometimes, in order to try and deceive him, if his 
 
 senses were concerned, I placed false marks as if to indi- 
 cate a spring; sometimes after he had followed a spring across 
 several fields I moved the pegs some feet away without his 
 knowledge. Nevertheless, he was never led astray and always 
 rectified such errors. In fine, I tried all sorts of ways to 
 deceive him, and I can testify that in more than six hundred 
 trials I did not succeed in doing so one single time." 
 
 Here are a few of the many cases of dowsing for metals.
 
 130 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 W. J. Brown, of Middlehill House, Box, Wilts, a member of 
 the councils of several public bodies, says (Pr. XIII, 94) : 
 
 " Some friends and myself arranged to test Mullins's capac- 
 ity for discovering metal. In his absence we took ten stones 
 off the top of a wall, and, having placed them on the road, we 
 deposited a sovereign under three of them. Mullins passed 
 his rod over the top of each stone, and without the slightest 
 hesitation told us at once under which stones the sovereigns 
 were. When he came to a stone under which there was no 
 sovereign, he at once said, ' Nothing here, master/ but when 
 he got to the others, he remarked, ' All right, master, thankee,' 
 turned the stone over and put the sovereign in his pocket." 
 
 Mr. H. B. Napier, agent for Sir Gabriel Goldney, thus 
 wrote Professor Barrett (Pr. XIII, 148) : 
 
 " Chippenham, Wilts, May llth, 1896. 
 
 "At Gloucester some years ago a sovereign was lost under 
 the board floor in the Finance Office. The members of the 
 Council did not themselves know exactly where to find it, 
 and sent for Mr. Tompkins, who indicated a particular spot 
 on the floor, and on a carpenter being sent for the sovereign 
 was found to be immediately beneath the spot " 
 
 Mr. W. G. Hellier, of Wick St. Lawrence, near Weston- 
 super-Mare, Bailiff of the Merchant Venturers of Bristol, 
 states (Pr. XIII, 51) : 
 
 " Whilst the dowser was tracing this spring, walking back- 
 wards and forwards across the line of its course, I hid my 
 pocket compass in the long grass in his track, and, when he 
 came to it, the rod turned over, and he said, ' There is summat 
 here/ I am certain that he did not see the compass until 
 afterwards, when I showed it to him hidden." 
 
 Now for various opinions on the causes of these phenomena. 
 
 Thus Mr. Sollas, Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, 
 Professor of Geology in the University of Dublin, says 
 (Pr. II, 73) : 
 
 "I am confident, from what I observed, that the sole im- 
 mediate cause for the turning of the rod is to be found in 
 the muscular contraction of the hand of the operator." 
 
 Professor Barrett declared in his first paper (Pr. XIII, 
 253): 
 
 " Doubtless a subconscious suggestion, of some kind, evoked
 
 Ch. IX] Exceptional Sensibilities in Dowsing 131 
 
 in the dowser's mind, excites the reflex action to which the 
 actual moTement of the rod is due. 
 
 " The recent discovery of a new type of obscure 
 
 radiation from certain bodies, such as uranium salts, and 
 also from numerous common bodies with which we are sur- 
 rounded, renders it conceivable that a radiation, to which 
 opaque bodies are permeable, may be emitted by water and 
 metals, which unconsciously impresses some persons " 
 
 Could not such a "radiation" affect the rod as well as 
 the person? 
 
 Dr. Lauder Bninton says (Pr. XIII, 8) : 
 
 " When we hear that a man is able to discover water at a 
 considerable distance below the ground on which he stands, we 
 are at first apt to scout the idea as ridiculous, while if we 
 were told that a caravan was crossing a desert, and that all at 
 once the thirsty camels started off quickly, and at a distance 
 of a mile or more water was found, we look upon the occur- 
 rence as natural. In the same way we regard as very remark- 
 able the story of a man tracing criminals with a divining 
 rod, but it becomes quite ordinary if we put a bloodhound in 
 the man's place." 
 
 Probably it was also Dr. Bninton who said (Ibid., 276) : 
 
 "I believe that the almost incredible acuteness of sight, 
 scent, and hearing, which a.re found universally in certain 
 classes of the lower animals, and are not uncommon in savage 
 races, are occasionally possessed by certain individuals amongst 
 civilized races. For instance: the presence of water-vapor 
 in the air over certain spots makes itself evident to everyone 
 as a visible fog in early morning. Now / am acquainted with 
 a rheumatic patient who, on passing over such a spot during 
 the day, when no vapor is visible, feels pains in her joints. 
 Of course, such a condition of hyperesthesia is very rare in- 
 deed." 
 
 This doesn't account for the movement of the rod. Then 
 the writer takes a different tack: 
 
 " The moving of the rod in a diviner's fingers depends 
 
 simply upon the bodily condition of the diviner himself, just 
 as the rigidity of a pointer's tail when scenting game depends 
 entirely upon the excitement of the dog." 
 
 The dog's tail is directly in contact with his nervous system 
 contains a part of it, in fact. The rod is not. Moreover, 
 the tail stands still, whereas the rod moves violently.
 
 132 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 And here speaks that acute observer, great naturalist, and 
 saintly soul, Dr. Wallace, who wrote to Professor Barrett 
 as follows (Pr. XV, 217) : 
 
 "If the rod does move wholly by muscular action, it does 
 not at all affect the power of the dowser in finding water, 
 but the fact should be proved. To me, the evidence you adduce 
 shows that it is not muscular action, and if this can be proved 
 it, of course, places the dowser in the ranks of a physical 
 'medium,' which I have always held him to be. If the two 
 facts you state are facts: (1) That the motion of the rod 
 cannot be intentionally produced (by any novice) without 
 visible muscular action of an energetic kind; and (2) that in 
 an outsider's hands, holding the rod for the first time, it will 
 often move if the dowser holds his wrists, and with no con- 
 scious, and little visible, muscular action on the experimenter's 
 part, then it follows that the motion is not produced by 
 muscular action at all, but is a physical phenomenon analogous 
 to hundreds of others occurring in the presence of ' mediums.' 
 
 "I think you should have said: "The obvious explanation, 
 of course, is that the rod is moved by the hands of the operator, 
 acting consciously or unconsciously. .There are, however, 
 many difficulties in the way of this view, and many facts 
 which seem directly opposed to it.' After which your various 
 statements would follow naturally. Now, they seem to me 
 to be in the nature of a non sequitur! 
 
 " Of course, I am a confirmed lunatic in these matters, so 
 excuse the ravings of a lunatic, but sincere, friend. 
 
 "ALFRED R. WALLACE." 
 
 Professor Barrett says (Pr. XV, 311) : 
 
 *' The probability that an explanation is to be found in 
 some extension of our knowledge of human personality, some- 
 thing new to science, and something akin to what has been 
 termed clairvoyance, gains considerable weight from a critical 
 study of cognate phenomena." 
 
 But how about the rod? 
 
 The first step regarding the correlation of these phenomena 
 with familiar ones is to determine whether the rod is really 
 moved independently of the conscious or unconscious volition 
 of the dowser. On this subject early testimony is conflicting, 
 but that recently accumulated seems to be overwhelming in 
 favor of the independence of the force. 
 
 True to the conditions of their craft, and very properly 
 so, most of the scientific men who have been very familiar
 
 Ch. IX] Docs the Dowser Move the Rodf 133 
 
 with the processes by which things become not what they 
 seem, or rather seem what they are not, have voted the 
 dowser's force to be involuntary muscular contraction, re- 
 sponse to clairvoyant vision, and several other things, some 
 of which are harder to accept than a new and as yet un- 
 correlated mode of force. 
 
 Professor Barrett says (Pr. XIII, 24) that the movement 
 of the rod is " an automatic action that occurs under certain 
 conditions in certain individuals." Perhaps his meaning 
 would have been expressed more precisely if he had said in 
 connection with "certain individuals": for he goes on to 
 produce a mass of evidence that the action is independent 
 of the will and of muscular control is the influence upon 
 the rod of a current between the organism and the object 
 sought. 
 
 Here are two bits of evidence that, so far as they go, seem 
 to dispose of the case. 
 
 Testimony of Sir E. Welby Gregory (Pr. II, 99) : 
 
 " The lines of water indicated by Mullins had been marked 
 by pegs 60 yards or 70 yards apart, and just visible above the 
 grass. These lines Towers and his twig emphatically con- 
 firmed, and I proceeded to test him. I had the projecting 
 extremities of the prongs of the twig held tight by pincers, so 
 that there could be no voluntary action on Towers' part when 
 crossing the marked lines. Despite of this, the point of the 
 twig twisted itself upwards, till the bark was wrinkled and 
 almost split, while the strain and pressure upon the muscles 
 of the man's hands were most apparent." 
 
 The following from Mr. F. Bastable, 14, Foskelt Road, 
 Fulham, appeared in the Carpenter and Builder of Septem- 
 ber 30th, 1892 : 
 
 (Pr.XIII,86): <r We procured two pairs of smith's tongs 
 to see if the twigs did actually twist, and held them in 
 a tight grip, with one pair securing the tips and the other the 
 fork, but the contortions still went on between the points held." 
 
 The following seems a pretty strong piece of evidence, 
 especially considering its source. 
 
 From Mr. H. W. Whitaker, the well-known geologist, an 
 utter disbeliever in the dowsing-rod, or in any practical good 
 resulting from its use (Pr. XIII, 69) :
 
 134 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 " The diviner, named Lawrence, an old white-haired, benevo- 
 lent-faced man . . . took ... a strong forked hazel twig, holding 
 an end of each fork in each hand, and keeping his elbows 
 tightly down to his side. I can only describe the antics of 
 that twig as a pitched battle between itself and him! It 
 twisted, it knocked about, it contracted and contorted the 
 muscles of his hands and arms, it wriggled, and fought, and 
 kicked, until it snapped in two and then what made it pain- 
 ful to watch until you got used to it, the old man reeled, and 
 clutched hold of anyone nearest to him for a few moments. It 
 evidently exhausts him very much, though afterwards I asked 
 him what effect it had on him, and he said it only made his 
 
 heart beat most violently for a short time He was asked 
 
 if he could mesmerize and he said, no. He held the wire over 
 Lady D.'s watch, and it wriggled just as it had done over 
 the water." 
 
 If it is worth while to administer a farther quietus to a 
 subject already disposed of, Professor Barrett does it, with his 
 increased light in his second paper (Pr. XV, 277) : 
 
 " Other correspondents have also urged that muscular action, 
 whether conscious or unconscious, is an insufficient explanation 
 of the phenomena actually observed. In the Journal of the S. 
 P. R. for December, 1897, Mr. E. T. Bennett cites some of the 
 evidence I gave in the previous Report in support of this 
 view. Mr. Bennett urges, with much cogency, that as Fara- 
 day's explanation of table-turning being due to involuntary 
 muscular action is now recognized as inadequate to cover all 
 the phenomena of this kind, so in like manner this explana- 
 tion fails to cover all the cases of the twisting of the divining 
 rod, and hence some other cause, external to the dowser, Is 
 probably at work." 
 
 This is followed by statements of various witnesses bearing 
 on the point, with fuller particulars and references than I 
 have space for. In fact the evidence is so overwhelming that 
 the only explanation of Professor Sollas and others having 
 stated a different opinion is that they did so before the evi- 
 dence accumulated. 
 
 In view of what has preceded, does not the dowser's force 
 look much like merely one more form of magnetism? It 
 is like the known forms, in being: 
 
 I. A current between two poles. 
 
 II. Evolved from a preceding mode of force that ab- 
 sorbed by the human system from its usual sources of supply.
 
 Ch. IX] Does Dowser Use Force akin to Magnetism? 135 
 
 This is shown by the almost universal experience of fatigue 
 and similar results after the experience. The best statement 
 out of a vast number is that of Mr. Stears (Pr. XIII, 164) : 
 
 " My powers vary with health. If tired I lose the power; 
 provide the animal system with a fresh supply of food, and 
 back the power comes." 
 
 III. In producing sensations like those from the electro- 
 magnetic current. The following accounts are but few out 
 of many. 
 
 Mullins stated to Mr. Plowman (Pr. XIII, 95) : 
 
 Whenever he is dowsing and gets over a stream of water 
 he feels a tingling sensation in his arms like a slight electric 
 shock, and the strength of this sensation enables him to guess 
 the approximate volume or depth of a spring." 
 
 Mr. Stone (Pr. XIII, 124) adds: 
 
 " The sensation I experience when over an underground 
 spring is very like what is felt when grasping the handles of 
 an electric machine, often seen at railway stations." 
 
 Mr. Tompkins (Pr. XIII, 161) : 
 
 " I feel a tingling sensation . . . when I get on to a running 
 
 stratum of water The moment I cross a stratum of water 
 
 I feel a sort of bracing sensation, which passes up my legs, 
 back, and shoulders, and down the arms to the twig; when I 
 get off the water course I feel the loss of this power, till I 
 cross the water again." 
 
 IV. In being transmissible from one person to another, 
 by holding the wrists. 
 
 V. In reversibility of the poles: sometimes the twig turns 
 up, sometimes down. Sometimes it oscillates or twists. 
 
 VI. Apparently in that the need of good conduction ap- 
 pears to vary inversely as the strength of the current. I 
 say : " apparently " because the phenomena suggesting this 
 are confusing. The electric spark jumps unconnected inter- 
 vals varying from a half inch between a child's finger and 
 a metal bracket, to those between the poles of a Ruhmkorff 
 coil, and those between a cloud and the earth. Some dowsers 
 are able to work without any twig or steel spring, going en- 
 tirely by sensations similar to those felt by others only when
 
 136 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 holding a twig or spring. This looks very much as if the 
 twig or spring helped close the circuit for a weak current, and 
 were superfluous for those who can generate a strong current. 
 
 The dowsing magnetism seems to differ from the earlier 
 known magnetisms in the following particulars : 
 
 I. Having its only known origin in the human system. 
 
 II. Instead of being restricted, like the well-known forms, 
 to metal and nerve tissue as conductors: it seems to act on 
 water and possibly all known inorganic substances, and also 
 on some, perhaps all, of the tissues of the human body, and 
 presumably animal tissue in general, though all this may be 
 practically through the nerve tissue. 
 
 III. In apparently being directed by will, so far as will 
 may be an element in setting the current in motion, and in 
 determining the pole external to the human system. The 
 dowsers are generally not affected when they are not de- 
 liberately "at work," and perhaps are able to fix one pole 
 of the current in any one of several substances they choose, 
 perhaps in any substance whatever; certainly in water 
 and metals, and are alleged to have traced a criminal in 
 France. 
 
 IV. In being apparently less reliable in the matter of 
 isolation. At least the evidence is perplexing even con- 
 tradictory. For particulars see Pr. XIII, 27, 31, 43, 58, 78, 
 186. 
 
 V. In being, in a new and more intimate way, an extension 
 of the control of mind over matter; and in giving one more 
 hint that perhaps the two are but different manifestations 
 of the same thing. 
 
 A connection with electricity is suggested by a statement 
 from Mr. A. B. Durfee, of Grand Eapids, Michigan (Pr. 
 XIII, 217) that Mr. Cyrus Fuller, a noted dowser of that 
 neighborhood a generation ago, told Mr. Durfee that whenever 
 he found a tree in a forest " stricken by lightning, he was sure 
 to find a stream " [underground] " leading very near to it." 
 
 The exercise of the power is virtually always accompanied 
 by physiological experiences, not only, as already stated,
 
 Ch. IX] Dowser's Telopsis and Visceral Sensations 137 
 
 fatigue and the sensations produced by grasping the handles of 
 an electrical machine, but also, in some cases, nausea, palpita- 
 tion, and " fearful perspiration." 
 
 Oddly, but suggestively, the electric ( ?) thrill frequently 
 goes to the solar plexus, in the near neighborhood of which 
 it produces nausea. This is stated in several instances. The 
 solar plexus seems to have some connection with telopsis 
 as will be substantiated later. Some telopsists even seem 
 to have a perception akin to sight through that region, and 
 (as already stated), some dowsers have clairvoyant experi- 
 ences in connection with the zoomagnetic (?) manifestations. 
 
 Mr. J. F. Young, of Llanelly, a member of the S. P. R., 
 and a successful amateur dowser, thus wrote to Professor 
 Barrett (Pr. XV, 360) : 
 
 " I found that after ' setting ' myself to use the rod, 
 
 i.e., getting into an abstracted mental condition, lost to all 
 around, when, or just before, the rod turned, I could, as it 
 were clairvoyantly, see the underground springs and actually 
 appeared able to trace them out as I walked along. My friend, 
 Mr. Robertson, who, as you are aware, also uses the rod with 
 success as an amateur water-finder, tells me he also had a 
 similar experience, and we have since read that a 'diviner' 
 named Adams, a Somerset man, frequently asserted the same 
 thing." 
 
 On this Professor Barrett expatiates (Pr. XV, 366) : 
 
 " Now it is worthy of note that this inquiry has led us to 
 the conclusion that some dowsers exhibit symptoms of induced 
 catalepsy and experience singular sensations in the epigastrium 
 when the object sought for is transcendentally ' perceived ' by 
 them. I have already pointed out in Part XII that the visceral 
 sensations of the dowser are probably emotional disturbances, 
 arising from a psychical state, and it is likely enough that a 
 similar explanation accounts for the cataleptic subject believ- 
 ing he sees with his stomach, the sensation being there. But 
 this explanation merely accounts for the secondary effects 
 observed; the induction of the psychical state still remains a 
 mystery." 
 
 All very well, but what accounts for the rod acting utterly 
 independently of the operator, as already abundantly indi- 
 cated? 
 
 After all this wading through the slough, I incline to do
 
 138 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 deliberately what Professor Barrett was led toward doing 
 by force of circumstances, and frankly accept (" provisionally " 
 of course) both interpretations a new molecular force, and 
 telepsychosis too, and a dozen others, if you please. I am 
 by no means sure they are not fundamentally one, whatever 
 the differences in their manifestations. 
 
 Mr. Barrett's conclusions so far as they are unfavorable 
 to a quasi-magnetic force, were probably reached before the 
 days of the trolley-car and the telephone ; and certainly before 
 the days of the wireless telegraph. Probably in these days 
 of new modes of force, he would find a much more rational 
 explanation of the dowser's spasm and the rod's action 
 in a hypothetical mode of force which is, like electricity and 
 magnetism, highly telekinetic, independent of any conductor 
 (as is indeed the electric spark, in the laboratory or in the 
 clouds) and for which I have, as already intimated, ventured 
 to provisionally suggest the name zob'magnetism. 
 
 And here I am again reminded of the difficulty of drawing 
 distinctions in Nature. Perhaps all these mysterious powers 
 are but different aspects of the same thing; and as I grope 
 on I seem to get more definite and unified notions of what 
 that thing is. I will give them later. 
 
 The more I have read about these various modes of force, 
 the more surprised I am at the scant evidence of efforts 
 made to correlate them in the laboratory. I have not even 
 seen any indication of a test whether table-tippers have the 
 dowsing power or vice versa. Lines of investigation opened 
 in this way might be very fruitful. 
 
 The accounts of Foster, Home, Moses, and not a few 
 others seem to indicate a probability that the organism pos- 
 sessing any one of the as-yet-mysterious powers we have been 
 describing is apt, though by no means sure, to possess some 
 of the others. Of course to the ignorant all this spells fraud, 
 and to even the credulous, so many accomplishments in one 
 man, none of which are possessed by average men. are a tax 
 on faith. But it should be carefully realized that the nearer 
 these alleged powers may be found to be various manifestations 
 of a single power, the more the tax on faith will decrease. 
 As electricity, whether manifested as light, heat, or kinetic 
 force, has its own range of vibrations, so these half-dozen
 
 Ch. IX] The Pendule Explorateur 139 
 
 new powers may be found to be associated in some other 
 single range of vibrations in the outer world, which interplay 
 with a corresponding capacity for nervous vibration that is 
 as yet developed in a few, and but few, human beings. 
 
 After I had written the foregoing passages, Professor Bar- 
 rett's admirable little book on Psychical Research appeared, 
 and I found to my astonishment that in it he had returned 
 to, or perhaps merely more clearly expressed, his belief that 
 involuntary muscular action moves the rod. Moreover, I 
 found the same conviction expressed in Mrs. Sidgwick's presi- 
 dential address in Pr. XXII. But wliat moves the muscles? 
 Well ! " Hier steh ich, ich kann nicht anders." If it were 
 only a question of physics, of course I would not dare to hold 
 my opinion in face of Professor Barrett's. But it is a question 
 of physiology and psychology, and not only of them, but of the 
 interpretation of evidence and of " common sense " whatever 
 that may mean. I'm not quite sure that I know, but I think 
 it relates to a pretty wide field wherein an ordinarily successful 
 man of affairs may legitimately be accorded as much weight 
 as a specialist in some particular department of knowledge. 
 
 Professor Barrett jumps to the dowsing-rod from the 
 pendule explorateur. This is a weight at the end of a cord 
 or chain held in the hand, and is generally believed to be 
 swung by unconscious and imperceptible muscular contractions 
 in the directions unconsciously willed by the person holding 
 it. This swinging in intelligent directions such as toward 
 letters of the alphabet on a ring surrounding the pendulum 
 is attributed to muscular action, because it will not take 
 place when the pendulum is suspended from any rigid inani- 
 mate support. Then it cannot be willed into definite direc- 
 tions even by persons in whose hands it will swing in definite 
 directions. 
 
 But in these hands it cannot be willed into definite direc- 
 tions either. From this it is argued that the muscular action 
 is involuntary. But I have not yet seen the demonstration 
 that the agency is muscular at all, though I find no insuper- 
 able difficulty in the hypothesis. 
 
 But it is certainly a long jump from the possible muscular 
 contractions of the pendulum-holder which are so minute
 
 140 Molar Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 that he and the spectators only infer them, to the marked 
 gyrations of the dowser's hands and arms. The queer thing 
 is that the dowsers themselves, professional and amateur, 
 unanimously declare (so far as I recall) that their gyrations 
 are not involuntary efforts to move the rod, but voluntary 
 efforts to keep it quiet, while Professor Barrett, and some 
 other scientific onlookers, declare that the actors themselves 
 don't know their own minds and bodies, and that what they 
 deny regarding them is true; and what they assert, false. 
 
 I don't know, though, that Professor Barrett's hypothesis 
 necessarily traverses the one virtually held by the dowsers, 
 and seeming probable to me. He says the rod is moved by 
 involuntary muscular contraction. I guess that it is moved 
 by zob'magnetism. The truth may be (though the men 
 holding the rod deny it) that it is moved by involuntary 
 muscular contraction, and that the involuntary muscular 
 contraction is caused by zoomagnetism. 
 
 Whatever may be the originality of my opinion regarding 
 the force that moves the rod, I can at least contribute, vicari- 
 ously, to the history of the subject one item which seems to 
 have escaped attention. My young daughter says that Moses 
 at the rock of Horeb was evidently the original dowser. 
 
 Since this chapter was written, Journal S. P. R. CCXCIV 
 has appeared with a letter from Germany announcing, in con- 
 sequence of some remarkable successes with the dowsing rod, 
 the formation of a very eminent society to investigate it. 
 
 Breaks in the municipal water-pipes in Munich, and one in 
 a dyke at Tambach near Gotha, are alleged to have been located 
 by it. 
 
 So far, the Germans " do not believe that the fundamental 
 principle of a solution to the problem lies in a supernormal 
 psychical gift of the dowser, but in the physical influence of 
 the soil acting on him." 
 
 The same number of the Journal contains a paper by Sir 
 William Barrett, in which he says that he has received a letter 
 from Professor Hyslop which 
 
 " illustrates the need of further investigation on the question 
 of the involuntary and unconscious muscular action which, I 
 have assumed in my papers, gives rise to the sudden twisting of
 
 Ch. IX] Unconscious Muscular Action Doubtful 141 
 
 the dowsing rod. It is true, as will be seen from my Report in 
 Proceedings, Vol. XV, pp. 276, et seq., and in subsequent papers 
 in the Journal, that the hypothesis of unconscious muscular 
 action needs to be stretched to almost incredible limits in some 
 cases, and amongst dowsers themselves it is universally dis- 
 credited. But what other hypothesis can take its place '. " 
 
 It had already been my lot to suggest one in the foregoing 
 pages. As 1 am not a physicist, I don't knew how many laws 
 supposed to be established, it may run counter to. Even if it 
 is correct, it is sure to run counter to some.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 MOLECULAR TELEKINESIS 
 
 Sounds 
 
 As already noted, the molar manifestations of telekinesis 
 are generally accompanied by molecular ones, especially of 
 " raps " more or less akin to crackings in seasoned furniture. 
 The source of these raps seems plainly molecular. There is 
 no apparent mechanical cause of them, and the objects, gen- 
 erally made of wood, from which they seem to proceed, give 
 no indication, like cracks from change of temperature, of 
 any change of structure caused by the source of the sound. 
 Moreover, we shall see later that similar phenomena take 
 place in the air itself. 
 
 We are reminded constantly of the absence of definite lines 
 of division in Nature. Allied with motions of the air started 
 by causes not aerial, which, so far as our present knowledge 
 goes, are essential to the transmission of sound, are alleged 
 motions in the air, of whose origin we as yet know nothing. 
 They accompany many sounds that seem to originate through 
 obvious manifestations of the telekinetic force, and so, it is 
 to be presumed, are a modification of it. 
 
 I observed no raps when P raised the music-stand, 
 
 though some of the other boys had heard raps around his 
 bed. I slept in a remote room. 
 
 The descriptions generally liken the raps, as said, to the 
 cracking of unseasoned wood, but there are varieties of sounds, 
 including one of a ticking in a letter. An account of this last 
 is given by Myers from the narrative of Mrs. Anna Davies 
 of Islington (Pr. VIII, 218) : 
 
 " One evening I paid a visit to Mrs. Brown, and she gave 
 
 me an Indian letter 1 placed it on the chimney-piece in 
 
 our sitting-room, and sat down alone. I expected my brother 
 
 home in an hour or two. The letter, of course, in no way 
 
 142
 
 Ch. X] Ticking in a Letter. Various Raps 143 
 
 interested me. In a minute or two I heard a ticking on 
 the chimney-piece, and it struck me that an old-fashioned 
 watch which my mother always had standing in her bedroom 
 must have been brought downstairs. I went to the chimney- 
 piece, but there was no watch or clock there or elsewhere in 
 the room. The ticking, which was loud and sharp, seemed 
 to proceed from the letter itself. Greatly surprised, I removed 
 the letter and put it on a sideboard, and then in one or two 
 other places; but the ticking continued, proceeding undoubt- 
 edly from where the letter was each time. After an hour or 
 so of this I could bear the thing no longer, and went out and 
 sat in the hall to await my brother. When he came in I 
 simply took him into the sitting-room and asked him if he 
 heard anything. He said at once, ' I hear a watch or clock 
 ticking/ There was no watch or clock, as I have said, in the 
 room. He went to where the letter was and exclaimed, ' Why, 
 the letter is ticking.'. .. My brother took the letter to Mrs. 
 J. W. either that night (it was very late) or next morn- 
 ing. On opening it, she found that her husband had suddenly 
 died of sunstroke, and the letter was written by some servant 
 or companion to inform her of his death." 
 
 In Home's case and many others, the presence of the 
 " spirits " was generally announced by " raps " at the begin- 
 ning of the seance; or, in common language, both those sets 
 of manifestations tappings and raps, like steam from a 
 safety valve, showed that the telekinetic force was ready for 
 action. 
 
 Sir William Crookes (Researches, 86-7) thus describes 
 the varieties of raps. His account is supported by hosts of 
 witnesses to one or more: 
 
 " The popular name of ' raps ' conveys a very erroneous 
 impression of this class of phenomena. At different times, 
 during my experiments, I have heard delicate ticks, as with 
 the point of a pin; a cascade of sharp sounds, as from an 
 induction-coil in full work; detonations in the air; sharp 
 metallic taps; a cracking like that heard when a frictional 
 machine is at work; sounds like scratching; the twittering as 
 of a bird, etc. 
 
 " These sounds are noticed with almost every medium, each 
 having a special peculiarity; they are more varied with Mr. 
 Home, but for power and certainty I have met with no one 
 
 who at all approached Miss Kate Fox In the case of Miss 
 
 Fox it seems only necessary for her to place her hand on 
 any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple 
 pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard several rooms
 
 144 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 off. In this manner I have heard them in a living tree 
 on a sheet of glass on a stretched iron wire on a stretched 
 membrane a tambourine on the roof of a cab and on the 
 floor of a theater. Moreover, actual contact is not always 
 necessary; I have had these sounds proceeding from the floor, 
 walls, etc., when the medium's hands and feet were held 
 when she was standing on a chair when she was suspended in 
 a swing from the ceiling when she was enclosed in a wire 
 cage and when she had fallen fainting on a sofa. I have 
 heard them on a glass harmonicon I have felt them on my 
 own shoulder and under my own hands. I have heard them 
 on a sheet of paper, held between the fingers by a piece of 
 thread passed through one corner. With a full knowledge of 
 the numerous theories which have been started, chiefly in 
 America, to explain these sounds, I have tested them in every 
 way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from 
 the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not 
 produced by trickery or mechanical means." 
 
 When Sir William Crookes gives his testimony regarding 
 physical phenomena, there is not much more to be said. 
 But this foregoing statement regarding Miss Kate Fox needs 
 reconciliation with the fact that Mrs. Maggie Fox Kane made 
 " exposures " of the frauds which she claimed all three sisters 
 had been guilty of. The reconciliation may partly consist 
 in the fact that a great deal of money was made by public 
 exhibitions of these exposures. But while they were going 
 on, Mrs. Kate Fox Jencken wrote a letter printed in Light, 
 expressing great distress over her sister's conduct, and saying 
 of her and an associate who had long been a professional 
 " exposer " of " spiritualism " : " They are hard at work to 
 expose the whole thing if they can, but they certainly cannot." 
 
 She also says that she had seen her sister but once since 
 her return from England, and yet the issue of Light for 
 November 3, 1888, two weeks earlier than the date of Mrs. 
 Jencken's letter, said : 
 
 " We learn from America that Mrs. Jencken and Mrs. Kane, 
 two of the Fox Sisters, have started on an exposure tour." 
 
 More particulars are given in the Jour, (not Pr.) S. P. R. 
 for January, 1889, pp. 15f., and the S. P. R. seems to have 
 considered the case settled by Mrs. Jencken's letter, as no 
 more has been said about it.
 
 Ch. X] Raps Heard by Barrett, Moses, Crookes, Etc. 145 
 From Professor Barrett (Pr. IV, 34) : 
 
 " Presently loud raps were given at this table beneath the 
 hands of the sitters, so loud, in fact, they quite startled me. 
 In character the sounds in general resembled the snapping 
 noises occasionally made by furniture when the joints open 
 under the heat of a room. But the sharpest and loudest 
 cracks can be well imitated in strength and character by 
 smartly striking a table with the edge of an ivory paper- 
 knife " 
 
 The following occurred in the presence of Moses. The 
 initials are Dr. Speeds (Pr. IX, 319, Note) : 
 
 "Sunday, July 20th. ... Knocks of the sharpest kind came 
 on the table and then on the floor. It was as if large glass 
 marbles had been thrown on the table, had bounded off on 
 the floor, and then rolled away. Till a light was struck it 
 was almost impossible not to believe that such had been the 
 case. . . . S. T. S." 
 
 Sir William Crookes prepared an apparatus with a parch- 
 ment diaphragm connected by a lever with a tracing register- 
 ing apparatus. On the diaphragm he placed a few bits of 
 black lead. He got the medium (a non-professional lady 
 whose name he does not give) to place her hands over the 
 diaphragm, without contact. What followed he thus de- 
 scribes (Researches, p. 39) : 
 
 " Presently percussive noises were heard on the parchment 
 resembling the dropping of grains of sand on its surface. At 
 each percussion a fragment of graphite which I had placed 
 on the membrane was seen to be projected upwards about l-50th 
 of an inch, and the end C of the lever moved slightly up and 
 down. Sometimes the sounds were as rapid as those from an 
 induction-coil, whilst at others they were more than a second 
 apart. Five or six tracings were taken, and in all cases a 
 movement of the end C of the lever was seen to have occurred 
 with each vibration of the membrane." 
 
 This is from Bartlett (op. cit., 36) : 
 
 " Thomas R. Hazard writes : 
 
 " ' One day as I was passing down Fifth Avenue I ... 
 saw Foster and a stranger standing quietly by an iron rail- 
 ing Shortly after the stranger left, and Foster joined me 
 
 [and] . . . told me that the gentleman who had just left him 
 was an occasional visitant of his circles, who had a short 
 time before joined him on the avenue and said to him: "Mr.
 
 146 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 Foster, I wish you could make raps somewhere else than 
 in your own room," to which Foster replied that he could 
 have them come anywhere ! The gentleman said, " I will give 
 you a dollar for each one you will make just here." .Where- 
 upon Foster asked the skeptic to stand with him beside the 
 iron railing and count aloud all the raps as they were made. 
 Soon the raps came on the iron railing, and the gentleman 
 counted them until the number ten was reached, when a 
 pause ensued, and Foster asked if the raps should yet go on. 
 " No," said the gentleman ; " I am satisfied," suiting his action 
 to his word by handing Foster a ten dollar bill, which he 
 then showed to me.' " 
 
 Of course the skeptic will account for this on the obvious 
 hypothesis that Foster lied. I knew him, and I don't think 
 he did. 
 
 In Mr. Armstrong's case he said of the raps on a table 
 (Pr. VII, 158) : 
 
 " They resembled the sound of the sparks given off by the 
 prime conductor of a large Holtz electrical machine, . . . and 
 the table always seemed supercharged with the ' force producing 
 fluid,' if I may be permitted to use the term, on every portion of 
 the table's surface, the chairs we sat on, and even on various 
 articles of furniture at considerable distance from us." 
 
 From Stainton Moses (Pr. IX, 280) : 
 
 " They have been heard ... in strange rooms ... in the country 
 . . . and even in the open air, under very curious circumstances. 
 ... At Southend ... a pier more than a mile in length, my 
 friend and I ... were sitting at the extreme end . . . when raps 
 
 came ... on the rail in front of us They followed us all along 
 
 the pier, and were audible at a great distance, as indeed any 
 sound is if made on a long wooden rail. This was at 4 
 o'clock in the afternoon. At 8 p. m. we went on to the pier 
 
 again The clear metallic rap was plainly audible . . . fifty 
 
 yards from me [and] ... to both of us when we were seventy 
 yards apart, and were apparently made in the space between us." 
 
 The sounds so far described, notwithstanding their variety, 
 have the common quality of proceeding from definite sources 
 appreciable by the senses. We now go on to a category of 
 sounds from no sensable sources. 
 
 Professor Alexander gives the following in connection with 
 the Davis children (Pr. VII, 180) : 
 
 " A peculiar whistling sound was heard by some on one 
 occasion coming from behind the curtains drawn before the
 
 Ch. X] The Davis Children's Raps. Moses 147 
 
 verandah door, and on another, by Mrs. Z. in the garden path 
 leading down to the gate, where she had been seeing some 
 friends out " 
 
 Little girls, and big ones too, do sometimes make "a 
 peculiar whistling sound." But what comes from other me- 
 diums may suggest that this one was not of the usual kind. 
 
 Prof. A. continues: 
 
 " The sound which has since developed to such an extent 
 was first heard by us on March 23d, 1873. At that time it 
 
 resembled the plucking of a string in mid-air We called it 
 
 the Lyre sound, for want of a better name A certain imita- 
 tion of it could be made by slightly touching the wires of a piano 
 at the upper notes I succeeded also in making some re- 
 semblance to it by drawing my finger over the wires of a musical 
 clock which hangs on the wall of the room adjoining. ... I sup- 
 posed that the piano or clock must be used in some way to make 
 a sound which seemed to be in mid-air. This theory was soon 
 upset, for the sound came in rooms where there was no musical 
 instrument; even in my own bedroom, where sometimes the 
 sound has been so loud as to be distinctly audible through the 
 wall in an adjoining room. . . . The sound would traverse the 
 room and seem to die away in the distance, and suddenly burst 
 forth into great power over the table, which appeared In some 
 inexplicable way to be used as a sounding-board. The wood 
 of the table vibrated under our hands exactly as it would have 
 done had a violoncello been twanged while resting upon it It 
 was no question of fancy or delusion. The sounds were at 
 times deafening, and alternated between those made by the 
 very small strings of a harp and such as would be caused 
 by the violent thrumming of a violoncello resting on the top 
 of a drum. . . . We never sat without them, and they formed 
 almost the staple phenomenon of the seance. With them, as 
 with other phenomena, great variety was caused by good or 
 bad conditions." 
 
 We are constantly reminded of the absence of definite lines 
 of division in Nature: even if the sounds above described, 
 and to be described hereafter, were carried by the air, their 
 source seems to have been some molecular action in the 
 atoms, as appears to be that of the " raps " already described. 
 
 Stainton Moses suggests (Pr. XI, 49, 50) that some sounds 
 are independent of the ear: 
 
 " May 30th The peculiarity of the seance was that when 
 
 I could hear the sound no one else could, and vice versa.
 
 148 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 I heard by clairaudience and not by natural hearing, being 
 
 very deaf with my cold 1 described it long before it was 
 
 heard by the others, and heard it frequently when they did not. 
 At the same time I was unconscious of sounds apparently made 
 on the table under my nose." 
 
 The sound referred to in the foregoing is the first among 
 those indicated in the following from Pr. IX : 
 
 (IX,268) : "... The most perfect musical sounds are made 
 when I cannot hear them; and, as a general rule, to which the 
 exceptions are so rare as only to serve to establish the prin- 
 ciple, the best and most successful manifestations occur when 
 the medium is deeply entranced." 
 
 (IX,279-80) : ". . . Of late they [the sounds] have changed, and 
 are usually audible to me before they strike the ear of any other 
 person. How far this may be attributable to clairaudience, a 
 faculty lately developed in me, I cannot say positively." 
 
 (IX,342-3) : " At one seance as many as seven different sounds 
 were going on at the same time in different parts of the room. 
 It would have been quite impossible for any one person to 
 have made them. " MARIA SPEER." 
 
 Moses* note-book says of certain sounds (Pr. IX, 281) : 
 
 " They represented two instruments, the one of three, 
 
 the other of seven strings, and they were used in playing thus : 
 Certain notes were sounded upon the three strings, and these 
 were followed by a run made as if by running a finger-nail 
 rapidly over the strings of the other instrument. The result 
 was like what musical cognoscenti call ' a free prelude ' ; what 
 I should describe as a series of notes, highly pitched, clear, and 
 liquid in their melody, followed by a rapid run on an instrument 
 of lower pitch. I speak of instruments, but . . . there was in the 
 room an ordinary dining-room no musical instrument of any 
 kind whatever." 
 
 Dr. Speer says (Pr. IX, 281) : 
 
 " The sound . . . during the space of fifteen months, almost 
 
 invariably presented itself at each sitting A sound like that 
 
 of a stringed instrument, played, or rather plucked, in mid-air, 
 while there was no stringed instrument in the room. Every 
 attempt was subsequently made to ascertain through what sub- 
 stance the sound could be evolved The sounds were formed 
 
 independently of any material substance. ... In process of time, 
 the manifestation became most extraordinary. It was almost 
 impossible (to an outsider it would have been absolutely im- 
 possible) not to believe that a large stringed instrument, e.g., a 
 violoncello, a guitar, a double bass, or a harp, was struck by
 
 Ch. X] Telekinetic Lights. Colonel Taylor 149 
 
 powerful human fingers On these occasions the sitters could 
 
 distinctly feel a strong vibration transmitted from the points 
 of the fingers in contact with the table up to the shoulder- 
 joint 
 
 " I confess myself entirely unable to give any idea of the 
 way in which these remarkable sounds are produced " 
 
 We have already, by almost insensible degrees, found our- 
 selves in what I provisionally assume to be molecular action 
 of the telekinetic force, though the force has so far generally 
 been associated with the molar action. We will now leave 
 that, and concern ourselves with some farther phenomena 
 that are purely molecular, until we meet the molar again 
 in discussing telekinetic phenomena associated with intelli- 
 gence, into which, by the way, we have already drifted some 
 distance, so inextricable from each other are the phenomena. 
 
 Lights 
 
 The molecular manifestations also include lights which sug- 
 gest not only the electric spark and the alleged magnetic aura, 
 but also often have characteristics peculiar to themselves. Un- 
 fortunately their case, like all manifestations of telekinesis, 
 is needlessly prejudiced by their being generally called " spirit 
 lights." The name of course tends to awaken in some cre- 
 dulity, and in others skepticism, both of which tend to obstruct 
 proper investigation. But probably every light from an un- 
 known source that has appeared since mankind had a word 
 meaning " spirit " has been attributed to spirits. Whatever 
 such a word may mean etymologically, in actual use it is no 
 more or less than an x to express a mode of force as yet un- 
 correlated with the modes already familiar. So it was with 
 the lights of electricity, whether seen in the clouds or in the 
 " artificial " spark. 
 
 Lieutenant-Colonel Taylor, a frequent contributor to the 
 Pr. S. P. R., thus describes a "spirit light" (Pr. XIX, 54) : 
 
 " This light seemed to me not to illuminate things 
 
 as much as a common light of equal brilliancy would do, but 
 perhaps a very feeble light, when looked at after the eye has 
 been some time in total darkness, may give an exaggerated 
 impression of brightness. I felt no heat when the light was 
 in my hand, nor did I feel the touch of anything."
 
 150 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 The following manifestation by Foster (Bartlett, op. cit., 
 p. 78) suggests the lights and electric crackling from a 
 Kuhmkorff coil. 
 
 " The lights were turned out without consulting Mr. Foster. 
 Had he been consulted, he would probably not have given his 
 consent, being as timid and apparently as afraid of darkness 
 as a child. Two leaves of the dining-table were taken out, 
 intending to shove the table together, to make it somewhat 
 smaller. But the table would not shove. Who has not ex- 
 perienced this difficulty with their dining-table! In this 
 instance, however, I consider it fortunate that the leaves were 
 left out. Many surprising physical manifestations occurred, 
 so startling in their nature that I can hardly believe that they 
 occurred myself! In these accounts of Foster, I have" [here- 
 tofore? H. EL] "intentionally avoided mentioning the physical 
 manifestations, and have thought it better to confine myself 
 entirely to mental phenomena. The raps, I think, might be 
 regarded as both mental and physical. Numerous questions 
 were asked and answered by Mr. Foster, when suddenly, looking 
 through the aperture which the vacant leaves left in the table, 
 I perceived numerous small lights, like little balls of fire, in 
 size from a large pinhead to that of a pigeon egg. The entire 
 space of the lower part of the table was filled with these 
 electric sparks, and this to me was a wonderful phenomenon. 
 . . . [At each rap. H.H.] " one of these sparks, or balls of 
 fire, darted against the side of the table or on the floor, pro- 
 ducing the rapping, and disappeared. When" [There were 
 three raps. H. H.] " we could see three little balls of fire 
 separate themselves from the others, run one after another, 
 strike, and disappear. ... If the rap was low, a little ball of 
 fire; just in proportion to the loudness of the rap was the 
 size of the ball used. A loud rap evidently required a large 
 ball of fire to explode. Having discovered this first, I called 
 the attention of the others to the fact. This lasted for nearly 
 one hour." 
 
 You will remember Foster's champagne baskets flying 
 around the room (Bartlett, op. cit., 24). In that account it is 
 stated that " what appeared to be electric sparks appeared in 
 many places in the room." 
 
 Here is an account by Moses (Pr. IX, 273-4) : 
 
 " A number of cones of soft light similar to moon- 
 light appeared in succession, until a dozen or more had been 
 made. They presented the appearance of a nucleus of soft, 
 yellow light, surrounded by a soft haze. They sailed up from 
 a corner of the room and gradually died out. The most con-
 
 Ch. X] Stainton Moses' Lights 151 
 
 spicuous was shaped like a mitre and was 8 or 9 inches in 
 
 height We determined to extemporise a cabinet for the 
 
 purpose of developing them." 
 
 Why " a cabinet " ? One does not seem to have been gen- 
 erally essential to the production of lights by Moses, and 
 does seem to have been generally essential to the production 
 of anything by mediums more open to suspicion. 
 
 " This was simply done by throwing open the door between 
 two rooms, and hanging in the doorway a curtain with 
 square aperture in the middle of it. On one side of the cur- 
 tain a table was put for the sitters; on the other side I was 
 placed in an easy-chair, and was soon in a state of deep trance, 
 from which I never woke until the stance was concluded. What 
 then took place is described in the records of friends who 
 were present. Large globes of light . . . sailed out of the 
 aperture and went into the room where the sitters were placed. 
 They are described as of the same soft, pale hue, like moon- 
 light. They were sufficiently bright to illumine the lintel 
 and door-posts, and to cast a strong reflection into the room. 
 Within the gauzy envelope was a bright point of concentrated 
 light, and the size varied considerably. The cone shape pre- 
 dominated, but some were like a dumbbell, and others like a 
 mass of luminous vapor revolving round and falling over a 
 central nucleus of soft, yellow light. They seem to have been 
 carried in a materialized hand, a finger of which was shown 
 at request by placing it in front of the nucleus of light. Round 
 each was soft drapery, the outline of- which was usually 
 perfectly distinct." 
 
 Dr. Thomson of Clifton added the following (Pr. IX, 274) : 
 
 " The appearance of the light reminded me strongly of what 
 I have seen when an electric discharge is passed through an 
 exhausted tube, with the exception, of course, of the latter 
 being momentary, whereas in the present case the light con- 
 tinued more or less for nearly an hour n 
 
 Later Moses says (Pr. IX, 331) : 
 
 "I had been very anxious to try the duration of the light, 
 because an imitation of such lights is made by phosphorized 
 oil; but lights so made are of very brief duration. I believe 
 that a favorable trial would show that Mentor's " [another 
 " spirit " whom we shall know better later. H. H.] " light 
 would last seven or eight minutes." 
 
 Sir William Crookes says (Researches, 91) : 
 
 " These, being rather faint, generally require the room to 
 be darkened. I need scarcely remind my readers again that,
 
 152 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 tinder these circumstances, I have taken proper precautions to 
 avoid being imposed upon by phosphorized oil, or other means. 
 Moreover, many of these lights are such as I have tried to 
 imitate artificially, but cannot. 
 
 " Under the strictest test conditions, I have seen a solid 
 self-luminous body, the size and nearly the shape of a turkey's 
 egg, float noiselessly about the room, at one time higher than 
 anyone present could reach standing on tiptoe, and then gently 
 descend to the floor. It was visible for more than ten minutes, 
 and before it faded away it struck the table three times with 
 a sound like that of a hard, solid body. During this time the 
 medium was lying back, apparently insensible, in an easy- 
 chair. 
 
 "I have seen luminous points of light darting about and 
 
 settling on the heads of different persons 1 have seen sparks 
 
 of light rising from the table to the ceiling, and again falling 
 upon the table, striking it with an audible sound." 
 
 Compare Foster's audible lights, a couple of pages back. 
 There are many similar cases. 
 
 Professor Alexander says (Pr. VII, 183) : 
 
 "A beautiful, transparent, bluish light... was one even- 
 ing seen by all, except Mr. Davis himself, playing on his left 
 shoulder. At my desire it moved to the right shoulder, but 
 seemed to have some difficulty in staying there. . . . The room 
 at the time was partially darkened, but not enough to hinder 
 us from plainly distinguishing the features of the persons 
 present." 
 
 Dr. Speer says (Pr. IX, 275-6) : 
 
 " He told me to rub my hands so as to generate more 
 
 power, and very soon another large light . . . appeared 
 
 " The way of renewing the light when it grew dim was by 
 
 making passes over it with the hand They . . . seemed to be 
 
 more easily and fully developed when I rubbed my hands to- 
 gether or on my coat." 
 
 This seems to correlate the lights definitely enough with 
 the other modes of force manifested by the medium. I as- 
 sume that the force came from Moses through Speer, though 
 that may be superfluous: all people are supposed to have 
 some power to gather and transmit electricity, and Moses's 
 initiative may have been enough for the as yet mysterious 
 force. These lights, however, were unlike any electric lights 
 we know, except those in vacuum tubes. 
 
 Lights, like sounds, have been in evidence so much more
 
 Cli. X] Temperatures. Matter through Matter 153 
 
 frequently in connection with ostensible intelligence, that I 
 leave farther consideration of them to that branch of the 
 subject, though we have already found the two inevitably 
 somewhat tangled together. 
 
 Temperatures 
 
 Shall we class as molar or molecular, the motion of air? 
 It is inseparably connected with phenomena of both heat and 
 cold, and therefore is both. As the reader will frequently meet 
 cases hereafter, I will not take the trouble to group them. 
 
 As a specimen, however, take the following from Sir 
 William Crookes's Researches, 86: 
 
 " These movements, and indeed I may say the same of every 
 kind of phenomenon," [telekinetic and telepsychic? H. H.] 
 " are generally preceded by a peculiar cold air, sometimes 
 amounting to a decided wind. I have had sheets of paper 
 blown about by it, and a thermometer lowered several degrees. 
 On some occasions ... I have not detected any actual move- 
 ment of the air, but the cold has been so intense that I could 
 only compare it to that felt when the hand has been within a 
 few inches of frozen mercury." 
 
 Similar allegations are made in connection with the mani- 
 festations of most, if not all, of the mediums. 
 
 Passing Matter Through Matter 
 
 Here are the alleged cases from Sir William Crookes (Re- 
 searches, pp. 96-7) : 
 
 " I then went to the dining-room door, and telling the 
 
 two boys to go into the library and proceed with their lessons, 
 I closed the door behind them, locked it, and (according to my 
 usual custom at seances) put the key in my pocket. 
 
 " We sat down, Miss Fox being on my right hand and the 
 other lady on my left, ... in total darkness, I holding Miss 
 
 Fox's two hands in one of mine the whole time We all 
 
 heard the tinkling of a bell, not stationary, but moving about 
 in all parts of the room, . . . now touching me on the head, 
 and now tapping against the floor. After ringing about the 
 room in this manner for fully five minutes, it fell upon the 
 table close to my hands 
 
 "I remarked that it could not be my little hand-bell 
 which was ringing, for I left that in the library. (Shortly 
 before Miss Fox came I had occasion to refer to a book, which
 
 154 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 was lying on a corner of a book-shelf. The bell was on the 
 book, and I put it on one side to get the book. That little 
 incident had impressed on my mind the fact of the bell being 
 in the library.) The gas was burning brightly in the hall 
 outside the dining-room door, so that this could not be opened 
 without letting light into the room, even had there been an 
 accomplice in the house with a duplicate key, which there 
 certainly was not. 
 
 " I struck a light. There, sure enough, was my own bell 
 lying on the table before me. I went straight into the library. 
 A glance showed that the bell was not where it ought to have 
 been. I said to my eldest boy, 'Do you know where my little 
 bell is ? ' ' Yes, papa,' he replied, ' there it is,' pointing to 
 where I had left it. He looked up as he said this, and then 
 continued, ' No it's not there, but it was there a little time 
 ago.' ' How do you mean ? has anyone come in and taken 
 it?' 'No,' said he, 'no one has been in; but I am sure it was 
 there, because when you sent us in here out of the dining-room 
 J.' (the youngest boy) ' began ringing it so that I could not 
 go on with my lessons, and I told him to stop.' J. corroborated 
 this, and said that, after ringing it, he put the bell down where 
 he had found it." 
 
 Sir William gives another where Home was the agent, in 
 Pr. VI. 
 
 This is from Stainton Moses (Pr. IX, 306, note) : 
 
 "April 2d. The medium was greatly convulsed, and sud- 
 denly a large stone was rolled violently across the table and 
 fell on Mr. Percival's knee. The stone had been brought from 
 the hall through a locked door, every hand at the table being 
 held during the process. Mr. Percival had been anxious to 
 have a proof of ' matter passing through matter,' and this 
 indeed was a solid one, as the stone was very large and 
 heavy. M. S." (Dr. [Mrs.?] Speer.) 
 
 Podmore gives another instance (Modern Spiritualism, II, 
 69): 
 
 " Communicated to the Dialectical Society by Mr. Fusedale : 
 . . . The children and my wife would see the things they [the 
 " spirits." H.H.] . . . took (in particular a brooch of my wife's) 
 appear to pass through solid substances, such as the wall or the 
 doors." 
 
 If matter can pass through matter, the fundamental estab- 
 lished axiom regarding it that two bodies cannot occupy 
 the same space at the same time, is mistaken, and our notions
 
 Ch. X] Materialization 155 
 
 regarding matter must be revised we must face the question 
 if the molecules of one body can pass through the inter- 
 molecular spaces of another without either body losing its 
 shape. The X-rays suggest some sort of an answer. The 
 same is true with a vengeance, if there is a substantial founda- 
 tion for the reports of materialization, and perhaps our later 
 consideration of them may give us a clue towards an explana- 
 tion of the new aspects of the subject 
 
 Materialization 
 
 Home, Foster, Stainton Moses, and perhaps one or two 
 other agents in good standing, are alleged to have caused 
 momentary phenomena (no lasting ones are yet alleged to 
 have been produced) possessing one or more of the attributes 
 heretofore associated with matter such as visibility, audi- 
 bility, odor, taste, temperature, texture, and resistance to 
 pressure; and there are several well-known agents of ques- 
 tionable standing who claim to have done the same, among 
 whom Eusapia Palladino is most prominent. 
 
 Probably the majority of investigators now accept what we 
 will provisionally call the other forms of telekinesis as fact, 
 and are trying to correlate them with our previous knowledge. 
 Materialization, on the other hand, they are still trying to 
 account for by trickery and illusion. And yet what little 
 character Home had, seems to have been so sincere! And 
 Stainton Moses, had he been a fraud (which nothing told 
 about him seems to encourage), would hardly have been con- 
 tented to defraud so small a circle; and as to poor Eusapia 
 Palladino, she is her own worst enemy, and that New York 
 report for many reasons cannot quite overbalance the earlier 
 reports. 
 
 One of the men who joined in it told me that Tie did 
 so with a mental reservation, and I am credibly informed 
 that another confessed the same. The first one told me that 
 he passed his hands between the floor and the legs of a 
 table raised by Eusapia, and found the space absolutely free ; 
 also that the table could not have been lifted from above 
 by any known agency, unless telekinesis may be accounted 
 a known agency. From the evidence, I believe that whatever
 
 156 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 Eusapia's frauds, some of her manifestations of telekinesis 
 were genuine. This raises some presumption that some of 
 her materializations may have been too. I don't see, however, 
 that it makes much difference whether they were or not: the 
 evidence of her fraud does not fatally detract from the credi- 
 bility of the witnesses in the other cases. 
 
 I am not at all prepared to deprecate the efforts to hunt 
 up tricks ; at the same time, after the impossibilities that have 
 become the whole world's actualities during the last forty 
 years, there does seem about as much justification for work- 
 ing provisionally on the hypothesis that a respectably 
 vouched-for marvel is true, as upon the old one that it is 
 false. 
 
 It may eventually seem that the claims of materialization 
 may gain a little strength from the possibility that it may be 
 a corollary of telekinesis. The case for materialization, how- 
 ever, is different from that for the simpler forms of tele- 
 kinesis. That is enough to convince anybody but the class 
 of skeptics who take nothing on testimony unless they have 
 experienced the like themselves, and are much more energetic 
 in denying the experience of others than in enlarging their 
 own. There are scores, probably hundreds, of mediums who 
 have given well attested cases of molar and molecular tele- 
 kinesis, but there are hardly half a dozen whose cases of 
 materialization are worthy of any consideration. To begin 
 a few well supported instances with a very mild example: 
 
 From Bartlett (op. cit., p. 64) : 
 
 "A gentleman, accompanied by two ladies dressed in deep 
 mourning, visited Mr. Foster The seance had only con- 
 tinued a short time when the elder lady said, ' Sarah Jane, 
 behave yourself, and stop hunching me.' ' Why, mother, I 
 am not hunching you, I am hunched myself.' Hundreds have 
 testified that while attending the seances they have been 
 touched by a hand, on the forehead, on the shoulder, or knee. 
 Was it imagination or a fact ? " 
 
 If this phenomenon was genuine, Foster produced the dis- 
 tinguishing effect of matter resistance of which more later. 
 But this is the only case from Foster I recall, and Bartlett 
 overlooked it when he told me that all the materialization he 
 had seen (obviously from others) was fraudulent.
 
 Ch. X] Crookes on Moses' Materializations 157 
 
 As we shall see later, materialized hands are quite gener- 
 ally alleged to accompany the lights in the Moses phenomena. 
 
 In the notes already quoted from Sir William Crookes, 
 some indications of "materialization" have incidentally ap- 
 peared. Here are some more (Pr. VI, 106, et seq.) : 
 
 " Mr. A. R. Wallace then asked for ' Home, Sweet Home.' 
 A few bars of this air were immediately sounded. He looked 
 under the table and said he saw a hand distinctly moving the 
 instrument " [An accordion. H. H.] " up and down, and play- 
 ing on the keys. Mr. Home had one hand on the table and 
 was holding the top end of the accordion, whilst Mr. A. R. 
 Wallace saw this hand at the bottom end where the keys were. 
 
 " We then heard a rustling noise on a heliotrope which was 
 growing in a flower-pot standing on the table between Mr. 
 Home and Mrs. Wm. Crookes. On looking round, Mrs. Wm. 
 Crookes saw what appeared to be a luminous cloud on the 
 plant. (Mr. Home said it was a hand.) We then heard the 
 crackling as of a sprig being broken off, and then a message 
 came: 
 
 "'Four Ellen.' 
 
 " Immediately the white luminous cloud was seen to travel 
 from the heliotrope to Mrs. Wm. C.'s hand, and a small sprig 
 of the plant was put into it. She had her hand then patted 
 by a delicate female hand. She could not see the hand itself, 
 but only a halo of luminous vapor over her hand." 
 
 " A hand was seen by some, and a luminous cloud by others," 
 [Did anybody see Polonius's whale? Clouds look very different 
 to different people, especially to believers and disbelievers. 
 H. H.] " pulling the flowers about which were in a stand on 
 the table. A flower was then seen to be carried deliberately 
 and given to Mrs. Wm. Crookes." 
 
 The following is from Sir William Crookes' Researches, 
 pp. 92-3: 
 
 " The hands and fingers do not always appear to me to be 
 solid and life-like. Sometimes, indeed, they present more the 
 appearance of a nebulous cloud partly condensed into the 
 form of a hand. This is not equally visible to all present. 
 For instance, a flower or other small object is seen to move; 
 one person present will see a luminous cloud hovering over 
 it, another will detect a nebulous-looking hand, whilst others 
 will see nothing at all but the moving flower. I have more 
 than once seen, first an object move, then a luminous cloud 
 appear to form about it, and, lastly, the cloud condense into 
 shape and become a perfectly-formed hand. At this stage, the 
 hand is visible to all present. It is not always a mere form, 
 but sometimes appears perfectly life-like and graceful, the
 
 158 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 fingers moving and the flesh apparently as human as that 
 of any in the room. At the wrist, or arm, it becomes hazy, 
 and fades off into a luminous cloud. 
 
 " To the touch, the hand sometimes appears icy cold and 
 dead; at other times, warm and life-like, grasping my own 
 with the firm pressure of an old friend. 
 
 " I have retained one of these hands in my own, firmly 
 resolved not to let it escape. There was no struggle or effort 
 made to get loose, but it gradually seemed to resolve itself 
 into vapor, and faded in that manner from my grasp." 
 
 Dr. Speer says regarding Moses (Pr. IX, 275) : 
 
 " The medium was entranced, and the controlling spirit 
 
 informed me that he would endeavor to place the light in 
 the medium's hand. Failing in this, he said he would knock 
 on the table in front of me. Almost immediately a light 
 came and stood on the table close to me. 'You see; now 
 listen, I will knock.' Very slowly the light rose up, and struck 
 three distinct blows on the table. ' Now I will show you my 
 hand.' A large, very bright light then came up, and inside 
 of it appeared the materialized hand of the spirit. . . . The 
 power having become exhausted, he exhorted me to wake the 
 medium." 
 
 From Moses. (Pr. IX, 311-12) : 
 
 " Sunday Evening, May 18th, 1873 Scent was brought, 
 
 not as before, but by a cool wind laden with the odor. It was 
 like otto [Sic for attar. H.H.] of roses, very powerful. As 
 it passed round the circle Dr. and Mrs. Speer and I saw a figure 
 carrying it apparently. I also saw a figure in the middle of the 
 table when the lyre sound was heard there." 
 
 It seems to me that all these odors we are about smell more 
 of imagination than of anything else. We shall meet them 
 again. 
 
 (Pp. 309-10) : " Wednesday, May 7th, 1873. ... We all saw a 
 hand descend from the top of the curtain and play the accordion. 
 It was a large hand, and its reflection on the window-blind 
 was strong. After this a head showed in similar way. When 
 Mrs. Crookes was told to go into the room and occupy the 
 chair ... a form was materialized as far as the middle. It floated 
 near the folding doors, and advanced towards Mrs. Crookes, who 
 screamed, and it vanished. 
 
 " Mrs. Crookes, to whom I (F. W. H. Myers) have shown this 
 account, makes the following comments (Pr. IX, 310-11) : 
 
 " Mr. Home then left me and stood between the two 
 
 rooms. The accordion was immediately taken from his hand
 
 Ch. X] Noses and Cox on Home's Materializations 159 
 
 by a cloudy appearance, which soon seemed to condense into 
 a distinct human form, clothed in a filmy drapery, stand- 
 ing near Mr. Home between the two rooms. The accordion 
 began to play (I do not remember whether on this occasion 
 there was any recognized melody), and the figure gradually 
 advanced towards me till it almost touched me, playing con- 
 tinuously. It was semi-transparent, and I could see the sitters 
 through it all the time. Mr. Home remained near the sliding 
 doors. As the figure approached I felt an intense cold, getting 
 stronger as it got nearer," [We shall meet much of this change 
 of temperature later. H. H.] " and as it was giving me the 
 accordion I could not help screaming. The figure immediately 
 seemed to sink into the floor to the waist, leaving only the 
 head and shoulders risible, still playing the accordion, which 
 was then about a foot off the floor. Mr. Home and my husband 
 came to me at once, and I have no clear recollection of what 
 then occurred, except that the accordion did not cease playing 
 immediately. 
 
 " Mr. Serjeant Cox was rather angry at my want of nerve, 
 and exclaimed : ' Mrs. Crookes, you have spoilt the finest mani- 
 festation we have ever had.' I have always regretted that my 
 want of presence of mind brought the phenomena to so abrupt 
 a termination." 
 
 " Thursday, December HI h. Douglas House. Dr. and Mrs. 
 S. and I (M.) The seance was short. I questioned Imperator " 
 [A " spirit " of whom we shall learn more hereafter. H.H.] " as 
 to a vision I had had on the previous night. He said that he 
 had appeared to me. He was somewhat different in appearance 
 to what had been described. I asked whether I should see 
 him again. He knocked out : ' Watch.' The clouds of light, 
 which had gathered as usual round me, lifted and went to 
 my right hand. They condensed gradually into a pillar, and 
 finally into a form, majestic, stately, and noble in mien. The 
 body was draped as with a toga, though that might simply 
 have been the spirit drapery. The right arm was extended 
 and pointed towards me. The face was the face of my vision, 
 though not so distinct. I asked that I might be touched, and 
 the figure slowly stepped towards me, but did not touch me. 
 Finally it faded away very gradually until it was dissipated in 
 luminous mist. Dr. and Mrs. S. saw misty light,- but nothing 
 more. I asked who it was, and ' Myself ' was rapped, but in 
 Imperator's knocks." 
 
 Vastly more impressive than the child's " It's me," but not 
 a whit more intelligent. 
 
 Imperator knew a language not evolved till a couple of 
 thousand years after his death. So they are learning in the 
 other world!
 
 160 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 In the many cases of which a few are here given, Home 
 and Stainton Moses are, so far as I know, the only persons 
 (except Foster in the foregoing very mild case) who are said 
 to have produced materializations without the conjunction 
 of cabinets, curtains, partial darkness, and other accessories 
 favorable to illusion. Eusapia Palladino's manifestations have 
 all been open to these objections, as well as to the one from 
 her frequent trickery. On the assumption, however, that 
 any materializations have been genuine, there is room for 
 some plausible guessing as to their relations to known modes 
 of force. 
 
 As has been seen, hands, limbs, faces, and entire human 
 figures seem to appear. Sometimes objects are moved by 
 apparently material hands. These hands are grasped by the 
 company. Sometimes they feel natural, sometimes cold and 
 clammy. All these phenomena are classed as "materializa- 
 tions." Now what do we so far know of " materialization " 
 of " matter " ? It has been followed down through atoms, 
 molecules, ions, until the latest view is that each portion 
 of it is an aggregate of units of force. All the phenomena 
 of matter that we know of, save resistance, we have long 
 known as manifestations of force in vibration heat waves, 
 light waves, sound waves, and the rest; and now resistance 
 seems to have been reduced, with the rest, to a mode of 
 force. Our conceptions are gradually changing from those 
 of two universes of, respectively, " matter " and " mind," to 
 a single universe of vibrations, all of it, of course, objective 
 to consciousness, as of old. Of the greater harmony of the 
 later conception with our latest knowledge, there seems little 
 question, but it is as revolutionary as was the conception of 
 evolution from inferior ancestors; and, while it is not as 
 repugnant to our habitual feelings as, at first, was the Dar- 
 winian conception, it will take some time to make the unified 
 universe of vibrations a permanent and consistent factor in 
 our thinking. But that it will in time become not only 
 that, but a welcome and fruitful one, seems highly possible. 
 
 Till lately we have supposed we knew two worlds one 
 of mind, and one which includes our own bodies external 
 to mind. Each of these worlds has always been at bottom
 
 Ch. X] Speculations on Materialization 161 
 
 a mystery, and the relation between them a mystery. Each 
 produces phenomena in the other, and yet to imagine mind 
 and matter turning into each other, is very difficult, and 
 until lately has been impossible. But now it really does 
 seem as if the division between them might be but superficial 
 and often merely one of those provisional lines with which 
 our minds are constantly dividing, in the effort to conquer, 
 the essential unity of Nature. 
 
 In the chase that analysis and hypothesis have made after 
 the smallest particle of matter, they now seem to have chased 
 all the particles away, and found nothing really there but 
 psychical influences that awaken in us the psychical effects 
 which we call resistance, roughness, smoothness, form, color, 
 etc., etc., just as in our visions, sleeping or waking, we ex- 
 perience those same sensations, without the intervention of 
 any particle of "matter." If there is, then, after all, but 
 one source of sensation mind acting on mind, " materializa- 
 tion " is not impossible, and there is no longer any necessity 
 for reading libraries to find out that we don't know how 
 mind can act on body, or body on mind. 
 
 Now as, in our experience, mechanical energy, muscular 
 energy, nervous energy, heat, light, electrical power, and the 
 rest, are constantly transmuted into each other, is it not easily 
 conceivable that any one of them may be transmutable into 
 resistance to pressure? Nay, a step farther, is it improbable 
 that the telekinetic force may belong with the rest in a 
 mutually interchangeable group, which can produce on our 
 waking perceptions as well as in our dreams, all the effects 
 which, in certain combinations, we recognize as " matter " ? 
 On this hypothesis, the force manifested by or through the 
 materializers can (not inconsistently) be assumed to manifest 
 itself as " matter," including such aggregates of force as we 
 are familiar with in the forms which usually perform certain 
 functions as hands which move things. 
 
 Another guess. The supply of force connected with any 
 one materializer is, of course, limited. Even the alleged 
 " messages " through the mediums assert that, and the accom- 
 panying phenomena illustrate it. When, on hypothesis, the 
 telekinetic mode is transmuted into the modes which, in certain 
 combinations and proportions, impress us as " matter," that
 
 162 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Ft. I 
 
 impression can last no longer than the amount of force 
 available for the effect, holds out. Hence the force which 
 manifests itself as a hand grasped by the sitter, gradually 
 becomes exhausted that is, gradually changes, as all modes 
 of force do, into other modes and the hand " fades " away. 
 
 Still another guess. The aggregate of modes of force 
 waves of light, heat, resistance, etc., which produce the im- 
 pression of, say, a hand or a complete human form, with 
 its drapery if you please of all those modes, only enough 
 may be present, at any moment, to produce a portion of the 
 phenomena usually impressing us as matter. The heat-mode 
 may be absent, and the " hand " feels cold. The sight-mode 
 alone may be present, the resistance-mode lacking, and the 
 sitter's hand passes through the only partially " materialized " 
 hand, or the partially materialized human figure ; or the spec- 
 tator, trying to grasp the human figure that he sees, passes 
 through it. 
 
 Somewhere about the middle sixties, I saw a play or two 
 at Wallack's, in which the visible elements, without the audible 
 and incompressible ones, were successfully introduced by 
 optical machinery. Moving figures apparently as " real " as 
 the actual actors, were placed on the stage, and the actual 
 actors walked right through them. 
 
 The apparent hands or more complete figures which oppose 
 no resistance, nevertheless are said to move objects. Even 
 if they do, it is consistent with the hypothesis that, at such 
 moments, the resistance-mode of force is temporarily added 
 to the sight-mode. 
 
 We even appear to have the resistance-mode separated from 
 all the others e.g., from visibility, etc. (Cf. Foster's case 
 ante.) I doubt if anj'body can believe the account of the 
 attempt at independent writing by the pencil and the lath 
 on pages 176-7, and similar cases, without assuming an 
 invisible and an inaudible but resisting agent, or even per- 
 sonality, handling the two objects. This conception is some- 
 thing more than mere unthinking anthropomorphism. 
 
 Now a question, in regard to which perhaps the reader 
 will prefer to do his own guessing. If the alleged partial 
 and temporary manifestations of human figures do really 
 come through the thinking and feeling entities called Home,
 
 Ch. X] "Spirits" Superfluous in Telekinesis 163 
 
 Moses, and many others, whence come the complete and life- 
 long manifestations of human beings that we know and are? 
 Was Carlyle stretching language very far in calling us all 
 spirits? "Ghosts," I believe, was his word. Do not our 
 latest knowledge and best thinking result in the idea old 
 in many forms that we are but expressions of a measureless 
 force which is ourselves and also behind ourselves? Would 
 any person given to the old phraseology be very fantastic in 
 calling us thoughts of the divine mind? 
 
 Please notice that hitherto this exposition, so far as I have 
 been able to keep the threads distinct in spite of the in- 
 evitable tangle with "spiritualism," has referred simply to 
 a mode, or modes, of force, manifested, or alleged to be 
 manifested, like electricity and magnetism, in mechanical 
 action, and in the production of lights and sounds; and, 
 unlike any modes of force previously known, in the pro- 
 duction, without the use of matter, of objects sometimes re- 
 sisting pressure and sometimes showing other attributes of 
 matter. The word "spirit" and its derivatives have been 
 used a few times, generally in passages quoted, as, at the pres- 
 ent stage of human intelligence, it is inevitable it should be 
 in the discussion of any phenomena not yet correlated with 
 familiar ones. So far, however, we have really simply en- 
 countered nothing more than new modes of force. As far 
 as concerns the merely kinetic side, the production of motion 
 in masses or molecules, it seems already as well correlated 
 with the other modes of force we know, as, say, the electro- 
 magnetic mode was a century ago : for : 
 
 (I) We know its source, which is the human organism: 
 for it is manifested only in the presence of specially endowed 
 human beings, and never, so far as we know, in their absence, 
 though Sir William Crookes thinks that probably all human 
 beings have it, some, however, in inappreciable amounts, and 
 I have already suggested the possibility of its existence in 
 other animals. Much testimony indicates the possibility of 
 one person possibly only a specially endowed one, collecting 
 the power from others. So with electricity. 
 
 (II) We know that it is a mode of chemical energy stored 
 up in food and air, and is extracted from them by human
 
 164 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Ft. I 
 
 beings, just as muscular and some kinds of intellectual force 
 are. 
 
 (Ill) We know approximately, that it is quantitatively 
 transmuted from those possessing it: for their other modes 
 of force are depleted in apparent, though not yet closely- 
 tested, proportion to the manifestations of this one. 
 
 So far as we have got, then, there is nothing more super- 
 normal or " spiritual " about the mode of force known as 
 telekinetic, than about any other; and we can expect to keep 
 on correlating it with the other modes, as we have correlated 
 each of them with their fellows, and also to get practical 
 advantages from it as we have from them. 
 
 Magnetism is unquestionably telekinetic, and it might not 
 be a strain of language to call electricity so, and even heat 
 and light. So the mere capacity to act without contact does 
 not necessarily entitle the new force more than any of the 
 others, to the name. 
 
 As magnetic aurse seem at last to be established, and as the 
 new mode of force has also been associated with aurae and other 
 lights without heat, its association with magnetism seems 
 very close; and as it is, so far as we know, manifested only 
 by human beings, anthropo-magnetism might be a good name 
 for it ; buf as there is a strong probability that it may also 
 exist, as electricity does, in some, if not all, of the lower 
 animals, a more general name would perhaps be safer, and 
 I have already used zoomagnetism. I had written this word 
 several times before I knew that Dr. Liebeault had used it 
 in a widely different connection, now virtually obsolete. I 
 prefer to stick to it until mine too becomes obsolete, especially 
 as, whatever may be the defects of such a name, it is a step 
 toward embracing this new mode of force in the "natural," 
 and correlating it with the modes we know better. 
 
 But have we not merely got back to our old discarded 
 acquaintance Animal Magnetism, seeking to be restored to 
 credit under a new Greek first-name ? No : this is an entirely 
 different character, and the different name may perhaps be 
 found to have uses that more than counterbalance the objec- 
 tions to its old associations. 
 
 The suspicion that the - so-called telekinetic force may be 
 magnetic, not only suggests its correlation with the modes
 
 Ch. X] Possible Uses of Telekinesis 165 
 
 of force generally recognized under that name, but with 
 some other modes which are yet but faintly recognized, or 
 regarded as illusions or frauds. 
 
 These other modes would be partly explained if it should 
 be found that heat in contact with a living human body 
 possessing marked telekinetic power, can be converted into 
 telekinetic power and stored in the system. But to com- 
 plete the explanation, Home's non-combustion of the hand- 
 kerchief, recited some pages farther on, would also have to 
 be accounted for : so a more probable hypothesis would be that 
 zoomagnetism is repellent of heat, and can be conveyed to 
 vegetable fiber generally, as we have abundant evidence that 
 it can to wood. 
 
 These questions will probably soon be settled in the labora- 
 tory. I am surprised that they do not appear to have already 
 received more attention from such men as Sir William 
 Crookes and Sir William Barrett. They may have had it, 
 however, without the investigators being yet ready to report, 
 although the former has lately said, in effect, that for many 
 years he has been kept so busy with the old modes of force 
 that he has had little time for the new ones. 
 
 Possible Uses of Telekinesis 
 
 If an electric eel were to make himself disagreeable to a 
 tadpole, the tadpole would probably not gain from the ex- 
 perience a very definite idea of the mode of force which 
 moves the Morse recording instrument, the telephone, the 
 trolley-car, the electric autos on land and water and in air, 
 and the " wireless." The boys of whom I was one, who saw 
 the playing with the same force in the Yale laboratory in the 
 early sixties, had practically little more idea of its later uses 
 than the tadpole would have ; and indeed Galvani, Volta, and 
 Ampere could not have had much more realization than we 
 boys had, of the possibilities lurking in the novel phenomena 
 which attracted their attention. 
 
 The new modes of force we have been considering may 
 have possibilities even more revolutionary than those of gal- 
 vanism and electricity. It seems not unreasonable to presume 
 that so far as the occurrences grouped, perhaps unwarrantably, 
 under the name of telekinesis, surpass in interest the picking
 
 166 Molecular Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 up of paper by glass or amber rubbed with silk, or even the 
 modest laboratory performances which were all that was 
 known of electricity fifty years ago, that far at least will 
 zoomagnetism eventually expand our reactions with the uni- 
 verse beyond the expansion given to them by electricity. 
 
 We may, even at the risk of " the dignity of letters," 
 amuse ourselves with a few of the possibilities : young couples 
 could place the furniture in their new flats independently of 
 the servant problem; the mountains might not be made to 
 come to Mahomet, instead of Mahomet's being obliged to go 
 to them, but many smaller things could be brought, even 
 perhaps through obstacles that are now as impermeable by 
 matter as we once supposed them to be by light and electricity ; 
 non-swimmers could (as we shall learn (?) in the next chap- 
 ter) levitate themselves above water, though perhaps it would 
 be too bold a flight to imagine those going down to the sea in 
 ships lifting themselves and their ships over the shoals or off 
 from the rocks, though persons threatened by runaway horses, 
 automobiles, or trolleys, or railroad trains could simply levi- 
 tate themselves over the dangerous objects, if indeed there 
 should be need of encountering such objects : for levitation 
 might make most human transits, if they were no longer than 
 the limits imposed by food supply and digestive power, aerial 
 instead of terrestrial, though it is not yet time to sell out 
 aeroplane stock at a loss ; we might not, for lack of matches, 
 have to go smokeless with tobacco in our pockets, or fireless 
 with fuel on hand, though the indications of the new force 
 being mutable into heat are as yet scant: the evidence re- 
 garding its power, or some kindred power, to resist heat is, 
 however, more positive, as we shall soon see. If that power 
 becomes developed at the outset of conflagrations, a man 
 could render himself to some extent immune against injury 
 by fire, often long enough to escape danger, and perhaps 
 could even be his own fire extinguisher. As to light, in an 
 unanticipated and often dangerous darkness, the human sys- 
 tem could supply its own. 
 
 These suggestions are of course as much jokes as prophecies, 
 but what would have seemed forty years ago, suggestions 
 of the electric light, the trolley-car, the telephone, and wireless 
 telegraphy?
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 MOLAR TELEPSYCHIC TELEKINESIS 
 
 THOUGH I have tried to restrict myself to physical matters, 
 we have already found them inevitably tangled up with 
 psychic ones. In fact I doubt if we know of one independ- 
 ently of the other if their separation is anything more than 
 one of the provisional mental processes which we have so 
 often found classification to be. And yet until the recent 
 strong indications that the incompressibility of matter is, 
 like its visibility and other sense impressions, but vibration, 
 the gulf between mind and matter was largely regarded as 
 impassable; but now it is very doubtful if the mind can 
 really make a coherent conception of any such impassable 
 gulf. Nevertheless from some points of view it seems im- 
 passable, and I have already spoken of it as such, and flatly 
 guessed the other way. 
 
 Here on the vague borderland of knowledge we get as 
 badly mixed up as if we were philosophers; but then we 
 acknowledge it. And though the borderland moves outward, 
 those who enter it at any stage, always must get mixed up. 
 Some of them have made all the discoveries, nevertheless. 
 
 An impassable gulf between the physical and the psychical 
 had long been regarded as necessary to the possibility of an 
 immortal soul in a mortal body. It was held that without 
 that impassable gulf, the body must drag down the soul with 
 the body's death. It does not seem to have entered into any- 
 body's mind that the vibrations constituting body might 
 in time even take on the qualities of soul, unless indeed there 
 was some such guess symbolized in the doctrine of the resur- 
 rection of the body. On re-reading the foregoing sentence 
 after some months, I find it, like many sentences more 
 nearly famous, rather deficient in clear meaning. Yet in 
 these gropings we must constantly encounter vague impres- 
 sions, and it may be well to let some of them stand in the 
 167
 
 168 Molar Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pi I 
 
 hope that here and there may be one which in time will turn 
 out a clue to something. 
 
 The telekinetic force we have been considering has a pecu- 
 liarity that, so far as I know, was never until about the 
 middle of the last century, generally associated with the mani- 
 festation of any recognized mode of force. We have been 
 accustomed to intelligent reactions from human beings, some- 
 times through inanimate things obviously regulated by them ; 
 but through telekinesis we are getting intelligent reactions 
 from inanimate things without the intelligence behind them 
 being clearly understood. 
 
 At first, the common inference was of course that the things 
 were moved by " spirits," but many of the best investigators 
 incline to the opinion that the intelligence regulating the 
 movements was the intelligence initiating them that the 
 medium, perhaps involuntarily, makes the intelligent re- 
 actions. 
 
 That may be true, but anybody who knows anything about 
 it (which but few people have taken the trouble to) knows 
 at least that if the only intelligence concerned is that of the 
 medium, the intelligence does not always act through the 
 muscles, or even the will. 
 
 Perhaps it is well to say before beginning on these things, 
 that I have no settled opinion regarding the source of this 
 ostensible intelligence. So far, my opinion has inclined much 
 more strongly to a " rationalistic " than toward a " spiritistic " 
 interpretation. I don't think much of that pair of words, 
 however : for I don't see why " spiritualism " is inevitably 
 not rational, though it has not yet been proved so, to my 
 satisfaction at least. Yet fairness compels me to admit 
 that I begin with a bias. For reasons that I cannot tell in 
 evidential detail, though I will later give an idea of their 
 general nature, I believe, as far as I believe anything im- 
 perfectly verified, that the soul survives the body; and there- 
 fore I must of course consider telekinetic phenomena indicat- 
 ing intelligence, under the bias of that belief. I can say, 
 however, that so far, I do not regard them as demonstrating 
 the belief, or even strongly supporting it. 
 
 Amid the tangled phenomena of telekinetics, we have al- 
 ready met some hints of intelligent manifestations. We will
 
 Ch. XI] Intelligence shown through " Table-tipping " 169 
 
 now proceed directly to them. We shall have occasion to go 
 over much of the ground we have been over before, though 
 with new crops on it 
 
 Intelligent " Table-tipping," etc. 
 
 First as to some molar phenomena : P *s music-stand, it 
 
 will be remembered, tilted in answer to questions, and I 
 
 attributed it to P 's unconsciously releasing the telekinetic 
 
 force to answer his own questions. 
 
 Let us now return to the Davis children. From Professor 
 Alexander's account of those interesting young persons, part 
 of which was given on pages 103 and 147, I purposely with- 
 held some passages, in order that I might present them here 
 to illustrate the manifestation of ostensible answering con- 
 sciousness. He says that the table's 
 
 " sudden emphatic movements . . . often meant, according to the 
 usual ' yes ' or ' no ' signals [Usually one rap for No and three 
 for Yes. H.H.] approval or disapproval of assertions made in the 
 conversation. 
 
 It would have been interesting to note whether the table 
 represented the views of the mediums. Elsewhere he says 
 (Pr. VII, 176) : 
 
 " On one occasion, a light three-footed table was inverted ; 
 and my hands, with those of Mr. Davis, Mrs. Davis, and the 
 two girls, were lightly placed on each of the feet. Care was 
 taken to see that no one did more than just touch the feet 
 of the table ; and, under these conditions, it sprang rapidly from 
 the floor into the lap of one of the sitters, and thence to the 
 floor again, repeating this manoeuvre for each of us in turn. 
 In the Thursday evening seances it was common for the table 
 to place itself in the necessary position on our sitting down 
 to it, either immediately before or after our hands had been 
 placed on its surface." 
 
 Here the table followed the natural inclinations of the 
 sitters. 
 Again the same apparent effect (Ibid., p. 177) : 
 
 " A favorite dog . . . was seated on a chair I jokingly chal- 
 lenged the invisible influence so to move the chair that the 
 dog might be obliged to jump down. Nothing happened for a 
 minute or so, when the dog left the chair apparently of its
 
 170 Molar Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt, I 
 
 own accord. Two or three seconds elapsed after it had sprung 
 to the ground; and then the chair tilted before us all. In the 
 same way a child's swing, hanging in a nook of the room, was 
 at my desire subjected to a slight but very visible oscillation." 
 
 This, too, was all in Professor Alexander's mind. 
 
 From Moses's Researches in Spiritualism. Quoted in Pr. 
 IX, 260-2 : 
 
 " Motion without contact, directed by evident intelligence, 
 is seen markedly in the following instance: I was calling on 
 a friend, and the conversation fell on the phenomena of Spirit- 
 ualism. A sitting was proposed, and nothing, or almost nothing, 
 occurred. We were quite alone in the room, which was well 
 lighted. We drew back from the table, intending to give up 
 the attempt. My friend asked why nothing occurred. The 
 table, untouched by us, rose and gently touched my tHroat and 
 chest three times. I was suffering from severe bronchial 
 symptoms, and was altogether below par. After this no rap 
 or movement could be elicited, and we were fain to accept the 
 explanation of our want of success." 
 
 Moses was not up to the work, and himself knew that the 
 source of his incapacity was in his bronchial tubes. The table 
 presumably echoed him. 
 
 In Chapter VIII it is stated that small objects from differ- 
 ent parts of the house were " generally thrown on the table " 
 when Moses and some friends sat. The original farther 
 states that 
 
 " such of them, however, as would easily break, were placed 
 
 ?uietly, and our attention was drawn to them by a request 
 or light." 
 
 This apparently means that the seance was, as very usual, 
 in a partly darkened room, that the objects thrown on the 
 table themselves made noise enough to attract attention, 
 but that when the more breakable objects were brought, the 
 raps made the signal calling for the alphabet, and on its 
 being given spelt out : " Light/' Thus far there is nothing 
 not easily accounted for by the agency (presumably invol- 
 untary) of the mediums. The Davis children, granted the 
 force under their control, could have unconsciously made 
 the table express their approval or disapproval. As one un- 
 consciously nods or shakes one's head, so a very simple de-
 
 Ch. XI] /* Reflex from the Medium Sufficient? 171 
 
 sire, with hardly an intellectual element, could have brought 
 their light table into the laps of the sitters or in a position 
 for the circle. Similarly there need not have been more 
 than a very simple reflex of their desire to have Professor 
 Alexander's wishes carried out in the table tilting after the 
 dog left it, or the swaying of the swing which he asked for. 
 
 So too with sundry tables reported as keeping time to 
 music, or with almost any response made by the table 
 to a question or desire naturally entertained by the medium. 
 But as we pursue our way, it seems gradually to go outside 
 of these possible reflexes from the medium. 
 
 In the account of Sir William Crookes' bell on page 153 
 the original says that before the bell was heard, the table 
 spelt out : " We are going to bring something to show our 
 power." Apparently there was no consciousness in the 
 medium of what was coming. 
 
 The same is true of Stainton Moses's big stone. The 
 original account states that its appearance was preceded by 
 a table message : " We have brought stone. Wait." 
 
 On the face of it, these communications have much less 
 than the preceding ones, the appearance of being reflexes 
 from the medium. 
 
 Tables have ascribed their motions to all sorts of angels 
 and devils apparently expressing the conceptions in the mind 
 of the medium of the force. 
 
 Dr. Salveton's table (as reported in the Annals of Psychical 
 Science, January-March, 1910) said that it was moved by 
 "a devil named Dormon," who agreed to show himself. 
 When asked why he did not come, the table said : " Candles." 
 They were put out. Still he did not appear, and the table 
 when asked the reason, said : " Gas," referring to a light in 
 the hall which came in through the transom. This was put 
 out. Regarding the rest of the experience, Salveton says: 
 
 " We were all excited in the extreme, but the nervous state 
 of Barthelemy G., C., and particularly that of Gabriel D., 
 
 seemed to me to be abnormal I ... put a further preliminary 
 
 question to the table Is there any danger in Dormon coming? 
 
 Yes. What danger? Insanity. For all? No. For one only? 
 
 Yes. Which one ? D Gabriel D., who had been thus named, 
 
 was in a highly-strung condition, and cried out : 'I don't care.
 
 172 Molar Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 No matter. We must go on to the end. I want to see what will 
 happen.' 
 
 " I learned later that Eugene B. had formerly had a lunatic 
 in his family, who was a great ' table-turner,' and who asserted 
 that these unusual movements were the work of the devil Dor- 
 mon, and that he had often seen this devil, who had the 
 appearance of a tall, beardless young man of corpse-like pallor 
 and draped in a shroud." 
 
 This of course points to the involuntary exercise on the 
 table of human force, either muscular or psycho-kinetic. 
 
 " I asked the table to tell Dormon " [the " devil "] " it was 
 ill-mannered of him not to be willing to show himself without 
 doing injury to one of us, that well-bred people did not act 
 thus; that, in these circumstances, he had only to remain where 
 he was, etc. Without allowing me to finish my diatribe, the 
 table said to me, ' M ! ' as in the story of Cambronne at 
 Waterloo, and, suddenly, with a noise comparable to that of 
 a hard blow of a mallet on a big drum of extraordinary sono- 
 rousness, the window was opened wide, the curtains not being 
 moved at all; the heavy copper candlestick and the box of 
 matches placed on the top of the trunk were thrown to the 
 ground, and the wick of the candle was half-extinguished by 
 
 touching the floor The table . . . began to turn, sometimes in 
 
 one direction and sometimes in another, at such a rate that we 
 could not follow it and the top slipped from under our fingers. 
 Then it began to dance a kind of waltz, and by degrees got 
 nearer to the trunk, in front of which, on the floor, there was 
 still the overturned box with the matches scattered about. When 
 it reached the trunk the table raised its feet, one after the 
 other, and let them fall with a rubbing motion, twice in each 
 direction. After a moment I noticed that each time the feet of 
 the table fell the head of a match exploded. I called out to my 
 comrades to press with all their might upon the table so as to 
 stop its movement; despite the combined weight of seven of us 
 leaning on the table, not merely with the tips of our fingers, 
 but with our open palms, we were not able to stop it. Then, 
 calling out to all of them to let go, and not to touch it, I took 
 hold of the center support of the table, turned it over in the air, 
 and put it down with the flat top downwards on the floor and 
 placed both my feet on it so that it was unable to move. . . . Only 
 the heads of the matches trodden on by the table had been rubbed 
 and bruised, without a single exception. . . . None of the matches 
 had been touched by the feet of the table anywhere but on the 
 head." 
 
 This is about the only account of " pure devilishness "
 
 Ch. XI] Dr. Salveton's Talk 173 
 
 that I have met with. One of the sitters was in a highly 
 strung condition, and had just been threatened with in- 
 sanity. 
 
 In support of the hypothesis that the table echoes the 
 medium, Dr. Salveton says: 
 
 "I have never observed any instance in which a sensible 
 answer was obtained which was absolutely unknown to all 
 the experimenters without exception. I have, on the con- 
 trary, only observed instances of replies known, supposed, or 
 foreseen in advance, before being formulated by the table, by 
 one of the experimenters, most frequently by the director of 
 the experiment, sometimes also by another who appeared to 
 play only a subordinate part. 
 
 " It was not long before we observed : 
 
 "1. That the sooner the table began to tremble after the 
 chain of hands had been formed around the top, the more 
 successful was the experiment, and the more easily and ac- 
 curately the replies were given. In other words, the stronger 
 and clearer the force, whether it was the sitters' force moving 
 the table as an echo to themselves, or was independent of 
 them. 
 
 " 2. That the replies through the table were always very 
 correct when they were previously known to one or other of 
 those joining hands in the circle. 
 
 " 3. That the replies were always confused or absurd when 
 the table was asked things unknown to all present. 
 
 " We formed the habit of leaving to the table itself the choice 
 of the experimenter who was to put the question, a choice 
 which it signified by leaning towards him. 
 
 " Every time that the choice fell upon me I noticed that 
 the reply that the table would make to each question came 
 into my mind before the table gave the answer, and that 
 every time that I did not clearly foresee the reply, the table 
 either did not answer or did not do so in an intelligible 
 manner. 
 
 " On several occasions we asked the table the ages of some 
 persons present (unknown to the questioner), the number of 
 coins an experimenter had in his purse, the number of matches 
 remaining in a partly emptied box, . . . and, for the most part, 
 [Italics mine. H.H.] the table replied correctly." 
 
 I suspect that the part where the table did not reply 
 correctly was where (as probably in the case of the matches 
 and the coins) nobody knew the fact that the case was, in 
 one point, like that of the magician with my matchbox given 
 on page 280.
 
 174 Molar Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 I have yet to meet my first case of a superusual report of 
 a fact not known to any human intelligence. Yet Salveton 
 tells of the table, in answer to an inquiry for an unknown 
 murderer, spelling out the name, occupation, and address. 
 The name, occupation, and address were found in the Paris 
 directory, but more than ten years having elapsed since the 
 crime, it was too late for any proceedings. But in this case, 
 a number of persons knew the name, occupation, and address, 
 and if they really were connected with the murderer, that 
 fact was known to at least the murderer himself. 
 
 Yet despite all this, Dr. Salveton says : 
 
 " A table has spelt out facts not known to any person pres- 
 ent, but known to others. Its replies, however, were reported 
 ' always very correct when they were previously known to 
 one or other of those joining hands in the circle ' and ' always 
 confused or absurd when the table was asked things unknown 
 to all present.' 
 
 " I hold it to be established, though not fully demonstrated, 
 that the motive force of the table is quite unconnected with 
 any diabolical or supernatural intervention, and that this 
 force is connected with the scientifically studied phenomena 
 of hypnotism and catalepsy; by the formation of a circle of 
 hands by the experimenters, for a longer or shorter period, 
 this force seems to be discharged from their persons, just as 
 electricity is discharged from several cells coupled up to form 
 a battery, and by the application of this force the table can 
 be made to execute movements dictated by the will of all or 
 one unknown to themselves, or vaguely perceived by one of 
 them only, by a sort of collective, but very feeble, hypnotism." 
 
 The first cases I gave showed that no " cells coupled " are 
 necessary. 
 
 Here is a more composite case from Bartlett (op. cit., 
 p. 117). It anticipates what will be told later of Foster's 
 reading from folded slips, and getting visions of the per- 
 sonalities to whom the names belonged. 
 
 From a Washington paper, name and date not given. Mr. 
 Bartlett, though plainly sincere, had not a historian's care 
 in his documentation. He tells me that every newspaper 
 account in his book which was cut out by him, is properly 
 attributed and dated, but that he used some clippings which 
 were sent him by others without the desirable memoranda,
 
 Ch. XI] Foster's Rocking-Chair. Barrett's Amateur 175 
 
 and, especially in the confusion of travel, marking those often 
 escaped him. 
 
 "When the folded slip was placed on the table, three raps 
 indicated that the spirit corresponding to the name was present. 
 
 ' Yes,' said Mr. Foster, ' it is little . She is your 
 
 cousin, who loved you very dearly, and is very glad you came 
 here. She points to that rocking-chair in the corner, behind 
 me, and says she will go and sit in it. If she can, she will 
 make it rock.' 
 
 " At this point we of course looked at the chair, but so 
 many other ' signs and wonders ' crowded upon us that in a 
 moment we had forgotten all about it, when suddenly the lad 
 looked up in amazement, and pointed to the distant rocking- 
 chair, which surely enough was rocking away vigorously. When 
 the fact was noticed and acknowledged, raps came in all parts 
 of the room, and the sofa jumped out of place once more, as 
 if in confirmation of our acknowledgment." 
 
 Apparently the following is a strong case for the medium 
 being the source of the intelligence, and not some other mind 
 behind the manifestations. In Pr. IV, 34, Professor Barrett 
 gives an account of a seance with a lady (amateur) in Dublin, 
 which, although interesting for the usual physical manifesta- 
 tions, I quote mainly for the sake of its conclusion. The 
 phenomena began with the usual raps, 
 
 " like the ticking of a hard point on the oilcloth which covered 
 
 the floor of the room In obedience to my request, the table 
 
 raised the two legs nearest to me completely off the ground, 
 some 8 or 10 inches, and thus suspended itself for a few moments. 
 Again a similar act was performed on the other side. Next 
 came a very unexpected occurrence. Whilst absolutely free 
 from the contact of every person the table wriggled itself 
 backward and forward, advancing towards the arm-chair in 
 which I sat, and ultimately completely imprisoning me in 
 my seat. ... It was followed by Mr. L. and Miss I., but they 
 
 were at no time touching it 
 
 "Addressing the table, I now asked if knocks could be 
 
 given without the contact of the hand Three knocks quickly 
 
 came. The hands of both Mr. L. and Miss I. were now 
 held up, and whilst they partially withdrew from the table, 
 the knocks still came, not so vigorously, but still there they 
 were. This went on for some minutes, till they ceased to 
 be heard. A refresher was then given in the shape of a 
 few moments' contact with the hands. Once more the knocks 
 returned, and continued some time after the hands were
 
 176 Molar Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pi I 
 
 removed." [Various ' refreshers ' of the force will be met with 
 as we proceed. H. H.] 
 
 " There was always a remarkable intelligence and often a 
 jocosity about the sounds, and when a tune was played on the 
 piano the raps kept time to it. Suddenly, only the tips of our 
 fingers being on the table, the heavy loo table at which we 
 were sitting made a series of very violent prancing movements 
 (which I could not imitate afterwards except by using both 
 hands and all my strength) ; the blows were so heavy that I 
 hurriedly stopped the performance, fearing for the safety of 
 the gas chandelier in the room below. 
 
 " It is true the character of the pious platitudes spelt out 
 by the table were just such as the medium herself (a Methodist) 
 would be likely to concoct." 
 
 Sir William Crookes says (Researches, p. 95) : 
 
 "During a seance with Mr. Home, a small lath, which I 
 have before mentioned, moved across the table to me, in the 
 light, and delivered a message to me by tapping my hand; I 
 repeating the alphabet, and the lath tapping me at the right 
 letters. The other end of the lath was resting on the table 
 some distance from Mr. Home's hands. 
 
 " The taps were so sharp and clear, and the lath was evi- 
 dently so well under control of the invisible power which was 
 governing its movements, that I said, ' Can the intelligence 
 governing the motion of this lath change the character of 
 the movements, and give me a telegraphic message through the 
 Morse alphabet by taps on my hand ? ' (I have every reason 
 to believe that the Morse code was quite unknown to any other 
 person present, and it was only imperfectly known to me.) 
 Immediately I said this, the character of the taps changed, 
 and the message was continued in the way I had requested. 
 The letters were given too rapidly for me to do more than 
 catch a word here and there, and consequently I lost the 
 message; but I heard sufficient to convince me that there 
 was a good Morse operator at the other end of the line, wher- 
 ever that might be." 
 
 I don't see the impossibility of " the good Morse operator 
 at the other end of the line" being Sir William himself, 
 as were plainly Professor Barrett's Dublin Methodist lady, 
 and hundreds of others, including the father of the Davis 
 children, in a part of Professor Alexander's report. 
 
 From Crookes's Researches, p. 94 : 
 
 "A 'good failure often teaches more than the most success- 
 ful experiment.' It took place in the light, in my own room, 
 with only a few private friends and Mr. Home present. Sev-
 
 Ch. XI] Pencil and Lath. Influence Covers Miles 177 
 
 eral circumstances . . . had shown that the power that even- 
 ing was strong. I therefore expressed a wish to witness the 
 actual production of a written message such as I had heard 
 described a short time before by a friend. Immediately an 
 alphabetic communication was made as follows: 'We will 
 try.' A pencil and some sheets of paper had been lying on 
 the center of the table; presently the pencil rose up on its 
 point, and after advancing by hesitating jerks to the paper 
 fell down. It then rose and again fell. A third time it tried, 
 but with no better result. After three unsuccessful attempts, a 
 small wooden lath, which was lying near upon the table, slid 
 towards the pencil, and rose a few inches from the table; the 
 pencil rose again, and propping itself against the lath, the two 
 together made an effort to mark the paper. It fell, and then 
 a joint effort was again made. After a third trial the lath 
 gave it up and moved back to its place, the pencil lay as it 
 fell across the paper, and an alphabetic message told us : ' We 
 have tried to do as you asked, but our power is exhausted.' " 
 
 M. Edmond Duchatel narrates in The Annals of Psychical 
 Science, January-March, 1910, that he and a " psychometrist " 
 seated at a table, got it to rap out a message from a friend 
 three kilometres away whom he had asked to concentrate 
 his attention on the topic at the hour appointed for the sitting, 
 and that he got not only the message, but that he and his 
 companion both got a pain in the shoulder from which, un- 
 known to them, the absent friend was suffering. 
 
 While the two persons were at the table, the distant third 
 person went to sleep (an experience almost unknown to him 
 in day-time) and was sleepy for hours after the seance closed. 
 He lost the pain in the shoulder when it was conveyed to 
 the sitters. 
 
 It seems as obvious as anything in these foggy regions 
 can be, that the message came to the " psychometrist's " sub- 
 liminal consciousness (which will be explained later, see 
 index) and was echoed back to him by the table. 
 
 The case anticipates also our consideration of telepathy, 
 but in the vast complexity of these phenomena, clear dis- 
 entanglement and sequent arrangement are almost impossible. 
 
 It may be handy to have a word for telepathic communica- 
 tion with persons not present with the sitter a wider tele- 
 pathy. Some of my Grecian friends suggest teloteropathy. 
 But this is anticipating. 
 
 Below are some of the occurrences and " messages " re-
 
 178 Molar TelepsycMc Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 ported by Sir William Crookes to have taken place in the 
 presence of Home. They gave to the manifestations of molar 
 telekinesis a " spiritual " background. These are so generally 
 associated that it is not practicable to give a considerable idea 
 of telekinetic phenomena without bringing in the alleged 
 spiritual element. Most of this, perhaps all, exhibited in 
 connection with telekinesis, I am inclined, as in my friend 
 
 P 's case, to attribute to the volition, often unconscious, 
 
 of the operator. 
 
 (Pr. VI, 102) : " Answers were given by raps and notes 
 on the accordion. The alphabet being called for by five raps, 
 the following message was spelled out : ' It is a glorious truth. 
 It was the solace of my earth-life and the triumph over the 
 change called death. Robert Chambers.' " 
 
 (Ib. 107) : " Mr. Home then took the accordion in his right 
 hand in the usual manner, and placing his left on the table 
 it was held both by Miss Douglas and Mrs. Wm. Crookes. 
 The light was then put out, and the following message was 
 spelt : 
 
 "'The Four Seasons. _ Winter first.' Spring The Birth 
 of the Flowers.' ' Birds in Summer.' 
 
 " The above messages were given whilst the piece was being 
 played. It would be impossible to give any idea of the beauty 
 of the music, or its expressive character. During the part 
 typifying summer, we bad a beautiful accompaniment, the 
 chirping and singing of the birds being heard along with the 
 accordion. During autumn " [Which the spirits seem to have 
 forgotten in the foregoing enumeration.] " we had ' The Last 
 Rose of Summer' played. 
 
 " Home said that the spirit playing was a stranger to him. 
 It was a high and very powerful one, and was a female who 
 had died young. 
 
 "Mrs. Wm. Crookes said: 'Is it my cousin M ? It has 
 
 flashed into my mind that it is she.' 
 
 " Answer by raps : ' Yes.' " 
 
 (Ib. 114) : " We soon had the message : ' We find we have 
 no more power.' The meeting then broke up." 
 
 On another occasion: 
 
 " Mr. Home then took it in his hand, where it played, and 
 delivered the following message by chords " [Presumably at 
 the mention of letters of the alphabet. H. H.] " in the usual 
 way: 
 
 " ' Our joy and thankfulness to have been allowed to make 
 our presence manifest. We thank you for your patience and 
 we thank God for His love.' "
 
 Ch. XI] TeleUnetic Shell Carving? 179 
 
 (Ib. 119) : " We then saw the accordion expand and con- 
 tract, and heard a tune played. Mrs. Win. Crookes and Mr. 
 Home saw a light on the lower part of the accordion, where 
 the keys were, and we then heard and saw the keys clicked 
 and depressed one after the other fairly and deliberately, as 
 if to show us that the power doing it, although invisible (or 
 nearly so) to us, had full control over the instrument." 
 
 The following is probably the most incredible case of 
 intelligent molar telekinesis on record. In puzzling over it, 
 one may properly ask: If the telekinetic power can move 
 objects without contact, move them with discrimination and 
 force or delicacy, where is the limit to what it can do with 
 them? The case suggests that the field may be at least as 
 broad as human faculty. According to all we have gathered 
 before regarding the power, I, for one, don't know whether 
 to believe in the following alleged manifestation or not. 
 Where is one to draw the line ? The account at least indicates 
 a direction in which to keep one's eyes open, but unlike most 
 of what I quote from Moses, it rests on his unsupported 
 testimony. 
 
 From Stainton Moses' memorandum book (Pr. XI, 61-2) : 
 
 "August 27th, 1875 Some time since a cameo was cut 
 
 during a seance at Douglas House Last night the experiment 
 
 was repeated under rery satisfactory circumstances A long 
 
 message was rapped out by Catharine [A frequent " control " of 
 Moses. A control is an alleged spirit producing phenomena, 
 including communications of any kind, through a medium. 
 II.II. j. She said they had brought a shell, and were going to 
 cut a cameo; that I was in trance 'for the night,' and that I 
 was to be left alone till morning, and not to be told of what was 
 done. A light was struck, and Dr. and Mrs. S. saw a shell in the 
 
 middle of the table. I was in deep trance Then Mentor came 
 
 and Imperator. [Two other controls whom I believe we have 
 met before, and shall often meet later. H.H.] After he left, 
 light was called for, and in the center of the table was a cameo 
 and a quantity of debris of shell. Noises had been heard as of 
 picking, and I saw a hand. The shell is more clearly cut than 
 the first, and shows a head, laurel-crowned. It is polished inside, 
 and shows plain marks of the graving tool. The seance lasted 
 about an hour. 
 
 " From Mr. Moses' letter to Mrs. Speer August 1st, 1875 : 
 " Mentor was the cunning workman who fashioned the 
 cameo. He is not content with his work, which he says was 
 bad, and that he can do much better. He actually carved it,
 
 180 Molar TelepsycUc Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 he says. And I see no reason to doubt it, seeing that I can 
 find no limit to spirit-power. If they are allowed to work in 
 their own way they can do almost anything. It is only when 
 we compel them to work in lines prescribed by us that they 
 find any difficulty." 
 
 I have deliberately transposed the chronological order of 
 these passages, because the one now first opens the subject 
 better. 
 
 Assuming the authenticity of the story, it is not very easy 
 to fasten the performance on Moses's involuntary self. The 
 power that disintegrated the particles of shell presumably 
 came from him, an agent apparently being always required, 
 and the most remarkable feats being performed while the 
 agent is in trance, as Moses was on this occasion. But that 
 he supplied the direction of the power the artistic capacity 
 is not an hypothesis so easy to adopt: for I have met no 
 other intimation that he had any capacity in the representa- 
 tive arts. The case leaves less room for the medium and 
 more for the alleged control, than any other alleged tele- 
 psychic telekinesis I can recall. 
 
 And here at last we are face to face with the spiritistic 
 hypothesis, and with the only choice as yet apparent, between 
 accepting it or leaving the judgment in suspense an art 
 in which apparently we shall have much practice as we pro- 
 ceed. 
 
 This astounding story is very properly " the limit " of our 
 attention to molar telekinetic displays of intelligence.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 MOLECULAR TELEP8YCHIC TELEKINESIS 
 
 So far as the tangled phenomena have permitted classifica- 
 tion, we have now had illustrations of telekinetic phenomena 
 under the heads of the unconscious molar (Chapters VIII, 
 IX), the unconscious molecular (Chapter X), and the con- 
 scious molar (Chapter XI). Let us proceed to the conscious 
 molecular, though so intermixed are the phenomena and the 
 accounts of them that I have already partly anticipated that 
 division, and question my wisdom in having attempted any 
 division at all. 
 
 Intelligent Sounds 
 
 First, the changes in furniture, etc., which produce " raps " 
 expressing intelligence. To begin again with the most prob- 
 able, or least improbable, manifestations those through the 
 young and innocent 
 
 Professor Alexander says of the Davis children (Pr. VII, 
 177): 
 
 " From the first outbreak of the phenomena raps were the 
 principal means used for announcing the supposed spirit pres- 
 ence. They came on the floor, on the table, and, more rarely, 
 on the walls, in signals which from the beginning were sharply 
 individualized for each separate influence, the same individu- 
 ality maintaining its characteristics throughout the sittings. 
 As before stated, they varied in loudness from hardly per- 
 ceptible ticks up to resounding blows, such as might be struck 
 by a large wooden mallet. In the quality of some of these 
 sounds there were also marked and persistent distinctions. 
 . . . This individuality of the raps was early forced upon our 
 notice; and we learnt to recognize them when heard." 
 
 (Ib. 179) : " The same blows came, but with even more 
 intensity; and they were finally requested by Mrs. Davis from 
 another room not to make so much noise, as they would wake 
 the children who were sleeping in other parts of the house. 
 The blows seemed to Mr. Davis to shake the whole building. 
 
 " Mr. Davis tapped out the alphabet from A to Z and 
 
 181
 
 182 Molecular Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 the numbers 1 to in Morse signals. At each letter given the 
 same sound was exactly imitated, the raps coming again near 
 the elder girl on the floor at the other end of the room. The 
 imitation was, indeed, so perfect that Mr. Davis declared it 
 was his own ' sending.' " 
 
 Mr. Davis was an expert telegrapher, and it seems not 
 improbable that through sympathies which often accompany 
 zoomagnetic power, and which will be dealt with later, it 
 really was, unconsciously, his own " sending," via the chil- 
 dren, especially in view of tha following paragraph (Cf. 
 Home's lath, in the last chapter) : 
 
 " Nevertheless, no message was given in Morse signals, the 
 reason affirmed being that, as the medium did not know tele- 
 graphy, they could not use her for that purpose. Now, Mr. 
 Davis was the only person present who knew anything at all 
 about Morse signals. . . . One only mistake was made at the 
 letter Q, which was, however, correctly given the second time. 
 All the other letters were smartly reproduced without the slight- 
 est hesitation. . . . Mr. X. found, when he tried alone, that, 
 although he knew telegraphy well, he could not kick out the 
 signals with his feet 
 
 "I may say that, in spite of the many little proofs we had 
 obtained of the genuineness of our phenomena, my attitude 
 and that of Mr. Davis towards each repetition of the mani- 
 festations was always one of watchful suspicion. Protests were 
 often made by the influences at work; and it was affirmed 
 that we hindered their action by our persistent doubts." 
 
 This necessity for faith for freedom from " doubts " of 
 course suggests necessity of a willingness to be gulled, and 
 was generally so interpreted in the days when we were even 
 more ignorant than we are now. The topic will be discussed 
 more fully later. 
 
 Eaps very generally come in answer to questions. In the 
 account (see in Chapter X) of Foster's percussive lights, the 
 original said, in place of the words I first put in brackets: 
 " When a question was asked, and the answer was no, which 
 was signified by one rap," and, in the other place " the answer 
 was yes," and the account, as I gave it, was followed by : 
 
 " We asked the raps to come as rapidly as possible, which 
 was done, dozens of them racing one after another, with 
 scarcely any intermission. Then we asked the raps to come 
 deliberately, then slow, which was immediately complied with.
 
 Ch. XII] Baps Respond to Auditors Will 183 
 
 That night's experience satisfied me forerer that there were 
 raps produced through an agency which has not yet been ex- 
 plained satisfactorily." 
 
 The raps produced in Mr. Armstrong's presence (page 146) 
 are said in the original account, to have come on his " ex- 
 pressing a wish," and he farther says: 
 
 " I could at will cause these sounds to cease or reappear, one, 
 two, three, or any number I demanded, and, stranger still, I 
 could induce a succession of knocks of various degrees of 
 intensity and so delivered as to ' knock out ' with wonderful 
 accuracy any tune I asked for. I can now recall amongst 
 many such the airs of ' Not for Joe,' and ' The Blue-bells of 
 Scotland,' as especially well marked." 
 
 Apparently this manifestation of nerve force is sometimes 
 as involuntary as that in St. Vitus's dance, as illustrated in 
 the following from the Autobiography of a Journalist, by 
 W. J. Stillman, the well-known artist and author, who was 
 for a long time our Consul in Crete (I, 189-90) : 
 
 " We heard of a remarkable case in the circle of our own 
 acquaintance which had been kept from public knowledge as 
 far as possible by the aversion to publicity of the father of 
 the subject, my brother's chief foreman. She was a girl of 
 fourteen, of a timid and nervous organization, who had suf- 
 fered great annoyance by the persistence of the rappings about 
 her wherever she might be; at first in her bedroom, but finally 
 to her great dismay in the class-rooms of the primary public 
 school of New York, in which she held the position of assistant 
 
 teacher The rappings caused such fright amongst the school 
 
 children that she was menaced with dismissal if they did not 
 cease. She implored the agency which was responsible for the 
 sounds to leave her alone at school and do what seemed best 
 to them at home, and the rappings did actually cease at school." 
 
 An apparent instance of the well-known reactive effect 
 of prayer on the organism. 
 
 From Sir Wm. Crookes (Pr. VI, 121), after an account 
 of a seance with Home: 
 
 "Raps then said: 'We must go.' The raps then com- 
 menced loudly all over the room and got fainter and fainter 
 until they became inaudible." 
 
 (Ib. 122): "Miss Douglas said: 'Dear spirits, how 
 pleased you would have been had you lived to witness the 
 progress Spiritualism is now making.' Immediately a mes- 
 sage was given in reply : ' We are not dead ! '
 
 184 Molecular Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 "I felt touched strongly on the knee by something feeling 
 like fingers. On putting my hand down a sheet of paper was 
 put into it. I said: 'Is anything written on it?' 'Yes.' 
 It being too dark to see what was written, I asked that it might 
 be told me by raps, and on repeating the alphabet I got the 
 following: ' Kctojdourdaniel.' On striking a light the fol- 
 lowing was seen neatly written: <R. C. to J. D. Our 
 Daniel.' " [Alluding to Home.] " Miss Douglas said the R. C. 
 was Robert Chambers, whilst J. D. were the initials of her 
 own name." 
 
 In these almost incredible performances there were none 
 of the " cabinets " and other paraphernalia used by Eusapia 
 Palladino and many others, and Sir William Crookes ex- 
 presses great confidence in Home's sincerity, and in the gen- 
 uineness of the phenomena manifested through him. 
 
 Bartlett says (op. di., 105) : 
 
 "I remember one evening calling with Foster upon Mrs. S., 
 who had recently moved into unfurnished apartments. Mrs. S. 
 said . . . * Please give us some physical manifestations. My 
 parlor is just the place, heavy blankets being over the windows, 
 to keep out the glare of the sun. One small wooden table 
 is the only furniture.'. . . ' No,' replied Mr. Foster, describing 
 at the same time how unpleasant it was for him to sit in 
 the dark. Mrs. S. persisted, 'Do, please, just this once.' 
 Finally Mr. Foster consented under these conditions: the 
 table was to be placed under the chandelier, we three should 
 take hold of hands around the table, matches should be placed % 
 on the table, Mrs. S. agreeing to light the gas the moment Mr. 
 Foster so requested. We sat in silence a moment, when Mr. 
 Foster said the spirit of M.," [Ada Isaacs Menken, Mr. Bart- 
 lett gives me permission to state. H. H.] " whom we all had 
 known in life, was there. Mr. Foster said that he saw the 
 spirit perfectly, and that she said if we would keep quiet she 
 would dance, and that the noise from the heels of her shoes 
 on the bare floor would give the tone and the character of the 
 dance. She did so. It was a success. Within a few moments 
 Foster said, ' Light the gas.' He was dripping with perspira- 
 tion, which showed his peculiar nervous condition during 
 physical manifestations. . . . After a short rest, the medium re- 
 cuperated, and we turned off the gas the second time M. 
 
 immediately returned and finished the dance. Whenever I 
 think of that night, I can distinctly hear the clitter-clatter of 
 the spirit dancer's shoes." 
 
 Of course if Foster had good control over raps and tick- 
 ings, he could, voluntarily or involuntarily, give them the
 
 Ch. XII] Temperatures, Moses' Raps 185 
 
 rhythm of a dance. His doing so need not be deliberately 
 fraudulent: he may have, as he said, visualized a dancer. 
 Neither is it proved (a negative is hard to prove) that there 
 was not one. 
 
 Mr. Bartlett continues the same account: 
 
 " Mr. Foster then said the spirits told him they would cool 
 the room (it being a hot summer's night). Immediately waves 
 of wind rushed through the room, so cool that it seemed as 
 though they came direct from an iceberg." 
 
 As already intimated, wind rushes and cooling of tempera- 
 tures are frequently noticed in the accounts of these phenom- 
 ena. They include some which eminent men of science declare 
 they have felt from a hole in Eusapia Palladino's head. That 
 seems about the simplest of her phenomena, with the least 
 chance for the cheating with which she seems to like to eke 
 out her real powers if she has any as I have no doubt she 
 has. 
 
 Here is a far different manifestation from Stainton Moses 
 (Pr. IX, 290) : 
 
 " The room, which had been filled (especially round me) 
 with floating clouds of light, grew suddenly dark, and absolute 
 stillness took the place of the previous loud knockings. It 
 would have been a strange scene for an ear-witness. The table, 
 isolated, with no human hand touching it, giving forth a series 
 of mysterious thuds of varying intensity, some of which might 
 have been made by a muffled sledge-hammer, all indicating 
 intelligence; an intelligence that showed itself by deliberation, 
 or eagerness, or stately solemnity, according to the nature of 
 the communication. Round the table three persons sitting 
 with a hush of expectation, and faces (if they could have been 
 seen) of awe-stricken earnestness; a question put, and a loud 
 response, another, and a series, as though by a counsel cross- 
 examining a dumb witness. The room shrouded in total dark- 
 ness, except at one end, where shifting masses of luminous 
 vapor now and again gathered into a pillar which dimly out- 
 lined a form, and again dispersed and flitted round the head 
 of one of the sitters. No scene could be imagined more calcu- 
 lated to strike a novice with awe, none more solemn and 
 impressive for those who participated in it. The Witch of 
 Endor was not more surprised when her unholy incantation 
 evoked the shade of Samuel than I was when Imperator, in 
 answer to my solemn adjuration, professed himself to be a 
 departed spirit."
 
 186 Molecular Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 Here is in detail some of the conversation alluded to 
 above : 
 
 " Question. Are these communications from spirits? An- 
 swer. Yes. Q. Spirits of the departed? A. Yes. Q. Are you 
 
 a spirit once incarnated? A. Yes Q. Is the account given 
 
 of these manifestations by spirits true? A. I don't know. 
 
 Q. Is what you tell us true? A. Yes (emphatically) 
 
 Q. Did you write that message the other night? A. No. 
 Q. Were you there when it was written? A. No. Q. You 
 did not come because Dr. Speer offended you? A. Yes. (Dr. 
 S. again apologized, and the apology was received with a series 
 of stately raps, suggestive of bows.)" 
 
 [A pretty strong indication of "the will to believe "! H. H.] 
 " Q. Then your absence let in an evil or lying spirit ? A. 
 Yes." [Again the mediaeval superstition! It was afterward 
 denied by Moses's " spirit," see p. 542 (Newbold sitting). H. H.] 
 "Q. Are we liable to that? A. Yes. Q. Then you do leave 
 me? A. No. Q. Not usually, you mean? A. Yes. Q. Then 
 we must be guarded and careful to sit with solemnity, and 
 follow guidance? A. Yes. Q. You are good? A. Yes. Q. I 
 solemnly charge and adjure you in the name of God that you 
 tell the truth. Are you a good spirit, once incarnated in the 
 flesh? A. Yes. (Three of the loudest knocks I ever heard. 
 We all involuntarily drew in our breath, and a feeling of awe 
 stole over us.)" 
 
 We are now getting into very high society. This gentleman 
 Imperator we will return to again. But some other matters 
 had better be treated first, one of them being Sir William 
 Crookes's conclusions regarding the significance of raps (Re- 
 searches, p. 95) : 
 
 "Whilst I have observed many circumstances which appear 
 to show that the will and intelligence of the medium have 
 much to do with the phenomena, I have observed some cir- 
 cumstances which seem conclusively to point to the agency of 
 an outside intelligence, not belonging to any human being in 
 the room 
 
 "I have been with Miss Fox when she has been writing a 
 message automatically to one person present, whilst a message 
 to another person on another subject was being given alpha- 
 betically by means of ' raps,' and the whole time she was 
 conversing freely with a third person on a subject totally 
 different from either." 
 
 As we shall see later, Mrs. Piper wrote as one person, and 
 at the same time talked as another.
 
 Ch. XII] Mysterious Sounds and Voices 187 
 
 Other sounds than raps are alleged to have manifested 
 intelligence. All sounds so manifesting are, like raps, re- 
 peated at request, a definite number of times, loud or faint, 
 and in different places; and by a prearranged code of signals, 
 give messages, and answer questions with varying accuracy. 
 
 Dr. Speer says of the musical sounds described on p. 148 
 (Pr. IX, 281) : 
 
 " Certain evidences of intelligence having been ap- 
 parent in the manifestations, we ascertained that the sounds 
 were in truth evidences of the presence of individuals pur- 
 porting to have long since departed from earth-life. The intel- 
 ligence was manifested first by answers to questions, which 
 were given in the same manner as the raps on a table, one, 
 two, three, five, etc. The peculiarity of the answers was that 
 the tone of the sounds corresponded in a most singular and 
 convincing manner with the nature of the response. In other 
 words, the passions of individuals, as exemplified on earth by 
 tones of speech, were here illustrated by the peculiar type and 
 tone of the musical sound." 
 
 Under Sounds we may as well include the unaccountable 
 " voices " of which accounts began to appear in manuscripts 
 long before there was any printing. The reader will prob- 
 ably not care for more than a single veridical case. Stillman 
 gives a good one (op. cit., I, 200-1) : 
 
 "I saw one day a hunter who had come into the woods 
 with a motive in some degree like mine impatience of the 
 restraints and burdens of civilization, and pure love of solitude. 
 He had become, not bestialized, like most of the men I saw, 
 but animalized he had drifted back into the condition of his 
 dog, with his higher intellect inert. He had built himself a 
 cabin in the depth of the woods, and there he lived in the most 
 complete isolation from human society he could attain 
 
 " He seemed to have no desire for companionship, but there 
 was nothing morose or misanthropic in his love of seclusion. 
 . . . He had heard of spiritism, and his own experience led 
 him to acceptance of its reality. In his solitary life, in the 
 unbroken silence which reigned around him, he heard mysteri- 
 ous voices, and only the year before he had heard one say that 
 he was wanted at home. He paid no attention to it, thinking 
 it only an illusion, but, after an interval, it was repeated so 
 distinctly that he packed his knapsack, took his dog, and went 
 out with the intention of going home. On the way he met a 
 messenger sent after him, who told him that his brother had 
 met with an accident which disabled him from all work, and 
 begged him to come to his assistance. The voice had come
 
 188 Molecular Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 to him at the time of the accident. As a rule, however, the 
 voices seemed vagarious and he attached no importance to 
 them, except as phenomena which interested him slightly." 
 
 Stillman also " heard voices " in the silence of the woods, 
 as many imaginative people do, but has not stated that any 
 of them were veridical. 
 
 Intelligent Lights 
 
 As raps and other sounds have communicated intelligence 
 from somewhere perhaps merely reflecting it from the me- 
 dium, so have lights. 
 
 Intelligence was manifested by Foster's lights, on pages 150 
 and 182. 
 
 Sir William Crookes says (Researches, p. 91) : 
 
 "I have had questions answered by the flashing of a bright 
 
 light a desired number of times in front of my face 
 
 I have had an alphabetic communication given by luminous 
 flashes occurring before me in the air, whilst my hand was 
 moving about amongst them. I have seen a luminous cloud 
 floating upwards to a picture. Under the strictest test con- 
 ditions, I have more than once had a solid, self-luminous, 
 crystalline body placed in my hand by a hand which did not 
 belong to any person in the room. In the light I have seen a 
 luminous cloud hover over a heliotrope on a side table, break 
 a sprig off, and carry the sprig to a lady; and on some occa- 
 sions I have seen a similar luminous cloud visibly condense 
 to the form of a hand and carry small objects about." 
 
 Here were intimations of materializations. Such are gen- 
 erally associated with light. 
 
 Moses says (Pr. IX, 275-6) : 
 
 " Since the commencement of the present year we have had 
 another kind of light altogether. ... It flashes with great rapid- 
 ity, and answers questions by the usual code of signals. The 
 light usually hovers over my head, sometimes coming into the 
 circle, but more frequently floating in a distant corner of the 
 room. It is not apparently solid, nor does it seem to be sur- 
 rounded with drapery." 
 
 Dr. Speer says (Pr. IX, 297) : 
 
 " December 31st, 1872 A column of light about seven feet 
 
 high was seen to move round the room, and about two feet to 
 the right of the column was a large glowing mass of light
 
 Ch. XII] The Speers on Moses 189 
 
 During the time Imperator was entrancing the medium, and 
 conversing with us through him, we saw a large bright cross 
 of light behind the medium's head, rays surrounding it; after 
 this it culminated into a beautiful line of light of great bril- 
 liancy, reaching several feet high and moving from side to side. 
 Behind this column of light on the floor was a bright cluster 
 of lights in oblong shape. These remained for more than half- 
 an-hour, and upon asking Imperator the meaning of the lights, 
 he said the pillar of light was himself; the bright light behind 
 him his attendant; and the numerous lights seen in the room 
 belonged to the band. The light around the medium's head 
 showed his great spiritual power. He also said in time we might 
 see him; might do so now were our spiritual vision clearer." 
 
 And here we are at last landed in the jumble of sounds, 
 lights, trances, materializations, alleged spiritual communica- 
 tions which, in addition to molar telekinetic phenomena, 
 raps, and Heaven knows what else, for a dozen years or 
 more, seem to have constituted the daily experience of Stain- 
 ton Moses and those near to him. 
 
 So far I have tried to keep the threads distinct, but they 
 have now become too complicated. 
 
 Moses' phenomena are so well summed up in a letter from 
 Mr. Charlton Speer that, at the expense of some repetition, 
 I give it virtually entire (Pr. IX, 344-9) : 
 
 "My Dear Mr. Myers, You have asked for some of my 
 personal recollections of seances with Mr. Stainton Moses, at 
 which I was present. ... It is important to note that at these 
 seances no less than ten different kinds of manifestations took 
 place with more or less frequency. On occasions when we 
 had fewer varieties we were usually told that the conditions 
 were not good. When they were favorable the manifestations 
 were more numerous, the raps more distinct, the lights brighter, 
 and the musical sounds clearer. The various occurrences may 
 be briefly enumerated as follows: 
 
 " 1. Great variety of raps, often given simultaneously, and 
 ranging in force from the rapping of a finger-nail to the tread 
 of a foot sufficiently heavy to shake the room. 
 
 " 2. Raps which answered questions coherently and with the 
 greatest distinctness; also gave messages, sometimes of con- 
 siderable length, through the medium of the alphabet. At these 
 times all the raps ceased except the one identified with the 
 communicating spirit, and perfect quiet prevailed until the 
 message was delivered. We could nearly always tell at once 
 with which spirit we were talking, owing to the perfectly dis- 
 tinct individuality of each different rap.
 
 190 ' Molecular Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 "3. Lights were of two different kinds objective and sub- 
 jective Dr. Speer and myself being of entirely unmedium- 
 
 istic temperaments, we were only able to see the objective 
 lights, but Mr. Stainton Moses, Mrs. Speer, and other occa- 
 sional sitters frequently saw and described those which were 
 merely subjective. Another curious point in relation to the 
 objective lights was that, however brightly they might shine, 
 they never unlike an ordinary lamp threw any radiance 
 around them or illuminated the smallest portion of the sur- 
 rounding darkness when it was dark in the slightest degree. 
 
 "4. Scents of various descriptions were always brought to 
 the circle the most common being musk, verbena, new-mown 
 hay, and one unfamiliar odor which we were told was called 
 spirit-scent. Sometimes breezes heavy with perfume swept 
 round the circle, at other times quantities of liquid musk, &c., 
 would be poured on the hands of the sitters and, by request, on 
 our handkerchiefs. At the close of a seance scent was often 
 found to be oozing out of the medium's head, and the more it 
 was wiped away, the stronger and more plentiful it became. 
 
 " 5. The musical sounds, which were many and of great 
 
 variety Having myself had a thorough musical education, 
 
 I was able to estimate, at its true value, the importance of 
 these particular manifestations The musical sounds pro- 
 duced in the room in which there was no instrument, . . . 
 were about four in number. First, there were what we called 
 the ' fairy bells.' These resembled the tones produced by strik- 
 ing musical glasses with a small hammer. ... It was difficult 
 to judge where the sound of these 'fairy bells' came from, 
 but I often applied my ear to the top of the table, and the 
 music seemed to be somehow in the wood not underneath 
 it; as on listening under the table, the music would appear to 
 be above. Next we had quite a different sound that of a 
 stringed instrument more nearly akin to a violoncello than. 
 
 anything else It ... might perhaps be produced by placing a 
 
 'cello on the top of a drum The third sound was an exact 
 
 imitation of an ordinary hand-bell, which would be rung sharply 
 by way of indicating the presence of the particular spirit with 
 whom it was associated. We naturally took care to ascertain 
 
 that there was no bell of any kind in the room Lastly, we 
 
 had a sound that it is exceedingly difficult to offer an adequate 
 description of. The best idea of it I can give is to ask you to 
 imagine the soft tone of a clarionet gradually increasing in 
 intensity until it rivaled the sound of a trumpet, then by de- 
 grees diminishing to the original subdued note of the clarionet, 
 until it eventually died away in a long-drawn-out melancholy 
 wail. This sound was ascribed to ' Odorifer.'. . . Like the two 
 previous sounds I have described, it was always associated with 
 one spirit. 
 
 " It is a noteworthy fact that in no case did the controlling
 
 Ch, XII] Mr. Cliarlton Speer on Moses 191 
 
 agencies produce more than single notes, or at best isolated 
 passages. This they accounted for as owing to the peculiarly 
 unmusical organization of the medium. . . . Over and over again 
 I thoroughly satisfied myself that there were no materials in the 
 room which could in any way assist in making any kind of 
 musical tones, and the clarionet and trumpet sound was one 
 that I should be utterly at a loss to imitate in any way. 
 
 " 6. Direct writing was often given, sometimes on a sheet 
 of paper placed in the centre of the table and equidistant from 
 all the sitters; at other times one of us would place our hands 
 on a piece of paper previously dated and initialed, and usually 
 a message was found written upon it at the conclusion of the 
 stance. We always placed a pencil upon the paper, but some- 
 times we only provided a small piece of lead, the results being 
 the same in both cases. 
 
 " 7. Movements of heavy bodies, such as tables and chairs, 
 
 were by no means infrequent The dining-table ... at which 
 
 we usually sat was an extremely weighty one, and was made 
 from solid Honduras mahogany, but at times it was moved 
 with much greater ease than the combined efforts of all the 
 sitters could accomplish and these combined efforts were power- 
 less to prevent its moving in a certain direction, if the unseen 
 force willed it to do so. 
 
 "8. The passage of matter through matter was sometimes 
 strikingly demonstrated by the bringing from other rooms of 
 various articles through closed and bolted doors. 
 
 " 9. The direct spirit voice, as opposed to the voice of a 
 spirit speaking through the medium while in a state of trance, 
 we very seldom heard, and never with any clearness or dis- 
 tinctness. But occasionally it was attempted, and by listening 
 carefully we could distinguish one or two broken sentences 
 which were hissed out in a sort of husky whisper. 
 
 " 10. The inspirational addresses given by various spirits 
 . . . though the voice proceeded from the medium it was always 
 immediately apparent that the personality addressing us was 
 not that of the medium. The voice was different, and the 
 ideas were not always in accordance with those held at the 
 
 time by the medium Although many spirits exercised this 
 
 power of control, the voice which spoke was always different 
 and in the case of those spirits which controlled regularly, 
 we got to know perfectly well which intelligence was com- 
 municating by the tone of voice and the method of enunciation. 
 
 " Suddenly the medium Mr. Stainton Moses, who 
 
 was sitting exactly opposite me, exclaimed, ' There is a very 
 bright column of light behind you.' Soon afterwards he said 
 that the column of light had developed into a spirit-form. I 
 asked him if the face was familiar to him, and he replied in 
 the negative, at the same time describing the head and features. 
 When the seance was concluded I examined my sheet of paper,
 
 192 Molecular Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 which my hand had never left, and found written on it a mes- 
 sage and signature. The name was that of a distinguished 
 musician. ... I purposely refrain from specifying him, as the 
 use of great names very frequently leads to results quite differ- 
 ent from those intended I asked Mr. Stainton Moses with- 
 out, of course, showing him the written message whether he 
 thought he could recognize the spirit he saw behind my chair 
 if he saw a portrait of him. He said he thought he could, so 
 I gave him several albums containing likenesses of friends, dead 
 and alive, and also portraits of various celebrities. I remained 
 in another part of the room, and did not watch him, nor even 
 knew when he was looking at the right album. On coming to 
 the photograph of the composer in question, he at once said 
 without hesitation, ' That is the face of the spirit I saw behind 
 you.' Then for the first time I showed him the message and 
 signature. 
 
 (Signed) " CHARLTON T. SPEER." 
 
 November 5th, 1893. 
 
 " Ashley Villa, Ventnor, 
 "October 80th, 1893. 
 
 "I wish to state that I am a daughter of Mrs. Stanhope 
 Speer, and was present at many of the seances recorded in 
 Light by my mother, and, further, that the facts therein stated 
 are in my recollection, and are true, and that the phenomena 
 actually took place. " CONSTANCE ROSALIE SPEER." 
 
 I cannot see that it will do any harm at this late day, to 
 state that, somewhere that I cannot trace, I have got the 
 suggestion that the portrait was of Mendelssohn. 
 
 There is a circumstance connected with this letter worth 
 noting. Paragraph 5 regarding the musical sounds is en- 
 tirely at variance with what Moses himself wrote in his 
 note-book over nineteen years before, on September 3 and 4, 
 1874 (Pr. XI, 54) : 
 
 " The musical sounds have reached seven 
 
 " 1. Grocyn The sounds are very pure, and express feeling 
 
 most wonderfully. They are most like a thick harp string. 
 
 " 2. Chom makes the sound of an old Egyptian harp with 
 four strings. There is little similarity to a stringed sound. 
 
 " 3. Said makes a noise somewhat similar to Chom's, but the 
 lyre has only three strings. It is an old Egyptian instrument, 
 and the sound is like dropping water on a steel plate, a sort 
 of liquid sound, very intense. I am told it is very like the 
 sound of a harmonium reed. 
 
 "4. Roophal makes a sound of a seven-stringed lyre, yery 
 pretty rippling sound, but the strings do not seem to me to be 
 arranged in harmonial progression.
 
 Ch. XII] Moses' Telekinetic Orchestra 193 
 
 " 5. Kabbila makes a sound like a drum, very deep, a sort of 
 prolonged roll. 
 
 " 6. makes a sound like the ringing of fine porcelain, 
 
 only that the ring is very much more pronounced. This is a 
 very intense sound. 
 
 " 7. The Welsh Harper makes a sound as of the highest 
 strings of a harp, sharp and ringing. 
 
 " In addition there is a sound of a tambourine and a sort 
 of flapping sound like large wings. These can scarcely be 
 called musical in any sense, though they are but exaggerations 
 of others in some way. The modus operandi is similar." 
 
 These names were spelled out to Moses or his companions, 
 the notes answering at significant letters when the alphabet 
 was repeated. And what a lovely lot of names they are 1 If 
 Koophal had only been accompanied by Damphool, they would 
 have been perfect, and what an orchestra to accompany 
 Imperator and his entourage! 
 
 But in face of the claim generally made by "spirits," as 
 will be more particularly indicated later, that they begin 
 receding from the possibilities of earthly communication im- 
 mediately after death, and are out of its reach altogether 
 in a period somewhere stated at about six years, why should 
 the vast majority of the gentlemen above named proceed 
 from regions so remote in space and time back to the very 
 infancy of music, when Europe has been supplying any 
 number of potentially musical ghosts during the last cen- 
 tury when the art has been at its best? 
 
 There is not a single point of resemblance between the 
 accounts, unless Moses' "ringing of fine porcelain" (Why 
 "fine"?) has some resemblance to Speer's bells. Dr. Speer 
 was a musician and Moses was not. Did they sound so 
 amazingly different to the two men? Did Speer never hear, 
 or in the nineteen years did he forget, the sounds Moses 
 reported; or did Moses never hear those Speer reported, or 
 did they come later in Moses' career, or did Moses imagine 
 the whole thing, including his beautiful names? He does 
 not speak of them as a single experience, but they "have 
 reached seven." Yet despite all this mix-up, there seems no 
 room to doubt there are too many other witnesses that 
 there were a variety of frequent superusual sounds, with in- 
 dications of intelligence behind them. Yet I confess myself
 
 194: Molecular Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. 1 
 
 more nonplussed about the whole Moses matter than about 
 even Home's fire performances: the testimony is so much 
 better and fuller regarding the latter. 
 
 Eegaj-ding the Moses phenomena, the Council of the 
 S. P. E. expressed itself as follows (Pr. IX, 353) : 
 
 " On the question whether the improbability of deception is 
 greater or less than the improbability that the events actually 
 occurred as recorded, the members of the Council individually 
 entertain diverse views, and they do not feel called upon to 
 express any opinion collectively. 
 
 "If the human powers we are familiar with can produce 
 such phenomena as those that took place in the presence of 
 Moses, the methods certainly open new and important fields 
 of investigation, even if less new and less important than 
 would be opened by new powers." 
 
 As I have said more than once, the time for the fraud 
 hypothesis in any respectably vouched-for phenomena, is 
 past. To my mind the strongest argument in favor of the 
 honesty of the experiences whether they were objective, or 
 co-operative hypnotic dreams, is in the portraits of Moses 
 (after death) and of the three Speers Doctor, Mrs., and 
 Mr. Charlton, their son, given in Pr. IX. I was tempted 
 to reproduce them here for that argument's sake, but they 
 by themselves would be out of proportion with the rest of 
 the book. Moses' face, taken after death, gives an impression 
 of strength and dignity which renders such weaknesses as 
 fraud absurd. The eyes being closed, impressions of sin- 
 cerity do not directly enter into the conditions; but if ever 
 any three portraits meant honesty, those of the Speers do, 
 and, in the portraits of the elders especially, very much in- 
 telligence and everything that goes to make up goodness are 
 liberally manifested. 
 
 Often, as my mind dwells upon it, I come up to the im- 
 pression that Moses imagined it all, as I think he imagined 
 the Imperator group and his various musicians (though not 
 the noises), and then I am brought up standing by the tes- 
 timony of these good people, and so the only hypotheses open 
 to my mind regarding Moses, and Home too, are three : 
 
 I. That many wise and good people lied, and lied con-
 
 Ch. XII] Hypotheses regarding Moses 195 
 
 currently; and that Dr. and Mrs. Speer encouraged their 
 son to lie. This I reject. It is less probable than even 
 
 II. That there were numerous illusions dreams, what you 
 please, possibly under the influence of hypnotism, so far 
 identical with from a couple to half a dozen of these people, 
 and at many times, that wherever several of the people give 
 accounts of any one experience there is no material difference 
 except in the nineteen-year-interval testimony over phenomena 
 so uncertain as the quality of musical tones. This hypothesis, 
 while I consider it more probable than the first, I consider 
 less probable than 
 
 III. That the events actually occurred in the normal ex- 
 perience of the witnesses, though possibly the meaning of 
 "normal" needs some sort of widening of which we have 
 not yet any clear inkling. 
 
 Now all I have said is that those three hypotheses are all 
 that are open to my mind. Perhaps that is not strictly cor- 
 rect : for in any doubtful case, no matter how many hypothe- 
 ses in the usual sense are " open," there is always the chance 
 that the correct one still lurks hidden behind. 
 
 I have said that I think III the most likely one open. That 
 is not saying that I accept it. Regarding the telekinesis of 
 
 P and the psychoses of Foster, and of Mrs. Piper as 
 
 will be shown later, to a certain extent I know, and anything 
 farther not inconsistent with what I know, I am inclined 
 to believe. Regarding Home and Moses and the other 
 mediums, I directly know nothing, and my readiness to 
 believe of course depends upon the concurrence of the testi- 
 mony with that regarding mediums I do know. Regarding 
 those I have not met, this gives me, so far, basis for little more 
 than a suspended judgment, always qualified, however, by 
 the fact that I know so many things not yet correlated with 
 what everybody knows, and I recognize so fully that the 
 field of possible knowledge is so immense beside the field 
 of yet-recognized knowledge, that I am more ready than 
 most people to accept alleged new phenomena as actually 
 from the field of possible knowledge. 
 
 The intelligence conveyed by the raps, sounds, and lights 
 which we have so far dealt with by merely telekinetic 
 means irrespective of impersonation or other utterance, vol-
 
 196 Molecular Telepsychic Telekinesis [Bk. II, Pt. I 
 
 untary or in trance, through the organism of a medium, does 
 not seem to have amounted to much with anybody but Stain- 
 ton Moses, and the answer to the question whether it did 
 with him will be largely a matter of personal predilection. 
 He thought it amounted to a great deal. 
 
 We shall meet more about it later. 
 
 The methodistical inspirations of Professor Barrett's friend, 
 even the pious expressions through Home, and some through 
 Moses, do not seem to tend much to edification, at least my 
 edification ; in fact, almost all that has been received through 
 raps and lights relates to the mere business of the manifes- 
 tations, and despite an occasional bit of apparent independ- 
 ence, like the " We are not dead " on page 183, there is very 
 little difficulty in making it out an echo of the medium 
 if one is disposed to. 
 
 Whatever the messages (?) through telekinetic phenomena, 
 they are so much surpassed by those through telepathy and 
 " possession," that it seems hardly worth while to linger 
 over the telekinetic ones. 
 
 But before leaving this region of lights and sounds and 
 phantasmagoric effects, presumably the reader who has so 
 far followed "this strange eventful history" may care to 
 know in a word how, after all, it impresses me. The raps 
 and apparently the electric manifestations attending them and 
 some molar telekinetic phenomena are so closely allied with 
 plain telekinesis and the probable involuntary agency of the 
 medium, that I believe in their genuineness. But the rest 
 impresses me like a dream as if half a dozen people, more or 
 less, had occasionally dreamed the same things. This impres- 
 sion may hardly seem worth putting down again, with the 
 conspicuousness of a chapter ending, as a final impression; 
 but perhaps as we go on, it may prove to be.
 
 BOOK II PART II 
 AUTOKINESIS 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE manifestations we have already seen of the modes of 
 force grouped, perhaps too freely, under the name Telekinesis, 
 have all been from the human body upon objects external 
 to it. Not only the molar movement, but the mysterious 
 changes of temperature, the sounds, lights, alleged materiali- 
 zations, the alleged passing of matter through matter, have 
 taken place only when a " medium " was present, and appar- 
 ently in consequence of an energy manifested through him. 
 
 We now approach a series of new phenomena even less cor- 
 related with established knowledge, which are alleged to take 
 place in the body itself. 
 
 As usual, we approach the group through a phenomenon 
 that might almost equally well be included in the group 
 we are leaving. I refer to the alleged levitation of the 
 human body by a force which apparently is generated in the 
 body itself. I at first grouped this phenomenon with those of 
 molar telekinesis, but as the object acted upon is not external 
 to the body, I finally decided to place it with the new group, 
 along with the resistance of the body to heat, and the pro- 
 duction of stigmata and blisters under the influence of sug- 
 gestion. The healing power of suggestion might probably be 
 justly included also. 
 
 The evidence for some of the alleged resistance to heat, and 
 for the stigmata and blisters seems conclusive; that for levi- 
 tation is not as strong, but certainly is too strong to be 
 ignored. 
 
 This new group has not yet, so far as I know, been even pro- 
 197
 
 198 Autolcinesis [Bk. II, Pt. II 
 
 vided with a name, in fact I don't know that the phenomena 
 have yet been grouped at all, and do not feel sure that I am 
 warranted in grouping them. Of course I do so tentatively. 
 For that matter all classification is tentative, and with the 
 process of knowledge is pretty sure to be upset, and names 
 to go with it. 
 
 As we must have a Greek name to command any respect, 
 perhaps autokinesis will serve for the moment, and last at least 
 as long as the book will. But I sometimes wish we could string 
 out names from our own roots, as do the good Germans, even if 
 we seemed to model them as they appear to, on their dachs- 
 hunds. 
 
 Levitation 
 
 When I first read of levitation, in Home's case, I was 
 tempted to give up farther attention to him and all his ways : 
 it was too much like a man lifting himself by his bootstraps. 
 A bird rises as a man walks, by transmuting molecular force 
 into mechanical force moving a mechanical apparatus against 
 a resisting medium. The same is true of perhaps all use 
 made by men of known molecular forces except magnetism, 
 and even the magnet could not lift itself without the aid of 
 a " keeper " placed above it. But there does not seem to be 
 any theoretical impossibility of the generation, perhaps from 
 gravity itself, of a force counter to gravity, somewhat as 
 negative magnetism is counter to positive. And this sentence 
 is hardly written before along comes Mr. Farrows' alleged 
 discovery that (so far as I can understand it, from the only 
 account I have been able to see), he can directly concentrate 
 the Hertzian waves upon a body with the result of counteract- 
 ing the effect of gravitation. If then, the waves of zoomagnet- 
 ism are convertible into Hertzian waves, " there you are ! " 
 
 I want to caution the reader who may be skeptical regard- 
 ing any one class of these phenomena, against applying here, 
 on the very far borderland of knowledge, the doctrine " falsus 
 in uno falsus in omnibus" with the same confidence that 
 he would apply it in familiar fields. People who get in the 
 way of seeing and recording strange things are very apt, 
 without any bad intentions, gradually to get into the way 
 of seeing and recording too many. Their doing so, however,
 
 
 Ch. XIII] Levitation, Moses 199 
 
 does not invalidate the genuine ones they gather in with 
 the rest; but it does throw upon the reader the difficult task 
 of discriminating, and in many situations, of keeping his 
 mind shut and at the same time quite ready to open. 
 
 But the evidence for levitation is at least worth reading, 
 especially as it does not all relate to but one person. Yet 
 there are probably not over half a dozen of whom it has been 
 alleged in modern times. I can find space for only our old 
 friends. 
 
 Stainton Moses says (Pr. IX, 260) : 
 
 " My first personal experience of levitation was about five 
 months after my introduction to Spiritualism. Physical phe- 
 nomena of a very powerful description had been developed 
 
 with great rapidity One day (August 30th, 1872) ... I felt 
 
 my chair drawn back from the table and turned into the corner 
 near which I sat. It was so placed that my face was turned 
 away from the circle to the angle made by the two walls. In 
 this position the chair was raised from the floor to a distance 
 of, I should judge, twelve or fourteen inches. My feet touched 
 the top of the skirting-board, which would be about twelve 
 inches in height. The chair remained suspended for a few 
 moments." 
 
 So far this is only the ordinary levitation of furniture 
 the chair, which could have been done by ordinary telekinesis, 
 with Moses on top of it; but he continues: 
 
 " And I then felt myself going from it, higher and higher, 
 
 with a very slow and easy movement 1 remember a slight 
 
 difficulty in breathing, and a sensation of fullness in the chest, 
 with a general feeling of being lighter than the atmosphere. 
 I was lowered down quite gently, and placed in the chair, which 
 
 had settled in its old position 
 
 " This experiment was more or less successfully repeated 
 on nine other occasions. On the 2d September, 1872, I see 
 from my records that I was three times raised on to the table, 
 and twice levitated in the corner of the room. The first move- 
 ment on to the table was very sudden a sort of instantaneous 
 jerk. I was conscious of nothing until I found myself on the 
 
 table my chair being unmoved In the second attempt I 
 
 was placed on the table in a standing posture. In this case I 
 was conscious of the withdrawal of my chair and of being raised 
 to the level of the table, and then of being impelled forward so 
 
 as to stand upon it In the third case I was thrown on to the 
 
 table, and from that position on to an adjacent sofa. The move-
 
 200 Autokinesis [Bk. II, Pt. II 
 
 ment was instantaneous, as in the first recorded case; and 
 though I was thrown to a considerable distance and with con- 
 siderable force, I was in no way hurt 
 
 " These phenomena of levitation have presented themselves 
 
 on a few other occasions 1 have discouraged them as 
 
 much as possible, from a dislike to violent physical manifesta- 
 tions. I have little power to prevent a special kind of mani- 
 festation, and none whatever to evoke any that I may desire; 
 but I do, as far as I can, prevent the very uncomfortable 
 phenomena which at this period were so strongly developed." 
 
 On December 3rd, Dr. and Mrs. Speer both sign a note 
 (Pr. IX, 289) : 
 
 "Mr. M. was moved about and floated twice." 
 
 We can conceive a force in the body counteracting gravita- 
 tion, but it is not so easy to see how a force impelling the 
 body as the rush of heat drives the rocket, should pervade 
 the chair or table too. Assuming the phenomena to be gen- 
 uine, is it the same force impelling both, or is there one 
 force raising the body and another making the chair or table 
 stick to it? In the fog of our present knowledge, all guesses 
 appear absurd. 
 
 Sir William Crookes says (op. cit., p. 89) : 
 
 " This levitation of human beings has occurred in my pres- 
 ence on four occasions in darkness. The test conditions under 
 which they took place were quite satisfactory, so far as the 
 judgment was concerned; but ocular demonstration of such 
 a fact is so necessary to disturb our pre-fonned opinions as 
 to ' the naturally possible and impossible,' that I will here only 
 mention cases in which the deductions of reason were confirmed 
 by the sense of sight. 
 
 " On one occasion I witnessed a chair, with a lady sitting 
 on it, rise several inches from the ground. On another occa- 
 sion, to avoid the suspicion of this being in some way performed 
 by herself, the lady knelt on the chair in such a manner that 
 its four feet were visible to us. It then rose about three inches, 
 remained suspended for about ten seconds, and then slowly 
 descended. At another time two children, on separate occasions, 
 rose from the floor with their chairs, in full daylight, under 
 (to me) most satisfactory conditions: for I was kneeling and 
 keeping close watch upon the feet of the chair, and observing 
 that no one might touch them." 
 
 Sir William does not tell us who were the agents in these
 
 Ch. XIII] Levitation, Home 201 
 
 cases. If the persons themselves were not, the cases, like the 
 beginning of Moses' case on page 101, were hardly levitations 
 of human beings at all, in the usual sense, but merely of 
 chairs on which human beings were sitting. But there is a 
 staggering number of vastly more improbable cases where 
 persons are alleged to have levitated themselves. Sir William 
 continues : 
 
 " The most striking cases of levitation which I have wit- 
 nessed have been with Mr. Home. On three separate occasions 
 have I seen him raised completely from the floor of the room. 
 Once sitting in an easy-chair, once kneeling on his chair," 
 [These two cases are like the preceding two levitations of 
 furniture. H. H.] " and once standing up. On each occasion 
 I had full opportunity of watching the occurrence as it was 
 taking place. 
 
 " There are at least a hundred recorded instances of Mr. 
 Home's rising from the ground, in the presence of as many 
 separate persons, and I have heard from the lips of the three 
 witnesses to the most striking occurrence of this kind the 
 Earl of Dunraven, Lord Lindsay, and Captain C. Wynne 
 their own most minute accounts of what took place. To reject 
 the recorded evidence on this subject is to reject all human 
 testimony whatever; for no fact in sacred or profane history 
 is supported by a stronger array of proofs." 
 
 In Pr. VI, 126, Sir William says of Home : 
 
 " He asked Mrs. Wm. Crookes to remove the chair from under 
 him, as it was not supporting him. He was then seen to be 
 sitting in the air, supported by nothing visible. 
 
 (P. 119) " Mr. Home then walked to the open space in the room 
 between Mrs. I.'s chair and the sideboard and stood there quite 
 upright and quiet. He then said : ' I 'm rising, I 'm rising,' 
 when we all saw him rise from the ground slowly to a height 
 of about six inches, remain there for about ten seconds, and 
 then slowly descend. From my position I could not see his 
 feet, but I distinctly saw his head, projected against the oppo- 
 site wall, rise up, and Mr. Wm. Crookes, who was sitting near 
 where Mr. Home was, said that his feet were in the air. There 
 was no stool or other thing near which could have aided him. 
 Moreover, the movement was a smooth, continuous glide up- 
 wards " 
 
 Sir William Crookes' notes (in Pr. VI) also give other 
 illustrations of levitation, both of the human body and in- 
 animate objects. There is also the oft-quoted account of 
 Home's being floated out-of-doors through one window and
 
 202 Autokinesis [Bk. II, Ft. II 
 
 back through another. Various hypotheses, none of them 
 satisfactory, have been proposed to account for these phenom- 
 ena on the theory of deception. 
 
 Here is a case regarding Foster which was reported before 
 the storm of modern criticism. It is from Ashburner, quoted 
 by Bartlett (op. tit., p. 110) : 
 
 " In my dunker-Kammer, a room the Baron von Reichenbach 
 
 had taught me how to darken properly for experiments 
 
 Suddenly a great alarm seized Mr. Foster; he grasped my right 
 hand, and beseeched me not to quit my hold of him, for he 
 said there was no knowledge where the spirits might convey 
 him. I held his hand, and he was floated in the air towards 
 the ceiling. At one time, Mrs. W. C. felt a substance on her 
 head, and, putting up her hands, discovered a pair of boots 
 above her head." 
 
 Resistance to Heat 
 
 The following cases seem to illustrate a mode of force 
 counteracting the effects of heat. They would probably not 
 seem worth quoting, to a reader in whose belief telekinesis was 
 not firmly established. But that being granted, this form of 
 autokinesis no longer seems impossible, though don't ask me 
 if I believe in it : for I should answer : I don't know. 
 
 Several travelers give mutually confirmatory accounts of the 
 Fire-walk in Japan and Fiji. 
 
 Mrs. Joseph Lindon Smith (wife of the well-known Boston 
 artist, and daughter of the well-known New York publisher 
 Mr. George Haven Putnam) gives me permission to state that 
 she successfully went through it in Japan. How to account 
 for what my friend tells me, I don't know. The late Andrew 
 Lang had an interesting paper on the subject in Pr. XV, 2-15 
 from which the following extracts are made: 
 
 " Science is acquainted with no substance alum or diluted 
 sulphuric acid, or the like which will produce the result of 
 preventing cauterization." [This is contradicted below by Mr. 
 Lang himself, at least as concerns sensation. H. H.] " Sir 
 William Crookes, at least, is not familiar with any such 
 resources of science. His evidence as to fire-handling by D. 
 D. Home is familiar, and I understand that Mr. Podmore can 
 only explain it away by a hypothesis of a trick played in a 
 bad light, by means of an asbestos glove or some such trans-
 
 Ch. XIII] Resistance to Heat. Fire-Walking in Fiji 203 
 
 parent dodge (Studies in Psychical Research, pp. 58-59). Per- 
 haps be adds a little ' hallucination ' on the part of the 
 spectators. But asbestos and hallucination are out of the 
 question in the cases which I am about to quote. Home was, 
 or feigned to be, in a state of trance when he performed with 
 fire. The seeress of Lourdes, Bernadette, was also in religious 
 contemplation when she permitted the flame of a candle to 
 play through her clasped fingers (which were unscathed) for 
 a timed quarter of an hour. Some Indian devotees, again, aver 
 that they ' meditate ' on some divine being while passing over 
 the glowing embers, and the Nistinares of Bulgaria, who dance 
 in the fire, are described as being in a more or less abnormal 
 mental condition. But even this condition is absent in the 
 well-attested Raiatean and Fijian examples," [Not to speak 
 of Mrs. Smith, as above. H. H.] " in which, also, no kind of 
 chemical preparation is employed. Finally, where savages are 
 concerned, the hardness of the skins of their feet is dwelt 
 upon. But, first, the sole of a boot would be scorched in the 
 circumstances, while their feet are not affected; next, the 
 savages' feet were not leathery (so Dr. Hocken avers) ; thirdly, 
 one of the Europeans who walked through the fire at Rarotonga 
 declares that the soles of his own feet are peculiarly tender. 
 Thus every known physical or conjectured psychical condition 
 of immunity fails to meet the case, and we are left wholly 
 without an ascertained, or a good conjectural, ' reason why ' 
 for the phenomena " 
 
 Mr. Lang cites (Pr. XV, 4) : 
 
 Te Umu-ti, or Fire-Walking Ceremony 
 
 (From the Journal of the Polynesian Society) 
 
 "In this Journal, Vol. II, p. 105, Miss Teuira Henry 
 
 describes this ceremony as practised in Raiatea, of the Society 
 
 Group. We have lately received from Colonel Gudgeon the 
 
 following account of his experiences Since the date of 
 
 the paper quoted, it has come to light that the Maoris of 
 New Zealand were equally acquainted with this ceremony, 
 which was performed by their ancestors. On reading Colonel 
 Gudgeon's account to some old chiefs of the Urewera tribe, 
 they expressed no surprise, and said that their ancestors could 
 also perform the ceremony, though it has long gone out of 
 practice. Editors." 
 
 Colonel Gudgeon says: 
 
 " The tohunga (priest) and his tauira (pupil) walked each 
 to the oven, and then halting, the prophet spoke a few words, 
 and then struck the edge of the oven with the ti" [A native 
 Draccena. H. H.] " branches. This was three times repeated,
 
 204 AutoUnesis [Bk. II, Pi II 
 
 and then they walked slowly and deliberately over the two 
 fathoms of hot stones. When this was done, the tohunga came 
 to us, and his disciple handed his ti branch to Mr. Goodwin, at 
 whose place the ceremony came off, and they went through the 
 ceremony. Then the tohunga said to Mr. Goodwin, ' I hand 
 my mana (power) over to you ; lead your friends across. Now, 
 there were four Europeans Dr. W. Craig, Dr. George Craig, 
 Mr. Goodwin, and myself and I can only say that we stepped 
 out boldly. I got across unscathed, and only one of the party 
 was badly burned; and he, it is said, was spoken to, but, like 
 Lot's wife, looked behind him a thing against all rules. . . . 
 A man must have mana to do it; if he has not, it will be 
 too late when he is on the hot stone. . . . Quite half-an-hour 
 afterwards someone remarked to the priest that the stones 
 would not be hot enough to cook the ti. His only answer was 
 to throw his green branch on the oven, and in a quarter of 
 a minute it was blazing. As I have eaten a fair share of the 
 ti cooked in the oven, I am in a position to say that it was 
 
 hot enough to cook it well 
 
 "I did not walk quickly across the oven, but with delibera- 
 tion, because I feared that I should tread on a sharp point of 
 
 the stones and fall All I really felt when the task was 
 
 accomplished was a tingling sensation not unlike slight elec- 
 tric shocks on the soles of my feet, and this continued for 
 seven hours or more. The really funny thing is that, though 
 the stones were hot enough an hour afterwards to burn up 
 green branches of the ti, the very tender skin of my feet 
 was not even hardened by the fire." 
 
 Mr. Lang comments (Pr. XV, 5) : 
 
 " On this report a few remarks may be offered. (1) No 
 preparation of any chemical, herbal, or other sort was applied 
 to the Europeans, at least. (2) ' The handing over the mono ' 
 (or power) was practised by Home, sometimes successfully (it 
 is alleged), as when Mr. S. C. Hall's scalp and white locks 
 were unharmed by a red-hot coal; sometimes unsuccessfully. 
 A clergyman of my acquaintance still bears the blister caused 
 when he accepted a red-hot coal from the hand of Home, as he 
 informs me by letter. (3) The ' walk ' was shorter than seems 
 common : only twelve feet, four paces. (4) A friend of Colonel 
 Gudgeon's was badly burnt, and the reason assigned was a 
 good folk-lore reason, since the days of Lot's wife, of Theoc- 
 ritus, and of Virgil: he looked behind. (5) The feeling as 
 if of ' slight electric shocks ' is worthy of notice. (6) Colonel 
 Gudgeon clearly believes that a man without mana had better 
 not try, and by mono, here, he probably means 'nerve,' as we 
 can hardly suppose, in spite of Home, that mana, in a super- 
 normal sense, can be ' handed over ' by one man to another."
 
 Ch. XIII] Fire-Walking in Fiji 205 
 
 From an account of the Fiji Fire Ceremony. By Dr. T. M. 
 Hocken, F.L.S. (Pr. XV, 6) : 
 
 " A number of almost nude Fijians walk quickly and un- 
 harmed across . . . the pavement of a huge native oven 
 termed ' lovo ' in which shortly afterwards are cooked the 
 succulent, sugary roots and pith of the Cordyline terminalis, 
 one of the cabbage trees, known to the Maoris as the ' /// and to 
 the Fijians as the ' masawe.' This wonderful power of fire- 
 walking is now not only very rarely exercised, but, at least 
 
 as regards Fiji, is confined to a small clan or family 
 
 They steadily descended the oven slope in single file, and 
 walked, as I think, leisurely, but as others of our party think, 
 quickly, across and around the stones, leaving the oven at the 
 point of entrance. The leader, who was longest in the oven, 
 
 was a second or two under half a minute therein 1 gained 
 
 permission to examine one or two of the fire-walkers prior to 
 their descent into the oven. . . . The pulse was unaffected, and 
 the skin, legs, and feet were free from any apparent ap- 
 plication. I assured myself of this by touch, smell, and 
 taste, not hesitating to apply my tongue as a corroborative. 
 The foot-soles were comparatively soft and flexible by no 
 
 means leathery and insensible This careful examination 
 
 was repeated immediately after egress from the oven, and 
 with the same result. . . . No incantations or other religious 
 ceremonial were observed. Though these were formerly prac- 
 tised, they have gradually fallen into disuse since the intro- 
 duction of Christianity 
 
 " I am absolutely certain as to the truth of the facts and 
 the bona fides of the actors. A feature is that, wherever this 
 power is found, it is possessed by but a limited few. I was 
 assured, too, that any person holding the hand of one of the fire- 
 walkers could himself pass through the oven unharmed 
 
 " Dr. Sementini of Naples found that frequent friction with 
 sulphurous acid rendered him insensible to red-hot iron; a 
 solution of alum did the same. A layer of powdered sugar 
 covered with soap made his tongue insensible to heat. In these 
 and similar instances, however, an explanation, though probably 
 not a very sufficient one, has been given, but in that forming 
 the subject of this paper no solution has been offered 
 
 " My next case occurs among a civilized race, the Japanese, 
 and is vouched for by Mr. Lafcadio Hearn . . . and by Colonel 
 Andrew Haggard (The Field, May 20th, 1899, p. 724). Colonel 
 
 Haggard saw the fire-walk done in Tokio, on April 9th, 1899 
 
 Ablutions in cold water were made by the performers, and 
 Colonel Haggard was told by one young lady that she had not 
 only done the fire-walk, but had been ' able to sit for a long time, 
 in winter, immersed in ice-cold water, without feeling the cold 
 in the least.'
 
 206 Autokinesis [Bk. II, Pt. II 
 
 "In a private letter, Dr. Schischmanof hints at extase 
 religieuse, as in the self-mutilations of Dervishes and Fakirs. 
 Their performances are extraordinary enough, but there was no 
 religious ecstasy in the little Japanese boy of six, whom Colonel 
 Haggard saw pass through the fire, none in Colonel Gudgeon, 
 none in the Fijians observed by Dr. Hocken." [And none in 
 Mrs. Smith. H. H.] 
 
 Many other instances, ancient and modern, with reflections 
 upon them, are given by Mr. Lang. He also discusses the 
 subject in his book on Modern Mythology. 
 
 I quote from Sir William Crookes (Pr. VI, 103f.). Note 
 date, Wednesday, March 9, 1871 : 
 
 " Mr. Home sank back in his chair with his eyes closed and 
 remained still for a few minutes. He then rose up in a trance 
 and made signs for his eyes to be blindfolded. This was done. 
 He walked about the room in an undecided sort of manner, 
 came up to each of the sitters and made some remark to them. 
 He went to the candle on a side table (close to the large 
 table) and passed his fingers backwards and forwards through 
 the flame several times so slowly that they must have been 
 severely burnt under ordinary circumstances. He then held 
 his fingers up, smiled and nodded as if pleased, took up a 
 fine cambric handkerchief belonging to Miss Douglas, folded 
 it up on his right hand and went to the fire. Here he threw 
 off the bandage from his eyes and by means of the tongs lifted 
 a piece of red hot charcoal from the center and deposited it 
 on the folded cambric; bringing it across the room, he told 
 us to put out the candle which was on the table, knelt down 
 close to Mrs. W. F. and spoke to her about it in a low voice. 
 Occasionally he fanned the coal to a white heat with his 
 breath. Coming a little further round the room, he spoke to 
 Miss Douglas, saying: 'We shall have to burn a very small 
 hole in the handkerchief. We have a reason for this which 
 you do not see.' Presently he took the coal back to the fire 
 and handed the handkerchief to Miss Douglas. A small hole 
 about half an inch in diameter was burnt in the center, and 
 there were two small points near it, but it was not even singed 
 anywhere else. (I took the handkerchief away with me, and 
 on testing it in my laboratory, found that it had not undergone 
 the slightest chemical preparation which could have rendered 
 it fireproof.) 
 
 " Mr. Home again went to the fire and, after stirring the 
 hot coal about with his hand, took out a red hot piece nearly 
 as big as an orange and, putting it on his right hand, covered 
 it over with his left hand so as to almost completely enclose 
 it, and then blew into the small furnace thus extemporized 
 until the lump of charcoal was nearly white-hot, and then
 
 Ch. XIII] Home and the Fire in the Grate 207 
 
 drew my attention to the lambent flame which was flickering 
 over the coal and licking round his fingers; he fell on his 
 knees, looked up in a reverent manner, held up the coal in 
 front and said : ' Is not Qod good ? Are not His laws won- 
 derful?/ 
 
 " Going again to the fire, he took out another hot coal with 
 his hand and holding it up said to me : 'Is not that a beautiful 
 large bit, William? We' [That is: the alleged spirits pos- 
 sessing him. H. II.) ' want to bring that to you. Pay no 
 attention at present.' The coal, however, was not brought. 
 
 " At Mr. Home's request, whilst he was entranced, I went 
 with him to the fireplace in the back drawing-room. He said: 
 1 We ' [The alleged " spirits." H. H.] ' want you to notice par- 
 ticularly what Dan is doing.' Accordingly, I stood close to 
 the fire and stooped down to it when he put his hands in. He 
 very deliberately pulled the lumps of hot coal off, one at a 
 time, with his right hand and touched one which was bright 
 red. He then said : ' The power is not strong on Dan's hand, 
 as we have been influencing the handkerchief most. It is 
 more difficult to influence an inanimate body like that than 
 living flesh, so, as the circumstances were favorable, we thought 
 we would show you that we could prevent a red-hot coal from 
 burning a handkerchief. We will collect more power on the 
 handkerchief and repeat it before you. Now ! ' 
 
 " Mr. Home then waved the handkerchief about in the air 
 two or three times, held it up above his head, and then folded 
 it up and laid it on his hand like a cushion : putting his other 
 hand into the fire, took out a large lump of cinder red-hot at 
 the lower part, and placed the red part on the handkerchief. 
 Under ordinary circumstances it would have been in a blaze. 
 In about half a minute he took it off the handkerchief with 
 his hand, saying : ' As the power is not strong, if we leave 
 the coal longer it will burn.' He then put it on his hand 
 and brought it to the table in the front room, where all but 
 myself had remained seated." 
 
 There can be no reasonable doubt that Sir William Crookes 
 saw what he says he did, though it was doubted for many 
 years, and he suffered in consequence. It is probably not 
 widely doubted now, and was not widely doubted when he 
 received his knighthood. The only open questions in the 
 present state of our knowledge are : did he see it in his sleep? 
 was he hypnotized ? 
 
 If he was, another witness was too ; for along comes Stainton 
 Moses, and testifies to even less possible (if that is possible) 
 things of the same kind. Probably his truthful intentions 
 stand as high as Sir William Crookes'.
 
 208 AutoUnesis [Bk. II, Ft. II 
 
 His account is dated two years later than Sir William's 
 (April 30, 1873), and refers to a different occasion (Pr. IX, 
 307): 
 
 "By degrees Mr. Home's hands and arms began to twitch 
 and move involuntarily. I should say that he has been partly 
 paralyzed, drags one of his legs, moves with difficulty, stoops, 
 and can endure very little physical exertion. As he passed 
 into the trance state he drew power from the circle by extending 
 his arms to them and mesmerizing himself. All these acts 
 were involuntary. He gradually passed into the trance state, 
 and rose from the table, erect, and a different man from what 
 he was. He walked firmly, dashed out his arms and legs with 
 great power, and passed round to Mr. Crookes. He mesmer- 
 ized him, and appeared to draw power from him. He then 
 went to the fireplace, removed the guard, and sat down on 
 the hearth-rug. There he seemed to hold a conversation by 
 signs with a spirit. He repeatedly bowed, and finally set to 
 work to mesmerize his head again. He ruffled his bushy hair 
 until it stood out like a mop, and then deliberately lay down 
 and put his head in the bright wood fire. The hair was in the 
 blaze, and must, under ordinary circumstances, have been 
 singed off. His head was in the grate, and his neck on a level 
 with the top bar. This was repeated several times. He also 
 put his hand into the fire, smoothed away the wood and coal, 
 and picked out a live coal, which he held in his hand for a 
 few seconds, but replaced soon, saying the power was not suf- 
 ficient. He tried to give a hot coal to Mr. Crookes, but was 
 unable to do it. He then came to all of us to satisfy us that 
 there was no smell of fire on his hair. There was absolutely 
 none. ' The smell of fire had not passed on him.' In the trance 
 state he passed about the room amongst the furniture without 
 touching any. He moved the lamp to the mantelpiece. He 
 spoke in a soft, subdued voice, called himself ' Dan/ and said 
 he had a work to do in London. During the evening we never 
 heard who the spirits were, but I was told that friends of 
 mine were present. 
 
 " [Mr. Crookes, to whom I (Myers) have shown this ac- 
 count, comments as follows twenty years later:] 
 
 " March 9th, 1893. 
 
 "I have a distinct recollection of the seance here described, 
 and can corroborate Mr. Stainton Moses' account. I was not 
 well placed for seeing the first part of the ' fire test ' here 
 
 recorded My back was to the fire, and I did not at first 
 
 turn round to see what he was doing. Being told what was 
 taking place, I looked and saw Home in the act of raising 
 his head from the fire. Probably this was the last occasion of 
 the ' several times ' it was repeated, as I have no recollection 
 of seeing it more than once. On my expressing great disap-
 
 Ch. XIII] Home and Another Orate Fire 209 
 
 pointment at having missed this test, Mr. Home told me to 
 leave my seat and come with him to the fire. He asked me 
 if I should be afraid to take a live coal [ember] from his 
 hand. I said, No, I would take it if he would give it to me. 
 He then put his hand among the hot coals [embers], and 
 deliberately picked out the brightest bit and held it in his 
 hand for a few seconds. He appeared to deliberate for a time, 
 and then returned it to the grate, saying the power was too 
 weak, and he was afraid I might be hurt. During this time 
 I was kneeling on the hearth-rug, and am unable to explain 
 how it was he was not severely burnt 
 
 " I do not believe in the possibility of the ordinary skin of 
 the hand being so prepared as to enable hot coals to be han- 
 dled with impunity. ... It is possible that the skin may be 
 so hardened and thickened by such preparations that super- 
 ficial charring might take place without the pain becoming 
 great, but the surface of the skin would certainly suffer severely. 
 After Home had recovered from the trance I examined his 
 hand with care to see if there were any signs of burning or 
 of previous preparation. I could detect no trace of injury to 
 the skin, which was soft and delicate like a woman's. Neither 
 were there signs of any preparation having been previously 
 applied. 
 
 " I have often seen conjurers and others handle red-hot coals 
 and iron, but there were always palpable signs of burning. A 
 negro was once brought to my laboratory who professed to be 
 able to handle red-hot iron with impunity. I was asked to 
 test his pretensions, and I did so carefully. There was no 
 doubt he could touch and hold for a brief time red-hot iron 
 without feeling much pain, and supposing his feet were as 
 resisting as his hands, he could have triumphantly passed the 
 ' red-hot plowshare ' ordeal. But the house was pervaded for 
 hours after with the odor of roast negro." 
 
 These two witnesses may have been hypnotized, but tes- 
 timony from sundry other witnesses to these and other im- 
 possible (?) performances of Home are given in Journal 
 S. P. R. IV and IX. 
 
 As to collective hypnotism, there are probably no eviden- 
 tially good cases on record. The celebrated East India one 
 of a generation ago is " good " enough, however, to repeat 
 for the present generation. A fakir threw a rope up twenty 
 or thirty feet into the air, the end still trailing on the ground. 
 Then he climbed it, coiled a little at the top, and sat on the 
 coil, and then, if I remember the yarn correctly, drew the 
 rope up after him. After he had performed the feat sundry
 
 210 AutoJcinesis [Bk. II, Pi II 
 
 times in several places, it occurred to somebody to photograph 
 him in his exalted position. The plate showed no fakir and 
 no rope. The story was repeated in the press throughout 
 the civilized world, but on investigation, there proved to be 
 no more story than there was rope or fakir on the sensitized 
 plate, or than there was sensitized plate. Before the investi- 
 gation, however, the story was credited to collective hypno- 
 tism. 
 
 Elongation 
 
 Before closing this department of the subject, perhaps I 
 ought at least to allude to the alleged elongations of the bodies 
 of Home and Morse and Herne. I allude to them because, to 
 my mind, they tend to cast discredit on the other stories of 
 Home, and, by implication, on all the rest of the marvels 
 chronicled by the S. P. R. Therefore, in what professes to 
 be a general sketch of all those alleged phenomena, it would 
 not be fair to suppress the elongations. If I must hold an 
 opinion, it would incline to ascribe them to hallucination on 
 the part of the witnesses, as it does regarding Home's per- 
 formances with hot coals, though I should not be surprised if 
 the world were yet to come into possession of a mode of 
 zob'magnetism resisting heat, if it has not one already illus- 
 trated in the Fire-walk. 
 
 With my impression regarding these alleged elongations, I 
 do not feel that my duty calls for more space than a reference 
 to the testimony from several witnesses, which is in Journal 
 S. P. R., IV, 123-6; X, 104f. 
 
 Stigmata and Blisters 
 
 Now by the way of this resistance to what usually affects 
 the body, we come to another direction of the body's energies. 
 Whether the future will associate either of them with what 
 we now call telekinesis or autokinesis is of course doubtful. 
 But as I get the eels out of the pot, I keep those nearest 
 alike as well together as I can. If you don't see the point 
 of the metaphor, try to write a little on these subjects yourself. 
 
 From the bleeding spots on hands and feet symbolizing the 
 wounds made by the nails of the cross, asserted to have been 
 found on St. Francis of Assisi and other religious enthusiasts,
 
 Ch. XIII] Mentally Induced Stigmata and Blisters 211 
 
 kindred phenomena run all the way down through the miracles 
 of Lourdes, to sundry well attested recent phenomena, and 
 branch off into hypnotic therapeutics, and Faith Cure and 
 Christian Science. 
 
 The scientific world paid little attention to these stories 
 before the case of Louise Lateau, of Belgium, who in 1868 be- 
 gan to exude blood from side, hands, feet, and forehead, every 
 Friday. There was an element of religious ecstasy in the 
 case. It is as well vouched for as most other phenomena 
 prominent in medical history. Myers gives the particulars 
 in Human Personality, I, 492. There, and also in the Journal 
 (not Proceedings) S. P. R., Ill, 100 (where, as well as in 
 the Proceedings, many of his chapters first appeared) he 
 gives a dozen well authenticated cases somewhat resembling 
 the Lateau case, variously due to ordinary hypnotic sugges- 
 tion, religious ecstasy, and other forms of self-hypnotism or 
 auto-suggestion. 
 
 Before going into them, however, let us anticipate Foster's 
 exhibition in Chapter XVIII. He is there said to have shown 
 some names "in letters formed of the living blood at that 
 moment coursing through the hand." 
 
 It looks as if the phenomenon should be classed with 
 Stigmata. But the following staggering statements from 
 Bartlett (op. cit., p. 23) look as if it was not even voluntary. 
 
 "It was in the early days of my acquaintance with Mr. 
 Foster that a friend of mine, by the name of Adams, from 
 Kvan.-villr. In.!., called upon me. As he was leaving, Mr. 
 Foster told him that in all his experience he had never known 
 one individual to bring so many spirits; that he should suppose 
 the whole Adams family had appeared to him, the room being 
 literally packed with them, coming and going. About two 
 o'clock the next morning, Mr. Foster called to me (I was sleep- 
 ing in the same room), saying: 'George, will you please light 
 the gas? I cannot sleep. The room is still filled with the 
 Adams family, and they seem to be writing their names all 
 over me.' And to my astonishment, a list of names of the 
 Adams family were displayed upon his body. I counted eleven 
 distinct names: one was written across his forehead, others on 
 his arms, and several on his back. It seemed to me then, and 
 still seems to me, as being almost miraculous. I can simply 
 term it unexplained, genuine phenomena, where trickery was 
 impossible."
 
 212 Autolcinesis [Bk. II, Pt. II 
 
 Whether or not it was stigmata a real phenomenon of the 
 strange involuntary self which also saw his visions, or whether 
 it was a trick to make more interesting the exhibition of his 
 real powers, why should he have played such a trick on 
 Bartlett? 
 
 You can produce the effects yourself by writing on your 
 skin with a blunt instrument (I've seen it done with a 
 match) and then rubbing the spot. Whether Foster did it 
 that way, I doubt : for if so, sometimes he must have done 
 it through his coat sleeve, which I cannot; and at times the 
 writing showed gradually while the sitter looked at the 
 apparently undisturbed skin. Mr. Bartlett says: 
 
 " As soon as Mr. Foster and I read that explanation, we tried 
 
 the experiment, but it was a failure If the number of 
 
 names which appeared on his arm and hand in one week 
 had been caused by scratching matches on his flesh, I think 
 he would have been badly mutilated. I know of no explanation 
 of this ' blood-red writing on the arm.' " 
 
 Myers considers the general subject in Pr. VII, 336-9, 
 whence I take the following: 
 
 "Professor Beaunis and Dr. Krafft-Ebing have slowed the 
 pulse by hypnotic suggestion; and these savants, as well as 
 Professor Bernheim, M. Focachon, and others, have produced 
 redness and blisters by the same means. Drs. Mabille, Kama- 
 dier, Bourru, Burot, have produced localized hypersemia, epis- 
 taxis " [nosebleed] , " ecchymosis " [a spot produced by extrav- 
 asated blood under the skin]. "Dr. Forel and others have 
 restored arrested secretions at a precisely fixed hour. Dr. 
 Krafft-Ebing has produced a rise of temperature at moments 
 fixed by himself, a rise, for instance, from 37 deg. to 38.5 
 deg. C. Burot has lowered the temperature of a hand as much 
 as 10 deg. C. by suggestion. He supposes that the mechanism 
 employed is the constriction of the brachial artery, beneath 
 the biceps. ' How can it be,' he asks, ' that when one merely 
 says to the subject, "your hand will become cold," the vaso- 
 motor nervous system answers by constricting the artery to 
 the degree necessary to achieve the result desired ? C'est ce 
 qui depasse noire imagination.'" 
 
 The following is an abstract of Dr. Levillain's account of 
 an experiment performed by Professor Charcot before a large 
 class at the Salpetriere : 
 
 " On April 26th, 1890, a hysterical woman was deeply hypno-
 
 Ch. XIII] Mentally Induced Stigmata and Blisters 213 
 
 tized, and it was suggested to her that her right hand and 
 wrist would swell and become cyanosed. After she was woke 
 [sir\, this suggestion gradually realized itself, and in four 
 days the right hand was in the condition of that of the 
 patients who had had spontaneous attacks. There was a 
 smooth surface, hardly any pitting on pressure, but much dull- 
 blue mottled swelling (which had obliged her to discontinue 
 wearing her rings), and anaesthesia. A bright red patch was 
 produced by touch. . . . M. Charcot re-hypnotized the patient, 
 and assured her that her hand was quite natural again, helping 
 his suggestion with a little massage. After a quarter of an hour 
 the anaesthesia, venous color, and swelling were gone. 
 
 " The subliminal consciousness " [We will consider this ex- 
 pression later. H. H.], " it will be seen, was able to turn out 
 to order the most complicated novelty in the way of hysterical 
 freaks of circulation. Let us turn to an equally marked dis- 
 turbance of the inflammatory type, the production, namely, of 
 suppurating blisters by the word of command. This phenome- 
 non has a peculiar interest, since, from the accident of a 
 strong emotional association with the idea of stigmata on hands 
 and feet, this special organic effect has been anticipated by 
 the introverted broodings of a line of mystics, from 8. Francis 
 of Assisi to Louise Lateau. A strange confirmation of ancient 
 legend! A singular testimony to the intensity of the medita- 
 tions of that great saint who 
 
 Nel crudo sasso intra Tevere ed arno 
 Da Cristo prese 1' ultimo sigillo, 
 Che le sue membra due anni portarno." 
 
 "The following experiment was performed by Dr. J. Ry- 
 balkin, in presence of his colleagues at the Hopital Marie, at 
 St. Petersburg. Dr. Ry balk in had previously experimented in 
 the same way with his subject. 
 
 "The subject ... was hypnotized at 8.30 a. m., and told: 
 'When you awake, you will be cold; you will go and warm 
 yourself at the stove, and you will burn your forearm on 
 the line which I have traced out. This will hurt you; a 
 redness will appear on your arm; it will swell; there will be 
 blisters.' On being awakened, the patient obeyed the sugges- 
 tion. He even uttered a cry of pain at the moment when he 
 touched the door of the stove, which had not been lighted. 
 
 " Some minutes later, a redness, without swelling, could be 
 seen at the place indicated, and the patient complained of 
 sharp pain on its being touched. A bandage was put on his 
 arm, and he went to bed, under our eyes. 
 
 " At the close of our visit, at 11.30, we observed a consider- 
 able swelling, accompanied with redness and with a papulous 
 erythema at the place of the burn. A mere touch anywhere
 
 214 Autokinesis [Bk. II, Pt. II 
 
 within four centimeters of the burn caused severe pain. The 
 surgeon, Dr. Pratine, placed a bandage on the forearm, which 
 extended up to the superior third of the arm. 
 
 " When the dressing was removed at 10 next morning we 
 saw at the place of the burn two blisters, one of the size of 
 a nut and the other of a pea, and a number of small blisters. 
 Around this tract the skin was red and sensitive. Before the 
 experiment this region had been anesthetic. At 3 p. m. the 
 blisters met in one large blister. ... In the evening the blister, 
 which was full of a semi-transparent yellowish fluid, burst, 
 and a scab formed on the raw skin. A week later ordinary 
 sensibility returned to the scar, and after a fortnight there 
 was only a red mark in the place of the bum." 
 
 Here is a case more suggestive in many ways than those 
 already given, from Myers (op. cit., I, 493) : 
 
 " A girl of about eighteen, who complained to me one day 
 
 of a pain through her chest 1 magnetized ... as usual, and 
 
 told ... in a whisper : 
 
 " * You will have a red cross appear on the upper part of 
 your chest, only on every Friday. In the course of some time 
 the words Sancta above the cross, and Crucis underneath it will 
 appear also; at same time a little blood will come from the 
 cross.' In my vest pocket I had a cross of rock crystal. I 
 opened the top button of her dress and placed this cross on 
 the upper part of the manubrium, a point she could not see 
 unless by aid of a looking-glass, saying to her, ' This is the spot 
 
 where the cross will appear.' This was on a Tuesday 
 
 Next day Mrs. G. told me she had seen the girl now and again 
 put her left wrist over the top part of her chest, over the dress; 
 this was frequently repeated, as if she felt some tickling or 
 slight irritation about the part, but not otherwise noticed; she 
 seemed to carry her hand up now and then unconsciously. 
 When Friday came I said, after breakfast, ' Come, let me 
 magnetize you a little; you have not had a dose for several 
 days.' She was always willing to be magnetized' as she always 
 expressed herself as feeling very much rested and comfortable 
 afterwards. In a few minutes she was in a deep sleep. I un- 
 buttoned the top part of her dress, and there, to my complete 
 and utter astonishment, was a pink cross, exactly over the 
 place where I had put the one of crystal. It appeared every 
 Friday, and was invisible on all other days. This was seen by 
 Mr. and Mrs. G., and my old friend and colleague, Dr. B. 
 . . . About six weeks after the cross first appeared I had occa- 
 sion to take a trip to the Sandwich Islands. Before going 
 I magnetized the girl, told her that the cross would keep on 
 
 showing itself every Friday for about four months 1 also 
 
 asked Dr. B. and Mr. G. to write me by every mail to Hono-
 
 Ch. XIII] Faith Cure. Christian Science 215 
 
 lulu, and tell me if the cross kept on appearing every Friday 
 
 While I was on the Sandwich Islands I received two letters 
 from Mr. G. and one from Dr. B. by three different mails, each 
 telling that the cross kept on making its appearance as usual; 
 blood had been noticed once, and also part of the letter S above 
 the cross, nothing more. I returned in a little less than three 
 months. The cross still made its appearance every Friday, and 
 did so for about a month more, but getting paler and paler until 
 it became invisible, as nearly as possible four months from the 
 
 time I left for the Sandwich Islands 
 
 "M. H. BIGGS, M. D." 
 
 To this account Edmund Gurney adds in a note quoted 
 by Myers (op. cit., I, 493) : 
 
 " As to the first two of these cases [the one quoted above and 
 another], it is possible to suppose that the hypnotic suggestion 
 took effect indirectly, by causing the girls to rub a patch of the 
 right shape. The suggestion may have been received as a 
 command, and there would be nothing very surprising in a 
 subject's automatically adopting the right means to fulfil a 
 previous hypnotic command. And even the third case might 
 be so accounted for, if the rubbing took place in sleep. At the 
 same time, it would be rash, I think, absolutely to reject the 
 hypothesis of the more direct effect." 
 
 In the sources I have quoted there are hosts of cases as 
 remarkable as those I have given. 
 
 Faith Cure, Christian Science 
 
 It would be superfluous to say much about these here: for 
 abundant literature is accessible. The votaries have got hold 
 of a truth, though many of them have got it by the tail. The 
 facts have been obscured by the fancies. Yet through religious 
 associations, some phases of truth can be got by many people 
 who otherwise, outside of commonplaces, could not get any 
 phases at all. This is true even of morality. Many a mind 
 incapable of grasping the sanctions of Natural Law, not to 
 speak of subordinating inclinations for the sake of conformity 
 with it, will perform no end of feats, objective and subjec- 
 tive, and make no end of sacrifices, in conformity with a sup- 
 posed command from even a mythical law-giver. 
 
 My allotment of space for the subject is not small because I 
 consider its importance small, but, as already intimated, be- 
 cause of the abundant discussion within everybody's reach.
 
 BOOK II PART III 
 
 PSYCHOKINESIS 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 A RATHER small allotment of space for a " Part " is made 
 here in the interest of classification. Perhaps the future may 
 furnish more material for this division. Now assuming 
 Telekinesis to be established, perhaps we are as nearly ready 
 to consider what I shall call Psychokinesis as people were a 
 generation ago to consider Telekinesis. To introduce it here 
 is to anticipate the phenomena of mediumship, but, as I often 
 have occasion to remark, all these phenomena are so tangled 
 up that, in the present state of our knowledge, cross classifi- 
 cation is often inevitable. 
 
 We need a name, and I hope the one I suggest will do, for 
 a mode of force of which we shall meet many indications here- 
 after, and which Hodgson describes as follows. Although it 
 is incidentally implied everywhere in the literature of medium- 
 ship, the passage I quote is the only direct allusion to it which 
 I know (Pr. XIII, 400) : 
 
 " The statements of the ' communicators ' as to what occurs on 
 the physical side may be put in brief general terms as follows. 
 We all hare bodies composed of ' luminiferous ether ' inclosed in 
 our flesh and blood bodies. The relation of Mrs. Piper's etherial 
 body to the etherial world, in which the ' communicators ' claim 
 to dwell, is such that a special store of peculiar energy is accumu- 
 lated in connection with her organism, and this appears to them 
 as ' a light. ' . . . Several ' communicators ' may be in contact with 
 this light at the same time. There are two chief ' masses ' of it in 
 her case, one in connection with the head, the other in connection 
 with the right arm and hand. Latterly, that in connection with 
 the hand has been ' brighter ' than that in connection with the 
 head. If the ' communicator ' gets into contact with the ' light ' 
 and thinks his thoughts, they tend to be reproduced by move- 
 ments in Mrs. Piper's organism. Very few can produce vocal 
 216
 
 Ch. XIV] Mediums Seem to Use a Mode of Force 217 
 
 effects, even when in contact with the ' light ' of the head, but 
 practically all can produce writing movements when in contact 
 with the ' light ' of the hand. Upon the amount and brightness 
 of this * light,' ccfteris paribus, the communications depend. 
 When Mrs. Piper is in ill-health, the ' light ' is feebler, and the 
 communications tend to be less coherent. It also gets used up 
 during a sitting, and when it gets dim there is a tendency to 
 incoherence even in otherwise clear communicators. In all cases, 
 coming into contacc with this ' light ' tends to produce bewilder- 
 ment, and if the contact is continued too long, or the ' light ' 
 becomes very dim, the consciousness of the communicator tends 
 to lapse completely " 
 
 But we have not the testimony of any living observer for the 
 manifestation of this force as a " light," though we have abun- 
 dant testimony of its manifestation and fluctuation, in the 
 varying degrees of vigor in mediumistic phenomena. Naming 
 it, however, is of course a somewhat tentative step. 
 
 Hodgson farther says (Pr. XIII, 410) : 
 
 " What it is that gets used up during the trance I do not 
 definitely know, but that there is something that does get used 
 up, that represents directly or indirectly some peculiar form of 
 energy, that when this is abundant the communications are 
 clearer, and that when, ceeteris paribus, it approaches exhaustion, 
 the communications become obscure and even absolutely in- 
 coherent, I have no doubt."
 
 BOOK II PART IV 
 TELEPSYCHOSIS 
 
 CHAPTEE XV 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 OF course these new manifestations of force that we have 
 just considered were generally attributed to " spirits," as 
 (pardon the frequent repetition) have been all new mani- 
 festations of force; but the indications seem to be that the 
 inanimate objects have been moved, sometimes voluntarily, 
 sometimes involuntarily, in response to the more or less defi- 
 nite volitions of the persons exercising the force that the 
 manifestations were psychical only in so far as they concerned 
 the psyche of the operator. 
 
 We now come to a group of phenomena that have nothing 
 to do with material objects external to the communicator, and 
 are physical only as concerns the communicator's organs of 
 expression. 
 
 The medium receives impressions apparently from other in- 
 telligences than his own, without the intervention of any 
 organs of communication with which we are familiar. These 
 impressions include facts that could have been communi- 
 cated by word, and also visions, auditions, and other sen- 
 sations. 
 
 They have apparently been derived from the minds of 
 persons present, persons distant, and ostensibly persons no 
 longer in the body. 
 
 And right here we are met by a strange fact : discrete as 
 are telekinesis and telepsychosis, rare as are the persons 
 manifesting either, yet generally, not always, a person mani- 
 festing one, manifests the other. No hint of an explanation 
 of the apparent connection between them has, so far as I 
 know, yet appeared. All we can yet do is to trace the tele- 
 218
 
 Ch. XV] Generally Known Instances of Telepathy 219 
 
 kinetic power from its molar manifestations up through 
 significant raps, lights, etc., to where these disappear, and 
 direct mental impressions take their places. 
 
 Both classes of phenomena, telekinetic and telepsychic, were 
 manifested by Foster, Home, and Moses, but only the tele- 
 psychic set through several important mediums whom we shall 
 consider later. 
 
 It is hard to account for the skepticism regarding telepathy 
 which prevailed till within a dozen years among investigators 
 who had long been familiar with it between the hypnotist 
 and his subject; and when the whole cultivated world knew 
 it between the conductor and his orchestra. The following 
 extract from the New York Evening Post of April 8, 1912, 
 is worth quoting in the connection. An orchestra had been 
 practising under an average conductor for a concert which 
 Nikisch was to conduct. The writer says [italics mine] : 
 
 " The men were tired, baring been rehearsing all the morning 
 and given a concert in the afternoon. Yet at seven o'clock of 
 the same day Nikisch assembled them for another rehearsal. 
 They hoped he would make it short and easy. He started off 
 with the fifth Tchaikovsky symphony. The rest may be related 
 in the player's own words, as chronicled in the London Musical 
 Times of February, 1905: 
 
 " ' Before we had been playing fire minutes we were deeply 
 interested, and, later, when we came to the big fortissimo, we 
 not only played like fiends, but we quite forgot we were tired. 
 For my own part, I simply boiled over with enthusiasm. I 
 could have jumped up and shouted as a matter of fact, when 
 we reached the end of the first movement, we all did rise from 
 our seats and actually shouted because we could not help it. 
 The weird part of it all was that we played this symphony 
 through with scarcely a word of correction from Nikisch 
 quite differently from our several previous performances of 
 the same work. He simply looked at us, often scarcely moving 
 his baton, and we played as those possessed. We made terrific 
 crescendos, sudden commas before some great chord, though 
 we had never done this before.'" 
 
 In this connection I am tempted to venture a speculation 
 which may be utterly valueless, but which may be found to 
 link in with later knowledge. 
 
 In the biography called Theodore Thomas (Chicago, 
 1905), II, 25, the great conductor says that in the Ride 
 and the Fire-Music of The Walkiire there are passages which
 
 220 Introduction [Bk. II, Pi IV 
 
 no violinist alone can play up to time, but which a dozen good 
 violinists playing together can. This I accounted for by 
 reasons which, for the present at least, are vague, but are 
 not without analogues and supports that as the interchange 
 of ability and diffusion of intelligence appear to have no 
 fixed limits, and as the intelligence of a dozen men cannot 
 be identical, it would be possible for each telepathically to 
 receive a capacity in addition to his own from others attempt- 
 ing exactly identical things with himself. Certainly this is 
 not the only case where each of several working together can do 
 more than each can do separately. In the higher psychoses 
 there are strong indications that twelve times one are not 
 barely twelve, but nearer twelve times twelve. Instance the 
 telepsychic powers of the dream state, as we shall consider 
 them later. 
 
 This is all very well, and I don't altogether despair of its 
 being very true. Nevertheless Thomas says : 
 
 " The intervals which one man drops another will play, as 
 no two players will drop the same interval, and so the general 
 effect is satisfactory." 
 
 That, too, is all very well, if failure in a rapid passage 
 means to players of that grade only the dropping of notes. 
 But I know that, to at least one amateur, it means the playing 
 of occasional wrong notes, and I have reason to believe that 
 it means the same to all players. If that is so, they would 
 not all play the same wrong notes, but several of them would 
 play different and discordant notes at the same time, of 
 which, to the great leader, " the general effect " could not 
 have been " satisfactory/' Therefore I continue to hold my 
 theory that the dozen played together correctly when no one 
 of them could have done it alone. Musicians generally have 
 had something of the same experience in ensemble playing 
 of doing with others what they could not do by themselves. 
 
 This all looks like telepathy, which is in part another name 
 for sympathy. 
 
 There was another illustration under the eyes of almost 
 everybody a generation ago : Planchette often writes what is 
 not in the mind of the person using it, but is very distinctly 
 in the mind of some other person present.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 TELEPATHY BETWEEN FOSTER AND THE AUTHOR 
 
 ONE Sunday evening in the early seventies, my wife and I 
 went, unannounced and unknown, to see Foster. We did 
 not give our names, but merely asked at the door of his 
 boarding-house (near Washington Square) if he could see us. 
 That he knew anything about us before would be a ridiculous 
 supposition. He did not know my name, and if he had 
 there were then even fewer persons to whom it meant any- 
 thing than there are now, and no portrait of me had ever 
 been published. 
 
 We were ushered into the second-story front room, an 
 ordinary "sitting-room," and Foster appeared. He was a 
 dark man of about thirty-five, rather coarse and heavy, with 
 a liberal jowl and a fairly genial face, expressive rather of 
 interest in the things of this world than those of any less 
 material one. His eyes were dark and rather dreamy. 
 Neither in temperament nor physique was he of the " spirit- 
 uality" to be expected, according to our usual standards, 
 in one whose susceptibilities to the hidden world were 
 evolved beyond those of men generally. Recent experiences, 
 however, have tended to modify the old notions regarding the 
 spiritual. 
 
 His manner had nothing " professional " about it, but was 
 easy, natural, and sincere. I expressed a desire for a sitting, 
 and he invited us to be seated. He sat by the ordinary parlor 
 table of that day, about two feet by four, on the side away 
 from the windows, and we on the other side, with our backs 
 to them. There was no machinery, no trance, no airs of 
 mystery, none of the " knockings " or " table-tippings " then 
 usually associated with " spiritual communications " nothing 
 outside of ordinary conversation, except the remarkable sub- 
 stance of the conversation. He merely reported to us im- 
 pressions that came into his consciousness, and told us that 
 221
 
 222 Telepathy between Foster and the Author [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 he thought they were put there by " spirits " (the universal 
 and immemorial way of accounting for the unaccountable), 
 but that he had no objection to our accounting for them in 
 any way we pleased. 
 
 After the natural comments on the object of our visit 
 and the state of the weather, he remarked : " Claude is here." 
 Claude was the name of a baby we had lost some seven 
 years before, and was of course the name most prominent 
 in our minds on going to see a " spirit medium." That he 
 should have known that we ever had such a child, or anything 
 else about us, was virtually impossible. Apparently he got 
 it telepathically from our minds. Soon he began to declare 
 the presence of other personalities friends we had lost, giving 
 us the names of perhaps a dozen in about the order of their 
 prominence in our minds. 
 
 We put questions mentally. The " spirits' " answers always 
 were germane to the questions, but were generally noncom- 
 mittal, and when otherwise, were wrong as often as right. 
 When my father was declared present, I said: "Ask him a 
 question I have in mind." Foster soon answered : " He says 
 it is best for you." My mental question was : " Is my way 
 of life satisfactory to you ? " 
 
 Soon after graduation I had lost a college friend who was 
 perhaps the best endowed person of his age I have known, 
 and who left behind him some unpublished MSS. In time 
 Foster announced : " Sextus is here." I said : " Please get 
 from him an answer to my mental question." 
 
 Foster said : " I'll try. Keep your mind on it as closely 
 as you can." 
 
 It is well to note here that while some mediums invite 
 concentration, others are confused by the sitter's letting 
 his mind dwell on anything: they want it kept as nearly 
 as possible a tabula rasa. We shall meet illustrations 
 later. Foster, on the contrary, said to me several times: 
 " Your mind is wandering. Concentrate it on the question ; 
 help me all you can." At last he popped out: "He says, 
 * Publish every word of them.' " Now that is the very last 
 thing Sextus would have said : he was the most modest of 
 men, and the most apt to settle such a question the other 
 way, or depend on the judgment of his friends.
 
 Ch. XVI] Piecing-out Telepathic Impressions 223 
 
 Foster impressed me as sincere, but I don't think that he 
 was able to draw an exact line between his " impressions " 
 from outside, as described to me, and his own inventions, 
 especially when he felt the impulse, not unnatural or entirely 
 inexcusable, to show by pertinent answers that he had re- 
 ceived correct impressions of questions in the mind of a sitter. 
 His spiritistic theory of the origin of his impressions had 
 started when it was the fashion to seek answers to questions 
 through table tippings, and when he found in himself the 
 sensibility to telepathic impressions, it was but a step almost 
 imperceptible to a person of his lack of training, to supply 
 coherent answers to questions, whether he was fully impressed 
 with such answers or not. I don't think he intended to 
 misrepresent, but simply did not distinguish. He probably 
 got the impression of the question, and himself supplied the 
 answer. This he did the more readily in the exultation of 
 having caught the difficult question. 
 
 As Foster got farther and farther away from our foremost 
 interests, which I assume most easily impressed his mind, 
 he began to write instead of talking, saying that perhaps the 
 "spirits" would guide his hand to write better than they 
 would communicate through speech. I think writing helped 
 him to concentrate. He wrote several scraps of paper which 
 are before me now. These are probably specimens of the 
 now widely known " automatic " writing. 
 
 One impression indicated on one of these scraps is in 
 writing not clear, but pretty plainly seeming to be " Votre 
 grandpere aux Fran$ais, Jean de Hass" Now I did have a 
 grandpere Francois, but never knew him, and he was about 
 the last person I would have thought of. Moreover, he was 
 more than two generations back, and his name was De Hass, 
 but it was not Jean. At the time, I did not know what it 
 was, and, of course, neither did Foster there being nothing 
 in my mind to give him an impression. So when he wanted 
 a Christian name, he seems to have taken, voluntarily or 
 involuntarily, the one which is most frequent. This jumping 
 consciously or unconsciously to the most common names is 
 very general among sensitives. 
 
 Probably Foster knew no French, and I cannot find any 
 warrant for the locution grandpere aux Fran^ais instead of
 
 224: Telepathy between Foster and the Author [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 the natural grandpere Francis. It surprised me at the time, 
 and surprises me still. It is barely possible that at some 
 time I had got hold of some such false locution, and held 
 it subliminally, and that Foster got it from my subliminal 
 consciousness. 
 
 To farther explain these unnecessarily long words for those 
 to whom they are new: they are an invention "made in 
 Germany," though in England and America quite usually 
 attributed to Myers, but I never knew him to claim it. 
 
 His first mention of it that I can find (in Pr. VII for 
 1891-2) was five years later than when Du Prel's Philosophy of 
 Mysticism showed it to be common stock among " the inevi- 
 table Germans." It seems to have started with Fechner. 
 Myers did more, however, than any one else to establish it 
 with English-speaking people as a working hypothesis. 
 
 The words are used to distinguish between conscious 
 thought and knowledge, and sub-conscious thought and know- 
 ledge. Why folks did not find these shorter and simpler 
 words good enough I have not been able to make out. The 
 preposition and the root limen, or more strictly, limin, which 
 means " threshold," is applied to a consciousness which seems 
 to exist under or away from the threshold of our daily 
 experience. 
 
 There is abundant evidence of there being within reach 
 of our memories more than we ordinarily realize so much, 
 in fact, that some observers think that every experience 
 and possibly every ancestral experience really survives in 
 the subliminal memory, and can be awakened under extraor- 
 dinary conditions, such as hypnotism and dreams and per- 
 haps death. Some even go so far as to find reason to believe 
 that each subliminal consciousness is part of an infinite con- 
 sciousness in which our individual consciousnesses merge and 
 communicate with each other telepathically. As we proceed, 
 we shall find more to suggest such a theory, or rather to turn 
 its name from a mere metaphor of locality into something 
 more significant. 
 
 The thing that struck me as most remarkable at Foster's 
 was that as he was telling me that his impressions often 
 came to him in visions, he exclaimed : " I had a strange 
 one then! I saw a large oyster-shell over your head, and
 
 Ch. XVI] Impression Visualized 225 
 
 from it a pearl seemed to fall into your head/' Now my 
 father, who had been dead fourteen years, having been one 
 of the founders of the Baltimore oyster industry, the pearl 
 coming to me from the oyster-shell was about as correct a 
 symbol for some of my important experiences as could 
 readily have been imagined. Foster knew no more about 
 this than about the revenues of the latest mandarin in China. 
 Foster gave many illustrations some to me and hosts to 
 others that his sensitiveness was not restricted to another's 
 passing thoughts, but was apt to respond to anything in 
 character and experience, without any conscious initiative 
 from the other ; and it was highly characteristic of the dream- 
 like action of the " sensitive " mind that he should have 
 caught this fact in my history and made a vision of it, just 
 as people in general are constantly taking some trivial cir- 
 cumstance and expanding it into a dream. 
 
 Upon my asking him how he got such impressions, he 
 said substantially: 
 
 "All I know about it is that they come into my mind, 
 and sometimes, like the oyster-shell, seem to appear to my 
 eyes. I think they are communicated to me by spirits, but 
 of course you'll think what you please." 
 
 I asked : " Why, with your power of getting at secret things, 
 don't you learn the secrets of the stock-market, and make 
 yourself rich ? " He answered : " I feel that if I were to 
 use my strange powers to get anything but a comfortable 
 livelihood, they would be taken away." His biographer 
 records, however, that he did receive a great deal of money 
 in legitimate fees, and some in more or less legitimate bets 
 as to what he could do, but that he was not avaricious, often 
 declined to take a bet that he had won, and let his money 
 pass through his fingers like water. 
 
 For instance, Mr. Bartlett quotes (op. cit., p. 99) from the 
 New York Graphic, October 24, 1874: 
 
 " One night a total stranger to Foster called at his rooms 
 and said: 
 
 " ' Foster, I don't believe in your humbug. Now, you never 
 saw or heard of me, and I will bet you twenty dollars that you 
 can't tell my name. I do it to test you.' 
 
 " ' T-w-e-n-t-y d-o-M-a-r-s,' repeated Foster; 'twenty dollars 
 that I can't tell your name? Well, sir (putting his hand to his
 
 226 Telepathy between Foster and the Auth(fr [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 brow), the spirit of your brother Clement tells me that your 
 name is Alexander B. Corcorane.' 
 
 " Mr. Corcorane was astonished, and took out his money to 
 pay the medium, who pushed it back with a laugh." 
 
 Of course he could have read both names from the visitor's 
 mind. 
 
 Foster did not tell me that he felt that his powers would 
 be taken away if he used them to obtain anything for which 
 he did not give an equivalent; but that was probably what 
 he meant. He was not a person of the high education that 
 seems necessary to enable most people to say very exactly 
 what they mean. In fact my recollection seems to be that 
 he was not very sure to say what he meant even grammatically. 
 
 The conclusions established in me by the interview were 
 that it could not be accounted for without the hypothesis 
 of thought-transference, as it was called then telepathy, as 
 it is called now; and that there was nothing correct in it 
 which could not be accounted for by that hypothesis. He 
 told me nothing important or verifiable which I did not know 
 before, but the things he did tell me, he could not have 
 known without absorbing impressions from my mind or 
 from other incarnate minds or from the " spirits." 
 
 His impressions had all the clearness and all the vagueness 
 of dreams from exact names to the (to him) meaningless 
 vision of the oyster shell and the pearl. 
 
 Myers has marked the difference between a mental impres- 
 sion and what might be called a sensory vision, like the pearl 
 oyster, by the two words telepathy and telesthesia. Though 
 perhaps he would confine telesthesia to a vision of an actual 
 thing or circumstance. Of course all such things merge 
 into each other as pretty much everything does into every- 
 thing else a fact to which I have called attention 
 probably often enough to tax your patience. The first two 
 or three times I did it merely as a matter of general scientific 
 interest ; but as I have progressed, I have been impelled to do 
 it more by fumbling against a vague suggestion of something ; 
 and as I have groped along, this something seems to become 
 more definite and pervasive, until now it begins to look like 
 a clue running through the whole subject, and leading by a 
 new route to a better standpoint for looking through its vistas
 
 Ch. XVI] Telepathy Basis of Various Manifestations 227 
 
 than (so far as I know) has so far been realized. Perhaps we 
 shall reach it definitely in due course. 
 
 Foster's explanation of the " spirits " had been the general 
 explanation for the mysterious during all previous history; 
 and at his time many scouted telepathy as a less probable 
 hypothesis. In fact telepathy was then scouted in favor of 
 fraud by many probably most of such people as are now 
 crying it up as against spiritism. 
 
 Although in those days Foster was called a "spiritual 
 medium," so was everybody else who did anything unex- 
 plainable. Under the discriminations of to-day, Foster as 
 I saw him, would not be regarded as a spiritual medium at 
 all. He was, so far as I observed him, merely a telepathic 
 sensitive. He did not profess to me that his body was 
 used as a medium by another spirit. His own spirit was 
 in the possession of it all the while, and simply communi- 
 cated to us what he thought other spirits told him. What 
 is to-day strictly meant by a spiritual medium is a person 
 whose spirit seems to relinquish the body for the use of 
 another spirit, who uses it to write and articulate, and by 
 so doing generally expresses an alleged personality entirely 
 distinct, perhaps in point of age and even of sex, from the 
 medium's waking self. But we are going to meet evidence 
 that Foster manifested these phenomena too. We shall find 
 reason to regard them as in some respects quite different from 
 what they seem. 
 
 Many years after I sat with Foster, I left a sitting with 
 Mrs. Piper more deeply, if possible, under the same im- 
 pression of telepathy than I was when I left Foster. But 
 there were additional features in her case that have since 
 inclined me toward additional convictions. I will be more 
 specific after we have been over the phenomena.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 SOME EARLY TELEPATHIC SENSITIVES 
 
 I HAVE introduced telepsychosis, as I introduced telekinesis, 
 by a personal experience because, as between my readers and 
 me, it is more direct than an experience from a third person. 
 But in the former case I began with the simplest sort of 
 illustration of the subject, while in the present case I have 
 subordinated simplicity to the other consideration. 
 
 Yet so many people have read of telepsychic experiences of 
 many kinds; in fact, so many people have known of, and 
 even experienced them, that any illustrations at all sometimes 
 seem almost superfluous. But the experiences are as yet so 
 little correlated with established knowledge that few people, 
 if any, profess to " understand " them to any extent, and 
 therefore more illustrations may be worth while to stimulate 
 your guesses as well as to explain other guesses, including 
 my own. 
 
 Moreover, next to the question of survival of death, and 
 strongly bearing upon it, this subject of telepathy, or telesthe- 
 sia, has turned out to be far the most important with which the 
 S. P. R. has had to deal. It seems to pervade nearly all 
 superusual psychic phenomena, and it is therefore well to 
 trace it from even earlier than the beginning of scientific 
 examination. 
 
 There have been many attempts to make the recent mani- 
 festations, beginning about the middle of the last century, of 
 a piece with manifestations going as far back as history. 
 There are at least two pretty clear differences. Most of the 
 early manifestations were associated with pathological condi- 
 tions and religious ecstasy. The recent ones are generally free 
 from the first, and those as late as the contemporary S. P. R. 
 records, are free from the second. Indeed, while the compar- 
 atively illiterate spiritualism of the American outbreak had 
 religious associations, it had few religious ecstasies. The
 
 Ch. XVII] Swedenborg 229 
 
 manifestations were generally normal, the earlier ones seem to 
 have been generally abnormal. 
 
 There seems then a good deal of warrant for assuming that 
 the recent phenomena come in the natural course of evolution, 
 while the earlier phenomena may have been precocious, and 
 therefore unsubstantial. 
 
 The reader who cares for a more complete and detailed 
 account than I have space for of these subjects previous to 
 the foundation of the S. P. R., will find the best I know in 
 Podmore's Modern Spiritualism (1902). But admirable as 
 it was at the time, in the light of later knowledge much of 
 it reads like the old disproofs of the possibility of a locomotive 
 moving over twenty miles an hour, or of more than one electric 
 light on a circuit. 
 
 The earliest celebrated sensitive in the modern world was 
 Swedenborg. His case of course received little general atten- 
 tion before the movement of which one symptom was the 
 foundation of the S. P. R. Nevertheless, the case had attracted 
 the investigation and confidence of so great a man as Kant, 
 who vouches for it, expressing himself as follows in a letter 
 reprinted as Appendix II in his Dreams of a Ghost-seer (Goer- 
 witz's translation, London, 1900) : 
 
 "In the year 1759, towards the end of July, on Saturday, 
 at four o'clock P.M., Swedenborg arrived at Gottenburg from 
 England, when Mr. William Castel invited him to his house, 
 together with a party of fifteen persons. About six o'clock 
 Swedenborg went out, and returned to the company quite pale 
 and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken 
 out in Stockholm, in the Sodermalm (Gottenburg is about three 
 hundred miles from Stockholm), and that it was spreading very 
 fast He was restless and went out often. Ke said that the 
 house of one of his friends, whom he named, was already in 
 ashes, and that his own was in danger. At eight o'clock, after 
 he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed, ' Thank God, the 
 fire is extinguished the third door from my house.' . . . On 
 Monday evening, a messenger arrived at Gottenburg, who was 
 despatched by the Board of Trade during the time of the fire. 
 In the letters brought by him the fire was described precisely 
 in the manner stated by Swedenborg." 
 
 This may have been pure telepathy from the minds of 
 witnesses in Stockholm, or it may have been telopsis (clair- 
 voyance) .
 
 230 Some Early Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 Kant also said on another subject (op. cit., pp. 17-18) : 
 
 " Madame Marteville, the widow of the Dutch ambassador 
 in Stockholm, some time after the death of her husband, was 
 called upon by Croon, a goldsmith, to pay for a silver service 
 which her husband had purchased from him. The widow was 
 convinced that her late husband had been much too precise 
 and orderly not to have paid this debt, yet she was unable to 
 
 find the receipt She requested Mr. Swedenborg . . . that 
 
 if, as all people said, he possessed the extraordinary gift of 
 conversing with the souls of the departed, he would perhaps 
 have the kindness to ask her husband how it was about the 
 silver service. Swedenborg did not at all object to complying 
 with her request. Three days afterward the said lady had com- 
 pany at her house for coffee. Swedenborg called, and in his cool 
 way informed her that he had conversed with her husband. The 
 debt had been paid several months before his decease, and the 
 receipt was in a bureau in the room upstairs . . . that her hus- 
 band had described to him how, after pulling out the left- 
 hand drawer a board would appear which would be required 
 to be drawn out, when a secret compartment would be disclosed, 
 containing his private Dutch correspondence, as well as the 
 receipt. Upon hearing this description the whole company 
 arose and accompanied the lady into the room upstairs . . . and, 
 to the great astonishment of all, the papers were discovered 
 there, in accordance with his description." 
 
 This, if telepathy, apparently could have been only from 
 the mind of Marteville surviving bodily death, though there 
 is a faint probability that some living person knew it. The 
 only remaining hypotheses are that it was telopsis, or that we 
 don't know. 
 
 As Podmore, and I dare say others, point out (Modern 
 Spiritualism, I, 15) : 
 
 " The idea of intercourse with distinctively human spirits, if 
 not actually introduced by Swedenborg, at least established itself 
 
 first in the popular consciousness through his teaching For 
 
 him there was no gulf fixed between this earthly life and that 
 which he believed to lie beyond death. The great principle of 
 continuity is preserved; Nature makes no leap, even over the 
 grave, and heaven and hell are seen in his prosaic pages to be 
 much like Stockholm or London." 
 
 Which latter fact is, with me at least, an argument, pro 
 tanto, for the genuineness of his heaven at least.
 
 Ch. XVII] Hudson Tuttle. Thomas L. Harris 231 
 
 Among the earlier uninvestigated cases of telepsychosis is 
 that of Hudson Tuttle, an untutored country boy on the 
 Erie shore of Ohio, who, in the early fifties, at the age of 
 sixteen, without books at hand, wrote a fairly correct outline 
 in fairly correct language of what was then known of the 
 evolution of the planet and the life and thought upon it. 
 This he of course supposed to be expressed through him by 
 spirits (Tuttle, Hudson: The Arcana of Nature. Latest 
 edition edited by Densmore. New York (date not given) : 
 copyrighted in 1909). 
 
 About the same time, probably a little earlier, Andrew 
 Jackson Davis, "the Poughkeepsie Seer," also uneducated, 
 wrote a similar work, Nature's Divine Revelations, and later 
 The Great Harmonia, and half a score of others, in trance, 
 at first brought on by hypnosis and later by auto-suggestion. 
 
 In March, 1846, Davis gave a description of an eighth 
 planet as yet unseen, with a " density four-fifths of water " ; 
 and in the following September Neptune was discovered, with 
 about that density. Davis said some other things, however, 
 absurd on their faces : so the planet seems a coincidence. But 
 he also declared a communion between incarnate and post- 
 carnate spirits that would soon be abundantly manifested. 
 Anybody who wants to, can of course apply this to the develop- 
 ments in the Pr. S. P. R. For much of this I am indebted to 
 Podmore, Modern Spiritualism, 1, 163. His account of Davis 
 is very interesting. 
 
 Of course both these men thought their writings inspired 
 by spirits. 
 
 There were many other writing mediums at the same epoch. 
 
 A young ex-blacksmith, named Charles Lmton, in 1853 
 wrote heteromatically a religious rhapsody called The Healing 
 of the Nations, which was well up to the standard of the 
 educated pulpit; and there were several other performances 
 of the kind, some of them in verse, or alleged verse, generally, 
 but not invariably, very bad. Thomas L. Harris's were al- 
 most endurable. Virtually all the stuff, however, was made 
 of echoes, and a little of it of direct but perhaps involuntary 
 telepathic plagiarism, or (even Podmore, from whom I have 
 taken some of this edifying information, virtually admits) 
 possibly telopsis.
 
 232 Some Early Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pi IV 
 
 These cases, like others before the overwhelming accumu- 
 lation of scientifically sifted evidence by the S. P. R., at- 
 tracted hardly any notice in the educated world, but now one 
 can, without fear of ridicule, mention them as worth attention. 
 
 The books of these authors and their fellows contain many 
 quotations from works which the authors profess never to 
 have seen except teloptically ; and it is hard to account for 
 the existence of their books on any other hypothesis than 
 teloteropathy and telopsis, unless it be that of fraud, which 
 is now out of date and not countenanced by the circumstances. 
 
 Tuttle and Davis, in the frequent enjoyment of what 
 Davis called " the superior state," both lived to be old men, 
 and I believe very good old men, and were alleged to be 
 useful in diagnosing and prescribing for disease, and certainly 
 were useful in raising above the hewing of wood and drawing 
 of water the thoughts of many people who believed the 
 lectures of these seers inspired by superhuman wisdom. 
 
 There is little room for doubt that they did telepsychically 
 absorb much that people generally have to attain by effort, 
 and that, without any of what is ordinarily called education, 
 they grew into the possession of a mass of irregular know- 
 ledge which, eked out by the vocabulary that came with it, 
 led a large number of disciples to believe themselves "getting 
 somewhere " ; and probably they were, as compared with where 
 they would have got without these teachers. I have had a 
 little very little correspondence with this order of " spirit- 
 ualists," and find them exceptionally good and kindly people. 
 No more so, however, than that arch skeptic who has no 
 belief whatever in Foster's " spirits," but implicitly believes 
 in the man, and wrote his life. 
 
 A word was said about our American seers diagnosing 
 diseases. Davis at least did. Probably the telopsis which 
 went to the pages of remote books went into the organs of 
 the body. Much matter regarding this, on the part of many 
 people, has been gathered, and I shall have a word to say 
 about it later. It may have big possibilities. 
 
 I have taken most of the foregoing data regarding Tuttle 
 and Davis from Densmore's Introduction to Tuttle's Arcana. 
 He also gives there an account of Mrs. Richmond, whose works 
 and biography by Barrett I possess, but do not care to quote
 
 Ch. XVII] Mrs. Richmond 233 
 
 from, as all the space I can spare will be better filled by 
 Densmore's account of her in his same introduction to Turtle 
 (op. tit., p. 65) : 
 
 " Mrs. Cora L. V. Richmond (nee Scott) was born in 1840, 
 near Cuba, Allegany County, N. Y." [The region from the 
 Hudson to a few hundred miles west was the cradle of the 
 mid-century " spiritualism." H. H.] " Her father, David W. 
 Scott, was a mathematician and inclined to philosophic studies. 
 Her mother, Lodensy Butterfield, had psychic gifts. . . . When 
 eleven years of age she was asked to prepare a composition and 
 took her slate and pencil into an arbor in the garden, expecting 
 first to write the essay on the slate and then copy it on paper. 
 In a little while she took the slate to her mother, saying she 
 had fallen asleep and somebody had been writing on her slate. 
 The writing began : ' My dear sister/ and was from a sister 
 of Mrs. Scott who had passed away in childhood. A few days 
 later Cora was seated at the feet of her mother, when sleep 
 again overtook her, and the mother, thinking she had fainted, 
 applied restoratives. Noticing a trembling motion of the hand, 
 she placed the slate and pencil in the child's hand, which imme- 
 diately began to write. In this way several messages, signed 
 by different members of the family who had gone to spirit life, 
 were written, each of them testifying to their existence in an- 
 other sphere 
 
 " A few months after the first writing on the slate, Cora was 
 controlled by what purported to be the spirit of a German 
 physician, but who withheld his name. For some four years 
 the German physician, at a given hour every day, controlled 
 Cora to diagnose and give medical advice to those who came 
 to her father's house for that purpose. This occupied two, 
 three, and sometimes six hours a day. Under the direction of 
 this physician she dressed wounds, and sometimes performed 
 minor surgical operations. Cora had no knowledge of any other 
 language than English, but the influence controlling her some- 
 times spoke through her in German. From the beginning of 
 her mediumship. it was stated through the child that her mission 
 was to be a public speaker, and that her efforts in the art of 
 healing were experiences to fit her for her lifework. 
 
 " It was not until she was fifteen that she began to give 
 lectures before large audiences/' 
 
 This is plainly the dream state as known to all who dream 
 at all, but as highly developed among the mediums. 
 
 Mrs. Richmond has spoken to large assemblies of spiritual- 
 ists in America and England, and is, or was until lately, 
 minister to a large congregation of them in Chicago. I have
 
 234 Some Early Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 read some of her discourses, which seem at about the usual 
 pulpit level, with more than the usual liberality. 
 
 In the same connection, Densmore gave some account of 
 Colville, which is doubly worth quoting from because its last 
 episode the voyage is not in print elsewhere, even in the 
 books by Colville from which Densmore takes most of his 
 material. 
 
 " W. J. Colville was born in England in 1860. The following 
 facts of his life are gleaned from a recently published auto- 
 biography : 
 
 " My mediumship originally declared itself in early chil- 
 hood. I was practically an orphan from birth 
 
 " How I first came to see my mother clairvoyantly I do not 
 know, but I distinctly remember becoming conscious, at fre- 
 quent intervals, of the gentle, loving presence of a beautiful 
 young woman, who invariably appeared to my vision attired 
 in garments of singular beauty 
 
 " I was first led to realize the unusual character of my vision 
 when I mentioned the presence of the ' beautiful lady in white ' 
 to two persons who were with me. I saw her very distinctly, 
 yet they declared that we three were the only occupants of the 
 apartment. The mystery of the fourth inmate was for me 
 greatly intensified, when it appeared to me that the other two 
 persons, besides her and myself, could pass through her and she 
 through them, while they appeared completely unconscious of 
 
 each other's presence The second evidence of clairvoyance 
 
 did not refer to sight, as ordinarily understood, but to mental 
 enlightenment, and this not only of a general but of a par- 
 ticular character, going deeply and precisely into manifold de- 
 tails of private family history, and including many revelations 
 which brought consternation to the hearers when I reported my 
 experiences. The people among whom I was being reared were 
 desirous of hiding from me many facts concerning my parents 
 of which my spirit mother evidently wished me to become 
 aware." 
 
 All the preceding matter was in the minds of the family 
 and may have been caught by the child telepathically. An 
 exception should be made of the mother's dress. This was 
 an elaboration of the original data, such as is generally made 
 in dreams. Even what follows is not necessarily prophecy 
 or even telopsis: the aunt knew her own room and her own 
 bonnet strings. That is the sort of difficulty with telopsis 
 generally.
 
 
 Ch. XVII] W . J. Colville 235 
 
 " The third feature in my clairvoyance was the actual pre- 
 dicting of coming events A single example will illustrate : 
 
 My grandmother's sister in Lincolnshire had decided to visit 
 Sussex, but had not communicated her intention to any one, 
 although her mind was fully made up. I had never seen my 
 great-aunt, and had rarely heard her mentioned, yet I distinctly 
 saw her in the house where I was then living, and accurately 
 described her appearance, even to the strings of the cap which 
 she wore when, a few days later, she paid her sister a visit." 
 
 What follows looks like telopsis, but it may have been 
 telepathy from those who had read the novel. 
 
 Page 81. "I was in Perth, West Australia, in 1896, when 
 Marie Corelli's novel, The Treasure of Heaven, A Romance of 
 Riches, reached Australian shores. The book had been widely 
 advertised before its arrival, and a committee of arrangements 
 had secured my consent to include a review of that book in a 
 
 course of lectures I was then delivering in the Town Hall 
 
 To my consternation I could not get hold of a copy until the 
 evening on which I was to speak, and as the book contained 
 nearly five hundred pages I gave up hope of reviewing it in 
 my lecture and decided to treat the topic from my own stand- 
 point, merely mentioning the fact that Marie Corelli's novel had 
 
 just reached the city At the close of the lecture I was 
 
 personally congratulated upon my exhaustive review of the 
 entire story and . . . told that I had quoted passage after passage, 
 in almost the exact words of the author, and had given a full 
 
 synopsis of the entire tale 1 have often had experiences 
 
 similar to the above and am therefore fully assured that it is 
 quite possible to speak intelligently upon matters with which 
 in my ordinary state I have merely the most superficial ac- 
 quaintance n 
 
 But now we come to something for which, as far as I 
 can see, we must wait for a correlation with anything we know. 
 
 " One night in February, 1906 ... I beheld in the air of the 
 room the vision of a large ocean steamship and, near it, the 
 date March 29th. Not having the least idea that the vision 
 concerned me individually, I took it for granted that some of 
 the other members of the party were about to take an un- 
 expected trip across the Atlantic T was impressed to try 
 
 my hand at automatic writing The writing ceased sud- 
 denly and I felt no inclination . . . even to read what had been 
 
 written until the following morning Next day I found 
 
 written . . . the substance of what here follows : ' Your friends 
 in Australia have decided to request you to leave San Francisco 
 on the Oceanic steamer Sierra, due to sail March 29th. You
 
 236 Some Early Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 must and will go then. There are several grave reasons for 
 your so doing. Among them an event of great importance 
 in California, the details of which you will learn in due season. 
 This is an important crisis in your life, and when you realize 
 all it signifies you will indeed know that unseen watchers guard 
 diligently your pathway.' No name was signed . . . except the 
 cryptic signature, ' One who knows.' 
 
 " Within a few weeks I received a letter from the editor 
 
 of a magazine in Sydney, urging me to comply with the request 
 of a committee of friends ... to leave San Francisco, March 
 29th, on the Sierra" 
 
 This, then, was telepathy ! Colville continues : 
 
 " The second portion of the writing I did indeed soon come 
 to understand. Reaching Sydney April 19th, 1906, passengers 
 and crew were shocked by the awful tidings of earthquake and 
 fire in San Francisco 
 
 "I have often been asked to describe the difference between 
 telepathic and spiritual messages. ... It is almost impossible 
 to discriminate between a message received from a communi- 
 cant on earth and from one who has passed to the other side 
 of existence. What, indeed, is that ' other side ' but the side 
 to which telepathy is indigenous? And can we afford to be 
 sure that when we are functioning telepathically we are not 
 behaving just as we should continue to behave were we sud- 
 denly divested of our material envelopes ? 
 
 " Now that I have rounded out nearly thirty years of public 
 service, I feel it a solemn duty, as well as a high privilege, to 
 bear unequivocal testimony to the always beneficial effect which 
 mediumship has had on me from all standpoints. Mentally and 
 physically I owe much to those very endowments and experi- 
 ences which mistaken people imagine are weakening to mind 
 and body." 
 
 There is a strange incongruity in the psychic material 
 which mediums get. The reader perhaps marveling at the 
 smooth diction, ample vocabulary, and sound sense of what 
 he may be perusing from an unlettered medium, is suddenly 
 dumped into a passage conspicuously lacking in some one 
 of those qualities, or perhaps all. These people for a time 
 show results that ordinarily can be attained only by educa- 
 tion, and then show a lack of them. It seems as if, in the 
 first cases, they have teloteropathically received the results of 
 somebody's education, and that, in the other cases, they are 
 either teloteropathically representing another order of mind,
 
 Ch. XVII] " Analysis " in Tuttle's " Psychic Science " 237 
 
 or perhaps expressing their own. But whatever the inter- 
 pretation of it, whatever portion of it is deliberately invented 
 fraud, whatever its neglect hitherto by scholars, in view of 
 much similar matter that has lately passed scientific scrutiny, 
 I am satisfied that much of the humbler "spiritualistic" 
 literature is sincere, results from spontaneous telepsychoses, 
 is outside of and often in advance of general experience, opens 
 up a new and promising range of mind, and is therefore 
 worthy of careful study. Let all this be illustrated by a few 
 passages. 
 
 Here is the "Analysis" serving as preface to Tuttle's 
 Psychic Science (Chicago, 1895) : 
 
 " There is a Psychic Ether, related to thought, as the luminif- 
 erous ether is to light. 
 
 " This may be regarded as the thought atmosphere of the 
 universe. A thinking being in this atmosphere is a pulsating 
 center of thought-waves, as a luminous body is of light. 
 
 " There is a state of mind and body known as sensitive, or 
 impressible, in which it receives impressions from other minds. 
 This state may be normal, or induced by fatigue, disease, drugs, 
 or arise in sleep. The facts of clairvoyance, trance, somnambu- 
 lism, and psychometry prove the existence of this ether, and 
 are correlated to [with? H. H.] it. 
 
 "Thought transference is also in evidence, as well as that 
 vast series of facts which give intimation of an intelligence 
 surviving the death of the physical body. 
 
 " This sensitiveness may be exceedingly acute, and the in- 
 dividual unconscious of it, and then it is known as genius, 
 which is acute susceptibility to the waves of the psychic at- 
 mosphere." 
 
 All this might have been written by any leader of the 
 S. P. R. From it we tumble into the middle ages, tautology, 
 and bombast. 
 
 " Sensitiveness explains the true philosophy of prayer. 
 
 " All the so-called occult phenomena of mesmerism, trance, 
 clairvoyance, mind-reading, dreams, visions, thought transfer- 
 ence, etc., are correlated to and explained by means of this 
 psychic ether. 
 
 " All these phenomena lead up to the consideration of im- 
 mortality, which is a natural state, the birthright of every 
 human being." 
 
 Next we have what may have been an accidental vague
 
 238 Some Early Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 generality, with possible meanings not at all realized by the 
 person expressing it, or it may have included many of the 
 profound suggestions I have quoted from Professors Cope, 
 Holmes, and others. 
 
 " The body and spirit are originated and sustained together, 
 and death is their final separation." 
 
 Then comes in a sentence which reads like Spencer, and 
 may be as profound as Boole, but which so far as I can fathom 
 it seems like nonsense. 
 
 " The problem of an immortal future, beginning in time, is 
 solved by the resolution of forces at first acting in straight 
 lines, through spirals reaching circles which, returning within 
 themselves, become individualized and self-sustaining." 
 
 Next a profound platitude that nobody fully appreciating 
 most of his preceding matter would have thought of writing : 
 
 " Spiritual beings must originate and be sustained by laws 
 as fixed and unchanging as those which govern the physical 
 world." 
 
 Then follows: 
 
 " Sensitiveness gives great pleasures and may give pain ; the 
 author's experience as a sensitive, related, shows this." 
 
 Now this jumble of profundities and superficialities, of 
 clear statement of difficult things, and turgid statement of 
 simple things, is typical of the old-fashioned spiritual litera- 
 ture, but, and here's an additional rub, also of the latest 
 communications through Mrs. Piper, professing to come 
 from some of the best minds that have lately been known to 
 the educated world. 
 
 Is it not a pretty clear inference that what comes from 
 them all is a jumble from all the minds going, including their 
 own, and varying from single impressions all the way up to 
 the complexes which portray a soul? This need not mean, 
 though it may, that what professes to come from the eman- 
 cipated spirits of Sidgwick, Myers, Hodgson, and James, 
 necessarily has any such exalted source: it may come from 
 memories and impressions of them in minds still on earth; 
 but wherever it comes from, it comes in shape so questionable 
 that even the early similar manifestations, so long neglected, 
 ought not to be neglected longer. 

 
 Ch. XVII] Impressions of Franklin and Bacon 239 
 
 But the early reports bring us nothing of the dramatic 
 character so strongly indicative of personality independent of 
 the medium, that abounds in the S. P. R. reports. Indeed 
 previous to Foster I find nothing like the modern " possession." 
 The medium sees and reports, sometimes with much veridicity, 
 but that is all : the medium is not described as impersonating. 
 Moreover I recall no clear case of spontaneous or self-induced 
 trance in normal persons prior to those contemporary with the 
 S. P. R., but my knowledge and my memory may be at fault 
 there. Of course there are plenty of hysterical visions and, 
 apparently, of telopsis. 
 
 Among the early records, the name of Benjamin Franklin 
 is given as a control much oftener than that of anybody else, 
 in fact by almost if not quite every medium. This suggests 
 at least the question whether, amid the strange jumble, there 
 may not have been from his powerful personality as power- 
 ful perhaps as any that earth has known something more 
 than the mere impression which accounts of it had made on 
 the waking medium. Podmore says, undoubtedly correctly 
 (Modern Spiritualism, I, 268) : 
 
 " Of all the august names which figure in the * inspirational ' 
 literature of the period, none, it should be remarked, occurs more 
 frequently, or is made sponsor for more outrageous nonsense." 
 
 Bacon's share of the tommyrot was nearly as great
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 RECENT TELEPATHIC SENSITIVES 
 
 IN the foregoing survey of the early sensitives I have made 
 no attempt to classify their manifestations, but in going on I 
 will try, so far as the complexity of the phenomena permits, 
 to group them under (a) simple impressions apparently re- 
 ceived from the sitter; (b) visions similarly received (both 
 a and b were illustrated to me by Foster) ; (c) simple im- 
 pressions apparently received from distant minds; (d) visions 
 similarly received; (e) impressions apparently received from 
 ostensible intelligences surviving death; (f) visions similarly 
 received ; and (g) impressions and visions without any assign- 
 able source. 
 
 Impressions from Persons Present 
 The following is from Stillman (op. cit, I, 183f.) : 
 
 " Mrs. H. K. Brown, the wife of our ablest sculptor 
 
 of that day . . . was, apart from the peculiar powers she pos- 
 sessed, one of the most remarkable women I have ever known, 
 both morally and intellectually No physical ' manifesta- 
 tion ' took place in her presence, and we never ' sat ' as a 
 ' circle/ but her telepathic and thought-reading powers in ordi- 
 nary social intercourse were most surprising. . . . Bryant, the 
 poet, assured me that she had recounted to him events in his 
 past life not known to any living person except himself, and I 
 had, myself, the evidence that in her presence there was nothing 
 
 in my past life beyond her perception 1 gave her one day 
 
 a letter of Ruskin without disclosing the authorship, and in 
 the course of a long analysis she said that the writer was not 
 married, to which I replied that in this she was mistaken, and 
 she rejoined, ' Then he ought not to be.' At that time Mr. and 
 Mrs. Ruskin were, so far as I knew, living together, and no 
 rumor of their incompatibility had come about. 
 
 " Mrs. Brown explained the possession of her occult powers 
 by a voice in the manner of Socrates's demon, which, she said, 
 was always present with her, and which she recognized as en- 
 tirely foreign to her. She repeated what she heard, word for 
 240
 
 Ch. XVIII] Apparent " Possession " of Foster 241 
 
 word as the words came, hesitating and sometimes leaving a 
 sentence incomplete, not hearing the sequence. When she asked 
 who was speaking to her, she received only the reply, 'We are 
 spirit,' and no indication of personality was ever offered." 
 
 From Bartlett (op. cit., p. 64) : 
 
 "Two gentlemen called on Mr. Foster, and inquired if he 
 could answer some questions in a foreign language. He replied 
 that he had usually been able to do so, and if the gentlemen 
 would kindly be seated and write their questions on slips of 
 paper [Writing evidently helped concentration. H. II. |. he 
 would see what the results would be. I am quite sure that 
 the mental strain was very severe on Mr. Foster during this 
 seance, for beads of perspiration could be seen on his forehead 
 
 frequently He answered numerous questions, but in a 
 
 language which he said he had never before spoken. . . . He 
 
 pronounced many of the words with some difficulty In 
 
 justice to Mr. Foster, and to show what a wonderful test he 
 had given them, one of the gentlemen made this explanation: 
 Some years ago, he was shipwrecked, and drifted to an unknown 
 island, where he was treated kindly by the natives, and where 
 he was compelled to remain for three years before being rescued. 
 It was there he learned this strange language. A young native, 
 who was his most intimate companion, died a few weeks before 
 he was rescued, and it was the spirit of this young man from 
 whom he was supposed to have had the communication, as 
 there was not another man in New York City, or in any part 
 of Europe, who knew a word of the language." 
 
 Bartlett gives a much more complicated case than this, for 
 which I have not space. 
 
 It now seems strange that it should not have occurred to 
 Mr. Bartlett that the "spirit" was the sitter, but his ex- 
 periences were before the world was familiar with telepathy. 
 Apparently, however, he does not state the explanation he 
 does give, as his own : for elsewhere, and in conversation with 
 me, he stubbornly repudiates the spiritistic hypothesis. 
 
 The speaking and understanding by mediums, of languages 
 which, in their ordinary state, they do not understand at all, 
 is testified to by a cloud of witnesses, and is one of the very 
 strongest illustrations of the community of mind which will 
 be found more obvious and more suggestive as we proceed. 
 Podmorc (Modern Spiritualism, I, 258-59) quotes the follow- 
 ing incidents from Judge Edmonds:
 
 242 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 (P. 258.) " ' Some Polish gentlemen, entire strangers to her, 
 sought an interview with Laura [Miss Edmonds] . . . and they 
 received answers, sometimes in English and sometimes in Polish. 
 The English she understood, but the other she did not, though 
 they seemed to understand it perfectly. 
 
 " ' This can be verified only by Laura's statement, for no one 
 was present but her and the two gentlemen, and they did not 
 give their names.' " 
 
 (P. 259.) "'The incident with the Greek gentleman was 
 this : He spoke broken English 
 
 " ' Occasionally, through Laura, the spirit would speak a word 
 or a sentence in Greek, until Mr. E. inquired if he could be 
 understood if he spoke in Greek. The residue of the conversa- 
 tion, for more than an hour, was, on his part, entirely in Greek, 
 and on hers sometimes in Greek and sometimes in English. At 
 times Laura would not understand what was the idea conveyed, 
 either by her or him. At other times she would understand him, 
 though he spoke in Greek, and herself when uttering Greek 
 words. 
 
 " ' My niece, of whom I have spoken, has often sung 
 
 Italian, improvising both words and tune, yet she is entirely un- 
 acquainted with the language. Of this, I suppose, there are a 
 hundred instances. 
 
 " ' One day my daughter and niece . . . began a conversation 
 with me in Spanish, one speaking a part of a sentence and the 
 other the residue. They were influenced, as I found, by the spirit 
 of a person whom I had known when in Central America, and 
 reference was made to many things which had occurred to me 
 there, of which I knew they were as ignorant as they were of 
 Spanish. 
 
 " * To this only we three can testify.' " 
 
 Podmore gives many more instances. He is of course very 
 skeptical regarding all. Perhaps he would be less so if the 
 recent much-better-recorded ones had been open to him. Yet 
 despite them, I am not free from similar skepticism. 
 
 I enjoyed the acquaintance of Judge Edmonds' daughter 
 Laura (Mrs. Gilmore) a woman of rare charm, refinement, 
 and cultivation, whose sincerity I deem beyond question. She 
 told me many marvels of telopsis and precognition from her 
 own experience. I had not then taken up the subject seri- 
 ously, and was careless about notes and correspondence. 
 
 Browning, the poet, tells (the evidence is in Pr. II, 130), of 
 
 " wearing under his coat-sleeves some gold wrist-studs . . . which 
 he had quite recently taken into wear, in the absence (by mis- 
 take of a sempstress) of his ordinary wrist-buttons. He had
 
 
 Ch. XVIII] Browning and Count Giunasi. More Foster 243 
 
 never before worn them in Florence or elsewhere, and had 
 found them in some old drawer, where they had lain forgotten 
 for years. One of these studs he took out and handed to the 
 Count [Giunasi], who held it in his hand awhile, looking 
 earnestly in Mr. Browning's face, and then he said, as if much 
 impressed, ' C'e qualche cosa che mi grida nelP orecchio, 
 " Uccisione, uccisione! " ' (There is something here which cries 
 out in my ear, ' Murder, murder ! ') 
 
 " ' And truly,' says Mr. Browning, ' those very studs were 
 taken from the dead body of a great-uncle of mine, who was 
 violently killed on his estate in St. Kitts, nearly eighty years 
 
 ago The occurrence of my great-uncle's murder was known 
 
 only to myself, of all men in Florence, as certainly was also 
 my possession of the studs.'" 
 
 But Count Giunasi could have got it from Browning's mind. 
 
 Account of a stance at the Continental Hotel on the last 
 day of March, 1873, from the Philadelphia Press. Please 
 remember what I have said before about Mr. Bartlett being 
 generally a confirmatory witness of what he quotes. Bartlett 
 (op. cit., 9) : 
 
 "'Well, sir' (with the usual brusquerie of the journalist, 
 who has no time to lose in conventionalities, for the paper 
 must go to press at a certain time) ' well, sir, let me grasp 
 the situation at once, and I confess candidly that I have not 
 even a scintilla of doubt as to the falsity of Spiritualism and 
 its varied forms and phases of humbug and jugglery.' 
 
 " As the journalist approaches his subject more closely, he 
 feels that his usual impersonality must be sometimes sunk as he 
 recites his experiences for that one-half hour in the medium's 
 room. These experiences are not simply strange, unaccountable, 
 mysterious, or any of the words which denote the idea of things 
 unaccounted for by natural causes; they are simply 'awful.' 
 The writer feels as though he were drifting into sacrilege in 
 his endeavor to give or to conceive of an idea of the power of 
 this man. When the reporter saw this man look back over 
 long years of time and long miles of space, and down deep into 
 the moldering dust of long-forgotten graves, and drag up to the 
 clear light of the present noonday sun of Philadelphia thoughts 
 from the inmost recesses of the heart of a woman who, in life, 
 would hardly have confessed those thoughts to herself when 
 he saw the name of the woman and that of the man she loved 
 (names which the inquirer had himself almost forgotten, time 
 and circumstance having almost completely blotted them out 
 of memory) when he saw those names written in plain, dis- 
 tinct characters, in letters formed of the living blood at that 
 moment coursing through the hand of Foster he could not
 
 244 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 refrain from yielding to the impulse to cry out in ideal pain 
 and awe-striking fear, stagger up from the table, and walk 
 about the room till a modified calmness came to his excited 
 feelings. And yet these were but the mere rudiments of the 
 ' art,' if it may so be called ; but it may not be so called, even 
 though the loss of a word leaves the sentence unfinished, for 
 it was no ' art.' 
 
 " Mr. Foster spoke the truth when he made the remark, 
 
 ' Mr. , I will reveal to you things that you would not dare 
 
 publish; they are too sacred; they touch family, social, and 
 heart relations too nearly even to be mentioned by the faintest 
 allusion.' And the listener paid the penalty for his skepticism 
 and scoffing even to the uttermost farthing, such a penalty the 
 amount of which he dare not publish." 
 
 The emotion and " fine writing " in the report tend to 
 detract from its probable accuracy, but on the other hand there 
 is no indication of anything more than telepathy: the sitter 
 apparently knew everything Foster told him. The initials 
 on Foster's hand were a favorite exhibition of his, though 
 he did not show it to me. It has already been treated under 
 " Stigmata." 
 
 Visions from Persons Present 
 
 The other day one of my sisters went to see one of the 
 Atlantic City gang of palmists, fortune-tellers, etc. He told 
 her how long she had been a widow, and that she had made 
 a mistake in selling a tract of land both of which facts 
 were of course well known to her; evidently the fellow had 
 some telepathic power. He said he " seemed to see " the tract 
 of land, though my sister never saw it: he had a vision, as 
 Foster had with me. 
 
 The very first paper published by the S. P. R. was on 
 " Thought Reading/' by a committee consisting of Professor 
 Barrett and Messrs. Gurney and Myers ; and a very primitive 
 paper it was, compared with what the same men were able 
 to furnish from fuller experience. It asks the question 
 (Pr. I, 13) : 
 
 "Is there or is there not any existing or attainable evidence 
 that can stand fair physiological criticism, to support a belief 
 that a vivid impression or a distinct idea in one mind can be 
 communicated to another mind without the intervening help 
 of the recognized organs of sensation? And if such evidence 
 be found, is the impression derived from a rare or partially
 
 Ch. XVIII] Mr. Outline's Report to S. P. R. 245 
 
 developed and hitherto unrecognized sensory organ, or has the 
 mental percept been CToked directly without any antecedent 
 sense-percept ? " 
 
 And it handles the now antiquated questions of collusion, 
 more or less conscious signaling, etc., etc., and discusses 
 the willing game, the public exhibitions of Bishop, Cum- 
 berland, and Corey, etc., etc. 
 
 Then are given the results of some experiments with the 
 Creery children tending to prove transfer of words and cards. 
 
 There is another report from the same committee in Pr. I, 
 70-97, with duplicates of drawings made by " agents " and 
 copied without being seen by " recipients." The resemblances 
 are unmistakable. A similar report is in Pr. I, 161-213. 
 
 Then comes a report, in Pr. I, 263-81, when Mr. Podmore 
 had been added to the committee, which seems to be chrono- 
 logically later than a report printed in Pr. II, 24ff., and to 
 be a tabulated summary of it, but apparently from considera- 
 tions of space or some other convenience, printed out of 
 chronological order. 
 
 The report in Pr. II is: 
 
 " An Account of some experiments in Thought-Transference, 
 Conducted by Malcolm Guthrie, J.P., and James Birchall, 
 Hon. Sec. of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liver- 
 pool." 
 
 Mr. Guthrie writes (Pr. II, 24-5) : 
 
 " A party of young ladies . . . found that certain of their 
 number, when blindfolded, were able to name very correctly 
 figures selected from an almanac suspended on the wall of the 
 room, when their companions, having hold of their hands, fixed 
 their attention upon some particular day of the month 
 
 " About this time I read an article by Mr. F. Corder in the 
 February number of CasselVa Magazine, which was written with 
 such an air of truthfulness . . . that ... I thereupon determined 
 to try the experiments, as described in Mr. Corder*s paper, upon 
 my son, a nervous and susceptible fair-haired boy of ten years 
 of ape. Much to my astonishment, and his own, he named 
 quickly and without difficulty objects which I placed behind him 
 
 when blindfolded He, however, would not perform more 
 
 than two or three experiments at a time, saying that it made 
 him ' feel queer.' 
 
 " I, however, at a subsequent period, tested my son's powers 
 under proper scientific conditions with the assistance of Mr.
 
 246 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 Birchall; and we were both satisfied as to his possession of the 
 faculty, although we did not consider him a useful subject 
 
 for study 
 
 " As to the party of young ladies to whom I referred ... I 
 am a partner in one of the large drapery establishments in the 
 city of Liverpool, and . . . the young ladies are connected with 
 one of the show-rooms of that establishment." 
 
 The experiments that these young ladies had begun for 
 amusement were now continued scientifically. The report 
 abounds in instances where some of them described unseen 
 objects upon which the others concentrated attention, e.g. 
 (Pr. II, 27f.) : 
 
 " The idea or name of the object did not come first to the 
 percipient, but the appearance seemed to dawn gradually upon 
 the mind. . . . First the color impression was received, then the 
 general shape, and afterwards any special characteristic, and 
 
 finally, the name As an illustration, take the case of a 
 
 blue feather. The 'subject' said, 'It is pale? It looks like 
 a leaf; but it can't be a leaf looks like a feather curled. Is 
 it a feather?' Again a key was described as 'A little tiny 
 thing with a ring at one end and a little flag at the other, like 
 a toy flag.' Urged to name it, she said, ' It is very like a 
 key.' ^ 
 
 " Proceeding a step further we agreed, in the absence of the 
 subject from the room, to imagine some object, and, under 
 similar conditions, to ask her to describe it. This experiment 
 was also successfully performed 
 
 " We . . . found that the movements of objects exhibited could 
 be discerned. The idea was suggested by an experiment tried 
 with a card which, in order that all present should see, I moved 
 about and was informed by the percipient, Miss E., that it was 
 a card, but she could not tell which one because it seemed to 
 be moving about. ... I bought a toy monkey, which worked 
 up and down on a stick by means of a string drawing the 
 arms and legs together. The answer was : 'I see red and 
 yellow, and it is darker at one end than the other. It is like a 
 
 flag moving about it is moving Now it is opening and 
 
 shutting like a pair of scissors.' 
 
 " In the transference of names, short quotations, etc 
 
 we met with but little success, but on one occasion, the proverb, 
 ' Time flies,' having been thought of by the company, elicited 
 the answer, ' Is it two words? is it " Time flies "? ' " 
 
 After a while outsiders were called in to witness, and the 
 experiments were not so successful because of nervousness and 
 lack of concentration on the part of agent, or recipient, or
 
 Ch. XVIII] Mathematical Estimate of Experiments 247 
 
 both. Sometimes, after visitors had gone, agents and recipi- 
 ents who had failed would make a fresh start with much 
 success. 
 
 Ideas of a colored church window, a revolving lamp to which 
 clung a stuffed monkey swinging a cocoanut were conveyed 
 with considerable success. So were names, numbers, tastes, in 
 fact virtually all ordinary sensations except odors, and there 
 are also drawings which the "recipients" reproduced with 
 varying success. Some are given in the paper. The re- 
 semblance is unmistakable. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge has a report on Mr. Guthrie's experiments 
 in Pr. II. He remarks (Pr. II, 190-1) : 
 
 " How the transfer takes place, or whether there is any 
 transfer at all, or what is the physical reality underlying the 
 terms 'mind/ 'consciousness,' 'impression,' and the like; and 
 whether this thing we call mind is located in the person, or 
 in the space round him, or in both, or neither; whether indeed 
 the term location, as applied to mind, is utter nonsense and 
 simply meaningless concerning all these things I am absolutely 
 blank, and have no hypothesis whatsoever. I may, however, 
 be permitted to suggest a rough and crude analogy. That the 
 brain is the organ of consciousness is patent, but that conscious- 
 ness is located in the brain is what no psychologist ought to 
 assert; for just as the energy of an electric charge, though 
 apparently on the conductor, is not on the conductor, but in 
 all the space round it; just as the energy of an electric current, 
 though apparently in the copper wire, is certainly not all in 
 the copper wire, and possibly not any of it; so it may be that 
 the sensory consciousness of a person, though apparently located 
 in his brain, may be conceived of as also existing like a faint 
 ech in space, or in other brains, though these are ordinarily 
 too busy and preoccupied to notice it." 
 
 In Pr. II, 239ff., is given an account by Gurney of some 
 experiments by M. Richet, and an application to them of 
 the Calculus of Probabilities by Richet himself and the 
 brothers Lodge. All is too technical for reproduction here, 
 even if there were space. M. Richet's conclusion was that 
 the probabilities that the experiments proved thought-trans- 
 ference were two to one. Gurney thought that Richet's cal- 
 culation left a wide element for mistake and unconscious 
 fraud, and that leaving that element out, the probabilities 
 were much higher.
 
 248 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 In Pr. Ill, 424, begins a paper by Mr. Guthrie, nearly 
 two years later than his preceding one. The experiments had 
 gone on under the supervision of various eminent men of 
 science, but Mr. Guthrie says (Pr. Ill, 425-6) : 
 
 " I have noticed a falling off ... since our first great re- 
 sults 1 am not equal to my former self in my power to 
 
 give off impressions, and if I exert myself to do so, I experience 
 
 unpleasant effects in the head and nervous system Then 
 
 we have lost one of our percipients; and as the novelty and 
 vivacity of our seances has departed, there is not tha same 
 geniality and freshness as at the outset. The thing has be- 
 come monotonous, whereas it was formerly a succession of 
 surprises. We have now nothing new to try 
 
 " Dr. Lodge tried the remarkable experiment of two 
 
 independent visual impressions, transferred at the same time 
 by two agents to the mind of one percipient, which resulted in 
 a combined impression, in which the two originals were abso- 
 lutely united." 
 
 Here is his account of it. (Lodge : Survival of Man, 
 p. 52) : 
 
 " I arranged the double object between Miss R d and 
 
 Miss E., who happened to be sitting nearly facing one an- 
 other. . . . The drawing was a square on one side of the paper, 
 a cross on the other. Miss R d looked at the side with the 
 square on it. Miss E. looked at the side with the cross. Neither 
 knew what the other was looking at nor did the percipient 
 
 know that anything unusual was being tried Very soon 
 
 Miss R d said, ' I see things moving about 1 seem to see 
 
 two things. ... I see first one up there and then one down 
 
 there 1 don't know which to draw 1 can't see either 
 
 distinctly.' (Well anyhow, draw what you have seen.) She 
 took off the bandage and drew first a square, and then said, 
 ' Then there was the other thing as well . . . afterwards they 
 seemed to go into one,' and she drew a cross inside the square 
 from corner to corner, adding afterwards, 'I don't know what 
 made me put it inside.' " 
 
 The result was like a drawing of the back of an envelope. 
 
 The diagrams in Pr. Ill were not apparently as successful 
 as those in the earlier papers, but in the earlier papers none 
 but successful ones were given, while this paper contains 
 several unsuccessful ones. 
 
 Farther accounts or criticisms of thought-transference are 
 contained in Pr. IV to VIII and XI, but they add little.
 
 Ch. XVIII] Transference of Imagined Scenes 249 
 
 There is an interesting fact regarding two sisters as alter- 
 nately agent and percipient, stated by Sir Oliver Lodge in 
 Pr. VII, 375 : 
 
 " So far as my own observation went, it was interesting and 
 new to me to see how clearly the effect seemed to depend on 
 contact, and how abruptly it ceased when contact was broken. 
 While guessing through a pack of cards, for instance, rapidly 
 and continuously, I sometimes allowed contact, and sometimes 
 stopped it; and the guesses changed, from frequently correct 
 to quite wild, directly the knuckles or fingertips, or any part 
 of the skin of the two hands ceased to touch. It was almost 
 like breaking an electric circuit At the same time, partial 
 contact seemed less effective than a thorough hand grasp." 
 
 In Pr. VIII, 434, are some remarkable experiments in 
 guessing imagined scenes which had no existence. Mrs. 
 Thaw, percipient; Dr. Thaw and Mr. Wyatt, agents. 
 
 "1st Scene. Locomotive running away without engineer, 
 and tears up station. Missed. 
 
 " 2nd Scene. The first real FLYING MACHINE going over 
 Madison Square Tower, and the people watching. Percipient: 
 I see lots of people. Crowds are going to war. They are so 
 excited. Are they throwing water? (Percipient said after- 
 wards she thought it was a fire and that was the reason of 
 the crowd.) Or sailors pulling at ropes. Agent said, ' What 
 are they doing?' Percipient: They are all looking up. It is a 
 balloon or someone in trouble up there. Agent said, ' Wliy 
 balloon?' Percipient: They are all looking up. Agent said, 
 ' I thought of a possible scene in the future.' Percipient : 
 Oh, it's the first man flying. That's what he's doing up there. 
 Agent: 'Where is it?' Percipient: In the city." 
 
 In Pr. XI, 3, Mr. Rawson says : 
 
 " If, as some maintain, thought moves by way of undulations 
 (or vibrations) in some medium more subtle than ether which 
 can permeate to the brain, the interposition of an obstacle may 
 interfere with those undulations. The result of my experi- 
 ments when an obstacle has been interposed shows that it does 
 not arrest them entirely, and at the same time proves, to my 
 satisfaction at any rate, that the success of the experiments 
 cannot be attributed to collusion." 
 
 An intervening object would of course distract the attention 
 and lessen the confidence of both agent and percipient. Nev- 
 ertheless successful experiments have been conducted with the 
 two parties in separate rooms. All the experiments yet alluded
 
 250 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 to were conducted, however, before the discovery of the vibra- 
 tions in wireless telegraphy, which pass through all sorts of ob- 
 stacles. After this discovery probably the influence of ob- 
 stacles in thought-transference would not have been con- 
 sidered. At least the later Pr. S. P. R., so far as they go, 
 indicate that it has not been. 
 
 By the appearance of Pr. XI in 1895 apparently the evi- 
 dence for thought-transference had become so conclusive that 
 the society did not care to publish more, at least of the 
 ordinary kind, although there were aspects of it incidental to 
 many phenomena described before and after, and there were 
 some specially interesting experiments between two ladies pub- 
 lished in the Journal (not the Proceedings) S. P. E. for 
 March, 1906, and in Pr. XXI. The friends were generally 
 separated twenty miles or more, and the ideas transferred 
 were mainly visual, of scenery, persons, etc., one of the ladies 
 being an artist. 
 
 In 1895 appeared Podmore's book: Apparitions and 
 Thought Transference, which is reviewed by Professor New- 
 bold in Pr. XI, 149. 
 
 The following remarks in the review are specially worth 
 considering (Pr. XI, 150-2) : 
 
 "It appears that tastes, smells, pains, visual images, motor 
 impulses, and inhibitions have been transferred to normal and 
 hypnotized patients, at varying distances and under conditions 
 which preclude any supposition of the intervention of normal 
 means. It is difficult to understand how anyone can follow 
 Mr. Podmore's masterly presentation of these results without 
 experiencing some degree either of conviction or of confusion. 
 
 " ' If,' he says on page 144, ' all the [spontaneous] 
 
 cases . . . hitherto recorded could be shown one by one to be 
 explicable by more familiar causes . . . the grounds for the be- 
 lief in telepathy would not be seriously affected; we should 
 merely have to modify our conception of its nature, and restrict 
 its boundaries.' 
 
 " This material is interpreted by many in favor of two 
 theories which are at present in the deepest disgrace in the 
 scientific world, the doctrine of a life after death, and its 
 twin, the belief that the intelligence does occasionally in some 
 sense leave its body during life, and visit distant scenes. Mr. 
 Podmore's object in adducing this evidence is, or seems to be, 
 not merely to prove that there is such a thing as a non-sensory
 
 Ch. XVIII] Newbold on Podmore's "Apparitions" 251 
 
 communication between mind and mind while in the body, 
 but also to show that, admitting such a non-sensory communica- 
 tion as experimentally established, we can explain these spon- 
 taneous phenomena without resorting to either of the above 
 obnoxious doctrines. 
 
 " We can be quite sure that . . . the phantasm does in- 
 deed belong, as Mr. Podmore shows in the chapter on hallucina- 
 tion in general, to the world of dream rather than to that of 
 matter. But until we have fixed more certainly the relations 
 of the dream-world to the material, it is as well not to be too 
 dogmatic in our assumptions 
 
 " But frequently the circumstances are such as strongly to 
 suggest an extra-human origin for the telepathic impulse. 
 Often the information thus conveyed is known to have been 
 in possession of some friend or relative of the percipient who 
 has recently died, and the information is sometimes such as 
 we should suppose the dead would wish to convey to the living. 
 When in such cases we not only know that the information 
 was in the possession of the dead, but also have good reason 
 for thinking that it is not in the possession of anyone living, 
 or not in the possession of any living person known to the 
 percipient, the presumption that the impulse originated with a 
 dead person becomes very strong. Mr. Podmore's unwillingness 
 to resort to this hypothesis is, I think, not unjustifiable. How- 
 ever repugnant such a doctrine may be to our sensibilities as 
 scientists, especially since it has been conjoined with the 
 absurdities of ' Modern Spiritualism/ it is our duty to con- 
 sider it fairly as one of the conceivable hypotheses. It is cer- 
 tainly not yet proved. But there was a time when telepathy 
 between living minds was also not yet proved, and it is not 
 likely that it would have stood as near proof as it does to-day 
 had Professor Sidgwick, Mr. Podmore, Mr. Gurney, Mr. Myers, 
 Mr. Hodgson, and others, at every step refused to consider the 
 hypothesis at all. Such evidence, as Mr. Podmore himself 
 shows, should be considered in the aggregate." 
 
 Here is another vision (Bartlett, op. cit., 51) : 
 
 Says a writer in the New York World, Dec. 27, 1885: 
 
 " While we were talking one night, Foster and I, there 
 
 came a knock at the door. Bartlett arose and opened it, dis- 
 closing as he did so two young men plainly dressed, of marked 
 
 provincial aspect 1 saw at once that they were clients, and 
 
 arose to go. Foster restrained me. 
 
 " ' Sit down,' he said. ' I'll try and get rid of them, for I'm 
 not in the humor to be disturbed ' 
 
 " Foster hinted that he had no particular inclination to 
 gratify them then and there, but they protested that they had
 
 252 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 come some distance, and, with a characteristically good-natured 
 smile, he gave in " 
 
 Then follows an account of a fairly good seance taps on 
 the marble table, reading pellets, describing persons, etc., 
 until 
 
 " I thought Foster was tired of the interview and was feign- 
 ing sleep to end it. All of a sudden he sprang to his feet 
 with such an expression of horror and consternation as an actor 
 playing Macbeth would have given a good deal to imitate. His 
 eyes glared, his breast heaved, his hands clenched 
 
 " ' Why did you come here ? ' cried Foster, in a wail that 
 seemed to come from the bottom of his soul. ' Why do you 
 come here to torment me with such a sight? Oh, God! It's 
 horrible ! It's horrible ! ... It is your father I see ! ... He 
 died fearfully! He died fearfully! He was in Texas on a 
 horse with cattle. He was alone. It is the prairies 1 Alone! 
 The horse fell! He was under it! His thigh was broken 
 horribly broken! The horse ran away and left him! He lay 
 there stunned! Then he came to his senses! Oh! his thigh 
 was dreadful! Such agony! My God! Such agony!' 
 
 " Foster fairly screamed at this. The younger of the men 
 . . . broke into violent sobs. His companion wept, too, and the 
 pair of them clasped hands. Bartlett looked on concerned. As 
 for me, I was astounded. 
 
 " ' He was four days dying four days dying of starvation 
 and thirst,' Foster went on, as if deciphering some terrible 
 hieroglyphs written on the air. ' His thigh swelled to the size 
 of his body. Clouds of flies settled on him flies and vermin 
 and he chewed his own arm and drank his own blood. He died 
 mad. And my God ! he crawled three miles in those four days ! 
 Man ! man ! that's how your father died ! ' 
 
 " So saying, with a great sob, Foster dropped into his chair, 
 his cheeks purple, and tears running down them in rivers. The 
 younger man . . . burst into a wild cry of grief and sank upon 
 the neck of his friend. He, too, was sobbing as if his own 
 heart would break. Bartlett stood over Foster wiping his fore- 
 head with a handkerchief , 
 
 "'It's true,' said the younger man's friend; 'his father was 
 a stock-raiser in Texas, and after he had been missing from his 
 drove for over a week, they found him dead and swollen with 
 his leg broken. They tracked him a good distance from where 
 he must have fallen. But nobody ever heard till now how he 
 died.' " 
 
 Now it is hardly to be supposed that the young visitor 
 could ever have had this scene in his mind as vividly as 
 Foster had. In that case where and how did Foster get the
 
 Ch. XVIII] The Vision of the White Fawn 253 
 
 vividness and emotion? How do we get them fa dreams? 
 He dreamed while he was awake. 
 
 Bartlett quotes the following " from Appendix P of Pro- 
 fessor Carpenter's book." What book, he has forgotten, and a 
 reasonable, though moderate, search has not enabled me to 
 discover. 
 
 " Some eight or ten years ago in New York City, a gentleman 
 and his wife were seated, one summer afternoon, in their 
 pleasant little parlor, talking of the ' hereafter,' when the hus- 
 band jokingly remarked, ' Wife, if you die first, will you come 
 to see me again ? ' She laughingly answered, ' Certainly, I 
 will.' ' In what shape,' said the husband, ' will you come, so 
 that I may be sure of your identity?' The wife replied, as 
 glancing out of the open window she observed a pet white 
 fawn playing in the yard, 'I will come in the shape of that 
 white fawn.' 
 
 " Five years later, the wife died. The grief-stricken hus- 
 band, hearing of the remarkable gifts of Foster, concluded he 
 would seek an interview. He was fortunate in finding Foster 
 alone. Questions were written, folded and placed on the table 
 in broad daylight, in the usual manner, but the result was dis- 
 appointing. No response came. ' Strange,' said Foster, placing 
 the papers one after the other to his forehead, 'I feel no in- 
 fluence whatever. I fear that I am not in the proper condition 
 to-day to satisfy you.' Again Foster placed the slips to his 
 forehead without result, and then rather abstractedly leaned 
 back in his chair. All at once, greatly to the astonishment of 
 his interviewer, Foster jumped up with unmistakable symptoms 
 of flurry and alarm in his countenance, at the same time brush- 
 ing violently from his lap something nobody saw or felt but 
 himself. At last he said : ' I know I must be out of sorts, un- 
 strung; for although many strange things are constantly hap- 
 pening, I never had an experience that startled me so before. 
 It may seem very foolish to you, but as I had one of your slips 
 pressed to my forehead, suddenly looking up, I saw a beautiful 
 white fawn run across the floor towards me, and it jumped into 
 my lap the moment I started from my chair. I cannot account 
 for it cannot understand it; I only know I saw just what I 
 have described.' 
 
 " His visitor said not a word, gave no clue to an explanation, 
 and did not subsequently visit Foster. As he said, he was 
 ' afraid to do so.' " 
 
 There was no actual fawn. Foster did not see any material 
 thing teloptically, but got a suggestion from the husband's 
 Btore of memories, and expanded it into its vision, as we are
 
 254 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 constantly expanding all sorts of notions into dreams. The 
 fawn was really less a construction of Foster's than my shell 
 and pearl were ; for the fawn had been in the husband's mind, 
 and the shell and pearl in combination, and especially with 
 the pearl falling into my head, never had been in mine. 
 
 My pearl and this fawn seem like catching dream-figments 
 from another mind; why not dream-images of persons in the 
 same way? Here is one more, but in it, as in many cases, 
 the percipient sees against the sitter's mind. What did he see? 
 
 From the Troy Press, March 6, 1875. Bartlett (op. cit., 
 p. 108) : 
 
 " He made almost a mental photograph of one of my rela- 
 tives an aunt who died fifteen years ago, and whose memory 
 has been especially dear to me. After he had given the shape 
 of her face, her apparent age, the color of her hair, and a sad, 
 thoughtful expression that especially characterized her face, I 
 added : ' She had brown eyes.' Mr. Foster instantly looked up, 
 as if into her face, and said : ' No ; hazel eyes.' I afterwards 
 learned that he was right and I wrong about it." 
 
 The sitter's subliminal vision could hardly have been more 
 correct than his conscious one, and given Foster a correct 
 image. This of course suggests that Foster saw the aunt's 
 spirit rather than the nephew's recollection of her. And this 
 suggests in turn that in the preceding case the wife actually 
 did appear as the fawn, though the husband had not the faculty 
 to see her. But in that case would not Foster have seen her 
 jump into her husband's lap rather than his own ? 
 
 Foster's " spirits " were sometimes in the body. Mr. Bart- 
 lett writes (op. dt., p. 21) : 
 
 " I have a vivid recollection of a certain seance where . . . the 
 spirit was described as having bright red hair, freckled face, 
 short chin-whiskers, etc. The gentleman said, ' You have given 
 the name correctly, and you have perfectly described my 
 brother, but he is alive and lives in Albany.' Mr. Foster re- 
 plied, ' In these visions, I perceive the persons plainly, but I 
 cannot always tell whether the spirit be in the body, or out of 
 the body.' " 
 
 Telepathy from the sitter. 
 
 Here is a very significant circumstance, if it really is a cir- 
 cumstance, but I may be mistaken in my impression. Foster,
 
 Ch. XVIII] Ideas from Distant Persons 255 
 
 Mrs. Piper, and others frequently talked or wrote about living 
 persons, but although many of the dead persons they men- 
 tioned, themselves took the floor and talked or were reported 
 in propria persona, there is not a case that I can recall where 
 any living person has professed to speak through a medium. 
 Yet on seeing this Professor Newbold writes me: 
 " If I am not mistaken Dr. Wiltse once was represented as 
 so speaking through Mrs. Piper." 
 
 Ideas from Persons Distant 
 
 The following was probably more apt to be teloteropathy 
 from the boy's mind than advice from any "spirit." (Bart- 
 lett, op. cit., p. 100) : 
 
 From the New York Graphic, October 24, 1874. 
 
 " One day (and everybody knows the story in Philadelphia) 
 Alexander McClure, the old Greeley leader of Pennsylvania, 
 came into the Continental Hotel with Colonel John B. Forney. 
 Mr. McClure was very sad, for he had received news that his 
 son was drowned at sea. 
 
 "'What do you think about it, Foster?' asked Colonel 
 Forney. 
 
 " ' Why, sir, the boy is not drowned at all,' replied Foster. 
 ' He's alive and well, and you'll have a letter from him in a day 
 or two, and then he will come home.' 
 
 " Two days afterwards McClure met Foster, and said, with 
 tears of gratitude : ' Why, Foster, you were right. My boy is 
 all safe. I had a letter from him to-day.' " 
 
 This illustrates a very frequent experience that the sensi- 
 tive's susceptibility extends beyond the sitter and picks up 
 impressions from the minds of distant persons; and the cases 
 where sensitives have produced any verifiable thing not pos- 
 sibly existent in such minds, are rare. But if they were not 
 in such minds, they could not be verified. This, therefore, 
 is of course not necessarily fatal to Foster's own conviction 
 that the impressions were given him by " spirits." 
 
 A wife feels a blow received by a distant husband (Pr. II, 
 128): 
 
 " BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, October 27th, 1883. 
 
 "I woke up with a start, feeling I had had a hard blow on 
 my mouth, and a distinct sense that I had been cut, and was 
 bleeding under my upper lip, and seized my pocket handker- 
 chief, and held it ... to the part, as I sat up in bed, and after
 
 256 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 a few seconds, when 1 removed it, I was astonished not to see 
 any blood, and only then realized it was impossible anything 
 could have struck me there, as I lay fast asleep in bed, and so 
 I thought it was only a dream! but I looked at my watch, and 
 saw it was 7, and finding Arthur (my husband) was not in the 
 room, I concluded (rightly) that he must have gone out on the 
 
 lake for an early sail 
 
 "I then fell asleep. At breakfast (half -past nine), Arthur 
 came in rather late, and I noticed he rather purposely sat 
 farther away from me than usual, and every now and then 
 put his pocket handkerchief furtively up to his lip. ... I said, 
 * Arthur, why are you doing that ? ' and added a little anxiously, 
 'I know you've 'hurt yourself; but I'll tell you why afterwards.' 
 He said, ' Well, when I was sailing, a sudden squall came, 
 throwing the tiller suddenly round, and it struck me a bad 
 blow in the mouth, under the upper lip, and it has been bleed- 
 ing a good deal and won't stop.' I then said, ' Have you any 
 idea what o'clock it was when it happened ? ' and he answered, 
 
 ' It must have been about seven.' 
 
 " JOAN K. SEVERN." 
 
 Mr. Severn confirms the experience throughout. 
 
 Vague uneasiness leads a husband to his injured wife (Pr. 
 II, 125) : 
 
 " CATHEDRAL YARD, WINCHESTER, January 31st, 1884. 
 
 " I am a working foreman of masons at Winchester 
 
 Cathedral More than thirty years ago ... in London . . . 
 
 I carried my food with me, and therefore had no call to leave 
 the work all day. On a certain day, however, I suddenly felt 
 an intense desire to go home, but as I had no business there 
 I tried to suppress it, but it was not possible to do so. Every 
 
 minute the desire to go home increased 1 got fidgety and 
 
 uneasy, and felt as if I must go, even at the risk of being 
 ridiculed by my wife 
 
 " The dbor was opened by my wife's sister . . . who lived 
 
 a few streets off. She looked surprised and said, ' Why, Skir- 
 ving, how did you know ? ' ' Know what ? ' I said. ' Why, about 
 Mary Ann.' I said, ' I don't know anything about Mary Ann ' 
 (my wife). 'Then what brought you home at present?' I 
 said, ' I can hardly tell you. I seemed to want to come home. 
 But what is wrong?'... She told me that my wife had been 
 run over by a cab ... and she had called for me ever since, 
 but was now in fits, and had several in succession. I went 
 upstairs, and though very ill she recognized me, and stretched 
 forth her arms and took me round the neck and pulled my head 
 down into her bosom. The fits passed away directly, and my 
 presence seemed to tranquilize her, so that she got into sleep,
 
 Ch. XVIII] Visions from Distant Persons 257 
 
 and did well. Her sister told me that she had uttered the most 
 
 piteous cries for me to come to her 
 
 "ALEXANDER SKIRTING." 
 
 Visions from Persons Distant 
 
 Here is an experience more attractive than the average 
 in these studies. It is from Rev. P. H. Newnham of Maker, 
 Davenport, England, given in a paper by Myers in Pr. III. 
 
 At Oxford one night in 1854 Mr. Newnham went to bed 
 with a violent headache, to which he was subject. Mr. 
 Newnham says (Pr. Ill, 6f.) : 
 
 " I dreamed that I was stopping with the family of the lady 
 who subsequently became ray wife. All the younger ones had 
 gone to bed, and I stopped chatting to the father and mother, 
 standing up by the fireplace. Presently I bade them good-night, 
 took my candle, and went off to bed. On arriving in the hall, 
 I perceived that my fiancee had been detained downstairs, and 
 was only then near the top of the staircase. I rushed upstairs, 
 overtook her on the top step, and passed my two arms around 
 her waist 
 
 " On this I woke, and a clock in the house struck ten almost 
 immediately afterwards. 
 
 So strong was the impression of the dream that I wrote a 
 detailed account of it next morning to my fiancee. 
 
 " Crossing my letter, not in answer to it, I received a letter 
 from the lady in question : ' Were you thinking about me, very 
 specially, last night, just about ten o'clock? For, as I was 
 going upstairs to bed, I distinctly heard your footsteps on the 
 stairs, and felt you put your arms round my waist.' " 
 
 Mrs. Newnham writes in confirmation. 
 Stillman says (op. cit., I, 184) : 
 
 " On one occasion, when Mr. and Mrs. Brown were on a fish- 
 ing trip into the wild parts of New York State, and, returning, 
 were on their way to the railway station, the wheel of their 
 wagon broke and they had to go to a blacksmith on the road 
 to have it repaired. She said to her husband that they would 
 lose the train, to which the voice replied that they would be 
 in time; for the train was late and they would arrive with a 
 minute to spare, and in fact as they drew up at the station 
 
 the train came in sight and they had a minute to spare 
 
 Her husband implicitly and always followed the directions given 
 her through her demon " 
 
 The S. P. R. Committee reports (Pr. II, 161) :
 
 258 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 " The account was sent to us by the Kev. Canon Warburton, 
 The Close, Winchester. 
 
 " ' Somewhere about the year 1848 I went up from Oxford 
 
 to stay a day or two with my brother 1 found a note on 
 
 the table apologizing for his absence, and saying that he had 
 
 gone to a dance 1 dozed in an arm-chair, but started up 
 
 wide awake exactly at one, ejaculating " By Jove, he's down ! " 
 and seeing him coming out of a drawing-room into a brightly 
 illuminated landing, catching his foot in the edge of the top 
 stair, and falling headlong, just saving himself by his elbows 
 and hands. (The house was one which I had never seen, nor 
 did I know where it was.) Thinking very little of the matter 
 I fell a-doze again for half an hour, and was awakened by my 
 brother suddenly coming in and saying, " Oh, there you are. 
 I have just had as narrow an escape of breaking my neck 
 as I ever had in my life. Coming out of the ball-room, I caught 
 my foot and tumbled full length down the stairs." 
 
 "'W. WARBURTON. 
 
 " ' The general impression was of a narrow landing 
 
 brilliantly illuminated, and I remember verifying the correct- 
 ness of this by questions at the time. 
 
 " ' This is my sole experience of the kind.' " 
 
 Here are three accounts of apparently teloteropathic veridi- 
 cal dreams given me by Professor Pumpelly, though all three 
 may have been teloptic, and the last one telakoustic : 
 
 " Between forty and fifty years ago, while visiting my sister 
 in New York City, I came down to breakfast where I found 
 my brother-in-law reading the morning paper. Soon my sister 
 also came down and joined us at table. She said she had had 
 an awful dream; she had dreamed all night that she was stand- 
 ing in a church, where a continuous procession of men was filing 
 by her, carrying on litters something covered with sheets. 
 
 " Her husband resumed reading his paper and soon said : 
 'Why, Netty, here it says that they are removing the bodies 
 from the St. Mark's graves.' 
 
 " Now, my sister's first child had been buried several years 
 before in the graveyard of St. Mark's church. My sister had 
 not seen the paper, and neither she nor her husband had heard 
 of any intention to disturb the graves." 
 
 " In the late winter of 1864-5, I was on my journey through 
 Siberia. In one of the first nights after leaving Irkutsk I 
 dreamed that I had arrived at my native village of Owego in 
 New York and had walked home from the station. As I came 
 up the driveway to the house I saw my mother and my father 
 standing at the door showing signs of great grief. I noticed 
 that my aunt, who lived with us and whom we all loved dearly,
 
 Ch. XVIII] Professor Pumpelly's Veridical Dreams 259 
 
 was not there. As soon as I waked I was so impressed by the 
 dream that I made a memorandum, as I remember, in the form 
 of an inverted torch, with the date. 
 
 " When I reached St. Petersburg about three weeks later, I 
 found in my mail the first news I had had, for six months, 
 from home. I learned that the aunt I had missed in my 
 dream had died. I do not remember now the relation in time 
 between the dates of the death and the dream. It was close, 
 and my impression is that I thought, in reading the letter, 
 that there was coincidence." 
 
 " In 1906 we were living in Capri. One morning my wife 
 told me of dreaming that she found her sisters and her brother 
 Otis (who had died several years before) in tears. When they 
 saw her, Otis said : ' We must tell Eliza.' 
 
 " That same day there came a cablegram saying that my 
 wife's favorite brother Horace was very ill, and within an hour 
 another cable saying he had died." 
 
 Here is an unreported case that came to me direct yes- 
 terday. The story will have to stand for what it may be 
 worth on my sole attestation. The parties are known to 
 me, but peculiar circumstances prevent confirmation by pub- 
 lishing their names. 
 
 On the first of January, 1912, a father was dying in one 
 city and a daughter twelve years old was lying ill with 
 pneumonia in another. Suddenly the child, with a rapt ex- 
 pression, raised herself to a sitting posture; her attendant 
 rushed in alarm to make her lie down, and the child ex- 
 claimed : " Father was taking me in his arms ! " The father 
 died at about the time. Whether before or after cannot be 
 accurately determined. 
 
 There are on record many similar occurrences well attested. 
 
 Whether all visions are telepathic, including teloptic, is an 
 open question. Myers inclines to the opinion that they are 
 not that sometimes the telergic effect includes a modifica- 
 tion of space that makes the vision objective. Certainly such 
 modifications of space can be produced by mechanical means, 
 as in the theatrical exhibitions I have already described. 
 Whether they can be produced by telergy is a question. There 
 are on record hundreds of such visions well attested, from 
 those of simple objects deliberately transferred according to 

 
 260 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 the early S. P. R. reports, to the complex ones spontaneously 
 received by Foster, Colville, and others. 
 
 The phenomena thus far given I have been content to 
 group under telepathy from the living, though some of them 
 are hard to account for in that way. 
 
 At the present time the great storehouse for these ex- 
 periences is Phantasms of the Living, by Edmund Gurney, 
 Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, London, 1886. 
 This book is now out of print. It is criticised in Podmore's 
 Apparitions and Thought Transference. There is a very good 
 article, with many cases, in Pr. V (Part XIV) by Gurney, com- 
 pleted by Myers after Gurney's death. There is also an im- 
 portant discussion by Mrs. Sidgwick on Phantasms of the 
 Dead, with some cases, in Pr. Ill (Part VIII), 69f. Others 
 are in Pr. VI (Part XV), by Myers, and in Part XVI by 
 Podmore and Myers, and in Pr. VIII (Part XXII) by Myers. 
 
 Space requires that generally the few accounts given here 
 should be much condensed. The increased vividness of de- 
 tails and frequent accompanying discussions and abundant 
 confirmations in the original statements would generally re- 
 pay the reader for going to the sources cited. It may be 
 worth while to repeat that the volumes of the Pr. S. P. R. 
 generally consist of several parts, which can be had separately 
 from Messrs. W. B. Clarke & Co., of Boston. 
 
 Ideas Apparently from the Dead 
 
 A weakness in the assumption that any telepathic intelli- 
 gence or vision really comes from the dead is in the fact that 
 the circumstances are nearly always in the minds of survivors 
 near the scene of death, and may be teloteropathically con- 
 veyed to the percipient. It is a question, however, in many 
 cases, whether that hypothesis does not strain probability 
 more than the spiritistic hypothesis. That it does, seems more 
 frequently the conclusion of those who have read many of the 
 cases, than of those who know but few. But compare the 
 extracts from Professor Pumpelly a page or two back. 
 
 Stillman (op. cit., I, 186-7) tells the following of a seance 
 where a child of seven, whose name is suppressed, acted as 
 medium. Stillman's questions were mental.
 
 Ch. XVIII] The Stillman Steamboat Case 261 
 
 " After several relatives had been named, I asked if our 
 brother Alfred was there, to which she instantly replied, ' There 
 is a gentleman sitting on the corner of the table by you who 
 says his name is Alfred.' The opportunity then occurred to 
 me of asking a ' test question/ which was, ' If Alfred is here, 
 will he tell me when he last saw Harvey?' The relevance of 
 this question will appear from the fact that they were together 
 on the steamer whose boiler burst on the Mississippi, killing 
 my brother and causing injury to the cousin such that he 
 committed suicide a month later. The reply was, ' He says he 
 does not remember.' At this I remarked guardedly to the 
 doctor [Another brother of Stillman, who was present. H. H.] : 
 'I asked Alfred when he last saw Harvey, and he replies that 
 he doesn't remember, but he must have seen him on board the 
 boat.' To this she instantly replied, with an explosive laugh, 
 4 He says that if he did it was all blown out of him! ' ... It was 
 quite in accordance with the character of my brother to joke 
 on the most serious subjects he was an inveterate joker " 
 
 All the facts were known to at least two persons present. 
 But where did the joke come from? 
 
 Here is a second Foster stigmata case, not given for the 
 stigmata, however. From Bartlett (op. c\t., p. 12) : 
 
 "During the same sitting a word of three letters appeared 
 upon the back of Mr. Foster's hand the letters were formed 
 by a red discoloration of the skin. The word was one which 
 was agreed upon by the gentleman and his wife before her 
 death, and it was to be used as a test by the one who should 
 die first. The word had never been mentioned to any person." 
 
 In this test, as in the fawn test, Foster was more successful 
 than, as we shall see, Mrs. Piper has been with some important 
 agreed post-mortem tests. 
 
 There are many habitual seers of waking visions, and hearers 
 of voices, and the heteromatists who write while awake are 
 closely allied with them. They are generally religious enthusi- 
 asts. St. Theresa, Joan of Arc, and the Seeress of Provost are 
 among the classical examples. A remarkable recent one is 
 Mme. Sophie Radford de Meissner, an American widow of a 
 Russian diplomat. She has just published an account of her 
 experience in a little volume entitled There are no Dead. She 
 believes herself in constant communication by audible voices 
 with her husband and son and others who have died. The book
 
 262 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 abounds in the orthodox anthropomorphic conceptions, and yet 
 it falls in with what perhaps I may call the very reasonable 
 present-day idea of Heaven as a sublimated earth scenery, 
 occupations, and all. As the old mixtures from the Apoca- 
 lypse, Milton, Bunyan, etc., were believed in with religious 
 fervor, the replacing of them strongly suggests outside influ- 
 ence ; and that the experience is so general, makes the sugges- 
 tion stronger still. 
 
 But Mme. de Meissner's heaven is by no means entirely secu- 
 larized. Her controls often see Christ, and have frequent re- 
 ligious services, and the angels and archangels sing with them. 
 
 I give a few passages : 
 
 (Op. cit., Foreword.) " There is no attempt at anything in 
 the way of ' test ' cases, despite the fact that many such have 
 been shown me, though never in reply to a demand for the 
 same. Spontaneously things have been told me, either for my 
 own guidance, or for that of friends in sorrow and despair; and 
 spontaneously have I been informed of things that have after- 
 ward come to pass; but any attempt at forcing communications 
 in regard to future happenings has invariably been met by a well 
 deserved rebuke from those who are 'given charge' over all 
 of us." 
 
 (Op. cit., 5.) "You all think so wrongly of the life here it 
 differs so little from that in the world, except in that it is so 
 much more grand and full." 
 
 This is directly against her intense orthodoxy. 
 
 (Op. cit., 12.) " ' There is no night here what you call the 
 night is the best time of all, for then you are with us. As soon 
 as you are asleep your Spirit is here, and we sit and talk either 
 in the house or in beautiful gardens, or on the river's brink.' " 
 
 (Op. cit., 23.) " (In reading a book of Professor Hyslop's, I 
 mentioned 'Rector's' name aloud, and he at once responds:) 
 
 " ' Yes ; I am here do you want anything ? ' 
 
 " (I tell him of how K. F. had told me I would be able to help 
 others, and add that I cannot see just how that may be.) 
 
 " A. ' You will know in a few weeks. You will be much 
 stronger, and will see them soon. It will come by prayer and 
 fasting.' " 
 
 The Titanic went down April 14th. On the 17th Mme. de 
 Meissner thought she had communications from W. T. Stead. 
 On the morning of the 18th she thought she had communica- 
 tions from Major Butt. It was not till the evening of the
 
 Ch. XVIII] Mme. de Meissner's Cases 263 
 
 18th that newg of the arrival of the Carpathia gave her any 
 other assurance of their deaths that she remembered when 
 writing. But of course during the interval, the papers were 
 full of wireless messages that probably mentioned them. For 
 the particulars of all this, I shall have to refer you to the book. 
 On reading these accounts, the habitual student is apt to say 
 to himself: "This admirable lady is more gifted with emo- 
 tional and imaginative power than with dry-as-dust judicial 
 habits. I wonder how many of these details are very natural 
 post facto imagination ! Certainly her imagination sometimes 
 supplies pretty wide interpretations of other incidents." 
 
 I give the following as illustrating what will appear to many 
 a point weak enough to raise questions regarding the whole 
 experience and it is not the only one. Yet if it is all imagi- 
 nation, it is at least a graceful bit, and there are many more 
 graceful things in the book. It will sometimes be a little hard, 
 though, for any but the very orthodox to sympathize with them. 
 Madame even goes so far as to have the mere pronouncing of 
 a sacred name break up very trying situations. 
 
 Here is the experience : 
 
 (Op. cit., 61-2.) " October 2, 1902. (Reading in the Journal 
 de St. Petersbourg of three workmen who had been run over by 
 an express train in Austria, I hear these unhappy men beg me 
 to help them they have no idea where they are, but are entirely 
 in the dark. Can see no way at all they cannot pray, for they 
 never did that in their lives, and do not know how.) 
 
 " (' Ask God to help you.') 
 
 " A. ' Who is Oodf ' 
 
 " (' Say : " Our Father Who art in Heaven," after me.') 
 
 " (This they do; then I hear an exclamation, and the words:) 
 
 " ' Now it is growing lighter, and we can see a little. Oh, 
 don't leave us, for we don't know at all where to go, or what 
 to do; but there is a young man coming toward us, and it gets 
 lighter as he comes nearer ' 
 
 " (From my son) ' Pray for these poor men but I can take 
 them only a little way yes, they can have work if they want it.' 
 
 " (Here they are shown a garden with flowers, and they say:) 
 
 " ' No, we don't know anything about flowers we only know 
 how to work on the rails.' 
 
 " (From my son) ' I cannot show them that, but there is one 
 here who can.' 
 
 " (From the men) ' Ah, here comes someone who we see will 
 give us work. Yes, now we see the work we are to do; and we
 
 264 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 will not be alone, for there are some men further down the road, 
 poor workmen like ourselves, and we can talk to them after a 
 while. Yes, now we are at work here, and we understand that 
 we must work as well as we can in order to come to a lighter 
 and brighter place.'" 
 
 Whatever impressions one may get from the book, there is 
 sure to be among them one that whether or not the experiences 
 are all pure auto-suggestions, they are a source of much happi- 
 ness to the author and, apparently, many of her friends ; and 
 the apparent fact that no harm comes from them suggests a 
 degree of genuineness. All such matter where deliberate de- 
 ceit is out of the question, is worth studying : for even negative 
 results help fix the boundaries of the positive ; and that there 
 is an important positive of some sort, whether a vast addition 
 to our general Cosmic Relations, or only to our traditional 
 psychology, is an opinion that can now be contradicted only 
 by the ignorant. 
 
 From Bartlett (op. cit., p. 62) : 
 
 "While I was connected with Mr. Foster I know of no one 
 stance which created such a sensation, and the reports of which 
 were so widely copied, as that given to Mr. C. E. De Long, of 
 San Francisco, an extended account of which appeared in the 
 San Francisco Chronicle, of January 23, 1874. 
 
 " Mr. De Long was wholly unknown to Foster. They all sat 
 down to the table, and after Foster had smoked awhile at his 
 cigar, he said : ' I can only get one message to-night, and that 
 is for a person named Ida. Do either of you know who Ida is ? ' 
 
 " Mr. De Long looked at Foster with rather a startled look, 
 and said, ' Well, yes, I rather think I do. My wife's name is 
 Ida.' 
 
 " ' Well,' said Foster, ' then this message is for her, and it is 
 important. But she will have to come here and receive it.' 
 
 " The next evening the same two, accompanied by Mrs. De 
 
 Long, were ushered into Foster's parlor After Foster had 
 
 smoked for several minutes in silence, he suddenly said : ' The 
 same message comes to me. It is for Ida. This is the lady, is 
 it? ' he asked, as of the spirit. ' Oh, you will write the message, 
 will you? Well, all right,' and with this he took up a pen and 
 dashed off the following: 
 
 " ' To my daughter Ida Ten years ago I entrusted a large 
 sum of money to Thomas Madden to invest for me in certain 
 lands. After my death he failed to account for the investment 
 to my executors. The money was invested, and twelve hundred 
 and fifty acres of land were bought, and one-half of this land 
 now belongs to you. I paid Madden on account of my share
 
 Ch. XVIII] The Vineyard-Madden Investment 265 
 
 of the purchase $650. He must be made to make a settlement. 
 
 " ' Your father, 
 
 " ' VINEYARD.' 
 
 " Both Mr. and Mrs. De Long sat and heard this communica- 
 tion read with astonished faces. Mrs. De Long . . . was terribly 
 frightened . . . for she knew that Foster did not know who she 
 was, nor who her father might have been 
 
 " Mr. De Long . . . next day called on Mr. Madden . . . [and] 
 asked Mr. Madden if there was not yet some unsettled business 
 between himself and the estate of the late Mr. Vineyard. Mr. 
 
 Madden thought for a moment, and then he said there was 
 
 When informed that Mrs. De Long had only just learned of 
 this investment of her father's, Mr. Madden expressed much 
 surprise. He said he supposed she and her husband and the 
 executors knew all about it, but were simply letting the matter 
 rest for the property to increase in value. Mr. Madden then 
 said that he was ready to make a settlement at any time. Thia 
 was readily assented to by Mr. De Long, and accordingly, on 
 Saturday last, Mr. Madden transferred a deed for 625 acres 
 of the land to Mrs. De Long 
 
 " Meanwhile Foster is overrun with people anxious to inter- 
 view their deceased parents, for the purpose of finding out if 
 the old folks are quite sure that their estates have been fully 
 and properly settled." 
 
 The dramatic features the letter, etc., are not unlike the 
 dramatic features of ordinary dreams. ' All could have been 
 teloteropathy from Mr. Madden's mind. But if so, as in 
 many similar instances, it must have been communicated in- 
 voluntarily. 
 
 Visions Apparently from the Dead 
 
 The records contain perhaps more visions apparently from 
 the dead than mere communications of unknown verifiable 
 intelligence. This of course generated the idea that often the 
 personages are present in a " spiritual " body palpable enough 
 to affect the eye, but telesthesia would be enough. 
 
 In the general gossip regarding Foster, the feature that 
 decided me to go to him was my being told by Professor 
 Pumpelly that Foster had announced to him the death, too 
 recent to be reported by any means then known, of a friend 
 in China whom, from Foster's description, Professor Pum- 
 pelly at once recognized as Sir F. B. He also told me that 
 news of the death was received through ordinary channels in 
 due time after Foster had told him of it.
 
 266 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 This would be interpreted by skeptical experts as a case 
 of teloteropathy. They would say that plenty of people in 
 China knew of Sir F/s death, and Foster unconsciously tapped 
 their minds, being stimulated thereto by a previous tapping 
 of Professor Pumpelly's mind; in other words, Professor 
 Pumpelly's presence put Foster's mind in sympathetic con- 
 nection with minds holding knowledge of special interest to 
 Professor Pumpelly. The men who have given incomparably 
 more attention to the subject than have any others Myers 
 and Hodgson one of whom began his studies as a thorough 
 skeptic, would say that the spirit of Sir F. gave the im- 
 pression for his friend to Foster. My impression, for which 
 reasons will appear as we proceed, is that some sort of psychic 
 record of all facts pervades the universe, and that Foster 
 caught up this one and others of interest to his sitters.* 
 
 (Pr. V, 408f.) From the Eev. G. M. Tandy, Vicar of 
 West- Ward, near Wigton, Cumberland. 
 
 "When at Loweswater, I one day called upon a friend, who 
 said, 'You do not see many newspapers; take one of those 
 lying there.' I accordingly took up a newspaper, bound with 
 a wrapper, put it into my pocket, and walked home. 
 
 " In the evening I was writing, and, wanting to refer to a 
 book, went into another room where my books were. I placed 
 the candle on a ledge of the bookcase, took down a book, and 
 found the passage I wanted, when, happening to look towards 
 the window, which was opposite to the bookcase, I saw through 
 the window the face of an old friend whom I had known well 
 at Cambridge, but had not seen for ten years or more, Canon 
 Kobinson (of the Charity and School Commission). I was so 
 sure I saw him that I went out to look for him, but could 
 find no trace of him. 
 
 " I went back into the house and thought I would take a look 
 at my newspaper. I tore off the wrapper, unfolded the paper, 
 and the first piece of news that I saw was the death of Canon 
 Robinson ! . . . I had not heard or read of his illness, or death, 
 and there was nothing in the passage of the book I was reading 
 to lead me to think of him." 
 
 Miss Hosmer, the sculptor, gives the following (Harriet 
 Hosmer: Letters and Memories. New York, 1912) : 
 
 * Since this book and its index were made up Professor Pumpelly tells 
 me that in the nearly fifty years since this occurrence, our memories of 
 it have grown apart. So it is best to regard it only as a "hypothetical
 
 Ch. XVIII] Miss Hosmer's Maid 267 
 
 " When I was living in Rome I had for several years a maid 
 
 named Rosa, to whom I became much attached 1 was greatly 
 
 distressed when she became ill with consumption and had to 
 leave me. I used to call frequently to see her ... and on one 
 occasion she expressed a desire for a certain kind of wine. I 
 
 told her I would bring it to her the next morning During 
 
 the rest of the afternoon I was busy in my studio, and do not 
 remember that Rosa was in my thoughts after I parted from 
 her. I retired to bed in good health and in a quiet frame of 
 mind. I always sleep with my doors locked, and in my bed- 
 room in Rome there were two doors; the key to one my maid 
 kept, and the other was turned on the inside. A tall screen 
 stood around my bed. I awoke early the morning after my 
 visit to Rosa and heard the clock in the library next, distinctly 
 strike five, and just then I was conscious of some presence in 
 the room, back of the screen. I asked if anyone was there, 
 when Rosa appeared in front of the screen and said, ' Adesso 
 sono contento, adesso sono felice ' (Now I am content, now I 
 am happy). For the moment it did not seem strange, I felt 
 as though everything was as it had been. ... In a flash she was 
 gone. I sprang out of bed. There was no Rosa there. ... In 
 the first moment of surprise and bewilderment I did not reflect 
 that the door was locked 
 
 "At breakfast I mentioned the apparition to my French 
 landlady, and she ridiculed the idea as being anything more 
 
 than the fantasy of an excited brain Instead of going to 
 
 see Rosa after breakfast, I sent to inquire, for I felt a strong 
 premonition that she was dead. The messenger returned, say- 
 ing Rosa had died at five o'clock. When I told Mr. Gladstone 
 of this ... he said he firmly believed in a magnetic current, 
 action of one mind upon another, or whatever you choose to 
 call it, but could not believe ghosts had yet the power of speech. 
 However, to me this occurrence is as much of a reality as any 
 experience of my life. 
 
 " Then, too, I have had many strange flashes of inner vision 
 in seeing articles that were lost. I have never been able to 
 produce them by reasoning or strong desire. They have come 
 literally in a flash " 
 
 If it were possible I should like to know if Miss Hosmer 
 really " awoke " and " sprang out of bed." The vast ma- 
 jority of visions occur in bed and are probably dreams. 
 
 Here is one of the most impressive visions on record. As the 
 percipient was not in bed it was probably not an ordinary 
 dream, though I do not see that it is of much consequence 
 whether it was or not. I put it here among visions appar- 
 ently caused by the dead, but it may be a true telopsis.
 
 268 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 Mrs. Sidgwick treats it as such in a valuable article On 
 the Evidence for Clairvoyance in Pr. VII. If it was a 
 telopsis, apparently it remained latent from 3 A.M. until 
 somewhere about 9 or 10, meanwhile causing the depres- 
 sion with which the percipient awoke. If it did not remain 
 latent, there are at least two guesses open that it took time 
 to come telepathically from some witness, or that it was tel- 
 epathed by a postcarnate soul. (Pr. VII, 33f.) : 
 
 " Statement of Mr. A. B. Wood. 
 
 "On October 24th, 1889, Edmund Dunn, brother of Mrs. 
 Agnes Paquet, was serving as fireman on the tug Wolf, a small 
 steamer engaged in towing vessels in Chicago Harbor. At 
 about three o'clock A.M., the tug fastened to a vessel, inside the 
 piers, to tow her up the river. While adjusting the towline 
 Mr. Dunn fell or was thrown overboard by the towline, and 
 
 drowned " 
 
 " Mrs. Paquet's Statement. 
 
 " I arose about the usual hour on the morning of the accident, 
 probably about six o'clock. I had slept well throughout the 
 night, had no dreams or sudden awakenings. I awoke feeling 
 gloomy and depressed, which feeling I could not shake off. 
 After . . . [two or three hours. H. H.] ... I went into the 
 pantry, took down the tea canister, and as I turned around my 
 brother Edmund or his exact image stood before me and 
 only a few feet away. The apparition stood with back toward 
 me, or, rather, partially so, and was in the act of falling for- 
 ward away from me seemingly impelled by two ropes or a 
 loop of rope drawing against his legs. The vision lasted but 
 a moment, disappearing over a low railing or bulwark, but was 
 very distinct. I dropped the tea, clasped my hands to my face, 
 and exclaimed, ' My God ! Ed. is drowned.' 
 
 " At about half -past ten A.M. my husband received a telegram 
 from Chicago, announcing the drowning of my brother. When 
 he arrived home he said to me, ' Ed. is sick in hospital at 
 Chicago; I have just received a telegram,' to which I replied, 
 ' Ed. is drowned ; I saw him go overboard.' I then gave him 
 a minute description of what I had seen. I stated that my 
 brother, as I saw him, was bareheaded, had on a heavy blue 
 sailor's shirt, no coat, and that he went over the rail or bulwark. 
 I noticed that his pants' legs were rolled up enough to show 
 the white lining inside. 
 
 "I am not nervous, and neither before nor since have I had 
 any experience in the least degree similar to that above related. 
 
 " My brother was not subject to fainting or vertigo 
 
 " AGNES PAQUET."
 
 Ch. XVIII] Mrs. Paquet's Drowned Brother 269 
 
 " Mr. Paquet's Statement. 
 
 " Wishing to break the force of the sad news I had to 
 
 convey to my wife, I said to her : ' Ed. is sick in hospital at 
 Chicago; I have just received a telegram.' To which she re- 
 plied : ' Ed. is drowned ; I saw him go overboard.' 
 
 " I started at once for Chicago, and when I arrived there I 
 found the appearance of that part of the vessel described by 
 my wife to be exactly as she had described it, though she had 
 never seen the vessel; and the crew verified my wife's de- 
 scription of her brother's dress, &c., except that they thought 
 that he had his hat on at the time of the accident. They said 
 that Mr. Dunn had purchased a pair of pants a few days before 
 the accident occurred, and as they were a trifle long before, 
 wrinkling at the knees, he had worn them rolled up, showing 
 the white lining as seen by my wife." 
 
 Considerable confirmatory matter is added. 
 
 Colonel H., vouched for by Mr. Gurney, tells (Pr. V, 412) : 
 
 " how, nearly twenty-three years before, he had formed a 
 
 friendship with two brother subalterns, J. P. and J. 8., and 
 how his intercourse with J. P. had been continued at intervals 
 up to the time of the Transvaal war, when J. P. was ordered 
 out on the staff. J. S. was already on the scene of action. 
 Both had now attained major's rank; the narrator himself had 
 left the service some years previously. 
 
 " On the morning that J. P. was leaving London, to embark 
 for the Cape, he invited the narrator to breakfast with him at 
 the club, and they finally parted at the club-door. 
 
 " ' Good-bye, old fellow,' I said, ' we shall meet again, I hope/ 
 
 "'Yes,' he said, 'we shall meet again.' 
 
 "I can see him now, as he stood, smart and erect, with his 
 bright black eyes looking intently into mine. A wave of the 
 hand, as the hansom whirled him off, and he was gone. 
 
 "The Transvaal war was at its height. One night...! 
 
 awoke with a start Standing by my bed, between me and 
 
 the chest of drawers, I saw a figure, which, in spite of the 
 unwonted dress unwonted, at least, to me and of a full black 
 beard, I at once recognized as that of my old brother-officer. . . . 
 I started from sleep, and sat up in bed looking at him. His 
 face was pale, but his bright black eyes shone as keenly as 
 when, a year and a half before, they had looked upon me as 
 he stood with one foot on the hansom, bidding me adieu. 
 
 " Fully impressed for the brief moment that we were sta- 
 tioned together at C in Ireland or somewhere, and thinking 
 
 I was in my barrack-room, I said, ' Hallo ! P., am I late for 
 parade?' P. looked at me steadily, and replied, 'I'm shot.' 
 
 " ' Shot! ' I exclaimed. ' Good God! how and where? '
 
 270 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 " ' Through the lunge/ replied P., and as he spoke his right 
 hand moved slowly up the breast, until the fingers rested over 
 the right lung. 
 
 " ' What were you doing ? ' I asked. 
 
 " ' The General sent me forward,' he answered, and the right 
 hand left the breast to move slowly to the front, pointing over 
 my head to the window, and at the same moment the figure 
 melted away. I rubbed my eyes, to make sure I was not dream- 
 ing, and sprang out of bed. It was then 4.10 A.M. by the clock 
 on my mantelpiece. 
 
 " The [second] morning I ... seized with avidity the 
 
 first paper that came to hand. . . . My eye fell at once on the 
 brief lines that told of the battle of Lang's Neck, and on the 
 list of killed, foremost among them all being poor J. P. 
 I noted the time the battle was fought, calculated it with the 
 hour at which I had seen the figure, and found that it almost 
 coincided. 
 
 " About six months afterwards ... an officer who was 
 
 at the battle of Lang's Neck . . . confirmed every detail 
 
 More than a year after the occurrence ... on my asking J. S. 
 
 if he had heard how poor P was shot, he replied, ' Just 
 
 here,' and his fingers traveled up his breast, exactly as the 
 fingers of the figure had done, until they rested on the very 
 spot over the right lung." 
 
 The following narrative was communicated by Mr. Edward 
 A. Goodall, of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colors, 
 London (Pr. V, 453) : 
 
 " At midsummer, 1869, I left London for Naples Arrived 
 
 at the hotel [in a village near by. H.H.] and while sitting per- 
 fectly still in my saddle talking to the landlady, the donkey went 
 down upon his knees as if he had been shot or struck by light- 
 ning, throwing me over his head upon the lava pavement 
 
 " It must have been on my third or fourth night, and about 
 the middle of it, when I awoke, as it seemed, at the sound of 
 my own voice, saying : ' I know I have lost my dearest little 
 May.' Another voice, which I in no way recognized, answered: 
 'No, not May, but your youngest boy.' 
 
 " The distinctness and solemnity of the voice made such a 
 distressing impression upon me that I slept no more. I got 
 up at daybreak, and went out, noticing for the first time tele- 
 graph-poles and wires. 
 
 "Without delay I communicated with the postmaster at 
 Naples, and by next boat received two letters from home. I 
 opened them according to dates outside. The first told me that 
 my youngest boy was taken suddenly ill; the second, that he 
 was dead.
 
 Ch. XVIII] Animals Seem to See Visions 271 
 
 " Neither on his account nor on that of any of my family had 
 I any cause for uneasiness. All were quite well on my taking 
 leare of them so lately. My impression ever since has been 
 that the time of the death coincided as nearly as we could judge 
 with the time of my accident. 
 
 " Mr. Goodall thinks that the mule's sudden fall otherwise 
 inexplicable may have been due to terror at some apparition 
 of the dying child. When this paper was read to the Society 
 for Psychical Research, Mr. Pearsall Smith gave the following 
 apparently parallel instance: 
 
 " A prominent barrister at Philadelphia . . . had parted, under 
 painful circumstances of controversy, with a friend who had 
 later gone to Italy for his health. Afterwards, while camping 
 out in the wilds of the Adirondacks, one day his horse became 
 excited and refused to advance when urged. While engaged 
 in the contest with the horse, the barrister saw before him 
 the apparition of his friend with blood pouring from his 
 mouth, and in an interval of the effusion he heard him say, '/ 
 have nothing against you.' Soon afterwards he heard that 
 his friend had at that time died during a discharge of blood 
 from the lungs." 
 
 I might properly include here, under apparent telepathy 
 from the dead, some more remarkable dream visions which I 
 prefer to leave for a special treatment of dreams. They 
 will be found in Chapter LV. 
 
 Miscellaneous Tele psychoses Without Assignable Source 
 
 Here is a vision pure and simple that is interesting, but 
 suggests nothing and explains nothing, and is one of a dozen 
 that cropped up one night around the table at the Authors' 
 Club, as they will crop up around any table if the conversa- 
 tion stimulates them. This one was given me by Dr. Rossiter 
 Johnson, and is unusual in not occurring while the percipient 
 was in bed, in involving the sense of hearing as well as that 
 of sight, and in having two witnesses. I don't trouble to get 
 the affirmation of the second one : the time when confirmation 
 of a respectable witness is needed in these matters is past. 
 
 Dr. Johnson writes that in August, 1895, near Amagansett, 
 Long Island, he was driving with his secretary in a neigh- 
 borhood known as Hardscrabble. 
 
 " We traversed a piece of the road that lies between two 
 turns. First it turns at right angles to the north, passes a 
 single farmhouse, and after a course of three or four hundred
 
 272 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 yards, turns at right angles to the east. When we were in 
 this part of the road, it was about half -past nine, and the moon 
 had risen. After we had passed the farmhouse (which was 
 completely dark, as if all the inmates had gone to bed), we 
 were skirting a large field on the east side of the road, when, 
 just the other side of the fence, suddenly appeared a spirited 
 team attached to a farm wagon, not at all like the buggy we 
 were in, going in the same direction that we were going, but 
 much faster. It appeared that the field was not cultivated very 
 close to the fence, and there was a belt of bushes, with weeds 
 or grass (wild growth of some sort) ; and the hoofs of the 
 horses and wheels of the wagon were distinctly heard crashing 
 through this. At the moment when the wagon was abreast of 
 our carriage, the distance between them could not have been 
 much more than a dozen yards. The horses and wagon were 
 perfectly distinct. I could not say that I saw any driver. They 
 went at a very rapid rate till they reached the corner of the 
 field, and then disappeared. Their whole course while they 
 were visible to me was about one hundred yards. When we 
 arrived at the turn of the road, they were nowhere in sight. 
 I said to my secretary : ' Did you see anything ? ' and in answer 
 she described exactly what I had seen. 
 
 " As the apparition was between us and the moon, there 
 could be no possibility of seeing on that side a shadow of the 
 buggy. I could recall nothing in my whole experience that 
 could have suggested such an apparition; neither could my 
 secretary." 
 
 Miss Hosmer, the sculptor, tells the following three stories 
 in the biography already cited: 
 
 " Lady A. wears a curious gold ring designed by her 
 
 husband. When taken from the finger it can be straightened 
 into a key 
 
 " All of her valuables, from jewel cases to her writing room, 
 where many important papers are kept, are fitted with locks 
 for this key. One morning she came into my room much 
 distressed, saying she could not find her ring key. ... I saw the 
 ring key, in my mind's eye, plainly on the table in her daugh- 
 ter's apartment The ring was found just where I saw it." 
 
 This may have been a stored up memory, but how about 
 this? 
 
 " On another occasion Lady A. could not find a despatch, 
 box containing valuable papers. ... A vision of it flashed across 
 my brain. I said, 'It is useless to search here, the box is at 
 Drummond's bank, in one of your large boxes.' ... I went to
 
 Ch. XVIII] Prophetic Visions 273 
 
 the bank I asked the clerk to bring out his ledger containing 
 
 the list of boxes. . . . When I ran my hand down the list (there 
 were seren) it stopped at five. Number five was brought 
 
 from the vault into the private room After taking out all 
 
 the carefully packed articles I was rewarded by finding the 
 
 lost box at the very bottom 
 
 " How and why these visions come is, as yet, an unknown 
 science, but I firmly believe it will be made clear some time, 
 perhaps at no distant day." 
 
 And this? 
 
 " Shortly after dinner I made the original observation that 
 I would take possession of the sofa and have ' forty winks.' I 
 had just lain down when I was moved to say, ' I have such a 
 feeling of a carriage accident.' I then dozed off for about 
 ten minutes . . . when a tremendous crash under my windows, 
 in the Cortile of the Barberini Palace, startled us both. Up I 
 flew to the nearest window, and there was the Princess Or- 
 aini's carriage, upside down, on a pile of bricks, which in true 
 Italian fashion had been left right in the driveway, with no 
 lantern." 
 
 Here are some more incidents that our classification is not 
 broad enough to cover. Lake the last from Miss Hosmer, they 
 open up the question of prophecy, and that opens up the 
 question of determinism; and that I have always considered 
 too tough to be handled by me or anybody else. 
 
 A few years since, a young woman had a sitting with an 
 obscure medium in Cambridge, who was under investigation 
 by James. She told her sitter : " You will lead thousands." 
 A series of accidents led the young woman to start an en- 
 tirely new charity, and she has brought it to the point where 
 she is literally " leading thousands." These facts are in my 
 personal knowledge, except as I depend on testimony regard- 
 ing the sitting. 
 
 Many years ago another young woman, with an older 
 friend, went, as a lark, to consult a negro woman who was 
 " telling fortunes " in New York. To the young woman the 
 fortune-teller said : "I see books, books, everywhere books 
 in piles!" A year or two later the young woman married 
 a young law student, whom she did not know at the 
 time of the "fortune-telling," and who after the marriage 
 became a publisher and the owner of many " piles of books." 
 I can vouch for the story: for I was the young man.
 
 274 Recent Telepathic Sensitives [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 My last extract under this head will be from Foster, and 
 I want to say an additional word about him here. After 
 witnessing what he unquestionably did in my presence, what 
 he is alleged to have done in the presence of others appears 
 no more incredible than what I knew him to do would have 
 appeared before its actuality was experienced. 
 
 The teller of the very big Foster stories, after his long 
 observation of Foster, shows himself in the following ex- 
 tracts (op. cit., p. 59) : 
 
 "I question whether Foster, or any other medium, ever pre- 
 dicted anything of value as regards the future. If in any large 
 degree it were possible, it would seem a violation of law either 
 natural or spiritual 
 
 " Is it better to know aught of the future ? Have we not 
 care enough with the present? 
 
 " Mr. Foster's power was astonishing because unusual, but 
 it was limited. . . . Although I have received many remarkable 
 tests, and what to the ordinary spiritualist would be proof 
 positive of direct communication between this and the spirit 
 life, I am still skeptical. The communications were never 
 decided enough. It seems to me, if it were true, such a great 
 truth would be known and accepted by all mankind. Spirit 
 telephone and telegraphy seem to work unsatisfactorily a thick 
 veil seems to hang between. I feel that there is a gulf, a 
 barrier, a dense fog, that will not dissipate." 
 
 Yet in the face of this Bartlett gives the following (op. 
 cit., p. 60) : 
 
 " We met an impulsive dashing young man, by the name of 
 Armijo, at Charpiot's Hotel, in Denver, Colo He was in- 
 clined to be a little abusive, and, although possibly not intend- 
 ing to do so, was almost insulting. He intimated the whole 
 thing was a fraud ; and finally said he would bet a large amount 
 that Mr. Foster could not tell anything that was not in his 
 own mind; could not tell anything which the future would 
 verify. Mr. Foster had borne with him very patiently, but 
 showed that he was somewhat vexed. Suddenly he said, rather 
 excitedly, ' I can tell you something that will happen to you 
 which is very painful, if I choose, but I do not care to give 
 you pain.' Armijo immediately defied him and said, ' That is 
 all stuff.' Finally Foster said, 'Well, young man, you will 
 "blow your brains out inside of three months.' And sure 
 enough, in a few weeks, picking up the Denver Rocky Mountain 
 News, we read as follows: 
 
 "'Sad suicide. P. C. Armijo, the sheep owner, suicides.
 
 Ch. XVIII] Prophecies Tend to Realize Themselves 275 
 
 He puts a bullet through his heart. LOTC the cause of the 
 rash act. The end of a promising life.' " 
 
 Bartlett very wisely comments: 
 
 " It is my opinion in this instance that Mr. Foster made a 
 mistake. He should have controlled his temper, as I am quite 
 sure no good ever comes from giving vent to such impressions. 
 And, although after the stance the young man laughed and 
 ridiculed the prediction, still is it not possible that it might 
 have preyed upon his excitable mind until he became crazed? 
 Or was his suicide the natural course of events? The account 
 in the paper referred to the ' Foster prophecy.' " 
 
 We have now reached the end of my space for phenomena 
 tentatively accounted for by telepathy, telopsis, and telakousis. 
 Many of the most intelligent spiritists would not confidently 
 lay those we have had to the charge of spirits, but there are 
 other phenomena which a few of the best minds of the age 
 attribute to intelligences that have survived the body. Be- 
 fore going to this latter class, however, it may be well to do 
 what we can to correlate with existing knowledge what we 
 have already been over, especially as our attempts may enable 
 us to grope more intelligently along the still mistier way 
 before us. 

 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 SUGGESTED CORRELATIONS OF TELEPATHY 
 
 AMONG the chaos of opinions called forth by the strange 
 phenomena we have been considering, there is at least one 
 on which probably all critics agree that our old conceptions 
 of the range of mind and the connection between minds must 
 be broadened. Our minds are now demonstrated to flow into 
 each other with a freedom not realized before the latter part 
 of the last century. But as abnormal and exceptional, such 
 things had been fancied, and perhaps exceptionally experi- 
 enced, from the remotest tradition. It had long been sus- 
 pected, and by some persons believed, that, under stress of 
 great emotion, some souls could impress some sympathetic 
 souls at a distance; and writers of fiction had occasionally 
 represented such occurrences, but they were regarded as in 
 the regions of romance, possible, if at all, only to almost 
 superhuman powers, and subjects of almost reverential awe. 
 Whatever their bases, until lately the modern mind has 
 generally regarded them as only of the confused limbo of 
 myth and fancy. 
 
 For only about thirty years has anything of the kind been 
 accepted as fact, and been placed under scientific observation 
 and classification. It is now established that such communi- 
 cation is frequent between persons of apparently all degrees of 
 intelligence, culture, and character, provided they be endowed, 
 as many are, with a certain sensibility which is as yet some- 
 what undefined, and does not seem to depend upon the posses- 
 sion of any one of, or group of, the said varieties of intelli- 
 gence, culture, or character. In other words, as I have already 
 said, and probably will say more than once again, it looks as 
 if mind, from single ideas up to whole personalities from 
 faint impressions like Foster's of my pearl-oyster up to clear 
 impressions of individualities, were floating about the universe, 
 from all sorts of places into all sorts of places, just as freely 
 276
 
 
 Ch. XIX] Telepathy and Hypnosis 277 
 
 as motion floats from muscle to electric battery, to heat, to 
 light, to vegetable nutrition, and back into muscle or as 
 oxygen floats from water to iron rust, to vegetable, to blood, 
 to the expired breath and back to iron rust. 
 
 Moreover, it looks as if each person were the center of a 
 lot of these floating ideas, and that individuals pick them up 
 in all ways and degrees, from the cause of the babe's mys- 
 terious smile apparently at nothing at all, up to the sources 
 of our best dreams ; and from impressions like those seized by 
 Foster from pretty much everything going, up to those aggre- 
 gations of thought, sensibility, and will which apparently 
 accrete to themselves bodies, and then leave them, and which it 
 seems the purpose and justification of the universe to evolve. 
 
 Some leading students claim that although most people 
 do not show any telesthesia, we all have it subliminally in 
 some degree, but that only the sensitives manifest it apprecia- 
 bly. As it is not " at home " at all times to all comers, they 
 say that when not at home it is beneath the threshold sub- 
 liminal as already explained. And when anybody does any- 
 thing psychologically queer and smarter (American " smart ") 
 than most folks can do, they generally charge it up to his 
 subliminal self. As far as yet used, the phrase seems to me 
 something to look wise over, and use as a scrap-basket for 
 anything you don't understand, and want to have folks (per- 
 haps including yourself) think you do. 
 
 But perhaps we can make this subliminal self, or whatever 
 else you see fit to call it, something more than a mere name 
 for the unknown faculties which accomplish the mysterious 
 results. 
 
 Granting, as we must, that there is something call it what 
 you will that does these queer things, the real question is: 
 what makes it do them what is the modus operandi of it 
 all? Now for a guess: anybody who claims to do more than 
 guess in these regions is a suspicious character. 
 
 Telepathy and Hypnosis 
 
 The way to correlate the unknown with the known is to 
 seek points of resemblance. Examination sometimes discloses 
 enough between the matter under investigation and familiar
 
 278 Suggested Correlations of Telepathy [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 things, to group it with them. In the woods you hear an ob- 
 ject stirring in the bushes. It eludes you so that you can't tell 
 at first whether it is reptile, bird, or quadruped. You catch 
 a glimpse of a brown surface as big as your hand, then you 
 know it is either bird or beast; for there is no reptile in 
 that region who could make such a display. Your next 
 glimpse shows that it has feathers, not fur ; and so by getting 
 particular by particular, you correlate with it those that con- 
 stitute partridge, and not chicken or turkey. Or if you are 
 in a new and wild region, the particulars you get may go 
 so far as to show you that you have found a bird, but the 
 later particulars may not correspond to anything you knew 
 before. Then to " know " the bird you will have to become 
 familiar with new particulars by studying them in books 
 or in as many specimens as you can find. On rereading this, 
 I suspect it is an unconscious echo from Spencer. If so, 
 so much the better. 
 
 Now let us see how far we can correlate this unfamiliar 
 telepathy with what we knew before. Are there any well 
 known examples of one person thinking another person's 
 thoughts and seeing visions under the influence of another 
 person? There unquestionably are. Many of the compara- 
 tively familiar range of phenomena once called mesmeric and 
 now called hypnotic come under that category; and if we 
 can get telepathy into the same category we will be that much 
 nearer to understanding or " knowing " it. So to bring hyp- 
 nosis into this comparison I will, as with telekinesis and 
 telepathy, give the slight general notion of it contained in 
 my own experience. I hope that an old man's fondness for 
 his boyhood is not leading me to overestimate the fitness 
 of introducing a second batch from the school where, when 
 we were boys, P first aroused my interest in telekinesis. 
 
 In the early fifties there turned up in N"ew Haven a couple 
 of wandering apostles of culture, who gave exhibitions at 
 "The Temple" (of the Muses?), which then stood on the 
 corner of Court and Temple Streets, and where I remember 
 seeing "Uncle Tom's Cabin" played: conformably with its 
 name, "The Temple" admitted only "moral shows." The 
 apostles aforesaid illustrated publicly and taught privately
 
 Ch. XIX] Some Primitive Hypnotism 279 
 
 what they were pleased to term "Electro-psychology." The 
 "electro" was supposed to come in through a tin or zinc 
 disk about as big as a silver dollar and twice as thick, in the 
 concaved center of one side of which was inserted a silver 
 half dime. The subjects, selected more or less pellmell 
 from the audience, went on the stage, and each held one of 
 the disks in the palm of the hand, and gazed at it intently 
 for a few minutes, when the operator told one to close his 
 eyes, made a few passes, and asked if he could open them. 
 In many instances the subject could not. 
 
 The "electricity" (galvanism) between the two metals 
 (what little there may have been of it) of course had "no- 
 thing to do with the case." The result came from gazing at 
 the bright object, just as the same result was rediscovered a 
 generation later and called for the first time hypnosis. 
 
 The operator told one subject : " Now you may open your 
 eyes to look at that steamboat coming." The subject did so, 
 and was at once much interested in the imaginary boat, the 
 operator suggesting : " How fast she comes ! What a lot of 
 people on board ! " and other things to the same effect, all 
 of which were responded to by the subject; and some of 
 them, if I remember rightly, suggested by him. Between 
 them they got her up to an imaginary dock, and when she 
 was near the operator asked : " Don't you see anybody 
 you know on board ? " Whereupon the subject began waving 
 his hand to the passengers and calling them by name, and I 
 think indicating the reception of responses. After the sub- 
 ject had uproariously called to Smith or Jones the operator 
 exclaimed : " Why, he's fallen overboard ! Help him out ! " 
 Whereupon the subject grabbed somebody near him on the 
 stage, and struggled to get him ashore. There were many 
 performances of the same kind. 
 
 I have never myself seen any other case of dramatic vision 
 produced by the hypnotizer, and you may attribute this one 
 to collusion or post facto memory on my part, if you please ; 
 but innumerable others are on record, including some where 
 hypnotizers have suggested the same vision to a number of 
 subjects at once, and each subject has filled it out and acted 
 it out according to his own waking idiosyncrasies, and differ- 
 ently from the others.
 
 280 Suggested Correlations of Telepathy [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 I believed, and still believe, these exhibitions to have been 
 genuine. The overwhelming mass of comparatively recent 
 evidence for similar things would alone go far to justify me, 
 but there were strong considerations in the same direction 
 at the time. 
 
 General Eussell, our schoolmaster, became greatly inter- 
 ested, and, because he thought the show educational, took 
 his boys several times, and took lessons in the art himself, 
 and exercised it a little, if I remember rightly, upon some 
 of the boys. But he soon gave it up because, I remember 
 distinctly, in spite of its being unmistakably "real," he 
 wasn't sure that it didn't " come of the devil " a gentleman 
 in whom he and all the other learned people of New Haven 
 at that time had the profoundest confidence. 
 
 Moreover, John Tuttle learned it too. John kept a shop 
 a couple of blocks from the school, where it was no un- 
 common feat for one of us boys (who were kept well exer- 
 cised) to demolish an entire pie on a Wednesday or Saturday 
 afternoon, or even at a midday recess. One Saturday after- 
 noon John tried his black art on a boy who is now one of 
 the leading bankers in New York, and closed his eyes effectu- 
 ally. He could not affect me. It has occurred to me since 
 I have read somewhat on the subject, that probably the other 
 boy was acquiescent with the experiment, and I resisted. 
 Possibly, however, he had only got farther along with his 
 pie! 
 
 Now in cases where a vision experienced by one mind is 
 plainly due to the influence of another mind, near or remote, 
 may not the influence be in some way akin to the hypnotic 
 influence which produced the vision of the steamboat? 
 
 A much simpler experience which I had many years later 
 with Hermann the prestidigitator is instructive. His wife, I 
 believe it was, remained on the stage while he went among 
 the audience and got from them all sorts of questions, to 
 which, without knowing them by any usual means, she gave 
 immediate answers. Wishing to see if there was any telopsis 
 involved, I handed him my match-box, asking how many 
 matches were in it. He asked me, and I said that I did not 
 know. He opened the box and counted them, and the instant
 
 Ch. XIX] Hermann's Hypnotic Telepathy 281 
 
 he knew the number, she flashed it back correctly. Plainly he 
 had hypnotized her before he started among the audience, and 
 subsequently telepathically impressed upon her the answers to 
 the questions put to him. This occurrence left me for a long 
 time confident that apparent telopsis is all telepathy, but later 
 facts have diminished that confidence. 
 
 It is well to tax a reader's credulity only by degrees, and 
 I now give a much better illustration of hypnotic telepathy 
 and vision building. Several instructive and entertaining 
 instances are given in a paper by Mrs. Sidgwick on Clair- 
 voyance and Telepathy in Pr. VII, especially those from 
 Dr. Wiltse of Skiddy, Kansas. I have space for but one 
 (Pr. VII, 77f.) : 
 
 "Mr. William Howard and Mr. N. Parker called upon me 
 early one morning (stating that they had called by request 
 of neighbors) to ask me to hypnotize Fannie for the purpose 
 of possibly gaining some knowledge of the whereabouts of the 
 body of Uncle Julian Scott, who had ridden into the Emerald 
 River late the night before and was drowned 
 
 " I then stated the case to her, asking her to go with us 
 [in her mind. H. H.] to the river, where we would take a 
 skiff and look for the body. 'Is Uncle Julian drowned? Poor 
 old man ! ' she exclaimed. She expressed her willingness to go 
 with us, only stipulating that Mrs. Wiltse should accompany 
 us. I pretended to get horses, and we started (in her mind). 
 
 "It was three miles to the river. On the real road lived a 
 Mrs. Hall, a widow, and Fannie called out suddenly, 'There 
 is Mrs. Hall's place! Let us have her go with us! ' ' All right, 
 Fannie, she says she will go with us, and here we are already ! ' 
 A few moments of that peculiar deep sleep to suggest the pas- 
 sage of time, and I rouse Fannie again by a gentle shake, and 
 say, ' Here we are, and here is the boat ; now I will paddle 
 slowly and you look carefully into the water. Now what do 
 you see?' She immediately began to describe rocks, logs, 
 snags, bottom, &c. (Suggestion. I had constantly to repeat 
 the question, 'What do you see? Do you see anything? Can 
 you see the bottom?' &c., or she would shortly be snoring.) 
 
 " After a little she said suddenly, as if somewhat excited, 
 ' There is something over yonder ahead of us ! ' Q. ' Which 
 way, Fannie?' F. 'Right hand, way down yonder. Paddle 
 nearer to it.' Q. ' All right. Here we go! Now, what is it? ' 
 F.' I see now. It is a hat.' Q. 'Where?' F. 'Don't you 
 see there in that drift?' (This is according to Mrs. Wiltse's 
 recollection of the affair. My own is that it was in a bush.) 
 Q. ' Describe the place, Fannie, so we can get it as we come
 
 282 Suggested Correlations of Telepathy [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 back.' F. 'Don't you see?' &c. And she described certain 
 peculiarities upon the bank. 
 
 " Soon after this she announced an object near the left bank 
 of the stream and asked to be paddled over there. Then asked 
 if we did not see an old tree body under the water near the 
 bank. Q. ' Yes, Fannie, what about it?' F. 'Why, don't 
 you see ? There is something under it.' Q. ' What is it, 
 Fannie?' F. 'I can't see. Paddle closer.' Q. 'All right! 
 Here we are!' (Silence on Fannie's part.) Q. 'What is it, 
 Fannie ? ' F. ' Some big dark thing ; I can't see what. There 
 is a saddle there. Don't you see it ? ' Q. ' Yes, Fannie, what 
 else ? ' F. ' Something, but I can't see it good ; the water is 
 muddy. The saddle is there. I can see it, and one stirrup is 
 gone.' Q. ' All right. Can you see anything on the bank that 
 we may know the spot as we come back ? ' F. ' Why, of course. 
 Don't you see how the sand is worked up in that low spot 
 around the roots of that tree ? ' 
 
 "I see that my evidence upon the points in regard to the 
 saddle with its missing stirrup and the hat is not as explicit 
 
 and at first hand as I could wish But common rumor had 
 
 it that Fannie was right upon these points. As to the rest 
 of the points, I was witness myself to the accuracy of her 
 statements, which I will proceed to conclude. 
 
 " We passed on down the river, Fannie professing inability 
 to see anything more of interest, and after a few minutes 
 complaining of being tired and cold, and teasing to go back, 
 said there was no use to go any further, that they would not 
 find Uncle Julian now, and repeated her curious assertion 
 about the uselessness of going any farther, by saying with 
 considerable stress, ' It will be no use ever to look below right 
 here ! ' Q. ' All right, Fannie. We will go back, but first show 
 us some mark by which we shall remember the place, can you ? ' 
 ' Why, don't you see ? ' she exclaimed in a tone of seeming 
 disgust. Q. 'What is it, Fannie?' F. ' Oh, don't you see 
 that tall bridge?' Q. 'Where, Fannie?' F. 'Why, right 
 there! We just now passed under it, right there it is.' (Note. 
 Bridges in these parts were very scarce. The Emerald River 
 had at that time but one bridge crossing it, an iron railroad 
 bridge, which I feel sure Fannie had never seen, as there was 
 no public road to it, it crossing the river at a wild, isolated, 
 almost inaccessible spot in the mountains, several miles from 
 where we were sitting.) ' What kind of a bridge is it, Fannie ? ' 
 I asked, purposely for a test of the reality of her vision, for 
 she was now back into the realm of my own knowledge, and 
 I was somewhat surprised at her correctness. F. (hesitating 
 for a space as if taking a careful view, then in a tone of 
 curious surprise) ' Why, it looks as if it must be made of 
 iron ! ' (Suggestion.)
 
 Ch. XIXJ Dr. Wiltse's Uncle Julian Case 283 
 
 " Just as I had suggested that we were on the way back, 
 Mr. Howard was called to the door, where a neighbor informed 
 him, in so low a tone that none inside heard it, that the body 
 had been recovered and conveyed to the residence of his (Uncle 
 Julian's) son, who lived on the bank of the river near the ford 
 where we had made our imaginary start with a boat. The 
 message had all the appearance of truth. Mr. Howard came 
 in looking rather chagrined, as I certainly felt, and informed 
 me in a whisper of the news. ' Be quiet,' I replied, ' I will 
 try another experiment.' I didn't believe this could be suc- 
 cessful. 
 
 " ' Fannie/ I said, ' here we are now at the landing. We are 
 all of us cold. Let us go into the Scotts' and warm.' She 
 agreed. I pretended we had entered the house, when Fanny 
 exclaimed in a much excited manner, 'Why, there he is.' 
 Q. 'Who, Fannie?' F. ' Why, don't you see it?' Q. 'See 
 what, Fannie?' F ' Why, they have found Uncle Julian and 
 got him laid out.' She then went on to speak of different 
 relatives and friends who were there, of their crying, &c., 
 naming such persons as we supposed it would be very certain 
 would be there. 
 
 " Here was telepathy, most likely, with a vengeance [and 
 dream-building, too. H. H.], for not a word of the whole 
 thing was true. The body was not recovered until fourteen 
 days after the drowning ... by a train hand from a moving 
 train crossing the bridge Fannie had declared we had 'just 
 passed under,' where it had lodged upon an old drift just below 
 
 the bridge 1 have as often thought of the perfectly apparent 
 
 prophecy of Fannie in her emphatic assertion, ' We have just 
 passed under that tall bridge and it will be useless ever to look 
 for Uncle Julian below here ! ' I could flip a marble from the 
 top of the bridge into the drift where rested his body fourteen 
 days after her curious trip by water to that identical spot by 
 way of what? I listen for the answer. Had I possibly dem- 
 onstrated the soul, as I began experimenting with the dismal 
 hope of perhaps some time accomplishing, fifteen years prior 
 to this, which hope I had never once quite relinquished?" 
 
 He certainly had demonstrated telepathy and dream build- 
 ing. Their connection with " the soul " we shall see more of. 
 
 The foregoing shows that hypnosis not only starts the visions 
 the hypnotizer suggests, but also frequently develops a teloptic 
 capacity independent of any voluntary suggestion of the hyp- 
 notizer. Therefore probably a sensitive under the influence, 
 conscious, or unconscious, of a sitter, or possibly of some re- 
 mote mind, could pick up a wide range of matter through 
 telesthesia.
 
 284 Suggested Correlations of Telepathy [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 Now in this vision the subject was, during a large part of 
 the time, in deeper trance than my steamboat dreamer; and 
 both of them, though in trance, were apparently wide awake, 
 " Fannie " part of the time, and my man all the time. So 
 was Foster when he saw the pearl and the fawn. Does it 
 not appear almost conclusive that he, like the others, was 
 hypnotized that, whatever else a sensitive may be, he is so 
 sensitive to the hypnotic influence that he is rendered tele- 
 pathic and perhaps teloptic and telakoustic by anyone who 
 happens along any postcarnate one, if you please that he 
 sees and hears, more or less accurately, the things that the 
 sitter or even someone at a distance consciously or uncon- 
 sciously suggests? 
 
 Hypnotic visions hold out also a second hope of correlation 
 with visions in general, in that they cover both the sleeping 
 and apparently waking fields waking while the influence is 
 slight, sleeping when it has become strong. This all would de- 
 pend upon the amounts and qualities of the power of the sitter 
 and the sensitive, hence perhaps we can account for the 
 good sittings and the bad ones and the different varieties 
 of them. 
 
 The hypothesis seems to correlate the hypnotic phenomena 
 pretty well, but of course there are gaps. How, for instance, 
 does it fit with Foster's wanting me to concentrate my mind, 
 and with other sensitives saying the exact opposite that they 
 do best when the sitter's mind is a tabula rasa ? Perhaps the 
 solution may be that generally, where the sitter wants a 
 specific thing, he must do his best to get it ; but that he will 
 be apt to get more things if the sensitive is not restricted 
 to specific ones, but simply picks up all that happen along. 
 
 The hypnotic hypothesis also tends to correlate with the 
 other facts it covers, the third fact that sympathetic sitters 
 generally get more than skeptical ones, and much more than 
 antagonistic ones. Mr. Bartlett tells me, however, that the 
 skeptics got the best sittings from Foster, apparently putting 
 him on his mettle. This was certainly not true of Mrs. Piper, 
 however, but she was always in deep trance. 
 
 Does this hypothesis, then, bring everything from the sitter,
 
 Ch. XIX] The Interrelation of Minds 285 
 
 and under it must the spiritistic hypothesis throw up the 
 sponge ? 
 
 Not by any means. In the first place it does not "bring 
 everything from the sitter." How can it bring true things 
 that he never knew, and even true things directly contrary 
 to all he ever knew, which the sensitive (or the control?) 
 insists upon, and which are subsequently found to be correct? 
 The hypothesis, then, must go beyond the sitter, and admit 
 the notion, already intimated, that in some way we cannot 
 yet make much of a guess at, the sensitive gets impressions 
 teloteropathically from any sort of mind anywhere. 
 
 James's objection to world-wide telepathy that it is almost 
 inconceivable that the mind should select the fitting thought 
 among the myriad thoughts of myriads of people would prob- 
 ably not have been made after he became familiar with the 
 wireless telegraph. Probably each mind receives only the 
 thoughts to which it is keyed. 
 
 Why not lump all those minds into the cosmic mind, of 
 which each is a part? We know that any sort of a fact, 
 or rather memory of a fact, may be in any number of 
 minds at the same time, and we know that all facts, or rather 
 all memories of them, are in the aggregate mind at all times. 
 The only open question is the interrelation of its components, 
 and telepathy is giving a new outlook on that. 
 
 From that limitless storehouse perhaps the sensitive draws 
 or is flowed in upon. Virtually all the commentators have 
 suggested this, but they have been contented with mere pass- 
 ing suggestions. We shall group some of them later. 
 
 All this conveys a tentative idea of how the sensitive gets 
 the hints, and how, just as we constantly dress up all sorts of 
 hints into elaborate dreams, these hypnotic hints are dressed 
 up into symbols, like the pearl, and the fawn, or into per- 
 sonages, such as those Foster and others sometimes describe 
 and sometimes enact, or as we all associate with in dreams. 
 But the hints must be pretty elaborate to make the personages 
 as nearly exact copies of their originals as they so often are ! 
 Compare Chapter XXIII on "The Idea." 
 
 I know I am repeating, and I intend to often. 
 
 Many people besides subjects known to be hypnotized have 
 visions, waking and sleeping, which are so much more definite
 
 286 Suggested Correlations of Telepathy [Bk. II, Pi IV 
 
 than mere recollections or imaginations, as to constitute a class 
 by themselves. These people " see things " which presumably 
 are not there, as definitely as if they were. These visions 
 seem to be most generally of persons, and have, even when 
 waking, the definiteness of ordinary dreams, with apparently 
 all the ordinary attributes of matter but resistance and per- 
 manency. When such visions have anything out of the com- 
 mon, such as relations to important events, those who know 
 most about these matters quite generally believe that there 
 is often a causal relation mathematically demonstrated to 
 be far beyond any possibilities of mere coincidence. Does 
 some other will, as in hypnosis, facilitate them or generate 
 them? Many of those who know most about them believe 
 that such is the case. "Will," however, is often too strong 
 a word : many cases would be better described by " influence," 
 or even by " unconscious influence." 
 
 Hypnosis seems much like dreaming in this other respect : 
 that the wide horizon of dreams is possible only when the 
 mind is freed from its absorption in outer details. Similarly 
 in hypnosis the attention is diverted from things in general 
 and concentrated on one thing, and that a thing not in itself 
 provocative of thought on the silver coin in the zinc disk, 
 if you please, or on any bright point on the chalk mark on 
 the floor to which the chicken's head is held for a time with 
 the effect of rendering her unable to raise it. Or the subject 
 may be, as I have been, laid on his back and gently crooned 
 to sleep with assurances that the trouble the physician attacks 
 is going to yield to suggestions of betterment. Whatever the 
 way, the mind is freed of all distractions, and the hypnotizer's 
 suggestion is made to occupy the whole of it. The suggestion 
 may be of an act, and the act is done; of an inhibition, and 
 there is nothing else in the mind to oppose it; of a vision, 
 say the steamboat, and the mind is filled with it. 
 
 Sometimes the psychic power may be strong enough to 
 overcome all competing distractions and impress the vision 
 in the midst of ordinary daily interests. Sometimes the re- 
 cipient may be, like the mediums, so susceptible to some sorts 
 of psychic impression as to receive them when other people 
 could not in the midst of alien conversation or occupation. 
 Sometimes the recipient may be peculiarly susceptible to them
 
 
 Ch. XIX] Telepathy and the Dream State 287 
 
 only in sleep or trance. Here ie probably still another illus- 
 tration of the arbitrariness of classification: at first glance 
 we hold sleeping and waking to be distinct, but there's an 
 indistinct region between them peopled by all sorts of visions, 
 just as sleep is peopled by dreams. Probably all people have 
 visions in the borderland between waking and sleeping; not 
 so many have them on the far side while sleeping; and very 
 few have them on the hither side while awake; and yet a 
 few certainly do. 
 
 This seems to imply in these people some power of having 
 the dream state side by side with their ordinary waking life. 
 That power may exist to some degree in all of us: there is 
 no knowing when any one of us may have a vision while he 
 is awake. 
 
 Telepathy and the Dream State 
 
 As already remarked, the vast majority of these impressions 
 come while the percipient is in bed, and it seems probable that 
 they come more than is supposed in dreams. From my own 
 experience I for one have no doubt of it. 
 
 One often dreams of things taking place in the room, and 
 then the tendency is to suppose oneself awake. 
 
 I had a very strong demonstration of this last night. When 
 I supposed I had not yet fallen asleep, I suddenly saw that 
 a light in the hall had been switched on, and heard some 
 talk, apparently from one or two of my boys, with their 
 mother in her room next mine. Then one of them came into 
 my room and told me that his younger brother had indigestion, 
 but that a doctor in Montreal (whence the speaker had come 
 a few hours earlier) had that afternoon given him and a 
 friend an awful lot of pills, and that there were enough left 
 over for the brother. Then he went out, switched off the light 
 in the hall, and I turned to go to sleep. 
 
 My sleep was intermittent and full of dreams, and in the 
 intervals my conscience reminded me that at dinner I had 
 eaten something apt to be productive of visions, and I began 
 to suspect the reality of my boy's visit to my room. In the 
 morning I found that the boy had not been there at all : the 
 whole thing had been a dream. And of course I am con-
 
 288 Suggested Correlations of Telepathy [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 firmed in the belief that I have stated that, as the vast 
 majority of visions are reported as seen when the seer is in 
 bed, the vast majority are dreams. That, however, does not 
 lessen my faith in the occasional veridicity of dreams : on the 
 contrary, whatever significance waking visions may have held 
 is proportionally transferred to dreams. I have had several 
 which there is such strong reason to believe both telepathic 
 and veridical that, unless they were, my universe is chaos. 
 Though most dreams are matters of ludicrous stupidity, there 
 have been others which in early times, and not always fool- 
 ishly, made and unmade empires, and in modern times have 
 made and unmade souls. 
 
 The absence of any known agent for some visions suggests 
 some active capacity in the sensitive which serves, like sight 
 or hearing, to involuntarily pick up (I sometimes like a split 
 infinitive) any circumstance, past or present, which happens to 
 be in range, perhaps in some sort of memory, individual or 
 cosmic, the range of course often being influenced by the pres- 
 ence of any person in any way connected with the circum- 
 stance, and his exerting some influence on the sensitive. 
 
 Impressions Lying Dormant 
 
 Many visions come when the presumed agents of them are 
 under great stress that may be transmuted into some sort 
 of hypnotic power. Yet on the other hand, as many come 
 when the presumed agent is in articulo mortis, with all the 
 powers that we know, apparently exhausted. It is easy to 
 assume that under such circumstances there may be awakened 
 powers that we don't know powers akin to those already 
 mentioned, which seem to transcend physical conditions. 
 
 But many visions even come after the death of the only 
 conceivable agent. In these we seem reduced to the alterna- 
 tives, on the one hand, of the vision being impressed before 
 the death, and lying dormant, or on the other hand, of the 
 agent's surviving bodily death and impressing the vision 
 after it. 
 
 There are many genuine cases of impressions lying dormant, 
 though some very conspicuous cases have lately been discovered 
 to be faked.
 
 Ch. XIX] Telepathy and Telopsis 289 
 
 Rudimentary Senses as Shown in Visions and Dreams 
 
 Another category where we can correlate telepathy with 
 what we know, seems to be that of the rudimentary senses. 
 Why may not the impressibility of the sensitive, or of any 
 hypnotic subject, be due to the action of a rudimentary sense 
 or faculty as yet developed to a noticeable degree in only a 
 few people ? We certainly have senses beyond the half dozen 
 usually enumerated. As they were once rudimentary the 
 eye a pigment spot, and the ear, in one instance, a mere 
 vibrating cord inside a chitin shell and as these senses must 
 have been subjectively known by faint and often paradoxical 
 sensations, so now, have we not strong reason to believe 
 that human beings have rudimentary connections with the 
 objective world, whose reports are as yet very faint and para- 
 doxical ? 
 
 Telepathy and Telopsis 
 
 Here, however, on the borderland of knowledge, we cannot 
 yet tell whether telesthesia telopsis and telakousis are really 
 anything more than telepathy. We cannot be certain that 
 visions of remote scenes or persons come from observation 
 of the actualities: there is no case, so far as I know, where 
 any telesthetic has verifiably reported anything not already in 
 the consciousness of some human being. Houses, rooms, 
 known places of any kind, and what people are doing there 
 are all memories in some minds, and may be telepathically 
 impressed on the mind that seems teloptic. 
 
 As an illustration of this and a test of a sensitive's ability 
 to get outside of human knowledge I may refer back to my 
 little experience with Herrmann and the match-box already 
 related. Sir Oliver Lodge tried the same thing with Mrs. 
 Piper (Pr. VI, 194). From a confused mass of lettered cards 
 he picked some without reading them and put them in en- 
 velopes. There was no correspondence between the reports 
 of the medium and the contents of the envelope. 
 
 On the other hand, Foster read galore from sealed enve- 
 lopes and from rolled pellets of paper, but the contents must 
 have been already known to the writers. There is a puzzle, 
 however, in the fact that if a name was written on one of half
 
 290 Suggested Correlations of Telepathy [Bk. II, Pi IV 
 
 a dozen slips, and all rolled into pellets without his seeing 
 them, he would pick out the right one. Of this so-called 
 " influence," we shall see more. 
 
 There are certainly very few cases of telopsis that cannot 
 be accounted for by telepathy or teloteropathy. But in Pr. 
 XI, 379, Myers quotes one that cannot be. 
 
 A sensitive in Boston successfully directed where to search at 
 Natick for the bodies of two boys whom nobody knew to have 
 been drowned, though on the chances considerable ineffective 
 search had been made near the spot. The seeress subsequently 
 went to the place, and although nobody had indicated to her the 
 exact spot where the bodies were found, she stood on the shore 
 and tossed over her back a stone which fell into the exact 
 place. The only apparent solutions open are telopsis or tele- 
 pathy from the cosmic soul, perhaps the special portions of 
 it that had been associated with the living boys. 
 
 Most cases of superusual warning can be accounted for by 
 usual causes, especially if we include telepathy among them, 
 but some cannot for instance, the voice which warned the 
 dentist away from a vulcanizing apparatus which soon ex- 
 ploded (Pr. XI, 424f.). 
 
 There is an elaborate prediction of death in Pr. XI, 432f. 
 which, among hypotheses yet open, can be accounted for only 
 by prophetic telesthesia or spiritism. Generally of course such 
 predictions hasten their own fulfillment, but in this case, the 
 decedent had known nothing of it. 
 
 Of prophetic dreams there are many. One of the best is 
 the Rev. Dr. Kinsolving's about the snake (Pr. XI, 495) : 
 
 " I seemed to be in woods back of the hotel at Capon Springs, 
 W. Va., when I came across a rattlesnake, which when killed 
 had two black-looking rattles and a peculiar projection of bone 
 from the tail, while the skin was unusually light in color. The 
 impression of the snake was very distinct and vivid before my 
 mind's eye when I awoke in the morning, but I did not mention 
 the dream to anyone, though I was in the act of telling my wife 
 while dressing, but refrained from so doing because I was in the 
 habit of taking long walks in the mountains, and I did not wish 
 to make her nervous by the suggestion of snakes. 
 
 " After breakfast, I started with my brother along the back 
 of the great north mountain, and when about twelve miles from 
 the hotel we decided to go down out of the mountain into the 
 road and return home. As we started down the side of the
 
 Ch. XIX] Possible Uses of Telepathy 291 
 
 mountain I suddenly became vividly conscious of my dream, to 
 such an extent as to startle me, and to put me on the alert. I 
 was walking rapidly, and had gone about thirty steps, when I 
 came on a snake coiled and ready to strike. My foot was in 
 the air and had I finished my step I would have trodden upon 
 the snake. I threw myself to one side and fell heavily on the 
 ground. I recovered myself at once and killed the snake with 
 the assistance of my brother, and found it to be the same snake 
 in every particular with the one I had had in my mind's eye. 
 The same size, color, and peculiar malformation of the tail. 
 
 " It is my belief that my dream prevented me from treading 
 on the snake, but I have no theory on the subject, and get con- 
 siderably mixed and muddled when I try to think on the line of 
 such abnormal experiences." 
 
 Another very striking one about an accident is in Pr. XI, 
 517. 
 
 There are some very remarkable forebodings that could not 
 have been telepathic, in the experience of a railroad engineer, 
 given in Pr. XI, 559f. ; and some interesting testimony re- 
 garding the percipient and narrator in this case, is given in 
 Pr. V, 333f. There are more good ones later in the same 
 paper. 
 
 Possible Uses of Telepathy 
 
 The possibilities of telepathy in terrestrial communication 
 are obvious. 
 
 We have had hints of the possibility of telepathic communi- 
 cation with postcarnate intelligences, and shall have more as 
 we go on. For the present a word may be worth while re- 
 garding communication with intelligences whose existence is 
 not so often questioned. 
 
 While it seems entirely impossible that there shall be any 
 physical transit among the heavenly bodies, because of the 
 lack of a supporting medium, telepathy holds out some sug- 
 gestion of communication with them. But the different ex- 
 periences which inevitably result from the different relations 
 of planets to their suns and each other, and their different 
 densities, gravities, lights, atmospheres, etc., involve differ- 
 ences in the inhabitants of any two planets so great that even 
 telepathic communication is hardly conceivable. But if telop- 
 sis and telakousis are or shall become independent of telepathy,
 
 292 Suggested Correlations of Telepathy [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 our seeing and hearing those remote fellow-creatures and their 
 environments becomes rationally conceivable perhaps even 
 more conceivable than would have been our present astronom- 
 ical knowledge say of the weight of the sun, to the Magi 
 that watched the star of Bethlehem. 
 
 Here is another possibility perhaps more immediate. Tut- 
 tle, Davis, and the general run of their kind candidly confess 
 themselves uneducated and generally in youth rather stupid 
 along conventional lines ; and yet the two named, without any 
 effort on their part, produced works up to the humble average 
 of printed matter, which pass among many people for gospels ; 
 and they spent their mature lives in the enjoyment of what, 
 to the man in the street, answered the purposes of an educa- 
 tion. In this last particular we might couple with them 
 Home, only his " education," ignorant boy as we know him 
 to have been, passed muster not only with the man in the 
 street but with princes and philosophers. 
 
 Now all this "education" was telepsychic. What hopes 
 for the future that fact holds out, can be appreciated only by 
 those who have had young people to care for in this revolu- 
 tionary age. The education extending from Boccaccio to 
 Doctor Arnold is entirely inadequate to the needs developed in 
 the last half century. 
 
 Until the last third of the last century there was one 
 pattern of education for everybody (except Mill and Spencer), 
 and despite the recent variety of patterns, we have got 
 little farther than confused experiment. Meanwhile the 
 small colleges where all sorts of boys were thrown into a 
 salutary struggle for the survival of the fittest, have, in 
 America, grown into colleges so large that the contact of 
 .all sorts of boys is no longer possible, but they all fall into 
 strata, mainly according to wealth and social position, where 
 those in one stratum have little chance for association with 
 the best intellects and characters in the other strata. The 
 rich boys, no longer held toward the pace of impecunious 
 friends, take their college course merely as the opportunity 
 of their lives to have a good time, which is generally a very 
 wild one; while the poorer boys go through without the 
 influence of the refinements which, in the old days, their 
 predecessors rubbed off from their more fortunate friends,
 
 Ch. XIX] Telepathy in Education 293 
 
 and often reciprocated by certain greater refinements which 
 flourish best in soil not over-rich. 
 
 The state of affairs in the colleges, however, is not so bad 
 as in the elementary schools. In the colleges there is some 
 chance for a boy to study what he is fitted for, whether or 
 no there is a chance for him to study it in the way he is 
 fitted for. But in the secondary schools there is little chance 
 at either for any boy above the average for whom those 
 schools are designed. The increased college entrance require- 
 ments of recent years are hard on all the boys, especially 
 in schools where there is an attempt to round them out into 
 something like symmetrical education. This taxes the 
 teachers so as to make attention to individual needs espe- 
 cially to those of an occasional recalcitrant genius out of 
 the question. 
 
 Now into this chaos of problems and pains are we to 
 look for light and order some time through the advent of 
 telepathic education guided of course by experience? Are 
 the rills of our little share of the psychic universe eventually 
 going to pour into all of us as freely as they did into the 
 gifted ignoramuses whom I named a page or two back ? 
 
 The hope does not seem extravagant. Yet the first person 
 to whom I suggested it answered in substance : " Then we 
 may as well lower the flags of character at once. Character 
 means effort." I replied : " There's not much danger of our 
 not finding work enough. The attempt in my college days 
 to supply it artificially, by giving us such stuff as pages of 
 chemical formulae to memorize, is laughed at now. Besides, 
 we're not going to get telepathy any faster than we get 
 character to handle it. Nature has been mighty conservative 
 with it so far." 
 
 Doubtful as this outlook may be, it is a big one. But 
 this book is fast becoming too big for its purpose.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 THE COSMIC SOUL 
 
 THE community of minds indicated by telepathy and some 
 allied phenomena which we shall reach later, has revived 
 in apparently all students the vague impression as old as phi- 
 losophy, which we have already been led to touch upon more 
 than once, that in some mysterious way all mind is one, just 
 as all force is one and all matter is one that mind, instead 
 of being a disconnected aggregation of individual parts, like 
 the sand on the beach, is more like the drops in the ocean, 
 where all the individual parts are blended. 
 
 The metaphor fails, of course, because in the mass of 
 fluid the drops lose their identity. Perhaps a better metaphor 
 would be that of the body politic, where ideas are inter- 
 changed, but the body is made up of individuals ; but that 
 metaphor fails in the lack of complete mutual interflow. All 
 metaphors illustrate but that part of the aspects of the subject 
 to which we apply them, and fail regarding the other aspects. 
 The coming of the unknown into the known is like the com- 
 ing of what we call a " dissolving view " ; we get partial and 
 inconsistent bits, and group them into guesses that at first 
 may be very wide of the truth, but that gradually, with more 
 light, become coherent and workably intelligent. 
 
 And yet though telepathy frequently forces upon us that 
 old notion that all mind is one, we nevertheless have the 
 knowledge that all the minds we clearly know are individual. 
 The idea is too big, and in its modern aspects too new to be 
 a clear one, yet the conception of the Cosmic Soul has been 
 touched upon by virtually all writers upon the Cosmic Ee- 
 lations ; and some have poetized a great deal upon panpsych- 
 ism; but, so far as I know, nobody has attempted to use the 
 conception persistently and systematically as a clue through 
 the psychic mysteries we are considering: all the recent 
 investigators seem to have rested with (may I say?) a lazy 
 294
 
 Ch. XX] Suggestions of Leaf, van Eeden, Lodge 295 
 
 content and an almost fetichistic reverence, upon the mere 
 phrase " the subliminal self " which Myers imported from the 
 school of Du Prel, or upon the, in some respects, wider notion 
 of sundry divisions of the self. But though the Cosmic Soul is 
 the first choice of hardly anybody, it is an alternate choice of 
 virtually everybody. 
 
 Here are some of the various aspects the notion has taken. 
 
 We got a trace of it back where Professor Holmes asks 
 whether the behavior of protozoa is due to " physical and 
 chemical factors," or whether we must assume an " entelechy 
 of some sort to explain the results." 
 
 Dr. Leaf says (Pr. VI, 565), italics mine: 
 
 " If then this under self, of whose workings we are only BO 
 irregularly and so imperfectly conscious, has such susceptibility 
 to other minds at all, it is no wild assumption to suppose that 
 it is continually receiving impressions from other minds, indeed 
 from every other mind in the universe, with varying clearness 
 and force depending on some conditions which we cannot at 
 present even guess at." 
 
 Dr. van Eeden says (Pr. XVII, 86) : 
 
 " I have heard the source of this supernormal information de- 
 nominated by an English poet as ' the collective memory of the 
 race,' and this broad and mystical conception, however vague, 
 seems to me in some respects the safest working hypothesis for 
 further investigation." 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge says (Pr. VI, 464), italics mine: 
 
 " Undoubtedly Mrs. Piper in the trance state has access to 
 some abnormal sources of information, and is for the time 
 cognizant of facts which happened long ago or at a distance; 
 but the question is how she becomes cognizant of them. Is it 
 by going up the stream of time and witnessing those actions 
 as they occurred; or is it through information received from 
 the still existent actors, themselves dimly remembering and 
 relating them; or, again, is it through the influence of con- 
 temporary and otherwise occupied minds holding stores of 
 forgotten information in their brains and offering them un- 
 consciously to the perception of the entranced person; or, lastly, 
 is it by falling back for the time into a one Universal Mind 
 of which all ordinary consciousnesses past and present are but 
 portions? I do not know which is the least extravagant sup- 
 position."
 
 296 The Cosmic Soul [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 And also (Pr. VI, 648) : 
 
 " There is yet another kind of mind-reading, if such it can 
 be called, which, though difficult to formulate and contemplate, 
 yet frequently suggests itself, viz., the gaining of knowledge 
 through some hidden community of mind, through the existence 
 of some central world-mind " 
 
 Myers says (Human Personality, I, 217-19) : 
 
 " Bodily death ensues when the soul's attention is wholly and 
 irrevocably withdrawn from the organism, which has become 
 from physical causes unfit to act as the exponent of an inform- 
 ing spirit. Life means the maintenance of this attention; 
 achieved, in this view, by the soul's absorption of energy from 
 the spiritual or metetherial environment. For if our individual 
 spirits and organism? live by dint of this spiritual energy, 
 underlying the chemical agency by which organic change is 
 carried on, then we must presumably renew and replenish the 
 spiritual energy as continuously as the chemical 
 
 " If this be so there may be a truth deeper than we can 
 at this moment stay to discuss in many subjective experiences 
 of poets, philosophers, mystics, saints. And if their sense of 
 inflowing and indwelling life indeed be true ; if the subliminal 
 uprushes which renew and illumine them are fed in reality 
 from some metetherial environment; then a similar influence 
 may by analogy exist and be recognizable along the whole 
 gamut of psychophysical phenomena 
 
 " The nascent life of each of us is perhaps a fresh draft, 
 the continued life is an ever-varying draft, upon the cosmic 
 energy. In that environing energy call it by what name we 
 will we live and move and have our being; and it may well 
 be that certain dispositions of mind, certain phases of per- 
 sonality, may draw in for the moment from that energy a 
 fuller vitalizing stream 
 
 " Let men realize that . . . their own spirits are co-operative 
 elements in the cosmic evolution, are part and parcel of the 
 ultimate vitalizing Power." 
 
 Elsewhere Myers says (Pr. VII, 120) : 
 
 " Just as a study of the propagation and interference of light- 
 waves depending on artifices of great complexity has made 
 known to us inferentially, yet not the less certainly, an obscure 
 physical entity which we style the cosmic ether; so also may 
 experiments on the propagation and interruptions of clairvoyant 
 or telepathic knowledge or memory conceivably reveal to us in- 
 ferentially, but not the less certainly, an obscure psychical en- 
 tity which we can best describe to ourselves as an anima mundi 
 or cosmic record of all things."
 
 Ch. XX] Myers Demands Nothing Less. James 297 
 
 In Myers's exposition of his theory of the Subliminal Con- 
 sciousness in Pr. VII and in Human Personality (I, llf.) he 
 piles up the indications of superusual faculty until he gets 
 far beyond our usual conceptions of human powers, and where 
 apparently nothing short of the cosmic soul could be equal 
 to the results. 
 
 James runs up against the same notion all the while. 
 In Pr. XXIII, 4, he named as possibly accounting for the 
 medium's report of forgotten things: 
 
 " Access to some cosmic reservoir, where the memory of all 
 mundane facts is stored and grouped around personal centers 
 of association." 
 
 Is "personal center of association" a bad name for per- 
 sonality ? 
 
 Here are some extracts from his A Pluralistic Universe: 
 
 (Page 299.) " For my own part I find in some of these ab- 
 normal or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor 
 of a superior co-consciousness being possible. I doubt whether 
 we shall ever understand some of them without using the very 
 letter of Fechner's conception of a great reservoir in which the 
 memories of earth's inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and 
 from which, when the threshold lowers or the valve opens, in- 
 formation ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional 
 individuals among us." 
 
 Each individual mind seems to be a subdivision of that 
 reservoir, all subdivisions being subject to intercommunication. 
 
 (Page 308.) " They have had their vision and they know 
 that is enough that we inhabit an invisible spiritual environ- 
 ment from which help comes, our soul being mysteriously one 
 with a larger soul whose instruments we are." 
 
 In his Psychology he says (I, 346) : 
 
 " I find the notion of some sort of an anima mundi thinking 
 in all of us to be a more promising hypothesis, in spite of all its 
 difficulties, than that of a lot of absolutely individual souls." 
 
 In Memoirs and Studies, James farther says : 
 
 (Page 201.) "My own dramatic sense tends instinctively 
 to picture the situation as an interaction between slumbering 
 faculties in the automatist's mind and a cosmic environment 
 of other consciousness of some sort which is able to work upon 
 them."
 
 298 The Cosmic Soul [Bk. II, Pt IV 
 
 (Page 204-5.) " There is a continuum of cosmic conscious- 
 ness, against which our individuality builds but accidental 
 fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a 
 mother-sea or reservoir." 
 
 What follows seems to indicate that he really means that 
 rills from it plunge into us, which has long been my guess. 
 Throughout the passage it is consoling to the ordinary writer 
 to find himself among a gentle mixture of metaphors by 
 so great a man: 
 
 " Our ' normal ' consciousness is circumscribed for adapta- 
 tion to our external earthly environment, but the fence is weak 
 in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the 
 otherwise unverifiable common connection. Not only psychic 
 research, but metaphysical philosophy, and speculative biology 
 are led in their own ways to look with favor on some such 
 'panpsychic' view of the universe as this. Assuming this 
 common reservoir of consciousness to exist, this bank upon 
 which we all draw, and in which so many of earth's memories 
 must in some way be stored, or mediums would not get at them 
 as they do, the question is, What is its own structure? What 
 is its inner topography?" 
 
 Podmore says (New. Spir., II, 162) that in his book on 
 Spiritism, the 
 
 " famous philosopher, Edward von Hartmann . . . explained the 
 physical phenomena as due to some force analogous to electricity 
 or magnetism emanating from the medium's body ; but held that 
 the mental manifestations point to a transcendental origin. 
 He suggests, in short, that in thought-transference or clairvoy- 
 ance the mind of the seer is in connection with the Absolute, and 
 through the Absolute with other individual minds." 
 
 Podmore also quotes (New. Spir., II, 172) Charles Bray 
 (On Force, its Mental and Moral Correlates) : 
 
 " Our bodies are continually giving off thought rays, just as 
 they give off heat rays. These thought emanations, it must be 
 inferred, are not lost to the universe ; and, indeed, ' many facts 
 now point to an atmosphere or reservoir of thought, the result 
 of cerebration, into which the thought and feeling generated by 
 the brain are continually passing.' With this general thought- 
 reservoir the persons called spirit mediums may be presumed to 
 be in communication." 
 
 The conception is not restricted to " psychical researchers " 
 in the special sense, but looms up in some form in almost
 
 Ch. XX] Bergson. Paradoxes Fringe all Knowledge 299 
 
 all philosophic writing. That we may be up to the latest 
 fashion, let us take the following from Bergson (Creative 
 Evolution, 191, italics mine) : 
 
 " From this ocean of life in which we are immersed, we are 
 continually drawing something, and we feel that our being, or 
 at least the intellect that guides it, has been formed therein 
 by a kind of local concentration." 
 
 (/&., 269.) " On flows the current, running through human 
 
 generations, subdividing itself into individuals Thus souls 
 
 are constantly being created which, nevertheless, in a certain 
 sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills 
 into which the great river of life divides itself." 
 
 When he writes of " life " dividing itself into individuals, 
 he probably would permit us to read " mind " or " souL" 
 
 In such matters we are pretty far along when we get 
 hold of anything substantial enough to call an idea. But 
 the vague groping feeling, yet a strong feeling, of a reality 
 behind all these paradoxes and metaphors, is by no means 
 rare a reality which is part of the advanced man's substi- 
 tute for the Mumbo Jumbo god, which is the best that the 
 mass of mankind, even of "civilized" mankind, have so 
 far been able to place behind their universe. 
 
 All paradoxes? Of course they are. The whole fringe 
 of our knowledge is made of paradoxes. 
 
 All metaphors? Of course they are: so is nearly all our 
 language after it gets past material things and the primary 
 sensations and operations that they initiate. 
 
 Vague adumbrations of the general notion of course are 
 found as far back as Pantheism is, but in the shape I am 
 fumbling over, it could not antedate modern evolution, in- 
 cluding the modern conceptions of force and matter. This 
 is probably why, in the indexes of the half-dozen histories 
 of philosophy I have at hand, I find the term World-Soul 
 in but two, and no closer equivalent than Pantheism in any 
 of the others, and in one or two (I don't care to look again 
 for the sake of exactness) not even that. The books all, of 
 course, contain various paragraphs about Pantheism. 
 
 Weber (History of Philosophy, translated by Thilly, p. 94f.) 
 has one on the World-Soul apropos of what Plato had to 
 say on the subject. The definite thing that can be dug out
 
 300 ' The Cosmic Soul [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 from his imaginative and sometimes poetical confusions is 
 that the cosmos has, in Weber's phrase: 
 
 " a soul, the mysterious link which unites the contrary prin- 
 ciples in the cosmos, and whose function it is to subordinate 
 the material world to the Idea, or to subject brutal necessity 
 to reason, to adapt it to the final purpose of the Creator. . . . 
 The soul of the world consists of Number, which subjects 
 chaotic matter to the laws of harmony and proportion." 
 
 whatever all that may mean nothing that I can see, unless 
 the cart before the horse, while in the various modern notions 
 there does seem to loom up something behind the fog, some- 
 thing which is simply the facts which Plato had not. 
 
 Paulsen says (Introduction to Philosophy, Thilly's transla- 
 tion, 232ff.) : 
 
 "Is all striving and willing, as it confronts us in the thou- 
 sand diverse forms of existence, finally combined into the unity 
 of one being and will? Does a unity of inner life, in whose 
 self -movement and self-realization all individual life and striv- 
 ing is included, correspond to the unity of the physical world 
 in universal reciprocal action?" 
 
 That last sentence has some correspondence with the ques- 
 tion: Is Mind as much of a constituent of the universe as 
 matter and motion? I shall give reasons for thinking that 
 it is more of one, if there can be a difference in essentials. 
 
 (76., 234.) " Eeality is not annihilated by becoming a thing 
 of the past. The past remains an eternal constituent of reality, 
 and the present moment does not comprise the whole of reality." 
 
 If Paulsen had had the recent evidence (much of which 
 we shall meet later) that everything past exists in memory 
 somewhere say in the Cosmic Mind (The inheritance of all 
 ancestral experience is not big enough to fill the bill) that 
 statement would have had additional certainty and significance. 
 
 (76., 234.) " May we now . . . say : What we see in our 
 own lives on the small scale, what we seem to recognize also 
 in the life of the earth, is true of the world at large? Are its 
 aim and being contained in a universal life, in an eternal 
 spiritual life, the fullness of which far surpasses our notions 
 of it, but of whose essence we get a glimpse in our own spiritual 
 natures ? 
 
 "I believe that we may make such statements and that we
 
 Ch. XX] Paulsen, Science Inadequate 301 
 
 may add: There is no view which explains existence more 
 simply and clearly." 
 
 Certainly none which so well fits the phenomena of tele- 
 pathy and, we shall see later, of " possession." 
 
 (76., 235-6.) "That this view is indeed more plausible 
 than any other is shown by the fact that all thinkers, with the 
 exception of a few philosophizing physicists, are remarkably 
 unanimous in regarding it as the final explanation of the 
 universe. In the East as in the West, in ancient as well as in 
 modern times, the thoughts of the freest and profoundest have 
 
 converged towards this point Wherever modern philosophy 
 
 finds its freest and boldest expression, it invariably returns to 
 
 this view Existence is a unified spiritual life, the visible 
 
 part of which is the evolution of psychical life, and particularly 
 of earthly human life. 
 
 " During the ascendancy of speculative philosophy, this the- 
 ory . . . was regarded as absolute truth. ... It was called the 
 secret religion of the cultured classes, and its followers were 
 convinced that it would gradually penetrate into such circles 
 as were as yet unable to grasp truth except in concrete images. 
 But it happened otherwise. As far as there can be any question 
 of a philosophical world-view among the cultured (most of them 
 get along without any), it is more apt to be found along the 
 lines of natural-scientific materialism or of an epistemological 
 skepticism. The physical view of things has dislodged the 
 poetical-speculative reflection. The notion of an inner uni- 
 versal life is, for the most part, wholly foreign to our natural 
 scientists. The idea of a world-soul . . . seems to them to be as 
 childish a dream as that of anthropomorphic gods. They do 
 not need the hypothesis, they can explain the world by means 
 of atoms and physical forces, excepting, perhaps, that small 
 remainder, the states of consciousness in the brain of living 
 beings. Science ... no longer allows itself to indulge in the 
 childish play of such fantastical speculations And the ed- 
 ucated classes, intimidated by the self-assurance of natural 
 science, are ashamed to profess views that do not bear its 
 stamp." 
 
 All of which casts some light upon the facts that within 
 a generation literature and art have drooped, that the soul 
 of man has taken up its residence in his pocket, that gambling 
 has again become a current amusement in circles otherwise 
 respectable, and that the best thing the age could do with 
 the proudest of its typical creations the Titanic was to 
 send it to destruction for the chance of being able to advertise 
 a trifling increment of speed.
 
 302 The Cosmic Soul [Bk. H, Pt IV 
 
 Heaven forfend, however, any attempt to cure such ills 
 by a revival of the old type of speculative philosophy ! Dog- 
 matism was a worse ill than any of them, and a priori 
 dogmatism is the worst of dogmatisms. 
 
 Let us see if we can focus the various glints shown in the last 
 half dozen pages into something like a systematic statement. 
 Of course all our terms must be provisional; in fact, with 
 our recent experience of the rapid evolution of knowledge, 
 we are pretty near a recognition that all terms whatever must 
 be provisional. But let us go ahead with those we have. 
 Of course we can get notions of these vague ideas only by 
 repetition of them from various points. I hope the repetition 
 will not overtax your patience. 
 
 Mind is as fundamental and pervasive a constituent of 
 the universe as Matter and Motion are. We cannot account 
 for mind as it is to-day without associating it with the atoms 
 from which we assume it to have started, though it is by no 
 means limited to them. Unlike matter and motion, it is 
 not fixed in quantity ; every moment its raw material is being 
 worked up into new thoughts, emotions, fancies and psychic 
 personalities, if you please; and all these are added to the 
 previous sum, pervade innumerable individualities, and 
 through some phenomena which we have already seen and 
 others which we shall see later, now generally appear to be as 
 indestructible as matter and motion. 
 
 All this looks very much like good hard fact. Now for a 
 venture on the thin ice. A soul is made up of experiences, 
 thoughts, feelings. How, then, about the old and widespread 
 notion of the souls at death flowing back into the cosmic 
 soul ? This question is suggested, not only by the considera- 
 tions just given, but also, of course, by the way things sus- 
 piciously like departed psychic personalities have been showing 
 themselves through the sensitives and in ordinary dreams. 
 
 But though perhaps we flow back into this constantly 
 increasing aggregate of mind the Cosmic Soul it seems 
 much more obviously to flow into us at times and in de- 
 grees that vary enormously, as we vary. Into the least 
 sensitive or receptive, it does not go perceptibly beyond 
 the ordinary psychoses of daily life; into others it seems to
 
 Ch. XX] Excluding Phenomena Admits Telepathy 303 
 
 penetrate in ways to which we hardly know how to assign 
 limits. Will it not presumably, as evolution goes on, flow 
 more and more into all of us? 
 
 Now the human receptacles for mind seem to be, to use 
 our poor phrase, elastic; and the flow of mind depends on 
 many more conditions than we have any idea of. One of them, 
 as we all know, is the flow of blood. Another seems to be (to 
 express it as well as we can with our rough matter-made 
 metaphor- words) making a place for the inflow by excluding 
 ordinary matters of attention, as in hypnosis. There are 
 all degrees of this exclusion, from the hypnotic subject's con- 
 centrating his attention on a single object or yielding it ex- 
 clusively to its hypnotizer, to Foster's voluntarily excluding 
 what does not concern his sitter, and perhaps feeling a hyp- 
 notic influence from the concentration of attention he asks 
 from his sitter; on to, as we shall see later, Mrs. VerralPs 
 excluding everything she can when awake; to everybody's 
 excluding almost everything in sleep ; to Mrs. Piper's excluding 
 everything in trance. Under these conditions, to speak very 
 roughly and provisionally, there seems to be a cosmic inflow 
 in proportion to the space provided for it. Foster gets an 
 occasional idea supernormally from the sitter and perhaps 
 even from discarnate minds; Mrs. Verrall gets a string of 
 them ; we nearly all get varying dreams, and some of us get 
 dreams beside which waking life is insignificant; and Mrs. 
 Piper appears to get the experiences of hundreds of souls 
 by the exclusion of her own and the reception of theirs. 
 
 There seems a close relation between hypnosis and cosmic 
 inflow. In fact, what is hypnosis but an inflow from one 
 unit of the cosmic mind to another from the agent to the 
 subject? What else is telepathy? Our being too ignorant 
 to make an answer does not prove the identity, but it does 
 leave the field open for exploration which may confirm the 
 identity. 
 
 But without the body, which seems as if it were devised 
 for the evolution of the individual soul, how do the alleged 
 departed souls remain individual? They profess to answer 
 by saying that they still have bodies, but better ones than 
 those we know. But we are anticipating. 
 
 Whether it all means spiritism or not, it certainly means
 
 304 The Cosmic Soul [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 at least wider reach of mind than we knew before some as 
 yet faint reaction and apparent blending of each mind with 
 more of the mind pervading the universe. 
 
 To cultivate this general view of the psychic universe as a 
 whole, now seems as important for the psychologist, as similar 
 views of matter and motion are for the physicist. 
 
 In opening up this wider reach psychical research has done 
 a work of unsurpassed importance. The fruition of that 
 work we have but begun to enter upon. There seems reason- 
 able hope that there is waiting something beside which all 
 that comes from our as yet rudimentary senses is insignificant. 
 
 And now probably you see why I have harped so on the 
 impossibility of rigid classifications in Nature on the fact 
 that those of science are necessarily arbitrary why I have 
 tried in so many connections to impress the truth that, so far 
 as we can really conceive, all Nature is one. I have done it 
 to prepare the way to the conception that all Soul is one. 
 
 But, if in solitude at such places as the Gornergrat, or 
 Lake Champlain, or anywhere under the stars, you have 
 not already felt that conception, you will probably find my 
 efforts wasted, and they may be mere waste anyhow, except 
 as they may possibly stimulate somebody else to better ones.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 THE COSMIC SOUL AND THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL 
 
 BUT how about the bearing of this doctrine of the Cosmic 
 Soul on the question of our individuality? 
 
 Each of us sets a good deal of store by his individuality, 
 some of us rightly, but take away from one of us the stream 
 of vital energy that in one sense is not himself at all, but 
 flows from outside to outside through his sympathetic nervous 
 system, and also take away the stream of consciousness that 
 certainly in large part flows from outside into his afferent sys- 
 tem and at least partly back to outside through his efferent 
 system take away these streams which are not himself, and 
 how much individuality is left ? The individuality of a corpse 
 that perceptibly begins to disappear within three days. 
 
 The individuality, then, does in part come from outside. 
 Yet it is unquestionably largely determined in amount and 
 character by the body the size, shape, and quality of the 
 brain and the blood-vessels supplying it, and, in less degree, 
 by the qualities of the heart and organs that affect the blood 
 supply. When the stream of mind-potential goes through a 
 man he is affected by just those things that his organism is 
 fitted to respond to. It is somewhat as if the brain cells and 
 their connections were a number of wireless telegraph re- 
 ceivers responding to such vibrations as they are keyed to. 
 The kinds of this responsiveness make up a man's individu- 
 ality. The other persons who respond to nearly the same 
 kinds are congenial with him. Farther, like the telegraph 
 instrument, he not only receives, but he sends out what he 
 has to say for himself also determines his affinities. 
 
 The stream of thought that flows through us, then, is 
 certainly not part of our individuality; and it certainly is 
 part of our individuality. What it shall be for any one of 
 us is determined more definitely than perhaps at any other 
 time, when (so far as there is a " when " to the determination 
 305
 
 306 Cosmic Soul and Individual Soul [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 of anything) it is fixed which one of a myriad of spermatozoa 
 is to become the tenant of a waiting ovum. That sperma- 
 tozoon seems to have its individual stream or streams of 
 outside power and mind-potential, while it is accreting to 
 itself pound after pound of matter, foot-pound after foot- 
 pound of energy, and later, universe after universe of ideas. 
 Its body, its energies, its universes will be unlike those of 
 any other creature: it will be an individual. 
 
 One soon comes to have an individual share in determining 
 what one's psychic stream shall consist of and whither it 
 shall flow. Whether it shall consist of the thoughts of 
 butcher, baker, or candlestick-maker, one has pretty much his 
 own way. So has he, but in less degree, as to whether it 
 shall be the thoughts of rich man, poor man, beggar-man, or 
 thief. In still less degree he determines whether it shall be 
 the thoughts of doctor, lawyer, priest, or engineer; still less 
 whether it shall be those of statesman, philosopher, artist, or 
 poet; and scarcely at all whether it shall be those of Shak- 
 spere, Newton, Humboldt, Lincoln, or Spencer. In one sense, 
 and in a very important sense, such men have relatively less 
 choice regarding their own individualities than have the rest 
 of mankind regarding theirs. The greater the individuality, 
 the less is it determined by itself. 
 
 But from another side: the greater the individuality, the 
 more is it determined by itself as it grows up. Lincoln had 
 to make Lincoln, but he could not help making Lincoln. 
 
 Not only can the man largely determine the contents of 
 his psychic stream, but he can also largely determine what 
 he shall do with it; and this not only, as already indicated, 
 in the broad general current of his life, but in the many 
 special things that are largely independent of the current. 
 
 But despite all this, the stream comes from outside him and 
 flows back to outside him, and is almost as independent of 
 him as if it ran through a hose, though he can use it in 
 the same ways to water gardens in his mind, or to put out 
 mental conflagrations, or, like a sand-blast, to carve inscrip- 
 tions and decorations. And while he uses his stream of 
 thought to affect both the world and his own mind, all the 
 while that stream of thought is not exclusively himself. And 
 it is himself! All those things are his work!
 
 Ch. XXI] The Stream of Consciousness 307 
 
 When we think of a man as an individual it is because 
 we take thought of only part of him, and probably the least 
 significant part : we cannot form a passably thorough idea of 
 a man without saturating it through and through with the 
 idea of the Cosmic Inflow from outside of God, if you 
 please. 
 
 " When me they fly, I am the wings." 
 
 Again I have been writing paradoxes, and I shall write 
 many more : that alarm bell always rings when we reach the 
 limits of our faculties. 
 
 Under ordinary circumstances the individual is conscious 
 of only the limited portion of the stream of mind which con- 
 stitutes " him " the " him " of the moment ; but in dream, 
 trance, hypnosis, and apparently articulo mortis, at least by 
 drowning, he seems conscious of a much larger proportion 
 of his own stream, sometimes apparently of all since the 
 first conscious experience. The stream, then, after it has 
 passed on is not lost, hopelessly sunken, or evaporated. Though 
 the man is not ordinarily conscious of the whole stream after 
 it has passed him, it seems to exist somewhere somewhere 
 whence it can be brought The recovered thing is but a copy 
 of the stream, one presentation of the " Idea " of the man. 
 But at least the Idea is not lost. .The medium telepathic- 
 ally from somebodies' memories, or heteromatically from a 
 postcarnate individuality presents some sort of a rendering 
 of it at any moment a rendering that is more than a stream 
 of memories more like a thinking, feeling, responding man. 
 
 We have, I trust, reached some sort of a reconciliation 
 between the idea of a Cosmic Consciousness and an individual 
 consciousness, the interflow between them being most strongly 
 manifested in states of inspiration and dream. We have what 
 seem to be the facts, whether we can reconcile them or not. 
 
 The Transcendent Ego 
 
 The last guess is at variance with the guess that inspiration 
 and dream come from a transcendent ego a subliminal self, 
 unless we adopt the Cosmic Mind as the transcendent ego 
 the subliminal self. 
 
 I cannot find any transcendent ego in the ordinary sense
 
 308 Cosmic Soul and Individual Soul [Bk. II, Pi IV 
 
 anything more in a man strictly as an individual independent 
 of cosmic inflow than what has been evolved by the sense- 
 reactions between him, including his ancestors, on the one 
 side, and on the other, the environment, including what has 
 been put into him by that portion of the reactions constituting 
 his education. In the strict sense of ego or self, apparently 
 there cannot be more than that much, if that much. 
 
 And yet it is often said of almost any man : " He surpassed 
 himself." This is of course a contradiction in terms another 
 paradox on the borders of knowledge. Yet it relates to a 
 universally admitted phenomenon. Now what does the phrase 
 mean what phrase that is not a contradiction in terms will 
 express it ? If there is any matter not yet verified, upon which 
 thinkers have agreed through all recorded time, it is that these 
 people who surpass themselves orators, poets, artists, musi- 
 cians, generals, even dancers and clowns everybody who does 
 anything, is occasionally " inspired " breathed into : and that 
 must be from outside. 
 
 What makes a " sensitive," or a genius, seems to be ability 
 beyond that of people in general, to evoke the contents of the 
 subliminal consciousness, whatever it may be Cosmic Soul if 
 you please, into the supraliminal or vigilant or waking con- 
 sciousness. This is imagination inspiration " possession," 
 though we may yet conclude that they may be also something 
 more. 
 
 The theory of inspiration is encouraged by the great ability 
 shown at times by men like Tolstoy whose intelligence and 
 reasoning powers are inferior who are constantly ignoring or 
 even contradicting obvious facts ; to whom two and two are as 
 apt to make five or seven, as four ; and yet who, between times, 
 gush out streams of imagination that fertilize the ages. 
 
 The source of the inspiration has lately seemed to contain 
 all mind that is on our planet, or ever has been, and to 
 manifest it in all degrees, from the lightest thought, imagina- 
 tion, or emotion, up to those complexes of them all which 
 we recognize as human souls. As we go on we shall find 
 accumulating indications in this direction. 
 
 True, Poe made out that the general scheme of "The 
 Raven " was not inspiration, but a pure piece of mechanical 
 construction, and the finding of the refrain a piece of me-
 
 Ch. XXI] The Transcendent Ego 309 
 
 chanical investigation ; but there are other things in the poem 
 that he would probably himself have called inspiration if he 
 had not been guardedly defending the contrary thesis ; and he 
 is generally thought to have supported it merely for the sake 
 of making a sensation, which is more easily done by con- 
 tradicting the truth than by supporting it. The fact seems 
 to be, however, that the mechanical inspirations of a Poe 
 or an Edison are inspirations as truly as the different in- 
 spirations of a Shakespere. 
 
 The idea of a transcendent ego seems to have come from 
 the idea of a transcendent universe. But the transcendent 
 universe is virtually demonstrable, while the transcendent 
 ego, as a purely individual quality independent of the cosmic 
 soul, seems far from demonstrable, and indeed counter to 
 the indications of evolution: for evolution apparently pro- 
 duces only the known ego resulting from interactions between 
 the known self and the known environment. Anything more 
 must apparently be an inflow from outside the known universe. 
 
 Those who hold for the individual subliminal are used to 
 seeing the physical man limited to his x pounds, and so 
 they assume a psychical man limited to his x capacities. 
 
 This x, however, they say = y + z, y being what the man 
 does ordinarily, and z being what he can do only in inspira- 
 tion or dream. Du Prel uses over and over again a com- 
 parison of y + z to the visible universe. When the man is 
 awake y only is in evidence this planet and the sun. When 
 he goes to sleep or goes into trance, or shows telepathic 
 powers, z appears the stars, but they were there all the 
 while, only not in evidence. Yet, it seems well to repeat, 
 Du Prel seems to posit a limited y + z (= x) faculties, 
 just as he posits x pounds for the body. 
 
 Now in view of such facts as that thoughts from single 
 brains are spreading into all the brains of the civilized world 
 every day, and that it has already become commonplace doc- 
 trine among all students that "the subliminal self forgets 
 nothing," isn't it a fundamental error to let the constant 
 familiarity with x pounds lead us to posit for each man a 
 limited x (= y + z) set of faculties, or, in more general 
 terms, to let the known fact that matter (motion) is limited,
 
 310 Cosmic Soul and Individual Soul [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 lead us more or less consciously to reason as if mind were 
 limited to assume even, in face of the now incontrovertible 
 facts of the dream-state the waking visions of Foster and 
 Stillman's friend, inspiration, ordinary dreams, trance, hypno- 
 sis, mediumship that even the individual's mind is limited? 
 It may be a likely guess that that portion of it which has been 
 evolved directly in connection with reactions between material 
 organism and material environment the y mind, perhaps 
 is limited; but how about the z mind of the dream state 
 as just particularized? Apparently it has not grown up in 
 the observed processes of evolution; before Mesmer it had 
 not attracted much attention beyond an occasional comment 
 by an occasional genius ; but all the while, with the evolution 
 of the y mind, that z mind has been spasmodically manifest- 
 ing itself more and more, until in our time such a man as 
 Gladstone has pronounced its study the most important study 
 of the age, and the first psychologist of recent years probably 
 devoted more attention to it than to any other department 
 of his subject. The y mind has observably been evolved, and 
 we know, after a fashion, how. But let us amend that phrase- 
 ology, and, provisionally at least, say that the capacity to 
 receive it has been evolved. This does not seem to contradict 
 any facts, and may be useful. 
 
 The z mind, on the other hand, seems sprung upon us all 
 of a sudden, or at least upon our modern observation, though 
 Joseph was an authority on it in Egypt, and there have been 
 others, in their way. But our modern students of psycholog- 
 ical evolution have hardly paid any attention to it, and the 
 special students of it have hardly tackled it from the evo- 
 lutionary standpoint. Why ? I hazard a guess. May it not 
 be that, unlike the y mind of everyday life, the z mind has 
 not, to any significant extent, been evolved in the individual, 
 that primarily it is as old as the universe, though it grows with 
 all mental action in the universe that it is the Cosmic Soul ? 
 
 What appears to be the human evolution of the y mind is 
 mainly constantly increasing ascertainment of truth already 
 existing in the cosmic mind open by logical and experimental 
 processes to human knowledge. The z mind, on the other 
 hand, may be the cosmic mind spasmodically flowing in with- 
 out such process, but shaped into individuality by each con-
 
 Ch. XXI] The Y Mind and the Z Mind 311 
 
 stitution, as each bay of the ocean gets individuality from the 
 shores. 
 
 Accordingly, if any portion, and not all, of the mind 
 survives bodily death, we would expect it to be the portion 
 we have designated by z, and later it may be found interesting 
 to inquire if, of the survivals alleged through the mediums, 
 any preponderant portion is of the z mind of that part of 
 the personality least connected, or least obviously connected, 
 with the evolutionary reaction between body and environ- 
 ment ; and if " evidential " matter sought so signally in vain 
 is not after all part of the y mind, which is mainly an 
 apparatus for the conduct of earthly life, and which, there- 
 fore, we could hardly expect to find strong and clear beyond it. 
 
 The phenomena suggest that the ordinary reactions between 
 the body and its environment evolve the commonplace self- 
 preserving faculties, and that exceptional circumstances which 
 we don't begin to understand even heredity seems to have 
 little to do with them produce sporadic persons specially open 
 to the exceptional forms of cosmic inflow genius, medium- 
 ship, and the rest. Even the quite general form of dreaming 
 is by no means universal, and dreams of a high order seem to 
 come rarely even to good dreamers, while persons subject to 
 mediuraistic visions are rarer than poets. 
 
 The discovery, if discovery it be, that the subliminal self 
 is the Cosmic Soul, may impress some readers as belonging 
 in the same class with the immortal discovery in Natural 
 History, made after so much investigation and reflection, that 
 a snaric is a boojum. Argument against such an impression 
 would be wasted. The subliminal self is as much a part 
 of accepted knowledge as is the law of association of ideas, 
 and the Cosmic Soul is at least an intuition of most of the 
 minds whose intuitions have been among the most important 
 of humanity's guiding lights. The conception that the sub- 
 liminal self and the Cosmic Soul are the same, may yet be 
 demonstrated to a clearness that will place it among those 
 beacons. 
 
 (Let me not be misunderstood regarding the guidance of 
 intuitions. They point out promising directions, but not 
 always infallibly.)
 
 312 Cosmic Soul and Individual Soul [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 Of the transcendent ego, or subliminal self, then, as gen- 
 erally described, I see no evidence; but of it as the Cosmic 
 Soul, I see much evidence. 
 
 The capacity to receive the Cosmic Inflow and farther 
 evolve it seems to be in course of evolution, and it often looks 
 as if that capacity might, while we are yet in the body, 
 'enormously enlarge our cosmic relations, through the dream 
 state ; and there is also enlargement for the old, old hope that 
 when we leave the body we may remain ourselves, and yet 
 become "one with God." 
 
 It looks, too, as if these possibilities might be the supreme 
 justification for the evolution of the universe. There may 
 be justification enough in birds and flowers, in the play of 
 lambs and children, in sex, in love, in the maternity around 
 which so much of the world's worship has centered, in know- 
 ledge, in wisdom, even as they have been ordinarily under- 
 stood; but a new significance, a new joy, a new glory over 
 and beyond them all sometimes seems to have been lately 
 promised by that as yet dim conception of the Cosmic Soul. 
 
 Now in wandering around amidst these mists I here come 
 upon an idol whose exaggerated cult I hate, but there may 
 be something in its temperate cult. I mean the idol of 
 a priori knowledge the notion that all knowledge is in the 
 mind, waiting to be dug out. Though man's mind may 
 not contain latent all knowledge, assuming a cosmic mind, 
 of course all knowledge is there, and the German professor 
 evolving his camel in his study, so far as he had any telepathic 
 communion with the cosmic mind, was right. But there is 
 no sign that all knowledge is in any human mind or accessible 
 by any human mind, even in the dream state. And unless it 
 is there, it can hardly be dug out by contemplation unchecked 
 by verification. 
 
 And now, having extracted whatever hope or consolation 
 or amusement we may have been able to derive from these 
 pages of guesswork, let us see if we can get them into a 
 paragraph. 
 
 There are unquestioned facts abundance of them outside 
 so-called mediumship that demonstrate something in man
 
 Ch. XXI] Th* True Mysticism and the False 313 
 
 beyond his surface faculties, to which the terms transcendent 
 ego and subliminal self have been applied. But is that ego 
 merely of himself ? Does it not seem to be rather each man's 
 share that portion which the individual's conformation and 
 circumstances permit to pass into him of that which tran- 
 scends our conception, and of which we confess our incapacity 
 wholly to conceive, by such words as infinite and eternal, and 
 which we attempt to express by such metaphors as " kinship 
 with the gods," or the better one of "God in us"? If in 
 that later metaphor we must include universal motion, why 
 not universal mind? 
 
 Around this vague conception, more perhaps than anywhere 
 else, center the vague lights that we have on this whole subject. 
 I shall try to indicate them wherever we meet them, but all 
 my indications will necessarily be vague, and many of them 
 inevitably mistaken; and as I have revised my work I have 
 come to fear that my persistency in these attempts will sorely 
 try your patience. But I believe the attempts would be 
 much surer and less trying if the many men who have trod 
 these misty paths before, every one of whom seems to have 
 seen those lights, had tried more persistently to follow their 
 indications ; and I believe that the ultimate solution will be 
 found among them. 
 
 I hope this chapter may have suggested some of the wider 
 notions of mind which recent experience demands. Yet it is 
 very largely analogy and imagination. I don't propose to 
 go to the stake for it, or send anybody else for denying it. 
 But, if you please, it is not all analogy or imagination, but it 
 has a very visible claim to being hypothesis based on un- 
 questionable facts. While we have been groping in the dark 
 it has been a dark where some pretty definite things have kept 
 turning up in some very suggestive ways. 
 
 Speculation to account for facts, however mystic it may 
 be, is a very different matter from the mysticism which scorns 
 facts, and seeks truth only as visions and telepathic impres- 
 sions from assumed mystic intelligences often through the 
 mortification of the flesh and vexations of the spirit, which 
 seldom find truth, and generally weaken the powers that seek it.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 MIND AND BRAIN AGAIN 
 
 Now let us go on to some facts in the general constitution 
 of mind which support the preposterous jumble of propositions 
 in the last two chapters. Possibly as we proceed, they may 
 seem less preposterous, and we may even find them supported, 
 if that's not too big a word, by others. 
 
 But let us keep safe in the realization that, until all are 
 verified, we must not assume them to be true, but equally 
 realizing that verified fancy is the chief source of progress. 
 
 These chapters are very repetitious. It has been said often, 
 but is not apt to be said too often, that the first essential of 
 good writing is knowing what you are writing about. Now 
 I am writing about certain facts, but as to the inferences from 
 them, I don't know : nobody knows : we are all guessing ; but 
 somebody must do the guessing and the bad writing bookfuls 
 of it if our descendants are to know. The " common law " 
 of our Cosmic Relations is going to be in no small degree 
 developed, as much of the common law of our Civic Relations 
 has been developed, by " text writers " correlating the cases. 
 
 The vague notions of a cosmic mind are dimmed by the 
 indications that mind is but a persistent individual secre- 
 tion of brain; but the vague conceptions clear up again so 
 far as we are able to think of mind as independent of brain. 
 Some reasons for so thinking were given in Chapter III. 
 There are others that I did not give there, because I thought 
 that they would be less tedious here, where they could be con- 
 sidered in connection with telepathy. 
 
 We have seen some indications that mind may be not a 
 product of our mechanical part, but a redistribution, into 
 combinations ever growing higher, of a primordial element 
 like force and matter an element inherent in each atom 
 of our structure, and also, like force and matter, constantly 
 flowing into us from the external universe, and constantly 
 going out. This primordial element I have already, probably 
 314
 
 Ch. XXII] Mind Potential Varies 315 
 
 following somebody whom I have forgotten, termed " mind- 
 potential." But I would now expand that term to cover 
 anything, from whatever it is that leads an amoeba to contract 
 when touched (while any inorganic thing that looks like 
 it, will not) up to whatever any psychic organism works over 
 into something else up to, say, the effects on the sensoria 
 of the sounds in Nature which Beethoven works into a great 
 piece of music, or the woodland colors and murmurs which 
 inspired " Thanatopsis," or the charms of womanhood which 
 have bred an infinite variety of poems. Moreover, each 
 product of mind becomes mind-potential for farther products : 
 so under that term I would include even the impressions 
 made on the sitter or reader by an alleged personality ex- 
 pressed through a sensitive. 
 
 And there is not only more mind, but higher mind. Mind- 
 potential, from its lowest to its highest forms, is constantly 
 worked into higher forms, new thoughts, feelings, impulses, 
 all sorts of mental and emotional products. If, then, there 
 is a cosmic soul, it would seem as already intimated to be 
 constantly growing by accretions from the souls developed on 
 the planets. 
 
 The material for furnishing copies of those individual 
 souls, or so much of them as is worth copying, seems to be 
 all there. Some specially gifted persons, more or less in the 
 dream state, and all of us in ordinary dreams, are able to 
 recover portions when even the memory of the originators 
 cannot. And the mind-product can be recovered not only 
 from each one's own memories, but from each other's mem- 
 ories, and apparently in much greater degree, independently of 
 the body, from some cosmic reservoir of all memories. 
 
 Mind's independence of the body, and its inflow to the 
 individual from outside is farther suggested by the following 
 group of considerations, some of which we have seen before 
 from a different point, or used before for a different purpose. 
 
 I. As we have seen, the matter and motion constituting 
 a man can be in only one place at one time, but his thoughts 
 and emotions can be in any number of places at any number 
 of times. 
 
 II. Mind, unlike matter and force, is free from limitation
 
 316 Mind and Brain Again [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 and measurability. Motion disposes itself toward measure- 
 ment in the most obliging manner : it sets part of itself off in 
 the form of matter, which part we can measure readily ; it also 
 places some of the remaining and imponderable part of itself 
 at our disposition so that we can measure it by its effects 
 upon matter. Even when it is amusing itself in blowing down 
 forests, or tumbling seas, or splitting up the earth, or swing- 
 ing planets, we can still measure it, but only by its effects 
 upon matter. 
 
 We cannot similarly measure mind. We can reduce to 
 foot-pounds the power that rolls Neptune for a year; but we 
 would never think of reducing to foot-pounds the thoughts 
 of Bismarck that built the German Empire, or even those of 
 Moltke that moved the armies which took part in the building. 
 And yet, such is the continuity of the universe that strict 
 classification fails here as everywhere; the differences ail 
 around are but differences of degree. Mind is measurable, 
 but thus far only in ways too insignificant to be worth taking 
 into account. We can already, to some extent, measure it by 
 its effect on matter, through the sphygmograph, for instance, 
 and we shall measure it more; but it is hard to foresee that 
 we shall measure it much. To measure mind as completely 
 as we measure force we would have to know even more re- 
 condite things than how many foot-pounds bring the flash 
 to the hero's eye, or the blush to the maiden's cheek. And 
 if we should ever think we had got the thing cornered, there 
 might escape from somebody one little thought that would set 
 all the men's eyes in the world flashing and all the maidens' 
 cheeks blushing, and would prove our measurements naught. 
 
 III. A given mental individuality varies from time to time 
 more than its physical companion, the brain. The healthy 
 powers of the body vary but little, but in inspiration and 
 dream (including somnambulism, trance, etc.), the powers 
 of the mind immensely surpass its ordinary powers. These 
 enormous differences take place in the same person, and so 
 suggest at least a partial independence of the brain. The 
 inference springing from these differences, so far as I know, 
 philosophers have, up to date, treated very queerly. On one 
 hand, they have ignored it; they all, so far as I know, gen- 
 erally assume that the colossal powers a man shows only
 
 Ch. XXII] Mind Does Not Vary as Brain 317 
 
 occasionally are carried about with him all the time. A 
 more reasonable inference seems to be that they are not, 
 but they are temporary increases in the flow into him from 
 the Cosmic Soul. And on the other hand, of the philosophers 
 I know who ordinarily ignore this inference, most, if not all, 
 incidentally imply it in such passages as those already quoted 
 regarding the Cosmic Soul. 
 
 IV. Minds differ more than brains do in amount, and at 
 least in mechanical structure. Just how much weight to 
 attach to this we don't know: for there may be differences 
 in molecular structure that, if we knew them, would account 
 for the differences in mind. Yet Dr. William Hanna Thom- 
 son assures me that so far as we know, the differences in brains, 
 when compared with the differences in minds, are as 
 nothing. 
 
 V. In addition to the enormous differences in amount be- 
 tween the psychical manifestations of different individuals or 
 of the same individual at different times, there seems to be 
 another line of cleavage which may indicate something im- 
 portant. On one side of the line is the group of manifesta- 
 tions which are (a) under voluntary control, (b) shown by 
 all men, and (c) running closely parallel with manifestations 
 of physical force, as shown in increased flow of blood and 
 consumption of tissue, and subsequent fatigue corresponding 
 with the intensity and duration of the psychical manifesta- 
 tions. On the other side is a group of manifestations (a) not 
 under the control of the individual, (b) almost entirely 
 (except in dreams) outside the experience of ordinary in- 
 dividuals, and (c) not usually accompanied by any noticeable 
 expenditure of physical force. With certain qualifications, 
 which I will immediately specify, this second group includes 
 inspirations, visions waking and sleeping, nearly all perhaps 
 all veridical dreams, and nearly all perhaps all pleasant 
 ones, and all the phenomena of somnambulism, hypnotism, 
 and trance, and automatic writing and the other forms of 
 mediumship. For convenience' sake, all of these are generally 
 included under the phrase " the dream state," even inspira- 
 tion being often included with them. Inspiration is perhaps 
 the principal borderland where the two groups, like all groups 
 divided by human classification, shade into each other.
 
 318 Mind and Brain Again [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 Ordinary dreams belong with the second group of psycho- 
 ses apparently independent of physical function, in so far as 
 they are not to any extent under the control of the individual, 
 are apparently not experienced by all men, and do not gen- 
 erally involve any appreciable waste of force and tissue. But 
 they are far from being unqualifiedly in the second group, 
 because they are appreciably under the control of some men 
 (Stevenson and van Eeden, for instance) and are experienced 
 by a very large portion of mankind. In short, they, like 
 inspiration, are on the borderland between ordinary psychic 
 processes, and those which seem to be largely in the tran- 
 scendent universe. 
 
 The classification of the two groups js rough and tentative, 
 partly because with our present knowledge we cannot be 
 very sure of our material we cannot be sure we have exact 
 recollections of even our "best" dreams, and of many we 
 have hardly any recollections at all. But the classification 
 seems fairly to fit what material we have, and will be found 
 to make a farther fit with some wider classifications to be 
 attempted later. The differences are clear enough (and that 
 is the point I am after), and suggest inflows through different 
 channels one from our worldly experiences, the others direct 
 from the cosmic mind. 
 
 As already noticed, " the dream-state " evinces powers en- 
 tirely surpassing those of the vigilant state in the reception 
 of higher-developed mind-potential, the vivifying of fainter 
 memories, the solution of harder problems, the transcending 
 of time and space, the reception of telepathic impressions, the 
 veridical copies of personalities incarnate and (alleged) post- 
 carnate, etc., etc. All these capacities seem illimitable, and 
 again suggest inflows from an illimitable source. 
 
 The first of the groups of capacities those of waking hours 
 that are common to all men, and subject to each man's control, 
 we more readily assume to be in some way peculiarly his 
 originated in his brain from the reactions of his soul with 
 the universe or even the secretion of his brain, than we can 
 assume the same of those exceptional capacities in the second 
 group which comparatively few men display, and no man to 
 any great extent controls. 
 
 I think we shall find weight added to this suggestion as
 
 Ch. XXII] Dreams and Tax on Tissue 319 
 
 we go on to consider illustrative details of the manifestation 
 of the exceptional and more or less involuntary powers. 
 
 In marking the differences between the two groups, one 
 qualification is that although in the long run some phenomena 
 of the dream-state do seem something of a physical tax, 
 and even characterize some forms of invalidism, they occur 
 more markedly with people in good health, and it is generally 
 when they present anything shocking or distressful that they 
 are attended by noticeable waste of force and tissue. Doubts 
 have been thrown on this, the old ascetic idea of mortification 
 of the flesh has even been held out as essential to mediumship. 
 As a cause, this is not true at all ; and as a result, it is seldom 
 true farther than the fatigue occasioned by telekinesis. The 
 cases of Foster, Colville, Tuttle, Davis, Mrs. Piper, Mrs. 
 Thompson are all the other way. Moses had rather defective 
 health, and so had Home, but their cases make no larger pro- 
 portion of the whole than would be those of the defectives 
 among people not mediumistic. 
 
 In psychosis apparently freed from physical parallelism, 
 we may include much of the experience, perhaps all the best 
 experience, of the mediums. Foster showed no more fatigue 
 in his cheerful sitting with me than any other equally long 
 sitting at a table would naturally involve, though he did show 
 much from his more terrible experiences, as already narrated 
 in the extracts from Bartlett. And Mrs. Piper, when favor- 
 ably circumstanced and well taken care of, seems better for 
 her trances than without them. Colville, we saw, emphatic- 
 ally testified the same thing, and the general testimony is to 
 the same effect. 
 
 Of course this question of parallelism in the higher psycho- 
 ses may be settled before long by experiment, though it is 
 not easy to get together the proper conditions of experi- 
 ment. 
 
 Meanwhile the considerations expressed in the last few 
 pages seem to offer a strong hint that there may be some 
 modes of mental action without any physical correlate. In- 
 deed have we not long been familiar in the dream-state with 
 features that may perhaps be more easily accounted for by a 
 hyper-physical or metaphysical psychosis than on any other 
 theory yet in sight?
 
 320 Mind and Brain Again [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 This hypothesis may throw some light on telepathy and 
 receive some from it. A fundamental difficulty with telepathy 
 is the assumed lack of a physical medium for transmission 
 of the assumed physical changes in the agent's brain to the 
 brain of the recipient. Possibly one is not needed, but if one 
 is, why are we not as much at liberty to assume an ether for 
 these assumed vibrations as we have been to assume an ether 
 for light or heat? But is it inconceivable that we may yet 
 find that in the phenomena involving telepathy we can drop 
 questions of " energy " and " neural tremors " altogether ? 
 Apparently such a result will be inevitable if telepathy from 
 discarnate intelligences shall ever be accepted as part of 
 established science. 
 
 In this connection the following remarks by Myers are 
 well worth considering (Pr. VI, 3201) : 
 
 " When we come to telergy, to the power of propagating in- 
 fluences or phantasms at a distance [and, shall we add, of receiv- 
 ing them when awake or asleep? H.H.] then the familiar paral- 
 lelism between bodily and mental states assumes a quite 
 strained and hypothetical air. At first ... we spoke of phan- 
 tasms coincident with moments of death or crises, as though 
 a strong upheaval of the conscious being disengaged some in- 
 fluence which might be felt afar off. But as further cases 
 were gathered in it became clear that the ' crisis ' which facili- 
 tated telergic action was not necessarily a moment of conscious 
 excitement or strain. Quite otherwise; for it was found that 
 the ' agent,' at the moment of the apparition, was often asleep, 
 or fainting, or even in a state of coma. Not the moment of 
 death alone, but also the hours of abeyance and exhaustion 
 which precede death, were found apt to generate these appear- 
 ances. Nor is the moment of death itself, under ordinary 
 circumstances, a moment of impulse or exaltation. Far oftener 
 it is an imperceptible extinction of energies which hare already 
 waned almost into nothingness. 
 
 "It would, then, be nearer the truth to say that telergic 
 action varies inversely than that it varies directly, with the 
 observable activity of the nervous system or of the conscious 
 mind." [Of., my suggestion earlier regarding brain change 
 varying inversely as the grade of the psychic process. H. H.] 
 " And it follows that the presumption commonly urged against 
 the conscious mind's continuance after bodily decay loses much 
 of its force when we are considering this new-found form of 
 mental energy, so much less manifestly dependent upon bodily
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 THE IDEA 
 
 BUT before we go on to explore the deeper mysteries, or, it 
 may be, the higher heights, perhaps we had better put into 
 our rucksacks another notion as old as philosophy, of which 
 not much use has been made lately, but which, like the Cosmic 
 Soul, is touched upon by pretty much everybody, and which 
 seems to gain new significance under the light of recent 
 developments. 
 
 We will perhaps best approach it indirectly. You and I 
 enter the Metropolitan Museum from Fifth Avenue. I try to 
 turn to the right, but you say : " No ! Let's go on and see 
 the Parthenon." I go with you to the model of the restora- 
 tion, and say : " Why, this is much more the Parthenon than 
 the ruins on the Acropolis," and you answer: "Oh, if we 
 could only have seen the real one ! " I suggest : " If you're 
 so much devoted to it, why don't you devote some of your 
 oppressive wealth to having it restored on the spot? Perhaps 
 the Greek government would be happy to have you." And 
 you, being of rather a romantic turn, object : " But that 
 wouldn't be the Parthenon." I ask :" Why not ? Couldn't 
 you leave all that's there now, to keep up the associations ? " 
 
 You say : " Perhaps, but the real architect couldn't superin- 
 tend it." I answer : " If that counts, there's hardly a cathe- 
 dral in Europe that lofty souls like yours have any right to 
 gush over: for there's hardly one that was finished in the 
 lifetime of the architect, or within that of anybody who ever 
 saw him. On the same principle, Beethoven's last quartets, 
 regarded by many connoisseurs as the greatest music in the 
 world, are not the real thing : for he never heard them played : 
 he composed them after he was deaf. And yet so far wrong 
 is your contention that the work is not complete unless its 
 creator supervises its production, that Beethoven's deafness 
 is regarded by some as having been a prerequisite of that great
 
 322 The Idea [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 music : it is doubted if his inspirations could have been so 
 wonderful if they had been interrupted by any external sounds. 
 Observe, too, please, in this connection, that, as there can be 
 an indefinite number of legitimate copies of the music, or 
 renderings of it, it seems reasonable that there could be as 
 many legitimate Parthenons." 
 
 " The architect's plan, then," you suggest, " must be the 
 real thing." 
 
 " In the hands of the workmen," I answer, " there were a 
 dozen copies of it, and possibly the original draft itself. Is 
 any one of them more 'the real thing' than the other? Or 
 would the first draft be more 'the real thing' than any 
 other ? The ' real thing,' then, as you have probably antici- 
 pated, is 'the temple not built with hands' the Idea in 
 the mind of the genius: the architect's plan, like the com- 
 poser's notes or the poet's writing, is merely an expression 
 of it; and any one of the three can be read from the paper 
 and received by another mind, without marble, or musical 
 instrument, or speech." 
 
 Ideas are the nearest to permanent of human productions. 
 Buildings crumble, men die, all portraits of them vanish ; still 
 the Ideas of them seem indestructible. The Idea of St. Mark's 
 Campanile has just been expressed again after what some 
 would presume to call " the real thing " fell. The Iliad was 
 not in writing: it was merely given to the air by the poet's 
 voice, and yet it outlasts Greece and Eome ; and many a little 
 poem survives, fresh and perfect, while the Pyramids crumble. 
 The streams of force and matter that built up the bodies of 
 generations pass on as their works decay, while the streams 
 of mind going through the same bodies build Ideas that do 
 not die. They live not only in the minds and records of suc- 
 ceeding generations, but as the pervasiveness of mind seems 
 unlimited, they seem also to survive in the Cosmos inde- 
 pendently of the generations of men. 
 
 When, as in dreams and trances, we are not occupied with 
 the phenomena called the material world, copies of the Ideas 
 come in upon us from unlimited distances in time and space. 
 Sometimes the artist draws them, just as the architect's assist- 
 ants do ; or as some artist, thousands of years after the archi- 
 tect is dead, extracts his Idea from the ruins or some other
 
 Ch. XXIII] Plato on The Idea 323 
 
 manifestation. William Blake, as he happens to be both seer 
 and artist, sees and reproduces any number of strange people 
 and things from ancient or distant environments; and with 
 such vraisemblance that it is hard, and probably unnecessary, 
 to believe that the originals never had " material " form. And 
 in dreams we all of us see similar things, both clearly and 
 jumbled up. " See " is a limited and inaccurate term. Our 
 senses are of course mere machines for doing what some of us, 
 in some conditions, can do a great deal better without them. 
 This generalization goes even so far as our muscles. Under 
 some circumstances, just as the telepsychic genius has no need 
 of senses, the telekinetic genius has no need of muscles. Thus 
 we get a glimpse of what seems to be a soul without the need of 
 a body. And yet we get no glimpse of any way in which that 
 soul could have been developed without a body. We do get 
 a glimpse, however, of its ultimately, after being developed, 
 getting along without a body; and in the apparent relations 
 of the individual soul with the cosmic soul, we get a glimpse 
 of how. 
 
 The foreshadowing of this set of notions in Plato is probably 
 the nearest distinct of those heretofore presented. As dug 
 out by Weber (I am through digging in Plato, for myself or 
 even for my readers), it relates to at least two distinct things 
 one, abstract or generalized ideas beauty, strength, wisdom, 
 as distinguished from beautiful, strong, and wise persons; 
 the other nearly what I have tried to express: he says, for 
 instance (or Weber says for him, op. cit. t 84) : 
 
 " The Ideas are the models or the originals, and the natural 
 beings or the individuals are the copies. . . . They are the 
 thoughts of God, which no human intelligence can wholly re- 
 produce, but which are none the leas real, absolutely real." 
 
 But he goes on (op. cit. f p. 84) : 
 
 " Now, every beautiful object, be it a man or a statue, an act 
 or an individual, is doomed to destruction and oblivion; beauty 
 in itself is imperishable." 
 
 Now I have tried to clarify an impression not merely that 
 generalities are indestructible (as they can be in a succession 
 of particulars even if the particulars be perishable in detail), 
 but that behind each particular thing is an individual Id(
 
 324 The Idea [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 may I say a concrete Idea ? which is indestructible ; and that 
 all things which appeal to the senses are merely copies of 
 the Idea which transcends the senses that this is true even 
 of our bodies, and that when they are gone the Idea sur- 
 vives. 
 
 Weber says of this conception as expressed by Plato 
 (pp. 85-6) : 
 
 " To sum up : (1) The Ideas are real beings; (2) the Ideas 
 are more real than the objects of sense; (3) the Ideas are the 
 only true realities; the objects of sense possess a merely bor- 
 rowed existence, a reality which they receive from the Ideas. 
 The Ideas are the eternal patterns (mzparfefyuara) after which 
 the things of sense are made; the latter are the images (<fc>*<z), 
 the imitations, the imperfect copies (opoiu/iaTa, funfoeif). The 
 entire sensible world is nothing but a symbol, an allegory, or 
 a figure of speech. The meaning, the Idea expressed by the 
 thing, alone concerns the philosopher. His interest in the sen- 
 sible world is like our interest in the portrait of a friend of 
 whose living presence we are deprived. 
 
 " The world of sense is the copy of the world of Ideas ; and 
 conversely the world of Ideas resembles its image. Parmenides, 
 132; Timceus, 48." 
 
 Not only do Ideas seem stored up somewhere independently 
 of human minds, but are there not indications that Ideas are 
 produced there that there are possible sources of all the 
 ideas which reach us, even those of us who cannot express 
 them ? As one such, I know that, as I shall particularize later, 
 I have seen things in my dreams superior to any that human 
 art has yet accomplished, and so, I presume, have others. 
 Itfay, we all know that each supreme work of art is a presenta- 
 tion of such an Idea, whether it came in an ordinary dream 
 or in a waking inspiration. But of those who have thus ex- 
 pressed any work, I have never met the recorded experience 
 '(pace Poe's doubtful account of " The Eaven ") of one who 
 claims to have created it himself. On the contrary, they are all 
 eager to claim that they were " inspired " by the muse or the 
 god or the daimone whatever anthropomorphic character 
 they may have given to the power not themselves. If asked 
 if they are proud of their work, they convey as best they can 
 the feeling that they are proud of being so constituted as to 
 be of being selected to be the mediums of their inspira- 
 tions from their respective divinities.
 
 Ch. XXIII] Inspiration, Subliminal Self, Cosmic Sovl 325 
 
 Now Du Prel, Myers, and their school want to dethrone 
 those old divinities, and deprive the artist of his claim to be 
 the agent of a higher power ; and so have provided him with 
 their "subliminal self," which throws out these splendid 
 things as a spring throws water a consciousness of his own 
 he does it himself after all; but they haven't told us where 
 are the headwaters of the spring. 
 
 I suspect both sides are right, as they are in so many world- 
 old battles. The artist is inspired by the god, and the god 
 the cosmic soul is his subliminal consciousness, as the cosmic 
 force is the motive power of his heart. You may not under- 
 stand how it is so (I certainly do not), but while you can 
 begin by thinking of the man and the cosmic power separately, 
 you can no more round out a conception of either without 
 including the other than you can round out a conception of 
 the voluntary nervous system through which man acts, without 
 including the involuntary nervous system through which the 
 cosmos supplies man the capacity to act. In this unity of 
 "diversity, independence with dependence, free will linked to 
 another will, " Behold ! I show you a mystery/' This is of 
 course as true as it was of Paul's. But how should it be 
 other than a mystery? These things are on the borderland 
 of our knowledge, where the best we can do is to fumble 
 in the dark, unless, as some of the wisest think, it were still 
 better to keep out of the dark altogether. But some others 
 of the wisest think that we can learn very valuable things there 
 perhaps strike an electric switch : so let us fumble a little 
 farther. 
 
 Every creation of man from tool to temple has behind 
 it an Idea the man's Idea furnished him by the God. An 
 object of Nature expresses "God's" Idea direct, not com- 
 municated through man. In a portrait, it is expressed in 
 another form by man, as the builder expresses the architect's 
 idea. But back of each object of art or Nature, there lies the 
 Idea. (See p. 487, 1. 8 from bottom.) 
 
 Now how about us? Some of us are pretty fine creations 
 a few of us more beautiful, more august, than any works of 
 art. Was there an " Idea " a " plan " behind the creation 
 of each one of us? In what mind? Certainly not in the
 
 326 The Idea [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 mind of either parent: neither of them had a definite idea 
 of what one of us would be like, beyond a possible remote 
 composite of both of them: anything like a prophetic sketch 
 or " plan " of one of us in their minds was out of the question. 
 But I hope I am not too wild in suggesting that somehow the 
 Idea of each one of us got into the universe perhaps before 
 the spermatozoon entered the ovum, perhaps only as the in- 
 dividual was developed. 
 
 Is it unreasonable, then, to fancy that the Idea of each 
 of us was and is in the Cosmic Mind, and just as the Parthe- 
 non in stone is but one copy of the architect's Idea, so, from 
 the " Idea " of one of us in the Cosmic Mind is constructed 
 the copy we know in carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, 
 iron, and a few other elements? That copy resists pressure 
 and, varying a good deal in dimensions and details, sometimes 
 abides a hundred years. It assimilates food, wastes tissues, 
 sees, hears, thinks, feels, talks, and interchanges thoughts and 
 feelings, and is in all ways apparent to our waking senses. 
 Those Ideas have also been expressed in various other copies 
 descriptions, photographs, paintings, statues as well as in 
 our bodies and souls themselves. 
 
 Then outside of our ordinary waking senses, in vision, 
 dream, trance, still other copies are presented. These other 
 copies do not abide with us long, though they return, and they 
 do think, feel, talk, weep, laugh, interchange thoughts and 
 feelings, resist pressure, and perform other physical functions, 
 certainly the most intense of them, though they may not have 
 been observed to perform all. Thus the expressions of an Idea 
 are both physical and psychical. Apparently the more impor- 
 tant expression is the psychic so important that even while 
 the two are together, from Homer down to Lincoln, the phys- 
 ical one sometimes appears to have been only ancillary 
 evolved only that it might promote the evolution of the other. 
 The physical expression in time 'disappears before our eyes. 
 The Idea on its psychic side (assuming its existence and 
 reasoning from the Ideas of other things) seems somehow not 
 subject to death, and we often act on assumptions possibly 
 no wilder than that it may find farther expression after the 
 death of the copy we call the body. 
 
 As the Idea behind the San Marco Campanile was capable
 
 Ch. XXIII] The Expression Goes, The Idea Abides 327 
 
 of resurrection though the bricks fell, so, we have some faint 
 evidence, abide the Ideas behind our visible frames, though 
 their atoms disintegrate ; and so, apparently much more prob- 
 ably, abide the Ideas constituting our psychic individualities. 
 They keep bobbing up in the most unexpected and inex- 
 haustible ways from what has been called the subliminal soul, 
 and what some of us prefer to call the cosmic soul. They 
 come up in ordinary dreams and in all sorts of visions ; come 
 up in copies which closely duplicate the familiar " living " 
 body and "living" soul, and have sometimes made com- 
 munications later demonstrated to have been "true," and 
 sometimes more important than anything in our waking life. 
 We know as a fact that these dream copies have apparently 
 been expressed over and over again, often very strikingly, 
 through many " mediums," and there would be no little justi- 
 fication for calling gratuitous the efforts to make them out 
 anything less than copies. The dream copies as presented by 
 the mediums, are not always as complete or as convincing as 
 the copy our faculties have enabled us to know during ordinary 
 life, or as the copies in our own dreams. But there is a strong 
 presumption that the expressions through the mediums may 
 not be convincing because the method of expression is poor. 
 We know, too, that this later sort of expression is very recent, 
 and, like many faculties under evolution, unaccountably spo- 
 radic, and appears to be as yet in a stage very elementary 
 compared with a possible later one. 
 
 Now with these demonstrations, such as they are, to our 
 presumably elementary apprehension, such as it is, of the sur- 
 vival of the Idea, and of its various presentations, is it wildly 
 extravagant to suppose that the Idea really does survive death 
 in new expressions new bodies even, to which the one with 
 which we are familiar may be merely preliminary and rudi- 
 mentary ? 
 
 This is not sheer guesswork built up on a jumble of words 
 which in themselves are but professions of ignorance: it is a 
 tentative interpretation of facts, which we have got to inter- 
 pret somehow, or resign the right and responsibility to use 
 our intellects. It may be all wrong, but doesn't it seem to 
 be in a direction where truth may ultimately appear more 
 clearly?
 
 328 The Idea [Bk. II, Pt IV 
 
 I have deliberately put some chapters of guesswork re- 
 garding these psychic mysteries right in the midst of the 
 phenomena to which the guesses apply, instead of putting 
 them before all the phenomena as deductions for the phe- 
 nomena to verify ; or after them all, as inductions which the 
 phenomena suggest. The inconsistency has been partly due 
 to the matter being so tangled up that it is hard to discuss 
 any without being led to discuss more, but partly because in 
 such uncertain studies it is well, after enough facts have been 
 given to justify any guesses, to make the guesses as aids to the 
 mere exposition of the remaining facts, not to speak of their 
 interpretation. 
 
 We will now go on to the partly anticipated phenomena.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 POSSESSION(T) IN GENERAL 
 
 WE now come to the phenomena which bring the question 
 of the Cosmic Inflow closer than do any others, and which, 
 of all the field we are exploring (and some would think of 
 all human annals), are probably the most interesting and the 
 most puzzling. They are perhaps the only phenomena whose 
 claims to interpretation by the spiritistic hypothesis are ad- 
 mitted by the weight of authority to be worthy of con- 
 sideration. 
 
 Nearly all such telepsychoses as have been recounted here 
 take place while the sensitive is in possession of his usual 
 faculties, and are described or expressed by the medium volun- 
 tarily. But there are telepsychoses which are expressed in- 
 voluntarily and unconsciously. Between these two classes of 
 expressions there is of course (as always between associated 
 groups) a transition group. In fact conformably with the in- 
 structive gradualness of the transitions in Nature to which I 
 have alluded so often, we find all degrees of such phenomena, 
 from the simplest telepathy to the inspiration which leads 
 almost everybody occasionally, without conscious effort, to 
 " surpass himself " ; to that which sets " the poet's eye in a 
 fine frenzy rolling " ; to that which sets Mrs. Verrall, while 
 otherwise perfectly conscious, to writing intelligent things 
 she does not intend; to that which sets Stainton Moses and 
 Mrs. Piper similarly writing while their intelligence is other- 
 wise engaged perhaps in studying a profound treatise or 
 something else utterly at variance with the written topics; to 
 that which makes Mrs. Holland occasionally write in trance, 
 and Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson always ; and so by degrees 
 to the apparently complete " Possession," where the medium's 
 soul appears to abandon the body and leave it at the service of 
 the hypothetical souls who use it to express themselves. 
 
 When the medium's soul is thus apparently absent, the 
 vital processes still continue: they are carried on through
 
 330 Possession (?) in General [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 the sympathetic nerve and its jponnections ; while the brain 
 with all thought, feeling, and voluntary movement is appar- 
 ently abandoned by the original personality, and apparently 
 open to use of other personalities. 
 
 These individualities, in vocabulary, inflection, and, some- 
 times, gesture, appear as boys and girls, adults and old 
 people, men and women ; Americans, Indians, English, French, 
 Hawaiians, Chinese ; schoolboys, pedagogues, scholars, philoso- 
 phers, prize-fighters, butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers. 
 All talk through the medium with a dramatic verisimilitude 
 that, while perhaps never reaching the impressiveness or 
 humor of the great dramatists, seems, in variety and faithful- 
 ness to nature, 'almost, if not quite, to surpass them all. 
 
 The ways of accounting for these strange phenomena we 
 will consider incidentally in connection with the phenomena 
 themselves, and systematically after we have been over as 
 full accounts of them as space permits. 
 
 Many students believe that the soi-disant other souls are 
 simply dissociated personalities of the medium, but at least 
 for purposes of study, we must discriminate Possession from 
 Dissociation, and yet the difference between them, like so 
 many differences we have noted, is so gradual that it is hard 
 to tell where one ceases and the other begins. Perhaps the 
 best distinction is that where a person thinks and acts unlike 
 " thonself," without claiming to be any other specific person 
 who has existed, we consider the new personality simply dis- 
 sociated we might almost say differentiated from the old. 
 This is generally the result of accident or disease. But when 
 the new personality appears without any occasion from acci- 
 dent or disease, and claims to be somebody that has existed in 
 another body, and talks and acts, and especially shows excep- 
 tional knowledge, as if it had so existed, some commentators 
 say, often provisionally, that the new body is " possessed " by 
 the soul that formerly " possessed " the other body. 
 
 But this classification, like all others, is defective : for there 
 are many insane persons who believe themselves to be some- 
 body else some of them always, some only occasionally. 
 But they do not show enough of the foregoing requirements 
 to fool anybody, and have not noticeably displayed mediumistic 
 phenomena.
 
 Ch. XXIV] Acted Dreams. Automatism 331 
 
 On reading the proofs, I see that it will probably be well, 
 without disturbing the preceding two paragraphs, to state here, 
 as a possible clue through the labyrinth we are approaching, 
 the conclusion I have reached (tentatively: that's as far as 
 it is yet time to go) that the phenomena of apparent posses- 
 sion result from the medium's identifying " thonself " with, 
 and so acting out, characters that are telepathically presented 
 in dreams, possibly by the sitter, possibly by other incarnate 
 intelligence, possibly by postcarnate intelligence, possibly by 
 any two of those things, or by all. This cryptic utterance 
 comes from so many considerations that to make it clearer by 
 giving them, especially with their illustrations, would be vir- 
 tually to give the rest of the book : so we may as well resume 
 that process. 
 
 It seems a corollary from the law of evolution that there 
 should always be not only a few men vastly greater than the 
 rest, but also that when new and strange faculties appear, they 
 should appear only in a few people. Dreams we all have, som- 
 nambulism not so many have, and hypnotism and trance we 
 have long known occasionally ; but telepathy and " medium- 
 ship" and "possession," all three seem to be comparatively 
 rare wonders of yesterday, though of course some scholars 
 think they have found evidence of them, as of everything 
 else, in remote antiquity. 
 
 We shall find in all these phenomena many traits in com- 
 mon. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to give the phe- 
 nomena names which do not imply opinions ; and this while 
 the weight of judgment appears to be that the time for 
 opinions is not yet come. A prominent alternate name for 
 " possession " is automatism, and Myers has so established 
 it that some objections to it seem worth considering. 
 
 Inanimate matter is generally moved by the immediate 
 application of outside force. When the force is stored up 
 within the matter, so that when it is released the matter 
 appears to be self-moving, the motion is called automatic. 
 Myers applies the term to all superusual experience and 
 function in the broadest sense, covering all superusual sensa- 
 tion, waking and sleeping; but when he applied the term 
 automatic to the writing and speaking and gesticulating of
 
 332 Possession (?) in General [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 the sensitives, he supported the thesis that those acts were 
 not performed by the consciousnesses of the mediums, but 
 by consciousness outside; while he called the phenomena auto- 
 matic he strove with all his strength to prove them hetero- 
 matic, and produced in the reader's apprehension mine, at 
 least a good deal of wobbling. 
 
 To one who has groped much among these uncertainties 
 there can be no wonder that a man of even Myers's ability 
 sometimes fell into an inconsistency, especially as he naturally 
 used the language as he found it. And yet in this case it 
 seems a little strange that, with his facility in coining words, 
 he rested content with the old one. 
 
 His definition of automatism is (Human Personality, I, 
 
 " The products of inner vision or inner audition externalized 
 into quasi-percepts, these form what I term sensory autom- 
 atisms. The messages conveyed by movements of limbs or 
 hand or tongue, initiated by an inner motor impulse beyond 
 the conscious will these are what I term motor automatisms. 
 And I claim that when all these are surveyed together their 
 essential analogy will be recognized beneath much diversity of 
 form. They will be seen to be messages from the subliminal 
 to the supraliminal self; endeavors conscious or unconscious 
 of submerged tracts of our personality to present to ordinary 
 waking thought fragments of a knowledge which no ordinary 
 waking thought could attain." 
 
 Here he clearly restricts the whole business to the indi- 
 vidual soul : no sign yet of his attributing any of it, as he 
 does later, to other intelligences acting through the organism 
 instead of its usual soul. 
 
 But he goes on (p. 223) to say that: 
 
 "All human terrene faculty will be in this view simply a 
 selection from faculty existing in the metetherial world; such 
 part of that antecedent, even if not individualized, faculty as 
 may be expressible through each several human organism." 
 
 " Faculty existing in the metetherial world " seems a pretty 
 good expression for Cosmic Soul. 
 
 Furthermore, on page 218, under Hypnotism, he had said : 
 
 " There may be a truth deeper than we can at this moment 
 stay to discuss in many subjective experiences of poets, philo-
 
 Ch. XXIV] Myers on the Metetherial World 333 
 
 sophers, mystics, saints. And if their sense of inflowing and 
 indwelling life indeed be true; if the subliminal uprushes 
 which renew and illumine them are fed in reality from some 
 metetherial environment; then a similar influence may by 
 analogy exist and be recognizable along the whole gamut of 
 
 psychophysical phenomena 
 
 " The nascent life of each of us is perhaps a fresh draft, 
 the continued life is an ever-varying draft, upon the cosmic 
 energy. In that environing energy call it by what name we 
 will we live and move and have our being; and it may well 
 be that certain dispositions of mind, certain phases of person- 
 ality, may draw in for the moment from that energy a fuller 
 vitalizing stream." 
 
 He closes the chapter with: 
 
 " Let men realize that . . . their own spirits are co-operative 
 elements in the cosmic evolution, are part and parcel of the 
 ultimate vitalizing Power." 
 
 Myers wrote these passages in speculation on the source 
 of the curative power of hypnotism, and they seem to in- 
 dicate the conviction I have already expressed that hyp- 
 notism opens the soul to influxes from a cosmic reservoir of 
 knowledge and will, just as other agencies open the blood 
 and nerves to influxes from the cosmic store of matter and 
 force. This is a broader view than the exclusively individual 
 one of the subliminal self. Though not without vagueness and 
 paradox, it certainly seems pointed to by the facts; it offers 
 an explanation where " subliminal self " is but a name ; and 
 is at least implied, even when tenninologically ignored, by 
 almost every writer on the subject. Our supraliminal souls 
 are individual, but they blend more or less with our subliminal 
 souls, which, as I fear I am wearying you by contending, 
 seem to be such inflows from a cosmic soul as our individual 
 make-ups permit. 
 
 We cannot draw a definite line between the supraliminal 
 and the subliminal, any more than we can between any other 
 related categories, and we are hardly to be charged with 
 inconsistency if, in treating of one aspect of soul, we omit, 
 or fail, to keep the other aspects equally in front. But does 
 it not seem probable that we will be on a more helpful way 
 to the truth if, in treating the subliminal aspect, we keep as 
 far as we can from confining it to the personal character-
 
 334 Possession(?) in General [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 istics, and keep prominent, as far as we can, the cosmic 
 characteristics? True it seems to be that strictly personal 
 characteristics determine the inflow of the cosmic element, 
 but as we look out through the channels open in the per- 
 sonality, we catch glimpses of that to which we can see no 
 limit in content or time, and to which we give the names that 
 only express our incapacity infinite and eternal. 
 
 But although Myers so clearly went for his automatism 
 outside of the purposeful individual, and into a cosmic in- 
 flow, later, as we shall have abundant occasion to see, he 
 absolutely leaves the cosmic inflow, and yet does not return 
 to the subliminal individual soul of his " automatist," but 
 attributes the "messages" to individual souls which have 
 left the body, and this he does without any insistent recur- 
 rence to his implied suggestion that both are different aspects 
 of the same thing the individual souls as parts of the cosmic 
 soul. 
 
 This all seems very inconsistent, and it is very inconsistent 
 unless the postcarnate souls and the automatist's soul are all 
 regarded as parts of the cosmic soul. But for " subliminal 
 self " substitute " cosmic soul," or, more definitely, " cosmic 
 inflow," and we have a hypothesis consistent with itself so 
 far as one in these vague regions can be. 
 
 But I don't recall Myers ever being consistent enough to 
 perform that very simple feat of substitution; and it was 
 avoided with what seemed to me almost fatuous care by Du 
 Prel, an immediate forerunner in Fechner's doctrine of the 
 subliminal self, who, for all I know, may have invented the 
 name. Du Prel's motive, however, was plain enough: he 
 wrote in the days of the reaction against the old theologies, 
 begun by Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and their fellow-laborers 
 on the Continent, and carried out on the Continent to such 
 extremes that Du Prel and many others would account for 
 a thing on any hypothesis, no matter how extravagant, rather 
 than on one involving an intelligent cause and regulator be- 
 hind the phenomenal universe : apparently for fear that some- 
 body might call it God. Man's was the highest intelligence 
 for which they would see any evidence, and they gave him a 
 " subliminal self " to account for any manifestations in or 
 through him which, a generation earlier, would have been
 
 Ch. XXIV] The Hypothesis of the Subliminal 335 
 
 called superhuman, and seem so to some of us in this genera- 
 tion. 
 
 Du Prel was specially put to it to account for the per- 
 sonalities that oppose the self in dreams, and he fished 
 them out of his universal reservoir " the subliminal." If 
 in a dream or trance an individuality leads you along some 
 ridgepole you never could have traversed alone, or solves some 
 problem beyond your powers, or even opposes you with some 
 knock-down argument you never thought of, that other per- 
 sonality is simply your " divided self " according to Du Prel 
 and his company; but according to some simpler souls, in- 
 cluding mine, that other individuality is more nearly what 
 it appears to be an independent inflow of the cosmic soul 
 into you. The modus operandi I don't attempt to explain, 
 but I'd rather attempt that than Du Prel's and Myers's job 
 of explaining the second personality as a divided part of the 
 first. 
 
 Myers hung on to the hypothesis and the name for it, and 
 this he did after he had accepted the human personality's 
 survival of bodily death, and the cosmic soul; and he did so 
 much to popularize the individual subliminal hypothesis in 
 the English-speaking world, that he seemed to feel for it the 
 affection sometimes felt for an adopted child. If he had 
 risen so far beyond his partiality for his bantling just as it 
 was, as to persistently identify it with the cosmic inflow, he 
 would, if I mistake not, have avoided many inconsistencies 
 and have added materially to the unity of his work. Of 
 course in the present state of our knowledge this proposed 
 shape of the hypothesis would probably have run him into 
 other inconsistencies, as I am perfectly conscious that it is 
 running me ; but I think it would still have left the balance 
 to the good, and have brought us a step nearer to correlating 
 the phenomena with established knowledge. 
 
 But in every one of the steps Myers certainly did go out- 
 side of the sensitive for his motive power. The operations 
 of the medium's brain, or hand, or tongue, or other members, 
 are apparently caused by an agency other than the conscious- 
 ness which we ordinarily recognize as the specific human 
 being. That agency may be what is called the subliminal 
 consciousness, but the chief English-speaking apostle of the
 
 336 Possession (?) in General [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 term, while he says it is that, defines that into something 
 more. The agency may be some sort of a halfway cosmic 
 soul, as one individuality amusing itself by aping other in- 
 dividualities (not a very likely hypothesis) ; or it may be a 
 really cosmic soul acting in a genuine capacity not yet clearly 
 comprehensible differentiating itself into each individual 
 thus becoming originator and sustainer of individual souls, 
 and, in some as yet mysterious way, identical with them. 
 Things seem to point this way, and Myers, apparently in 
 spite of himself, involuntarily kept admitting that they did. 
 I do not say that he was not justified in doing so, and 
 that the phenomena are really heteromatic, but if, like Myers, 
 I were fully confirmed in a belief in spiritism, I should say 
 so. Myers's inconsistency in using the word automatic when 
 he means heteromatic probably is due to his trying to ride two, 
 or rather three, horses. If all the phenomena are due to his 
 pet subliminal soul, and that is all shut up in the medium, 
 the proceedings are of course automatic. But once admit 
 telepathy, even from the sitter, not to speak of teloteropathy 
 from remote incarnate intelligences, and much less from dis- 
 carnate ones, and your automatism is gone. As the writings 
 profess to be heteromatic, and as the theory of the cosmic 
 inflow, which I tentatively accept, would make them heter- 
 omatic, I shall call them heteromatic. 
 
 Between the holders of the hypothesis of the subliminal 
 self there is confusion and controversy. The spiritistic side, 
 led perhaps by Myers and adhered to by Hodgson, Lodge, and 
 others, claims that the medium's subliminal soul is a distinct 
 thing, and that there are other things equally distinct appear- 
 ing as the souls of the " possessors " of the medium, all of 
 which souls, they incidentally admit, may be inflows from 
 the cosmic soul. 
 
 The anti-spiritistic side, led perhaps by Podmore, admits 
 the subliminal soul, but as to the possessions being manifesta- 
 tions of other souls, they are no such things, but mere processes 
 of the medium's subliminal soul largely telepathic reflec- 
 tions from other incarnate souls. The dramatic quality of 
 these reflections, initiative, comment, repartee, discussion, 
 disagreement, even violent argument, expressions of satisfac-
 
 Ch. XXIV] Perhaps all Sides Correct 337 
 
 tion and dissatisfaction ranging all the way from joy to a 
 rage that smashes things all this is left unaccounted 
 for. 
 
 There is a third group in the controversy, led perhaps by 
 James, which goes very little farther than to say: it is not 
 yet time for an opinion. 
 
 And there is at least a fourth position, though I hardly 
 see signs of its being occupied by a "group," which would 
 claim that there seem some glimmerings of everybody being 
 right (as in most controversies) in the direction of the 
 hypothesis, as yet very vague and paradoxical, that although 
 the individual soul is contained within the pretty definite 
 limits of its individuality, yet within those limits, it is a 
 portion a sort of bay if you please, of the cosmic soul, and 
 is subject to occasional influxes or tides from the cosmic 
 soul in the shape of all sorts of inspirations (which turns the 
 fluid metaphor of a tide into a gaseous one), not only those 
 of music, poetry, hypothesis, eloquence, etc., but of all sorts 
 of dreams and visions, normal or hypnotic, and " possessions " 
 of all degrees, from heteromatic writing up to entire apparent 
 substitution or at least predominance of a soul that, like the 
 minor inspirations or possessions, has drifted in from the 
 cosmic aggregate. 
 
 In writing this hypothesis I have been trammeled by the 
 inevitable behindhandedness of words in such connections, 
 and the most abstract words being, as we all know, metaphors 
 from material things. I am very conscious, too, that the 
 statement contains a luxuriant abundance of things already 
 said by others as well as myself, and I again crave your 
 patience for my repetitions. The conceptions are necessarily 
 too vague for definite statement once for all, and whether they 
 are anything more than mirages, and even if they are only 
 mirages, what they are can best be determined by approach- 
 ing them through all the avenues that may be found open. 
 
 Whether the " possession " is only apparent, or is partial, 
 or is complete, or is one at one time and the others at other 
 times, is an open question. Apparently all three may occur 
 in the same sitting. 
 
 There is undoubtedly another soul than the medium's in-
 
 338 Possesswn(f) in General [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 volved, but the method of its action upon him, perhaps we 
 shall find, does not go so far as substitution for his soul. 
 
 Mrs. Sidgwick very fully and ably argues this view in 
 Pr. XV, but she pays so little attention to the dramatic 
 elements in the sittings attributing them almost exclusively 
 to telepathy, even if from postcarnate spirits, that the argu- 
 ment leaves my opinion in suspense, except so far as my 
 fumbling feeling about the Cosmic Soul sometimes seems 
 to render both telepathy and possession names for something 
 bigger. 
 
 Of course there may have been what we provisionally call 
 possession in many of the phenomena already given, especially 
 those under telepathy; but the indications of it are much 
 stronger in the set which we now approach heteromatic 
 writing and dramatic impersonation. The ancients also asso- 
 ciated the idea with dreams and the like, and we may yet 
 be brought back to a somewhat similar impression. I, for 
 one, have reached it already.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 POSSESSION (?) IN HETEROMATIC WRITING 
 
 ON revising this chapter, I find it among the most unsatis- 
 factory in the book, and my own work in it among its most 
 unsatisfactory parts. Yet its relation to some of the least 
 unsatisfactory of later chapters, leads me to advise you, if 
 your patience is not yet exhausted, at least to skim through it. 
 
 Ever since there was writing, of course there has been 
 writing more or less " inspired." 
 
 The capacity for it, as Dr. Crookes declares of the capacity 
 for telekinesis, seems to exist in some degree in everybody. 
 James says (Memories and Studies, pp. 199-200) : 
 
 " I have come to see in automatic writing one example of a 
 department of human activity as vast as it is enigmatic. Every 
 sort of person is liable to it, or to something equivalent to it; 
 . . . our subconscious region seems, as a rule, to be dominated 
 either by a crazy ' will to make-believe/ or by some curious ex- 
 ternal force impelling us to personation. The first difference 
 between the psychical researcher and the inexpert person is that 
 the former realizes the commonness and typicality of the phe- 
 nomenon here, while the latter, less informed, thinks it so rare 
 as to be unworthy of attention. / wish to go on record for the 
 commonness. 
 
 " The next thing I wish to go on record for is the presence, 
 in the midst of all the humbug, of really supernormal know- 
 ledge " 
 
 Mahomet professed that the Koran was entirely hetero- 
 matic from the Angel Gabriel. 
 
 Swedenborg was devoted mainly to science, and with great 
 success, until 1745, when he claimed that God appeared to 
 him and said : " I have chosen thee to unfold the spiritual 
 sense of the Holy Scripture. I will myself dictate to thee 
 what thou shalt write " ; and surely from even the very un- 
 sympathetic point of view which I myself share, the writing 
 was a very extraordinary performance. 
 339
 
 340 Possession( ?) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 Blake, time and again, disclaimed voluntary authorship of 
 his writings. 
 
 Accounts of several other heteromatic writers are given in 
 Miss Underbill's Mysticism and Psychology, pp. 78-80 : 
 
 " Madame Guyon states in her autobiography, that when she 
 was composing her works she would experience a sudden and 
 irresistible inclination to take up her pen ; though feeling wholly 
 incapable of literary composition, and not even knowing the 
 subject on which she would be impelled to write. If she resisted 
 this impulse it was at the cost of the most intense discomfort. 
 She would then begin to write with extraordinary swiftness; 
 words, elaborate arguments, and appropriate quotations coming 
 to her without reflection, and so quickly that one of her longest 
 books was written in one and a half days. 
 
 " ' In writing I saw that I was writing of things which I had 
 never seen: and during the time of this manifestation, I was 
 given light to perceive that I had in me treasures of knowledge 
 and understanding which I did not know that I possessed.' 
 
 " Similar statements are made of St. Teresa, who declared that 
 in writing her books she was powerless to set down anything but 
 that which her Master put into her mind. So Blake said of 
 ' Milton ' and ' Jerusalem,' ' I have written the poems from im- 
 mediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines 
 at a time, without premeditation and even against my will. The 
 time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and 
 an immense poem exists which seems to be the labor of a long 
 life, all produced without labor or study.' 
 
 " There are, of course, extreme forms of that strange power 
 of automatic composition, in which words and characters arrive 
 and arrange themselves in defiance of their authors' will, of 
 which most poets and novelists possess a trace " 
 
 As already indicated, apparent possession to the extent of 
 heteromatic writing was manifested in America by, among 
 others, Tuttle, Davis, and Colville. Foster never did it to 
 any extent. 
 
 Here is a case from Stillman, through a friend whom he 
 calls Miss A. (op. cit., 1, 190-1) : 
 
 " After having been for some time troubled by the rappings 
 she began to feel involuntary motions in her right hand which 
 increased to constantly recurring violent exercise of the muscles, 
 when it occurred to her from the character of the motions that 
 the hand wanted a pencil to write and she laid paper and a 
 pencil on the table. Her hand then took possession of the 
 pencil and began to scrawl aimlessly over the paper until, after 
 the interval of many days, the agency seemed to have sufficient
 
 Ch. XXV] Stillman's Miss A. Stainton Moses 341 
 
 control over the muscles to form legible letters The hand 
 
 wrote legibly and neatly in reply to mental, i.e., unspoken ques- 
 tions, she having no control of the muscles so long as the 
 ' influence ' . . . chose to use it. She knew what was written only 
 when the writing was finished and she read it, as we did; and 
 the writing was . . . quite as regular and well formed when her 
 
 eyes were bandaged As a further test of the involuntary 
 
 character of this we ... tried her with . . . my brother talk- 
 ing with her from one side of the table, while she was writing 
 
 in reply to my mental questions on the other. 
 
 " Under these circumstances she wrote for us the re- 
 plies in conversations with what purported to be the spirits 
 of three deceased relatives . . . and the handwriting of the . . . 
 series of communications was a better imitation of their writing 
 than I, knowing it, could have produced. That of my sister- 
 in-law . . . my brother recognized ... as that of his wife, but 
 that of our brother was a perfect reproduction down to the 
 smallest accidents, and that which was given as the responses 
 of my cousin equally so, and executed with a rapidity of which 
 I was incapable a large scrawling hand, that of our brother 
 being of a character entirely opposed, slowly and laboriously 
 formed, with occasional omissions of the last line of a final n 
 quite common in his writing. The girl had never known either 
 of these relatives." 
 
 Stainton Moses was about the earliest of the heteromatic 
 writers who have come under modern scientific criticism. 
 The writing began in 1873, nine years before the foundation 
 of the S. P. R., so, though none of it is given before Vol. VIII, 
 chronologically it properly comes before that from others 
 given in earlier volumes. 
 
 In addition to the diary-like account of his seances, upon 
 which we have already drawn, he left twenty-four note- 
 books of automatic writing, which are treated by Myers in 
 Pr. VIII, IX, XI. He says (Pr. XI, 64) : 
 
 " These automatic messages were almost wholly written .by 
 Mr. Moses's own hand while he was in a normal waking state. 
 The exceptions are of two kinds. (1) There is one long pas- 
 sage . . . 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's presence 
 
 " 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
 
 342 Possession (?) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 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." 
 
 And elsewhere (Pr. IX, 257-8) : 
 
 " As a general rule the same alleged spirits both manifested 
 themselves by raps, &c., at Mr. Moses's sittings with his friends, 
 and also wrote through his hand when he was alone. In this, 
 as in other respects, Mr. Moses's two series of sittings when 
 alone and in company were concordant, and, so to say, com- 
 plementary; explanations being given by the writing of what 
 had happened at the seances. When ' direct writing ' was given 
 at the seances, the handwriting of each alleged spirit was the 
 same as that which the same spirit was in the habit of em- 
 ploying in the automatic script. The claim to individuality 
 was thus in all cases decisively made. [And on p. 334.] 
 Each series presupposes and refers to the other. The trance- 
 addresses given at the seances are continued by the messages 
 written in privacy. The phenomena of the seances are pre- 
 dicted in the automatic script [This suggests that Moses's 
 agency, involuntary perhaps, may have been behind both. 
 H.H.] and similar phenomena sometimes occur to Mr. Moses 
 when alone." 
 
 (Page 255.) " The ' controls ' themselves are of various 
 types; and there is one rare 'control' (' Magus ')... whose 
 utterances seem to me shifty and exaggerated, in a way very 
 common in automatic script, and who does apparently endorse 
 a complete impostor. The utterances of other 'controls' for 
 the most part reflect Mr. Moses's own opinions on other 
 mediums, or are sometimes more severe. [Page 257.] [There 
 are] spirits who give such names as Rector, Doctor, Theo- 
 philus, and, above all, Imperator. . . . The names which they 
 assert to have been theirs in earth-life . . . are for the most 
 part both more illustrious and more remote. . . . Mr. Moses 
 himself . . . justly felt that the assumption of great names is 
 likely to diminish rather than to increase the weight of the 
 communication For a long while one of his main stumbling- 
 blocks lay in these lofty and unprovable claims. Ultimately 
 he came to believe even in these identities, on the general 
 ground that teachers who had given him so many proofs, both 
 of their power and of their serious interest in his welfare, were 
 not likely to have deceived him on such a point. But he did 
 not count upon a similar belief in others, and he expressly 
 wished to avoid seeming to claim special authority for the 
 teachings on the ground of their alleged authorship " 
 
 We shall find later that after Moses's death his alleged 
 spirit gave an entirely different set of names for the earthly 
 originals of these alleged personalities.
 
 Ch. XXV] Moses' Writing Controls 343 
 
 Moses says (Pr. XI, 65-7) : 
 
 " I soon found that writing flowed more easily when 
 
 I used a book that was permeated with the psychic aura; just 
 as raps come more easily on a table that has been frequently 
 used for the purpose, and as phenomena occur most readily in 
 the medium's own room." 
 
 One argument for this point of view could be found in the 
 well-known effect upon violins of much playing. But Mr. 
 Bartlett tells me that Foster had no experience parallel to 
 that of Moses in this regard. Moses continues : 
 
 " At first the writing was very small and irregular, 
 
 and it was necessary for me to write slowly and cau- 
 tiously, and to watch the hand, following the lines with my 
 eye; otherwise the message soon became incoherent, and the 
 result was mere scribble. In a short time, however, I found 
 that I could dispense with these precautions. The writing, 
 while becoming more and more minute, became at the same 
 time very regular and beautifully formed. As a specimen of 
 caligraphy some of the pages are exceedingly beautiful. The 
 answers to my questions (written at the top of the page) were 
 paragraphed and arranged as if for the press, and the name of 
 God was always written in capitals, and slowly, and, as it 
 seemed, reverentially. The subject-matter was always of a pure 
 and elevated character. . . . Throughout the whole of these writ- 
 ten communications, extending in unbroken continuity to the 
 year 1880 [From 1873. H.H.], there is no flippant message, 
 no attempt at jest, no vulgarity or incongruity, no false or 
 misleading statement 
 
 " The earliest communications were all written in the minute 
 characters that I have described, and were uniform in style 
 and in the signature, ' Doctor, the Teacher.' . . . Whenever and 
 wherever he wrote, his handwriting was unchanged, showing, 
 indeed, less change than my own does during the last decade. 
 The tricks of style remained the same, and there was in short 
 a sustained individuality throughout his messages. He is to 
 me an entity, a personality, a being with his own idiosyncrasies 
 and characteristics quite as clearly defined as the human beings 
 with whom I come in contact 
 
 " After a time, communications came from other sources, 
 and these were distinguished each by its own handwriting, and 
 
 by its own peculiarities of style and expression 1 could tell 
 
 at once who was writing by the mere characteristics of the 
 caligraphy." 
 
 Myers, having seen all the heteromatic writing, tacitly 
 endorses Moses's statements regarding its visible qualities.
 
 344 Possession? ?) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 "By degrees I found that many spirits who were unable to 
 influence my hand themselves sought the aid of a spirit 
 'Rector' [a gentleman whom we shall meet often. H.H.], 
 who was apparently able to write more freely and with less 
 strain on me; for writing by a spirit unaccustomed to the 
 work was often incoherent, and always resulted in a serious 
 drain upon my vital powers. They did not know how easily 
 the reserve of force was exhausted, and I suffered proportion- 
 ately." 
 
 Apparently in Moses's case it taxed some source of physical 
 energy which ordinary writing does not; and yet there are 
 several automatic writers who give no indication of tax. Even 
 Mrs. Piper, with the arduous phenomena attending her 
 trances, can hardly be said to " suffer," unless the trance is 
 unduly prolonged. 
 
 Moses continues (Pr. XI, 67) : 
 
 "I had, obviously, no right to print that which concerned 
 others. Some of the most striking and impressive communica- 
 tions have thus been excluded " 
 
 This is one of the great disadvantages regarding the veri- 
 fication of all alleged communications through mediums: the 
 most evidential are those too personal to print. 
 
 Moses goes on: 
 
 " At first . . . even . . . the thoughts were not my thoughts. 
 Very soon the messages assumed a character of which I had 
 no doubt whatever the thought was opposed to my own. [We 
 have met and shall meet more of this enough to have seriously 
 disturbed my original conviction that the phenomena are prin- 
 cipally due to the sitter or writer. H.H.] But I cultivated 
 the power of occupying my mind with other things during the 
 time that the writing was going on, and was able to read an 
 abstruse book, and follow out a line of close reasoning while 
 the message was written with unbroken regularity. Messages 
 so written extended over many pages, and in their course there 
 is no correction, no fault in composition, and often a sustained 
 vigor and beauty of style. 
 
 " In several cases, information of which I was assuredly 
 
 ignorant, clear, precise, and definite in form, susceptible of 
 verification, and always exact, was thus conveyed to me. 
 [Such cases abound with nearly all the honest mediums. H.H.] 
 I never could command the writing. It came unsought usu- 
 ally, and when I did seek it, as often as not I was unable to 
 obtain it. [This, too, is quite usual. H.H.] The particular
 
 Ch. XXV] Imperator's Teaching of Moses 345 
 
 communications which I received from the spirit known to me 
 
 as Imperator mark a distinct epoch in my life 1 underwent 
 
 a spiritual development that was in its outcome a very re- 
 generation For me the question of the beneficent action of 
 
 external spirit on my own self was then finally settled. I have 
 never since, even in the vagaries of an extremely skeptical 
 mind, and amid much cause for questioning, ever seriously 
 entertained a doubt." 
 
 Myers comments (Pr. XI, 69) : 
 
 " 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's unwillingness to have the 
 books fully inspected during his lifetime. . . . The reader will 
 generally find the evidence for identity much more satisfactory 
 in the case of spirits recently departed, and more or less on 
 the medium's own level, than in the case of spirits more exalted 
 and remote." 
 
 Which might be translated into ordinary language to the 
 effect that time usually dims recollections and interests, 
 wherever they exist. It might even hold if a " spirit " is 
 nothing more than an echo of a medium ; but that it is more 
 than that, whatever else it may be, the evidence strongly 
 indicates. But the fading of memories apparently is true only 
 of the everyday consciousness upon which new events crowd 
 the old the supraliminal. From the subliminal (or the 
 Cosmic Soul?) the remotest experiences are constantly pop- 
 ping up in pristine freshness : time seems to make no differ- 
 ence whatever. Imperator seems to have impressed himself 
 more than any other " spirit," and he professed to date a 
 long time back. Yet this does not traverse Myers's " eviden- 
 tial " point. 
 
 Myers farther comments on Imperator (p. 107) : 
 
 " The teaching which he offers as the highest boon, and 
 which Mr. Moses accepts as such, is by no means so novel or 
 so illuminating as is sometimes implied. But this is only to 
 say that Imperator is not our appointed guide; that it is not we 
 who are directly reached by his exhortation or argument. His 
 utterances, like other human utterances, fall short of the uni- 
 versality, the permanence, which their author would fain 
 give them. But in regard to their primary end, the develop- 
 ment of Mr. Moses's own soul, I know not if words of more
 
 346 Possession (?) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 weight could have been spoken, or that sturdy and downright 
 spirit led onwards by any surer way." 
 
 After a good deal of reading and pondering, I find the pro- 
 portion of Moses's self in all these proceedings looming in my 
 apprehension larger and larger. The benefits he got from 
 them look to me like that portion how large a portion I am 
 not saying of the benefits of prayer which are independent 
 of external results, and consist in the benefit to character from 
 intense absorption in an inspiring subject. 
 
 Here is a very suggestive interview between Moses and 
 " Imperator " (Pr. S. P. R. IX, 255-6). " Our friends " (line 
 3) refers to Rector, Doctor, and Prudens. " John King " was 
 a " spirit " that used to " materialize " at these seances. " The 
 more material spirits," " Kabbila," " deceiving spirits " isn't 
 all this the terminology of a set of ideas now outworn, which 
 would readily have obtained lodgment in Moses's mind during 
 his youth, and which tends to mark the whole passage as an 
 involuntary creation of his own? 
 
 " Q. Was anyone present at the last seance at Mrs. IVs ? 
 I was much impressed. A. Yes. I was not present myself 
 but our friends were there. We do not advise you to rest much 
 on that. Q. What? I thought it conclusive proof. A. You 
 must use your own judgment. We do but warn you to be care- 
 ful. Q. Do you mean to say it was not genuine? A. We 
 only urge you to be wary. The manifestation was suspicious 
 and is not to be depended on. Q. I am surprised. Who 
 writes? A. It is I, tl: S: D. [Imperator, Servus Dei. 
 H.H.] Q. Then you will tell me. Am I to understand that the 
 manifestation was not of a materialized form? A. We do not 
 feel it part of our work to save you from the use of your own 
 powers. You are warned. Exercise your observing faculties. 
 Q. But I am bewildered. A. It is needful for you to work 
 through such experience. We may not save you from it. Only 
 be wary. Q. I have long wanted information about those 
 forms and have had grave doubts, but I have believed in 
 J. K. [John King]. A. It is not our plan to give you any 
 further information now. We only say that what was then 
 presented was dubious. Q. But I am to write about it. Was 
 it a materialization at all ? Is there such a thing ? A. You will 
 know all in due time, but that was not reliable. We urge you 
 to be careful. You are always careful, as you think. But be 
 wary as to generalizing too rapidly. There is in the manifesta- 
 tion of the lower spirits much deception, nor can you ever be
 
 Ch. XXV] Moses Compared with Mrs. Piper 347 
 
 sure that such is not being practised. It is so in all the mani- 
 festations in which the more material spirits are concerned. 
 Q. You do not tell me much. A. We do not purpose to do so. 
 We only warn. It was not reliable. Q. But I had my hand 
 in J. K.'s and the other on the medium's body. There could 
 be no deception there. A. On the medium's boot, but not on 
 his body, as Kabbila informs us. But we will go no further. 
 It is not our habit to go so far. Seek not further information. 
 It will not be given. We do not wish to communicate at length 
 now. You have done all that you are capable of doing. Q. 
 But I want to ask further. Are my senses good for nothing, 
 or am I so easily deceived? A. No, no. Neither. But you 
 know nothing of occult influence when deceiving spirits are 
 present. The mixture of the true and false would make it 
 impossible for you to arrive at fact. Hence have we warned 
 you so urgently to beware of the introduction of such. They 
 are fatal to our work. Cease now. 
 
 "tI:S:D. 
 
 "tR. [Rector.]" 
 
 And the general style of expression and the signatures ! It 
 all looks to me as if Moses had unconsciously dramatized the 
 whole thing, and imagining St. Paul, as later indicated, for 
 the role of " Imperator " had so much impressed himself as to 
 give his language the coloring it bears throughout, and, as 
 we shall see later, even to impress Hodgson and Mrs. 
 Piper. 
 
 But most of the dramatizations of Mrs. Piper are a differ- 
 ent matter. There are scores, probably hundreds, of them to 
 each one of Moses', and they are generally of people who are 
 known to have been real, and who are recognizable by their 
 friends. Imperator and his companions may have been real 
 too, but there is little in the nature of proof, and we shall 
 later meet something much like disproof. But there are good 
 reasons for giving some account of them. 
 
 Here is a characteristic bit of Moses's experiences from his 
 diary, quoted in Pr. IX, 71 : 
 
 " On an evening in the month of January, 1874, I repeatedly 
 
 said to Mrs. Speer, ' Who is Emily C ? Her name keeps 
 
 sounding in my ear.' Mrs. Speer replied that she did not know 
 anyone of that name. 'Yes,' I said very emphatically, 'there 
 is someone of that name passed over to the world of spirit.' . . . 
 It became a regular thing for us to receive a message giving 
 such facts as an obituary notice would contain. We therefore
 
 348 Possession(?) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 looked for them, and we found an announcement of the death 
 
 of 'Emily, widow of the late Captain C C .' On a 
 
 subsequent evening in the following year . . . she returned again. 
 Dr. Speer and I had gone out for a walk in the afternoon . . . and 
 
 at our seance in the evening came ' Emily C C .' I 
 
 inquired what brought her, and her answer was rapped out on 
 the table. ' You passed my grave.' ... At this time I never 
 went near a graveyard but I attracted some spirit, identified 
 afterwards as one whose body lay there. I said, ' No, that is 
 impossible; we have been near no graveyard,' and Dr. Speer 
 confirmed my impression. The communication, however, was 
 persistent, and we agreed that we would take the same walk 
 the next day. We did so, and at a certain place I had an 
 impulse to climb up and look over a wall . . . and my eye fell 
 
 at once on the grave of 'Emily C C ,' and on the 
 
 dates and particulars given to us, all exactly accurate." 
 
 As Moses intimates, it became a regular thing for him 
 to have such experiences; several are given. They seem 
 to mean that among the other superstitions with which his 
 mind was saturated was that of spirits haunting their graves. 
 But then how about that strange power to see through a 
 stone wall, or at least feel through one, which perhaps we are 
 all going to admit before long that some folks have, and 
 perhaps not ? In addition he seems to show here the subliminal 
 memory which, without the operator's knowledge, retains all 
 sorts of things that come out in the conditions where that do- 
 all and bear-all which we call the subliminal self has full swing. 
 This unlimited capacity even in the most ordinary man who 
 dreams, seems to point to something not really in the ordinary 
 man, but something greater, outside him, and occasionally 
 working through him. Is it the Cosmic Soul? 
 
 Here is another instance of Moses's overlooking points 
 obviously open to criticism of the faith that swalloweth all 
 things. I am not sure Saint Paul included that character- 
 istic, and I do not assert that Moses's faith may not have 
 been justified. He says (Pr. XI, 74) : 
 
 " There stands ... a short letter written automatically by me 
 in a peculiar archaic handwriting, phrased in a quaint old- 
 fashioned spelling. It is signed with the name of the spirit . . . 
 
 who was a man of mark 1 have since obtained a letter in 
 
 his handwriting, an old yellow document, preserved on account 
 of the autograph. The handwriting in my book is a fair imita-
 
 Ch. XXV] The Blanche Abercromby Case 349 
 
 tion of this, the signature is exact, and the piece of old-fash- 
 ioned spelling occurs exactly as it does in my book. This, it 
 was said, was purposely done as a point of evidence." 
 
 And similarly (p. 81) : 
 
 " I have had repeated cases of signatures which are 
 
 veritable facsimiles of those used by the persons in life; such, 
 for example, are the signatures of Beethoven, Mozart, and of 
 Swedenborg " 
 
 This would be more remarkable if the signatures were those 
 of private persons, which he would have been less apt to have 
 seen and forgotten having seen, but retained in his "sub- 
 liminal memory." Even the " archaic handwriting phrased 
 in a quaint old-fashioned spelling " may be similarly accounted 
 for. I don't say it must be. 
 
 Here is Myers's presentation (from Pr. XI, 96) of the cele- 
 brated (if a thing can be celebrated among a small part of 
 the public) "Blanche Abercromby" case which he calls 
 
 " in some ways the most remarkable of all, from the series of 
 chances which have been needful in order to establish its 
 veracity. The spirit in question is that of a lady known to 
 me, whom Mr. Moses had met, I believe, once only, and whom 
 I shall call Blanche Abercromby 
 
 " This lady died on a Sunday afternoon, about twenty years 
 ago, at a country house about two hundred miles from London. 
 Her death, which was regarded as an event of public interest, 
 was at once telegraphed to London, and appeared in Monday's 
 Times; but, of course, on Sunday evening no one in London, 
 save the Press and perhaps the immediate family, was cog- 
 nizant of the fact. It will be seen that on that evening, near 
 midnight, a communication, purporting to come directly from 
 her, was made to Mr. Moses at his secluded lodgings in the 
 north of London. The identity was some days later corrobo- 
 rated by a few lines purporting to come directly from her, and 
 to be in her handwriting. There is no reason to suppose that 
 Mr. Moses had even seen this handwriting. His one known 
 meeting with this lady and her husband had been at a stance 
 not, of course, of his own 
 
 " On receiving these messages Mr. Moses seems to have 
 mentioned them to no one, and simply gummed down the pages 
 in his MS. book, marking the book outside 'Private Matter.' 
 The book when placed in my hands was still thus gummed 
 down, although Mrs. Speer was cognizant of the communica- 
 tion. I opened the pages . . . and was surprised to find a brief
 
 350 Possession ( f) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Pi IV 
 
 letter which, though containing no definite facts, was entirely 
 characteristic of the Blanche Abercromby whom I had known. 
 ... I happened to know a son of hers sufficiently well to be able 
 to ask his aid and ... he lent me a letter for comparison. The 
 strong resemblance was at once obvious, but the A of the sur- 
 name was made in the letter in a way quite different from that 
 adopted in the automatic script. The son then allowed me 
 
 to study a long series of letters From these it appeared that 
 
 during the last year of her life she had taken to writing the 
 A (as her husband had always done) in the way in which it 
 was written in the automatic script." 
 
 Here is the equally celebrated Garfield case, but there does 
 not exist, so far as I am aware, a word of testimony regard- 
 ing it outside of Moses's diary, quoted in Pr. XI, 102: 
 
 "30, St. Peter's Bedford. 
 
 " September 20th, 1881, 10 A.M. This morning, on awaking 
 at 5.54 A.M., I was aware of a spirit who desired to communi- 
 cate. It turned out to be Mentor, with him B. Franklin, [Epes] 
 Sargent, and others. ^They told me in effect, 'The President 
 is gone. We were with him to the last. He died suddenly, 
 and all our efforts to keep him were unavailing. We labored 
 hard, for his life was of incalculable value to our country. He 
 would have done more to rescue it from shame than anyone 
 now left.' [Notwithstanding the universal sympathy and 
 cordial recognition of the President's many virtues, this opinion 
 was by no means universal among the best-informed Americans 
 " in the body " at the time, whatever may have been the 
 opinion in the " spirit world." H.H.] I asked why it had 
 been deemed necessary to come to me with the news. It was 
 replied that a period of great activity in the spirit world was 
 now being renewed, and that my sympathies with him and 
 with his work, and their own knowledge of me, had inclined 
 
 them to bring the news The evening papers Globe and 
 
 Echo which I purchased at 4.30 P.M., gave me the first mun- 
 dane information of the event. It is now stated that he died 
 at 10.50 P.M., and on the 19th (yesterday). That in English 
 time is 3.50 A.M. of this day, 20th, or two hours before I woke 
 and got the message." 
 
 Here is the famous steam-roller incident, the most striking 
 evidential piece of Moses's ostensibly heteromatic writing, and 
 there is much of the same kind. This is taken from his 
 diary (Pr. XI, 42) : 
 
 "February 20th, 1874 The Baron had previously mag- 
 netized me very strongly, and had rendered me more than usually 
 clairvoyant. He also recognized a spirit in the room, but
 
 Ch. XXV] The Steam Roller Case 351 
 
 thougjit it was the spirit of a living person. After dinner, 
 when we got upstairs, I felt an uncontrollable inclination to 
 write, and I asked the Baron to lay his hand upon my arm. 
 It began to move very soon, and I fell into a deep trance. As 
 far as I can gather from the witnesses, the hand then wrote 
 out, ' I killed myself to-day.' This was preceded by a very 
 rude drawing [" which resembled a horse fastened to a kind 
 of car or truck," Mr. Percival says in The Spiritualist of 
 March 27th], and then 'Under steam-roller, Baker-street, 
 medium passed,' [i.e., W. S. M., H.H.] was written. At the 
 same time I spoke in the trance and rose and apparently 
 motioned something away, saying, ' Blood ' several times. This 
 was repeated, and the spirit asked for prayer. Mrs. G. said a 
 few words of prayer, and I came out of the trance at last, 
 feeling very unwell. On the following day Dr. Speer and I 
 walked down to Baker-street and asked the policeman on duty 
 if any accident had occurred there. He told us that a man 
 had been killed by the steam-roller at 9 A.M " 
 
 Here is Mr. Percival's comment on the same incident 
 (Pr. XI, 76-78) : 
 
 " Neither he nor anyone present was aware that a man had 
 committed suicide there in the morning by throwing himself 
 under a steam-roller. A brief notice of the occurrence appeared 
 in the Pall Mall Gazette in the evening, but none of the party 
 
 had seen that paper It is worth remarking that on the front 
 
 of the steam-roller which was used in Baker-street a horse is 
 represented in brass, and this, perhaps, may serve to account 
 for its appearance in the medium's drawing, where we should 
 certainly not expect to find it." 
 
 Myers says (Pr. XI, 92) : 
 
 " Further information about this suicide was given by entry, 
 February 23, 1874. It is remarkable that ' Miss X,' a frequent 
 contributor to the Pr., then a child, was prevented by a monition 
 (as she informs me) from entering the street where the traces 
 of this incident were still risible." 
 
 " February 23rd, 1874. 
 
 " Q. I very much wish to communicate with Imperator. 
 FA long pause.] A. ' Whatever communication you hold must 
 be brief. You are unfit to commune now.' Q. That spirit 
 who communicated at Mrs. Gregory's. ("The place of the 
 steam-roller communication. H.H.] A. ' He was what he 
 said. It surprises us much that he should have been able to 
 attach himself to you. It was owing to your being near the 
 place where he met his bodily death. Do not direct your mind 
 strongly to the subject lest he vex you.' Q. What does he 
 want ? Can I help him ? A. ' He was wretched and sought
 
 352 Possession(f) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 help in ignorance. Prayer will aid him.' Q. Well, now, how 
 comes it that he woke at once, and Sunshine [an allusion to 
 somebody who had died earlier. H.H.] sleeps still? A. 'He 
 has not yet slept. It will be well if he gets repose which will 
 enable him to progress hereafter. . 
 
 "<tI:S:D. 
 
 "'xTheophilus.'" 
 
 The following bit of Moses's heteromatic writing refers 
 to the same incident (Pr. XI, 921) : 
 
 " February 24th, 1874. 
 
 " Q. Is the spirit unharmed by such a ghastly mutila- 
 tion as that ? . . . A. The spirit body is not to be harmed by 
 injury to the body of earth otherwise than by the shock. And 
 the very shock might stir it rudely into action, and excite it 
 rather than lull it into quiescence. You are not now in a con- 
 dition which enables us to go far into the subject. You have 
 far from recovered your spiritual tone as yet. Q. Then that 
 spirit haunted the place of its departure? A. It is usually 
 so that a spirit which has so rudely been severed from the body 
 would hover near even for a long time after. Q. How did it 
 come to pitch on me? A. You passed by, and being in a 
 highly sensitive condition the disturbed spirit would naturally 
 be attracted to your sphere, even as iron is attracted to a power- 
 ful magnet. Moreover, when he came near he would be enabled 
 to discern you by the aura which surrounds you and which 
 is visible to the spirit eye. Light and attraction would both 
 enable him to recognize a channel of communication which he 
 longed for. You have been told before that an aura surrounds 
 all material objects, and that aura in the case of a medium is 
 
 recognizable afar off by spirit eyes All spirits know this, 
 
 though all do not [suspicious grammar for such a very heavy 
 
 intellectual swell. H.H.] profoundly understand it Hence 
 
 it is that the highly developed are more open to attack from 
 the grosser spirits. Q. Then to spirit eye, the aura declares 
 the character? A. To the more developed and progressed 
 [He has just intimated that the spirit in question was anything 
 but "developed and progressed." H.H.] it does so, and hence 
 the concealment is not possible in our spheres. The spirit 
 carries its character impressed on the very atmosphere it 
 breathes. This is a law of our being. Q. Very beautiful, but 
 very awful! A. Nay, friend, not so: but a great safeguard, 
 seeing that we know we are open to the gaze and the knowledge 
 of all. It is well that it should be so. We pause." 
 
 To me all this sort of thing seems to speak as plainly 
 of the imagination of the Anglican clergyman, as Judge Ed-
 
 Ch. XXV] Reading of Closed Books by " Spirits " 353 
 
 rounds' visions speak of the imagination of a man of matter- 
 of-fact mind who, presumably, as such men often do, loved 
 such reading as the Apocalypse and Milton and Bunyan, and 
 who fell into the role of "medium." 
 
 But admitting all that, how account for the testimony of 
 the Speers and half a dozen other good people to Moses's tel- 
 ekinetic performance his lights and music and materializa- 
 tions, and the true things he told which he could not have 
 learned by any means we are as yet familiar with ? 
 
 The Reading of Closed Books by " Spirits " 
 
 If the following is correctly told it indicates something 
 more than telepathy. It is an alleged interview, with the 
 answers automatically written, between Moses and some 
 "spirit " whose name is not given (Pr. S. P. R., XI, 106) : 
 
 " Q. Can you read? A. No, friend, I cannot, but Zachary 
 Gray can, and Rector. I am not able to materialize myself, or 
 to command the elements. Q. Are either of those spirits 
 
 here ? A. I will bring one by and by. I will send Rector 
 
 is here. Q. I am told you can read. Is that so? Can you 
 read a book? A. [Spirit handwriting changed.] Yes, friend, 
 with difficulty. Q. Will you write for me the last line of the 
 first book of the ^Eneid? A. Wait. Omnibus errantem terris 
 et fluctibus astas. [This was right.] Q. Quite so. But I 
 might have known it. Can you go to the book-case, take the 
 last book but one on the second shelf, and read me the last 
 paragraph of the ninety-fourth page? I have not seen it, and 
 do not even know its name. A. ' I will curtly prove by a short 
 historical narrative, that popery is a novelty, and has gradually 
 arisen or grown up since the primitive and pure time of Chris- 
 tianity, not only since the apostolic age, but even since the 
 lamentable union of kirk and the state by Constantino.' [The 
 book on examination proved to be a queer one called Roger's 
 Antipopopriestian, an attempt to liberate and purify Christian- 
 ity from Popery, Politikirkality, and Priestrule. The extract 
 given above was accurate, but the word ' narrative ' substituted 
 for ' account.'] Q. How came I to pitch upon so appropriate 
 a sentence? A. I know not, my friend. It was by coinci- 
 dence. The word was changed by error. I knew it when it 
 was done, but would not change. Q. How do you read? You 
 wrote more slowly, and by fits and starts. A. I wrote what 
 I remembered, and then I went for more. It is a special effort 
 to read, and useful only as a test. Your friend was right last 
 night; we can read, but only when conditions are very good.
 
 354 Possession(f) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 We will read once again, and write and then impress you of 
 the book: 'Pope is the last great writer of that school of 
 poetry, the poetry of the intellect, or rather of the intellect 
 mingled with the fancy.' That is truly written. Go and take 
 the eleventh book on the same shelf. [I took a book called 
 Poetry, Romance, and Rhetoric.} It will open at the page for 
 you. Take it and read, and recognize our power, and the per- 
 mission which the great and good God gives us, to show you 
 of our power over matter. To Him be glory. Amen. [The 
 book opened at page 145, and there was the quotation perfectly 
 true. I had not seen the book before: certainly had no idea of 
 its contents] [These books were in Dr. Speer's library. 
 F. W. H. M.] " 
 
 Here is the last veridical heteromatism quoted from Moses 
 in the Pr. S. P. E. It is in XI, 103. Mrs. Speer writes: 
 
 "Dr. Speer died February 9th, 1889, and shortly after his 
 death Mr. Moses received from him a remarkable proof of 
 identity, of which he wrote me an account at the time 
 
 " Mr. S. M. came one Sunday to dine with us. He looked 
 strange and remarked to me, ' I have seen your husband again, 
 and he sent you a message which I do not understand.' He 
 seemed troubled, and I saw he was unable to take any dinner. 
 Suddenly he took out his pocket-book and rapidly wrote some- 
 thing in one of the sheets, tore it out, and handed it to me, 
 saying, ' Can you make anything out of this ? ' I saw a messag<\ 
 
 written 'Tell dearest all's well.' The word omitted was 
 
 a pet name he often called me when alone. I think no one 
 had ever heard it, and I am quite sure Mr. Moses never had. 
 The name is too absurd to print, as pet names often are " 
 
 Now to sum up Moses. The following case was not by 
 automatic writing, but by raps. I give it because of its 
 instructiveness regarding Moses's mental make-up. He says 
 (Pr. XI, 72) : 
 
 "Perhaps I may here mention a case in which I endeavored 
 to mislead a communicating spirit but without any success. 
 If there be truth in the allegations of the too-clever people that 
 constitute the Society for Psychical Eesearch [Moses resigned 
 in 1886, disgusted because his associates would not swallow 
 everything that he would. H.H.] there should have been con- 
 veyed from my brain to that of the impersonal entity with 
 which I communicated the falsity I had fabricated. [This is 
 a sheer Mosesism, see below. H.H.] There came a spirit 
 
 who represented herself to be my grandmother 1 then asked 
 
 if she remembered me as a child. She did. I proceeded to 
 detail two imaginary incidents such as might occur in a child's
 
 Ch. XXV] Defects of the Subliminal Theory 355 
 
 life. I did it so naturally that my friends were completely 
 
 deceived Not so, however, my ' Intelligent Operator at the 
 
 other end of the line.' She refused altogether to assent to my 
 story. She stopped me by a simple remark that she remembered 
 nothing of the sort. ... I certainly rose from the table convinced 
 that I had been talking to a person that desired to tell the 
 truth, and that was extremely careful to be exact in statement." 
 
 If the spirit was an echo of Moses's self, of course it would 
 not echo what Moses knew to be false (except so far as some 
 folks delight in what is false, which apparently Moses did 
 not). But assuming it to be an echo, the dramatic char- 
 acter of the responses would remain to be accounted for. 
 Yet even that would not seem difficult to anybody who has 
 successfully written dialogue. Such a person knows that, in 
 such a mind, thoughts readily take the shape of dialogue and 
 the dramatic tinge naturally resulting. But admitting that, 
 we still have to account for the fact that these dramatic 
 impersonations often appear in the automatic writing and 
 trance utterances of people who never show any dramatic 
 power in the ways we consider normal ; and then of course the 
 difficulty, with difficulties generally, is pitchforked on to " the 
 subliminal self." This has been done until, to at least my 
 perhaps irreverent imagination, the strictly individual sub- 
 liminal self is beginning to look like a joke. And yet the 
 readiness of so many intelligent people to attribute every- 
 thing superusual to it is one of many circumstances that 
 are making it loom into an immensity of which perhaps we 
 have had some glimpse, but of which their imaginations do 
 not yet all seem to have caught the significance. 
 
 All this carries instruction regarding the queer intellect 
 of Moses an intellect that could assume that the falsity 
 would be conveyed, but that the telepathy would stop at the 
 convenient point of not conveying the fact that it was a 
 falsity; and an intellect that could utterly ignore so obvious 
 a reflection from himself, and attribute the phenomena en- 
 tirely to another intelligence. This last point, however, may 
 not be fairly open to criticism regarding the mind of a firm 
 believer: the criticism, if directed at all, should be directed 
 to the belief. 
 
 There is a degree of ingenuousness in the following sen- 
 tence which, especially when associated with things that have
 
 356 Possession (?) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 been noted before, inclines me to quote it as an element to 
 be considered in estimating Moses's mind (Pr. IX, 291) : 
 
 " So closed a most impressive seance ; in which the opinion 
 of the intelligences themselves declared unmistakably [Italics 
 mine. H.H.] for the Theory of Departed Spirits. Though 
 this would not form any strong argument to convince one who 
 had made up his mind in an opposite direction, still it must be 
 allowed to have its weight." 
 
 The following passage, too, is so peculiar that the reader 
 may care to take it into consideration (Pr. IX, 291) : 
 
 " Taken in connection with other collateral evidence such as 
 the materialized spirit form, the strongly marked individuality 
 which pervades communications from each particular spirit, the 
 totally different nature of the knock in each case, and the fact 
 of certain tests being given, the balance of evidence must be 
 allowed to be strong. 
 
 " For instance, I see a materialized form which bears re- 
 semblance to a deceased friend (Step No. 1). I see that form 
 standing by during the progress of phenomena (Step No. 2). 
 A knock different from any other is given (Step No. 3). That 
 knock gives a communication which purports to come from the 
 person whose form I see near me (Step No. 4). Questioned, 
 that communicating intelligence asserts in the most solemn 
 manner that it is what it pretends to be, and persists in that 
 statement on being adjured (Step No. 5). On being further 
 pressed a test known only to myself is given to prove identity 
 (Step No. 6). That information is confirmed by other com- 
 municating intelligences, who knock with their own special 
 knock, and are apparently distinct individualities (Step No. 
 
 " Step No. 5," I think, will be apt to strike the hard- 
 headed reader as showing the same ingenuousness manifested 
 in the quotation before the last. Moses continues: 
 
 " This forms a strong link [Does he mean chain ? There are 
 seven elements. H.H.] of credence in favor of the theory 
 advanced by the intelligences themselves. On the other side 
 is the manifest fact that communications purporting to come 
 from our deceased friends are not always trustworthy, and that 
 they are generally marked by evidences of intellectual weak- 
 nesses. It may be that the falsehoods are traceable to lying 
 spirits who personate spirits of good, and that the low order 
 (intellectually speaking) of the communications may be ac- 
 counted for by the tortuous channel through which they come 
 and the medium through which they have been filtered. But
 
 Ch. XXV] Difficulties Support Genuineness 357 
 
 the explanation is not perfectly satisfactory. And there is the 
 additional stumbling-block that it is prime facie extremely 
 unlikely that the spirits of the noble, the learned, and the 
 pure should be concerned in the production of physical and 
 intellectual phenomena which, when not silly, are frequently 
 mischievous, and when distinctly true are not new, and being 
 new are not true." 
 
 It is now held by common consent that these communica- 
 tions, no matter if thoroughly genuine, are, in their nature, 
 difficult to make; and the reader as he goes on will find 
 growing reason to believe the same. Probably he may even 
 come to regard imperfection as a tag of genuineness. 
 
 And connected with this hypothetical difficulty of com- 
 munication is another point not hypothetical at all. Plainly 
 it is not part of the cosmic order (or divine plan, if you 
 prefer) that at our present stage of evolution we should 
 know much of any possible future life, even if there is one. 
 There is more to say on these points later: at present it is 
 enough if we continue our examination with a realization 
 that it is a priori probable that communication between this 
 little universe of our experience and the presumably greater 
 one beyond, would be difficult, and not to any great degree 
 possible to our present faculties or consistent with our pres- 
 ent duties. And yet it does seem possible that we have lat- 
 terly attained a degree of evolution consistent with our having 
 something more than the say-so of prophets to assure us 
 that a future life exists and is happy. 
 
 If these are reasonable positions we need not take much 
 account of the fact that the communications are frequently 
 of the character Moses calls a " stumbling-block." My read- 
 ing, however, has not, that I remember, covered any appar- 
 ently genuine ones which were " mischievous " in any worse 
 sense than sportive, though there may have been such. When 
 I say " genuine " of course I mean only honest not deliber- 
 ately fraudulent. I do not mean the word to endorse a 
 spiritistic interpretation. 
 
 The notion of " lying spirits," in which Moses and many 
 others deal, is of course a part of the traditional theology, 
 but it hardly seems necessary, and will probably be found 
 peculiarly repulsive by those who regard evil as simply an 
 exaggeration or disproportion, which includes a lack of the
 
 358 Possession (?) in-Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 good, which is incident to the imperfections of the present 
 life. 
 
 A control purporting to be Moses, later gave up " lying 
 spirits " and a good deal more that was his. See Chapter 
 XXXV. 
 
 Moses goes on to say (Pr. IX, 292) : 
 
 " The argument that God permits for the establishment of a 
 fading faith, manifestations such as these, would satisfactorily 
 dispose of all objections." 
 
 I should be a bit slow to accept this argument unless the 
 manifestations were clearer, but Myers tells us (Pr. IX, 
 293-4) : 
 
 "Mr. Moses came in a few months more to believe com- 
 pletely in the actual identity of the communicating intelli- 
 gences. But this passage in his diary [i.e., the preceding, not 
 all of which have I quoted. H.H.] tends to show (what on 
 other testimony also I believe to have been the case) that he 
 was by no means anxious to believe in, or to defer to, the 
 claims of alleged 'spirit guides/ His previous Anglican con- 
 victions were very strong; and his intellectual habit of mind 
 inclined rather to the side of stubbornness than of pliancy." 
 
 When even Myers perpetrates such a phrase as " intellectual 
 habit of mind " we can well allow anybody the margin for 
 inadvertences that I suggested should be allowed to Moses, 
 and that we all occasionally need. 
 
 We have to recognize, however, in his relations to his 
 superusual experiences, that in the last quarter of the nine- 
 teenth century he was, as Myers reminds us, an Anglican 
 clergyman, and that his experiences strongly appear to be 
 in writing colored by his type of mind. If we want any 
 farther illustrations of what that type was, they abound in the 
 next extract. 
 
 From a letter of Mr. Moses to Mrs. Speer, dated April, 
 1876 (Pr. XI, 63) : 
 
 " I send you a package which you will see is ' spiritual.' 
 
 It contains a fragment of spirit-drapery sweetened by some 
 spirit musk. Magus is the operator, and I believe Mentor 
 with him. At any rate, those two have been at work. I think 
 that the musk smells more powerfully than usual. I had a 
 long and very beautiful communication from Imperator yes- 
 terday (Easter Day) which I am minded to copy out and print.
 
 Ch. XXV] Letter, Moses to Mrs. Speer 359 
 
 Easter Day seems to be a favorite with them. I have had a 
 message on that day every year. The idea is the passage from 
 Death to Life symbolized by the Crucifixion and Resurrection, 
 and typifying the death of Self Denial, and Self Sacrifice lead- 
 ing to the Regeneration or Resurrection of the Spirit from dead 
 Matter to the higher life. It is well worked out, and very 
 striking. There was also a communication written out about 
 the state of affairs in the spiritual world. You must read what 
 Imperator says. He does not speak hopefully, and wishes us 
 not to meet yet, though he evidently contemplates the resuming 
 of our circle hereafter. But by that time, he says, my physical 
 mediumship will either be absolutely under control, so as to 
 be no longer fraught with danger, or will have ceased. The 
 latter seems to be implied, though he seems to hint that material 
 evidence will always be forthcoming. He is very decisive in 
 saying what he does, and says that we are none of us ever left. 
 It gives me a very strong idea of prearranged plans and of 
 wise and powerful protection. He evidently looks far ahead; 
 his plans are now for the far future, and the mind is first pre- 
 pared. I am quite conscious of that. 
 
 " I shall probably hear more before we see each other. I 
 heard nothing of the Moravians this year." 
 
 This refers to a poltergeist racket alleged to be raised 
 every Easter by the ghosts of people buried in a Moravian 
 churchyard near which Moses lived. Apparently he could 
 not be near a churchyard without stirring up a ghost. He 
 says so himself (Pr. XI, 71). He continues the present 
 theme : 
 
 "Nor was I conscious of any 'presence/ which looks like 
 a withdrawal from the objective. But Mentor's drapery and 
 musk are objective enough. [' The letter from which these 
 extracts are taken' (adds Mrs. Speer), 'still retains the scent 
 of the musk referred to at the commencement, as "sweetening 
 the spirit-drapery," although it was written nearly seventeen 
 years ago. The drapery is lost, but the strong perfume of musk 
 remains fresh and pungent.'] " 
 
 On May 2nd, 1880, occurred the last sitting which Mrs. 
 Speer has recorded. She concludes her records in Light 
 (October 21st, 1893) with the following words: 
 
 "I have now come to the end of the seances at which any 
 notes were properly taken. Other meetings we have since had 
 occasionally, and at times Imperator spoke through Mr. S. M. 
 until within a few months of his decease. Raps were sometimes 
 heard and messages given. Musk and coral were also brought 
 and scattered over the room at several different times. Half
 
 360 Possession (?) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 that took place could not be recorded, and often the addresses 
 were imperfectly taken down. It is also impossible to give 
 any idea of the impression produced upon the circle by the 
 beauty and refinement of some of the manifestations, or by the 
 power and dignity of Imperator's influence and personality." 
 
 "Musk," of all perfumes, for "refinement"! I confess 
 that the effect on me of Imperator's musk and other " prop- 
 erties," and so much of his utterances as I have cared to 
 read, has been something like that of an ordinary service and 
 sermon in a very " high " church. Whether such would be 
 the effect on others, I don't know; and whether such an 
 effect answers to one's spiritual needs is a personal matter. 
 
 At first one result of the effect on me was an impulse to 
 relegate the whole thing to the limbo of buried superstitions. 
 But then I reflected that, though Moses's manifestations don't 
 happen to suit my tastes, a large portion of Mrs. Piper's, 
 outside of those from the Imperator group, do, and that 
 fact is to me an argument for their genuineness, though not 
 a proof of it. Why, then, shouldn't the manifestations 
 through Moses be suited to people of a different taste, of 
 whom there are a great many more than of my taste, and 
 some of whom, to judge by the portrait of Dr. and Mrs. 
 Speer, and of Moses too, are certainly in some respects a 
 great deal better people than I am? 
 
 If the order of nature really does permit communications 
 with intelligences beyond our ordinary observation, there ap- 
 pears no reason why those communications should not be con- 
 formed to the tastes and capacities of the people participating 
 in them, and should not be credited to spirits possessing, in 
 the respective cases, congeniality with the mediums. People 
 who like musk go to heaven, I suppose, as well as those who 
 don't, and are just as apt to talk back to earth, and if Moses, 
 with all his virtues, happened not only to like musk, but also 
 to be a prig (I don't know well enough to say whether he was 
 or not), why should not his intimates in the other world like 
 musk, and be prigs too? 
 
 But Mrs. Piper was nothing of that kind, nor by a long 
 shot was Hodgson, unless Imperator and his gang corrupted 
 him toward the last of his life here, which, as will be seen, 
 doesn't seem indicated by Hodgson's alleged post-mortem com- 
 munications ; and yet, as will also be seen, the Imperator group
 
 Ch. XXV] Moses' "Spirit Teachings" 361 
 
 (or at least some manifestations doubtfully professing to be 
 they) swooped down on him and Mrs. Piper too. 
 
 Perhaps my distaste for all that sort of thing is abnormal. 
 If so, I am of course not entitled to pass judgment. As the 
 earth is big enough for all of us, so presumably will heaven 
 be too, and the change in the twinkling of an eye probably 
 will not be of all of us to the same pattern; and so the in- 
 dication of there being a variety of patterns ought not to be 
 taken as an argument that all the indications are fallacious. 
 
 Of what were the profundities which Imperator wrote 
 through Moses, Myers gave little idea. I don't find the 
 Spirit Teachings in which Moses chronicled them, a book 
 over which I care to spend much time. I did give an evening 
 to it, however, and found that it expresses the reactions 
 of the soul of an Anglican clergyman with itself or kindred 
 souls. For those who are fond of tracing the evolution of 
 ideas of questionable present value, from primitive peoples 
 down to the primitive-minded people to-day, the book may 
 have interest and, possibly, value. But it will not do much 
 for those who find the days microscopically short for keeping 
 up with live interests. 
 
 Here is a fair enough sample. Perhaps you can find where 
 the superhuman wisdom comes in: I can't. But I can find a 
 good deal of old-fashioned anthropomorphism. 
 
 M. A. Oxon : Spirit Teachings, London, 1907, p. 16 : 
 
 " The other, the philosopher, hampered by no theories of what 
 ought to be, and what therefore must be bound by no sub- 
 servience to sectarian opinion, to the dogmas of a special school, 
 free from prejudice, receptive of truth, whatever that truth may 
 be, so it be proven he seeks into the mysteries of Divine wis- 
 dom, and, searching, finds his happiness. He need hare no fear 
 of exhausting the treasures, they are without end. His joy 
 throughout life shall be to gather ever richer stores of knowledge, 
 truer ideas of God. The union of those two the philanthropist 
 and the philosopher makes the perfect man. Those who unite 
 the two. progress further than spirits who progress alone. 
 
 " ' His life,' you say. Is life eternal? 
 
 " Yes ; we have every reason to believe so. Life is of two 
 stages progressive and contemplative. We, who are still pro- 
 gressive, and who hope to progress for countless myriads of ages 
 (as you eay), after the farthest point to which your finite mind
 
 362 Possessionf?) in Heteromatic Writing [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 can reach, we know naught of the life of contemplation. But we 
 believe that far f ar in the vast hereafter there will be a period 
 at which progressive souls will eventually arrive, when progress 
 has brought them to the very dwelling-place of the Omnipotent, 
 and that there they will lay aside their former state, and bask 
 in the full light of Deity, in contemplation of all the secrets of 
 the universe. Of this we cannot tell you. It is too high. Soar 
 not to such vast heights. Life is unending, as you count it, but 
 you are concerned with the approach to its threshold, not with 
 the inner temple. 
 
 " Of course. Do you know more of God than you did on 
 earth f 
 
 " We know more of the operations of His love more of the 
 operations of that beneficent Power which controls and guides 
 the worlds. We know of Him, but know Him not; nor shall 
 know, as you would seek to know, until we enter on the life of 
 contemplation. He is known to us only by His acts." 
 
 At the close of Myers's second paper on Moses, in Pr. XI, 
 113, he said : " At some future date, should my readers desire 
 it, I shall hope to record some more of the Moses phenomena," 
 but he did not, although before his death he had nearly six 
 years to do it in. 
 
 So far, you may think the attention paid to Moses and 
 his friends unjustified. But they appear again in some very 
 puzzling ways. 
 
 Whoever or whatever the Imperator group may be, there is 
 this important point regarding them: they were contrary to 
 Moses's previous beliefs, and he fought and fought them until 
 at last they overthrew his previous beliefs. And yet, those 
 who fight the obvious implications of these strange experi- 
 ences, and the vastly more obvious implications of experiences 
 stranger still (some of which we shall learn later) say that 
 these opinions contrary to his own, came from the deepest 
 and best and wisest stratum of his own nature. So they say 
 that a similar overturning in a dream, of a terribly dangerous 
 opinion of my own, apparently by a discarnate person deeply 
 interested in my welfare, was done by myself. My guess 
 that all these are enlightened and led by the Cosmic Inflow 
 may be absurd, any other guess may be absurd, but among 
 all possible absurdities, can any other be as absurd as that the 
 agency that contradicts and overthrows a man's deepest con- 
 victions is himself?
 
 Ch. XXV] Moses' Atmosphere Oppressive 363 
 
 To go from Moses to the other heteromatists seems like 
 going from a close room an oriental close room into the 
 open air; and I say this despite a very vivid recollection, not 
 altogether canny, of Mrs. Piper in trance : for I also remem- 
 ber the naturalness of her controls, contrasted with the stilted- 
 ness of those of Moses. To many of us a future life in their 
 company would be a doubtful blessing; while with Mrs. 
 Verrall's and Mrs. Holland's and Mrs. Piper's people, at 
 least before Imperator and his entourage appeared among 
 them, it would apparently retain whatever of attractiveness 
 life has here, with immunity from many of its ills.
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 DRAMATIC "POSSESSION "(?) EARLY CASES 
 
 WE now leave for a time the heteromatic writing form of 
 apparent possession, and take up the dramatic form. We 
 have records of apparent possession from far back of the 
 Delphic priestess inspired or intoxicated by her subterranean 
 fumes, down to our own time, and through varieties of priests 
 and seers similarly affected by their favorite tipples or by 
 hypnosis or auto-suggestion or spirits, if you see fit to look 
 at it in that way. 
 
 We will begin with a few cases in modern times previous 
 to the records of the S. P. R. 
 
 As I have often said, there are no abrupt transitions in 
 Nature. 
 
 Possession and telesthesia insensibly shade into each other. 
 Which was Foster's experiencing the pain in the following? 
 (Bartlett, op. cit., 146) : 
 
 From the Melbourne Argus: 
 
 " I took a slip of paper, and holding it in my hand on a card, 
 carefully concealed from other eyes than my own, wrote, ' Have 
 
 you seen ? ' giving the name of a cousin of mine. ... I folded 
 
 the paper and handed it towards him. As soon as he touched 
 it, and before it left my hand, he rejoined, ' She says she has 
 
 seen , and what is more, he is here now. He is standing 
 
 behind your chair.' And after a moment's pause he added, ' He 
 was killed.' I said, ' Yes. How ? ' and was told to point pri- 
 vately to the letters of the alphabet on a card and the reply 
 would be rapped out. I pointed and raps came at the letters 
 DROW at which moment Mr. Foster, who could not have 
 seen what I was doing, put his hand suddenly on his side and 
 exclaimed, 'What a pain! He was killed by a fall. And I 
 have a vision of water a fall in water,' the truth being that 
 my cousin hurt his side in plunging into the St. George's 
 Baths, Liverpool, and was drowned before it was suspected that 
 he was doing more than indulging in a prolonged dive." 
 364
 
 Ch. XXVI] Foster's Apparent " Possession " 365 
 
 Here we reach apparently full possession (Bartlett, op. cit. t 
 93): 
 
 From the Sacramento Record, December 8, 1873 : 
 
 " Foster at one time seized A.'s hand, exclaiming, ' God bless 
 you, my dear boy, my son. I am thankful I at last may speak 
 to you. I want you to know I am your father, who loved you 
 in life and lores you still. I am near to you; a thin veil alone 
 separates us. Good-by. I am your father, Abijah A .' 
 
 " ' Good heavens ! ' exclaimed A., ' that was my father's 
 name, his tone, his manner, his action.' 
 
 " ' And,' said Foster, ' it was a good influence ; he was a man 
 of large veneration.' " 
 
 I said that the above indicated possession. But it is not 
 possession to the extent of complete expulsion of the original 
 consciousness, as in the trances of Home, Moses, and Mrs. 
 Piper. 
 
 And which is the following? (Bartlett, op. cit., 103) : 
 
 " [Letter to editor, written Nov. 30, 1874] 
 
 " New York Daily Graphic : . .. He told me he saw the spirit 
 of an old woman close to me, describing most perfectly my 
 grandmother, and repeating : ' Resodeda, Resodeda is here ; she 
 kisses her grandson.' Arising from his chair, Foster embraced 
 and kissed me in the same peculiar way as my grandmother did 
 when alive." 
 
 But here the possession seems complete (Bartlett, op. dt. t 
 140). From the Melbourne Daily Age: 
 
 " Mr. Foster. . . in answer to the question, What he died of? 
 suddenly interrupted, ' Stay, this spirit will enter and possess 
 me,' and instantaneously his whole body was seized with quiv- 
 ering convulsions, the eyes were introverted, the face swelled, 
 and the mouth and hands were spasmodically agitated. Another 
 change, and there sat before me the counterpart of the figure 
 of my departed friend, stricken down with complete paralysis, 
 just as he was on his death-bed. The transformation was so 
 life-like, if I may use the expression, that I fancied I could 
 detect the very features and physiognomical changes that 
 passed across the visage of my dying friend. The kind of 
 paralysis was exactly represented, with the palsied hand ex- 
 tended to me to shake, as in the case of the original. Mr. Foster 
 recovered himself when I touched it, and he said in reply 
 to one of my companions that he had completely lost his own 
 identity during the fit, and felt like waves of water flowing all 
 over his body, from the crown downwards."
 
 366 Dramatic "Possession" (?). Early Cases [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 Here is a still more remarkable case from Stillman (op. cit. f 
 I, 192). The medium was, I believe, the one in the hetero- 
 matic writing already taken from Stillman. The possession 
 seems to have been throughout free from trance. 
 
 "I asked Harvey [the control, Stillman's cousin. H.H.] if 
 he had seen old Turner, the landscape painter, since his death, 
 which had taken place not very long before. The reply was 
 'Yes,' and I then asked what he was doing, the reply being a 
 pantomime of painting. I then asked if Harvey could bring 
 Turner there, to which the reply was, ' I do not know ; I will 
 go and see,' upon which Miss A. said, ' This influence [Harvey's. 
 H.H.] is going away it is gone'; and after a short pause 
 added, ' There is another influence coming, in that direction,' 
 pointing over her left shoulder. ' I don't like it,' and she shud- 
 dered slightly, but presently sat up in her chair with a most 
 extraordinary personation of the old painter in manner, in the 
 look out from under the brow and the pose of the head. It 
 was as if the ghost of Turner, as I had seen him at Griffiths's, 
 eat in the chair, and it made my flesh creep to the very tips 
 of my fingers, as if a spirit sat before me. Miss A. exclaimed, 
 ' This influence has taken complete possession of me, as none 
 of the others did. I am obliged to do what it wants me to.' 
 I asked if Turner would write his name for me, to which she 
 replied by a sharp, decided negative sign. I then asked if he 
 would give me some advice about my painting, remembering 
 Turner's kindly invitation and manner when I saw him. This 
 proposition was met by the same decided negative, accompanied 
 by the fixed and sardonic stare which the girl had put on at 
 the coming of the new influence. This disconcerted me, and 
 I then explained to my brother what had been going on, as, 
 the questions being mental, he had no clue to the pantomime. 
 I said that as an influence which purported to be Turner was 
 present, and refused to answer any questions, I supposed there 
 was nothing more to be done. 
 
 " But Miss A. still sat unmoved and helpless, so we waited. 
 Presently she remarked that the influence wanted her to do 
 something she knew not what, only that she had to get up and 
 go across the room, which she did with the feeble step of an 
 old man. She crossed the room and took down from the wall 
 a colored French lithograph, and, coming to me, laid it on the 
 table before me, and by gesture called my attention to it. She 
 then went through the pantomime of stretching a sheet of 
 paper on a drawing-board, then that of sharpening a lead pencil, 
 following it up by tracing the outlines of the subject in the 
 lithograph. Then followed in similar pantomime the choosing 
 of a water-color pencil, noting carefully the necessary fineness 
 of the point, and then the washing-in of a drawing, broadly.
 
 Ch. XXVI] The Stillman-Turner Case 367 
 
 Miss A. seemed much amused by all this, but as she knew 
 nothing of drawing she understood nothing of it Then with 
 the pencil and her pocket handkerchief she began taking out the 
 lights, ' rubbing-out,' as the technical term is. This seemed to 
 me so contrary to what I conceived to be the execution of 
 Turner that I interrupted with the question, ' Do you mean to 
 say that Turner rubbed out his lights?' to which she gave 
 the affirmative sign. I asked further if in a drawing which I 
 then had in my mind, the well-known ' Llanthony Abbey,' the 
 central passage of sunlight and shadow through rain was done 
 in that way, and she again gave the affirmative reply, emphatic- 
 ally. I was so firmly convinced to the contrary that I was 
 now persuaded that there was a simulation of personality, such 
 as was generally the case with the public mediums, and I 
 said to my brother, who had not heard any of my questions [He 
 says above that they were mental. H.H.], that this was another 
 humbug, and then repeated what had passed, saying that Turner 
 could not have worked in that way. 
 
 " Six weeks later I sailed for England, and, on arriving in 
 London, I went at once to see Ruskin, and told him the whole 
 story. He declared the contrariness manifested by the medium 
 to be entirely characteristic of Turner, and had the drawing 
 in question down for examination. We scrutinized it closely, 
 and both recognized beyond dispute that the drawing had been 
 executed in the way that Miss A. indicated. Ruskin advised 
 me to send an account of the affair to the Cornhill, which I did; 
 but it was rejected, as might have been expected in the state 
 of public opinion at that time, and I can easily imagine 
 Thackeray putting it into the basket in a rage. 
 
 "I offer no interpretation of the facts which I have here 
 recorded, but I have no hesitation in saying that they com- 
 pleted and fixed my conviction of the existence of invisible and 
 independent intelligences to which the phenomena were due." 
 
 To me they seem the nearest I have come to a communica- 
 tion of something not known to any earthly intelligence, and 
 yet it may have been so known.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 PRELIMINARY REGARDING THE S. P. R. SITTINGS 
 
 IT is again one of the classifications whose inevitable arbi- 
 trariness I have harped upon to illustrate the unity of things, 
 that now places before us as a separate category the sittings 
 of Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson, and a few others. I prefer 
 to use the space mainly for the two named, as the best. Their 
 manifestations were in trance, and though the voice no longer 
 takes part, gestures still do in a remarkable degree. 
 
 Mrs. Piper's sittings for communications in response to 
 ordinary human interests, with scientific experiment only as 
 incidental, are reported in Pr. VI, VIII, XIII, XIV, 
 XVI, XXIII, and XXIV. Sittings with special view to cross- 
 correspondence and very tedious sittings most of them are, 
 though productive in response to close study are reported in 
 XXII and XXIV. Cross-correspondences are two or more 
 " messages " through different sensitives which are meaning- 
 less taken separately, but significant when taken together. 
 Such cases seem to prove a mind outside of the sensitive's. 
 More of Mrs. Piper's sittings are reported for the first time 
 in Chapters XXVIII and XXXVI of the present work. 
 
 Mrs. Thompson's sittings are reported in Pr. XVII and 
 XVIII. 
 
 The principal features that set the S. P. K. sittings apart 
 from others are that they are 
 
 (a) better reported, sometimes stenographically, and al- 
 ways at least by competent and trained observers taking notes, 
 or by the medium's own script; 
 
 (6) better guarded against fraud, though in the light of 
 the vast evidence accumulated during the last thirty years, 
 bothering with the idea of deliberate fraud, even in the primi- 
 tively authenticated cases of Foster and Moses, seems silly; 
 
 (c) with the possible exception of my Chapters XXVIII 
 and XXXVI, infinitely better edited and commented upon.
 
 Ch. XXVII] Superior Sitters and Controls 369 
 
 Since 1882 these matters, previously neglected, have received 
 the closest attention of some of the best minds in both hemi- 
 spheres ; 
 
 (d) evoked by vastly better sitters largely the editors 
 and commentators above referred to; 
 
 (e) emanating from vastly better alleged controls whether 
 actual personalities or appropriate and suggestive memories in 
 the minds of survivors. Latterly they profess to be many of 
 the eminent sitters alluded to of course after their deaths. 
 Among the recent alleged controls have been not only Moses 
 himself, Myers, and Hodgson, but also the equally high in- 
 telligences of " George Pelham," Gurney, and Sidgwick, who 
 had not been habitual sitters. There have been from these 
 controls and others, sittings which in number, variety, veri- 
 similitude, and dramatic quality are as much superior to other 
 sittings as illumination from the sun is superior to that from 
 the moon. 
 
 The mediums, as already indicated, vary very much in effec- 
 tiveness, just as all machines for communication vary their 
 capacity is evolved to different degrees of efficiency, just as 
 all faculties are, and the communications therefore, and for 
 other reasons, vary in clearness, consecutiveness, and intelli- 
 gibility. 
 
 The degree of success seems to depend partly upon the 
 condition of the medium and the atmosphere, but much more 
 upon the character of the sitter. The mediumistic faculty 
 needs sympathy and co-operation. The sitter and the medium 
 are a pair striving for a result. If we are studying what is 
 done by pairs in racing, or tennis, or golf, or duet-music, or 
 telepathic communication, there is no use, except for expert 
 study, in spending time with pairs who do badly. From this 
 point of view, in the examination we are about to make, we 
 may as well confine our attention to what comes to good 
 sitters from good mediums. But there is also the point of 
 view of the man who " wants to see both sides," and I shall 
 try to meet his just requirements. 
 
 In the early days the need of sympathy was held sympto- 
 matic of fraud. The time for that is past. 
 
 Perhaps as a result of the conditions, many of the com- 
 munications fall below the intelligence of the alleged spirits
 
 370 Preliminary on the S. P. R. Sittings [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 while they were in the body; often they contradict what 
 would be expected of the spirits; and often they are sheer 
 nonsense. All this is no worse than might reasonably be 
 expected even if the communications were (or are) genuine. 
 
 Sir William Crookes says (Researches, pp. 84-5) : 
 
 " A third error is that the medium must select his own circle 
 of friends and associates at a seance; that these friends must 
 be thorough believers in the truth of whatever doctrine the 
 medium enunciates; and that conditions are imposed on any 
 person present of an investigating turn of mind, which entirely 
 preclude accurate observation and facilitate trickery and de- 
 ception. In reply to this I can state that ... I have chosen 
 my own circle of friends, have introduced any hard-headed un- 
 believer whom I pleased, and have generally imposed my own 
 terms, which have been carefully chosen to prevent the possi- 
 bility of fraud." 
 
 Directly counter to this, Moses testifies (Pr. IX, 259) : 
 
 "We had ventured on one occasion, contrary to direction, to 
 add to our circle a strange member. Some trivial phenomena 
 occurred, but the -usual controlling spirit did not appear. When 
 next we sat, he came ; and probably none of us will easily forget 
 the sledge-hammer blows with which he smote the table. The 
 noise was distinctly audible in the room below, and gave one 
 the idea that the table would be broken to pieces. In vain we 
 withdrew from the table, hoping to diminish the power. The 
 heavy blows increased in intensity, and the whole room shook 
 with their force. The direst penalties were threatened if we 
 again interfered with the development by bringing in new sit- 
 ters. We have not ventured to do so again ; and I do not think 
 we shall easily be persuaded to risk another similar objurga- 
 tion." 
 
 But later we read of several people joining the circle at 
 different times in peace and quietness ! ! Translation to the 
 spirit world ( ?) does not seem to make us angels of consistency 
 all at once, though perhaps in Moses's case, as in so many 
 others, time may have changed conditions. 
 
 When -several good witnesses swear they saw something 
 remarkable done, the production of a thousand other good 
 witnesses who saw it tried in vain means little, and means 
 less in proportion to the supposed difficulty and rarity of the 
 act unless they can prove their experience the only genuine 
 experience, and the opposite experience the result of fraud
 
 Ch. XXVII] Reports Usually Best Passages 371 
 
 or misapprehension. The fraud question, however, in connec- 
 tion with most of the phenomena I have bothered with or 
 shall bother with, is simply out of date. 
 
 It follows, extreme as the statement will first appear, that 
 except so far as the negative sittings directly tend to explain 
 away the positive ones, they are negligible. Yet I wish to 
 present the negative side as strongly as I can without boring 
 you with repeated quotations of uninteresting and resultless 
 matter. But I wish to emphasize the fact that, although poor 
 sittings are probably less apt to be reported than effective ones, 
 they do appear in the reports pretty often perhaps a tenth of 
 the total; and this notwithstanding that successful sitters are 
 apt to return often, while unsuccessful ones are not. 
 
 I also wish to emphasize that in some cases the attempts 
 to " explain away " bear a very fair aspect of success, though 
 candor compels me to say that they often seem to me more 
 improbable than the flat-footed spiritistic hypothesis which 
 I began by scouting, and which I am not yet ready to accept. 
 
 I wish, too, to be distinctly understood as admitting tele- 
 pathy from the sitter wherever that will serve, and telotero- 
 pathy from other incarnate minds wherever there is room 
 for it. 
 
 And finally I wish to state that the tests perhaps most 
 ingeniously devised and generally regarded as most crucial, 
 of which we shall meet the details later the reading after 
 death, through the medium, of sealed letters prepared by the 
 communicator before death, have failed in the two reported 
 cases, and that such reading does not, for any reason that I 
 can see, appear more difficult than other feats performed 
 by or through the medium. This, however, I take to be 
 mainly an argument against accounting for the phenomena by 
 telopsis. 
 
 This test was once regarded by a good many as final against 
 the survival of the author of the letter. It is certainly final 
 against his ability and inclination, if he survive, to com- 
 municate matter that from our point of view should be as 
 easy to him as other matter which he or the medium does 
 communicate, except in the vital point that the contents of 
 the letter can be proved not to be in the mind of any living 
 person, while of little or nothing else in the matter com-
 
 372 Preliminary on the S. P. R. Sittings [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 municated through the medium, can that be proved. The 
 alternatives then are: (I) If the writer can't tell what he 
 did himself for the express purpose of telling it if he should 
 survive, he did not survive; (II) he did survive, as shown 
 by many other proofs, but there are insurmountable obstacles 
 to his giving the proof in question. Of this more later. 
 
 The circumstances under which the controls appear are 
 very various. We have had some indications of them already, 
 but they will grow much more distinct as we go on. In 
 many of the most important sittings there are ostensibly 
 gathered around the medium several " personalities," of whom 
 generally one acts as spokesman, or writer, for the others, 
 though the others sometimes speak or write for themselves. 
 Who shall be the spokesman seems to be determined by the 
 natural selection of some " person " of superior experience or 
 intimacy with the medium. " He " often professes to repeat 
 verbatim, and it is not always possible to tell whether the 
 alleged communication is to be taken as direct or indirect. 
 
 Thus Mrs. Piper, for the earlier part of her mediumship, 
 was generally controlled by an alleged French physician call- 
 ing himself Dr. Phinuit, who spoke for " everybody," but she 
 appeared gradually to come more readily under the immediate 
 control of any " personality " who wished to communicate, 
 though as Phinuit gradually disappeared, part of his place 
 was inherited by George Pelham and also by Hector, pro- 
 fessedly one of the Imperator group with whom we have 
 already become acquainted in connection with Stainton Moses ; 
 and Imperator himself occasionally took a hand. 
 
 Mrs. Thompson is generally under the ostensible control 
 of her daughter Nelly, who died in infancy, but has been 
 growing up. (?) 
 
 Since the deaths of Gurney, Myers, and Hodgson, they have 
 ostensibly controlled very freely, the automatic writings of 
 Mrs. Verrall, Mrs. Holland, and Miss Eawson being almost 
 dominated by them. 
 
 The sittings, recorded but not printed by the S. P. R., 
 are announced to be largely incoherent and insignificant. 
 But not a few too intimate for publication are, for that very 
 reason, more impressive than anything that has been pub- 
 lished. Even from those published, of course I can
 
 Ch. XXVII] Propaganda versus Exposition 373 
 
 give but fragments; and at best one who has read and re- 
 read thousands of pages of records of sittings and comments 
 thereupon can hardly pick out the few hundred pages most 
 worth boiling down for one who has read but little. The 
 difficulties of the task are greatly increased by the editors and 
 commentators having more generally had in mind their fellow- 
 students than the average uninitiated reader. 
 
 There are at least two obvious ways in which this material 
 can be presented. In Human Personality Myers, who had but 
 half of the present accumulation to select from, strung his 
 on the thread of his theories, and used it in advocacy of them. 
 To do this, of course, he had to select here and there without 
 regard to chronological sequence. 
 
 I have preferred to attempt an outline by approximately 
 consecutive specimens from the Pr. S. P. R. and a few other 
 records. Myers's method has advantages for propagandism 
 which this has not; but this has enabled me to present what 
 perhaps I may call the Piper drama the appearing, mani- 
 festations, and disappearing of her principal " controls," Phi- 
 nuit and G. P., and her relations with Myers and Hodgson 
 living and with their alleged personalities when they had 
 ceased to " live." From this chronological presentation, per- 
 haps you can better decide whether, in the later manifestations, 
 those personalities were mere memories or refrain from de- 
 ciding. 
 
 My method of presentation has also left me absolutely un- 
 trammeled by any theory, except what has grown up during 
 the work itself. This condition has probably enabled me to 
 present both sides more fairly than I could otherwise have 
 done. 
 
 It is tantalizing to be able to give only such small scraps 
 of the reports : they must afford a very inadequate notion not 
 merely of the variety of the phenomena, but of the impressions 
 pro and con. The matter I had selected as desirable for con- 
 veying even the impression worth attempting here, was about 
 twice as much as I can give room. 
 
 It is of course desirable that interested readers should be 
 able to roam at will through the Pr. S. P. R., and even readers 
 who have not them within reach, can practically do so at 
 moderate expense. A full set up to 1912 would cost well over
 
 374 Preliminary on the S. P. R. Sittings [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 a hundred dollars, but nearly all the volumes consist of sev- 
 eral " Parts," and these can be bought separately in paper at 
 not over a dollar and a half each. The American agents are 
 the W. B. Clarke Company of Boston. If you want fuller de- 
 tails of any topic than are given here, by naming to the agents 
 the volume and page cited, you will enable them to send you 
 the Part. My naming the Part as well as the volume and page 
 containing each citation, would be a nuisance to us both. 
 
 The sittings themselves soon become borous, but the treat- 
 ment of them by the various editors is generally interesting, 
 and nearly all literature of a very high order. As I have re- 
 read and re-read it since making the first draft of this book, the 
 inadequacy and injustice to the whole subject of what I 
 can give here, has been doubly borne in upon me, and I should 
 be tempted to suppress it if it were possible otherwise to urge 
 readers to the sources from which I have drawn, if there were 
 any chance that even when so urged, those getting an inad- 
 equate notion here would seek the vastly better one there, and 
 if (the reason perhaps of least worth) it were not for features 
 on which I have dwelt when my predecessors have not. In 
 case you may care for fuller, and in many ways vastly better, 
 treatment of the sittings, let me recommend you, in the order 
 given (not necessarily that of merit, but approximately that of 
 interest to the lay reader) to the following papers from which 
 I have but briefly abstracted Hodgson's report in Part (not 
 Volume) XXXIII; James's in Part LVIII, and Piddington's 
 (on Mrs. Thompson) in Part XL VII. The editorial matter 
 in all these is very full, and of very high rank even as literature 
 alone. Perhaps merely as sittings, the Junot series (the last 
 which I abstract) in Part LXI are the most interesting of all. 
 The editorial matter there is very good as far as it goes, but 
 to go very far would have been superfluous, as there were few 
 points not adequately treated by the editors of sittings pre- 
 viously published. Next in interest to most intelligent readers 
 perhaps indeed greater than any other part to one who has 
 read the first two I have named, is Mrs. Verrall's admirable 
 account of her own and Mrs. Holland's automatic writing, 
 which fills all of Vol. XX. This too is of high value as 
 literature. 
 
 A little patient practice will be needed in reading the
 
 Ch. XXVII] Peculiarities of Reports 375 
 
 records, partly because they are reported in so many ways, 
 notes of sittings having been kept by various people in various 
 forms. I have found it impracticable to reduce them to uni- 
 formity. The words of the "controls" uttered or written 
 by (or through?) the medium, in some cases are not set off 
 by any sign. This is often unfortunate, especially where the 
 medium's utterances are jumbled up in the same paragraph 
 with those of the sitters in parenthesis, and of various com- 
 mentators in brackets. 
 Professor Newbold says (Pr. XIV, 8) : 
 
 " The reader will observe that ' yes ' and ' no ' are often written 
 when no questions are recorded. This is due to the fact that, 
 the writing being exceedingly illegible and coming very rapidly, 
 the sitter reads aloud with a slight interrogatory inflection at 
 any convenient resting point, as at the end of a sheet or at an 
 apparent pause in the sense. To this the writer responds with 
 ' yes ' or ' no,' to show whether he is being correctly understood. 
 If these utterances are, as I believe them to be, entirely dissev- 
 ered from the normal consciousness of Mrs. Piper, they as truly 
 reveal to us a new world of mind as the microscope reveals a 
 new world of matter " 
 
 Moreover, there are not infrequent grammatical errors that 
 divert the attention. I have thought best not to correct any 
 of them. Some may be misprints; some from inadequate 
 memoranda or stenographic reports ; some from indistinctness 
 of heteromatic script; some may be due to the heteromatists 
 (though if any occurred in the script of the highly educated 
 ones, they were probably edited out) ; but I feel disposed to 
 take them as slips of the alleged communicators, even when 
 they professed to be such high and mighty personages as the 
 Imperator group. This is especially the case where those per- 
 sonages tried thee-ing and thou-ing, and slipped up on the 
 " number " of their pronouns and verbs. This of course tends 
 to make them out as at least partly the products of the imagi- 
 nation of a medium unpractised in such language; and it 
 does not seem greatly to stretch consistency to assume that 
 they might be genuine personages, and their reported language 
 subjected to a coloring from the channel through which it 
 comes. 
 
 Editors have often found difficulty in separating the words 
 of different controls: they appear to interrupt each other,
 
 376 Preliminary on the S. P. R. Sittings [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 and sometimes there seems to be a veritable struggle among 
 them for possession of the medium. It is therefore not always 
 easy (or possible, for that matter) for even the practised 
 reader to get the meaning clearly. I have risked straining 
 the patience of such readers by continuing my own interpola- 
 tions intended to help the novice. I hope none of them will 
 appear too banal. They are, as hitherto, in square brackets 
 and followed by my initials, and should be discriminated from 
 other notes in square brackets by sitters or other editors. 
 
 I realize that these frequent interruptions are apt to be- 
 come a nuisance to some readers whose sympathy I should 
 be very sorry to lose, especially to those who are already 
 in the habit of reading sittings and interpreting for 
 themselves. But, to lay readers generally, for whom espe- 
 cially I write, they are apt to be serviceable, even if at the 
 expense of some annoyance. I hope I have not made the 
 reports of sittings more tedious than they naturally are, by 
 the attempted help I have interjected. 
 
 Like some other writings, accounts of sittings should be 
 taken in moderate instalments, especially if they are read seri- 
 ously, in order that the mind may be keen for all the indica- 
 tions, for or against. And after you get through, if you are 
 reasonable, as of course you are, you will find it a matter of 
 incontrovertible indications both ways. 
 
 Don't feel discouraged by the sitting given first: probably 
 it is given more in detail and with less editing into smooth- 
 ness, than the later ones. 
 
 If you find yourself inclined to stop, don't before you 
 have tried skipping, and looked into the Junot sittings, which 
 are the last. 
 
 I have intentionally repeated a good many of my own 
 comments, and unintentionally not a few, but it hardly seems 
 worth while to fish them out, especially as the reasons suf- 
 ficiently sound, I trust, for the deliberate repetitions, will 
 probably in some degree hold good so far as they may be 
 good at all for the accidental ones. 
 
 All the sittings published have, of course, had editors, and 
 remarks by the editors are of course frequently injected into 
 the reports. Sometimes when, in the course of a sitting, the 
 editor speaks in propria persona, and there seems danger of
 
 Ch. XXVII] "Evidential" Tests 377 
 
 ambiguity, I prefix his initial to the paragraph. Keep this 
 in mind, or you will occasionally be puzzled. 
 
 The controls say that not all of them can communicate 
 through any known medium, and that some can communicate 
 through some mediums but not through others. Often one 
 of them who claims that he cannot communicate through the 
 medium then present, professes to make his communication to 
 another " spirit," who delivers it through the medium. Phi- 
 nuit, George Pelham, and Rector are the most frequent in- 
 termediaries. 
 
 I want to say at the outset that if we are to consider as 
 evidential of spiritism only facts not possibly known by any 
 incarnate intelligence, the sittings do not seem to me worth 
 taking into account. Not only do the indications pro and con 
 too nearly offset each other; but, as has often been said, the 
 only accessible proof of a statement is in some incarnate mind, 
 and all such proof must open up the suspicion of telepathy, 
 or at the worst teloteropathy. 
 
 Therefore I give the extracts from the records of sittings 
 not so much for their " evidential " value as for whatever in- 
 dication they may contain that the things said, no matter 
 whether facts or falsities, are said by substantially the per- 
 sonalities claiming to say them for whatever they may show 
 of (a) the habits of mind and turns of expression of the 
 alleged communicator; (6) emotions, initiative, response be- 
 yond the reach of telepathy; and (c) growth in the alleged 
 communicator's character from the sittings of one year to 
 those of later years. The question is whether these are in 
 kind and degree sufficiently identical with the personalities 
 alleged. If they are, the facts or falsities communicated 
 seem to me of minor consequence. On the other hand, if 
 the personalities communicating the facts or falsities lack in- 
 dividuality and vraisemblance, they may all be summed up as 
 the medium and the sitter; and the facts or falsities summed 
 up as successful or unsuccessful telepsychoses from incarnate 
 minds. 
 
 What indications of personal identity the records contain, 
 cannot be fairly indicated in half a dozen sittings. Yet, out- 
 side of the Pr. S. P. R. and Myers's bulky volumes, they have 
 been very lightly treated by anybody. Podmore in his big and 

 
 378 Preliminary on the S. P. R. Sittings [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 important two-volume work, devotes to them less than twenty 
 pages. I shall give them some hundreds enough, I hope, to 
 give a fair outline of the Piper drama. 
 
 The impressions made upon me by the various phenomena, 
 I have given pretty much as they occurred. They often con- 
 tradict each other flatly, but, as will be seen, out of the mass 
 of confusion, some elements gradually preponderated and 
 shaped themselves into a theory which at last grew pretty firm 
 and distinct, but of course I hold it only tentatively. But after 
 the revolutions that have come within less than a century, how 
 many opinions will it do to hold in any other way? 
 
 I for one find agreeable the change from the close over- 
 stimulated atmosphere of Moses into the often prosy paths 
 but natural human interests usually brought before us by 
 Mrs. Piper. Her controls generally profess to be ordinary 
 people seeking communication with friends they have left 
 behind. Whether she really gives that communication or 
 not, she gives an astonishing semblance of it, and with a 
 verisimilitude and vastness of detail that place her in a class 
 apart. 
 
 Mrs. Piper differs from many of the heteromatists in 
 that her writing is in trance. In the early part of her 
 career her vocal organs were used by several controls, each 
 with a special voice and enunciation, but that has gradually 
 disappeared, and for many years she has manifested only 
 by writing and gesture. No other heteromatist's scripts, not 
 even Mrs. Verrall's, have been scrutinized by as many careful 
 and competent students as Mrs. Piper's, and perhaps none 
 have impressed people as strongly with the conviction that 
 they emanate from a life beyond ours. 
 
 In one sense they say very little, and reiterate that little 
 ad nauseam; but the little is said by so many ostensible per- 
 sonalities, and in such a number of different connections, as to 
 produce probably more dramatic variety, so far as mere variety 
 goes, than ever before was expressed through a single human 
 being. But what is said contains nothing that could be 
 uttered only by a soul suddenly admitted to vast superhuman 
 knowledge, as the old theories assumed the postcarnate soul 
 to be. An error in those theories, however, is no argument 
 against the present manifestations.
 
 
 Ch. XXVII] Skipping Best for Some Readers 379 
 
 So far as regards the Pr. S. P. R., the cheap stage scenery 
 and inflated conversation borrowed from all sorts of mytho- 
 logies, and attributed by most of the early " mediums " to the 
 life beyond earth, Mrs. Piper has little use for, although she 
 did descend a good way into both when, about midway in 
 her career, Stainton Moses, postcarnate, turned up with his 
 grandiloquent friends Imperator & Co. Mrs. Piper describes 
 little scenery, and her people, while uttering many incoher- 
 ences, outside of Imperator & Co., talk little coherent non- 
 sense, and in their conversations with the sitters are as 
 true to nature as anybody ; and this is probably the strongest 
 support for the belief that the communications are from 
 actual personalities. 
 
 But since the foregoing paragraph was in type Professor 
 Xewbold has intrusted to me some records of sittings not re- 
 ported in the Pr. S. P. R., that call for modifications of this 
 statement They will be discussed in Chapter XXXVI. 
 
 I want finally to repeat again that the sittings tend soon 
 to become borous, but I hope that some readers who do not 
 care to study them may be repaid for skipping through them : 
 many quotations of interesting comment are scattered among 
 them, and a general knowledge of them is essential to under- 
 standing anything that may be worth while, if there is any- 
 thing worth while, in the speculations which follow them.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 MRS. PIPER: AUTHOR'S EXPERIENCE 
 
 As in Telekinesis and Telepathy, I began, for the reasons 
 there given, with my own experience; for the same reasons, 
 I run counter to chronology to present a sitting I had with 
 Mrs. Piper in 1894. It was a typical Piper seance of the 
 period. Although it was not printed in the Pr. S. P. R. be- 
 cause I was then too busy and procrastinating to revise the 
 copy which Hodgson sent me, it has some special points 
 worth noting, and in general can serve as a text for ex- 
 pounding many of the points of mediumism. One special 
 point is that it is one of the sittings when Mrs. Piper both 
 spoke and wrote automatically before she ceased the former, 
 and after she began the latter. 
 
 Mrs. Piper's psychic manifestations in an ordinary sitting 
 are much more complex than Foster's were, but so far as 
 I know, she has not, like him, given telekinetic ones. In 
 fact telekinesis appears for the time to be under a cloud. I 
 have read no account of it from an English medium since 
 Home and Moses, though Eusapia Palladino still has her 
 adherents, of whom I am one as far as the lion's skin goes, 
 but of late it seems to have been shrinking, and the fox's 
 to be expanding. This slowing up in telekinetic phenomena, 
 however, is probably nothing but an illustration of the law 
 of the rhythm of motion. But to return to Mrs. Piper and 
 Foster. While the impressions of both were obviously due 
 to some sensibility not yet evolved in people generally, Mrs. 
 Piper, while appearing a person much more susceptible to 
 spiritual impressions (whatever that may mean), in her own 
 personality had, in a sense, nothing to do with the matter. 
 Foster expressed himself, giving an account of what he saw 
 and felt, while she abolished herself, appearing to move her 
 own personality from her body, giving place to other apparent 
 personalities who expressed themselves through her vocal
 
 Ch. XXVIII] Genuineness. Modus Operandi 381 
 
 organs, gestures, and writing. What they did, did not seem 
 to pass through her consciousness, and the apparent passage 
 of their consciousnesses through her organism involved some 
 disturbance in it. Mrs. Piper was in a trance, the passage 
 of the communications distorting her face, changing her 
 voice, and seeming to affect her whole being. Foster, on the 
 contrary, appeared as wide awake, intelligent, and cheerful 
 as people generally are in ordinary conversation. He re- 
 marked, after perhaps an hour or an hour and a half, that 
 he was feeling a little tired. Mrs. Piper, on coming out 
 of the trance after perhaps an hour, was somewhat exhausted. 
 This, however, was not the case some years later, as will 
 appear. 
 
 Mrs. Piper did not know who I was, unless Hodgson had 
 told her, and I am confident he had not. There was a good 
 chance for her to read about me from his mind, as he knew 
 me well, but she read next to nothing that he knew! 
 
 Before we began, Hodgson placed some sheets of paper 
 and pencils on a small table within reach of Mrs. Piper, 
 and others on the mantel east of the table for his own 
 memoranda. Mrs. Piper and I sat facing each other on 
 the west side of the table. Hodgson moved to and fro 
 between the table and the mantel. 
 
 She did not hold my hand. Early in her career, as re- 
 corded in many places, she seems to have held her sitter's 
 hands through the whole stance, but gradually she came 
 not to touch the sitter at all. The change appears to have 
 come some time between '89 and '96. When that change 
 took place, the suggestions of " muscle reading " in her case, 
 made by Mr. Podmore and others, were disposed of. 
 
 In the early reports are also several allusions to the seance 
 room being darkened. That, too, had become outgrown 
 before my sitting, and with it, of course, the deductions of 
 fraud naturally drawn from it. 
 
 After we had been seated a minute or two, Mrs. Piper's 
 eyeballs rolled upward, her face became slightly convulsed, 
 and she began talking in a rough voice not her own. As 
 I remember, the voice at first affected me as if it were coming 
 from a statue, but I soon got used to it She was apparently
 
 382 Mrs. Piper: Author's Experience [Bk. II, Pi IV 
 
 " under the control " of Phinuit, an alleged French physician, 
 with whom readers of the Proceedings of the Society for 
 Psychical Eesearch are well acquainted, and whom I will later 
 introduce more at length to others. 
 
 At times there seemed to be changes of control not noted 
 in the report. I attempt to note such, and have essayed a 
 few other incidental improvements. These notes are some- 
 times interpolated in square brackets, with my initials, but 
 often in the separate paragraphs and in the larger type of 
 the author's usual part of the book. 
 
 Below are given Hodgson's notes of what was said, and 
 exact transcripts of what was written. The reader new 
 to the subject should know that alleged communications 
 through alleged mediums generally come with apparent diffi- 
 culty a sort of stammering or feeling for words, and con- 
 siderable confusion. Literal reproductions, despite such in- 
 serted elucidations as may be practical, are not very smooth 
 reading. The confusion is attributed by some to the medium's 
 delays in " fishing " for intimations from sitters ; by others 
 to difficulties inherent in the case, especially with inexperi- 
 enced controls. 
 
 All these elements of confusion might suggest to one read- 
 ing for the first time well annotated notes of a sitting, that 
 he is examining a photograph of chaos and old night. As 
 I have already cautioned, patience is needed not only for 
 understanding the notes, but for estimating them as evidence. 
 
 Don't let the difficulty of the following sitting discourage 
 you regarding the later ones. They are apparently much 
 more freely " edited," and are much easier reading. 
 
 Sitting of April 8, 1894 
 Present, Richard Hodgson, Henry Holt. Notes by Hodgson. 
 
 " Phinuit speaking. [See Note 1, at end of sitting, p. 390.] 
 * Came all the way from spirit to see you. Want to tell you some- 
 thing about yourself. That gentleman [referring to Sitter] has 
 spirits around him all the time. He don't believe it, but he's 
 a medium.'" 
 
 Later indications tend to verify this, but I have not tried 
 to increase them : I have been too busy, and have wanted to 
 keep a level head as far as I can.
 
 Ch. XXVIII] Friend's Troubles Reported . 383 
 
 " Sitter. ' You don't know me, do you ? ' Ph. ' I have never 
 met you before.' G. P. [breaking in] ' Awful scrape over here. 
 Want you to help me out. A. [assumed initial] is in a dan- 
 gerous condition.' Ph. [explaining] ' G. P. wants to speak to 
 you. He knows you.' " 
 
 G. P. is the "George Pelham " well known to readers 
 of the Pr. S. P. R., whom I will more fully introduce 
 to others later. When living he was a friend of mine as well 
 as of Hodgson, and of my friend indicated by the pseudo 
 initial A. 
 
 "S. 'All right.'" 
 
 Here G. P. " assumed control " of the medium so Hodg- 
 son's notes say, but possibly " Phinuit " reported for him. 
 I cannot remember now whether there was a change of voice. 
 
 "G. P. 'I'd like to know where Mabel is, and who the 
 dickens is that? Do you know what I mean I' S. 'Mabel? 
 No.' G. P. ' A.'s in a critical state. He's not himself now. 
 He's terribly depressed.' S. ' Can you tell anything [more] 
 about AJ ' G. P.' Friend of yours in body.* S. ' Of Hodg- 
 son ? ' [This question and the following seem to have been mild 
 "tests": I knew the man well. H.H.] G. P. 'Yes.' S. 
 ' Did I ever know him ? ' G. P. ' Yes you knew him very well. 
 You're connected with him.' S. ' Through whom ? ' G. P. 
 'Do you know any B.?' [assumed initial. H.H.] S. 
 'Are A. and I connected through B.?' G. P. 'Write to B. 
 and he'll tell you all about it' " [See Note 2.] 
 
 It turned out later that A. actually was low in his mind, 
 and that B., whom nobody present knew, was trying to get 
 him diverting occupation. This was found, too, to be a case 
 of cross-correspondence. 
 
 None of these circumstances were known to anybody pres- 
 ent, but they were known to other minds " in the body," and 
 hence the medium's utterance of them is open to the inter- 
 pretation of teloteropathy. Similar instances are not rare. 
 
 " G. P. [apparently : notes are uncertain] continued. 
 ' Somebody wants to come in here. There's a lady with you 
 [natural, but probably I willed a change of subject. The 
 mediums generally respond promptly to such willing.] Go on 
 writing, it will help you.' [This may be taken to have referred 
 to some literary work on which I was engaged.] G. P. ' You're 
 going away. Don't go to sleep. Wake up and talk to me.
 
 384 Mrs. Piper: Author's Experience [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 [Repeated in two or three ways.] Au revoir! I'll see you 
 later.' " 
 
 Here Mrs. Piper's right hand began reaching and grasping, 
 and Hodgson put a pencil in it. She wrote continuously in 
 a very large sprawling, irregular hand. Among other pas- 
 sages were those given below. The omitted ones are con- 
 fused. My part of the dialogue was probably (it was nearly 
 eighteen years before this writing) put by Hodgson on each 
 sheet as the medium went to the next, and the whole revised 
 by me in the typewritten copy which he sent. Before going to 
 press I paragraph and punctuate a little, though at danger of 
 forcing intelligibility. The explanatory or suggestive com- 
 ments of Hodgson or myself are in rectangular brackets, 
 mainly from notes made at the time. 
 
 At the risk of discouraging you, and the certainty of pre- 
 senting the material of the sittings in a disadvantageous form, 
 I have concluded to let it stand with all its obscurities and 
 eccentricities, edited only by comment. The S. P. R. reports 
 are generally selections with the mold marks smoothed away, 
 but you may care for a specimen of the unmitigated thing, even 
 at the cost of extra hard reading. 
 
 " G. P.' And how are you? G. P. G. P. [signature repeated] 
 I am not dead. How are you H.? [evidently referring to me, 
 whose initial Mrs. Piper did not know.] I am glad to see him. 
 Come and speak. Watson help those fingers. [Reference to 
 Watson (unknown) suggests similarity of sound to Hodgson 
 Medium's fingers cramped.] Too bad about A. I am sorry for 
 him. I have however [been] a help to him. I am here. 
 
 Carlton [unknown] is a . I see you H. [Sitter] speak 
 
 to me.' S. ' Can you hear well? ' G. P.' Not clearly H. I'll 
 get in stronger in a moment. All O.K. H. we will be O.K. 
 
 in a moment how is W ? ' [A living acquaintance of 
 
 G. P. and myself, but seldom in my mind, certainly not then, 
 but whom G. P. in the flesh or spirit, would very naturally ask 
 about. He was not known to Mrs. Piper or Hodgson. H.H.] 
 S. ' First-rate, I think.' G. P.' Good. Can't I help him don't 
 you think ? How are you getting on with your writing old man ? 
 Can't I help you?'" 
 
 Apparently referring to my literary work aforesaid. This 
 desire to help is constantly manifested by G. P., and is, 
 on the whole, more characteristic of those in the alleged 
 new life certainly of G. P. than in this life.
 
 Ch. XXVIII] G. P. Criticises Remote Conversation 385 
 
 "G. P. 'I think he is going across water.' S. 'Do you 
 mean I am?' G. P.' No F. J. [a common friend not in my 
 mind at the time] [undeciph.l .' S. 'Will you answer me a 
 question? ' G. P.' Yes I should be pleased.' S. ' Will you tell 
 me what you think of that talk last night?' [A controversial 
 talk on philosophic subjects at the Century Club table, as I 
 remember, in which Hodgson and I had participated.] G. P. 
 ' Nonsense.' [Possibly medium telepathically gave my own im- 
 pression. The hand motioned to me not to speak, and the 
 written answers anticipated what I thought of saying.] G. P. 
 ' I know what you would ask, so will, yes I. Baby nonsense 
 or talk this is my well.' S. ' It made me tired.' G. P.' So 
 it does me and it is rubbish. Rubbish don't bother your clear 
 brain about such trash ... if it moves at ... thanks [probably 
 for assistance with pencil] ... if it moves at all it will only 
 
 talk baby talk ... yes tell him he goes to B [unrecognized 
 
 now] and hears nonsense.' H. ' Now tell him.' S. ' She 
 reads my mind like a book' [referring to medium]. G. P. 
 ' Not out of your mind old chap you mistake it concerns E. G. 
 and yours truly.' 
 
 " S. [to Hodgson] ' Do you know who E. G. is? ' [Writing 
 resumed.] G. P.' Perfectly. Oh, yes, Edmund Gurney. He 
 was there and tried to get... (when was it?) the impression 
 where you dined where D.?' S. 'Dined?' [Referring to 
 occasion of aforesaid talk.] G. P.' Yes. Yes.' S. 'You 
 think it was nonsense?' G. P.' Exactly. Rightly named, 
 yes. This is what I am trying to tell you my good friend: 
 your clear brain ought to clear up such nonsense.' S. 
 [or possibly Hodgson] ' But you held the mind-stuff theory 
 yourself.' G. P.' Well, mind stuff theory is all right when 
 put on a clear basis ... no ... but I want to keep you fellows 
 on the right track, you certainly understand me very well 
 considering you know me so little in my present state . . . yes . . . 
 very . . . perfectly only I find it a little difficult to express my 
 thoughts through this protoplasm. [Note 3.1 Exactly . . . yes . . . 
 evolution . . . yes . . .' S. ' What can you tell me about A. ? ' G. 
 P.' All about him.' S.' Are you troubled about him ?' G. P. 
 ' Not exactly troubled, yet I am afraid he has a mood of de- 
 pression at the present time which is not entirely satisfactory, 
 think so, H.?...What about your work? are you clearing up 
 weather any maters [matters?] and how about cosmical weather. 
 [This was on G. P.'s mind especially in conection with Hodgson 
 who was present, but I don't know that he had ever discussed it 
 with me] . . . Philosophy.' [Topics I was working on.] S. 
 ' Can you tell me my name ? ' G. P. ' Yes, I will surprise, I 
 will surprise you in a moment by telling you old chap just who 
 you are.' " 
 
 This illustrates one of the most perplexing and frequent
 
 386 Mrs. Piper: Author's Experience [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 features of mediumistic communications. If the medium 
 was simply reading my mind, why shouldn't she promptly 
 read so clear and simple a thing as my own name, especially 
 as, on the telepathic hypothesis, she was reading much foggier 
 and more complex things? Her not doing so, and number- 
 less similar cases, make very strongly against the telepathic 
 hypothesis. But on the spiritistic hypothesis, why should 
 my old friend delay giving my name, and end without giving 
 it at all? When at last it was given (see below) it was by 
 my ostensible remote cousin, who never saw me. Still the 
 surname was his own. 
 
 " G. P. [continuing] ' I am also [ ?] talking baby talk . . . 
 yes . . . what about the one and the many, the many and the one. 
 [Same true as regards " cosmical weather." See above] . . . yes, 
 I will here... do you believe in telepathy? A AUK [substi- 
 tuted letters, harking back to A.'s troubles.] Yes . . . and will be 
 the instigator, hear you me? Where is [undeciph.] Verm [?] 
 yes . . . yes . . . tell me I must clear up these things H. I know. 
 Give me time and I'll explain all, don't worry me, do you . . . 
 D ... e too bad.' " 
 
 The writing here became very hurried and confused, appar- 
 ently from the attempted intrusion of my young cousin, 
 Albert, who had lately been drowned, and who now seemed 
 to appear and want to communicate. 
 
 " G. P. [apparently to my cousin]. Til tell him... yes in 
 a moment, did you ... oh, I can't hear you [apparently a child 
 of mine breaks in here and is addressed by G. P.] well dear, 
 come along . . . Papa . . . who is Roy [ ?] Ray yes ... all ... yes 
 . . . but there is a child here ' [I had lost children, and willed 
 the medium to stop impersonating them, and she left the sub- 
 ject. Note 4]. G. P. 'and a young Hall [effort, as appears 
 later, for Holt] who passed out of [the body?] by drowning 
 [My cousin. I never saw him] the young man is, he died, as 
 you term it, by drowning, and his name is Alfred' [wrong, but 
 corrected later.] S. 'What's his other name?' G. P. 'Am 
 telling you can't you wait? Haccket. G. [or J.] Alfred... 
 what . . . Hackett ... yes ... all I hear ... he ... yes and he knew 
 him very well.' S. ' The name Alfred is a mistake.' G. P. 
 ' Not a mistake, not in the least. Don't you recall Alfred? He 
 knew you years ago perfectly and John also, he was the one 
 who was with him.' " 
 
 This looks like an echo of the prominence in the mind 
 of most Holts of the name of Sir John, the English chief
 
 Ch. XXVIII] Sitter's Drowned Cousin Manifested 387 
 
 justice in the seventeenth century, from whom not a few 
 of the Americans of the name claim to be descended, in spite 
 of the fact that he had no children. 
 
 "8. 'I don't know him.' G. P. 'You do know him... 
 this . . . yes ... it is so and right ask John [unrecognized] he 
 is ... brother [Albert had no brother John] [ ?] in earth . . . 
 
 r. . . this is important. Henry ' [Sitter's Christian name. G. 
 never used it in life.] S. ' Are you sure Alfred is the 
 name ? ' G. P. ' I am not sure but I think it is very nearly 
 right as I hear it. HA...H O W I know, don't mind me.' 
 S. ' I am listening [Reading probably meant] attentively.' 
 G. P.' You don't quite believe me, that is that I am I Yes. yet 
 I am all that remains of yours truly G. P. H on Horn H o r t e 
 on [Farther efforts towards sitter's name.] (S. Horton?) no 
 leave . . . H o n . . . I want . . . please don't worry him [apparently 
 alluding to cousin] he is in a dream keep quiet and let him see 
 where he is ... yes . . . Ard [ ?] for him . . . yes I did . . . Alfred J 
 [or G ?] are you talking H . . . Haris . . . what . . . Harry [Sitter's 
 usual name with intimates, but G. P. never used it in life] . . . 
 keep clear if you can and I'll help Hone.' [Apparently my 
 cousin shoves G. P. aside and takes control of the medium.] 
 A. ' Do speak speak to me now . . . not 11.' S. ' Yes you were 
 drowned.' A. ' You know me. Do, oh do tell my mother to 
 cheer up and don't worry . . . she . . . yes . . . Holt [Correct at 
 last]... Yes.'" 
 
 Some people are so opposed to the spiritistic hypothesis, 
 or perhaps I should say to any hypothesis but fraud, that they 
 attribute to it this " feeling for " names which is very frequent 
 among mediums. I can't see any indication that it may not 
 be a perfectly natural process, on the hypothesis of limited 
 power both to apprehend and to communicate in either 
 " spirit " or medium, or of obstacles to both, which the means 
 are not fitted readily to overcome. 
 
 " G. P. [apparently]' and you must speak to him, you heard 
 . . . you . . . S. ' Where is his mother ? ' A. [apparently] 
 ' In the South . . . yes . . .' [she had been there lately, but had 
 returned. I knew the first fact, and I think I knew the sec- 
 ond.] S. 'Are you sure she's in the South?' A. 'Yes she 
 is there now.' [Note 5.] S. ' Does she live there?' A 
 ' No, not her home.' [Correct.] ' Alfred now you must know, 
 do, oh do please. [See Note 6.] I ask of you it was. the great- 
 est sorrow to her . . . yes . . . [undeciph.] and Uncle Will [not 
 recognized. See below regarding identifying mother.] will 
 know.' S. ' Uncle Will ? ' A.' W not William not ... No ... 
 will know.' S. 'Will know?' A.' Yes, please tell her for
 
 388 Mrs. Piper: Author's Experience [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 me. [Several pencils rejected, on ground, apparently, that 
 they had been handled by other persons. Writing resumed.] 
 Thanks . . . don't let anybody touch those any more ... no ... 
 thanks.' S. ' Won't it be distressing if I tell his mother ? ' 
 A. ' Tell her. But I shall be there before you are, and I will 
 help her to bear it. Albert was my name rightly spelt [for 
 the first time] but she called me Al . . . yes and Allie.' " 
 
 The medium stopped writing, and Phinuit took control 
 again, speaking: 
 
 " P. ' There's a great deal more thought here than's said. 
 Dp you sleep pretty well? [I did not.] You sit in chair 
 with arms, and write on bits of paper [True: on pad.] 
 Eggs are very good for you.' S. ' All of the egg?' [I used 
 the white at breakfast daily.] P. ' You take the white of it 
 very nicely.' [Correct.] S. ' You are reading my mind. How 
 about fruit ? ' P. ' Fruit's good.' [It was very bad for me, 
 though I persisted in it from mistaken advice. Phinuit appears 
 to have telepathically received my false impression.] S. 
 ' These are only vague generalities.' P. ' Well, that's specific 
 enough. Do you want me to tell you the color of your grand- 
 father's cat's tail ? ' [Sitter asks about wines, mentioning 
 names. Phinuit said he didn't know names of places. Sitter 
 speaks of white wines, etc., and Khine wines.] S. ' Not [good] 
 for me? ' P. ' White wines good acid. Sweet wines not good. 
 [Correct.] You taste oranges when you eat them. They come 
 up in your throat.'" 
 
 I ate them habitually at breakfast. This and the arm- 
 chair and writing are wonderful bits of telepathy or some- 
 thing else. 
 
 "S. 'If I don't eat fruit, I'll get lithemia.' P. 'Take 
 potatoes.' S. ' Disagreeing with the faculty.' P. ' Grated 
 potatoes beaten with milk. Something the matter with liver? ' 
 S. < Now No.' [Sitter had taken blue pill the night before.] 
 P. 'There's no disease in your liver.'" [Correct, Note 7]. 
 
 G. P. seems to return. 
 
 " G. P. ' He seems to be very anxious H. [apparently referring 
 to Albert] and will say... Oh! Here comes a military man 
 with epaulets on his shoulders and had a bullet wound in his 
 head... too bad' [see below]. S. 'But George people don't 
 wear epaulets on their knees.' P.' On knees? Who said 
 knees? ' S. ' You're getting tautological.' G. P.' Not in the 
 least H. but I am as in a dream. Shall I be more philosoph- 
 ical?' S. 'Oh no! But be like yourself.' G. P. 'But you 
 seem not like yourself any more than I, I don't know why.
 
 Ch. XXVIII] Errors Mixed with Truths 389 
 
 Perhaps you can explain Why Why Why. Yes. ..yea. ..his 
 son has been speaking now to me [apparently a repetition of 
 why recalled to Sitter's mind a similar habit of repeating 
 "Why? Why? Why?" in Sitter's living little son, and the im- 
 pression went over telepathically into the medium, leading to 
 a confusion of my living son with the drowned cousin] . . . yea 
 he wants to have Helen know where he is. El liza . . . Ellen 
 [no such person recognized : not his mother's name.] . . . yes in 
 the body ? ' S . ' Where is she now ? ' G. P.' In the South 
 I hear. Do speak.' S. 'What color was the military suit?' 
 G. P.' It was Red.' " 
 
 This is suggestive. I associate my cousin Albert, father 
 of the drowned boy, with visits in childhood to my grand- 
 father's, and one of the conspicuous recollections of those visits 
 is a young cousin in a much-too-big red military coat that 
 one of the elders used to wear at " general trainin'." But 
 the bullet hole is a mystery. The " grandpere aux Franqais " 
 in my Foster sitting is said to have been a general, but he was 
 not of that family, and I never looked him up. 
 
 " G. P. ' Now you must speak I cannot keep him up and seem 
 my natural self, not for {'.} him... there was [is?] a sister 
 Margaret . . . [No sister. H.H.] Al . . . I declare you must 
 speak . . . dazed . . . why ...Hou Hou Hor II or Ho a.' 
 S. ' It would be unfortunate to add an x, George.' G. P. ' No 
 sarcasm needed.' S. ' I don't mean it as sarcasm.' G. P. 
 ' Thanks. Thanks, no I should must confess I should not treat 
 you thus, not much, too bad, help the poor fellow will you H. 
 . . . you can indeed. Where am ... yes trust me as you used . . . 
 did in years gone by. I look ... yes ... tell father I have ex- 
 plained all ... will explain and it will be clear to ... We '" 
 
 Possibly Albert had resumed "control," though this may 
 have been a reference by G. P. to his own father, with 
 whom I had always been more intimate than with G. P. 
 himself. 
 
 "G. P.-< Where is H-s?' S. <H-s?' G. P. 'Yes.' [It 
 happened that the sitter had been thinking specially of H s the 
 day before.] G. P.' Tell him W. [H s's deceased daughter] is 
 
 really not dead, and is with H. a great deal . . . yes . . . H ' 
 
 S. ' What HJ ' [For some reason, probably the indistinctness 
 of the writing, the name does not seem to have been clear at 
 the moment, though it was later recognized.] G. P. ' In the 
 body . . . yes . . . yes . . . and you remember him or I do. Ask her 
 father and the message will [undeciph. "be taken" see be- 
 low.] Frank. [Possibly a dear friend of Sitter, wishing to
 
 390 Mrs. Piper: Author's Experience [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 communicate, but too late for the medium's psychokinetic power. 
 [Note 8] ... yes . . . what [undeciph.] my thinking now ... be 
 taken . . . little mixed . . . who is Stead [Perhaps the well known 
 W. T. Stead, who was then visiting mediums] ... no all right . . . 
 do you know A. [undeciph.] . . . yes there it is ... A 1 bert H 
 J H A J H I am going.' 
 
 The writing ends abruptly, and the medium wakes. 
 
 I make no apology for having treated the apparent per- 
 sonalities at one moment as if they were simply human beings 
 in a new stage of existence, and at the next moment as if they 
 were dramatizations by the medium. The first method is 
 of course sometimes adopted provisionally as the most con- 
 venient, but both ways correspond to the alternating impres- 
 sions of any sitter not die-stamped with the spiritist view 
 or its extreme opposite. When I was a score of years younger 
 (and wiser, as the younger think?), I should have been 
 more consistent in the non-spiritistic way. Now, while I 
 believe in a future life, so far as it will do to use the word 
 " believe " in the absence of complete verification (whatever 
 that may mean), I am still in doubt whether "the spirits 
 of just men made perfect " or the spirits of any men at all, 
 speak through the mediums. At the moment I suspect they 
 impress the mediums telepathically to speak for them. This 
 seems as in ordinary dreams, only so much more intensely that 
 (as sometimes in my dreams) the dreamer feels identified with 
 the "agent," and Mrs. Piper speaks as the agent. 
 
 The following comments would have interrupted the mem- 
 oranda of the sittings too much, had they been placed among 
 them. 
 
 NOTE 1. The amount of discussion already bestowed upon 
 Dr. Phinuit, of whom we shall see much more, almost places 
 him, with Junius, not to speak of the Baconian Shak- 
 spere, among the great problematical characters of literature. 
 Through the dozen volumes of the S. P. K., from VI, where 
 he makes his first appearance, up to where he disappears, 
 nearly every commentator has a whack at him, and the 
 whacks soon get very amusing. 
 
 Half the whackers say he does not know French ; the other 
 half prove that he does. Mrs. Sidgwick and Mr. Lang state 
 that he does not, and consider him an unmitigated scoundrel.
 
 Ch. XXVIII] Opinions Matters of Temperament 391 
 
 Neither of these commentators, by the way, was a "good 
 sitter." On the other hand, Mr. Rich, who was a good sitter, 
 found Phinuit at home in French; Sir Oliver Lodge, also a 
 good sitter, is fond of the old fellow; and I, who also am a 
 good sitter, think Phinuit, not only as I talked with him, 
 but as I have read about everything in print regarding him, 
 one of the most natural and amusing characters I ever met, 
 and far from the least lovable. 
 
 Half the commentators say that he is an ignorant quack, 
 who never uses a scientific term; the other half say that 
 he has helped them and their friends, and given them effi- 
 cacious prescriptions abounding in the technicalities of the 
 pharmacopeia. 
 
 The whole discussion is a very remarkable instance re- 
 markable even in the debatable regions of Psychical Research 
 of how honest and intelligent people amid new and ques- 
 tionable experiences, do not see with their eyes or hear with 
 their ears, but do both with their temperaments. The evi- 
 dence will increase as we proceed. 
 
 An objection is reasonably taken to Phinuit's uncertain 
 and unverifiable character. But that character is not nearly 
 as uncertain and unverifiable as some commentators make 
 out. Wherever Mrs. Piper got the Phinuit of my sitting, 
 whether from her own invention or from me, or from himself, 
 she certainly did not get from me his prescription of grated 
 potatoes as a cure for my ailments: all I had to give in that 
 line was objection by the very highest authorities to just 
 that food. Of all ways to account for him yet proposed, 
 far the least labored seems to be that she got him from 
 himself; but being the least labored does not necessarily prove 
 that way the nearest correct. Maybe it will yet be found 
 correct in the form that she got him from the cosmic con- 
 sciousness, where perhaps he and she and you and I are 
 always to be found by such as have the finding power. 
 
 NOTE 2. The medium gets impressions of all sorts from 
 things and persons connected with the sitter or the control. 
 In this instance, I was "connected with" B, but only so 
 far as he had become a professor at Yale long after my 
 graduation : I did not know him personally. But my intimate
 
 392 Mrs. Piper: Author's Experience [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 connection with A was not only direct, but through several 
 persons intimate with us both and with G. P. Mere tele- 
 pathy, certainly mere telepathy from my mind, would have 
 " spotted " some one of these connections much more readily 
 than the alleged one with B, which was hardly a connection 
 at all. The simplest solution for the whole business, though 
 perhaps not the most "scientific," or even rational, is that 
 the spirit of G. P. was troubled about A, and habitually 
 thinking of me at the University Club as a Yale man, 
 was reminded, on my turning up at the seance, of the solution 
 of A's troubles proposed by B, who was at Yale, and, it turned 
 out later, was trying to get A a place there, and G. P. 
 wanted me to help. 
 
 NOTE 3. " This protoplasm." G. P. uses the expression 
 at other sittings, and I think that no other of Mrs. Piper's 
 controls does. If she makes them herself, how does she keep 
 them so distinct? The sittings, however, abound in com- 
 plaints from the controls that they find it hard to express 
 themselves through the " too solid flesh " of the mediums. 
 
 NOTE 4. Illustrations of the same experience (in shutting 
 off would-be communicators, by will) are frequent. I am 
 evidently far from alone in feeling a repugnance from hav- 
 ing communications from loved and lost ones pass through 
 the body or even the dreams of a stranger. But those who 
 seek such communications may have better nervous organisms 
 than mine, and I do not wish to have my avoiding what pur- 
 ported to be such communications, indicative of any opinion 
 regarding their genuineness. 
 
 I experience no such repugnance regarding communications 
 in my own dreams, as will be abundantly demonstrated later : 
 for there the communication is not through an intermediary. 
 
 NOTE 5. This is one of the very frequent cases of the 
 medium going counter to the sitter's knowledge, and goes 
 to controvert the telepathic theory. Among such cases are 
 many where the medium (or control) turns out to be right, 
 and the sitter wrong. 
 
 NOTE 6. This intense desire, so natural under the alleged 
 circumstances, to prove survival to their friends, will be 
 found characteristic of virtually all the controls. Those
 
 Ch. XXVIII] Controls Wish to Prove Survival 393 
 
 claiming to be persons familiar while on earth with the 
 methods of Psychical Research, strenuously and ingeniously 
 use those methods for the purpose. We shall find, after 
 the deaths of Myers and Hodgson, that their alleged spirits, 
 like that of G. P., apparently bent all their powers toward 
 that end. With them it is generally alleged to be for the 
 promotion of science, but with the controls generally, as in 
 the case just given, it is of course for the comfort of survivors. 
 
 NOTE 7. As already intimated, there has been a great 
 deal of difference among the commentators as to Phinuit's 
 knowledge and capacity as a physician. His diagnosis of 
 me might have been telepathic from me, but his dietary 
 certainly was not. He has made many diagnoses that cer- 
 tainly were not telepathic, and prescriptions as technical as 
 doctors generally make, with good results. Instances will 
 appear in later extracts. 
 
 NOTE 8. "Frank [possibly a dear friend," etc.]. I said 
 " possibly," and after " dear friend " I was tempted to add : 
 " or Mrs. Piper's personation of one." But why should Mrs. 
 Piper personate an individual she never heard of, and of 
 course cares nothing about, for the delectation of another 
 individual she never heard of and cares nothing about? 
 The answer, " Because the latter gives her ten dollars," doesn't 
 fit the case: she is amply demonstrated to be not that sort 
 of person. Perhaps James would say, in his pet phraseology : 
 Because she has a " will to communicate," which is another 
 way of saying: Because she wants to. But why should she 
 want to? And why, on the telepathic hypothesis, out of 
 the hundreds of persons who have affected my memories, 
 should she pick out this friend when I had not him specially 
 in mind, and when there were " on the other side " other 
 persons whose effect on me had been much greater? Or, 
 to put a stronger case, if she picked G. P. out of my mind, 
 why of all people who have left traces there should it be he ? 
 The traces of him were not as strong as those of many other 
 men much younger than myself. Such questions have been 
 asked by innumerable sitters. The only answer worth con- 
 sidering that I have seen, and that may not be worth much, 
 is that when the sitter does not select the communicator, 

 
 394 Mrs. Piper: Author's Experience [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 and Mrs. Piper does not, the only alternative is that he 
 selects himself that, in this case, G. P. communicated be- 
 cause before he died he had determined and announced that 
 if there was any survival of death he was going to give 
 evidence of it if he could ; and " Frank/' if the occurrence 
 of the name had anything to do with my friend, sought to 
 communicate probably because he was of a peculiarly affec- 
 tionate disposition peculiarly apt to want to console those 
 who had mourned him, and among his generally conservative 
 circle of friends I was the first one who had given him any 
 chance by turning up at a sitting. If at the time, amid the 
 confusion natural to both the sitter's mind and the writing, 
 I had attached all this significance to the name, probably 
 I should have tried to give him the chance; but probably I 
 would not have succeeded : for " the light was going out," 
 as the controls generally express it. Many of them have 
 declared that to them a medium, when in condition to receive 
 communication, is surrounded by a light, and that as the 
 nervous sensibility or capacity is consumed in the process 
 of communication, the light fades away. When I say: "the 
 controls say" this, I am not expressing any opinion as to 
 what a control is. The reader, if he is built that way, may, 
 for all me, consider it a fraudulent impersonation by a sec- 
 ondary self of the medium, and made up of data telepathically 
 acquired. But the reader, by the time he gets through with 
 the facts, will find himself saddled with a pretty tough job. 
 A good many people, however, and some of them not very 
 highly endowed, have been equal to the job, or thought 
 they were. 
 
 The uninitiated reader who has struggled through the 
 incoherences of this sitting will probably be surprised and, 
 I fear, discouraged to learn that, judging by the published 
 records of other sittings, this is a fairly good one. I take 
 shame to myself for neglecting to write out my comments and 
 return the record to Hodgson. With his experience, he prob- 
 ably would have edited it into much more comprehensible 
 shape. I prefer to leave it with its imperfections. 
 
 If, instead of attributing the whole thing to telepathy, 
 I had then estimated the importance of the subject as I
 
 Ch. XXVIII] Changes in Author's Views 395 
 
 do now, and had the leisure I have now, I should hare 
 returned it, even if I had realized that, after eighteen years, 
 my comments would be much better informed, and I would 
 have occasion to use the matter again in an exposition of 
 my own. But my attitude regarding spiritism that it was 
 nothing but telepathy from the sitter, having been fixed in 
 my interview with Foster, and considerable reading and in- 
 timate association with Hodgson and some other members 
 of the S. P. R. not having changed it; and finding, at the 
 time, in my seance with Mrs. Piper nothing but telepathy, 
 I felt no interest in farther personal investigation. 
 
 I went away from the sitting with the conviction : " She 
 gave me nothing which was not in my own mind: ifs the 
 same old story " ; and I have not been near a medium since, 
 and do not care to go. (See Preface to Second Edition.) 
 
 After this confession, my venturing to write upon the 
 subject may seem to others, as it often does to me, pre- 
 sumptuous. That view, however, would have silenced most 
 of the historians: for hardly any one of them, or even any 
 editor, witnesses the events or hears the debates that he gen- 
 eralizes upon ; nor often does any philosopher discover or even 
 witness most of the facts that he correlates, nor (I hope I am 
 not wearying you) any scientist most of the facts on which 
 he bases his discoveries. 
 
 There exist better books on this department of my subject 
 than I dare hope this is going to be, but most of the 
 good ones appeal principally to students who have held 
 many sittings; and were begun to support theses, while 
 I write for lay readers, and at least began with the intention 
 of letting the theses regarding this part of my subject form 
 themselves as I should go along. Moreover, my long experi- 
 ence as a publisher has taught me that intermediaries are 
 needed between experts and lay readers. I have habitually 
 said to experts to whom I have suggested non-technical books : 
 "The right point of view must cover both knowledge and 
 ignorance; I can trust you for the knowledge, and I can 
 supply the ignorance." I am doing something of that here. 
 
 Nevertheless, if the persons who get and read an average 
 book, would get and read the forty volumes of the Proceedings
 
 396 Mrs. Piper: Author's Experience [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 and Journal of the S. P. R., and would arrange from their 
 necessarily heterogeneous contents, fairly systematic presenta- 
 tions of the principal classes of phenomena, probably this book 
 would not have been written. I even doubt if it would have 
 been if there were any probability that as many persons as 
 may read it, would ever read, in Part XXXIII (Vol. XIII), 
 Hodgson's treatment of the ground he covers. There are only 
 two reasons why I do not advise you, if your time is limited, 
 to drop this book where you are, and substitute that : Hodgson 
 does not cover the ground that I shall attempt to cover in 
 my chapters on the dream life, and in my final summary, and 
 in the passages preliminary to them; and, so far as I know, 
 no other writer on the general subject has been as persistently 
 haunted as I have by the conception of the Cosmic Soul. 
 
 And again, in a subject consisting so largely of specula- 
 tion, and interpreted so largely by temperament, there is 
 a chance of almost any work, however humble, doing some- 
 thing that other works do not. 
 
 Behind all the apologia I have given, is the fact that I have 
 found the change from a disbelief in the survival of bodily 
 death, so fruitful, intellectually as well as emotionally, that I 
 am prompted to do what I can to share it with others. Never- 
 theless, my convictions do not rest on the phenomena of 
 mediumship, to which I do not yet confidently assign the 
 spiritistic hypothesis at least as it is usually understood. 
 
 But when, about 1908, I had my long row of " Proceed- 
 ings " bound up, and began to read consecutively what, before, 
 I had merely dipped into spasmodically, the aspects of the 
 evidence underwent some change. Moreover, in the mean- 
 time I had received, in other ways, indications pointing more 
 strongly to survival of bodily death than to any explanation 
 I could frame or find (see Chapter LV). This of course 
 tended to change my point of view regarding the phenomena 
 shown by the "mediums," but by no means reversed it. 
 I gradually realized, however, that my conclusion that Mrs. 
 Piper gave me nothing which was not in my own mind, was 
 very superficial. The effect on me of reading the Pro- 
 ceedings is that if we render unto telepathy all the things 
 which are telepathy's, there is still a great deal to be ac- 
 counted for. Ascribe every verified statement in the reports,
 
 Ch. XXVIII] Experiences Outside Telepathy 397 
 
 if you will, to telepathy, what are you going to do with 
 the immense number of alleged personages through whom 
 the statements come, with their own consistent opinions 
 regarding the statements and other things, their initiatives, 
 discriminations, responses, retaliations? 
 
 Mrs. Piper gave me at least the following things which 
 were not in my own mind : 
 
 I. The impersonation of Phinuit. Mrs. Piper didn't get 
 from me his humor or bumptiousness or medical skill or 
 philanthropy or dramatic qualities generally. 
 
 She may have got him from the first medium with whom 
 she sat (see Chapter XXIX), and it may have been a delib- 
 erate invention of that medium, expanded by her; but not by 
 her supraliminal self : for that knows next to nothing of what 
 occurs in her trances; and her honesty regarding it is now 
 beyond all question. If she had developed and expanded 
 a fictitious dramatic impersonation, which she calls Phinuit, 
 she did it through her subliminal self an activity to which 
 I find it more and more difficult to apply the term " self," ex- 
 cept only so far as its nature and degree are determined by the 
 conformation of the self as a receiving and transmitting in- 
 strument. But so far as the subliminal self is a motive power, 
 I grow less and less able to conceive it as anything but 
 a cosmic inflow, different from the cosmic inflow making 
 our ordinary (supraliminal) selves, in being a special in- 
 flux depending upon some unusual circumstance in Mrs. 
 Piper's case, presence of a sitter and the condition of trance. 
 
 In guessing the Cosmic Soul to contain in some mys- 
 terious way "the potency and power" of all the ideas, 
 impressions, memories, psychical activities in what we call 
 the universe, I of course guess it to contain all the groups 
 of them which we call personalities. Until lately, person- 
 alities have appeared to be " real or imaginary " : the real 
 ones appearing to be created by a spontaneous cosmic inflow 
 independent of any human volition, into a receptacle that 
 we know in each case as an independent human body; the 
 imaginary ones, so far as we have known until lately, are 
 created by a cosmic inflow sought and controlled more or less 
 definitely by a real personality an author. We know some of
 
 398 Mrs. Piper: Author's Experience [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 them as Colonel Esmond, Becky Sharp, lago, Eosalind, and 
 the like, and entertain regarding them many of the opinions 
 and feelings that we entertain regarding real personalities. 
 Now supposing Phinuit never to have existed in the flesh, are 
 he and his class, of these imaginary personalities, or do they 
 belong to still a third class a cosmic inflow without a 
 " human body," and yet not " created by a cosmic inflow 
 sought or controlled ... by a real personality " ? If he did 
 once exist in the flesh, of course he is just such an individual 
 effect of the cosmic inflow as G. P. and my cousin and hosts 
 like them, and as you and I may yet be in fact are already, 
 only we have so far been (or had to be) content to use only 
 our own bodies. 
 
 This is guess and speculation. Whether I'm ready to 
 swear to it as fact, as I do to the words uttered to me by 
 the Phinuit personality or impersonation I am guessing 
 about, is another matter. 
 
 II. Mrs. Piper did not get from me Phinuit's statement, 
 whether true or not, that I am a medium a point on which 
 there was probably never an opinion, or even a curiosity, in 
 any mortal mind. Whence, then, could the assertion have been 
 telepathed ? I am a very good dreamer, and she may have per- 
 ceived some mediumistic quality in my makeup. There is 
 probably more than is realized, in everybody's. 
 
 III. She did not get from me Phinuit's question whether 
 I wanted him to tell me the length of my grandfather's cat's 
 tail. 
 
 IV. She did not get from me the dramatic verisimilitude 
 of G. P.'s comments and remarks. / didn't call her " this 
 protoplasm " ; and she didn't call herself that by a long shot. 
 Then somebody other than I must have invented those phrases 
 and all the other things she did not get from me. To say that 
 she did, is, as we shall have abundant evidence later, to say 
 that she is the greatest dramatist that ever lived. To say 
 that her subliminal self did, is but to beg the question. So 
 is it to say that a secondary self was Phinuit and a tertiary 
 self G. P., and so on down to the hundreds of her controls. 
 
 V. She did not get from me the facts about A and B, 
 yet she may have got them teloteropathically from either or 
 both of those persons.
 
 Ch. XXVIII] Telepathy Inadequate 399 
 
 VI. She did not get from me her G. P. : for hers was 
 not merely the G. P. I had known, but one who had grown. 
 She may have got from me some facts of his personality, 
 but where did she get his anxiety to prove his continued 
 existence, and to have me do something to better the state 
 of affairs with A and B? 
 
 VII. She may have got from me the facts that my cousin 
 Albert was drowned and that his mother was (or had been) 
 in the South, but she did not get from me his poignant 
 anxiety to have me tell his mother that he had survived the 
 drowning. 
 
 Among these seven points are germs which we will find 
 growing as we proceed to sittings of far more interest
 
 CHAPTEK XXIX 
 
 HODGSON'S FIRST PIPER REPORT, 1888-91 
 Mrs. Pipers Early Experiences 
 
 FROM my experiences with Mrs. Piper, let us now turn to 
 the records where, but for reasons given, we would naturally 
 have begun. 
 
 Probably the first public mention of Mrs. Piper in any 
 organ seriously associated with science is in the Proceedings of 
 the American S.P.E. for July, 1886. On p. 95 is the state- 
 ment: 
 
 " In two persons (one of them being the Mrs. P. who is men- 
 tioned in the report on mediumistic phenomena) an arm was 
 made absolutely anaesthetic, whilst retaining its muscular con- 
 tractility." 
 
 And in the " report " aforesaid (pp. 102-6) signed by no 
 less a person than James, it is stated : 
 
 " This lady can at will pass into a trance condition, in which 
 she is 'controled' by a power purporting to be the spirit of a 
 French doctor, who serves as intermediary between the sitter and 
 the deceased friends. This is the ordinary type of trance-medi- 
 umship at the present day 
 
 " I am persuaded of the medium's honesty, and of the genuine- 
 ness of her trance ; and ... I now believe her to be in possession 
 of a power as yet unexplained." 
 
 Now the hypnotic theory of telepsychosis that I advanced 
 earlier, if it is to fit Mrs. Piper, must be modified to this 
 extent. She is not readily thrown into the hypnotic trance 
 by anybody but herself. Neither is she susceptible to ordinary 
 thought-transference, when vigilant, like Mr. Guthrie's young 
 women, and she has an appreciable number of failures 
 in trance. James reports on all that in Pr. American S.P.R., 
 102f., and adds: 
 
 " So far as the evidence goes, then, her medium-trance seems 
 400
 
 
 Ch. XXIX] Mrs. Piper's Early Experiences 401 
 
 an isolated feature in her psychology. This would of itself be 
 an important result if it could be established and general- 
 ized " 
 
 The result seems to have since been " established and gen- 
 eralized," and she does not even exhibit telekinesis, which 
 was done by Foster, Home, and Moses. 
 
 The first important report published on Mrs. Piper is in 
 Pr. VI, by Myers, Lodge, and James, and covers sittings in 
 England from the latter part of November, 1889 till early in 
 February, 1890. But this does not deal with manifestations as 
 early as some reported in Pr. VIII by Hodgson, and covering 
 sittings from 1887 through 1891. In making my selections, 
 I will attempt to follow chronology as closely as practicable, 
 and accordingly will draw on Pr. VIII before Pr. VI. 
 
 The papers in the Proceedings being prepared by different 
 persons, widely differently circumstanced, even in different 
 continents (not excluding Asia), the order of their publica- 
 tion was by no means that of the occurrence of the events 
 they chronicled. Hence in our attempts at a chronological 
 order, which at best we can attain but very roughly, we will 
 have to skip to and fro among the volumes. 
 
 Hodgson prefaces his report with an interesting account of 
 Mrs. Piper's initiation into mediumship (Pr. VIII, 46f.) : 
 
 " Mrs. Piper herself has given me what information she could. 
 In reply to inquiries in January, 1888, she informed me that her 
 husband's father and mother ... in 1884 . . . persuaded her to try 
 consultation with a medium who gave medical advice. She was 
 at that time suffering from a tumor. She visited Mr. J. R. 
 Cocke, a blind medium, also a ' developer ' of mediums. He 
 professed to be controlled by -a French physician whose name was 
 pronounced Finny. While there, she felt curious twitchings, 
 and thought she might become completely unconscious. On a 
 second visit to Mr. Cocke he placed his hands on her head, and 
 shortly after she became unconscious. As she was losing con- 
 sciousness she was aware of a flood of light and saw strange 
 faces, and a hand moving before her. The ' flood of light ' she 
 had experienced once before, a few months previously ; it imme- 
 diately preceded a swoon, caused by a sudden blow on the side 
 of the head. When she lost consciousness on the occasion of her 
 second visit to Mr. Cocke, she was said to have been controlled 
 by an Indian girl who gave the name ' Chlorine,' and to have 
 given a remarkable test to a stranger who was present. She
 
 402 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 had several more sittings with Mr. Cocke, and was again con- 
 trolled, apparently on each occasion by ' Chlorine.' " 
 
 This name is evidently pitched upon on account of its 
 euphony and apparent femininity, by some consciousness 
 we can't tell whose, perhaps Mrs. Piper's subliminal (what- 
 ever that may mean) unaware of the meaning of the word 
 (which I hardly need tell the reader usually refers to a 
 rather fetid gas), and especially of its etymological meaning 
 light green. 
 
 Hodgson continues: 
 
 " On her second visit to Mr. Cocke, he professed to be con- 
 trolled by John Sebastian Bach. After this she tried sitting at 
 home with her relatives and friends. Phinuit (sic) ' controlled ' 
 first, and since then regularly, but she was also ostensibly con- 
 trolled at occasional times by Mrs. Siddons, Bach, Longfellow, 
 Commodore Vanderbilt, and Loretta Ponchini. It was said that 
 ' Mrs. Siddons ' recited a scene from Macbeth, Longfellow was 
 said to have written some verses, and Loretta Ponchini (who 
 purported to be an Italian girl) to have made some drawings. 
 These verses and drawings have not been preserved 
 
 " Dr. Phinuit only came at first to give medical advice. He 
 ' didn't care to come for other matters,' as he thought them ' too 
 trivial.' 
 
 " Finally Sebastian Bach said they were going to concentrate 
 all their powers on Phinuit, and he ultimately became the chief 
 control. 
 
 " Mr. Piper says that there is no question but that it is the 
 same Phinuit or personality who controls Dr. Cocke, no matter 
 how their names are spelt." 
 
 The questions regarding him are different from those re- 
 garding most of the other controls : for, with the exception of 
 the Imperator group, they, in ordinary life, were generally 
 known, personally or historically, to the sitters ; while Phinuit 
 has loomed upon the world as free from origins as Melchize- 
 dek, and some people think, despite his lack of priestly ways, 
 with as important a mission. But he has alleged a lot of 
 origins that, so far, cannot be traced. Even, however, if 
 they never can be, the fact would not prove that he never 
 existed. 
 
 He himself (I use the term simply for convenience, without 
 expressing any opinion, and shall do so freely regarding other 
 controls) says through Mrs. Piper (Pr. VIII, 50; Hodgson's 
 comments are interspersed) :
 
 Ch. XXIX] Phinuit's Account of Himself 403 
 
 " ' Phinuit is one of my names ; Scliville is my other name ; 
 Dr. Jean Phinuit Scliville ; they always called me Dr. Phinuit.' 
 He was unable to tell the year of his birth or the year of his 
 death, but by putting together several of his statements, it would 
 appear that he was born about 1790 and died about 1860. He 
 was born in Marseilles, went to school and studied medicine at a 
 college in Paris called ' Merciana '( ?)College, where he took his 
 degree when he was between twenty-five and twenty-eight years 
 old. ' Merciana. You know the name " Meershaum " f That 
 is the same name ; I cannot spell it ; sounds something like that.' 
 He also studied medicine at ' Metz, in Germany.' At the age of 
 thirty-five he married Marie Latimer, who had a sister named 
 Josephine. ' Josephine was a sweetheart of mine first, but I 
 went back on her and married Marie after all.' Marie was 
 thirty years of age when he married her, and died when she was 
 about fifty. He had no children. P. : 'Do you know where the 
 Hospital of God is, Hospital de Dieu (Hotel Dieu)?' Sitter: 
 ' It is in Paris.' P. : 'Do you remember old Dyruputia ? Dyr- 
 uputia [Dupuytren ?] was the head of the hospital, and there is 
 a street named for him.' He went to London and from London 
 to Belgium. ' I went to very different places after my health 
 broke down.' " 
 
 On Dec. 26, 1889, Phinuit said to Sir Oliver Lodge through 
 Mrs. Piper (Pr. VI, 520) : 
 
 " ' I have been 30 to 35 years in spirit, I think. I died when I 
 was 70 of leprosy, very disagreeable. I had been to Australia 
 and Switzerland. My wife's name was Mary Latimer. I had a 
 sister Josephine (p. 495). John was my father's name. I 
 studied medicine at Metz, where I took my degree at 30 years 
 old, married at 35. Get someone to look all this up, and take 
 
 pains about it. Look up the town of , also the Hotel Dieu 
 
 in Paris. I was born in Marseilles, am a Southern French gen- 
 tleman. Find out a woman named Carey. Irish. Mother Irish, 
 father French. I had compassion on her in the hospital. My 
 name is John Phinuit Schlevelle (or ?Clavelle), but I was 
 always called Dr. Phinuit. Do you know Dr. Clinton Perry? 
 Find him at Dupuytren, and this woman at the Hotel Dieu. 
 
 There's a street named Dupuytren, a great street for doctors 
 
 This is my business now, to communicate with those in the body, 
 and make them believe our existence.' " 
 
 Hodgson comments regarding the statements he quoted, and 
 that just given. He says : 
 
 " Some discrepancies will be noticed between these statements 
 and those given in Pr.VI,520, and I understand that no trace of 
 ' Jean Phinuit Schliville ' has been discovered at the medical 
 schools where Phinuit claims to have studied and practised, or
 
 404 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 along other lines of inquiry suggested by the few fragments 
 
 which he offers of his life history 
 
 " Concerning his inability to speak French, Phinuit's original 
 explanation to me was that he had lived in Metz the latter part 
 of his life, and there were many English there, so that he was 
 compelled to speak English and had forgotten his French. I 
 replied that this explanation was very surprising, and that a 
 much more plausible one would be that he was obliged to use 
 the brain of the medium, and would therefore manifest no more 
 familiarity with French than she possessed. This trite enough 
 suggestion appeared to Phinuit also more plausible, since a 
 few days later he offered it himself to another sitter as an ex- 
 planation of his inability to sustain a conversation in French ! " 
 
 There is a very simple answer to all this: he could speak 
 French, though Mrs. Piper could not. See pages 414 and 420. 
 
 < " Dr. C. W. F. [see Report No. 23, Pr.VIII,98f. H.H.], reques- 
 tioned Phinuit about the prominent medical men in Paris in 
 Phinuit's time. The names of Bouvier and Dupuytren were 
 given. Dr. F. tells me that he (Dr. C. W. F.) knew nothing 
 about Bouvier previously, but knew well about Dupuytren. The 
 doctors he had in mind at the time of his question ' were Vel- 
 peau, Bouillaud, Nelaton, Andral, and many others, all promi- 
 nent forty or fifty years ago with extended reputations.' [If it 
 is all telepathy, why didn't Phinuit name one of them from Dr. 
 F.'s mind? H.H.] Taking the foregoing considerations together, 
 it appears to me that there is good reason for concluding that 
 Phinuit is not a French doctor." 
 
 Or he must be a French doctor communicating under dis- 
 
 Hodgson goes on to say something which tends very strongly 
 to separate Phinuit's personality from Mrs. Piper's (Pr. VIII, 
 55-6) : 
 
 " On one occasion, not long before a sitting (June 30th, 1888), 
 Mrs. Piper was startled by a very near sudden clap of thunder, 
 and Phinuit, on being afterwards questioned, appeared to have 
 no knowledge of the circumstance, and apparently tried to guess 
 at what had occurred. Similarly on questioning Phinuit at one 
 of my early sittings concerning the life of Mrs. Piper, he pro- 
 fessed ignorance on the subject, but said that he would ' find out 
 things.' . . . Soon afterwards, however, Phinuit told me of inci- 
 dents in connection with Mrs. Piper which I think that Mrs. 
 
 Piper herself would never have mentioned to me 1 have also 
 
 met with several cases where Mrs. Piper [in the waking state? 
 H.H.] knew not a little of the sitter's ordinary environment,
 
 Ch. XXIX] Hodgson's First Account of PJiinuit 405 
 
 names of friends, &c., and yet this information was not given 
 by Phinuit." 
 
 Hodgson says (Pr. VIII, 5) of one occasion when he per- 
 suaded Phinuit to stand up : 
 
 " Mrs. Piper stood up without changing the position of her 
 feet, at the same time throwing her head slightly back and her 
 chest forward, and thrusting the thumbs jauntily into what would 
 have been the annholes of her waistcoat had she worn one." 
 
 Hodgson continues (pp. 8-9) : 
 
 " I have been at sittings where Phinuit has displayed such 
 paltering and equivocation, and such a lack of lucidity, that I 
 believe had these been my only experiences with him I should 
 without any hesitation have condemned Mrs. Piper as an im- 
 postor. Such failures appear to depend sometimes, but not al- 
 ways, on the sitter. As Phinuit himself confessed (May 26th, 
 1888) : ' Sometimes when I come here, do you know, actually it 
 is hard work for me to get control of the medium, and sometimes 
 not at all. Then I am weak and confused.' 
 
 " Considering, then, my own first six sittings [from which we 
 will have extracts later. H.H.], I find that all the correct (veri- 
 fiable) statements made by Phinuit concerned matters known to 
 me, except the insignificant prophecy that my sister (in Aus- 
 tralia) would soon have a fourth child a boy. I had no (con- 
 scious) knowledge even that another child was ' coming very 
 soon.' On the other hand, I did not consciously know the Chris- 
 tian name of my mother's father, though I had probably heard 
 it, and this was incorrectly given as John. [Identically the 
 same with Foster and my " Orandpere aux Franqais" H.H.] 
 Further, Phinuit failed to obtain information, or made funda- 
 mental mistakes, in matters about which my own recollections 
 were very clear and vivid. The most striking circumstances cor- 
 rectly mentioned were concerning the lady whom I have called 
 ' Q.' and my cousin Fred, and were such as I should expect those 
 persons to select, if in actual communication with me, as proofs 
 of identity. But then, again, Phinuit was unable to tell me of 
 circumstances about which I made special inquiry, and which 
 were at least as familiar to the alleged ' spirit ' as those described 
 to me. Thus, Phinuit never told me the full name of ' Q.,' 
 though I frequently asked for it at later sittings. His explana- 
 tion was that ' Q.' refused to tell him, but Phinuit has frequently 
 urged his ignorance on this point as a proof that he cannot ' read 
 my mind ' (an inability of which he is very anxious to assure 
 me), and I suspect that this ignorance may be assumed." 
 
 But there is too much of just that sort of ignorance in all 
 mediumistic manifestations. All the experience since this
 
 406 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 writing of Hodgson's (1891) indicates that ignorance to be a 
 powerful argument against the telepathic hypothesis: if the 
 mediums read the minds of the sitters or of absent persons, 
 why should many of the least definite things be read, and 
 many of the most definite left unread? But, on the other 
 hand, Hodgson continues (pp. 9-10) : 
 
 " However this may be, there is no doubt but that Phinuit's 
 unquestionable failure to obtain satisfactory replies to many 
 questions which have been asked of ' deceased friends ' is a most 
 formidable objection, as we shall see later, to the ' spirit hypo- 
 thesis ' at least as it is commonly accepted. 
 
 " Admitting now that the facts mentioned at these first sit- 
 tings of mine were drawn by Phinuit from my mind, I must 
 notice that they were, certainly most of them, and possibly all 
 of them, obtained from my mind at a time when I was not con- 
 sciously thinking of them Vivid conscious thinking of a cir- 
 cumstance does not seem, indeed, to help Pbinuit in any way, 
 but rather the contrary." 
 
 Not so Foster with me : quite the reverse, and not so Mrs. 
 Thompson generally, and numerous other cases. Mrs. Verrall 
 comments on her experience with Mrs. Thompson's control 
 (Pr. XVII, 174) : 
 
 "When at Nelly's suggestion I have fixed my attention on 
 some detail for the sake of helping her to get it, I have never 
 succeeded in doing anything but what she calls ' muggling her.' " 
 
 Hodgson resumes (Pr. VIII, 11) : 
 
 " My conclusion, then, about my own [Hodgson's. H.H.] first 
 six sittings is that the statements made by Phinuit may be re- 
 garded as explicable on the hypothesis that he had access to 
 portions of my ' subconscious ' mind." 
 
 We shall find that farther experience reversed Hodgson's 
 conclusions. But even at that stage of the game he farther 
 concludes a striking illustration of the self-contradictions 
 incident to these perplexing phenomena (Pr. VIII, 56) : 
 
 " I am convinced, as regards the bare information shown by 
 Phinuit, that it cannot be accounted for entirely by thought- 
 transference from the sitters, and that at least some hypothesis 
 which goes as far as thought-transference from the minds of dis- 
 tant living persons is demanded." 
 
 I am astonished to find throughout the Pr. S. P. E. how 
 much there is of this " harping on my daughter " on " bare 
 information." Grant all the telepathy (" bare information ")
 
 Ch. XXIX] Miss E. 0. W.'s Sittings 407 
 
 you please from the sitter and from incarnate intelligences 
 the world over; deny, if you please, any telepathy ("bare in- 
 formation ") whatever from discarnate intelligences, you have 
 still got to account for the give-and-take and general dra- 
 matic character of the controls. How do you propose to ? By 
 the medium's secondary personalities? Then are you ready 
 to allow that she has a thousand ? If not, have you any third 
 hypothesis to offer but the spiritistic? I certainly have not, 
 except spiritism as interpreted by the Cosmic Inflow, which, 
 vague as it is, nevertheless seems to me, amid all its fogs, more 
 like a fact than a hypothesis. I shall have more to say regard- 
 ing secondary personalities. 
 
 Hodgson goes on to give details from forty-one of the sittings 
 which Mrs. Piper gave before she went to England in 1889. 
 After a few extracts from them, I will devote a chapter to 
 the English reports in Pr. VI, and a few words about 
 Hodgson's reports from twelve more sittings after her return 
 to America up to the end of 1891. 
 
 Miss E. 0. W.'s Account of Sittings with Mrs. Piper 
 (Pr. VIH,29f.). 
 
 " My forty-fire sittings with Mrs. Piper cover the period from 
 November 12th, 1886, to June 19th, 1889. In forty-one of these 
 the control was taken, for at least a part of the hour, by a per- 
 sonal friend whose subjects of conversation, forms of expression, 
 and ways of looking at things were distinctly unlike either Mrs. 
 Piper's or Dr. Phinuit's. The clearly-marked personality of that 
 friend, whom I will call T., is to me the most convincing proof 
 of Mrs. P.'s supernatural power, but it is a proof impossible to 
 present to anyone else 
 
 11 T. was a Western man, and the localism of using like as a 
 conjunction clung to him, despite my frequent correction, all his 
 life. At my sitting on December 16th, 1886, he remarked, 'If 
 you could see it like I do.' Forgetful for the instant of changed 
 conditions, I promptly repeated, ' As I do.' ' Ah,' came the re- 
 sponse, ' that sounds natural. That sounds like old times.' 
 
 " March 1st, 1888, he requested, ' Throw off this rug,' referring 
 to a loose fur-lined cloak which I wore. I ... weeks after re- 
 called that he bad once, while living, spoken of it in the same 
 way as I threw it over him on the lounge. February 18th, 18S7, 
 T. remarked, ' I like your arrangement here,' referring to a new 
 gown by a term which he was wont to use. 
 
 " March 2nd, 1887, came this : ' I never knew you had a little 
 sister here. She tells me she has been here a long time, ever
 
 408 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 since she was a little toddling baby.' Certainly not I [from 
 whose mind it could be read on the hypothesis of " telepathy 
 from the sitter." H.H.], nor Mrs. P., who has children of her 
 own, would speak of a four months old child as a ' toddling 
 baby.' It is more thinkable of a man who, like T., never knew 
 anything of young children. 
 
 " I have received from T., dictated through Mrs. P. to her 
 husband and sent me by post, seven letters at intervals . . . each 
 contains familiar allusions and the old-time opening and closing 
 phrases, either of which is too long and individual to have been 
 merely chanced upon. The post-office address of the first is 
 worth mention. Mrs. P. had learned from me neither name nor 
 
 residence On November 16th, 1886, Dr. P. told me that T. 
 
 was dictating a letter to me. ' How will you address it ? ' I 
 asked. ' T. knows your address and will give it to the medium.' 
 November 29th, a friend, who had been sitting with Mrs. P., 
 brought me word that the promised letter had been mailed to 
 Miss Nellie Wilson, 
 
 Care David Wilson, 
 
 Beading, Mass. 
 
 " By applying at the post-office at Heading I was able to ob- 
 tain the letter. I alter the names, but these points may be 
 noted : 
 
 " 1. My surname is given correctly. 
 
 " 2. I have a cousin, David Wilson, of whose relationship and 
 friendship T. was well aware. His home, however, has always 
 been in New York. 
 
 "3. Heading was my home during my childhood and youth, 
 but I removed from it thirteen years ago. I knew T. only sub- 
 sequent to that removal. 
 
 " 4. While living there I wrote my name with the diminutive, 
 Nellie, but since then have preferred to write my baptismal 
 name Ella, or merely the initial E. T. was wont to use the 
 initials merely. 
 
 " At my next sitting, November 30th, I inquired about this 
 mongrel address. ' T. was not strong enough,' [differences of 
 clearness are often attributed to differences of " strength " in 
 the communicating " spirit." H.H.] said Phinuit, ' to direct 
 where the letter should be sent, but he thought your cousin 
 David would attend to your getting it. Your other friends here 
 [in the " spirit world." H.H.] helped us on the rest of the ad- 
 dress.' ' But they would not tell you to send to Reading.' ' Yes, 
 they would, they did. It was Mary told us that.' ' Nonsense,' 
 said I, thinking of a sister of that name. ' Not Mary in the 
 body. Mary in the spirit.' ' But I have no such friend.' ' Yes, 
 you have. It was Mary L. Mary E. Mary E. Parker told us 
 that.' I then recalled a little playmate of that name, a next door 
 neighbor, who moved away from Reading when I was ten years 
 old, and of whose death I learned a few years later. I had
 
 
 Ch. XXIX] Hodgson's First Sitting 409 
 
 scarcely thought of her for twenty years. The ' E.' in the name 
 I hare not verified." 
 
 The address of this letter proves one of six things, or some 
 seventh thing unimaginable in the present state of our know- 
 ledge. Of the five possible solutions which will the reader 
 who does not prefer to suspend his judgment, accept as strain- 
 ing the probabilities least? Each strains them some. They 
 are: (I) Mrs. Piper fooled somebody. The solution is out of 
 date. (II) Mrs. Piper patched together reminiscences lying 
 latent in Miss Wilson's mind, and unknown to her supralim- 
 inal self. (Ill) Mrs. Piper had tapped incarnate minds 
 other than Miss Wilson's. (IV) Mrs. Piper had an inflow 
 from the cosmic consciousness (an idea which everybody men- 
 tions with respect but nobody has yet tried persistently to 
 apply) of knowledge which had once been part of Miss Wil- 
 son's individuality, but had lost that connection, though re- 
 connectable with her mind or any mind under favorable cir- 
 cumstances. The "favorable circumstances," so far as we 
 can guess, were a desire somewhere in that cosmic mind, 
 presumably in the portion of it constituting a postcarnate 
 Mr. T. (for there is no apparent reason for inferring such a 
 desire in Mrs. Piper's mind: that could only be a desire to 
 humbug, and, as already said, is out of date), to address a 
 letter to Miss W., and a successful (sufficiently successful) 
 search for her address among other portions of that mind. 
 (V) The spiritistic theory as usually held, which may not 
 extravagantly be considered included in IV. 
 
 No one of these hypotheses is very satisfactory, but we in- 
 crease knowledge mainly by unsatisfactory hypotheses which 
 farther knowledge sometimes modifies until they become sat- 
 isfactory. 
 
 R. Hodgson. First Sitting. May Ith, 1887. (Pr.yiTI,60.) 
 
 [From notes made on return to my rooms immediately after 
 the sitting.] 
 
 " Phinuit began, after the usual introduction, by describing 
 
 [correctly. H.H.] members of my family Phinuit tried to get 
 
 a name beginning with ' R,' but failed. [A little sister of mine, 
 named Rebecca, died when I was very young, I think less than 
 eighteen months old.] 
 
 " Phinuit mentioned the name ' Fred.' I said that it might be 
 my cousin. ' He says you went to school together. He goes on
 
 410 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 jumping-frogs, and laughs. He says he used to get the better 
 of you. He had convulsive movements before his death, strug- 
 gles. He went off in a sort of spasm. You were not there.' 
 [My cousin Fred far excelled any other person that I have seen 
 in the games of leap-frog, fly the garter, etc. He took very long 
 flying jumps, and whenever he played, the game was lined by 
 crowds of schoolmates to watch him. He injured his spine in a 
 gymnasium . . . lingered for a fortnight, with occasional spas- 
 modic convulsions, in one of which he died.] Phinuit described 
 a lady, in general terms, dark hair, dark eyes, slim figure, etc., 
 and said she was much closer to me than any other person : that 
 
 she ' died slowly It was a great pain to both of you that you 
 
 weren't there. She would have sent you a message, if she had 
 known she was going. She had two rings ; one was buried with 
 her body; the other ought to have gone to you. The second part 
 of her first name is sie.' [True, with the exception of the 
 
 statement about the rings, which may or may not be true No 
 
 ring ever passed between the lady and myself After trying in 
 
 vain to ' hear distinctly ' the first part of the name, Phinuit gave 
 up the attempt, and asked me what the first name was. I told 
 him. I shall refer to it afterwards as ' Q.'] " 
 
 At Hodgson's second sitting, November 18th, 1887, Phinuit 
 referred to the beautiful teeth of "Q." and Hodgson says: 
 " < Q.'s ' teeth were not beautiful." 
 
 R. Hodgson. Fourth Sitting. December th, 1887. 
 (Pr.VIII,63f.) 
 
 " Information purporting to have been received from 
 
 ' Q.' The chief new matter was : 
 
 "(a) That I had given her a book, 'Dr. Phinuit' thinks, of 
 poems, and I had written her name in it, in connection with her 
 birthday. [Correct.] 
 
 "(6) . . . [Correct. This includes a reference to circumstances 
 under which I had a very special conversation with ' Q.' I 
 think it impossible that ' Q.' could have spoken of this to any 
 other person. It occurred in Australia in 1875.] 
 
 "(c) That she 'left the body' in England, and that I was 
 across the country. [This is incorrect. ' Q.' died in Australia. 
 I was in England.]" 
 
 Here (a) and (&) go strongly for telepathy from the 
 sitter, and (c) goes just as strongly against it. 
 
 " He referred to a church to which both ' Q.' and myself used 
 to go, and then asked if it was in ' Hanover Square.' I replied, 
 No, whereupon he told me not to note anything until he got it 
 ' clearer.' 
 
 " ' Dr. Phinuit ' then charged me with weighing too much 
 who he was, where he came from, etc., while he was trying to
 
 Ch. XXIX] Hannah Wilde, J. F. Brown, " Aunt Kate " 411 
 
 give me information, and said that this harassed and confused 
 him. I should, he said, be as ' negative ' as possible during the 
 sitting. [The charge was justified, as I had actually drifted 
 into the consideration of what Phinuit was, etc.] " 
 
 This series of sittings continued the famous (?) Hannah 
 Wilde communications (Pr. VIII, 69-84), which included a 
 vast number of things that were so, and one apparently most 
 important thing, that was not, namely, a letter written by 
 Phinuit which purported to be a copy of a sealed letter left by 
 Miss Wilde, and had no relation whatever to it. See the sim- 
 ilar case of the Myers letter. Chapter XLI. 
 
 There are some sittings of which Hodgson says (Pr. VIII, 
 85): 
 
 " Mr. John F. Brown, a member of our Society . . . writes to 
 me on February 20th, 1891, that he is fully convinced that Mrs. 
 Piper's dealings with him have been false and fraudulent 
 throughout. His opinion, I believe, is that Mrs. Piper pretends 
 to go into trance, proceeds by guesswork, questioning, etc., and 
 adds such information as she has been able to obtain by secret 
 inquiry beforehand concerning the sitters. I understand that he 
 attributes importance to the details of all his visits to Mrs. 
 Piper, and his accounts are therefore given in full." 
 
 All that about "secret inquiry" now seems ludicrous. I 
 quote this allusion and a few others of the same kind to 
 show both sides. I have read over Mr. Brown's details, and 
 find them more interesting than I fear he did, but less inter- 
 esting than some others which would better occupy our limited 
 space than this, for instance (Pr. VIII, 92-3) : 
 
 " 5, Boylston-place, March 6th, 1889. 
 
 " Mr. Robertson James has just called here on return from a 
 sitting with Mrs. P., during which he was informed by Mrs. 
 P. entranced that ' Aunt Kate ' had died about 2 or 2.30 in 
 the morning. Aunt Kate was also referred to as Mrs. Walsh. 
 
 " Mrs. Walsh has been ill for some time and has been ex- 
 pected during the last few days to die at any hour. This is 
 written before any despatch has been received informing of the 
 death, in presence of the following: 
 
 " RICHARD HODGSON. 
 " WILLIAM JAMES. 
 " ROBERTSON JAMES. 
 
 " On reaching home an hour later I found a telegram as 
 follows : ' Aunt Kate passed away a few minutes after mid- 
 night. E. R. WALSH.' 
 
 "(Signed) WM. JAMES.
 
 412 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 , " Mrs. William James, who accompanied Mr. Kobertson James 
 to the sitting on March 6th, writes as follows: 
 
 " 18, Garden-street, CAMBRIDGE, March 28th, 1889. 
 " Concerning the sitting mentioned above on March 6th, I 
 may add that the ' control ' said, when mentioning that Aunt 
 Kate had died, that I would find ' a letter or telegram ' when I 
 got home, saying she was gone. 
 
 " ALICE H. JAMES. 
 
 " July, 1890. 
 
 "It may be worth while to add that early at this sitting I 
 inquired, ' How is Aunt Kate ? ' The reply was, ' She is poorly.' 
 This reply disappointed me, from its baldness. Nothing more 
 was said about Aunt Kate till towards the close of the sitting, 
 when I again said, ' Can you tell me nothing more about Aunt 
 Kate?' The medium suddenly threw back her head and said 
 in a startled way, ' Why, Aunt Kate's here. All around me I 
 hear voices saying, " Aunt Kate has come." ' Then followed the 
 announcement that she had died very early that morning, and 
 on being pressed to give the time, shortly after two was named. 
 
 " A. H. J." 
 
 And here is a manifestation eight months after Mrs. Walsh's 
 death, of a control claiming her name and impersonating her. 
 The reader will probably agree that Hodgson was a pretty 
 good reporter, and that if Mrs. Piper was not really " pos- 
 sessed " (by a cosmic inflow of Mrs. Walsh's personality?) 
 Mrs. Piper or her subliminal self, whatever that may mean, 
 was a pretty good dramatic author and actress. 
 
 R. Hodgson. November 1th, 1889. (Pr.VIII,93-4.) 
 
 [From a letter written to Professor W. James on the day of 
 the sitting.] 
 
 " Mrs. D. and I had sitting to-day at Arlington Heights, and 
 the usurpation by ' Kate Walsh ' was extraordinary. She (Mrs. 
 Piper) had got hold of my hands, and I had to make a few 
 fragmentary notes afterwards of the remarks, themselves frag- 
 mentary, which she made. The personality seemed very intense, 
 and spoke in effortful whispers. 
 
 "' William William God bless you.' Sitter: 'Who are 
 you?' 'Kate Walsh.' S. 'I know you.' 'Help me help 
 
 me ' [Taking [i.e., Mrs. Piper "taking," &c. H.H.] my 
 
 right hand with her right, and passing it to her left and making 
 me take hold of her left hand.] ' That hand's dead dead this 
 one's alive ' [i.e., the right] ' help me.' 
 
 " The left hand . . . was cooler than either of my hands, while 
 the right hand was warmer than either of my hands [the im- 
 plication being that Mrs. Piper was possessed by Mrs. Walsh. 
 H.H.]
 
 Ch. XXIX] "Aunt Kate" Continued 413 
 
 " ' I'm alive I'm alive Albert's coming over soon. He can't 
 stay poor boy poor boy Albert Albert Alfred Albert I 
 
 know you Alice Alice William Alice ' S. ' Yes, I know. 
 
 I'll tell them. You remember me. I stayed with you in New 
 York.' ' Yes, I know. But, oh, I can't remember. I'm so cold 
 I'm so cold. Oh, help me help me' [making tremulous 
 movements of hands]. S. ' I know. I'll tell them. You remem- 
 bor me ; my name's Hodgson.' ' Yes. Mr. Hodgson. Where are 
 the girls? Yes. You had fish for breakfast on the second day, 
 didn't you ? ' S. ' I don't remember very well.' ' And the tea 
 who was it spilt the cup of tea? Was it you or William?' [I 
 think I remember something about the tea, but not very clearly. 
 R.H.] ' You were in the corner room bedroom upstairs. 
 Were you cold? Then there was some blancmange you didn't 
 like that. No. It was cream Bavarian cream. [Is all this 
 Mrs. Piper, or is it Shakspere, or is it the spirit of a fussy old 
 lady? H.H.] Albert poor boy; he's coming soon. William 
 [something about arranging the property] William God bless 
 him.' 
 
 " The above was much less than was really said. But that was 
 the sort of thing, and nothing a la mode Phinuit at all. It was 
 the most strikingly personal thing I have seen." 
 
 This, some commentators want us to believe, was " another 
 personality" of Mrs. Piper if Phinuit was. Four in the 
 case of Sally Beauchamp are well established, and eleven in 
 the case of Dr. Wilson's patient (Pr. XVIII). I wonder 
 how many Dr. Prince would consider a probable number, and 
 at what number the spiritistic hypothesis would begin to 
 appear easier than the divided personality one. 
 
 James thus commented on Hodgson's letter (Pr. VIII, 94) : 
 
 " The ' Kate Walsh ' freak is very interesting. The first men- 
 tion of her by Phinuit was when she was living, three years or 
 more ago, when she had written to my wife imploring her not 
 to sit for development [i.e., as a medium. H.H.]. Phinuit knew 
 this in some incomprehensible way. A year later [in a sitting] 
 with Margaret Qibbens [sister of Mrs. James], I present, Phi- 
 nuit alluded jocosely to this fear of hers again, and made some 
 derisive remarks about her unhappy marriage, calling her an 
 ' old crank,' etc. Her death was announced last spring, as you 
 remember. In September, sitting with me and my wife, Mrs. 
 Piper was suddenly ' controlled ' by her spirit, who spoke directly 
 with much impressiveness of manner, and great similarity of 
 temperament to herself. Platitudes. She said Henry Wyckoff 
 had experienced a change, and that Albert was coming over 
 soon ; nothing definite about either. Queer business ! "
 
 414: Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 (7. W . F. } M.D. Providence, R. I., May 11th, 1889. (Pr.VIH,98f .) 
 [Extracts from a letter to James.] 
 
 [The sittings] " rather force me to believe that Dr. P. is not 
 
 a fictitious personage Dr. P. has partially forgotten his 
 
 French, so far as speaking it goes, yet I am convinced that he 
 understands all that I say in that language, and that Mrs. P. 
 does not, from my tests of her capacity, and she impresses me as 
 being a truly honest woman 
 
 " Q. : ' How long do you think I shall live? ' (He had pretty 
 well described my physical condition.) He answered this ques- 
 tion by counting in French on the medium's fingers to eleven. 
 Q. : ' What influence has my mind on what you tell me ? ' A. : ' I 
 get nothing from your mind; I can't read your mind any more 
 than I can see through a stone wall.' He added that he saw 
 objectively the persons of whom he spoke to me, and that they 
 
 conveyed to him the messages given The names of several 
 
 persons he called up he spelt in French, as Robert, not being 
 able, seemingly, to pronounce them well in English. . . . ' How do 
 you get what you tell me about myself; my length of life, my 
 going to Europe, etc. ? ' A. : ' I get it from your astral light.' 
 [He generally says from spirits. H.H.] . . . The doctor has em- 
 phasized my own mediumistic power at each seance, and has 
 said that I would surely write. ' Get a planchette, and I will 
 come to your own house as a test.' " 
 
 As already said, and probably will be said again, people with 
 mediumistic aptitudes get good sittings. 
 
 A good illustration of the fallibility of the communications 
 isinPr. VIII, 114: 
 
 Miss A. A.B., Boston. January or February, 1888. 
 " I went to Mrs. Piper chiefly to see if she could tell me of 
 some china we had lost. It had been stored during a long ab- 
 sence in Europe, and upon our return we could not find it 
 
 She said, ' You have lost some china, and you feel very badly 
 about it. It was taken from your home by a man who has been 
 
 in the employ of your family a long time ' Several months 
 
 after Mrs. Piper told me this, the china was found precisely 
 where it was first placed, and where it had been overlooked, as 
 the box was believed to contain something else." 
 
 Apparently telepathy of the sitter's suspicion. And here 
 are two of the reverse (Pr. VIII, 115) : 
 
 " ' Did you ever own a bird ? ' ' Yes.' ' It is a parrot, and is 
 flying all about your head now.' ' Do birds, then, have another 
 life?' 'I tell you this anything that you have had here and 
 want there again, you will have. You will have that parrot 
 again.' I never owned but one bird, and that was a gray parrot."
 
 Ch. XXIX] Revs. W. H. and M. J. Savage 415 
 
 The dramatic character of the second makes it a double 
 strain on the telepathic theory (Pr. VIII, 104f.) : 
 
 Rev. W. H. Savage. December 28th, 1888. 
 
 " ' Ah ! Here is somebody from outside he says his name is 
 Robert West. He wants to send a message to your brother.' 
 Then, after a moment, ' I wrote an he is writing it and I am 
 reading for you an AR TI article A G A against his W 
 work in the AD V Advance. What the dickens is the Ad- 
 vance f ' I said, ' It is a paper.' Then she continued, ' I thought 
 he was wrong, but he was right, and I repent, he was right. 
 
 I want you to tell him for me. I am sorry 1 want to right 
 
 all the wrong I did in the body.' I said to her, ' Can you see 
 him ? ' ' Yes,' she replied. ' How does he look ? ' I asked. ' He 
 has grayish blue eyes, a beard, a rather prominent nose, a firm 
 mouth, a large forehead, and he brushed his hair up, so,' brush- 
 ing my hair with her hand, to show the fashion of his. ' He is 
 of medium build, rather tall. He died of hemorrhage of the 
 kidneys.' . . . The description of Mr. West is photographic in its 
 truth. His appearance at our interview was entirely unheralded 
 by anything leading up to it 
 
 " Mr. M. J. Savage writes on June 26th, 1890 : 
 
 " Mr. West . . . became editor of The Advance. While on that 
 paper he wrote a severe criticism on me, my doctrines, and my 
 work. My brother had not seen this criticism, and did not even 
 know about it. 
 
 " Neither of us knew the cause of his death. On writing to 
 The Advance, after this sitting, the correctness of Mrs. Piper's 
 statement as to his death was confirmed. 
 
 " Mr. W. H. Savage further writes July 5th, 1890: 
 
 " 1. When Mrs. P. began speaking of Mr. West, she turned 
 with a surprised look, as at an unlocked for interruption, with 
 the remark, ' Ah ! here is, etc.' [as above. H.H.] 
 
 " 2. When I asked for a description she turned again in the 
 same direction and said, ' Hold up your head and let me look 
 at you.' Then she went on to describe as given in the statement. 
 
 " 3. She gave the date of death correctly, as well as cause. 
 
 " 4. I did not know that West was dead. 
 
 " 5. As my brother says, I had never heard of the attack on 
 my brother of which the interview speaks." 
 
 Rev. M. J. Savage. January 15th, 1889 (Pr.VIII.105f.) 
 
 " On January 15th, 1889, the Rev. M. J. Savage had a sitting 
 with Mrs. Piper, in the course of which Rev. Robert West pur- 
 ported to communicate, stating that his body was buried at 
 Alton, 111., and giving the text on his tombstone. Mr. Savage 
 was unaware of either of these facts at the time of the sitting. 
 He soon afterwards ascertained that Rev. Robert West's grave 
 was at Alton, 111., but he did not ascertain the text on the tomb- 
 stone. He recently informed me of the circumstance, and I
 
 416 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 have since obtained from Mr. J. A. Cousley, editor of the Daily 
 Telegraph, Alton, 111., a copy of the inscriptions on the tomb- 
 stone. I requested Mr. Savage then to furnish me with the 
 text which had been given to him through Mrs. Piper. Yester- 
 day he found his notes made on the day of the sitting, and read 
 me the text, which agreed with that sent to me from Alton viz., 
 ' Fervent in spirit, serving the Lord/ R. HODGSON. 
 
 " The above is correct. (Signed) M. J. SAVAGE. 
 
 " July 25th, 1890." 
 
 The following, if genuine (and there seems no more reason 
 to doubt it than any other Piper manifestation), looks more 
 like a case of "possession" than perhaps any other case of 
 hers: 
 
 Miss A. M. R. (Pr.VIII,lllf.) 
 
 " BOSTON, February Tilth, 1888. 
 
 " At the first sitting I tried to get some information regarding 
 a friend who had then been dead about three months. I was 
 told by Dr. Phinuit . . . that I probably would not get anything 
 satisfactory for some time, and was advised to wait about eight 
 months. At the expiration of that time I sat again, and at the 
 third sitting from that time (I think my dates are correct) the 
 medium was controlled for a few minutes during the hour by 
 what purported to be the spirit of my friend who, however, 
 seemed to have such imperfect control that he could only speak 
 in a choked, whispering voice. At the next sitting he was 
 stronger, and now is able to take control and talk easily and 
 distinctly for perhaps half an hour. I have received the impres- 
 sion, from what has been told me through the medium, that for 
 some months after the death of my friend he did not sufficiently 
 understand the conditions of his new existence, or the conditions 
 under which he could return, to be able to reach me through any 
 medium." 
 
 " BOSTON, December Vlth, 1888. 
 
 " He used to be lame He has often said to me, ' You 
 
 know my lame leg ; well, it is all well now.' ... He tried very 
 hard [i.e., acting through the medium. H.H.] to raise himself 
 from the chair without succeeding at first. I told him he had 
 better not try, as it might be too much for the medium. He in- 
 sisted on trying, however, but commenced rubbing one leg, and 
 asked me if I could remember which leg was lame. [This 
 strange sort of ignorance is very characteristic of " controls." 
 H.H.] At last he raised himself, but instead of walking, as Dr. 
 P[hinuit] would do, he leaned heavily on me, and seemed to hop 
 or hitch along on one foot exactly as a person would do who 
 could use only one foot in walking. After he came back, he 
 dropped into the chair exhausted, and said that was the hardest 
 work he had done since coming back, and that it was too much
 
 Ch. XXIX] Miss A. M. E.'s Lame Control 417 
 
 of the real life for him; he did not like it He says that his 
 
 spiritual body was not lame, but that he had to come back that 
 
 way so I would recognize him " 
 
 " BOSTON, June 23rd, 1890. 
 
 " At each sitting I have conversed with two personalities, Dr. 
 P., the regular control, and the control which claims to be the 
 
 spirit of my friend H When my friend H. takes control of 
 
 the medium it seems to be quite a different personality, although 
 there is something in the voice or manner of speaking that is like 
 Dr. P. The voice, however, is not nearly so loud. When I 
 asked him once why this was, he told me that Dr. P. was right 
 by him and that he could not stay a moment without his help. 
 In a great many little ways he is quite like what my friend used 
 to be when living, so much so that I am afraid it would take a 
 great deal of explanation to make me believe that his identical 
 self had not something to do with it. ... This, too, in spite of the 
 fact that he does not always know how to spell his own name 
 correctly, though I am happy to be able to state that he cer- 
 tainly knows what his name is. He says the longer he is away 
 the more he forgets about things in this life, though he does not 
 
 forget his friends He insists that he can see me in my room, 
 
 and often knows what I am doing. At one time he asked me 
 how I liked that little drab-colored book that I had been reading 
 with another person. There was a particular book which I had 
 been reading aloud with a friend, but it was covered with brown 
 paper, as I remember, and I had no idea what the cloth cover 
 was. On reaching home I took off the paper cover, and found 
 that it was a drab-colored cloth cover. I may have seen the 
 book when new, and before the paper cover was put on, but if I 
 did I had completely forgotten about it." 
 
 These subliminal memories are frequent. The mediums 
 often get them contrary to the supraliminal convictions of the 
 sitters. Do they get them from the sitter's mind, or have they 
 passed into the cosmic mind via postcarnate souls ? 
 
 This account concludes (Pr. VIII, 113-4) : 
 
 " When I talk with H. about the philosophy of spirit return, 
 he always seems more or less puzzled, and generally refers me to 
 Dr. P., saying that he knows more about such things. He hardly 
 knew at first what I meant by the medium, but says that he has 
 for the time being another organism, and that is about all he 
 knows. When he asked me why I did not come oftener to see 
 him, I explained to him, somewhat as I would to a child, that the 
 medium was not always at command, and that I had to pay 
 money for a sitting with her. He said, ' I am an expensive 
 article, then ? ' I replied, ' Yes, you spirits are quite expensive 
 articles.' "
 
 418 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Pi IV 
 
 Mr. F. 8. 8. (Pr.Vin,119.) 
 
 "(Question: Well, Sarah is her middle name. What is her 
 other? Could not answer.) [Phinuit says (H.H.)] ' She is dif- 
 ferent from your mother; has very original ways of thinking, 
 and ideas. She is very positive; set as the hills; and doesn't 
 believe <in me. She is a crank, and so am I, but she will 
 have to be a good deal bigger than she is to scare me.'. . . 
 My aunt had given several sittings to [had several with? H.H.] 
 Mrs. P., but with no success; hence she had become somewhat 
 skeptical ; hence the medium's words, ' She does not believe in 
 me.' Mrs. P. had no possible means of associating my aunt and 
 me, to my knowledge." 
 
 Mr. M. N. (Pr.VIII,120f.) 
 
 " Briefly stated, the three cases of prophesying which I have 
 experienced with Mrs. Piper, and which have come true, are as 
 follows : 
 
 " She told me that a death of a near relative of mine 
 
 would occur in about six weeks, from which I should realize 
 some pecuniary advantages. . . . My wife, to whom I was then en- 
 gaged, went to see Mrs. Piper a few days afterwards, and she 
 told her (my wife) that my father would die in a few weeks. 
 
 " About the middle of May my father died very suddenly in 
 
 London Previous to this Mrs. Piper (as Dr. Phinuit) had 
 
 told me that she would endeavor to influence my father about 
 certain matters connected with his will before he died. Two 
 days after I received the cable announcing his death, my wife 
 and I went to see Mrs. Piper, and she [Phinuit] spoke of his 
 presence, and his sudden arrival in the spirit-world, and said 
 that he (Dr. Phinuit) had endeavored to persuade him in those 
 matters while my father was sick. Dr. Phinuit told me the 
 state of the will, and described the principal executor, and said 
 that he (the executor) would make a certain disposition in my 
 favor, subject to the consent of the two other executors, when I 
 got to London, Eng. Three weeks afterwards I arrived in Lon- 
 don; found the principal executor to be the man Dr. Phinuit 
 had described. The will went materially as he had stated . . . and 
 my sister, who was chiefly at my father's bedside the last three 
 days of his life, told me that he had repeatedly complained of the 
 presence of an old man at the foot of his bed, who annoyed him 
 by discussing his private affairs. 
 
 " The second instance I would give you is as follows : 
 
 " Dr. Phinuit stated that I would receive a professional offer 
 within two weeks by letter, to my present address, with the name 
 of the manager's firm on the left hand corner of the envelope, 
 and (as far as I could understand him) either from a man 
 named French, or else from a Frenchman. Within the time 
 stated the letter came, answering to the description of its appear- 
 ance, and to this address, but the offer was from a Frenchman.
 
 Ch. XXIX] Mr. J. Rogers Rich 419 
 
 " The third is as follows: 
 
 " Dr. Phinuit stated on one occasion that some relative was 
 suffering at that time from a sore or wounded thumb. We knew 
 
 of no one at the time Shortly after this conversation my aunt 
 
 stated that she had received a letter from cousins ' Oh, by- 
 
 the-bye . . . Jennie has . . . injured her thumb in some machine.' 
 . . . Dr. Phinuit cured me, or apparently did so, by a prescription 
 sent me by Mrs. Piper, of an internal trouble from which I had 
 suffered for eighteen months." 
 
 The following report (Pr. VIII, 126f.) by Mr. J. Rogers 
 Rich, made from contemporary notes of the sittings, is among 
 the best, and illustrates (by the converse) what has been re- 
 marked more than once that scientific (and consequently 
 skeptical?) people do not make the best sitters. This artist 
 made an admirable one. 
 
 " I had always had a dislike for any ' mediums ' or ' spiritual- 
 ists ' of every kind, but on meeting this woman I was at once 
 attracted to her by the simple and sympathetic manner which 
 she showed on greeting me, and I felt a delicacy about making 
 an appointment for a sitting, she seeming to me too gentle and 
 refined for a business of this sort. I was at once struck with the 
 peculiar light, or inward look, in her eyes. Her voice was full 
 and agreeable, but in every way a 'feminine' voice, and there 
 was an entire absence of any masculinity in her manner, which 
 I had been expecting to find under the circumstances. 
 
 " My first sitting with her was on September 6th, 1888. With 
 little trouble she went into the trance . . . and after a moment's 
 silence ... I was startled by the remarkable change in her voice 
 an exclamation, a sort of grunt of satisfaction, as if the person 
 had reached his destination and gave vent to his pleasure thereat 
 by this sound, uttered in an unmistakably male voice, but rather 
 husky. I was at once addressed in French with, ' Bonjour, Mon- 
 sieur, comment vous portez vous ? ' to which I gave answer in 
 the same language, with which I happen to be perfectly familiar. 
 My answer was responded to with a sort of inquiring grunt, 
 much like the French ' Hein ? '. . . Nearly all my interviews were 
 begun in the same manner. ... I was quite unwell with nervous 
 
 troubles The first thing told me was of a ' great light behind 
 
 me, a good sign,' &c. Then suddenly all my ills were very clearly 
 and distinctly explained and so thoroughly that I felt certain 
 that Mrs. Piper herself would have hesitated to use such plain 
 language! Prescriptions were given to me for the purchase of 
 
 herbs, and the manner of preparing them My profession 
 
 (painting) was described, and my particular talents and manner- 
 isms in design were mentioned My mother was clearly de- 
 scribed ! She was ' beside me, dressed as in her portrait (painted
 
 420 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 a year or two before her death), and wearing a certain cameo 
 
 pin, the portrait of my father.' " 
 
 "Second Sitting on October 5th . . . The 'Doctor' told me 
 of my niece being frequently 'in my surroundings,' and that 
 she was then at my side. Up to this time I had not heard my 
 name mentioned, so I asked for it from my niece. The ' Doctor ' 
 was again puzzled and said, ' What a funny name wait, I can- 
 not go so fast ! ' Then my entire name was correctly spelt out 
 but entirely with the French alphabet, each separate letter being 
 clearly pronounced in that language. My niece had been born, 
 lived most of her short life, and died in France. Then the 
 attempt to pronounce my name was amusing finally calling me 
 ' Thames Rowghearce Reach.' The ' Doctor ' never called me 
 after that anything but ' Reach.' " 
 
 It is now time for a comment on Hodgson's expressions on 
 p. 404 regarding Phinuit's French. Between there and here 
 they have been traversed more than once, this time, I think, 
 pretty strongly : for the spelling of a name " entirely with the 
 French alphabet, each separate letter being clearly pronounced 
 in that language," is a feat that few English-speaking 
 students could accomplish, because the matter is of little con- 
 sequence, and generally neglected. I have been in France 
 some, and have translated two French books without incurring 
 critical censure that I am aware of, and yet that feat would 
 be far beyond me. 
 
 Mr. Rich's farther remarks on this subject at the close of 
 his account are the most important which it has evoked (Pr. 
 VIII, 131) : 
 
 "One day Mrs. Piper pointed to a plain gold ring on my 
 finger and said: ' C'est une alliance, how you call that? A wed- 
 ding ring, n'est-ce pas ? ' This was true. Now if Mrs. Piper 
 had learned French at school here [which she did not or any- 
 where else. H.H.] she would most probably have called this ring 
 * un anneau de marriage,' and not have given it the technical 
 name ' alliance.' I several times carried on a short conversation 
 in French, making my observations in that language and receiv- 
 ing answers in the same, but which were always curt, and ended 
 with an expressed wish in broken English not ' to bodder about 
 French but to speak in English.' I made use, too, of certain 
 slang expressions which were apparently perfectly understood but 
 answered in English, though correctly." 
 
 But to return to Mr. Rich's earlier record (Pr. VIII, 
 128-9) :
 
 Ch. XXIX] Mr. Rich's Friend Newell 421 
 
 "November 8th. . . . A friend's sister had met with a loss by 
 fire, and wished to see what could be done towards tracing the 
 incendiary. This lady had a habit of coloring or bleaching her 
 hair, of which she had sent a lock as a test. 'Dr. Phinuit' at 
 first refused to touch the hair, saying that it was 'dead and 
 devilish ! ' As I knew nothing whatever of the persons con- 
 nected with the fire, I noted down the descriptions given, which 
 tallied perfectly with that of the parties suspected, as I after- 
 wards learned. . . . Breaking into the run of conversation, the 
 ' Doctor ' of a sudden said, ' Hullo, here's Newell ! ' (mentioning 
 the name of a friend who had died some months before). 
 ' Newell ' is a substitute for the real name. I should add that 
 ' Newell ' had frequently purported to communicate directly with 
 his mother through Mrs. Piper at previous sittings, but this was 
 the first time that any intimation of his presence was given to 
 me. I was totally unprepared for this, and said, ' Who did you 
 say ? ' The name was repeated with a strong foreign accent, and 
 in the familiar voice and tone of the ' Doctor.' Then there 
 seemed for a moment to be a mingling of voices as if in dispute, 
 followed by silence and heavy breathing of the medium. All at 
 once I was astonished to hear, in an entirely different tone and 
 in the purest English accent, ' Well, of all persons under the 
 sun, Rogers Rich, what brought you here? I'm glad to see you, 
 old fellow? How is X and T and Z, and all the boys at the 
 club?' Some names were given which I knew of, but their 
 owners I had never met, and so reminded my friend ' Newell,' 
 who recalled that he followed me in college by some years and 
 that all his acquaintances were younger than I. I remarked an 
 odd movement of the medium while under this influence; she 
 apparently was twirling a mustache, a trick which my friend 
 formerly practised much." 
 
 Now if all this drama is telepathy, it certainly is not of the 
 " common or garden variety," and if " Newell " is a secondary 
 personality of Mrs. Piper, it is one of hundreds of instances of 
 that woman having secondary personalities who are men. I 
 have read accounts of a good many undoubted cases of sec- 
 ondary personality, and have yet to read one where the sex 
 was crossed. Aren't these interpretations growing to look a 
 little absurd ? 
 
 Mr. Rich now gets back to Phinuit's prescription (Pr. VIII, 
 129-30) : 
 
 " I had been following the treatment prescribed by the ' Doc- 
 tor,' and had prepared at my home the herbs, etc., according to 
 his orders, as I thought. But I found that the medicine had not 
 the effect promised and so told him. The answer was that it was
 
 422 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 my fault for ' they were not properly prepared.' I assured him 
 that they were, whereat he said that ' that old nigger . . . had not 
 followed my directions, had used the wrong proportions, had for- 
 gotten to watch the cooking, and was a fool anyway ! ' On in- 
 quiry I found this to be the fact, for she had understood me to 
 say a quart instead of a pint, and confessed to having forgotten 
 the mixture and allowed it to boil down but ' thought it wouldn't 
 make any difference.' 
 
 " A lock of hair belonging to a friend who is quite noted for 
 his amusing self-conceit was greeted with a laugh and recognized 
 as belonging to ' His Koyal Highness,' or the ' Duke B,' calling 
 him by his real name and attaching the titles by way of 
 ' chaff.' 
 
 " Some prophecies were made to ' occur soon,' but I regret to 
 say that the ' Doctor's ' idea of ' soonness ' and mine differ 
 greatly for they are not yet fulfilled. 
 
 " June 3rd, 1889. My ninth sitting. This time I asked to 
 communicate with my friend ' Newell,' previously referred to in 
 my fourth sitting. The ' Doctor ' said, * I'll send for him,' and 
 kept on talking with me for a while. Then he said, ' Here's 
 Newell, and he wants to talk with you " Reach," so I'll go about 
 my business whilst you are talking with him, and will come back 
 again later.' Then followed a confusion of words, but I clearly 
 heard the voice of the ' Doctor ' saying : ' Here, Newell, you come 
 by the hands while I go out by the feet,' which apparently being 
 accomplished in the proper manner, my name was called clearly 
 as ' Rogers, old fellow ! ' without a sign of accent [Remember 
 that "Phinuit" always pronounced it with an accent. H.H.] 
 and the same questions put as to how were the ' fellows at the 
 club.' My hand was cordially shaken [by the medium. H.H.], 
 and I remarked the same movement of twisting the mustache, 
 which was kept up by Mrs. Piper during the interview. ' Newell ' 
 spoke of a ' pastel ' which I was drawing . . . and described the 
 pleasure he had in watching me do it. He told me of certain 
 private family affairs which I knew to be correct. Finally he 
 bade me good-by. Before going he spoke to me of his ' present 
 life,' and told me that he was writing a poem ; that he was now 
 pursuing his literary studies with the greatest pleasure, &c., &c. 
 ' But,' he said, ' was I not sick, and did I not suffer before I left 
 you all? Why, the leaving of the material body, Rogers, is ter- 
 rible. It is like tearing limb from limb; but once free, how 
 happy one is.' When ' Newell ' left me there was the usual dis- 
 turbance in the medium's condition, and then the resumption of 
 the familiar voice, accent and mannerisms of Dr. Phinuit." 
 
 The Doctor's remark: "Here, Newell, you come by the 
 hands while I go out by the feet " has haunted me since I first 
 read it many years ago, and for several reasons.
 
 
 Ch. XXIX] Sympathetic Ganglia. The Dog Grover 423 
 
 The hypnotists have found a peculiar sensibility in the pit 
 of the stomach, near the sympathetic ganglia. Their subjects 
 and some somnambulists appear to hear and see from there. 
 And there are suggestive accounts of its being the place of 
 entrance and exit of the soul or astral (?) body suggestive 
 because it is near the umbilicus, where the foetus derives its 
 nutriment from the mother. Whatever that may amount to, 
 it seems absurd that the hands, and of all things the feet, 
 should be the avenues of spiritual entrance and exit; but in 
 the light of our inherited preconceptions, a good many things 
 uncovered by " psychical research " have seemed absurd, and 
 yet some of them have, in time, become quite matters of 
 course. It has already ineffectually taken me nearly twenty 
 years to get over the feet and what they suggest. They have 
 been one reason why I do not care to visit mediums. I don't 
 want any of the souls I love coming to me through a stranger's 
 body, especially the inferior members of such a body. Phinuit, 
 however, does not appear to have been a very finical person, 
 and as a medical man he is presumably to be credited with 
 superiority to many of a layman's prejudices. 
 
 But with all my objections to the passage, isn't it as dra- 
 matic as Falstaff or Pistol ? I don't see how one can read it 
 without laughing at the idea that telepathy can be made to 
 cover the whole case. For myself, its dramatic quality so far 
 tends to overcome its coarseness and apparent absurdity, that, 
 commonplace as it is, it stands high among the phenomena 
 that weigh with me for the spiritistic hypothesis and almost 
 equally high with those that weigh against it. It would stand 
 higher still in the latter class if it were not so magnificently 
 in keeping with delightful old Phinuit. I'm sorry for any 
 reader of the Proceedings who does not enjoy him with the 
 two gentlemen I named before him. 
 
 Mr. Rich continues (Pr. VIII, 130) : 
 
 " Then I produced a dog's collar. After some handling of it 
 the ' Doctor ' recognized it as belonging to a dog which I had 
 once owned. I asked ' If there were dogs where he was ? ' 
 ' Thousands of them ! ' and he said he would try to attract the 
 attention of my dog with this collar. In the midst of our con- 
 versation he suddenly exclaimed, ' There ! I think he knows you 
 are here, for I see [him] coming from away off ! ' He then de-
 
 424 Hodgson's First Piper Report [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 scribed my collie perfectly, and said, ' You call him, Reach,' and 
 I gave my whistle by which I used to call him. ' Here he comes ! 
 Oh, how he jumps! There he is now, jumping upon and around 
 you. So glad to see you! Rover! Rover! No G-rover, 
 Grover ! That's his name ! ' The dog was once called Rover, 
 but his name was changed to Grover in 1884, in honor of the 
 election of Grover Cleveland." 
 
 This too is perhaps telepathy ! Or are we on the brink of 
 finding that a woman's secondary selves are not only men, and 
 by the hundred, but sometimes dogs ? The only demonstration 
 necessary would be for Mrs. Piper to try to bark. 
 
 Mr. Rich continues (p. 130) : 
 
 "A child was constantly beside me and in my surroundings. 
 It was attracted to me and had much influence over me : 'It is 
 a blood relation, a sister.' I denied this to hare ever been a fact 
 for I never had a sister and never heard of one. The answer 
 came : ' I know that, you were never told of it. The birth was 
 premature, the child dead, born some years before you were. Go 
 and ask your aunts to prove it.' On questioning an aunt who 
 had been always a member of our family, I learned that such had 
 been the case, and that by the time I came into the world the 
 affair had been forgotten and there had never been a reason for 
 informing me of the circumstances, proving that I in no way 
 had any intimation of it, and that this communication could 
 not be explained by thought-transference or the like." 
 
 Note that though Mr. Rich was a grown man, this sister, 
 born several years before he was, appeared to Phinuit as a 
 child. Similar anomalies in regard to even stillborn children 
 appear several times in the reports. It is no explanation of 
 them to say that they are inconsistent with the spiritistic 
 hypothesis. We may yet find that they are not. Either way, 
 they await explanation. Generally the controls appear as 
 having grown, and in long series of sittings (see Junot Series, 
 Chapter XLIX) as growing. 
 
 Mr. Rich remarks (p. 131) : 
 
 " Although the ' prophecies ' of the ' Doctor ' were not fulfilled 
 at the time I understood him to mean as ' in the spring ' or ' in 
 the fall,' I have since found several of these things come true, 
 and in the season which he mentioned, but not that year in 
 which he led me to expect them to be realized." 
 
 Barring some comparatively insignificant matters, this
 
 Ch. XXIX] Chronology of Reports 425 
 
 closes the sittings previous to Mrs. Piper's departure for Eng- 
 land late in 1889. We will now turn to her sittings there, 
 reported in Pr. VI, and then give a brief glance back to Pr. 
 VIII, where Hodgson gives those from her return in the spring 
 of 1890 through 1891
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 MRS. PIPER'S ENGLISH SITTINGS, 1889-90 
 
 THESE were held under the supervision of Sir Oliver Lodge 
 and Dr. Walter Leaf, and the report of them has an introduc- 
 tion by Myers, and is followed by a statement of impressions 
 of Mrs. Piper by James. All these experts expressed perfect 
 confidence in the honesty of the medium, and that the phe- 
 nomena were not explicable by any agency yet known to 
 science. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge says (Pr. VI, 445) : 
 
 " The details given of my family are just such as one might 
 imagine obtained by a perfect stranger surrounded by the whole 
 of one's relations in a group and able to converse freely but 
 hastily with one after the other; not knowing them and being 
 rather confused with their number and half-understood mes- 
 sages and personalities, and having a special eye to their phys- 
 ical weaknesses and defects. A person in a hurry thus trying to 
 tell a stranger as much about his friends as he could in this way 
 gather would seem to me to be likely to make much the same 
 kind of communication as was actually made to me." 
 
 With rather more confusion, one gets this impression con- 
 stantly in reading the hundreds of pages of such reports, and 
 it reminds me, and probably many, of frequent similar im- 
 pressions in dreams, which naturally awakens the notion of 
 inflow of more or less confused material from the cosmic mind. 
 
 Touching Phinuit, Sir Oliver Lodge says (Pr. VI, 448f.) : 
 
 " The name is useful as expressing compactly what is naturally 
 prominent to the feeling of any sitter, that he is not talking to 
 Mrs. Piper at all. The manner, mode of thought, tone, trains of 
 idea, are all different. You are speaking no longer to a lady 
 but to a man, an old man, a medical man. All this cannot but 
 be vividly felt even by one who considered the impersonation a 
 consummate piece of acting. 
 
 " Whether such a man as Dr. Phinuit ever existed I do not 
 
 know, nor from the evidential point of view do I greatly care 
 
 It can be objected, why if he was a French doctor has he so en- 
 426
 
 Ch. XXX] Sir Oliver Lodge on Phinuit 427 
 
 tirely forgotten his French? [But he has not. See p. 420. H.H.] 
 ... I am unable to meet this objection, by anything beyond the 
 obvious suggestion that Mrs. Piper's brain is the medium util- 
 ized, and that she is likewise ignorant. But one would think 
 that it would be a sufficiently patent objection to deter an im- 
 personator from assuming a role of purely unnecessary diffi- 
 culty 
 
 " Admitting, however, that ' Dr. Phinuit ' is probably a mere 
 name for Mrs. Piper's secondary consciousness, one cannot help 
 being struck by the singular correctness of his medical diag- 
 noses. [Of course this, like everything else in the sittings, is de- 
 nied by somebody. Cf. ante. H.H.] In fact the medical state- 
 ments, coinciding as they do with truth just as well as those of 
 a regular physician, but given without any ordinary examina- 
 tion and sometimes without even seeing the patient, must be held 
 as part of the evidence establishing a strong prima facie case for 
 the existence of some abnormal means of acquiring information. 
 Not that it is to be supposed that he is more infallible than an- 
 other. I have one definite case of distinct error in a diag- 
 nosis 
 
 "At times Dr. Phinuit does fish. Occasionally he guesses; 
 and sometimes he ekes out the scantiness of his information 
 from the resources of a lively imagination. . . . The fishing process 
 is most marked when Mrs. Piper herself either is not feeling well 
 or is tired. . . . When he does not fish he simply draws upon his 
 memory and retails old facts which he has told before, occasion- 
 ally with additions of his own which do not improve them. His 
 memory seems to be one of extraordinary tenacity and exactness 
 [more than any human memory. H.H.I, but not of infallibility; 
 and its lapses do introduce error [as to fishing, see p. 523. H.H.]. 
 
 " He seems to be under some compulsion not to be silent. 
 Possibly the trance would cease if he did not exert himself. At 
 any rate he chatters on, and one has to discount a good deal of 
 conversation which is obviously, and sometimes confessedly, in- 
 troduced as a stop-gap It would be a great improvement if, 
 
 when he realizes that conditions are unfavorable, he would say 
 so and hold his peace. I have tried to impress this upon him, 
 with the effect that he is sometimes confidential, and says that he 
 is having a bad time; but after all he probably knows his own 
 business best, because it has several times happened that after 
 half an hour of more or less worthless padding, a few minutes 
 of valuable lucidity have been attained. 
 
 " I have laid much stress upon this fishery hypothesis. . . . But 
 in thus laying stress I feel that I am producing an erroneous 
 and misleading impression of proportion. I have spoken of a 
 few minutes' lucidity to an intolerable deal of padding as an 
 occasional experience, but in the majority of the sittings held 
 in my presence the converse proportion better represents the 
 facts."
 
 428 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 The amount of attention given everywhere to Phinuit may 
 seem out of proportion, especially here, and also especially in 
 view of the fact that for several years, the old fellow has been 
 absent from mortal converse, and replaced by a great variety 
 of people (?) who speak, or rather write, for themselves. But 
 this attention to him is, on my part at least, largely because 
 he may help toward an explanation of those " other people." 
 
 Here is an episode explaining a nickname that Phinuit 
 habitually applied to Sir Oliver (Pr. VI, 47 If.) : 
 
 " Cousin married, and the gentleman passed out at sea, round 
 the sea Hullo, he's got funny buttons, big, bright. . . A uni- 
 form. He has been a commander, an officer, a leader; not mil- 
 itary, but a commander. . . . [A little further on Phinuit sud- 
 denly brings out the word Cap'n in connection with him, but, in 
 a curious and half puzzled way, applies it to me. It remained 
 my Phinuit nickname to the end, though quite inapplicable.] 
 Your mother has got a good picture of him taken a long time 
 ago, pretty good, old-fashioned, but not so bad of him. Yes, 
 pretty good. He looks like that now. He looks younger than 
 he did " 
 
 As in this vision, so it was in one of my own dreams which 
 I suspect was in several respects veridical; and in two other 
 dreams where I cannot trace any veridicity, the persons had 
 grown young. But in another which I fully believe to have 
 been veridical, the person had grown older in proportion to 
 the time since " passing over," but there was a peculiar reason 
 for such a manifestation: I fancy that my friend may have 
 wanted to appear to " grow old along with me." 
 
 You see I am now justifying Phinuit's report of my medi- 
 umship, but don't be alarmed. There is not much of it. Even 
 if more were possible, I have been too busy with other things, 
 and have a disinclination regarding it. 
 
 Phinuit asks (Pr. VI, 551) : 
 
 " ' Do you remember the little one that passed out of the 
 body ? ' E. C. L. [Sir O.'s sister. H.H.] : * No, but I know there 
 
 was one.' ' Well, he's here But you wouldn't know him now. 
 
 He's grown up.' E. C. L. : ' Then they do grow ? ' ' Certainly. 
 He's about 35, I should say. [The brother referred to, who died 
 aged five weeks, would have been 33.] They all look about 35 
 here.' " 
 
 But how about such utterances as this to Mrs. Leaf (Pr.
 
 Ch. XXX] Controls Growing in Years 429 
 
 VI, 594), and in the case of Mr. Rich's sister? Do they not 
 flatly contradict what has been said about growing up? 
 
 " ' There is a little child round you. The little body of a child. 
 It belonged to your aunt that is in the spirit, that passed out 
 years and years ago; you will have to ask your mother about it. 
 You will find that it is a little child that never lived in the body.' 
 R. M. L.: ' Whose child was that? ' ' The child does not know 
 whose child she was. Don't you see, the child was too young. 
 I can't get it to talk to me. I see this little one; it belongs 
 either to an aunt or a cousin. Your mother will know about it.' 
 
 " [This is not known to be correct of the child of an aunt or 
 cousin. Mrs. Leaf had herself lost a baby, born dead.]" 
 
 There are some things to suggest that if there are post- 
 carnate souls, they can appear as of any age in their experi- 
 ence and so show their history since separation, to anyone 
 rejoining them. 
 
 One naturally speculates whether, if there is a future state, 
 those there keep growing old with all the disagreeables inci- 
 dent to so doing. Twice, in dreams, I remember very vividly, 
 the old had grown young. This recalls Peter Ibbetson's state- 
 ment that he and his beloved kept themselves about twenty- 
 seven. There are reports that Peter Ibbetson is not all fancy, 
 but even if it were, such reports would be inevitable. 
 
 This whole question seems as much of a jumble as the ques- 
 tion arising from the controls' frequent assertion that their 
 life is free from pain, while the medium is frequently acting 
 evidences of pain usually that of their last illnesses. In sev- 
 eral places the controls say this is done to prove identity. 
 
 Here is an account by Sir Oliver that makes strongly for 
 the telepathic hypothesis, but the last sentence is rather 
 against it (Pr. VI, 466-7) : 
 
 "You have a son in the body a smart boy clever, but not 
 
 very strong . . . but he has got worms badly ' Ought he to go to 
 
 school ? ' ' By no means. You ought to keep him at home and 
 nurse him, and give him vermifuge. You will, won't you? 
 Worms are his chief trouble ; they consume his food, his stomach 
 is filled with slime; he feels nausea; no ambition; rather irri- 
 table.' [All this about my eldest boy is painfully true, except 
 that it is perhaps a little exaggerated. We had suspected worms 
 before, and perceiving the outside symptoms correctly described 
 as above, we took the matter in hand seriously, and after acting
 
 430 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt, IV 
 
 for some days under medical advice we established the truth of 
 the aboTe statement precisely.]" 
 
 And yet it is frequently said that Phinuit could not 
 t 
 
 " ' Can you tell me what his favorite pursuit is ? ' 
 " [This I asked because he exhibits a remarkable and constant 
 hankering after architecture, spending all his spare time when 
 not feeling sick and headachy in drawing plans of houses and in 
 reading about buildings. The reply was utterly wide of the 
 mark.] 
 
 " ' Pursuit ? oh, takes an interest in natural things ; is mu- 
 sical.' " 
 
 We may as well follow this boy through the sittings (Pr. 
 VI, 505f.) : 
 
 "Mrs. L.: 'Do you remember little V?' [The Lodges' sick 
 boy. H.H.] Dr. : ' I do remember.' O. L. : < Where is he now? ' 
 Dr. : ' He is with Mary [i.e., his grandmother : true] . He is 
 better there, and we are going to take good care of him, that 
 nothing serious happens. You remember. See if we don't take 
 good care of him, in your life, not in ours. Our interest is very 
 great, very large, and we could do a great deal. And, Marie, 
 
 dear [Mrs. Lodge. H.H.], do not worry; be brave Do not 
 
 eend him to school. Let him stay at home and rest well, and get 
 
 strong He will pull through, and come out all right. He has 
 
 got worms. Yes, he has got them still; but he will outgrow it, 
 and make a fine boy. Do not worry. I don't tell you that to 
 encourage you, but because it is true.' Mrs. L. : ' Are they little 
 or are they big worms ? ' Dr. : ' Large, not small, but large 
 worms; that is they are not tapeworms. No.' [True.] Mrs. 
 L. : ' What should we give him ? ' Dr. : ' You give him vermifuge 
 to take. Suggest some.' [N.B. This is not the usual Phinuit 
 method of prescription : it is quite exceptional.] O. L. : ' Mer- 
 cury ? ' Dr. : ' No, too strong. Weaken him.' Mrs. L. : ' San- 
 tonin? Scammony? Quassia?' Dr.: 'Yes, scammony is good. 
 Give him that with quassia alternately.' O. L. : ' Both injected? ' 
 
 Dr. : ' Yes, best thing in the lot I tell you you have got a great 
 
 comfort in that boy.' Mrs. L. : ' Will he live to be a man ? ' 
 Dr. : ' Fretting ! It is all bosh, and you had better be asleep than 
 fretting about people. Do as I told you. He will come out 
 all right. That's what's the matter. Give him hot water to 
 
 drink You make the vermifuge I told you Take good 
 
 care of yourself, Marie, we'll take good care of him. Change 
 will do him good. There is others in your surroundings that 
 needs looking after just as much and more. [This grammar was 
 not telepathed from the Lodges! H.H.] You need not worry 
 about any of them for the present. It is all right. It will be
 
 Ch. XXX] Controls Do Best near Home 431 
 
 all right ____ But God knows. What He told me to say, and 
 what He allows me to know, I know and no more. I can't help 
 getting mixed up sometimes; and it makes me mad. I'd like to 
 be all straight, not crooked. I do take care of you. When the 
 voice of Dr. Phinuit is no longer heard in the body, remember 
 you had a friend in me, and one who will always look after you, 
 no matter what one says about me. I go on. I fight, fight them 
 all ; and they will always do ---- Get good for me to do. God 
 bless you all, and the best wishes. Captain ! Is there anything 
 else? I will speak to you again. Doctor! ' " 
 
 Sir Oliver thus speaks about something which the reports 
 had suggested to me before I had read up to his mention of it, 
 and which to me did not by any manner of means "seem 
 absurd" (Pr. XXIII, 138, A.D. 1909): 
 
 " One curious circumstance I feel constrained to mention 
 though it will seem absurd and that is that the controls seem 
 to do best in their own country. For instance, long ago [1889. 
 H.H.], before any of us on this side of the Atlantic had seen 
 Mrs. Piper, a control calling itself Gurney sent messages through 
 that medium while she was still in America; which messages, 
 when recorded on this side, were thought feeble and unworthy, 
 so that the control was spoken of both by Prof. W. James and 
 by those in England as ' the pseudo-Gurney.' When, however, 
 Mrs. Piper came over here the ' Gurney ' messages became bet- 
 ter, and could be described as quite fairly lifelike." 
 
 It was this Gurney control whom Sir Oliver Lodge reported 
 in Pr. VI as " Mr. E.," but revealed in a later paper in Pr. 
 XXIII as Edmund Gurney. The later report duplicates and 
 enlarges a contemporary report in which he suppressed several 
 matters that twenty years later he felt free to print. I quote 
 here from the later account, interrupting, and I fear confusing, 
 our chronological order, for the sake of getting in the com- 
 ments which Sir Oliver made in 1909. He says (Pr. XXIII, 
 
 " I learnt in this way more about the life and thoughts of 
 Edmund Gurney than I had known in his lifetime. [And Mrs. 
 Piper knew less. Then where did it come from? H.H.] My 
 acquaintance with him . . . began in the early seventies, when . . . 
 he ... sat on the benches of University College, London, to listen 
 to my regular college lectures on Mechanics and Physics ---- He 
 was good enough to strike up a friendship with his youthful 
 instructor, and I occasionally lunched with him, and once or 
 twice saw him in his rooms at Clarges Street. 
 
 "The talk gradually turned upon psychical matters ---- Mr. 

 
 433 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 Gurney was even then at work on systematic preparation for the 
 
 book, Phantasms of the Living Before long he introduced me 
 
 to his friend, F. W. H. Myers, who, like Mr. Gurney, was pa- 
 tience itself in trying to inspire my superficial and dogmatic 
 materialism with an element of larger sense. 
 
 " A few years after all this the S.P.R. was founded, but I was 
 not one of the original members. I joined, I suppose, after the 
 Liverpool thought-transference experiments in 1883 and 1884 
 [see p. 245 f.]. I had migrated to Liverpool in 1881, and remained 
 there till 1900. Professor Barrett I had of course known all 
 along as a physicist, and in the eighties we had some conversa- 
 tions on thought-transference in connection with the Liverpool 
 experiments, in some of which I took part, and on which I re- 
 ported in the Pr.S.P.R.,Vol.2. 
 
 " Until 1884 I was unconvinced of the possibility of telepathy; 
 and not till the end of 1889 did the evidence for survival of per- 
 sonality beyond bodily death make any serious impression upon 
 me. . . . Edmund Gurney died in 1888, at a time when I was 
 entirely absorbed in orthodox physical experiments and the- 
 ory 
 
 "The first mention of Gurney in my sittings occurred on 
 Saturday evening, December 21, 1889. ... (A photograph of my 
 late Demonstrator Mr. Clark was here handed in.) L. : ' Can 
 you tell who this is?' [Phinuit.]: 'Well I will try. Edmund 
 will help me. A vessel burst in his stomach, and he passed out 
 very suddenly. He was away, not at home. A clever fellow and 
 a great help. He fell. Edmund sends his love to you.' (A letter 
 from Edmund Gurney was handed in.) L. : ' Can you read 
 this? ' P. : ' Oh, I don't know. I can't read it word for word. I 
 can tell you what it is about. It has got Edmund's influence on 
 it. So had that picture. Had you kept it with Edmund's let- 
 ter? ' L. : ' Well it had been in the same pocket.' P. : ' You must 
 not do that. You mix things up if you do that. No, I can't 
 read this letter. It is something about some books ' 
 
 " [Here the personality seemed to change and to represent Ed- 
 mund Gurney. He spoke so naturally that for a time I forgot 
 to take notes, but nothing evidential was said. The notes go on 
 thus : They are henceforward very imperfect, i.e., fragmentary.] 
 
 " G. : ' I am here, I etherially exist. I wrote to you about some 
 books for the Society. I have seen a little woman that's a me- 
 dium, a true medium. I have written to Myers using her hand. 
 I did do it, I, Edmund Gurney, I.' L. : 'Is this a medium here 
 now ? ' G. : ' Yes, she's a medium. Very few you will get like Dr. 
 Phinuit. He is not all one would wish, but he is all right. You 
 are Lodge. I know you. Lodge we shall beat them yet. There 
 is no death, only a shadow and then Light. Experiment and 
 observation are indispensable. We have to use some method like 
 this to communicate 
 
 " ' Yes, God is in Nature, all Nature is God. We are a reflec- 

 
 Ch. XXX] The Gurney Control 433 
 
 tion of God. Don't give up a good thing. The world will know, 
 and our Society will know, that there is no death. I didn't 
 know. I would have given anything to have had you come and 
 speak to me, if you had passed away first, as I am speaking to 
 you now.' L. : 'Is it goocl to be where you are?' G.: 'Yes, it 
 is good, the only good thing. Life in material world is beauti- 
 ful. Marriage is beautiful, but this is far better.' L. : 'Is there 
 no marriage?' G. : 'No, no, Swedenborg was all wrong. Jesus 
 Christ was right ; he knew. He was a reflection of God.' " 
 
 Evening of 25th Dec., 1889. (Pr.XXO,149f.) 
 "(Phinuit now seemed to leave, and another control, speaking 
 in a more educated voice, took his place; the change taking 
 place with a little uncertainty and difficulty as to how to man- 
 age it, and a seeming colloquy between the departing and en- 
 tering controls, Phinuit giving sotto voce instructions. After 
 the change was over, the voice said) : ' Lodge, how are you ? I 
 tell you Edmund Gurney is living, not dead. Edmund Gurney, 
 that's me : you know me, don't you ? ' L. : ' Yes, Gurney, de- 
 lighted to see you again.' G. : ' Don't give it up Lodge. Cling 
 to it, it's the best thing you have. It's coarse in the beginning 
 but it can be ground down fine. You'll know best and correct ( I) 
 It can only come through a trance. You have to put her in a 
 trance. You've got to do it that way to make yourself known.' 
 [Foster required no trance, and many of the heteromatic writers 
 require no trance. H.H.] L. : 'Is it bad for the medium?' 
 G. : ' It's the only way Lodge; in one sense it's bad, but in an- 
 other it's good. It is her work. If I take possession of the 
 medium's body, and she goes out, then I can use her organism 
 to tell the world important truths. There is an infinite power 
 above us. Lodge believe it fully, infinite over all, most marvel- 
 ous. One can tell a medium she's like a ball of light. You 
 look as dark and material as possible, but we find two or three 
 lights shining. It's like a series of rooms with candles at one 
 end. Must use analogy to express it. When you need a light 
 you use it, when you have finished you put it out. They are 
 like transparent windows to see through. Lodge, it's a puzzle. 
 It's a puzzle to us here in a way though we understand it better 
 than you. I work at it hard. I do. I'd give anything I possess 
 to find out. I don't care for material things now, our interest 
 is much greater. I am studying hard how to communicate; it's 
 not easy. But it's only a matter of a short time before I shall 
 be able to tell the world all sorts of things through one medium 
 or another. Who's that ? ' L. : ' It is my brother. He's taking 
 
 notes How is it they see their things?' G.: 'I don't know, 
 
 there is something about articles worn by spirits which retains 
 their personality ( ?) and a spirit controlling a medium is sensi- 
 tive to such. In nine cases out of ten they will recognize their 
 things; it doesn't come from your mind.' L. : 'Then it's not
 
 434 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 ordinary thought transference.' G. : ' No, it's not that. Investi- 
 gate. You can verify with patience. From time to time you 
 will hear from me and I will advise you. I met a lady in Amer- 
 ica a Mrs. Dorr ' [mother of Mr. George B. Dorr, whom we 
 shall meet later. H.H.]. [A lady well known to Mrs. Piper, but 
 I did not happen to know the name then. O. J.L.] L. : ' Daw ? ' 
 G. : ' No, Dorr, D o r r, a very nice lady ; very intellectual spirit- 
 ual and good. 1 had a long talk with her, and through her I 
 found the medium. She is a medium. These people are links 
 
 between the material and spirit worlds Where's Myers ? 
 
 Give him my love. I want to help him. Lodge, when I passed 
 out at first I didn't know who I was, nor where I was. I hunted 
 about for my friends and for my body. Soon however my sister 
 welcomed me. Three of them, all drowned. If I see Myers I 
 will talk to him. No spirit in the spirit world is more anxious 
 to let friends know than I was. [S.ome private matter here.] 
 Don't mention this. Tell Myers if you like. Myers is my con- 
 fidential friend. There is nothing I wouldn't have him know. 
 Kate is my wife, my sister is Ellen, [abbreviated] Lodge keep 
 up your courage; there is a quantity to hope for yet. Hold it 
 up for a time. Don't be in a hurry. Get facts ; no matter what 
 they call you, go on investigating. Test to fullest. Assure your- 
 self, then publish. It will be all right in the end no question 
 
 about it. It's true ' L. : ' What sort of person is this Dr. 
 
 Phinuit? ' [It is noteworthy that all the Controls treat Phinuit 
 as a genuine person of whom they have to speak circumspectly 
 when he is likely to be able to overhear what they are saying or 
 read what they are writing. Compare, for instance, statements 
 about him made by G. P. in the Hodgson Keport; footnote to 
 page 369, Vol. 13.] In the present instance the Gurney Control 
 replied to my question thus : ' Dr. Phinuit is a peculiar type of 
 man ; he goes about continually and is thrown in with everybody. 
 He is eccentric and quaint but good hearted. I wouldn't do the 
 things he does for anything. He lowers himself sometimes ; it's 
 a great pity. He has very curious ideas about things and people, 
 he receives a great deal about people from themselves (?). And 
 he gets expressions and phrases that one doesn't care for, vulgar 
 phrases he picks up by meeting uncanny people through the 
 medium. These things tickle him and he goes about repeating 
 them. He said to me the other day " Mr. Gurney what you think 
 a gentleman said to me the other day : he said ' put that in your 
 pipe and smoke it, Dr.' " He picks up this sort of thing and it 
 tickles him. He has to interview a great number of people and 
 has no easy berth of it. A high type of man couldn't do the 
 work be does. But he is a good-hearted old fellow. Good-bye 
 Lodge. Here's the Doctor coming.' L. : ' Good-bye Gurney. 
 Glad to have had a chat with you.' 
 
 " (The Control here changes back again.) P. : ' This [ring] 
 belongs to your Aunt. Your Uncle Jerry tells me to ask By
 
 
 Ch. XXX] Aunt Isabel More Gurney 435 
 
 the way, do you know Mr. Gurney's been here; did you hear 
 him? ' L. : ' Yes, I've had a long talk with him.' " 
 
 Evening of 2Qth Dec., 1889. (Pr.XXm,154.) 
 
 " (Dr. Phinuit speaking and reporting in the first person.) 
 
 ' I could almost come back and die over again to see you. You 
 
 tell Mary that her sister Isabel [See later] still lives; tell her 
 
 she has done nobly; tell her William and I are together. That 
 
 lazy gardener ! ' 
 
 " (Then the voice and manner changed to that of the Gurney 
 
 control. G. : ' Don't give up a good thing, Lodge Who is 
 
 here ? ' L. : ' This is my wife.' G. : ' How do you do, Mrs. Lodge 
 (shaking hands) [i.e., the medium does. H.H.]. I remember 
 having tea with you once.' [It was true that Mr. Gurney had 
 done so.] L. : (Introducing) ' Mr. and Mrs. Thompson.' G. : 
 4 Yes, I remember you, I think. [They had once met.J Good-by, 
 Lodge ; don't divulge my secrets.' L. : ' No, all right ; good- 
 
 by ' 
 
 " [L.] The point of this short episode is the sudden and natu- 
 ral stoppage of the conversation directly the control realizes that 
 strangers are present. That and the introductions that followed 
 were all just as if the Gurney control were a person really 
 present." 
 
 Monday Evening, 3rd February, 1890. (Pr.XXIII,155f.) 
 " Phinuit suddenly said, ' Here's Mr. Gurney.' (Thereupon 
 the control appeared to change, the impression somehow con- 
 veyed being very much as if Phinuit were leaving and another 
 coming in his place. The voice also became different and more 
 educated than before. No longer was I called ' Captain,' nor 
 were people's relations and personal affairs any more regarded 
 as objects of interest.) . . . G. : ' It is wonderfully difficult to com- 
 municate. All the time I've been here I have only found two 
 mediums beside this one. More people might be mediums, but 
 many won't when they can.' L. : ' What constitutes a medium ? ' 
 G. : ' Not too much spirituality and not too much animalism, not 
 the highest people and not the lowest. Sympathetic and not too 
 self-conscious, able to let their minds be given up to another 
 that sort of person easily influenced. Many could, but their 
 pride and a sense of self comes in and spoils it.' [Despite 
 Phinuit and Gurney, my conscience does not trouble me on the 
 point, if you will pardon my saying so. H.H.] L. : ' Gurney, 
 what about those table-tilting and physical things? Is there 
 anything in them ? ' G. : ' Mostly fraud. The rest electricity. 
 [Apparently a queer remark for Gurney, but possibly not beyond 
 natural carelessness. Of course all modes of force are inter- 
 changeable. H.H.] A person's nerves are doing they don't 
 know what. They are often not conscious when they move 
 things.' L. : ' It's like automatic writing then ? ' G. : ' Something.
 
 436 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 Often the tilts and noises are made by them when under the 
 control of some other spirit, and then the message may be gen- 
 uine. Trance things and automatic writing are good. Often 
 good. Other things sometimes, but mostly fraud.' L. : ' Can 
 things be moved without contact V G. : ' No, all bosh.' [We 
 know better now; there are hosts of cases. See under Tele- 
 kinesis. H.H.] L. : ' Then that Eglinton writing, with bits of 
 pencil untouched ? ' G. : ' Trickery, Lodge. Not worth a thought. 
 Most of this I have gone into, and it's as false as that elf, that 
 fiend, I might say. She bewitched me once. What's her name, 
 that woman who smoked?' L.: 'Blavatsky?' G.: 'That's her 
 
 name Who is this V L. : ' It's my sister, a young girl.' 
 
 G. : ' Oh ; pleased to make your acquaintance. I didn't meet you 
 I think.' E. C. L. : ' No, I never saw you.' G. : ' Glad to see you 
 now. . . . Phinuit will be coming back soon. He's a good old 
 man. He has a hard place. I wouldn't do the work he does for 
 anything. Seeing all manner of people and hunting up their 
 friends, and often he has hard work to persuade them that they 
 are really wanted.' L. : 'Is he reliable ? ' G. : ' Not perfectly, 
 he is not a bit infallible. He mixes things terribly sometimes. 
 He does his best ; he's a good old man but he does get confused, 
 and when he can't hear distinctly he fills it up himself. He does 
 invent things occasionally, he certainly does. Sometimes he has 
 rery hard work.' L. : ' Are his medical prescriptions any good ? ' 
 G. : ' Oh, he's a shrewd doctor. He knows his business thor- 
 oughly. He can see into people [He certainly did into me. 
 H.H.], and is very keen on their complaints. Yes, he is good 
 in that way, very good.' L. : ' Can he see ahead at all ? Can 
 anyone ? ' G. : ' I can't. I haven't gone into that. I think 
 Phinuit can a little sometimes. He can do wonderful things; 
 he has studied these things a good deal ; he can do many things 
 
 that I can't do But he is far from being infallible.' L. : ' The 
 
 Thompsons are waiting in next room. Shall I call them in ? ' 
 G. : ' The Thompsons ? Oh, I know, I met them at your house 
 once at dinner I think. No, I don't specially want to see them. 
 Well, Lodge, I must be going. Good-by.' (Here the medium 
 seemed to sleep a few moments, and then woke up again in the 
 Phinuit manner, putting out hand and feeling sitter's head.) 
 ' Eh, what. Oh, yes. All right. [This was internal colloquy.] 
 Look here, Mr. Gurney has been here ; he told me to express his 
 regret that he had not said good-by to Miss Lodge.' E. C. L.: 
 ' Oh, it doesn't matter a bit.' P. : ' I'm to tell him that, am L 
 
 Very well ' 
 
 " [L.] Again it was the dramatic character of the speaking 
 
 that was impressive -rather than the things said 1 attach no 
 
 importance to what is said concerning physical phenomena: it 
 does not pretend to represent more than an individual opinion, 
 whoever the individual may be The casual reference of un- 
 known phenomena, part to fraud, the rest to ' Electricity/ though
 
 Ch. XXX] Significance in Changes of Control 437 
 
 quite common with uneducated people, was especially unworthy 
 of Edmund Gurney, and not in the least the sort of thing he 
 would have said to me when alive. [Then it was not telepathy 
 from Sir Oliver, whatever it was. H.H.] . . . But the little friendly 
 speeches to my sister were quite appropriate to Mr. Gurney, and 
 so especially was the readiness to depart the instant he heard 
 
 that the Thompsons were waiting to come in Not that he 
 
 had any objection to them; but, besides the dislike of keeping 
 anyone waiting, he had the natural unwillingness of the man of 
 sensitive temperament to be thrown with strangers needlessly. 
 
 " It will have been observed that several times in the record I 
 have emphasized the change of control. I have done so all the 
 more explicitly because now [1909. H.H.] it seems a compara- 
 tively extinct, or at any rate a less pronounced, feature. The 
 whole business of ' control ' seemed more difficult then [1889. 
 H.H.], and it is possible that a personality really changes now 
 without our noticing the change so much. Then, however . . . 
 once I remember it occupied a minute or two, with a muttered 
 internal colloquy going on, as if there were a tangle or a hitch 
 somewhere. 
 
 " The naturalness of the change in manner and memory was 
 
 very pronounced A reader may think that this is due to the 
 
 perfection of conscious acting, while a sitter of any experience 
 will hardly think that. The fluctuation of memory is certainly 
 not artificial; it is a genuine change of personality whatever 
 that may be ... unmistakably analogous to multiple personality, 
 whether that be ever due to control by actual possession or 
 not 
 
 " February 3rd, 1890 (as reported on p. 550, Vol. 6), I asked 
 for a certain person to come and control instead of only sending 
 messages, and was told that it was too difficult. I pleaded ' Mr. 
 Gurney does.' To which Phinuit replied, ' You are greedy. 
 Yes, Mr. Gurney does, but Mr. Gurney is a scientific man, who 
 has gone into these things. He comes and turns me out some- 
 times. It would be a very narrow place into which Mr. Gurney 
 couldn't get.' " 
 
 This closes the report which Sir Oliver made in 1909 (Pr. 
 XXIII), giving more fully than he did in Pr. VI the con- 
 temporaneous report of the Gurney sittings that took place in 
 1889. 
 
 The appearances of the Gurney control in 1889 were largely 
 picked out and made consecutive, from sittings when other 
 controls also appeared. We will now revert from the account 
 of the Gurney control in Pr. XXIII, then twenty years old, 
 to the contemporary account in Pr. VI of the other controls
 
 438 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 who sometimes appeared at the same sittings when Gurney 
 did, and sometimes at others. Here is a characteristic Phi- 
 nuit touch (Pr. VI, 484) : 
 
 " She remembers more than you do. What do you think she 
 says to me? She says, don't swear, doctor; she did, sure as you 
 live." 
 
 There is a very remarkable case of telopsis, too long to give 
 here, in Pr. VI, 487-90. 
 
 Sitting 44. December 24ta, 1889. (Pr.VI,499, 506.) 
 "Present: O. J. L.; later, M. L. also; with Briscoe taking 
 shorthand notes all the time. (Verbatim report as a specimen 
 taken at random.) 
 
 " Dr. : ' How do you do, Doctor ? ' (Evidently referring to the 
 last sitter, Dr. C.) 
 
 " O. L. : < H'm. I am very well, thank you.' Dr. : ' 'Ullo, I 
 thought it was the Doctor (i.e., Dr. C.). You know I saw him 
 last.' O. L. : ' Yes, you did.' Dr. : < Two times. Well, I thought 
 it was him, don't you know.' [Again this bad grammar cannot 
 be telepathic from Sir O., nor was it apt to come from Mrs. 
 Piper. The bearing of this on the genuineness of Phinuit 13 
 worth considering. H.H.] . . . Dr. : ' Do you know who Jerry 
 J E R K Y is ? ' O. L. : ' Yes. Tell him I want to hear 
 from him.' U[ncle] J[erry. H.H.] : ' Tell Robert, Jerry still 
 lives. He will be very glad to hear from me. This is my watch, 
 and Robert is my brother [surviving. H.H.], and I am here. 
 Uncle Jerry my watch.' (Impressively spoken.) O. L. : ' Do 
 you see Aunt Anne now ? ' Dr. : ' Yes, she looks the same iden- 
 tical ; always the same Aunt Anne [Apparently Aunt Anne 
 
 takes control. She was a devoted aunt who had brought up Sir 
 Oliver and his brothers and sisters. Bear this in mind. H.H.] 
 We took good care of him. You little woman [to Lady Lodge. 
 H.H.], didn't we?'" 
 
 With reference to the next sitting, Sir Oliver says (Pr. 
 VI, 455) : 
 
 41 One of the best sitters was my next-door neighbor, Isaac C. 
 Thompson, F.L.S., to whose name indeed, before he had been in 
 any way introduced, Phinuit sent a message purporting to come 
 from his father. Three generations of his and of his wife's 
 family living and dead (small and compact Quaker families) 
 were, in the course of two or three sittings, conspicuously men- 
 tioned with identifying detail ; the main informant representing 
 himself as his deceased brother, a young Edinburgh doctor, 
 whose loss had been mourned some 20 years ago, " 
 
 Sir Oliver introduces the sitting (Pr. VI, 5071) :
 
 Ch. XXX] Uncle Jerry, Aunt Anne. Thompsons 439 
 
 " The next sitting was the first with our neighbors the Thomp- 
 sons. Mrs. Piper had been introduced to them a day or two 
 before, and liked them particularly; they are too near neighbors 
 to attempt making strangers of. Their children also she had 
 seen more or less: though no other relatives." 
 
 Sitting 45. December 24th, 1889. (Pr.VI,508f.) 
 "Present: O. L., Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, and A. L. [a 
 brother of Sir Oliver, I believe. H.H.] taking notes. 
 
 " 0. L. holding hands [i.e., Mrs. Piper's. This had been nec- 
 essary perhaps in the beginning, but it was outgrown before 
 I saw her in 1894. H.H.]. Mr. and Mrs. T. some way off. 
 
 " P. : ' Hulloa, Captain, I've been talking to your friends. 
 Had a long talk with Uncle Jerry. He remembers you now, as 
 a boy with Aunt Anne [this is exactly how he would remember 
 me], but you were kind of small. He knew you but he didn't 
 know me very well ; wondered what the devil I wanted trying to 
 talk to him and how I got here. Yes, he remembers his watch 
 it's in possession of Robert. He used to call him Bob. (Took 
 watch in hands.) Ha ! well, this watch came from Russia yes 
 Uncle Jerry said so. [Unlikely.] . . . Who are those people 
 over there?' O. L. :' Mr. and Mrs. Thompson.' P.: 'Oh! why 
 that's the gentleman to whom his father sent his love and said 
 something about Ted. Didn't you tell him?' O. L.: 'Yes, I 
 did, but wasn't sure you meant him.' P. : 'Of course I did. 
 They're a couple, they are. One wants to do something and the 
 other doesn't.' [Had just been discussing a proposition on 
 which they took different views.] . . . P. : 'I say, Captain, your 
 friends have a lot to tell you, they're just clamoring to get at 
 you. Why the devil don't you give them a chance ? ' O. L. : 
 ' Well, I will next time.' P.: ' There's Marion Agnes. Ha, ha, 
 I got it that time Adnes Agnes.' Mrs. T. : ' Agnes, all right.' 
 [Phinuit had had difficulty in pronouncing it once before. H.H.] 
 (Watch handled again. It was a repeater, and happened to go 
 off.) P. : ' Hullo, I didn't do that. Jerry did that, to remind 
 you of him. Here, take it away it goes springing off it's 
 alive.' Mrs. T.: 'What can we do for Theodora's headaches?' 
 P. : ' Nerves of stomach out of order. Have you got anything 
 of hers to give me ? ' O. L. : ' Go and get a lock of her hair.' 
 (Mr. T. went next door for that purpose.) P.: 'It was Uncle 
 Jerry, the one that had the fall. I'll bring you some more news 
 of him. Give me back his nine-shooter. (Meaning the watch.) 
 [Here hair was brought in, and O. L. and A. L. were ordered by 
 Dr. P. to "clear out," which they did.] I don't care to talk 
 diseases before everybody. [Note 0.] Confound it, I saw 
 your influence before anyone else here. Didn't the Captain tell 
 you? You lost your purse, and if you had told me I could 
 
 have found it Mighty mean trick about the purse ! Lord ! 
 
 done as quick as a fly. [Note P.] Who is the lady wears a
 
 440 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 cap in the spirit? She don't part her hair in the middle she 
 sends her love to you (Mrs. T.).' Mrs. T. : 'Perhaps it is my 
 mother.' P. : ' Well, I see more than a dozen ladies, but she 
 wears a lace cap. There was some throat trouble in your mother. 
 (Indicating.) [Note Q,~\ The mother of one of you is in the 
 body. I think it is the gentleman's. She is an angel she is & 
 good woman has some trouble with ankle left one it catches 
 her. She will be with you for some time.' [Note R.~\ " 
 
 NOTES 
 
 " 0. Mr. T.'s daughter's headaches well described, and some 
 rery old-fashioned herb remedies suggested, with the recom- 
 mendation to see him (Dr. P.) again in six weeks if not cured. 
 
 " P. Mr. T. was robbed of his purse in London 30 years ago 
 serious matter to him then. 
 
 " Q. Remarkably correct description of Mrs. T.'s mother, who 
 always wore lace caps and with ribbons to hide a lump on throat 
 she parted her hair at side. 
 
 " B. Mr. T.'s mother, aged 81, living in Cheshire. The state- 
 ment about pain in ankle was true; she had rheumatic pains in 
 left ankle at the time." 
 
 Sitting 46. Christmas Day, 1889. (Pr.VI,512f.) 
 
 " Present : O. L. and Alfred Lodge 
 
 " P. : ' How are you, Captain ? Who have you got to see us 
 this time ? ' O. L. : ' No one. We are having this to ourselves.' 
 P. : ' How's Mr. Thompson? He's all right, is he? I am pleased 
 he was here. How are you, Alfred ? . . . Give me some things of 
 
 Aunt Anne's, and give me Uncle Jerry's watch again Aunt 
 
 Anne wants to know where her very dark brown cloak is; if 
 Eleanor has it. A funny-looking thing; is that what you call 
 sealskin ? She would like Ellen to have it. They want Eleanor 
 Ellenelly Ellen to make a change in her surroundings, for 
 her good, at least until Alfred is settled. She is all mixed up 
 now. [True.] She should come into your surroundings, the 
 work will be good for her, it will take her out of herself. Give 
 her something to think about, it will be better for her physically 
 and every way. Your mother says so, Uncle Jerry says so, 
 Uncle John says so, your mother and father say so, and Aunt 
 Anne says so. There now, they are very anxious about it.' [All 
 these were no longer living, and Phinuit professed to speak for 
 them from the spirit world. H.H.] O. L. : ' But they must send 
 her name better.' 
 
 " [NOTE (Pr.VI,507). [L.]. The welfare of my only sister, 
 Eleanor, commonly called Nellie, much younger than the 
 brothers, and left in their charge is naturally a care to us, and 
 the advice given and subsequently iterated again and again by 
 Phinuit, as the one message which my mother was anxious to 
 send, is extremely natural. Mrs. Piper had not seen, nor so far
 
 Ch. XXX] Lodge Family Controls 441 
 
 as I know heard of, my sister, who was in Staffordshire during 
 this first series; but at the second series of sittings she was 
 present on a short visit. The state of her health has for some 
 time made her place of abode and study a serious consideration.] 
 
 " P. : ' Give me a pencil. (Wrote on back of letter while hold- 
 ing it to forehead the word ' Nellie ' distinctly.) There, that's 
 her name, and that's your Aunt Anne's writing; she wrote it. ... 
 This was a Russian watch the Emperor of Russia once had it. 
 [Know nothing of this.] . . . Captain, your friends [in " spirit 
 world." H.H.] are very anxious about Nelly. They Wow she's 
 not been feeling well. Let her be in your surroundings for a 
 little while. It will do her good. If you can't see it now you 
 
 will see it in the future It's true, I tell you. They know 
 
 what they are talking about Our poor little Alfred [her 
 
 brother. 11.11. | can't see it as we can. He wants her in his 
 surroundings to be with him. Your mother says it's not wise, 
 not yet, anyhow. . . . She says distinctly, " She must be in Oliver's 
 surroundings for a while." [All this advice would be exceed- 
 ingly important if it could be depended on Her keeping 
 
 house for Alfred was one of the floating ideas.] To appre- 
 ciate my advice is one thing, to remember me is another. Don't 
 forget me, my boy. Jerry says, " Do you know Bob's got a long 
 skin a skin like a snake's skin upstairs, that Jerry got for 
 him ? " It's one of the funniest things you ever saw. Ask him 
 to show it you. Oh, hear them talking ! Captain ! ' 
 
 " [ L. J This episode of the skin is noteworthy. I cannot 
 imagine that I ever had any knowledge of it. Here is my Uncle 
 Robert's account of it when I asked him about it : ' Yes, a crinkly 
 thin skin, a curious thing; I had it in a box, I remember it well. 
 Oh, as distinct as possible. Haven't seen it for years, but it 
 was in a box with his name cut in it; the same box with some 
 of his papers.'" [Teloteropathy from Uncle R? H.H.] 
 
 Sitting 47. Evening of Christmas Day, 1889. (Pr.VT,516f.) 
 "Present: O. J. L. and A. L. (taking notes). 
 " ' Captain, do you know that as I came I met the medium 
 going out [i.e., his spirit met the medium's spirit? H.H.], 
 and she's crying. Why is that ? ' [Why couldn't he know tel- 
 epathically, if telepathy accounts for all this? H.H.] O. L.: 
 'Well, the fact is she's separated from her children for a few 
 days, and she is feeling rather low about it.' P. : ' How are you, 
 Alfred? I've your mother's influence strong. (Pause.) By 
 George ! that's Aunt Anne's ring (feeling ring I had put on my 
 hand just before sitting), given over to you. [Aunt Anne 
 takes control? H.H.] And Oily dear, that's one of the last 
 things I ever gave you. It was one of the last things I 
 said to you in the body when I gave it you for Mary. I 
 said, " For her, through you." ' [This is precisely accurate. 
 The ring was her most valuable trinket, and it was given
 
 442 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 in the way here stated not long before her death.] . . . O. L. : 
 1 Yes, I remember perfectly.' A. A. : 'I tell you I know it. 
 I shall never forget it. Keep i^ in memory of me, for I am 
 not dead. Each spirit is not so dim ( ?) that it cannot recollect 
 its belongings in the body. They attract us if there has been 
 anything special about them. I tell you, my boy, I can see it 
 just as plain as if I were in the body. It was the last thing I 
 gave you, for her, through you, always in remembrance of me. 
 (Further conversation and advice, ending) Convince yourself, 
 [Kegarding spirits' survival ? H.H.] and let others do the same. 
 We are all liable to make mistakes; but you can see for your- 
 self ' 
 
 " P. : ' Give me that watch. [Trying to open it.] Here, open 
 it. Take it out of its case. Jerry says he took his knife once 
 and made some little marks up here with it, up here near the 
 handle, near the ring, some little cuts in the watch. Look at it 
 afterwards in a good light and you will see them.' [There is a 
 little engraved landscape in the place described, but some of the 
 skylines have been cut unnecessarily deep, I think, apparently 
 out of mischief or idleness. Certainly I knew nothing of this, 
 and had never before had the watch out of its case. O.J.L.] " 
 Extract from letter [from Uncle Robert]. (Pr.VI,528.) 
 " GREAT GEARIES, ILFORD, September 16th, 1890. 
 
 " As you wished me to send you notes of anything that struck 
 
 me in the report of Mrs. Piper's sittings here goes The 
 
 marks on the watch I do not think were made by him, as I 
 cannot remember his having a repeater until he lost his sight. 
 The term 'little shaver' fits his method of expression to a T." 
 
 Sitting 49. December 26ta, 1889. (Pr.VI,520f.) 
 "Present: O. L., alone; afterwards M. L. also. 
 
 " Then came Mrs. Lodge, and Phinuit began to diagnose 
 
 her illness, which he did very exactly, and to prescribe for her. 
 The prescription was wild carrot infusion and laudanum lotions, 
 with precise and minute instructions. The prescriptions have 
 done good. The complaint has been a long-standing one." 
 
 In connection with this should be read the following (Pr. 
 VI, 546-7) : 
 
 " P. : ' Mary, you come here ; let those people clear out. You 
 have been taking carrot.' M. L. : ' Yes, you told me to.' P. : 
 ' Yes, I know. Well, now you have taken plenty of that. Get 
 some Uva3 Ursi. Do you know what that is? (No.) Well, it's 
 mountain cranberry. Get some of those leaves. You can get 
 the infusion, but leaves are better because pure. Let them steep 
 and take a wineglassful before going to bed. Take it instead of 
 carrot for three weeks and then carrot again. (Medical details 
 gone into, accurate in general, but one statement which turned 
 out false. Prescribed also for third boy, viz., 2oz. Huxum's
 
 h. XXX] Phinuit's Prescriptions 443 
 
 tincture of cinchona, 2oz. French dialyzed iron, and 4oz. drug- 
 gists' simple syrup; a teaspoonful after shaking in wineglass of 
 water, with a few drops of lemon juice or other acid.) He has 
 a pain here when he runs, blood poor, &c. [Details correct.] 
 Give him milk, lime water, and eggs.' (Further advice to M. 
 L., who having had the influenza badly, was in low spirits, with 
 attempts to cheer her.) " 
 
 And yet more than one objector has said that Phinuit is 
 absolutely ignorant of medicine! 
 
 Here is a strange, strange circumstance. It fits well enough 
 here to justify an episode. June 26, 1895, Phinuit says to 
 Professor Newbold, as per the unpublished Notes : 
 
 " Nothing special the matter with your liver, but it is inactive 
 sometimes and that throws the bile into the stomach. Do you 
 know what aloes are? Get some rhubarb, aloes, and mandrake, 
 5/8 grain of aloes, 2/8 mandrake, and 1/8 of rhubarb com- 
 pounded into a small pill and take one every night." 
 
 Now years ago I was very seriously troubled by bile working 
 up into the stomach. A very great physician gave me Elixir 
 Euonymus, which acted like magic. I learned that it was a 
 cholagogue. A few months ago I said : " By the way, Doctor, 
 I may have to go to Euonymus again, but it has always 
 struck me as strange that when I was troubled by excess of 
 bile, you gave me a drug to make more. It did the trick, 
 however, and that's enough." I forget his answer: for I 
 was leaving somewhat hastily, having already used up more 
 time than either of us had to spare. Probably no more passed 
 than a laugh over the satisfactory result of the paradox. I 
 remember that he admitted it to be a paradox, and that I felt 
 that his facing it and doing his work in spite of it, was an 
 illustration of his greatness. Well, here is Phinuit doing pre- 
 cisely the same thing! Now was Mrs. Piper, masquerading as 
 Phinuit, a really great doctor too? Or was Phinuit really 
 himself and a great doctor? He was no doctor at all, accord- 
 ing to several skeptical commentators not in the opinion of 
 Sir Oliver Lodge, however, in whose family he " practised," 
 and whose opinions are thought worthy of respect by the people 
 in England who confer knighthoods, and elect the presidents 
 of the A. A. S., not to speak of those everywhere who grate- 
 fully read his writings and profit by his investigations. 
 
 Do you realize that through Mrs. Piper, a woman of no
 
 444 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 special education or capacity, except in her strange gift when 
 she was not herself, spoke a trained, judicious, resourceful, and 
 successful physician? This physician used slang and swore. 
 So have a great many other good physicians. He was vain. 
 So are a great many other good physicians. He pieced out 
 his knowledge with conjecture. That's the habit, and even 
 the tradition, of the profession it is necessary in many cases, 
 more than in any other profession in the main honest. With 
 unvarying labor and patience, despite a little humorous irri- 
 tability, this physician treated many people, as we have seen 
 and shall see more later, to their physical and emotional good, 
 and he misled no man to his hurt. Was she that physician? 
 Did she get the knowledge, training, character, telepathically 
 from some other physician? Account for it in all ways yet 
 tried, is not the simplest and most rational just the plain 
 fact? Beside this explanation every other yet offered is 
 labored, sophisticated, and self-deceiving. This one, it is true, 
 is counter to nearly all human experience. So are a great 
 many things that people don't bend all their energies to make 
 seem different from what they appear. I am not arguing for 
 spiritism : I don't yet know whether to " believe " in it or not. 
 I'm arguing only for common sense, as I see it, and honesty 
 towards one's self wherever the ways may lead. They may, 
 on the whole, lead away from spiritism, for all I know, but 
 they don't in this case. 
 
 But to return to the sitting (Pr. VI, 522) : 
 
 " P. : ' She has a picture of him. [Apparently Lady Lodge's 
 deceased brother. H.H.] They talked about having it copied.' 
 [Right] M. L.: 'What sort of picture?' P.: 'It's a paint- 
 ing of him.' M. L.: 'Who did it?' P.: 'Wait a bit, I'll 
 ask him. Oh, I see, you done it yourself. [Again, telepathy 
 would hardly give him bad grammar from Lady Lodge. H.H.] 
 [True, and he used to be pleased with it.] He says so. It's a 
 good one. You're a good little girl, Mary. I say, do you know 
 who Isabella is?' M. L.: 'Yes, yes.' P.: 'Oh, it is splendid; 
 you never saw her sad. Though she had her troubles, too.' 
 M. L. : ' She had, indeed.' P. : ' She is as beautiful as ever, and 
 as pure as the snow. She's a good creature.' [Isabella takes 
 possession. H.H.] ' I tell you, you dear thing, to be as brave as 
 I was always do the best you can ; do what your conscience tells 
 you. Take that advice from Isabella. Oh, what larks we had! 
 Oh! (Laughing all over.) Do you remember Clara? (Laugh-
 
 Ch. XXX] Lodge and Thompson Families 445 
 
 ing again, and jigging about in chair.) I'll sing for you. Why, 
 Mary dear, who ever thought to see you again like this, and 
 Oliver too? Oh, such fun! What shall I do for you now I'm 
 here ? ' M. L. : ' Sing us one of your songs.' I. : ' Shall I ? You 
 used to sing and play some yourself. Your papa and I have 
 more fun than you could shake a stick at. Mary, how fat you 
 are! Where are your crimps? (Feeling hair.) You used to 
 crimp it. [True.] Getting lazy, eh? Well, this is fun to see 
 you again. Oh, I do feel so happy. (Dr. P. chuckling.) She 
 whistled, and away she goes. I never saw such a merry girl as 
 that, never. How happy she is. Mary, it's about time you 
 brightened up.' [This extraordinary episode was very realistic, 
 and represented our memory of a bright-dispositioned aunt by 
 marriage of my wife's.] " 
 
 (Sitting 50, last of first aeries. December 26th, 1889. 
 (Pr.VI,523f.) 
 " Present : O. L. and Mr. and Mrs. Thompson ; later M. L. also 
 " (To Mrs. L.) : ' Aunt Izzie wants to talk to you. [See 
 previous sitting, ' Isabella '; Aunt Izzie was her familiar name.] 
 [She takes possession. H.H.] 'Shall I sing to you? What 
 would you like? You have not been well lately. Are you glad 
 to hear of Aunt Izzie? I could almost come back and die over 
 again to see you. You tell Mary that her sister Isabel still lives; 
 tell her she has done nobly; tell her William and I are together. 
 That lazy gardener ! ' [This message is exceedingly intelligible. 
 The Mary referred to is my wife's mother, recently widowed, and 
 left with a house and garden to manage in Staffordshire. ' Aunt 
 Izzie ' had been staying with her quite recently, at a time when 
 the gardener was troublesome.] (Then the voice and manner 
 changed [to Gurney. H.H.] 'Don't give up a good thing, 
 
 Lodge ' 
 
 "Mr. T.: 'Can you tell me about my other sister?' P.: 
 ' Sarah no Eliza-Maria that's it. She's all right. We are 
 together and happy. That's Ted's sister and Ike's sister. She 
 and Ted and father are all together. She teaches entirely, and is 
 very religious. But she doesn't know you (Mrs. T.) in spec- 
 tacles. (Took them off.) That's right; now I know you 
 
 Cap'n, I'm going to leave you. God bless you and keep you in 
 His holy keeping. God bless you, Susie, Ike, Marie, and Cap- 
 tain ! Cap'n, I hate to leave you, but I've got to go. Au revoir, 
 au revoir! Marie. I've got to go, but not for long; hope to see 
 you soon again. Cap'n, speak to me again. Good-by, good-by, 
 good-by.' " 
 
 End of the First Series of Liverpool Sittings. 
 
 Sitting 77. (First after interval.) January 31st, 1890. 
 
 (Pr.VI,531f.) 
 
 " Present : O. L., M. L., and, for first time, E. C. L. 
 " After recognitions and greetings, and saying that Myers had
 
 446 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Ft. IV j 
 
 told him to take care of the medium and not stay too long, he 
 [Phinuit. H.H.] began sending messages about my sister, but 
 speedily became aware of someone present and recognized her 
 
 with ' Hallo, by George, that's Nelly Come here, Siss (to 
 
 Nellie). [Sir Oliver's sister. Phinuit sees her (?) for the first 
 time, and recognizes her. Cf. pp. 440-1. H.H.] Your father [i.e., 
 his " spirit." H.H.] wants me to look at you. Oh, you're not at 
 all right. You're wrong.' E. C. L.: ' Oh, I'm pretty well.' P.: 
 ' You feel pretty well, but you're not. You haven't a right cir- 
 culation at all. You are what they call anaemic,' &c. [Full med- 
 ical details given at considerable length, all true, and prescrip- 
 tions practically identical with what had been tried by London 
 and Malvern consulting physicians. Then advice given to stay 
 with me instead of elsewhere.] " 
 
 Sitting 79. February 1st, 1890. (Pr.VI,536f.) 
 " [Here M. L. entered with our second boy, who had begged to 
 see Dr. Phinuit, all the children being curious about the strange 
 voice. Phinuit immediately personated A[unt] A[nne.] . . . 
 A. A.: 'Mary, bring him here. You dear little fellow. God^ 
 bless you. That's what's his name. Oliver dear, have I lost my 
 memory? That's Burney, Bury B, Bodie Brodie. Yes, Brodie. 
 [The name Burney is, as it happens, a natural one to occur first 
 to A. A.] I remember you, my dear, when you were quite small 
 light hair a chubby little thing. You don't remember Aunt 
 Anne ? ' M. L. : ' No.' A. A. : < He was the last, I think. Let's 
 see, another older and another younger. Yes, three. One older 
 and one younger.' M. L. : ' Yes, there were three.' A. A. : ' But 
 this was my boy. Oliver, wasn't that the last? Seems to me 
 another one that I saw.' O. L. : ' Yes, three altogether.' A. A. : 
 ' Another boy. Three boys. One named after your father ' (to 
 M. L.). M. L.:'Yes.' A. A. :< That was the last.' (Further 
 friendly remarks to Brodie about his lessons and so on. Some 
 from Phinuit speaking in his own person. Ending :) ' Glad to 
 see that fellow; done me good. [The grammar puzzle again. 
 H.H.] Good-by, Brodie. That's a piece to make a man of. Let 
 
 him go That boy is a deep thinker Nell [Sir O.'s sister], 
 
 how's your heart? Smashed yet?' E. C. L.: 'My what?' 
 P. : ' No, no, it's has had his heart smashed. [Convention- 
 ally true.] . . . Nelly, have you got your medicine ? ' E. C. L. : 
 ' No.' P. : ' She must take it (and so on, insisting on her taking 
 it, which she had not intended to do). Nell, how do you suppose 
 f knew the name of the man owning the chain ? ' E. C. L. : ' ij 
 can't imagine.' P. : ' No, can you tell a body's name like that ? ' 
 E. C. L. : ' No.' P. : ' No, it will be a good test, to him and to the 
 world. Be a good girl. God watch over you, bless you, and all 
 good spirits guide and help you. I'll see you again. I must go. 
 Au revoir.'"
 
 Ch. XXX] More of Thompson Family 447 
 
 Sitting 80. February 2nd, 1890. (Pr.VI,539f.) 
 
 "Present: E. C. L. and O. L. (E. C. L. holding hands. 
 O. L. taking notes.) 
 
 " P. : ' Here's Ted Thompson, he says it was only the 
 
 child's erratic condition, but a good thing really, and it will 
 come out all right. We knew it was going to happen, but didn't 
 
 think it worth bothering about She was afraid of being 
 
 snubbed. What on earth is he talking about? He don't want 
 me to know what he means. He says: " Tell Ike it's all right; 
 ' try again ' never was beat. It will come out all right. And 
 tell Susie too." ' 
 
 " [Mr. Thompson had been much troubled by a young daugh- 
 ter having run home from school. This happened since the first 
 series of sittings. Nothing had been said about it, and I was 
 curious to see whether Dr. Phinuit would get hold of it. The 
 Thompsons had not been in during this present series. ' Ike ' 
 and ' Susie ' are Mr. and Mrs. Thompson ] 
 
 " Ted (control) : ' Maria's all right, tell them. She passed out 
 at 12 years old. [True.] He sends his love to his mother. 
 Who are you ? ' O. L. : ' I am a friend of your brother and live 
 next door. I hope he will be able to come and see you next time 
 if you will come again. He is a good friend of mine.' T. : ' That 
 will be very kind of you. I do not wish to intrude or take up 
 your time, but if you can arrange this it will be very kind. I 
 was going to be a physician myself, but was cut off. [True.] 
 I do not regret it. Happiness reigns in my veins. And tefl 
 Ike, if you please, to go and see mother often, and that Fanny 
 had better stay with her for the present. He will understand. 
 [Quite intelligible.] . . . Ask him not to let trivial things bother 
 him. He has been fretting lately. Send her [the runaway 
 schoolgirl. 1 1. II . ] to another place and she won't fly back again. 
 She was a little bit homesick. There are a good many have 
 done it before, and will do it again. Don't lay it up against 
 her for too long. [Quite intelligible and useful advice.] Tell 
 them I am unseen but in peace and happiness. Remember me 
 to Ike, and if you will let me see him again I shall be grateful. 
 I do not want to annoy you but he was my brother and I am 
 very fond of him.'" 
 
 Sitting No. 83, last in England. February 3rd, 1890. 
 (Pr.VI,550f.) 
 
 "Present: O. L., E. C. L., and afterwards Mr. and Mrs. T. 
 and M. L. 
 
 " P. : ' Ike, did you ever hear from me and from father 
 
 before? ' Mr. T. : ' No, never before just lately.' P.: ' That's a 
 mistake, Ike. You heard once before some time ago. You 
 shouldn't forget.' Mr. T. : ' Oh, yes, so I did, many years ago. 
 For the moment I did not think of it.' [Referring to an old 
 interview which his friends had had with some medium at Bris-
 
 448 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt, IV 
 
 tol, when vivid personal messages from Dr. T. were likewise sup- 
 posed to be sent.] . . . P. : ' Now, all you people come here. Good- 
 by, Susie. Good-by, Ike. Good-by, Nelly. Now, all clear out 
 and let me talk to Marie. (Long conversation of a paternal 
 kind, with thoroughly sensible advice. Then O. L. returned.) 
 Captain, it's not good-by, it's au revoir, and you shall hear of me 
 when I've gone away.' O. L.: 'How can I?' P.: 'Oh, I will 
 tell some gentleman a message and he will write it for me. 
 You'll see. 
 
 " ' Au revoir, au revoir/ &c." 
 
 End of Second Series of Sittings at Liverpool. 
 
 and last of Phinuit and his Lodge friends; and my scraps, 
 though selected with great care and labor, must give a very 
 inadequate idea of their association. I strongly recommend 
 the interested reader to get Pr. Part (not Volume) XVII. 
 
 We now reach the sittings edited by Dr. Leaf (Pr. VI, 
 558-615). 
 
 Dr. Leaf speaks of Phinuit's " complete ignorance of 
 French." This has already been disposed of. It is not 
 strange, however, that testimony of what occurs in these 
 foggy regions is contradictory: it is hard enough to get good 
 evidence in everyday affairs. Dr. Leaf also ascribes to Phinuit 
 rather more " fishing " than other commentators do, and gives 
 ingenious demonstrations of it, but yet says (Pr. VI, 56 If.) : 
 
 " His supposed fishing was employed, if at all, only when the 
 supernormal power was for a time in abeyance; possibly it is 
 only an imagination of my own. But even with all risk of 
 being misunderstood, it seems essential that this side should be 
 put forward, if only to show that the investigators were fully 
 alive to all the various methods by which it might be possible 
 to take advantage of their credulity or carelessness. The more I 
 consider the whole of the evidence, the more I remain convinced 
 that it gives proof of a real supernormal power, subject, how- 
 ever, under conditions at which we can hardly even guess, to 
 periods of temporary eclipse 
 
 " It is probable that here a certain amount of muscle-reading 
 was called into play as a guide to a right conclusion. The 
 medium usually sat with the hand of the sitter pressed to her 
 forehead. The attitude is a favorite one with so-called thought- 
 reading performers. [As already said, this was given up later, 
 as she appeared to grow in power. H.H.] ... A very common 
 statement was that some relation of the sitter was lame in the 
 knee, or still more commonly that he had rheumatism there. 
 This was usually accompanied by a grasping of the knee, which
 
 Ch. XXX] Dr. Leafs Opinions 449 
 
 euggests muscle-reading. In one case the suffering was followed 
 downwards and rightly located in the toe. At other times the 
 pain was said to be in the head headaches or neuralgia. This 
 was equally accompanied by feeling over the sitter's head. Not 
 only are rheumatism and headaches two of the commonest of 
 complaints, and the most likely to be guessed right, but the 
 knee and the head were the most accessible portions of the 
 sitter's frame, and those about which unconscious information 
 could best be giTen. ' Suffering from a cold,' too, was a favor- 
 ite diagnosis. As the sittings took place in December and Jan- 
 uary, and the later ones during the height of the influenza epi- 
 demic, it is not to be wondered at that this was generally ad- 
 mitted to be correct. 
 
 " I have now gone through all the possible explanations of 
 divination by fraud which after a careful study of the whole of 
 the evidence I am able to suggest. It will be found that they 
 are far from covering the whole of the facts." 
 
 Now there was nothing of the kind in my sitting some 
 years later, or, I suspect, in any of the sittings after the ex- 
 clusively writing period set in. The time has passed for this 
 sort of ingenuity, and commentators seldom trouble them- 
 selves with it now. I give it, however, " to be fair." 
 
 Here I think is a questionable saltus, unless the first sen- 
 tence is restricted to the incidents in hand (Pr. VI, 567) : 
 
 " Several instructive incidents point directly against any 
 knowledge derived from the spirits of the dead! For instance, 
 in Mrs. H. Leaf's first sitting a question was put about ' Harry/ 
 whose messages Phinuit purported to be giving: 'Did he leave 
 a wife ? ' No answer was given to this at the time, but in 
 accordance with Phinuit's frequent practice the supposed hint 
 was stored up for future use ; and at Mrs. H. Leafs next sitting 
 she was told, ' Harry sends his love to his wife.' Now, as a 
 matter of fact Harry never was married. In Mrs. B.'s second 
 sitting and in Mrs. A.'s account of her brother's suffering in 
 the arm, wrong facts were stated which corresponded to the 
 sitter's belief. This evidently indicates thought-transference, not 
 spiritual communication." 
 
 It seems to me, as perhaps illustrated in the first sentence 
 of the above quotation, that commentators generally have 
 erred in trying to restrict mediumistic phenomena to some one 
 of several causes thought-transference, fishing, fraud, sec- 
 ondary personality, or that merely nominal omnium gatherum, 
 the subliminal self, whereas there is a strong chance that al- 
 most every s&mce shows them all, in the case of the honest
 
 450 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 mediums, allowing a little for unconscious fraud and fishing. 
 In this view, the whole thing readily comes under the hypo- 
 thesis of the Cosmic Soul of ideas and impressions of all sorts 
 floating about the universe picked up in all sorts of ways 
 and in all sorts of combinations, and remodeled into all sorts 
 of new combinations. Phinuit as above gets the ideas Harry, 
 wife, and remolds them into " Harry sends his love to his 
 wife," just as in the case I gave early, Foster got the ideas 
 Sextus, manuscripts, publish, and blurted out, " He says : 
 ' Publish every word of them,' " when Sextus, I know if I 
 know anything unverified, never said any such thing. 
 
 It is quite probable too that all the ideas Harry, Sextus, 
 manuscripts, publish came from the sitter's mind. Wherever 
 they came from, they were parts of the hypothetical Cosmic 
 Soul. Now in that hypothetical soul " Harry " may be any- 
 thing from a mere name, to Colonel Esmond, or the Harry in 
 question, just as Parthenon may be a name, a memory, a char- 
 coal sketch, a photograph, a painting, the original structure, 
 a restoration of it in picture or model, or the ruins still left. 
 And the aforesaid " Harry " may be a memory in a sitter's 
 mind, and so be reflected into Phinuit's, or hypothetically a 
 survival of the original soul once expressed in a visible Harry, 
 and as such have not only announced himself at the first sit- 
 ting, and even (for "communications" often seem difficult, 
 and often are plainly open to misunderstanding) have started 
 Phinuit into his blunder at the second sitting, by trying to 
 send some message to the sitter which Phinuit, with the idea 
 wife already in his head, misunderstood. But even if we 
 don't grope after an explanation of the " subliminal self " but 
 merely cover our mysteries with that name, and if we insist 
 on drawing a line (which the hypothetical cosmic inflow can 
 save us the trouble of doing) between thought-transference 
 and spiritism, that some phenomena are due to the one does 
 not prevent other phenomena being due to the other. That 
 most of the inflows of the Cosmic Soul in dreams are inco- 
 herent nonsense, does not prevent others being coherent, up 
 to creations transcending the art of the waking world, and 
 even up to prophecy. Don't find fault with all this because it 
 is vague. What else can be our glimpses into the unknown 
 world of these phenomena, whether it is a post-mortem world
 
 Ch. XXX] Phinuit Reflects Mrs. Piper 451 
 
 or not ? Demand only that what we think we see, shall not be 
 inconsistent with what we feel clear about. 
 Dr. Leaf says (Pr. VI, 567) : 
 
 " On the whole, then, the effect which a careful study of all 
 the reports of the English sittings has left in my mind is this: 
 That Dr. Phinuit is only a name for Mrs. Piper's secondary 
 personality, assuming the name and acting the part with the 
 aptitude and consistency which is shown by secondary personali- 
 ties in other known cases." 
 
 But he does not express an opinion regarding her other 
 controls, or whether each one of them was a "secondary" 
 personality; or how many thousand secondary personalities, 
 and of how many sexes, a woman can have! In fact, up to 
 the stage of these sittings, these questions hardly came to the 
 surface, because nearly all of the alleged communications 
 were through Phinuit, other apparent communicators so 
 seldom taking control that the change of control was not often, 
 if ever, specially noted in the reports a grave omission which 
 I have ventured here and there to attempt to supply. 
 
 Dr. Leaf gives first (Pr. VI, 568-74) a very remarkable 
 case of telopsis in the sitting of Mr. J. T. Clarke at Professor 
 W. James's house at Chocoma, New Hampshire. I have no 
 space for these remarkable sittings, but urge them on the 
 attention of the interested reader. 
 
 Sitting on December 2Sth, 1889. (Pr.VI,589.) 
 " Present : Mrs. Herbert Leaf, and Walter Leaf reporting. 
 
 Mrs. H. Leaf was introduced as ' Miss Thompson.' 
 " P. : 'I see you. How are you, you lady ? I say, Captain 1 
 
 Captain, come here.' [' Captain ' is the name by which Dr. 
 
 Phinuit speaks of Professor Lodge.] W. L. : ' The captain is 
 
 not here.' P.: 'Oh, then, that's you, Walter? Where are we 
 
 now? Where be IT" 
 
 I have taken the above for its next to last word, as throwing 
 some possible light on Phinuit. "Where be I?" is rank 
 Connecticut Yankee of the time before the New York and 
 New Haven Railroad was built. It is probably Massachusetts 
 Yankee too. Mrs. Piper does not use such language, but it 
 abounded in her ancestry and " surroundings." Phinuit's use 
 of it is the extreme illustration of that strange blend of New 
 England and France which constitutes him. I cannot see, 
 however, that this disproves the previous incarnation of the
 
 452 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 fellow. On the cosmic-soul hypothesis, Phimrit's portion of 
 it has often been in the same receptacle with Mrs. Piper's. 
 It is not necessary to suppose that her exclusion was complete. 
 In fact, many considerations look as if any number of souls 
 at least my z souls on p. 310 might telepathically virtually 
 occupy the same body at the same time. Of course there is 
 nothing " scientific " about this guess : we are far beyond the 
 reach of science. Such guesses, however, sometimes suggest 
 a direction in which it pays science to keep an eye open. But 
 to return to Phinuit as a possible guest of Mrs. Piper's mortal 
 frame, which I don't believe he was more than telepathically. 
 Here is a piece of intense Phinuitism (Pr. VI, 595) : 
 
 " I don't think Harry ever knew him [Professor Verrall ? 
 H.H.] ; he passed out before you got hitched. 
 
 " [Correct; Harry died August, 1887, and I was married the 
 following September. K.M.L.] " 
 
 On p. 606 of Pr. VI, Professor Macalister, writing to Mr. 
 Myers, says: 
 
 " Mrs. Piper is not anaesthetic during the so-called trance, and 
 if you ask my private opinion it is that the whole thing is an 
 imposture and a poor one." 
 
 Now as Mrs. Piper has been proved "anesthetic during 
 the so-called trance " several times by authorities at least as 
 high as Professor Macalister (James being one), some ques- 
 tion arises as to the value of the second opinion he states, and 
 of the value of the opinions held on the whole subject by any 
 excessively scientific person without enough mediumistic 
 faculty, whatever that may be, to make a good sitter. 
 
 This somewhat strenuous observation calls for a word. 
 I have already spoken of the advantage of a sympathetic 
 attitude on the part of the sitter. There seems to be more in 
 this than merely the greater liability of the sympathetic to 
 be gulled, and I venture on a few suggestions of what the 
 " more " may be. 
 
 People in general, including sitters, fall into two classes: 
 those of the intuitive, humanistic, and sympathetic make-up, 
 and those of the calculating scientific, skeptical make-up 
 "Platonists and Aristotelians." The first group, I need 
 hardly say, includes the poets and most of those gener-
 
 Ch. XXX] Platonists and Aristotelians 453 
 
 ally called philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Goethe. The 
 second group includes Aristotle, Bacon, and Spencer, all of 
 whom the " high priori " philosophers hardly admit to be 
 philosophers at all. 
 
 Now the first group seems to include the dreamers and the 
 mediums. Socrates with his inner voice and his hours of 
 sleepless unconsciousness, was in all probability a medium ; and 
 Plato and Goethe were both great dreamers; while regarding 
 Aristotle, Bacon, and Spencer I cannot recall at the moment 
 any assertion of remarkable dreams. 
 
 Now it is noticeable through the reports that scientific men, 
 especially those devoted to the inorganic sciences, get very 
 little out of the sittings, and are disposed to vote them all 
 humbug. Sir Oliver Lodge is a marked exception. Sir 
 William Crookes and Sir William Barrett have devoted them- 
 selves mainly to the telekinetic phenomena. 
 
 I am as far as possible from intimating that either class is 
 superior to the other. It would be interesting to debate 
 whether we owe more to Shakespere or to Spencer, although I 
 should hardly take Shakespere for the mediumistic type of 
 man, but rather (if you and God will forgive me), for the 
 medium-mystic, and he is always in media tutissimus. 
 
 Assuming the generalizations in the preceding paragraphs 
 to be well founded, we might risk a much more uncertain one 
 that as truth is generally indicated first to the intuitive type 
 of mind Kant with the nebular hypothesis and Goethe with 
 the relations of the vertebrae to the skeleton and the leaves to 
 the plant so the free appearance of the phenomena of medi- 
 umship to the intuitive type of person, and the scant appear- 
 ance to the scientific type, have a certain correspondence with 
 Nature's general ways, and so far raise a presumption that 
 the phenomena are normal and deserve study. There may 
 even be in this some color for presumptions going farther. 
 
 I want, however, to guard against being supposed to rate 
 intuition higher than I do. Early in this book I enlarged on 
 the inevitability of intuitions beyond the reports of senses in 
 course of evolution, as probably all our senses still are. Yet 
 intuition proves nothing, but merely points ways for investi- 
 gation often misleading ways. Nevertheless a man cannot 
 speak of it with any respect without danger of being supposed
 
 454 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 to rate it as high as did the German professor with his camel. 
 Professor Bergson has suffered from this to such an extent 
 that when, before his American lectures, he told me he con- 
 sidered intuition inconclusive without verification, I was a 
 little surprised; and when I told Mr. Eutgers Marshall what 
 he had said, I was thought to have misunderstood him. 
 
 It is not surprising, then, to be told that Professor Mac- 
 alister's sitting was " unsatisfactory," and it is an amusingly 
 incorrect one throughout. The same is true of the next sit- 
 ting, the sitter's account of which begins in the following aus- 
 picious manner, but note well the last line. Mr. Barkworth 
 was plainly not the victim of any gullible sympathy. 
 
 Mr. T. BarJcworth. December 3rd. (Pr.VI,606.) 
 " In commencing the seance I held the medium's hands, which 
 were icy cold and did not seem to gather warmth. Pulse very 
 feeble, often quite imperceptible, and somewhat rapid. The 
 medium seemed to find my influence uncongenial; she com- 
 plained more than once that I had done something to her, that 
 her head was bad, that she felt queer, had never felt so before, 
 &c. She continually groaned as if in suffering. After long 
 waiting Mr. Myers took my place with much better results." 
 
 Professor G. H. Darwin (p. 627) naturally is "wholly un- 
 convinced of any remarkable powers or of thought-transfer- 
 ence." Equally naturally, though conversely, the next sitting 
 with Miss Alice Johnson is not half bad. Yet Dr. Leaf finds 
 much apparent fishing in it, but ends with (Pr. VI, 614) : 
 
 " Even on the most unfavorable view, therefore, it seems ne- 
 cessary to assume more than chance and skill in order to explain 
 this sitting." 
 
 The following of course falls in with the good cases. Un- 
 fortunately, for the excellent reasons given below, no details 
 are furnished. 
 
 Miss X. December 1tJi. (Pr.VI,629.) 
 
 " Miss X. was introduced, veiled, to the medium in the trance 
 state, immediately after her arrival at Mr. Myers' house. She 
 was at once recognized, and named. 'You are a medium; you 
 write when you don't want to. You have got Mr. E.'s influence 
 about you. [E. was Edmund Gurney. Miss X. was a crystal- 
 gazer, and very prominent in the S.P.R. H.H.] This is Miss 
 X. that I told you about.' She was subsequently addressed by
 
 Ch. XXX] Miss X. Mr. Konstamm 455 
 
 her Christian name, one of similar sound being first used but 
 corrected immediately. 
 
 " A large part of the statements made at this and the follow- 
 ing sittings were quite correct, but in nearly all cases of so 
 private and personal a nature that it is impossible to publish 
 them. [As so often in the best sittings. H.H.] . . . But these 
 sittings were perhaps the most successful and convincing of the 
 whole series 
 
 " ' You see flowers sometimes ? ' (Asked, * What is my favorite 
 flower? There is a spirit who would know.') ' Pansies. No, 
 delicate pink roses. You have them about you, spiritually as 
 well as physically/ Miss X. has on a certain day in every month 
 a present of delicate pink roses. She frequently has hallucina- 
 tory visions of flowers." 
 
 The following is suggestive. Compare with it the various 
 remarks on the influence of the sitter. 
 
 Mr. E. M. Konstamm. January 25th. (Pr.VI,645.) 
 
 " Mr. K. was told that be knew one Allen, a smart fellow, 
 
 but lame. This the sitter is inclined to refer to Mr. Rider 
 Haggard's ' Allan Quatermain.' whose adventures he had just 
 been reading." 
 
 Commenting at the close of this series of sittings, Sir 
 Oliver Lodge says (Pr. VI, 647-8) : 
 
 "Is thought-transference from the sitter, of however free 
 and unconscious a kind, a complete and sufficient mode of 
 accounting for the facts? Mr. Leaf definitely takes the posi- 
 tion that ... it is sufficient, and, considering the large amount of 
 labor he has spent on the documents, his opinion is entitled to 
 very great weight. For myself, I am not so convinced, but I cor- 
 dially admit the difficulty of any disproof of his position " 
 
 Here are a few extracts from Professor James's paper in 
 this same volume (Pr. VI, 651f.) : 
 
 " As for the explanation of her trance-phenomena, I have none 
 to offer. The primd facie theory, which is that of spirit-control, 
 is hard to reconcile with the extreme triviality of most of the 
 communications. What real spirit, at last able to revisit his 
 wife on this earth, but would find something better to say than 
 that she had changed the place of his photograph? And yet 
 that is the sort of remark to which the spirits introduced by the 
 mysterious Phinuit are apt to confine themselves. I must admit, 
 however, that Phinuit has other moods. He has several times, 
 when my wife and myself were sitting together with him, sud- 
 denly started off on long lectures to us about our inward defects 
 and outward shortcomings, which were very earnest, as well as
 
 456 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 subtile morally and psychologically, and impressive in a high 
 degree. These discourses, though given in Phinuit's own person, 
 were very different in style from his more usual talk, and prob- 
 ably superior to anything that the medium could produce in the 
 same line in her natural state." 
 
 All of which exceptional facts may mean simply that in 
 this case the sitter had the exceptional intellect and character, 
 including the candor, modesty, and capacity of self-examina- 
 tion of William James. Possibly it was a case of a man show- 
 ing himself to himself of the fourth-dimensional trick of 
 turning a rubber ball inside out without destroying it an 
 anticipation of the possible port-mortem privilege of each soul 
 as a member of the Cosmic Soul, of regarding itself face to 
 face or the further possibility of telepathically regarding 
 itself as reflected in another soul. This last possibility is, I 
 suppose, rank spiritism. I rather like it. 
 
 But whatever the facts mean, they do not necessarily mean 
 for one moment that the " control " exercising this sympathy 
 and delivering the resulting lecture, was not a discarnate spirit 
 that had been incarnate in a voluble and profane but very 
 amiable old French physician, rather mixed in a good many 
 of his far-back memories, and in some of his properties much 
 influenced by Yankee contact. James goes on to say of him 
 (p. 655) : 
 
 " Phinuit himself, however, bears every appearance of being a 
 fictitious being. His French, so far as he has been able to dis- 
 play it to me, has been limited to a few phrases of salutation, 
 which may easily have had their rise in the medium's ' uncon- 
 scious ' memory ; he has never been able to understand my 
 French [He understood Mr. Rich's, Chap. XXIX! H.H.] ; and 
 the crumbs of information which he gives about his earthly ca- 
 reer are, as you know, so few, vague, and unlikely sounding, as to 
 suggest the romancing of one whose stock of materials for in- 
 vention is excessively reduced. He is, however, as he actually 
 shows himself, a definite human individual, with immense tact 
 and patience, and great desire to please and be regarded as in- 
 fallible. . . . The most remarkable thing about the Phinuit per- 
 sonality seems to me the extraordinary tenacity and minuteness 
 of his memory. The medium has been visited by many hundreds 
 of sitters, half of them, perhaps, being strangers who have come 
 but once. To each Phinuit gives an hourful of disconnected 
 fragments of talk about persons living, dead, or imaginary, and 
 events past, future, or unreal. What normal waking memory 
 could keep this chaotic mass of stuff together? Yet Phinuit
 
 Ch. XXX] Discussion by James 457 
 
 does so; for the chances seem to be, that if a sitter should go 
 back after years of interval, the medium, when once entranced, 
 would recall the minutest incidents of the earlier interview, and 
 begin by recapitulating much of what had then been said. So 
 far as I can discover, Mrs. Piper's waking memory is not re- 
 markable, and the whole constitution of her trance-memory ia 
 something which I am at a loss to understand." 
 
 Which naturally harks back to the theory that she, or 
 "he," draws on a stock that fills the universe. And how 
 does that theory stand comparison with the theory that several 
 controls independent of Phinuit (and later Imperator and his 
 gang) speaking to each of " many hundreds of sitters " and 
 keeping them all distinct, are all of them secondary, or 
 alternating, personalities of Mrs. Piper? 
 
 James says (p. 656f.) of the E. control: 
 
 " I confess that the human being in me was so much stronger 
 than the man of science that I was too disgusted with Phinuit's 
 tiresome twaddle even to note it down. When later the phe- 
 nomenon developed into pretended direct speech from E. [Gur- 
 ney. H.H.] himself I regretted this, for a complete record would 
 have been useful. I can now merely say that neither then, nor 
 at any other time, was there to my mind the slightest inner 
 verisimilitude in the personation. [Later, regarding the Hodg- 
 son control, his opinion was very different. See Chapters XLIII 
 and XLIV. H.H.] But the failure to produce a more plausible 
 E. speaks directly in favor of the non-participation of the 
 medium's conscious mind in the performance. She could so 
 easily have coached herself to be more effective. 
 
 " Her trance-talk about my own family shows the same inno- 
 cence Few things could have been easier, in Boston, than for 
 
 Mrs. Piper to collect facts about my own father's family for use 
 in my sittings with her. But although my father, my mother, 
 and a deceased brother were repeatedly announced as present, 
 nothing but their bare names ever came out, except a hearty 
 message of thanks from my father that I had ' published the 
 book.' I had published his Literary Remains; but when Phinuit 
 was asked ' what book ? ' all he could do was to spell the letters 
 L, I, and say no more 
 
 " The aunt who purported to ' take control ' directly was a 
 much better personation [than Phinuit. H.H.], having a good 
 deal of the cheery strenuousness of speech of the original. She 
 spoke, by the way, on this occasion, of the condition of health of 
 two members of the family in New York, of which we knew 
 nothing at the time, and which was afterwards corroborated by 
 letter. We have repeatedly heard from Mrs. Piper in trance
 
 458 Mrs. Piper's English Sittings, 1889-90 [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 things of which we were not at the moment aware. If the super- 
 normal element in the phenomenon be thought-transference it is 
 certainly not that of the sitter's conscious thought. It is rather 
 the reservoir of his potential knowledge which is tapped; and 
 not always that, but the knowledge of some distant living person, 
 as in the incident last quoted. It has sometimes even seemed to 
 me that too much intentness on the sitter's part to have Phinuit 
 say a certain thing acts as a hindrance. [Again the reverse of 
 
 Foster. H.H.] 
 
 " My mother-in-law, on her return from Europe, spent a morn- 
 ing vainly seeking for her bank-book. Mrs. Piper, on being 
 shortly afterwards asked where this book was, described the place 
 so exactly that it was instantly found. I was told by her that the 
 spirit of a boy named Robert F. was the companion of my lost 
 infant. The F.'s were cousins of my wife living in a distant 
 city. On my return home I mentioned the incident to my wife, 
 saying, ' Your cousin did lose a baby, didn't she ? but Mrs. Piper 
 was wrong about its sex, name, and age.' I then learned that 
 Mrs. Piper had been quite right in all those particulars, and that 
 mine was the wrong impression. But, obviously, for the source 
 of revelations such as these, one need not go behind the sitter's 
 own storehouse of forgotten or unnoticed experiences [or the 
 world-soul's? H.H.]. Miss X.'s experiments in crystal-gazing 
 prove how strangely these survive. If thought-transference be 
 the clue to be followed in interpreting Mrs. Piper's trance-utter- 
 ances (and that, as far as my experience goes, is what, far more 
 than any supramundane instillations, the phenomena seem on 
 their face to be) we must admit that the ' transference ' need not 
 be of the conscious or even the unconscious thought of the sitter, 
 but must often be of the thought of some person far away." 
 
 Hodgson's report of the sittings in America from Mrs. 
 Piper's return in 1890 to the end of '91 (Pr. VIII, 133f.) 
 contains much of an "evidential" nature, including some 
 remarkable telopses. But so abundant are such cases that it 
 hardly seems worth while to string them along. They prove 
 nothing more than telepathy, unless they contain dramatic 
 elements; and the present state of the skeptical argument is 
 such that even each dramatic case tends to add a recruit to 
 Mrs. Piper's regiments of alternate selves. Credat Ju- 
 dceus! 
 
 In May, 1892, Hodgson closed as follows (Pr. VIII, 58) 
 his comments on the sittings reported: 
 
 " The foregoing report is based upon sittings not later than 
 1891. Mrs. Piper has given some sittings very recently which
 
 Ch. XXX] Hodgson's Promised Developments 459 
 
 materially strengthen the evidence for the existence of some 
 faculty that goes beyond thought-transference from the sitters, 
 and which certainly prima facie appear to render some form of 
 the ' spiritistic ' hypothesis more plausible. I hope to discuss 
 these among other results in a later article." 
 
 We shall meet this discussion in time.
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 HODGSON'S SECOND PIPER REPORT, 1892-5 
 
 I. The G. P. Sittings 
 
 SOME six years later than the reports drawn from in 
 the preceding chapter, Hodgson, in Pr. XIII, published 
 another report on Mrs. Piper's trance, taken from some 
 five hundred sittings. During the five years had been de- 
 veloped heteromatic writing and the control known as G. P., 
 and Mrs. Piper had undergone two important surgical opera- 
 tions, which had entirely remedied a somewhat defective 
 state of health, with great benefit to the manifestations. 
 Through the heteromatic writing, not only were the records 
 better kept, but there were many more manifestations of 
 knowledge of facts unknown to the sitter and afterwards 
 verified, and much more indication of the characteristics of 
 various persons than had been practicable through Phinuit's 
 talk. 
 
 My abstract can give but a very inadequate idea of this 
 matter. The interested reader should get Pr. Part XXXIII 
 of Vol. XIII. 
 
 Touching the writing, Hodgson says (Pr. XIII, 291f.) : 
 
 " The first case of this automatic writing which I witnessed 
 myself occurred on March 12th, 1892. The sitter, a lady, had 
 taken several articles as test objects, among them a ring which 
 had belonged to Annie D . 
 
 "Phinuit made [oral. H.H.] references to this lady, giving 
 the name Annie, and just before the close of the sitting Mrs. 
 Piper's right hand moved slowly up until it was over the top 
 of her head. The arm seemed to become rigidly fixed . . . but the 
 hand trembled very rapidly. Phinuit exclaimed several times: 
 ' She's [i.e., Annie D. ? H.H.] taken my hand away,' and added : 
 'she wants to write.' I put a pencil between the fingers, and 
 placed a block-book on the head under the pencil. No writing 
 came until, obeying Phinuit's order to ' hold the hand,' I grasped 
 the band very firmly at its junction with the wrist and so 
 stopped its trembling or vibrating. It then wrote : ' I am Annie 
 460
 
 Ch. XXXI] Early Piper Writing 461 
 
 D [surname correctly given] ... I am not dead ... I am not 
 
 dead but living 1 am not dead . . . world . . . good bye ... I am 
 
 Annie D .' The hold of the pencil then relaxed, and Phinuit 
 
 began to murmur ' Give me my hand back, give me my hand 
 back.' The arm, however, remained in its contracted position 
 for a short time, but finally, as though with much difficulty, 
 and slowly, it moved down to the side, and Phinuit appeared 
 to regain control over it. Previous to this I had witnessed 
 a little of Phinuit's writing, but I was not aware that any 
 other ' control ' had used the hand while Phinuit was mani- 
 festing at the same time [by the voice. H.H.] . . . The char- 
 acteristics of the actual handwritings themselves . . . vary super- 
 ficially a great deal, according to the excitement, so to speak, 
 of the purported ' communicator,' to the frequency of his 
 writing in that way previously, and probably to other causes 
 difficult to estimate except speculatively. It would seem, more- 
 over, that until instructed in some way, the quasi-personality 
 that guides the writing is unaware that he is writing. The 
 process from the point of view of the ' communicator ' rather 
 resembles the definite thinking of his thoughts, with the object 
 of conveying them to the sitter, and I feel very sure that this 
 is true whatever theory may be held as to the identity of the 
 ' communicator,' whether this is what it purports to be, or 
 merely another stratum of Mrs. Piper's mind believing itself to 
 be an extraneous intelligence." 
 
 Hodgson says (Pr. XIII, 292-3) : 
 
 " When the arm is being seized ' for the purpose of writing,' 
 as also to a less extent when Phinuit is regaining control, it 
 shows a certain amount of spasmodic movement, which occasion- 
 ally is extremely violent, knocking pencils and block-books helter- 
 skelter off the table, and requiring considerable force to restrain 
 it. Sometimes, but not often, the writing will be interrupted by 
 a spasm in the arm, and the hand will be strongly clenched and 
 bent over at the wrist, but after an interval that can be meas- 
 ured in seconds rather than minutes, the hand will be released 
 and proceed with the writing." 
 
 Do the probabilities seem preponderant that all this is 
 genuine, or that it is " put up " ? Nothing like it is reported 
 in the Proceedings, of the other heteromatic writers. All of 
 which seems congruous with Mrs. Piper's apparently more 
 thorough " possession " in other respects. Hodgson continues : 
 
 "It is not necessary for Phinuit to stop talking while the 
 hand is writing. On one occasion when I was present Phinuit 
 was listening to the stenographic report of a previous interview, 
 commenting upon it, making additions to his statements about 
 some objects, and at the same time the hand was writing freely
 
 462 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pi IV 
 
 and rapidly on other subjects, and holding conversation with 
 another person, the hand purporting to be 'controlled' by a 
 deceased friend of that person. [Perhaps this is put up, too? 
 Is it within the compass of mortal faculty? Is it two controls 
 at the same time? The brain consists of two halves. H.H.] 
 This lasted for over twenty minutes. On another occasion, when 
 I was not present, I was informed that Phinuit for about an 
 hour kept up a specially rapid and vigorous talk, more voluble 
 even than usual with him, with two or three young girls who 
 were present at the sitting, and during the whole of this time 
 the hand was writing on other matters with another person. 
 The only one that appeared to be distracted was the sitter who 
 was talking with the ' hand,' who was remonstrated with by the 
 ' hand ' for not paying sufficient attention to it. I have . . . 
 never failed to get this double action when desired if Phinuit 
 was present and the hand was being used by another ' control.' 
 In all cases when the ' hand ' is writing independently of Phi- 
 nuit, the sense of hearing for the ' hand-control ' appears to be 
 in the hand, whereas Phinuit apparently always hears through 
 the ordinary channel. This apparent heteraesthesia will be con- 
 sidered in Part II. of my Eeport." 
 
 Also during the five years since Hodgson's first report, to 
 the two accounts of professed control by personal friends of 
 sitters there given, he was able to add many, especially from 
 George " Pelham," and he stated that they had inspired the 
 following significant remark, which I think worth repeating, 
 as he did. It closed his previous report in Pr. VIII, and is 
 reprinted in the volume we are now considering (Pr. XIII, 
 290): 
 
 " Mrs. Piper has given some sittings very recently which 
 materially strengthen the evidence for the existence of some 
 faculty that goes beyond thought-transference from the sitters, 
 and which certainly prima facie appear to render some form of 
 the ' spiritistic ' hypothesis more plausible." 
 
 To this he added in the new report (Pr. XIII, 291) : 
 
 "The results present an appearance precisely in accordance 
 with what we should expect from returning ' spirits ' communi- 
 cating under the conditions involved, and . . . such results do not 
 fall into orderly relation with one another on the hypothesis of 
 telepathy from the living." 
 
 To prove this Hodgson presented a masterly examination 
 of the evidence ; and, in short, it was this series of phenomena 
 that turned Hodgson, the arch skeptic and arch unveiler of
 
 Ch. XXXI] George " ' Pelliam" 463 
 
 frauds, into a spiritist. Of this report, so high an authority 
 as James later said (Pr. XXIII, 28) : 
 
 "I admire [it] greatly ... especially in sections 5 and 6, 
 where, taking the whole mass of communication into careful 
 account, he decides for this spiritist interpretation. I know of 
 no more masterly handling anywhere of so unwieldly a mass of 
 material." 
 
 Here, too, should my scrappy extracts interest any reader, 
 I advise "thon" to get the full report in Pr. Part (not 
 Volume) XXXIII. 
 
 George " Pelham " is the principal control in this series. 
 He was of a leading New York family, graduated from Har- 
 vard, and for some years after graduation lived in or near 
 Boston ; but for three years before his death, had made his 
 
 headquarters in New York and the family seat at , 
 
 at both of which places, and elsewhere, I had seen much of 
 him. He had been trained in the law, but I think had not 
 practised, but had been a rather assiduous reader in literature 
 and philosophy. He had published a meritorious biography 
 of an eminent ancestor, and another volume of "pure lit- 
 erature." 
 
 Perhaps I may as well digress here to add my own to the 
 general testimony that the Piper controls calling themselves 
 George " Pelham " and (much later in this record) Hodgson 
 and Myers are fac-similes of the men as I knew them ; and to 
 give my testimony whatever weight it may be entitled to, I 
 venture to explain also how I knew the last two. Hodgson 
 I knew even better than " Pelham," in his frequent visits to 
 New York, and mine to Boston ; and especially for a fortnight 
 or so while we were both attending the Chicago Fair in '93, 
 when we met virtually every day, and frequently several times 
 a day. We also were together for a week or so on a visit to 
 Old Farm. (See Chapter XLIV.) Myers was there at the 
 same time, and so was James, the house-party probably having 
 been selected somewhat with reference to the common interests 
 of its members in Psychical Research. Under such circum- 
 stances I came to know Myers better than probably would 
 have been the case in years of ordinary meetings. 
 
 Yet candor obliges me to say that since I wrote the fore-
 
 464 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 going passage, a lady who thinks she knew G. P. better 
 than anybody else did tells me that his alleged postcarnate 
 self is not like him at all. Does this illustrate anything 
 more than the different aspects a person presents to different 
 people ? 
 Hodgson says (Pr. XIII, 295) : 
 
 " G. P. met his death accidentally, and probably instantane- 
 ously by a fall in New York in February, 1892, at the age of 
 
 thirty-two He was an Associate of our Society, his interest 
 
 in which was explicable rather by an intellectual openness and 
 fearlessness characteristic of him than by any tendency to be- 
 lieve in supernormal phenomena We had several long talks 
 
 together on philosophic subjects, and one very long discussion, 
 probably at least two years before his death, on the possibility 
 of a 'future life.' In this he maintained that in accordance 
 with a fundamental philosophic theory which we both accepted, 
 a ' future life ' was not only incredible, but inconceivable ; and I 
 maintained that it was at least conceivable. At the conclusion 
 of the discussion he admitted that a future life was conceivable, 
 but he did not accept its credibility, and vowed that if he should 
 die before I did, and found himself ' still existing,' he would 
 ' make things lively ' in the effort to reveal the fact of his con- 
 tinued existence." 
 
 That his " spirit," or at the very least, recollections of him 
 which must have been in other minds than Hodgson's or Mrs. 
 Piper's, and which were telepathically obtained and dramat- 
 ically combined by Mrs. Piper, should have at length con- 
 verted Hodgson to the spiritistic belief, is a strange outcome. 
 
 As a " control " G. P. differs in some particulars from his 
 earthly self as known to me. He greeted me through Mrs. 
 Piper with a degree of jollity and bonhomie that I had never 
 seen in him on earth. The genial helpful creature "going 
 about doing good " in aid of everybody's communication, that 
 appears as his manifestations from another world ( ?), he may 
 have been at heart in this one ; but if he was, it was under 
 a mask of shyness or reserve developed on a sensitive nature 
 by contact with a rough world. Yet he had an unusual degree 
 of candor, not to say self-assertion, which, though never 
 boisterous, was apt, at times, to become somewhat dogmatic. 
 I never thought of him as a happy man here, while utterances 
 attributed to him give a welcome impression that he is a happy 
 man there. This impression I think must have had more
 
 
 Ch. XXXI] 0. P.'s First Appearance 465 
 
 effect on Hodgson's opinions regarding G. P.'s postcarnate 
 existence than Hodgson has stated, or perhaps realized. I 
 think any friend of G. P.'s must be somewhat affected by it, 
 even if unconsciously. This I find more the case regarding 
 him than I later found regarding the controls representing 
 Hodgson and Myers : for they were happier men here. 
 
 Hodgson goes on to say of G. P. (Pr. XIII, 295-6) : 
 
 " On March 7th, 1888, he had a sitting with Mrs. Piper. . . . 
 I may add my own opinion that Mrs. Piper never knew until 
 recently that she had ever seen G. P 
 
 " G. P.'s conclusion was, briefly, that the results of this sitting 
 did not establish any more than hypenesthesia on the" part of 
 the medium. 
 
 " I knew of G. P.'s death within a day or two of its occurrence, 
 and was present at several sittings with Mrs. Piper in the 
 course of the following few weeks, but no allusion was made to 
 G. P. On March 22nd, 1892, between four and five weeks after 
 G. P.'s death, I accompanied Mr. John Hart [not the real 
 name], who had been an old intimate friend of his, to a sitting." 
 
 That he did not appear till a month after his death is in 
 accord with the many indications and assertions that it takes 
 time for the newly emancipated soul to " find itself " from a 
 dazed condition after death. If telepathy were all, Hodgson's 
 mind was probably fuller of G. P. at the first sitting after his 
 death than a month later. It often seems too as if the presence 
 of a close friend were necessary to help the control's early 
 utterance. This one did not speak at Hodgson's many sittings, 
 until the first sitting when his closer friend Hart was present. 
 
 After Phinuit had announced a " George," an uncle of Mr. 
 Hart, he went on (Pr. XIII, 297f.) : 
 
 " There is another George who wants to speak to you. How 
 many Georges are there about you any way? 
 
 " [R. H.] The rest of the sitting, until almost the close, was 
 occupied by statements from G. P., Phinuit acting as inter- 
 mediary. George Pelham's real name was given in full, also 
 the names, both Christian and surname, of several of his most 
 intimate friends, including the name of the sitter. Moreover, 
 incidents were referred to which were unknown to the sitter or 
 myself. One of the pair of studs which J. H. was wearing was 
 
 given to Phinuit '(Who gave them to me?) [Throughout 
 
 these sittings, the sitters' remarks are in parentheses. H.H.] 
 That's mire. I gave you that part of it. I sent that to you. 
 (When?) Before I came here. That's mine. Mother gave you
 
 466 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 that. (No.) Well, father then, father and mother together. 
 You got those after I passed out. Mother took them. Gave 
 them to father, and father gave them to you. I want you to 
 keep them. I will them to you.' Mr. Hart notes : ' The studs 
 were sent to me by Mr. Pelham as a remembrance of his 
 son 
 
 " James and Mary [Mr. and Mrs.] Howard [Pseudonyms. 
 H.H.] were mentioned with strongly specific references, and in 
 connection with Mrs. Howard came the name Katharine. ' Tell 
 her, she'll know. I will solve the problems, Katharine.' Mr. 
 Hart notes : ' This had no special significance for me at the 
 time, though I was aware that Katharine, the daughter of Jim 
 Howard, was known to George, who used to live with the How- 
 ards. On the day following the sitting I gave Mr. Howard a 
 detailed account of the sitting. These words, " I will solve the 
 problems, Katharine," impressed him more than anything else, 
 and at the close of my account he related that George, when he 
 had last stayed with them, had talked frequently with Katharine 
 (a girl of fifteen years of age) upon such subjects as Time, 
 Space, God, Eternity, and pointed out to her how unsatisfactory 
 the commonly accepted solutions were. He added that some 
 time he would solve the problems, and let her know, using almost 
 the very words of the communication made at the sitting.' Mr. 
 Hart added that he was entirely unaware of these circumstances. 
 I was myself unaware of them, and was not at that time ac- 
 quainted with the Howards 
 
 " G. P. : ' John, if that is you, speak to me. Tell Jim I want 
 to see him. He will hardly believe me, believe that I am here. 
 I want him to know where I am . . . O good fellow. All got 
 dark, then it grew light 
 
 " ' Go up to my room. (Which room ?) Up to my room, 
 where I write. I'll come. Speak to me, John. (What room?) 
 Study. (You said something about a desk just now.) I left 
 things all mixed up. [Remember : his death was sudden. H.H.] 
 I wish you'ld go up and straighten them out for me. Lot of 
 names. Lot of letters. I left things mixed up. You answer 
 them for me. Wish I could remember more, but I'm con- 
 fused 
 
 "'Who's Rogets? [Phinuit tries to spell the real name.] % 
 (Spell that again.) [At the first attempt afterwards Phinuit 
 
 leaves out a letter, then spells it correctly.] Rogers Rogers 
 
 has got a book of mine. (What is he going to do with it?) ' 
 
 " Both Hart and G. P. knew Rogers, who at that time had a 
 certain MS. book of G. P. in his possession. The book was 
 found after G. P.'s death and given to Rogers to be edited. G. 
 P. had promised during his lifetime that a particular disposition 
 should be made of this book after his death. This action . . . 
 was here, and in subsequent utterances which from their private 
 nature I cannot quote, enjoined emphatically and repeatedly,
 
 Ch. XXXI] G. P. Sends for Relatives and Friends 467 
 
 and had it been at once carried out, as desired by G. P., much 
 subsequent unhappiness and confusion might have been avoided. 
 
 " During the latter part of the sitting, and without any re- 
 levance to the remarks immediately before and after, which were 
 quite clear as expressions from G. P. came the words, ' Who's 
 James? Will William.' [It must be remembered that Phinuit 
 was talking throughout.] This was apparently explained by 
 Phinuit's further remarks at the close of the sitting. 
 
 " Phinuit: ' Who's Alice? (What do you want me to say to 
 her?) [To R. H.] Alice in spirit. Alice in spirit says it's all 
 over now, and tell Alice in the body all is well. Tell Will I'll 
 explain things later on. He [George] calls Alice, too, in the 
 
 body. I want her to know me, too, Alice and Katharine 
 
 Speak to him. He won't go till you say good-by. [The hand 
 then wrote : George Pelham. Good day ( ?) John.] ' 
 
 " [Alice James, the sister of Professor William James, had 
 recently died in England. The first name of Mrs. James is also 
 Alice. Alice, the sister of Katharine, is the youngest daughter 
 of Mr. Howard and was very fond of G. P.] 
 
 " As 1 have already said, the most personal references made 
 at the sitting cannot be quoted ; they were regarded by J. H. as 
 profoundly characteristic of Pelham, and in minor matters, 
 where my notes were specially inadequate, such as in the words 
 of greeting and occasional remarks to the sitter, the manner of 
 reference to his mother with him ' spiritually,' and to his father 
 and [step] mother living, etc., the sitter was strongly im- 
 pressed with the vraisemblance of the personality of Pelham." 
 
 Mrs. Piper's time was so engaged that it was nearly three 
 weeks before these astounding developments could be followed 
 up by G. P.'s intimate friends the Howards, for whom, during 
 the interval George (as, for at least convenience' sake, we 
 will provisionally admit the control to be) asked through 
 Phinuit at nearly every sitting when his friends, especially 
 Jim (Howard) were to be brought. On April 11, 1892, they 
 came. Hodgson says (Pr. XIII, 300f.) : 
 
 " I made the appointment, of course without giving names . . . 
 during nearly the whole of the time of trance apparently G. P. 
 controlled the voice directly. The statements made were inti- 
 mately personal and characteristic The Howards, who were 
 
 not predisposed to take any interest in psychical research, but 
 who had been induced by the account of Mr. Hart to have a 
 sitting with Mrs. Piper, were profoundly impressed with the 
 feeling that they were in truth holding a conversation with the 
 personality of the friend whom they had known so many years. 
 . . . All the references to persons and individuals are correct. 
 
 " G. P. : ' Jim, is that you ? Speak to me quick. I am not
 
 468 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 dead. Don't think me dead. I'm awfully glad to see you. 
 Can't you see me? Don't you hear me? Give my lore to my 
 father and tell him I want to see him. I am happy here, and 
 more so since I find I can communicate with you. I pity those 
 people who can't speak 
 
 " (What do you do, George, where you are?) 
 
 " ' I am scarcely able to do anything yet; I am just awakened 
 to the reality of life after death. It was like darkness, I could 
 not distinguish anything at first. Darkest hours just before 
 dawn, you know that, Jim. I was puzzled, confused. Shall 
 have an occupation soon. Now I can see you, my friends. I 
 can hear you speak. Your voice, Jim, I can distinguish with 
 your accent and articulation, but it sounds like a big bass drum. 
 Mine would sound to you like the faintest whisper. (Our con- 
 versation then is something like telephoning ?) [Remember : the 
 sitter's part is given in parentheses throughout. H.H.] Yes. 
 (By long distance telephone.) [G. P. laughs.] (Were you not 
 surprised to find yourself living?) Perfectly so. Greatly sur- 
 prised. I did not believe in a future life. It was beyond my 
 reasoning powers. Now it is as clear to me as daylight. We 
 have an astral fac-simile of the material body. [G. P. when 
 living would probably have jeered at the associations of the 
 word * astral/ E.H.] . . . Jim, what are you writing now? (No- 
 thing of any importance.) Why don't you write about this? (I 
 should like to, but the expression of my opinions would be no- 
 thing. I must have facts.) These I will give to you and to Hodg- 
 son if he is still interested in these things. [Cuts both ways, 
 as the living G. P. knew that " these things " made Hodgson's 
 sole occupation. H.H.] (Will people know about this possibility 
 of communication ?) They are sure to in the end. It is only a 
 question of time when people in the material body will know all 
 about it, and everyone will be able to communicate. ... I want 
 
 all the fellows to know about me What is Rogers writing ? 
 
 (A novel.) No, not that. Is he not writing something about 
 me? (Yes, he is preparing a memorial of you.) That is nice; 
 it is pleasant to be remembered. It is very kind of him. He 
 was always kind to me when I was alive. Martha Rogers [de- 
 ceased daughter] is here. I have talked with her several times. 
 She reflects too much on her last illness, on being fed with a 
 tube. We tell her she ought to forget it, and she has done so 
 in good measure, but she was ill a long time. She is a dear 
 little creature when you know her, but she is hard to know. She 
 is a beautiful little soul. She sends her love to her father. . . . 
 Berwick, how is he? Give him my love. He is a good fellow; 
 he is what I always thought him in life, trustworthy and honor- 
 able. How is Orenberg? He has some of my letters. Give him 
 my warmest love. He was always very fond of me, though he 
 understood me least of all my friends. We fellows who are 
 eccentric are always misunderstood in life. I used to have fits
 
 Ch. XXXI] 0. P. Arranges for a Test 469 
 
 of depression. I have none now. I am happy now. I want my 
 father to know about this. We used to talk about spiritual 
 things, but he will be hard to convince. My mother will be 
 easier ' 
 
 " He referred to a tin box of German manufacture which he 
 
 said was either in New York or Z [giving the name, a very 
 
 peculiar one, of the locality of his father's country residence.] 
 He said that it contained letters from three persons whom he 
 specified. He wished the Howards to have this box. They re- 
 plied that the letters were all burned. 
 
 " G. P. : ' I think not. I want you to have them. I want you 
 to tell my father about this. (Can't you give us something that 
 will convince him? something we don't know and he does?) I 
 understand, a test. You can tell him about this tin box that I 
 left in my room. I know they have taken the chest, but this tin 
 
 box they have not.' [The box was found at Z , but there were 
 
 no letters in it. ... This was explained to G. P. at a sitting on 
 May 14th, 1892, by Mrs. Pelham. Phinuit: 'That's the one I 
 had reference to. He says he put some letters in before going 
 across the water, but he doesn't remember taking them out.'] 
 
 " At the sitting of April 13th, G. P. had direct control of the 
 voice for about twenty minutes only. Then Phinuit acted as 
 intermediary, and there was also a little writing, a few lines by 
 G. P., in the form of an affectionate letter to Mr. and Mrs. 
 Howard. Apparently G. P. was more confident of giving his 
 own exact words by the direct writing process than by the 
 method of getting Phinuit to repeat them. 
 
 " Mr. Howard was absent during part of the sitting The 
 
 following is from Mr. Howard's notes on his return to the 
 sitting: 
 
 " G. P. : ' I answered part of that question [the part he an- 
 swered was correct], but did not give the names of the other 
 two people because it would be no test, because I told her [Mrs. 
 Howard] the names of the other two in life, and as she knows 
 them, if I was to give the names in her presence, they would say 
 it was thought-transference. No, I shall reserve the two names 
 to tell Hodgson some time when he is alone with me, because he 
 does not know them.' [All true.] " 
 
 A good deal of persistence and purpose and emotion in this 
 kind of " telepathy " ! But in the conservative search for non- 
 spiritistic sources of the phenomena, a statement in Mrs. How- 
 ard's absence would simply be attributed to teloteropathy 
 from her, as if she were present. It should be noted that 
 during G. P.'s life, telepathy from the sitter had been re- 
 luctantly conceded as a defense against the spiritistic hypo- 
 thesis, but it was not till after his death that teloteropathy
 
 470 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 from persona at a, distance had been conceded ; and it was not 
 until 1909 seven years later, that James, one of the most 
 steadfast holders of the conservative fort, in his report on 
 the communications from Hodgson's alleged spirit, admitted, 
 as among the possible " sources other than R. H.'s surviving 
 spirit for the veridical communications from the Hodgson 
 control," " access to some cosmic reservoir, where the memory 
 of all mundane facts is stored and grouped around personal 
 centers of association." 
 
 James had a subtler mind than mine or almost anybody's. 
 Mine is not subtle enough to be very seriously impressed by 
 the difference between " memory of mundane facts stored and 
 grouped around personal centers of association" and a sur- 
 viving personality ; and" what difference does impress me, is 
 pretty well filled up when, in addition to " the memory of 
 mundane facts," the "personal center" also has "grouped 
 around " it, the initiative, response, repartee and emotional 
 and dramatic elements that, as shown not only by the G. P. 
 control, but, years later, by the Hodgson control, and by hun- 
 dreds of others, make a gallery of characters more vivid than 
 those depicted by all the historians. I don't say, though, that 
 they are more vivid than those depicted by the dramatists and 
 novelists, but I may yet say it; nor do I yet say that they are 
 not, like those of the dramatists and novelists, fictional in a 
 sense; though even claiming them to be historical, as in a 
 sense they are, is not claiming them to be surviving. Many 
 historical characters have put in that claim through Mrs. 
 Piper and other mediums, and while our greatest psychologist 
 knew as much as anybody about the claims, and seemed some- 
 what on the road to admitting them to be from surviving 
 personalities, he did not live to go farther than memories 
 " stored and grouped around personal centers of association." 
 
 This thesis seems supported by Foster's communications in 
 languages unknown by him, and possibly by the French which 
 Phinuit did know, despite the assertions of Mrs. Sidgwick, 
 Mr. James, and others. 
 
 But d bos the " memories " ! one is tempted to say ; credit 
 them all to telepathy if you will: what are they beside the 
 active and spontaneous emotions and responses?
 
 Ch. XXXI] G. P. Tinged by the Medium 471 
 
 At the sitting last quoted, G. P. wrote, in answer to the 
 question below (Pr. XIII, 303) : 
 
 " (Can't you tell us something he or your mother has done?) 
 ' I saw her brush my clothes and put them away. I was by her 
 side as she did it. I saw her take my sleeve buttons from a 
 small box and give them to my father. I saw him send them to 
 John Hart. I saw her putting papers, etc., into a tin box.' 
 
 " The incident of the ' studs ' was mentioned at the sitting of 
 Hart. G. P.'s clothes were brushed and put away, as Mrs. Pel- 
 ham wrote, not by herself, but by ' the man who had valeted 
 George.' " 
 
 This incident is used by Mrs. Sidgwick in Pr. XV, 31, in 
 support of the thesis that a medium's communications are 
 influenced by education and social habits. I am disposed 
 entirely to endorse this. The communications seem to me to 
 come from a blending of the control, the medium, and the 
 sitter. Perhaps this utterance will seem less Delphic as we 
 go on. 
 
 Hodgson says that ten days after (Pr. XIII, 304) : 
 
 " Mr. Pelham wrote to Mrs. Howard on April 24th, 1892 : 
 '. . . The letters which you have written to my wife giving such 
 extraordinary evidence of the intelligence exercised by George in 
 some incomprehensible manner over the actions of his friends 
 on earth have given food for constant reflection and wonder. 
 Preconceived notions about the future state have received a 
 severe shock.'" 
 
 On May 16th the following occurred (Pr. XIII, 314). Is 
 this play of conversation covered by telepathy or even by 
 memories " stored," etc. ? 
 
 " [Phinuit speaks on behalf of G. P.] ' Ask Hodgson whether 
 this is important to him or not. I am determined to [writing 
 again] transfer to you my thoughts, although it will have to be 
 done in this uncanny way. (Never mind. That's all right. We 
 understand, etc.) Good. I will move heaven and earfh to ex- 
 plain these matters to you, Hodgson. [Phinuit speaks.] [For 
 G. P.?H.H.] You see I am not asleep. [Written.] I am wide 
 awake, and I assure you I am ever ready to help you and give 
 you things of importance in this work. [Phinuit speaks.] It 
 was like Greek to him before he came here. I could not believe 
 this existence. [Written.] I am delighted to have this oppor- 
 tunity of coming here to this life, so as to be able to prove my 
 experiences and existence here. Dear old Hodgson, I wish I 
 could have known you better in your life, but I understand you 
 now, and the philosophy of my being taken out and (Didn't you
 
 472- Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 go too soon?) Not too soon, but it is my vocation to be able 
 to explain these things to you and the rest of my friends. [This 
 he (?) carried out for years. H.H.] (Does it do you harm ?) 
 And it is all nonsense about its doing me harm, for it surely 
 does no harm, and will help to enlighten the world. What think 
 you, Hodgson? (I agree entirely. I think it's the most im- 
 portant work in the world.) Oh, I am so glad your exalted 
 brains are not too pretentious to accept the real truth and philo- 
 sophy of my coming and explaining to you these important 
 things. (Now, George, we mustn't keep the medium in trance 
 too long.) Do not worry about her, she is having a good time, 
 and I will do no harm. You know that too well. [Phinuit 
 speaks.] He says he's not an idiot. (Oh, I know he's not an 
 idiot, etc.) 
 
 " [Written.] ' I understand. You see I hear you. Now I 
 will proceed with my important conversation. Your material 
 universe is very exacting, and it requires great practice and per- 
 severance to do all I want to say to you.' " [Cf . " this pro- 
 toplasm " in my sitting, Chapter XXVIII. H.H.] 
 
 November 22nd, 1892. (Pr.XIII,413.) 
 " Present : Mr. and Mrs. Howard, R. H. and Reporter. 
 " After a short conversation with Phinuit, G. P. wrote : 
 " ' Haloo, Hodgson, you know me. Haloo, Jim, old fellow, I 
 am not dead yet. I still live to see you. Do you remember how 
 we used to ask each other for books of certain kinds, about cer- 
 tain books, where they were, and you always knew just where to 
 find them. [This was characteristic. The sitting was held in 
 my library, where George and myself had . . . frequent occasion 
 to turn up references in one book or another. George, living, 
 had remarked several times on my accurate knowledge of loca- 
 tion of the books in my shelves. J] Halloa, I know now 
 where I am. Jim, you dear old soul, how are you ? ' " 
 
 November 28th, 1892. (Pr.XIII,414-5.) 
 "Present: Mr. and Mrs. Howard, and (part of the time) 
 their eldest daughter Katharine, R. H. and Reporter. 
 
 " ' Katharine, how is the violin? [She plays the vio- 
 lin.] ... To hear you playing it is horrible, horrible ' Mrs. 
 
 H. : ' But don't you see she likes her music because it is the 
 best she has.' G. P. : ' No, but that is what I used to say, that it 
 is horrible.' [George was always more or less annoyed by hear- 
 ing Katharine practise when she was beginning the violin as a 
 little child. K] " 
 
 The above, we are assured, is "telepathy"! The follow- 
 ing (Pr. XIII, 416f.) maybe? 
 
 " Mrs. Piper [on coming out of the trance. H.H.] : ' There is 
 the man with the beard' [whom she saw in the trance. H.H.].
 
 Ch. XXXI] Mrs. Piper in French and Italian 473 
 
 Mrs. Piper then described what she thought was a dream. 'I 
 saw a bright light and a face in it, a gentleman with a beard 
 on his face, and he had a very high forehead and he was writing.' 
 R. H. : ' Would you know it again if you saw it ? ' Mrs. Piper : 
 1 Oh, yes. I would know it, I think.' R. H. : ' Well, try and 
 recall it.' [See note at end of sitting.] 
 
 " [Medium says she feels queer and as if she could turn right 
 round and go into the trance again. Does not know what is the 
 matter with her. After saying this she becomes entranced again 
 very quickly at 9.22, and Phinuit appears, shouting.] 
 
 " Ph. : ' You know you don't play that on me. George Pelham 
 is a very clever fellow, but I am going to tell you he passed by 
 me, and do you know what he did, he let her go without signal- 
 ing to me at all; he did it by mistake; he told me afterwards, 
 
 and so I came back to tell you [To Katharine] Vous etes 
 
 bonne fille. C'est la petite de madame: bonne fille, bonne fille, 
 grande belle fille.' [I was struck by Phinuit's speaking French 
 all at once to Katharine, as she always speaks French with her 
 sisters, having lived so long in France. There was more French 
 than was here reported, as the stenographer does not know 
 French well, and had to get what we could remember from us 
 afterwards. Mr. Howard and I were much struck by the thor- 
 oughly French use of the word belle. Katharine is in no sense 
 of the word a beautiful girl as English people generally under- 
 stand the word belle, but she is conspicuously a tall, well-devel- 
 oped, well-made girl, of the sort to which belle in the French 
 sense would be applied. K.] " 
 
 How about the frequent claim that Phinuit knew no 
 French ? 
 
 " Mrs. Piper is apparently about to come out of trance when 
 another control takes possession for a few minutes, who is 
 thought by Mrs. Howard to be Elisa, and who whispers some- 
 thing in Italian to Mrs. Howard. [Mrs. Piper knew no Italian. 
 H.H.] Again Mrs. Piper is apparently about to come out of 
 trance when Phinuit returns for a moment to say au revoir. 
 [What follows is in substance the conversation between Elisa 
 and Mrs. Howard.] 
 
 " E. : ' Pazienza, pazienza, pazienza.' Mrs. H. : ' Si cara Elisa.' 
 E. : [Tries to give a message in Italian to her sister, but Mrs. 
 H. could only catch a few words.] Mrs. H. : ' Non comprendo 
 bene.' E. : ' Taceo, pazienza, pazienza. Dire tutto a Frederica 
 [name of sister] a rivederla. Elisa a rivederla.' [Signs of 
 suffering indicating the trouble that caused the death of Madame 
 Elisa.] Mrs. H. says in Italian ' Don't suffer, Elisa.' E. : ' Pa- 
 zienza a rivederla.' 
 
 " After Mrs. Piper comes out of trance she is shown a collec- 
 tion of thirty-two photographs, nine of them being of men, from
 
 474 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 which she selects the picture of the person whom she saw when 
 coming out of trance the first time. The photograph that she 
 first picked out was an excellent likeness of G. P. She after- 
 wards picked out another photograph of him. She stated that 
 she never knew the gentleman when living." 
 
 Within twenty- four hours in this experiment, or some other, 
 as reported elsewhere, the dream recollection had faded away ; 
 she could not recognize the photograph. 
 
 Now in face of such an occurrence as this (and it does not 
 stand alone), the talk about subliminal self, in the usual 
 sense, secondary personality and all that, simply " won't do." 
 We can talk about telopsis here, if we want to, but telopsis of 
 what ? Of that photograph ? Nonsense ! And as strange as 
 anything else about it, is that there is nothing strange about 
 it. In my own dreams I see any number of people I never 
 saw before, just as plainly as I see any number on the street, 
 and if photographs were handed me, as those were to Mrs. 
 Piper, immediately on awaking, I could identify them. Had 
 I seen fit to develop the mediumship Phinuit ascribes to me 
 (and Sir William Crookes, by implication ascribes to all of 
 us), or had you seen fit to develop the mediumship probably 
 latent in you (instead of perhaps killing it by scientific 
 skepticism an admirable thing in its place) had we devel- 
 oped our mediumship so that we were giving sittings and 
 having friends at hand with pictures of the people we saw in 
 our dreams, we might be identifying controls too. This iden- 
 tification is nothing out of the ordinary course of nature, only 
 the wit to see that it is, has but just come. If it is a step 
 toward accepting the spiritistic hypothesis, what is the harm ? 
 Only it is well to remember that " fools rush in." 
 
 As to the attempted solution that Mrs. Piper sees G. P. 
 as he exists in the memory of his friends, and picks out the 
 photograph of the man she sees: in the mind of an average 
 friend mine, for instance, he doesn't exist with the defi- 
 niteness of a photograph. If I had tried, when I sat with 
 Mrs. Piper, to describe him to an artist to enable him to draw 
 a portrait, I should have been wrong in so many particulars 
 that the portrait would not have been recognizable. I should 
 have given him a square forehead, and a photograph I have 
 looked at since, which I recognized as a very good one, has
 
 Ch. XXXI] G. P.'s Intense Scene with Howard 475 
 
 a round forehead, and having seen that portrait within a 
 year, I couldn't say now whether the nose is straight or 
 slightly aquiline. I only feel sure that it was not pug. I 
 don't remember, either, whether his mouth was firm or 
 rounded, or his chin and jaw light or pronounced. 
 
 Yet at the sitting when Mrs. Piper saw him, the sitter may 
 have been gifted with a much more pictorial memory than 
 mine; and with any sitter, Mrs. Piper may have just as 
 definite an idea as the sitter has, and that may be, like mine, 
 definite enough to recognize, but not to describe. But can 
 telepathy convey more than the agent can describe ? She may 
 have seen the man at all the sittings, as we see in dreams 
 people that we never knew or know we knew, or it may have 
 been the man himself who used her organism to speak 
 and write when it was asserted that he did. Each one of 
 us will have to fumble to his own conviction if he ever reaches 
 one. Mine is simply that she saw him in dreams, and the 
 sitters or his surviving personality impressed those dreams 
 upon her. One reason for that conviction is that despite the 
 occasional alleged going out of one control, and coming in 
 of another, generally the controls succeed and interrupt each 
 other without any intervals, as in dreams. 
 
 Hodgson continues (Pr. XIII, 321-2) : 
 
 " It was during this sitting [Dec. 22, 1892] that perhaps the 
 most dramatic incident of the whol series occurred. 
 
 " Mr. Howard : ' Tell me something . . . that you and I alone 
 know. I ask you because several things I have asked you, you 
 have failed to get hold of.' G. P. : ' Why did you not ask me this 
 before? ' Mr. H. : ' Because I did not have occasion to.' G. P. : 
 'What do you mean, Jim?' Mr. H. : 'I mean, tell me some- 
 thing that you and I alone know, something in our past that you 
 and I alone know.' G. P. : ' Do you doubt me, dear old fellow ? ' 
 Mr. H. : ' I simply want something you have failed to answer 
 certain questions that I have asked now I want you to give me 
 the equivalent of the answers to those questions in your own 
 terms ' G. P. : ' You used to talk to me about ' 
 
 " The writing which followed . . . contains too much of the 
 personal element in G. P.'s life to be reproduced here. Several 
 statements were read by me, and assented to by Mr. Howard, 
 and then was written ' private ' and the hand gently pushed me 
 away. I retired to the other side of the room, and Mr. Howard 
 took my place close to the hand where he could read the writing. 
 He did not, of course, read it aloud, and it was too private for
 
 476 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 my perusal. The hand, as it reached the end of each sheet, tore 
 it off from the block-book, and thrust it wildly at Mr. Howard, 
 and then continued writing. The circumstances narrated, Mr. 
 Howard informed me, contained precisely the kind of test for 
 which he had asked, and he said that he was ' perfectly satisfied, 
 perfectly.' After this incident there was some further conversa- 
 tion with references to the past that seemed specially natural as 
 coming from G. P. 
 
 " ' Jim, I am dull in this sphere about some things, but 
 
 you will forgive me, won't you ? . . . but like as when in the body 
 sometimes we can't always recall everything in a moment, can 
 we, Jim, dear old fellow ? . . . God bless you, Jim, and many 
 thanks. You often gave me courage when I used to get de- 
 pressed. You know how you especially used to fire at me some- 
 times, but I understood it all, did I not, old f ellow ? . . . and I 
 used to get tremendously down at the heel sometimes, but I am 
 all right now, and, Jim, you can never know how much I love 
 you and how much I delight in coming back and telling you all 
 
 this When I found I actually lived again I jumped for joy, 
 
 and my first thought was to find you and Mary. And, thank the 
 Infinite, here I am, old fellow, living and well ' 
 
 " Characteristic also of the living G. P. was the remark made 
 to me later, apparently with reference to the circumstances of 
 the private statements : 
 
 " ' Thanks, Hodgson, for your kind help and reserved manners, 
 also patience in this difficult matter.' " 
 
 All this, I suppose, is mere telepathy or the subliminal self 
 of an average New England housewife! 
 
 Hodgson's comments apply equally well to the following : 
 
 December 19th, 1892. (Pr.XIII,433f.) 
 " Present : Mr. and Mrs. Howard, E. H., and Keporter. 
 
 " Mrs. Howard gives a letter . . . saying, ' I want you to 
 
 see your father's letter, because there is something in it that 
 will please you.' 
 
 " G. P. : ' This does not sound as father would talk when I 
 
 was in the body He believes that I exist ' [calls for Hodgson, 
 
 complains of being muddled, and asks Hodgson to put his hand 
 'up there' (i.e., probably against the forehead)], 
 
 i.e., the medium's forehead. This frequent claim by the 
 controls of bodily characteristics and functions (including 
 their giving, sometimes in pantomime, through the medium, 
 the symptoms of their last illnesses) is very incongruous with 
 their frequent claims of exemption from bodily infirmities, 
 and is one of the suggestions that after all the medium " does 
 it all " ; and as soon as one gets comfortably settled in this, to
 
 Ch. XXXI] G. P. Philosophizes 477 
 
 many, uncomfortable conviction, along comes something to 
 upset it 
 G. P. continues (Pr. XIII, 433-4) : 
 
 " ' He was pained, but he is no longer pained, because he 
 feels that I exist.' Mrs. Howard: ' That is right; I hare read it.' 
 G. P. : ' That brings me nearer to my father; now give him my 
 tenderest love and tell him that I am very near him, and see him 
 almost every day, if I could go by days, but I can't judge of 
 that, because I have no idea of time; that is one thing I have 
 lost, Hodgson. . . . You of all others are the one that I want to 
 be absolutely certain of my identity. . . . Hodgson, I mean, and 
 Jim, I want you both to feel I am no secondary personality of 
 the medium's [struggling to get the last phrase out.] . . . Now, 
 about my theory of spirit life independent of the material sub- 
 stance. I live, think, see, hear, know, and feel just as clearly as 
 when I was in the material life, but it is not so easy to explain it 
 to you as you would naturally suppose, especially when the 
 thoughts have to be expressed through substance materially. . . . 
 Nevertheless, I am bound to do just all I can for you to prove 
 to you that I (George Pelham) do absolutely exist, independ- 
 ently of the material body which I once inhabited Tou see as 
 
 I was explaining to you about thought, and had not strength 
 materially nor time to finish, I will go on to that again and in a 
 little more detail, which will explain to you (as well as any- 
 thing) how and what I am now, i.e., as a spiritual Ego. 
 Thought is, as I said before, in no wise dependent upon body, 
 but must necessarily, as you see, depend upon the body of an- 
 other person or Ego in the material to express one's thought 
 fully after the annihilation of one's own material body. ... In 
 consequence of this you see that there must necessarily be more 
 or less confliction between one's spiritual Ego or mind, and the 
 material mind or Ego of the one which you are obliged to use to 
 explain these difficult problems to you, my friends, in the 
 material ' 
 
 " Questions asked for. R. H. asks what becomes of the me- 
 dium during trance. ' She passes out as your etherial goes out 
 when you sleep.' R. H. : ' Well, dp you see that there is a con- 
 flict, because the brain substance is, so to speak, saturated with 
 her tendencies of thought? ' G. P. : ' No, not that, but the solid 
 substance called brain, it is difficult to control it, simply because 
 it is material . . . her mind leaves the brain empty, as it were, and 
 I myself or other spiritual mind or thought takes the empty 
 brain, and there is where and when the conflict arises.' " 
 
 People who knew G. P. have said to me : " You know per- 
 fectly well that George was too intelligent a fellow for his 
 spirit to talk the twaddle it is alleged to." Well, after more
 
 478 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 attention to the matter than they have given, I conclude that 
 I don't know any such thing. The expression " my tenderest 
 love " at the beginning of the foregoing paragraph, struck me 
 as one of those rare and happy collocations of a couple of 
 simple words that come only to people with a touch of genius, 
 and the next dozen lines and many lines throughout his com- 
 munications, are anything but twaddle. Often though the 
 sense persists, the expression weakens into superfluities and 
 repetitions, but hardly worse than a good writer's first draft 
 sometimes shows, because of sleepiness or wandering; and it 
 would not be extravagant for a holder of the spiritistic hypo- 
 thesis to claim that in such cases there is strong evidence to 
 justify ascribing the " twaddle " to difficulties in genuine com- 
 munication.
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 HODGSON'S SECOND PIPER REPORT, 1892-5 (Continued) 
 II. Miscellaneous Sittings 
 
 October, 1893. (Pr.XIII.480f.) 
 
 " Sitter : Mr. L. Vernon Briggs, Hanover, Mass. 
 
 " The medium was then given a handkerchief of a Hono- 
 lulu boy who had been shot in Boston intentionally or unin- 
 tentionally was not known. This boy had shown great affection 
 for a person present following them [sic] twice to Boston 
 from Honolulu as a stowaway. The medium showed great 
 suffering placed her hand to her side, saying, ' It's my stomach 
 Oh, my side. They put me out too quick.' Here the medium 
 seemed to suffer too much, and Dr. Phinuit was asked to take 
 control and speak for the boy. [This makes a jumble with the 
 claim of freedom from bodily ills, and the other claim of repre- 
 senting them for evidential purposes. H.H.] Conversation con- 
 tinued through Dr. Phinuit. ' Is this you, Kalua?' [This 
 question was put by Mr. Briggs. R.H.] ' Yes, I did not kill 
 myself. He killed me. We were gambling that was wrong. 
 He hid my purse under the steps where I was killed.' [The 
 cellar was examined five planks, one below another, were taken 
 up but no purse was found.] Kalua also said there was shrub- 
 bery near it. [There was no shrubbery in the cellar of this 
 house.] 
 
 " The boy seemed delighted to speak with his friend, and 
 finally took the hand and wrote, 'This is splendid Oh, Dr., 
 help me.' He asked questions, and tried to give the name of a 
 place in the Hawaiian Islands, which finally was made out. He 
 then tried to write his own language, and did write some words 
 which were understood. For instance, he wrote 'lei,' which 
 means ' wreaths ' and which he always made daily for his 
 friend. 
 
 " Dr. Phinuit said what he heard sounded like Italian and 
 that the boy was singing which he was always doing in life. 
 He spoke again of his death, and said : ' The man had a hot 
 temper and disputed with me, and he shot me he did not mean 
 to.' [Question] 'What became of the revolver?' [Answer] 
 4 He threw the revolver into the hot-box where the pepples are. 
 [Note. This was true the revolver was found in the furnace.] 
 479
 
 480 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 [Known to Mr. Briggs. By pepples was meant pebbles, inter- 
 preted by the sitters as coals. R.H.] 
 
 " ' Did you get my trunk ? ' * Yes.' ' So glad you have it- 
 keep my things.' < Did you get them, M. ? ' ' Yes.' 
 
 " He was asked where his father was. And we could only 
 understand Hiram. Phinuit could not get Hawaii for some 
 time it was finally written Hawaiin Islands. We asked which 
 one Phinuit said it was Tawai. This was interesting, as the 
 island is spelled with a K, but pronounced with a T." 
 
 Now, if you please, recall what has already been said 
 (p. 452f.) about scientific and sympathetic sitters, and look 
 forward to what Hodgson says on pages 520 and 526; and 
 then, in contrast with all the foregoing touches of personality 
 obtained by sympathetic sitters, compare the following by an 
 eminent man of science. Probably the reader free from the 
 skeptical habit has found in the records somewhat more 
 " reminiscence of old affection ... to make the presence of a 
 beloved spirit seem real." 
 
 April 28th, 1892. (Pr.XIII,460f.) 
 " Sitter : Professor J. M. Peirce. R. H. taking notes. 
 
 " In regard to the indefinable, unreasoned impression 
 
 made by the interview, a point to which I am forced to attrib- 
 ute much importance in the case of some of my friends who 
 have visited Mrs. Piper, I must say that I received none that 
 tends to strengthen the theory of a communication with the de- 
 parted. No personal trait, no familiar and private sign, no 
 reminiscence of old affection, no characteristic phrase or mode 
 of feeling or thought, no quality of manner was there, to make 
 the presence of a beloved spirit seem real. I never for one in- 
 stant felt myself to be speaking with anyone but Mrs. Piper, nor 
 do I perceive any change of voice or personality, beyond what 
 
 is ordinarily witnessed in skilled impersonation Whatever 
 
 the explanation of the phenomena, I believe this process to go 
 on, a struggle for knowledge to whose issue the sitter con- 
 tributes. J. M. PEIRCE. 
 
 "P.S. Since writing the foregoing, I have gone over the 
 notes in detail, making a memorandum of successes and failures. 
 I am surprised to see how little is true. Nearly every approach 
 to truth is at once vitiated by erroneous additions or develop- 
 ments." 
 
 But here is another eminent scientific man whom I know 
 intimately, but who has the sympathies of a practising physi- 
 cian.
 
 
 
 Ch. XXXII] Scientific Sitters 481 
 
 May 6th, 1892. (Pr.XIII,462f.) 
 
 " Sitters : Dr. and Mrs. L. E. H. New York. 
 
 " [Dr. H. says :] The large number of little details brought 
 out about the family are extremely interesting, the most marked 
 being those relating to Walter, his death and his friends, and 
 to David, many of the remarks made by both of these are 
 strictly characteristic. However, nothing appeared in the sit- 
 ting which could be afterwards confirmed, which was not fully 
 known either to Mrs. H. or myself. [Otherwise confirmation, 
 even of truth, might be impossible. H.H.] All the things here 
 brought out might be explained as simply mind-reading, but a 
 wonderful example of that." 
 
 So I thought for some time after my sitting, but I thought 
 differently on knowing more and thinking more. This is 
 another illustration of the fallacious treatment of mere know- 
 ledge of facts as the main indication of personality. 
 
 Another eminent scientific sitter blest with a poetic imagina- 
 tion (Pr. XIII, 524-5) : 
 
 May 25M, 1894. 
 
 " Sitters : Professor and Mrs. N. S. Shaler, at the house of 
 Professor W. James Account of the sitting given by Pro- 
 fessor Shaler ... in a letter to Professor James. 
 
 " The statements made by Mrs. Piper, in my opinion, 
 
 entirely exclude the hypothesis that they were the results of con- 
 jectures, directed by the answers made by my wife 
 
 " While I am disposed to hold to the hypothesis that the per- 
 formance is one that is founded on some kind of deceit, I must 
 confess that close observation of the medium made on me the 
 impression that she is honest. Seeing her under any other con- 
 ditions, I should not hesitate to trust my instinctive sense as to 
 the truthfulness of the woman. 
 
 " I venture also to note, though with some hesitancy, the fact 
 that the ghost of the ancient Frenchman who never existed, but 
 who purports to control Mrs. Piper, though he speaks with a 
 first-rate French accent, does not, so far as I can find, make the 
 characteristic blunders in the order of his English words which 
 we find in actual life. Whatever the medium is, I am convinced 
 that this ' influence ' is a preposterous scoundrel. 
 
 " I think I did not put strongly enough the peculiar kind of 
 knowledge which the medium seems to have concerning my 
 
 wife's brother's affairs They had the real life quality. So, 
 
 too, the name of a man who was to have married my wife's 
 brother's daughter, but who died a month before the time fixed 
 for the wedding, was correctly given, both as regards surname 
 and Christian name, though the Christian name was not remem- 
 bered by my wife or me. So, too, the fact that all trouble on
 
 482 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 account of the missing will was within a fortnight after the 
 death of Mr. Page cleared away by the action of the children 
 was unknown. The deceased is represented as still troubled, 
 though he purported to see just what was going on in his 
 family." 
 
 Another eminent scientific man, though one also blessed 
 with a poetical imagination (XIII, 482-3) : 
 
 "1524, Walnut Street, PHILADELPHIA, PA., January 27th, 1894. 
 
 " MY DEAR JAMES. I have read, with care, since the receipt 
 of your note, the memoranda you and I made at my sitting with 
 Mrs. Piper. 
 
 " If I had never seen you and heard your statements in regard 
 to Mrs. P., my afternoon sitting with her would have led me to 
 the conclusion that the whole thing was a fraud and a very 
 stupid one. Of course I do not think this, because I am bound 
 to consider all the statements made, not merely the time spent 
 with me. As to this point I want to make myself clear, because 
 I should like on another occasion to repeat my sitting 
 
 " On re-reading your notes I find absolutely nothing of value. 
 None of the incidents are correct, and none of the very vague 
 things hinted at are true, nor have they any kind or sort of 
 
 relation to my life, nor is there one name correctly given 
 
 " S. WEIR MITCHELL (M.D.)." 
 
 With which contrast the following. This sitting will appeal 
 very differently to different temperaments. To some it will 
 probably appear illusive gush, and they can skip. But skip- 
 ping does not account for it. To others it will probably 
 appear the most important sitting on record. Whether one 
 scoffs or prays, it will at least be worth while to use a little 
 imagination to see the entranced medium, with face gen- 
 erally as expressionless as if a statue were speaking, pouring 
 forth at one moment some brusquerie in the rough deep tones 
 of Phinuit ; at the next, in the same voice softened to gentle- 
 ness, petting a child; then, perhaps, a return of the gruff 
 tones in some biting sarcasm to some interloping control; 
 then perhaps issuing from the same mouth, a child's voice 
 singing the little boat song all going on amid the weeping 
 relatives who join in the song, with the sympathetic Hodgson 
 assisting the performance, and probably perplexed to know 
 whether he is in Heaven or in bedlam. I confess that I have 
 such perplexity, with the doubt that James intimates some- 
 where, whether so important a section of the universe one
 
 
 Ch. XXXII] The Sutton Sittings 483 
 
 including so much and such deep feeling, can be bedlam. And 
 yet look at the mediaeval church at intervals for nearly fifteen 
 centuries, and from the Nile to the Pillars of Hercules! 
 
 Sitting with Mrs. Piper at Arlington Heights, December Sth, 
 1893. (Pr.XIII,485f.) 
 
 " Present, Mrs. Howard, Rev. S. W. Sutton, and myself [Mrs. 
 Sutton. H.H.] Report by Mrs. Sutton from notes taken by 
 Mrs. Howard during the sitting. 
 
 [Hodgson says (p. 484):] "Mrs. Sutton [the sitter. H.H.] 
 herself has had many remarkable psychical experiences, espe- 
 cially in seeing the ' figures ' of deceased persons, and in 1887 
 published a little book giving an account of some of these. It 
 was called Light on the Hidden Way, with an Introduction by 
 James Freeman Clarke. 
 
 " Phinuit said : '. . . A little child is coming to you. 
 
 This is the dearest lady I have met for a long time the most 
 light I have seen while in Mrs. Piper's body. He reaches out 
 his hands as to a child, and says coaxingly: Come here, dear. 
 Don't be afraid. Come, darling, here is your mother. He de- 
 scribes the child and her ' lovely curls.' Where is papa ? Want 
 papa. [He takes from the table a silver medal.] I want this 
 want to bite it. [She used to bite it.*] [The notes marked with 
 asterisks were added some four years after the sitting. H.H.] 
 [Reaches for a string of buttons.] Quick 1 I want to put them 
 in my mouth. [The buttons also. To bite the buttons was for- 
 bidden. He exactly imitated her arch manner.*] I will get 
 
 her to talk to you in a minute A lady is here who passed 
 
 out of the body with tumor in the bowels. [My friend, Mrs. C., 
 died of ovarian tumor.*] She has the child she is bringing her 
 to me. [He takes some keys.] These bring her to me these 
 and the buttons. Now she will speak to me. Who is Dodo? 
 [Her name for her brother George.] Speak to me quickly. I 
 want you to call Dodo. Tell Dodo I am happy. Cry for me no 
 more. [Puts hand to throat.] No sore throat any more. [She 
 had pain and distress of the throat and tongue.*] Papa, speak 
 to me. Can not you see me? I am not dead, I am living. I 
 am happy with Grandma. [My mother had been dead many 
 years.*] Phinuit says: Here are two more. One, two, three 
 here, one older and one younger than Kakie. [Correct.*] 
 That is a boy, the one that came first. [Both were boys.*] . . . 
 Was this little one's tongue very dry? She keeps showing me 
 her tongue. [Her tongue was paralyzed, and she suffered much 
 with it to the end.] Her name is Katharine. [Correct.*] She 
 calls herself Kakie. She passed out last. [Correct.*] Tell 
 Dodo Kakie is in a spiritual body. Where is horsey? [I gave 
 him a little horse.] Big horsey, not this little one. [Probably 
 refers to a toy cart-horse she used to like.] Dear Papa, take
 
 484 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 me wide. [To ride.] Do you miss your Kakie? Do you see 
 Kakie? The pretty white flowers you put on me, I have here. 
 I took their little souls out and kept them with me. Phinuit 
 describes lilies of the valley, which were the flowers we placed 
 in her casket. 
 
 " Papa, want to go to wide horsey. [She plead this all through 
 her illness.] Every day I go to see horsey. I like that horsey. 
 I go to ride. I am with you every day. [We had just come 
 from Mr. Button's parents, where we drove frequently, and I 
 had seen Kakie with us. (This means that Mrs. Sutton had 
 seen the ' apparition ' of Kakie. R.H.) Margaret (her sister) 
 is still there, driving daily.] [I asked if she remembered any- 
 thing after she was brought down stairs.] I was so hot, my 
 head was so hot. [Correct.*] [I asked if she knew who was 
 caring for her, if it was any comfort to her to have us with her.] 
 Oh, yes, oh, yes. [I asked if she suffered in dying.] I saw the 
 light and followed it to this pretty lady. You will love me 
 always? You will let me come to you at home. I will come to 
 you every day, and I will put my hand on you, when you go to 
 sleep. Do not cry for me, that makes me sad. Eleanor. I 
 want Eleanor. [Her little sister. She called her much during 
 her last illness.*] I want my buttons. Row, Row, my song, 
 sing it now. I sing with you. [We sing, and a soft child voice 
 sings with us] [i.e. Mrs. Piper's child-voice. H.H.], 
 " Lightly row, lightly row, 
 
 O'er the merry waves we go, 
 
 Smoothly glide, smoothly glide 
 
 With the ebbing tide. 
 
 " [Phinuit hushes us, and Kakie finishes alone.] 
 " Let the winds and waters be 
 
 Mingled with our melody, 
 
 Sing and float, sing and float, 
 
 In our little boat. 
 
 Papa sing. I hear your voice, but it is so heavy. [Papa and 
 Kakie sing. Phinuit exclaims: See her little curls fly!] [Her 
 curls were not long enough to fly at death, six weeks before.*] 
 Kakie sings : Bye, bye, ba bye, bye, bye, O baby bye. Sing that 
 Tfdth me, papa. [Papa and Kakie sing. These two songs were 
 the ones she used to sing.] [She sang slight snatches of others 
 in life not at the sitting.*] Where is Dinah? I want Dinah. 
 [Dinah was an old black rag-doll, not with us.] I want Bagie 
 [her name for her sister Margaret.] I want Bagie to bring me 
 my Dinah. I want to go to Bagie. I want Bagie. I see Bagie 
 all the time. Tell Dodo when you see him that I love him. 
 Dear Dodo. He used to march with me, he put me way up. 
 [Correct.*] Dodo did sing to me. That was a horrid body. I 
 liave a pretty body now. Tell Grandma I love her. I want her 
 to know I live. Grandma does know it, Marmie Great grand- 
 ma, Marmie. [We called her Great Grandmother Marmie but
 
 Ch. XXXII] The Sutton Sittings 485 
 
 she always called her Grammie. Both Grandmother and Great 
 Grandmother were then living.*] 
 
 " Here is Hattie. Speak to her. I am so happy. [Button 
 string broke Phinuit is distressed. We gather them up and 
 propose to re-string them.] Hattie says that is a pretty picture 
 there. [Hattie was the name of a dear friend who died several 
 years ago. She was very fond of my copy of the Sistine Ma- 
 donna, and in her last illness asked to have it hung over her 
 bed, where it remained till after she passed away. This did not 
 occur to me when Phinuit gave her words, nor for some weeks 
 after the sitting.] [It was plainly stored away somewhere all 
 the time. In the cosmic soul? Such cases are frequent. H.H.] 
 I want the tic-tic. Take the buttons, and give me the pretty 
 tic-tic. Open the tic-tic. Mamma, do you love me so? Don't 
 cry for me. I want to see the mooley-cow, where is the mooley- 
 cow? [R. H.: Did she so call it? A.: Yes.*] Take me to see 
 the mooley-cow. [She used to be taken almost daily to see the 
 cow.] Phinuit says : I cannot quite hear what it is she calls the 
 tic-tic. She calls it ' the clock/ and holds it to her ear. [That 
 was what she called it.] . . . She has the most beautiful, great, 
 dark violet eyes. [Correct.*] She is very full of life very in- 
 dependent, but very sweet in disposition 
 
 " [Kakie again.] I will put my hand on papa's head when he 
 goes to sleep. Want the babee. [Her characteristic pronuncia- 
 tion.*] Phinuit takes the doll and says : She wants it to cuddle 
 up to her, so. She wants to sing to it, Bye baby, bye bye. 
 God knew best, so do not worry. The little book. Kakie wants 
 the little book. [She liked a linen picture book.*] . . . Phinuit 
 describes a gentleman with a beautiful face, greatly agitated, 
 also a very large gentleman with him he was a great preacher 
 Phillips Phillips Brooks. He says : I want to say that when 
 I made mistakes in life, I hope you will do all in your power 
 to rectify them. [I asked if he did not believe in an after-life?] 
 Yes, but I did not believe in the possibility of communication 
 
 after death Here we see its full importance. [Mrs. Howard 
 
 notes : ' I knew Phillips Brooks from the time I was a girl and 
 had more than one long talk with him.' It was known to myself 
 and also to Mrs. Howard, that the Rev. Phillips Brooks had 
 spoken disparagingly of attempts to obtain communications 
 from the ' deceased ' through Mrs. Piper's trance. R.H.] 
 
 " [There was also a long and painful effort with great agita- 
 tion and anxiety to give an address asked for. This address is 
 not known by those desiring to have it. To obtain it was the 
 object of the communication with the gentleman whose necktie 
 was placed in Mrs. Piper's hand. Nothing intelligible was ob- 
 tained.*] " 
 
 If nobody knew this address, the failure is consonant with 
 the fact that in no sitting whose report I have ever read, has
 
 486 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 any communication been made of any new knowledge that 
 could not be obtained by the sweat of the mortal brow. The 
 mere fact of immortality, if it be a fact, may perhaps with the 
 aid of a little faith, be so imparted, and with it much that is 
 worth more than most other knowledge; but I have not met 
 anything farther of importance. The cases of apparent pro- 
 phecy are not yet frequent enough or clear enough to reason 
 from. In fact nothing seems to be but the dramatic veri- 
 similitude, the range of the controls' knowledge, their appar- 
 ent growth, and the reasonableness of the conditions (so far as 
 they can explain them) under which they profess to be. Of 
 all this more anon. 
 
 A little more of the sort of thing that must be infinitely 
 precious to some minds follows (Pr. XIII, 489) : 
 
 "After the writing, we thought the sitting over, and Mr. 
 Sutton had gone across the room, when Kakie's little voice piped 
 up. Want papa want papa. Dear papa. [Phinuit pats his 
 face.] Do you love me, papa ? Want babee. Sings, Bye, bye 
 papa, sing mama sing. Cuddles doll up in neck and sings. 
 [An exact imitation marvelously animated and real.*] 
 
 " It may Be of interest to note that the day before the sitting, 
 Mr. Sutton had questioned whether it was right or desirable for 
 them to bring them back for our gratification. It did not occur 
 to him during the sitting, but Alonzo said ' Do not think it 
 wrong to bring us back we love to come.' 
 
 " The ' sitting ' was as a whole very satisfactory. The con- 
 versation did not follow the order of our conscious minds, and 
 had the movement and vivacity of objective personalities. 
 
 "KATHARINE PAINE SUTTON." 
 
 A second sitting of the same people, Dec. 21st, was much 
 like the first. I cull a few touches. There's nothing to pre- 
 vent anybody from skipping them. 
 
 Second sitting with Mrs. Piper at Arlington Heights f 
 December 21**, 1893. (Pr.XIII,489f.) 
 
 "Present, Mrs. Howard and myself [Mrs. Sutton. H.H.]. 
 Report by Mrs. Sutton from notes taken by Mrs. Howard during 
 the sitting. 
 
 " Dr. Phinuit assumed control, . . . recognized me cor- 
 dially and said: Baby wants to see her mamma, come, dear. A 
 sweet child voice sang softly [the little boat song as before. 
 H.H.] 
 
 " [The child voice again.] Kakie did see papa. Papa is 
 marching with Eleanor. Sings, ' March, march,' etc. [Eleanor
 
 Ch. XXXII] The Button Sittings 487 
 
 is a little invalid. Mr. Sutton carries her a great deal often 
 sings, ' March,' etc. had done so at this time.*] 
 
 " I asked her to sing ' Bye Bye ' with me, which she did pre- 
 cisely as when here. I could not repress the tears. Phinuit 
 said: You must not weep. When the little shroud is wet, the 
 child grieves. 
 
 " ' Kakie ' says : Dear Mamma, do you love me so? I love you 
 and I see you. I am happy here, I have so many little children 
 to play with and I love my Auntie. I like to be with you. I 
 play with Eleanor. [Living sister. H.H.] Does Eleanor see 
 me? I play with her every day. I like the little bed. I play 
 with it. [The lady with whom we stayed in Duxbury had lent 
 Eleanor a doll's bed, which she greatly enjoyed. Of course we 
 had not associated it with Kakie.] Where is Bagie? [Her 
 name for her sister Margaret.] 
 
 " Phinuit said : Mary C. wishes to speak to you. [See previ- 
 ous sitting. R.H.] She said: We will care for your babies. 
 We lore them dearly. Hattie [a deceased friend*] is here. 
 She loves them too. ... I can see you and. know the darkness and 
 
 perplexities, but it is the darkness just before the dawn 1 see 
 
 you are nervous and impatient sometimes when the aching body 
 is tired out, but control your nerves, can't you, dear? that is 
 all I want to change in you. I know you try, but it seems as if 
 you ought to rise above it. [This is not in the least like her.*] 
 
 " Phinuit said : There are many here anxious to speak to you. 
 Here is your father and your mother. They have been here a 
 long time, your mother came first. [Correct.*] They are very 
 bright. They want to tell you to be patient. They see bright 
 days before you. [No. We have had much illness and tribula- 
 tions manifold with smaller income than ever before.*] n 
 
 The most scientific investigator, despite all the suspicious 
 emotional element, must at least admit Mrs. Button's candor. 
 
 " Kakie wants her buttons. [I gave them to Phinuit.] She 
 wants them all, they are not all here. [At the previous sitting 
 the string had broken and they scattered on the floor. We 
 thought we found them all, but when Mrs. Piper's sweeping day 
 came, the rest were found.] [How is this for " evidence " ? H.H.] 
 Phinuit said: There are eignt buttons here. Kakie, let me see 
 how many you have. [He counts twelve in French.] I ex- 
 claimed: Do you have buttons there? He replied: She had not 
 the button, but she has the idea of them, which is the reality. 
 [See Chapter XXIII. H.H.] 
 
 " [Kakie asks for her ball. I gave it to Phinuit, who tries to 
 find what she wants to do with it.] Bite it? Toss it? Roll it? 
 Throw it? [No, she wants a string. Mrs. H. gave him a string. 
 He tries to tie it around the ball.] [A little red wooden ball 
 with a hole through it. The ball had a string through it when 
 she used to play with it.*] No, that is not right, through it.
 
 488 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 There, there, be a good little girl. Don't cry. Don't be impa- 
 tient, you want your mamma to see how you can do it, so she will 
 know it is you, don't you, dear? Old man will do it for her. 
 [The " old man " was Mrs. Piper, was he? H.H.] [He put the 
 string through, held it up, and hit it with the finger, making it 
 swing.] That is it, is it not, darling? Nice little girl as ever 
 was. [While she was sick, it was her great delight to have me 
 hold the string, and let her hit the little red ball with her finger 
 or spoon. She made the motions as if doing it, after she be- 
 came unconscious.] 
 
 " [Again I saw her for a moment, (i.e., Mrs. Sutton herself 
 saw the ' apparition ' of Kakie. See introductory remarks to 
 her sittings. R.H.) standing at the table, trying to reach a 
 spool of tangled red knitting silk, and at the same moment 
 Phinuit reached for it, saying :] She wants that, she and Eleanor 
 used to play with. She calls it Eleanor's. She is delighted with 
 it it brings her nearer her little sister. [All true, but I had 
 not connected it with Eleanor in my thought.] I gave Phinuit 
 a lock of Eleanor's hair. He felt it a moment and said: You 
 cut that close to the head that was right. I can see her per- 
 fectly lovely little girl. [I had not told him whose hair it 
 was.] . . . How that poor child has suffered! [She is recovering 
 
 from spinal meningitis and paralysis.] 
 
 [He gives a correct diagnosis and advice that apparently was 
 good : for after them he continues. H.H.] : " I do not see her go 
 
 out of the body She must have great care, or she will go put 
 
 like that [snapping his fingers]. [She ... begins to... im- 
 prove *] [Phinuit returns to Kakie. H.H.] . . . She wants 
 
 Eleanor's hair. Phinuit makes the motion of drawing something 
 from it and giving it to her, saying : Now she has it. She can get 
 
 nearer her little sister with it I gave him a bit of Mr. Button's 
 
 hair, without saying whose it was. As he took it, he said laugh- 
 ing: That is papa's hair, mighty little of it, was not he stingy 
 of it though? [When I cut it, Mr. Sutton warned me playfully 
 that he had not much to spare.] He will live to be a hundred. 
 You need not worry about that. [Mrs. S. has all of a woman's 
 solicitude for a perfectly healthy husband. S.W.S.*] 
 
 " Phinuit exclaimed : I see you in such a pleasant home ! All 
 the surroundings so pleasant lovely trees. Mr. Sutton will re- 
 ceive a ' call ' soon from a good parish, and will accept it. ... 
 [I named several places.] I think it ends in ton Winchendon 
 sounds like it. ... Vestry, church parlors, etc. a comfortable 
 support ... it will be a permanent settlement. . . . [We came to 
 Athol to a small struggling parish and small salary ! No vestry, 
 or anything of the sort. . . . The permanence of the settlement is 
 problematical.*] 
 
 "Phinuit turns his head, as if looking at a child beside me, 
 and says : Yes, I know ' Kakie wants,' but Kakie must be pa- 
 tient, others want to speak to mamma. [She was very persistent
 
 Ch. XXXII] The Heywood Sittings 489 
 
 with ' Kakie wants ' when here.] . . . You dear little girl, you 
 want to get in mamma's lap, and you shall. [Phinuit makes the 
 movement of lifting her into my lap, and for a moment I saw 
 her distinctly lying in my arms, with the sweet look of demure 
 contentment she used to have when I held her.] Phinuit said: 
 You have a child here who came long ago. He is a beautiful 
 spirit now, he does not get near enough for me to hear him, 
 but I can see him. And there is another little one here, too, 
 they call ' baby,' not long here, it never lived on earth. Mary 
 C- has it. She does love that baby so, she and Hattie. Eliz- 
 abeth is here, too, they love you and will care for your babies. 
 [Elizabeth. Possibly an old lady I dearly loved, but I never 
 called her or heard her called Elizabeth.*] 
 
 " Kakie wants the little bit of a book mamma read by her 
 bedside, with the pretty, bright things hanging from it mamma 
 put it in her hands the last thing she remembers. [This is 
 curious. It was a little prayer-book, with cross, anchor, and 
 other symbols, in silver, attached to ribbons for marking the 
 
 places 1 read it ... when she seemed unconscious, and after 
 
 her death I placed it in her hands to prevent the blood settling 
 in the nails. The last thing she remembered was my placing it 
 in her hands ! What does this signify ?] [Mrs. Piper held her 
 hands in just that position when she asked for it.*] " 
 
 Here is a specimen of what investigators have to contend 
 with. That it can be got up deliberately on the spur of the 
 moment, or is apt to be intended, seems hardly supposable. 
 
 March 3rd, 1894. (Pr.Xin,501-2.) 
 
 " Mr. Charles Heywood, Gardner, Mass. (Associate Am.S.P.R.) 
 
 "R. H. present part of the time. 
 
 "Mr. Heywood accompanied me for a sitting on March 1st, 
 1894. There was no speech but apparently strenuous attempts 
 at writing as by different persons. The oddities of spelling and 
 writing were probably Phinuit's. The following is the complete 
 record of the writing of March 1st. 
 
 " no light no light here [Spelt backwards and written for- 
 wards, on thgil, etc.]. 
 
 "no liht liht [Spelt backwards and written forwards] no 
 [written correctly]. 
 
 " no liht can't stay y yes no liht [Spelt backwards and written 
 forwards]. 
 
 " can't stay [Spelt forwards and written backwards, i.e., yats 
 tnac, beginning with the letter c and writing from right to 
 left], here [spelt backwards and written forwards, the h in 
 mirror-writing]. Phinuit [mirror-writing] followed by a stroke 
 with an r perhaps intended for Dr. on tighl [or lighl]. too 
 bad [spelt backwards and written forwards] bad dab oot. Dr. 
 Phinuit [spelt backwards and written forwards, and some of the
 
 490 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 letters mirror-writing]. Adieu [Spelt backwards and written 
 forwards]. No use G. P. [followed by a scrawl suggesting 
 Adieu] " 
 
 Extracts from Letters from Mr. Heywood. (Pr.XIII,503f.) 
 GARDNER, January Wth, 1895. 
 
 " Phinuit made some remarkable prophecies at my last 
 
 sitting. The minor predictions, many of them, were fulfilled, 
 and I naturally expected a corresponding realization of the two 
 great predictions up to which the lesser led ; but the Doctor evi- 
 dently took too much for granted. The big things failed to 
 occur." 
 
 GARDNER, February Wth, 1896. 
 
 " I send all which I can positively submit to strange 
 
 eyes, and I beg to assure you that what is omitted is of a char- 
 acter which exhibits startling internal evidences of being com- 
 municated by the personality of my dead wife Phinuit's read- 
 ings from locks of hair, gloves, etc., pressed against Mrs. Piper's 
 forehead, were excellent so far as they related to the character 
 of the persons and their circumstances, but his predictions were 
 simply my own ideas of the probabilities, and in almost every 
 
 instance have failed Favorite expressions often used by her 
 
 [his wife when living. H.H.], i.e., ' Don't be stupid! ' ' Now you 
 are waking up!' 'Well, I should say I had!' 'Don't IV 
 'Well I guess!' 'Dear,' and particularly 'Dear little boy,' 
 flowed from the pencil in such a familiar way that I felt the 
 influence of her personality very strongly. Some little traits 
 were shown in the impatient brushing away of loose articles 
 upon the table, and the pounding of the table with the fingers 
 when perplexed. When I saw that motion I exclaimed : ' Ah ! 
 now I recognize you beyond a doubt ! ' Little things like that 
 seemed to supply the missing links in the chain of identity." 
 
 From the Automatic Writing at Sitting of March 3rd, 1894. 
 (Pr.XIII,505f.) 
 
 " D. : ' Charlie, I am Dorothy [a pet name of my wife] 
 C-h-a-r-1-i-e, this is to you. Will tell you all soon. Wait for 
 him' [me, her.] 
 
 " G. P. : ' The lady is ' [through?] [This was a fragment in- 
 tended for somebody who had sat the previous day.] [Such in- 
 terpolations are quite frequent. H.H.] Read [a scrawl, perhaps 
 meant for ' Charlie.'] [Daisy ?] I am here [a scrawl, then 
 ' strong.'] C. H. : ' What is that? ' G. P. : ' Strong. I am and 
 I saw her and in consequence right it for you.' Hodgson and 
 Heywood : 'Ha ha ! See How George spells " write " ! ' G. P. : 
 'Am I not right? [Presumably to D. P. B.] Well, do speak 
 and I will help you. This was a mistake, if you please ' " 
 
 The initials evidently refer to Mrs. Heywood, and are
 
 Ch. XXXII] The Heywood Sittings 491 
 
 probably those of her maiden name. They are spelled out 
 below. 
 
 "C. H,: 'Is this Daisy?' D. P. B.: 'Yes, and I love you 
 and I want you to forgive me for not coming before. I tried so 
 hard to reach you, dear Charley, you know ' [Neither I nor 
 my wife ever spelt my name ' Charley.' C.H., '96] [Date of 
 note. Sittings were in '94. H.H.] C. H.: 'Yes, I know, dear, 
 but now you have come to me.' D. P. B. : ' Oh, speak to me ! 
 My cough is right all now [all right now.] Where is my pic- 
 ture, dear? Give it to me a minute.' [My wife had no cough.] 
 [I carry a photograph of my wife in my watch case. Taking 
 the watch from my pocket I placed it in the hand, which rested 
 upon it a few seconds, and then resumed as follows :] D. P. B. : 
 ' Dp you miss me now ? I see you always.' C. H. : ' I can scarcely 
 believe this to be you, Daisy. Can't you give me some proof?' 
 
 " [Then followed an attempt to write a name. Probably ten 
 minutes were consumed in this effort, but she seemed unable to 
 
 write the whole name She finally spelt it phonetically, 
 
 but I ... failed to recognize what she was driving at, and 
 remained in utter ignorance until the next sitting, when she 
 was able to write the full name correctly, and imparted a 
 bit of information of which I was entirely ignorant. She had 
 intended to tell me the matter, and about a month before her 
 death had started to do so, but something had turned the con- 
 versation In attempting to explain the matter at her first 
 
 sitting, she referred me by name to a person who might readily 
 have given me the needed information, but I felt unwilling to 
 discuss the matter.] 
 
 " C. H. : 'I can't think what that means.' D. P. B. : ' Do, 
 dear. Give it [the watch] to me a minute. Oh, how this helps 
 me. I am still a little confused fused fused.' [If this fre- 
 quent sort of thing is fraud, it is pretty ingenious fraud. But 
 how absolutely consistent it is with difficult communications 
 from some source I H.H.] 
 
 " [Then follows a reference of an extremely personal nature, 
 which afforded me a strong proof of personality. It was per- 
 fectly intelligible at the time, and it began with ' I tell you this, 
 but don't let that gentleman hear me,' evidently referring to 
 Pelham, as Hodgson had left the room sent out some time be- 
 fore by Phinuit. Abridged from original transcript. C.H. '96.] 
 
 " D. P. B. : ' Don't feel strange with me, dear, for I love you 
 and always did.' C. H. : ' Can't you give me some further proof 
 
 of your identity?' D. P. B.: 'I will Am I dreaming? 
 
 Where are you now ? ' C.H. : ' Right here, near you. I wish I 
 might see you.' D. P. B. : ' I will try to have you see me as I 
 am. Poor little boy too bad yes do you recall recall can't 
 I help you when you go home. I say don't you hear me ? '. . . 
 
 " [When I professed ignorance of some of the circumstances
 
 492 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 the pencil rather impetuously wrote ' Don't be stupid/ and then 
 ' Don't be discouraged.'] 
 
 " D. P. B. : ' A . . . is gone and I am glad of it. I am so happy 
 for that. Now talk to me, dear. Don't you know the Sunday 
 we went to the Point' C. H. : * Point? ' D. P. B. : ' Yes [joy- 
 fully]. That is what I want to say: was it Sunday? And I 
 remember it so well. P oint Pines ' [triumphantly] . C. H. : 
 ' Oh, the Point of Pines.' D. P. B. : ' Yes.' C. H. : And that is 
 what you were trying to say, is it ? ' D. P. B. : * Yes, all the 
 time. Do you remember the little place where we sat. I go 
 there often, yet I don't see you there.' C. H. : ' Well, haven't 
 you seen me there sometimes ? ' D. P. B. (joyously) : ' Well, I 
 should say I had ! ' C. H. : ' Oh, I recognize that expression ! 
 I know now that you are Daisy.' D. P. B. : ' Well, 7 know I am 
 D.' [a scrawl]. C. H. : ' Can you write your name ? ' D. P. B. : 
 ' Yes, I'll give it to you Bb-R-A-a. [Here the hand seemed 
 angry at its inability to write, and covers the paper with dots.] 
 Over. I wrote it. I wrote it. Do read. It is over here, turn ' 
 [hand fumbles among the loose sheets lying on the table covered 
 with writing]. C. H. : 'Can you give me your middle initial?' 
 D. P. B.: 'Yes, P. D. B. do read R no more A that is 
 not ' [a scrawl]. C. H. : ' Will you give it me later ? ' D. P. B. : 
 ' Yes, before I go I will write it in full. Yes. Now let me 
 speak my mind. Do you go west ? ' C. H. : ' No. Didn't you 
 like me to go West? ' D. P. B. : ' Not a bit. You know how I 
 felt. Don't try to fool with me now. . . . You want me to speak 
 natural [ly] ' [which was exactly the wish framed in my mind], 
 
 C. H. : ' You feel well and happy, then? ' D. P. B. : ' Don't I 
 well, I guess! [one of her favorite idioms]. All burden that 
 about.' 
 
 " [Then follows some advice upon a certain matter which 
 events have proven to be invaluable. Any other course than the 
 one advised would have been fatal to my welfare. C.H., 
 '96.] 
 
 "D. P. B.: 'Where are those pants?' C. H.: 'Pants?' 
 
 D. P. B. : ' Yes those light things. I did not like them too 
 much like a negro.' C. H. : ' Negro, is that ? ' D. P. B. : ' Yes ' 
 [joyfully and flourishingly]. 
 
 " [During the summer of 1891, the year before the death of 
 my wife, I owned a pair of very light and very loud trousers, 
 
 which afforded endless amusement to my wife and myself 
 
 We called them my coon pants! But reminiscences of that sort, 
 as may be imagined, were far from my mind during the 
 seance.] 
 
 " C. H. : ' And you don't consider yourself dead ? ' D. P. B. : ' I 
 don't think I am dead not much ! I want to trouble you a little 
 while longer. What about your hair? Yes, dear.' [The hand 
 dropped the pencil and came forward to my head and fingered my 
 hair.] C. H. : 'It's longer than it was when you were here.
 
 Ch. XXXII] Mrs. J. E. R. E. 493 
 
 That's the fashionable cut now.' D. P. B. : ' Looks well.' C. H. : 
 ' You like it, don't you ? ' D. P. B. : ' Yes.' C. H. : ' Others do, 
 too.' D. P. B. : ' I don't care whether they do or not. I do. 
 Where is the cradle ? ' C. H. : ' It's in the baby's room.' D. P. 
 B. : ' It's where I can't see it. I can't find it.' C. H. : ' If you 
 
 go in there you can't fail to see it [suddenly recollecting] 
 
 Oh, I know what you mean ! ' D. P. B. [energetically] ' Now 
 you are just waking up!' 
 
 " [ The hand, in the exuberance of its pleasure at my evidence 
 of intelligence, swept watch, note book, loose sheet and pencils 
 off the table on the floor. After they were replaced the writing 
 continued.] 
 
 " D. P. B. : ' Too bad.' C. H. : ' Oh, that's all right.' D. P. B. : 
 - I know, but see what I did. Look here, do you remember the 
 cradle you never got? ' C. H.: ' Yes, and that's a very good evi- 
 dence that Daisy is here. I remember very well. And you re- 
 member that promised cradle.' D. P. B. : ' Yes, I am now. Well, 
 I guess I do.' 
 
 " C. H. : ' Will you be near me and help me in the 
 
 future? ' D. P. B. : Yes, I wilL I promise. Ask him [G. P.!] 
 to help me.' GEOBGE [?] : ' Yes, I will ' Enter Hodgson. 
 
 " HODGSON* : ' Come, Dr. Phinuit, it is time to close the sitting.' 
 D. P. B.: ' Who are you?' C. H.: ' This is Mr. Hodgson, the 
 Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research.' D. P. B. : ' Do 
 you know my baby? He is a very nice boy. You go and see 
 him. He looks like me.' C. H. : ' Now remember your promise 
 to write your full name.' D. P. B.: 'Yes, D. P. B. [indis- 
 tinctly.] Now D. P. B. [in startlingly distinct capitals] Daisy 
 Park Bradford. [The ' Park ' scrawly ; the ' Bradford ' very 
 plainly written]. Da [scrawl] Par [oh well, this me?] For- 
 give me for my wrongs.' C. H. : ' But there are no wrongs to 
 forgive.' D. P. B. : * Mistakes.' [Then, as if seized by desire to 
 summarize rapidly the proofs of identity, the hand scrawled in 
 coarse, hurried letters ' Point of Pines ' ' the Seat ' ' Don't 
 take A.... no' 'My stomach is better so is the baby']. 
 C. H. : ' You remember what we dreaded for the baby? ' D. P. 
 B. : ' Well, yes, but no fear of them now. I must go.' C. H. : 
 ' Good-by ! ' D. P. B. : ' No, don't say good-bye.' [And with 
 this the sitting terminated.] " 
 
 April 4th, 1894. (Pr.XIII,510f.) 
 " Sitter: Mrs. J. E. R. R. (Associate A.B.SP.R.) 
 
 " Mrs. Piper became first controlled by Dr. Phinuit. 
 
 " [Spoken] : That lady's a medium. You have a very won- 
 derful light, but you doubt yourself sometimes Do you know 
 
 Robert who troubled your whole life ? . . . Never will any more. 
 Yes, indeed, Robert was a great sorrow, and we are glad to re- 
 form him here 
 
 " Taken as a whole it would appear that the effort was made
 
 494 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 by several of my nearest relatives to inform me of the death of 
 the bad influence of my life, and to let me know that they knew 
 a story I had never told to any one of them. I do not know 
 whether R. E. W. is living or dead. 
 
 " Mrs. R. writes later : 
 
 "DEAR DR. HODGSON, What do you think of this? I have 
 just received reply from England as to Dr. W., who you will 
 remember George, through Mrs. Piper, said was ' there.' Well, 
 
 he is alive, well, and stronger than ever 1 for years have not 
 
 thought consciously of Dr. W. nor cared whether he lived or 
 died, nor have I borne him malice for the trouble, as ' George ' 
 emphasized it, that his influence brought into my young life. 
 Why then so strange a re-awakening? Why so false a test? . . . 
 
 "J.E.R.K." 
 
 Which is offset by this (Pr. XIII, 513) : 
 
 " CARNEGIE STUDIOS, March 23rd [1895]. 
 
 "DEAR DR. HODGSON, When I had my sitting with Mrs. 
 Piper, perhaps you remember that Phinuit broke off suddenly to 
 say : ' There's a little child coming, it is still in the body, not 
 born yet.' I asked if it was Dr. Moore's baby whose arrival I 
 was then anxiously awaiting. Phinuit said : ' Yes, but he is not 
 coming to stay, he is guarded by a great spirit.' The baby was 
 born a couple of weeks later, and died suddenly this morning. 
 
 "I have not the papers here but I think my recollection is 
 correct. I have remembered it several times since the child's 
 birth, but it seemed so healthy I thought it was all a mistake. 
 It may seem worth while to note this without mentioning names. 
 Cordially yours, J. E. K. R." 
 
 May 26th and 29th, 1894. (Pr.XIII,525f.) 
 
 " Sitter : Professor C. E. Norton, of Harvard, at the house of 
 Professor W. James. . . . Professor Norton has made the follow- 
 ing statement: 
 
 " First, that there was no question as to Mrs. Piper's 
 
 good faith, or as to her delusion in respect to the nature of the 
 influences to which she was subject when in the trance state. 
 [She herself had no opinion. H.H.] 
 
 " Her conditions seemed to me analogous to those of an ill 
 person dreaming a suggested dream, in which trains of dream 
 to which the dreamer has been accustomed are modified by the 
 special conditions of the moment 
 
 " There was no evidence of acquaintance with any facts known 
 only to myself, or which were remote and obscure 
 
 " As to the origin of many of the phantasmagorias of her 
 trance dreams, I formed a very distinct opinion, but many ex- 
 periments would be required to test its correctness, and these I 
 shall never make."
 
 Ch. XXXII] Remarkable Telopses 495 
 
 If the following was simply Mrs. Piper's telopsis of a lady 
 with sore eyes, what was the reason for sending any " love " 
 and giving the husband's initial? (Pr. XIII, 528) : 
 
 " Dr. K on May 16th, 1896 . . . made the following state- 
 ment in the course of a letter in reply to my [Hodgson's. H.H.] 
 inquiry on another matter. 
 
 " I receired from Mrs. P. a few words of communica- 
 tion from someone who claimed to be my Uncle G ' Give my 
 
 love to L. and tell her I see the trouble with her eyes.' L. is the 
 
 initial of my uncle's widow I had but just returned from a 
 
 year's trip abroad, and I knew nothing about my Aunt L 
 
 Later, when I reached my home, I found out that my aunt had 
 been for some little time under treatment for some trouble with 
 her eyes." 
 
 About November BOth, 1895. (Pr.Xni,534-5.) 
 
 " Sitter : Professor Herbert Nichols. 
 
 " The following account, undated, was forwarded to me [Hodg- 
 son] by Professor James, to whom it was sent. 
 
 " [Received by R. H. December 24M, 1895.] 
 
 " Just before coming away I had a wonderful sitting with 
 Mrs. Piper. As you know, I have been a Laodicean toward her 
 heretofore. But that she is no fraud, and that she is the greatest 
 marvel I have ever met I am now wholly convinced. Think my 
 interview more wonderful than any I have ever heard reported 
 of her before 
 
 " Mamma and I one Christmas exchanged rings. Each had 
 engraved in his gift the first word of his favorite proverb. The 
 ring given me I lost many years ago. When Mamma died a 
 year ago, the ring I had given her was, at her request, taken 
 from her finger and sent to me. Now I asked Mrs. Piper ' What 
 was written in Mamma's ring?' and as I asked the question I 
 held the ring in my hand and had in mind only that ring. But 
 I had hardly got the words from my mouth till she slapped down 
 on the paper the word in the other ring"
 
 CHAPTEE XXXIII 
 HODGSON'S SECOND PIPER REPORT, 1892-5 (Continued) 
 
 HI. The Thaw Sittings 
 
 THE sittings of Dr. and Mrs. Thaw are much like those of 
 Mrs. Sutton. They had lost twin children, Margaret, aged 
 six months, a year before the sittings began, and Ruth, fifteen 
 months old, three months before. Much of the baby talk 
 alleged to come from Ruth was natural to her age at death. 
 Of course none of Margaret's could have been natural at six 
 months; and at the sittings much talk was ascribed to both 
 that would have been impossible to children at eighteen 
 months, their putative age at the time of the sittings. More- 
 over, in the report of the sitting of March 12th it is definitely 
 stated that the last one who died had only six words at the 
 time of death three or four months before. The increase of 
 vocabulary in that time seems to indicate a rate of develop- 
 ment unknown in earthly conditions, or additions in Phinuit's, 
 or Mrs. Piper's, impersonations. Yet the impersonations are 
 too good and contain too much superusual knowledge to be 
 merely faked. The whole thing is a puzzle. 
 
 Dr. and Mrs. Thaw are both of the mediumistic tempera- 
 ment, if that term may be provisionally allowed, and the sit- 
 tings are among the most successful on record. Mrs. Thaw 
 has told me of hearing the tappings about her bed which are 
 alluded to in the sittings. 
 
 Hodgson says (Pr. XIII, 536-7) : 
 
 "The record of one sitting... is omitted altogether, at the 
 request of the sitter, as being too intimately personal, and con- 
 taining much very private matter concerning the deceased. [As 
 already suggested, perhaps unnecessarily often, this is inevitable, 
 and most regrettably the case with the best evidence. H.H.] . . . 
 The records should be read in detail to be appreciated, as the 
 form in which the information is given is in most cases not less 
 important than the matter." 
 
 496
 
 Ch. XXXIII] The Thaw Babies 497 
 
 Unfortunately space imposes a most difficult choice between 
 the full presentation of a narrow variety of sittings or a 
 scanter presentation of a greater variety. I, of course, have 
 tried to go in medio: no pun intended. 
 
 The notes in brackets are by Dr. Thaw, except where they 
 bear my initials. 
 
 I have peppered more than my usual proportion of com- 
 ments through these sittings. I hope they will be less of a 
 nuisance than a help. 
 
 First Sitting. February 14th, 1892. Present, Dr. and Mrs. 
 A. B. Thaw, and Mrs. Holmes. (Pr.XIII,537f.) 
 
 " 1.1 A little child comes here to gentleman. Puts 
 
 hand on his head. [Child always did so.] Light golden hair. 
 [Correct.] [Dr. T. has hair in pocket; stands ten feet away.] 
 Little boy. [Child was very generally mistaken for boy.] 
 
 " Phinuit [in a child's voice, for ' R ' [Ruth, the baby. H.H.] : 
 ' Tell mamma not to trouble so. [Here, and at times later, there 
 seemed to be great physical distress and pain in abdomen, throat 
 and head.] It pains me so here. [Hands on abdomen.] [Cor- 
 rect. Child had dysentery, with sore throat.] My throat hurts. 
 The powder I Take it away. I don't like it. Take it away.' 
 [Bismuth was given through entire illness of two weeks, and 
 was always given with trouble.] " 
 
 Did the child's suffering continue, or would a child do this 
 and what follows for evidential purposes? It may be worth 
 while to repeat that "spirits" often declare that those in 
 their world are freed from their earthly pains, but they also 
 give indications of suffering pain as here. Some of them have 
 said they did it for evidential purposes. 
 
 " Phinuit : ' Curly golden hair.' [Hair was very curly.] Phi- 
 nuit [for R] : ' I am not dead. I am not dead. I am not dead.' 
 Phinuit: 'My head aches so! [To Mrs. H.] Sis! Put your 
 hand on my head. Throat so bad! Hurt so!' [Pause.] Phi- 
 nuit [for R.] : ' I can't tell why mamma don't speak to me ! 
 Don't put it in the bottle. Take it away.' Phinuit: 'Little 
 girl! Long light hair. Eh Eh Eth Ethie, Ethie, Ethie. 
 [Changing sound of E.] She's trying to tell me. Net- tie. 
 Ne-thie. [This appears to be feeling for the name Ruthie. See 
 below. H.H.] Can't get it. There's something the matter. This 
 little child hasn't learned to talk.' [Correct, except for a few 
 words which were mentioned at later sittings.] " 
 
 And yet she did talk very precociously, or Phinuit talked 
 for her, before and after this.
 
 498 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 " [2.] Phinuit [for K.] : ' Take me up in your arms ! The 
 stars! Stars! When I saw the stars, then I knew I wouldn't 
 stay. [A good deal for a child of fifteen months to know. H.H.] 
 The book! I want the book. The book! I want mamma to 
 speak to me. I am trying to reach my mamma.' [Phinuit has 
 pains or distress here.] Phinuit : ' Never saw anyone so anxious 
 to come. Trying to get through the veil. But can't do it.' 
 [Some mumbling here.] Phinuit [for R.] : ' I've come such a 
 long way to speak to you, mamma. They took all my things and 
 put them in the box. [Correct.] I didn't like that. Oh, dear ! 
 There's papa too.' ^Phinuit: ' This is dreadful. This little girl 
 will take me out with her. She's tearing me to pieces. [Great 
 pain apparently.] See the little curls! Ethie! Ethie! Oh, 
 dear! Oh, dear! [More suffering.] What do I see? I don't 
 want Harry. [To Mrs. H.] [Pause.] Here come two ! Baby 
 and little girl. [Correct.] She's gone to get baby.' Phinuit 
 [for R.] : ' She's here, too. And I'm not sorry.' Phinuit : ' Ellie 
 Ethie. [We tell Phinuit that the first letter of the name is R.] 
 These children are crazy, trying to get to you. To reach through 
 the veil.' Phinuit [for R.] : ' I've been to you once. [About six 
 weeks after the death, Mrs. T. woke one night and heard a noise 
 like light rapping on the foot of the bed, which lasted for several 
 minutes. She told me about it in the morning.] I'll come again 
 often. Some time you'll see me. See papa writing. Tell papa 
 to go home and think about it. [Eighteen months old child! 
 They develop fast " there " ! H.H.] Tell papa I'll come to him, 
 too. I'll touch him.' Phinuit : ' Ret-tie. Ret-thie. [Phinuit is 
 given watch and chain that belonged to Dr. T.'s mother, who 
 died thirty years before.] Here comes a lady. Grandma ! She's 
 here, too, with children. Grandpa in the body. [Mrs. T.'s 
 father is living.] Never saw such a trouble to reach anybody. 
 [Another pause.] . . . Oh, dear ! In the body. Another one, to 
 be. Coming to stay with you. [See later in this sitting.] I've 
 got something the matter with my teeth. [Baby was teething 
 when she died.] . . . Take me in your arms, mamma. [Suddenly.] 
 And there's my picture! [Mrs. T. was painting a picture of 
 Ruthie when she was taken ill.] It's good. It was the last 
 chance. I watched it every day. And you never did better.' [A 
 very precocious connoisseur ! H.H.] . . . Phinuit : ' Who's mother ? 
 Grandma. Hear the little one call Grandma.' " 
 
 If she was still "the little one," in comparison with her 
 sister she had not been growing; they were twins. 
 
 " Phinuit [for R.] : ' Tell papa to think it over, and when alone 
 I'll come again.' [And neither at eighteen months could natu- 
 rally have said this. H.H.] . . . Phinuit [impressively] : * Friends, 
 let me speak a word to you. Let me tell you there will be an- 
 other that will stay. [Mrs. T. asks if there are any more.] One
 
 Ch. XXXIII] Some Older Friends 499 
 
 now. Only one.' Mrs. T.: (Will she stay?) Phinuit: 'She 
 will stay. One more ! [Mrs. H. asks, * Boy or girl ? '] Phinuit : 
 ' I'm a little boy. Three sisters ! Two to stay and two to go, 
 but not to die 1 ' [Pause.] [Mrs. T. has since had two children, 
 both girls, born one in October 1893, the other in September, 
 1895] . . . Phinuit [for R.] : ' Speak to me, mamma ! Speak to 
 me. I want to stay. Can't you think I'm here? Tell papa. 
 [Watch is given again.] Watch. Grandma's. Put Sis's hand 
 on my head. [Short pause.] Ruth! Two Ruths! Two of 
 them. Mamma v s grandma.' [Correct.] . . . Phinuit [for R.] : 
 ' Great grandma. My namesake ' " 
 
 Do children of eighteen months know about great-grand- 
 parents and namesakes? Much of this is telepathy, but how 
 about the dramatic quality? 
 
 " Phinuit [Loud] : ' Friend ! H O W A He's talking to me. 
 I hear him whisper. He's coming nearer.' [Phinuit here gives 
 a nickname for a friend recently dead. Nickname not known to 
 anyone present. On inquiry his widow said it was the name 
 commonly used by his mother and sisters, all dead, but not used 
 by anyone living. A. B. Thaw.] [Compare with Mrs. Speer's 
 case. p. 354. H.H.] 
 
 " [3.1 H . H . [Giving name of friend.] 
 
 "(Mrs. T.: Does he know the babies?) Phinuit [speaking 
 softly and with feeling] : ' Quite well, quite well.' [True.] " 
 
 Second Sitting. February 21th, 1892. (Pr.XIII,541f.) 
 " [R. Hodgson and Miss R. have first part of sitting; those 
 present at last half are Dr. and Mrs. A. B. Thaw and Mrs. 
 Thaw's brother, Mr. A. Dow, who writes shorthand.] 
 
 " Phinuit : ' Come here, little girl, come here. Tells me 
 
 to pat you on the head. [To Dr. T.] That's it. She talks very 
 sweetly and very softly. She comes here and says that Who is 
 BBerthie Bertie B-E-A-R-T-A-I-C-E. [Living child Bea- 
 trice her own pronunciation.] Ruth, Ruthie Ruthie here 
 This little girl... she has brought another little girl. Little 
 Marjery Marjaret. You speak to papa too.' " 
 
 A good deal to ask of a six months' baby; and Phinuit 
 always insists that she's " the little one " as compared with her 
 twin Ruth. He also often represents her as walking. 
 
 " ' Here comes a lady to you. You have got her picture 
 
 a very large picture of her. [Correct of Dr. T.'s mother.] 
 And she has come. She is attracted by the influence in the body. 
 I will awaken her in a minute. Don't hurry me, please. The 
 children don't like to be sent away. The little one is gone. 
 Little Ruth is here with me, with little light curls all over her 
 head. [To Dr. T.] She makes me pat your head. But two will
 
 500 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Ft. IV 
 
 stay. Little Betty is going to stay in the body with you. And 
 there is going to be one more that is going to stay. There 
 will be two with you and two of us here. I can't quite' 
 [Broken.] " 
 
 "[To Dr. T.] ' This is your mother. This is her watch. She 
 
 says, ' Tell W [Dr. T.'s father] that the baby is all right." 
 
 [Mother died in premature childbirth, but father was also dead at 
 the time of the sitting.] [Why didn't she meet him then, in- 
 stead of sending a message ? H.H.] [But Dr. Thaw's then living 
 
 brother was also named W . See below. R.H.] I don't 
 
 know what that means. . . .' (Dr. T. : Are you all happy there ?) 
 E. : 'I am very happy. Oh, if you will only believe there is no 
 death ! I live and love you. Don't let these little things worry 
 you. It grieves me. Will you cherish me in your memory as 
 you always did, and think of me as I am ? Watching over you. 
 [To Mrs. T.] This dear little woman. [Placing hands on heads 
 
 of Dr. and Mrs. T.] Who is L ? I don't know. I only love 
 
 you. I will stay with you.' R. [Baby Ruth. H.H.] : ' Speak to 
 me. Tell Betty [living sister. H.H.] I love her.' (Mrs. T.: 
 How does Margaret look?) Phinuit: 'The dear little thing- 
 dear little thing. There, pat her, and papa, we love.' M. : 'He 
 used to take me on his arm. I see him. He can take me no 
 more in the body, but in the spirit, if he will. You have carried 
 me, you have seen me. You will see me again. Truly, truly, 
 truly!' (Mrs. T.: What can we do to see you?) 'Mamma, 
 dear! Mamma, dear! We'll be with you. Do nothing. Be 
 patient. When your pillow is wet, I cannot rest. When you 
 are cheerful, I am happy. Don't cry. In the body. Dry away 
 those tears, and don't fret. That's all right.' " 
 
 As said at the outset regarding the vocabularies of the 
 children, this advice from a child of six months is of course 
 highly incongruous, and suggests either manufacture on the 
 part of Phinuit (whatever that may mean) or developments 
 much more rapid in the other life than in this one, or dreams 
 with their mixture of true and false. 
 
 Third sitting. March Vtth, 1892. (Pr.XIII,545f.) 
 " [Dr. and Mrs. Thaw. Mr. Alexander Dow writing shorthand.] 
 
 " ' Here's the baby. Oh ! I'm so fond of this little one. 
 
 She wants me to tell you she's not afraid of me any more. She 
 knows I talked to you in the body. You know what I mean? 
 I explained it to Ruthie.' (Mrs. T.: Little Ruthie!) Phi- 
 nuit : ' The little baby is Margaret. She is very delighted. She 
 wants a posie give her some posies. [Mrs. T. had brought 
 some little flowers for the babies, at this time on the table in 
 paper.] Posie, posie, give one posie. [Taking flowers and sep-
 
 Ch. XXXIII] The Thaw Babies Again 501 
 
 'arating them.] That's for the little one.' (Mrs. T.: I brought 
 them for the little ones.) Phinuit: 'That's for the little one. 
 She wants some for the other one just two or three. You don't 
 know how the little one can speak now. [But if she had been 
 growing so as to speak, how was she still " the little one " ? 
 Very possibly an entirely genuine dream. Perhaps pp. 428-9 
 may have some interest in this connection. H.H.] You know 
 she takes the spirit of these things the spiritual thing and the 
 spirit part is just as real to her as your life is to you.' M. : 
 'Come to me, Mamma.' (Mrs. T.: If I might see her!) 
 Phinuit: 'What a bright facel She has grayish blue eyes 
 large, full and pretty. I call them blue, a grayish blue. What a 
 Tery bright and pretty little mouth she hasl [Correct descrip- 
 tion of M.] She loves you both. Do you know, I can get more 
 from the children than I can from the old ones, because there is 
 such a strong tie between you. [Has often been noted. H.H.] . . . 
 She wants me to separate the posies and give some to the other 
 baby. I will give her so many [separating flowers], and that one 
 will have so many. Just the same for each little one.' R. : 
 'Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty. Where's the little blue flowers? 
 Pretty, pretty, pretty.' Phinuit: 'Oh! That's a pretty baby- 
 Ruth Pretty, pretty, pretty. Do you love the babies ? ' (Dr. T. : 
 What do you think, Dr.?) Phinuit: 'She says that. Baby, 
 baby, babie. This little one says Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, 
 pretty. BABY Can you hear her speak? Do you hear her 
 speak ? Bettie Bettie Bettie she keeps calling Bettie. Give 
 me the little toy thing. I like that it refreshes her. I never 
 saw two brighter children. You know they have no more pain 
 in the stomach.' (Dr. T. : Doctor, don't they ever suffer in the 
 spirit body ?) Phinuit : ' No more pain no pain.' (Dr. T. : 
 Do they grow up as we do here?) Phinuit: 'In just the same 
 number of years, but in this world there is no time. Life goes 
 on forever. That is, there is no death. I tell you, friends, just 
 as sure as you live in the body, I lived once in the body. I lived 
 in Germany and Paris and Marseilles. I know if those cranks 
 weren't so stupid they could find me. [Referring to efforts on 
 the part of the S.P.R. to find out about him.] Well! I hear 
 Baby, calling baby, baby, baby.' [All these words baby pretty 
 Bettie were given with just the accent Ruth gave when she 
 was alive. Pretty was one of the first words, and she said it 
 constantly about anything she liked. These were the only words, 
 except Mamma and Papa and pussie.] " 
 
 Mrs. Thaw told me that the absolute resemblance between 
 these ejaculations and those of her child while living con- 
 vinced her that they were made by the child's surviving spirit. 
 But here is the constantly recurring fact that the little one 
 seems to have got a suspiciously large vocabulary in the few
 
 502 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 months since her death one perhaps as full as Mrs. Piper's. 
 And yet similar things constantly happen in dreams, and 
 some dreams contain truth. 
 
 " Phinuit : ' Do you know she takes your hand and pats it like 
 that [patting Mrs. T.'s hand] like that. You will see her just 
 as sure as you live. The veil will be lifted so you can see these 
 two little ones when you are partially dreaming. It will not be 
 
 a dream. It will be real [Pointing to Dr. and Mrs. T.'s 
 
 foreheads.] I see a great big light. What is that light ? What 
 is that light here? [The mediumistic nature of the sitters? 
 H.H.] You, friends, are going to make a change in your life. 
 It is going to be the best change you can make. The baby 
 speaks to me. [Very precocious intelligence from a child! 
 Dream mixture again, but apparently veridical and prophetic, 
 though possibly only telepathic ! H.H.] It's in a different street 
 a different place entirely. It's a pretty place. I see the 
 change. I see all the little details. I see it in detail, that I can't 
 describe. [All correct.] 
 
 "'Who is that lady that is with you? No, the stout lady. 
 [Not stout.] She is very good to your little girl. [The living 
 one. H.H.] . . . She has care of the little ones, and is cranky 
 sometimes.' (Mrs. T. : Do the babies remember her?) [She was 
 the nurse who had charge of them all their lives.] Phinuit: 
 ' The little ones, the babies in the spirit world, remember her 
 
 very well Who's M J ? Your mother told me to tell 
 
 you.' [All correct. Aunt of Dr. T.] (Dr. T.: Is she happy 
 now ?) Phinuit : ' She remembers you when you were a little 
 fellow. She was with you when your mother come out of the 
 body.' [Correct.]" 
 
 " Come " not " went " is very dramatic, as coming from 
 Phinuit's side ; and the bad grammar was not telepathed from 
 Dr. and Mrs. Thaw. 
 
 ' AH Who is Ellie? Who is Nellie? The baby calls that 
 she calls her Nellie. [Nurse spoken of before.] Nellie! 
 That's a good memory for the little one, isn't it? Such pretty 
 light curls ! All over her head. Just as perfect a little girl as 
 can be ! ... You will see her in the new house. She wants me to 
 go there for you. She says there is going to be a better change 
 for you. It's going to be near the corner [correct of new house], 
 and you will go up to the upper room, up one flight front, and 
 in that room you will see the babies come to you. This is a kind 
 of what do you call it? A sitting place. You will get the 
 babies there. You stay there some twilight evening. They will 
 come to you. You will hear some patter, patter of the little 
 ones, and soon you will realize they are with you. I shouldn't 
 be surprised if you saw '"
 
 Ch. XXXIII] Phinuit Moralizes and Felicitates Himself 503 
 
 Mrs. Thaw tells me she often heard the " patter, patter," 
 but never saw. 
 
 " ' How funny your mother wears her hair! [Smoothing hair 
 as Dr. T.'s mother always wore it.] Wears it so funny. She's 
 the picture of modesty; she's the most modest looking woman 
 you ever saw ! You know that what you call death in the body 
 is natural. You know that it is hard, particularly when those 
 you love pass over behind the veil. But they are far more happy 
 behind the veil than in the body. For it is God's will to take 
 them, as they hare lived. We tell you of these things, because 
 it is right for you to know, and the instrument like the one I 
 have here [i.e., the medium. H.H.] is to use to explain what we 
 are in the spirit. But sometimes it is very hard to get the in- 
 fluences straight, and I tell you everything I can, and even then 
 
 it is hard for everyone Look on it right. Don't let it worry 
 
 you and affect your health. Little woman, keep straight. Don't 
 be too much exercised, and keep perfectly cool. You will get all 
 you want. It will be a help to you in the body. When you meet 
 a friend and you want them to know your experience, you can 
 explain it to them with perfect reason. Go on with your own 
 experience. If they do not wish to listen to you do not bother 
 them. Your mother is guiding me every minute.' " 
 
 Few people could stand this free communication (if com- 
 munication it be) or want it. Some people stop it, as already 
 indicated, by willing the medium to cease, which the medium 
 seems always to do readily. 
 
 " ' But here's well, wait a minute Annie Annie no, Anna 
 Eliza. That's the name. Comes. Anna Eliza. That's the 
 mother, Eliza. Anna Eliza. I hear it. [Mrs. T.'s dead aunt. 
 She was called Aunt Eliza, and it was unknown to us at the 
 time that she had a first name Anna.] . . . They tell me I am 
 smart enough to hear this all right. [Dr. T. offers suggestion.] 
 I don't want any of your help, Ellen. [To A. D.] What the 
 dickens is your name ? A-l '[Laughs.] (Dr. T. : What is it?) 
 Phinuit : ' I know. I know what it is.' [Laughs.] (Dr. T. : 
 Well, tell us what it is.) Phinuit: ' Oh, no. I know what it is 
 just the same.' (Dr. T.: Tell us.) Phinuit: 'Well, it's a 
 great long name, and it ends with e-r.' (Dr. T.: Good guess, 
 Doctor!) Phinuit: 'Oh, I am guessing, am I? What a good 
 fellow I am to guess! [Spells.] Al-e-x-a-n-d-e-r. How do you 
 like that? You can call that what you like. You can give it a 
 name. [Is this telepathy, or is Phinuit one of the best dramatic 
 characters ever drawn ? If he is, who drew him ? Apparently it 
 was not in Mrs. Piper's power to do it. H.H.] Do you know, if 
 it hadn't been for your little girl I never should have found it 
 out. The little curly headed one. She tried to spell it for me
 
 504 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 but couldn't. [Children of eighteen months don't " try to spell " 
 often in this world! H.H.] She told your sister [pointing to 
 Mrs. T.J, and she asked this lady the lady the little one went 
 to find [Dr. T.'s mother in first sitting], and she tells her, and 
 then she came and spelled it for me. Grace is with your little 
 ones, and she makes me put your hand up there so and she 
 wants to be remembered to her papa in the body. [All true.] 
 
 Who's L ? [Spelling diminutive.] Your mother just called 
 
 that to me. She comes closer closer. She wants you to tell 
 
 I-d-a it sounds like thai I-d-a. Oh! L !' [Dr. T.'s 
 
 sister's usual name.] " 
 
 Fourth sitting. March 18th, 1892. (Pr.XIII,553f.) 
 " [Mr. Perkins sitting. Mr. A. Dow writing. Mrs. Thaw 
 in back part of room.] 
 
 " Phinuit to Mr. D. : ' Aleck, you pay more attention to 
 
 me and stop your writing.' [He was taking notes. H.H.] . . . 
 (Mr. P.: What hour was I born?) Phinuit [counting]: <Un, 
 deux, trois, quatre [up to ten]. Oh, you were born at two o'clock. 
 We begin at one, that's dark; then two.' [After some confusion, 
 not understanding whether night or day, decides at two at 
 night.] (Mr. P.: Father thought it was eleven.) Phinuit: 
 ' Your mother tells me you were born at two, and she was there 
 then and ought to know. If your father says you were born at 
 eleven he makes a mistake, that's all there is about it.' " 
 
 Here is a remarkably dramatic passage. I do not mean 
 melodramatic, but merely lifelike the sort of thing not easy 
 to invent. 
 
 " He says something about Bawldin Baldwin. I don't 
 
 know how you pronounce it. You know who he is? Well, he 
 sends love to you, and says that you kind of misunderstood him, 
 and it was too bad. You can make it all right now. And he 
 says ' Tell George he is a good fellow, but he didn't understand 
 me; you must say so.' [Mr. P. and friend B. had misunder- 
 standing for several months before B's death.] . . . There's some- 
 one calling who speaks in a whisper. George will tell you 
 something. [This friend's name, George Baldwin.] (Mr. P.: 
 Well, I'll listen.) Phinuit: ' Ask Fred. He's there with you; 
 tell him I'm all right. [Verified afterwards. Fred, an intimate 
 friend of G. B.] It was a cough that took me off, consumption, 
 for I passed out with it [True] and you fellows were good to 
 me, but you never quite understood me; you never did, quite. 
 I ... taught in the school [G. B. taught in preparatory de- 
 partment of same school.] . . . It's not long since I came here. 
 I'm so glad to see you. Look here! I want to talk to you. I 
 tell you there's only a veil between us. There's a good time for 
 you boys ... I don't see you come here for a long time. I hope 
 one of you will drop round and see me sometimes [i.e., through
 
 Ch. XXXIII] Older Friends Again. Phinuit Prophesies 505 
 
 the medium. H.H.] I didn't think I was coming here but 
 woke up. I choked at first, but I'm better now. You wouldn't 
 go to sleep if you had seen me when I first waked up. I didn't 
 think I was going to wake up like this. You haven't got all 
 your wits about you yet, and so you don't recognize your friends. 
 I'll be with you; I'll help you out in all your little difficulties. 
 I'll be with you. I mean well.' (Mr. P.: Will you tell me 
 about them ? There's one that passed out after you did.) Phi- 
 nuit: ' This one talks in a whisper to me. Good fellow, mean* 
 well. What a funny nose he has. He looks as if his nose 
 turned up a little. You know what I mean.' [Correct.] " 
 
 Could anything be more absurd than the supposition that 
 Mrs. Piper "got up" all this? 
 
 " [Mrs. T. gives mother's glove again] . . . ' She's nearer 
 
 to you [pointing to Mr. D., then to Mrs. T.] I can't make out 
 which one she's more with, but she's nearer one of you.' (Mrs. 
 T. : She's living with me now.) Phinuit : ' Oh, you live in one 
 home, but I see the other in another home, and she lives with 
 you [pointing to Mrs. T.] [Pointing to Mr. D.] She's very 
 fond of you.' (Mrs. T. : Yes, he's better than I am.) Phinuit : 
 ' What nonsense, he isn't better than you, don't be jealous.' 
 (Mrs. T.: I'm not jealous.) Phinuit [nibbing Mrs. T.'s head] : 
 ' No, and you are not going to begin in your old age, are you ? 
 You be a good girl. You'll be all right if you don't read lying 
 down. . . .' (Mrs. T. : What about Father's business ?) [Phinuit 
 immediately makes motions as of playing on piano keys. Mrs. 
 T.'s father's invention, a typesetter, with keys like a piano.] 
 Phinuit : ' It has keys. Keys with letters on them. [Correct.] 
 [Mr. D. takes Mrs. T.'e place.] Oh, it's such a funny thing. 
 Did he invent them? Well, he's a great man. There's going 
 to be a spring addition that's going to be very useful, and after 
 
 a few months of dullness it will be all right He's going to 
 
 sell some of these things Add the spring part, and it will be 
 
 good. All this long pull and dull time was for the best. [Long 
 struggle to get the thing started.] . . . George Perkins. Do you 
 know how I got his name first. One of his friends whispered 
 me his name. George is a good fellow. Honest fellow. George 
 is true blue. Don't tell that to him ; he might get conceited.' 
 (Mr. D.: I don't believe he'll get conceited.) Phinuit: 'Well, 
 I'm only in fun.' [Mrs. T. takes Phinuit's hand] [i.e., the 
 medium's. H.H.] (Are we going to do any good in our work?) 
 Phinuit: 'You are going to make a change. Who's Emily? 
 You're going to change your life. I'll be there. [Mrs. T. found 
 on getting home that the Christian name of principal of the 
 school they were starting was Emma. This we had never heard 
 or seen, as the lady was not known personally to Mrs. T., and her 
 acceptance . . . was not received by us until after the sitting.] . . .
 
 506 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 It's going to be splendid. It has to do with the mind. [Feeling 
 Mrs. T.'s eyes.] The physical being of those who can't see. To 
 benefit the blind, the ignorant. I don't mean the eyesight. [Dr. 
 and Mrs. T. starting free primary school and kindergarten.] 
 Margery will be there. Mamma, mamma, I love you. Don't 
 cry. Ruthie will be there.' (Mrs. T. to children : Do you sleep 
 there?) Ruthie: 'I sleep, I wake, I play. I wake, I sleep, I 
 play.' (Mrs. T.: Won't they knock for me again?) R.: 'Ill 
 go on Bettie's bed and tap, tap, tap for you. Don't cry. I live. 
 I am here. Tell mamma I am here. Pat papa for me. Posie 
 posie posie.' Phinuit : ' Speak to me, friends, I'm getting 
 weak. Speak to me, I can't hear you.' (Mrs. T. : Good-by, Dr. 
 Phinuit.) Phinuit [in a weak voice] : ' Speak louder, friends, 
 I'm going.' " 
 
 Sixth Sitting. May 10th, 1892. (Pr.XIII,564f.) 
 " Phinuit: ' Florence [Mrs. Thaw. H.H.], I'm glad to see you. 
 
 (Well, we're glad to see you.) Good boy, doctor Sometimes 
 
 I come a long way to see you. Where's the tube ? [Reference to 
 phonograph.] ... I had a long talk with Alva. He wants me to 
 tell this to you and to Sabrina when I saw her. He caused her 
 a great deal of sorrow, and he's sorry for it. [Sabrina is Mrs. 
 Dow. Alva was her first husband, deceased. The statements 
 made about him are true. R.H.] Tell her about this, or you'll 
 do him a great injustice. He's been in great suffering. You 
 can help him out of this. (What can we do?) Get her to say 
 that inwardly and in her very soul she freely and frankly for- 
 gives him. You'll be the means of saving his soul. I talked 
 with him.' [Further remarks about tlie great distress of Alva 
 and his desire to be forgiven, and to be helped in attaining a 
 higher state.] . . . 
 
 " (How is W going to pass out ?) * He's going to sleep, 
 
 and when he wakes he'll be in the spirit. Heart will stop. Kid- 
 neys out of order. He's out of order all over. It'll be one of 
 the greatest reliefs to all concerned.' [Note. At the time of 
 
 sitting Dr. T. had no more reason to expect the death of W 
 
 than at any time for two or three years, W being a chronic 
 
 invalid with asthma. . . . W died September 3rd, in sleep, of 
 
 heart failure, four months later. In the sitting of May 22nd 
 the time of death is put at ' six months, or a little less.'] " 
 
 See his appearance as control in twelfth sitting, page 510 of 
 this book. Sixth sitting continues : 
 
 " ( Can you tell us about Dr. H to-day ?) [Pause.] ' Hallo, 
 
 doctor. I want to thank you for all the many kind things you've 
 done for me. The children are all right. There's not one of 
 them coming to me. What's that about the grave, the tomb? 
 (I don't know.) Well, tell them not to worry about it. [Dr. 
 H.'s wife was for nearly a year much depressed by the fact that
 
 Ch. XXXIII] Phinuit Prophesies and Prescribes 507 
 
 H.'s body lay in vault awaiting burial.] He says something 
 
 about A . [Spelling name of daughter.] She coming out 
 
 all right, and I know it. She's going to stay in the body for 
 
 the present. [H.'s daughter A was dangerously ill at that 
 
 time, but on our next visit was found to have passed the crisis.] 
 I'm glad to see you, my best friends. The first time I saw you, 
 you looked like great black specks to me. Now you look more 
 like yourselves. [Speaks of the spiritual activities there], "a 
 nigher range of activities is carried on than in your universe. 
 Words cannot express how beautiful it is like the dawn in the 
 body," etc., etc. [This long speech so characteristic of Dr. H. 
 that Dr. T., wishing to know whether he or Phinuit was speak- 
 ing, said:] (Can you tell me anything about Dr. Phinuit?) I'm 
 talking to you myself, you rascal. I'm talking for him. (Well, 
 you're trying to make us think he's talking.) I'm simply telling 
 you what he says. I'm trying to imitate him.' " 
 
 Who made these dramatic touches, and the little ones which 
 follow, from the seventh sitting, May 19, 1892 (Pr. XIII, 
 570)? 
 
 " [Dr. Phinuit listened to his own voice in phonograph, say- 
 ing, ' Oh, you're a nice old fellow. You've got me on record.'] 
 
 " [Phonograph says, ' I'm going out.'] So I am going out. 
 Ha, ha, that's good." 
 
 Eighth Sitting. May 20th, 1892. (Pr.Xin,570f.) 
 
 " [Mr. L. Dow sitting/] 
 
 " (How about Medium? She has a cough) ' My Me- 
 dium? She has a cough, has she? Well, you have her put a 
 half ounce of turpentine in a half a cup of boiling water, and 
 inhale it. (What for her trouble under the arm?) Oh, that's 
 poor blood. A tonic will scatter that. You give her two ounces 
 of tincture of cinchona; four ounces of French dialyzed iron 
 and four ounces simple syrup. Give her a teaspoonful one half- 
 hour before meals.' " 
 
 And Phinuit knew no medicine! Was he Mrs. Piper? 
 
 Ninth Sitting. May 22nd, 1892. (Pr.XIH,572f.) 
 " Sitter, Miss Ellen Heffern, nurse of Mrs. Thaw's children. 
 
 " She told me to get that. [Object given which the 
 
 sitter supposed to be her mother's hair. It was, however, an 
 Agnus Z)et.] . . . [Miss Heffern brought several articles to the 
 
 sitting in a parcel The Agnus Dei . . . was wrapped in paper, 
 
 and she supposed that this particular packet contained her 
 mother's hair. . . . R.H., 1898.] Put that in there. Put it in 
 there and wear it, [thrusting nis finger down the neck of the 
 sitter] just as she told you to. [When sitter insisted that 
 Phinuit was wrong about this object he tore off paper and showed 
 the Agnus Dei.~\ [True. Mother had told sitter to wear it.] "
 
 508 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 Later, Dr. and Mrs. Thaw sitting. 
 
 All the following dramatic business (Pr. XIII, 575-6) 
 strains the telepathic and divided personality theories hard : 
 
 " [Phinuit writes Harry twice, in mirror writing. (Harry is 
 the name of one of Dr. Thaw's brothers. R.H.) The hand 
 was then seized by another ' influence,' and the following was 
 written, during the course of which Phinuit made occasional 
 remarks like these to the communicating intelligence; 'I told 
 you if you'd come with me I'd show you your friends, you old 
 idiot.'. . . ' He's as stubborn as a mule.'. . . ' Don't thump me,' 
 etc.] . . . [Phinuit then struggles to ' get his hand back.'] I got 
 it away. [To Mrs. T.] What are you worrying about? (I 
 want to go to you.) What? (To the babies sometimes.) Oh, 
 you wicked, wicked little thing, etc. [To Dr. Thaw. H.H.] Dr., 
 can't you straighten her out better than that? You stop your 
 worrying. You've nothing to worry about. Go to sleep. ... (I 
 want to see them so much sometimes.) Oh, you act like a baby. 
 Come here, dearie, come along. Look at the little curly-headed 
 one. [To Dr. T.] Your mother's got her. See her jump her. 
 [Dandling.] Can't you see her, you stupid fools? (No.) You 
 can see her, can't you, Hodgson? (No.) Humph. [The reader 
 may be good enough to remember what was said earlier about 
 the mixing up of Phinuit's remarks and the children's. H.H.] 
 Tell mamma p-tee, p-sse, happy little Ruthie. Bring a posies. 
 That's a spirit posy. Don't worry mother. Dranma, she says. 
 Ruth, dranma, don't worry papa, don't worry you [to Mrs. T.] 
 pt-tee, pt-tee. [Remember what Mrs. Thaw told me about these 
 ejaculations. H.H.] [Phinuit departs heavy breathing.] Pttee. 
 Pttee. (Little baby. How do you do, baby?) Pt-tee. (Little 
 Margaret with you ?) Pt-tee. [Points upwards and to one side 
 at picture with forefinger. Hand rises, finger points, trembles, 
 and hand sinks.] " 
 
 Of this scene Hodgson says (Pr. XIII, 385) : 
 
 " I was taking notes, sitting slightly to one side and partly 
 behind Mrs. Piper, while Dr. and Mrs. Thaw were sitting in 
 front of her, with their heads somewhat bowed. Phinuit appar- 
 ently 'left,' and his place was taken by Ruthie, who began 
 whispering pttee pttee. The hand rose and turned somewhat 
 diagonally and extended the forefinger and pointed towards a 
 picture on the far side of the room. The Thaws did not see 
 this action until I drew their attention to it, when they looked 
 up, and followed the direction of the pointing. The hand then 
 trembled and sank. Dr. Thaw noted : ' During the last month 
 of Ruthie's life it was a regular morning custom to bring her to 
 the room in which this sitting was held our bedroom and she 
 would always point, as hand did in sitting, with one finger
 
 Ch. XXXIII] The Babies. Pantomime at Picture 509 
 
 (unusual with a baby) and say "pt-tee, pt-tee," just as in sit- 
 ting. This little incident had not been in either sitter's con- 
 scious mind since baby's death, six months before. Mrs. Piper 
 had never been in that room until the actual time of sitting. 
 Many other pictures in the room, two of which Mrs. Piper's 
 hand could have pointed at more easily than the particular one 
 always noticed by the baby.' " 
 
 But to return to the ninth sitting : 
 
 " [Phinuit returns.] Baby wanted to come. The old lady 
 stood up behind her so she wouldn't fall. Don't be so impa- 
 tient, little one, wait a minute, darling. Thank mamma for the 
 posy. Bring the posy again another day. She has no pain 
 no teeth. I'm happy, happy. Don't cry any more. (And little 
 Margaret?) Little one can't talk so well. Little Margaret, 
 Margie, beautiful, they're just like flowers in blossom. (Why, 
 they were twins. Why can't she talk as well as the other ?) She 
 doesn't talk so much. Her talk is different; she doesn't articu- 
 late quite so distinctly. I can understand it, but you wouldn't. 
 Little da da da dada." 
 
 One of the mutually exclusive explanations so far suggested 
 is that Margaret lived here six months less than Ruth. 
 
 " (Why did she put her finger up?) Pt-tee, Pt-tee. That's 
 what she used to do in the body. Your mother says she had the 
 baby do that so that you'd know it's baby." 
 
 Tenth Sitting, May 23rd, 1892. (Pr.XIII,577f.) 
 " [Present : Dr. and Mrs. Thaw. R. H. taking notes.] 
 " [Phinuit to Mrs. Thaw. H.H.] ' Well, little girl, you're got 
 over your worrying. I'll go and find some friends for you. (I 
 want to bring my little Betty in to you.) [Servant Nellie brings 
 in Beatrice, Mrs. T.'s little daughter.] Ha! Nice little girl, 
 come here. Here comes the baby. Two babies. Give me 
 Ruthie's play-toys. [Rosary.] See the baby. It's too heavy for 
 her. [Puts rosary round Mrs. T.'s head, between her and 
 Betty.] See! That's little Margaret. Dad, Dad, Dad. Ptee, 
 pssy, Nanna, Nanna. [Stroking B.'s hair.] Pttee, pttee, pttee. 
 [Phinuit leaves, Baby comes. Finger points toward picture.] 
 Pttee pttee, etc. There, there, etc. [Places B.'s hand on Mrs. 
 Piper's head, strokes B.'s hair, etc., points toward picture again, 
 'Pttee, ptt-ee.' Places hand on Dr. T.'s head and pats it.] 
 [Phinuit returns. Mrs. T. is sending B. away.] Ruthie wants 
 
 the little one to stay Who's Elsine? [Struggles after name.] 
 
 That's W , too. W in the body.' (Who's speaking?) 
 
 Dr. H. : ' George William . . . Andre Valliere says tell George I'm 
 all right. I have seen Whiskers.' [' Alfred Howell's dog, then 
 dead.' Dr. Thaw, 1896.] "
 
 510 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 I retain this partly because I want to see my dog Laddie 
 mentioned in Chapter VII, and his predecessor, Whiskers. 
 
 Eleventh Sitting. May 29th, 1892. [R. H. taking notes.] 
 
 (Pr.XIII,579f.) 
 
 After a sitting with the Thaw's nurse, which was as Irish 
 as that good woman herself 
 
 " There were indications of ' change of control/ after 
 
 which there was a long silence while Mrs. Piper's hand pulled as 
 though at a mustache, moved her hair back from the forehead, 
 and felt my [Hodgson's. H.H.] face over. I said ' Hallo, who's 
 there? What's the matter? Why don't you speak ?' Finally 
 the voice came, very different apparently from Phinuit's: 
 ' That's the funniest I didn't think I could get it can't be 
 possible I've got here at last. Well! Well! Well. You've 
 changed since I came here, tremendously. You don't know me, 
 do you ? I'm George Pelham.' " 
 
 For some time sittings had been arranged with persona 
 unknown to G. P., whom (at his then stage of development?) 
 he would not have been apt to seek. Later apparently he tried 
 to be on hand to help everybody. 
 
 "This incident occurred about a fortnight after the sitting 
 with G. P.'s father and mother. The series of stenographically 
 reported sittings did not begin till the following November. A 
 long conversation ensued, in which one or two obscurities in 
 recent sittings were referred to, but dealing chiefly with G. P.'s 
 experiences immediately after death, first impressions, anxiety 
 to speak with friends, etc. Nearly all this was spoken into the 
 phonograph, and scarcely any notes were taken. Unfortunately 
 we found later that the phonographic record gave us only a few 
 
 scattered words here and there When asking G. P. to talk 
 
 into the phonograph, I said, ' You know what a phonograph is ? ' 
 ' Of course I dp. Why, Hodgson, you must think I've got very 
 unintelligent since I came over here.' " 
 
 Telepathy and divided personality ! ! ! 
 
 Twelfth Sitting. [Over seven months since previous one. H.H.] 
 
 January 16th, 1893. (Pr.XIII,580f.) 
 
 " [Dr. and Mrs. Thaw sitting. A. D. taking shorthand notes.] 
 
 " Phinuit : ' That's Florrie. [Mrs. Thaw. H.H,] I'm so glad 
 
 to see you. How are you ? Where's the doctor ? ' (I'm here.) 
 
 Phinuit : ' You're here too ! I'm so glad to see you Here, 
 
 speak to the baby. She has a gentleman with her. Who is 
 who is I know that gentleman just as well as can be. That is 
 the gentleman I told you was going to pass out of the body. 
 That is W . That's your brother W . [See p. 506.]
 
 Ch. XXXIII] Dr. Thaw's Brother. Dr. II 511 
 
 [Brother assumes control. H.H.] Well, I never! Oh, hello 1 
 B-l-r. B-l-r. B-l-r. [Dr. A. B. Thaw is usually called by his 
 middle name, Blair, by his relatives and intimate friends. R.H.] 
 Hello, Florence, Florence. How are you? [Phinuit while 
 apparently repeating for W., interjects in his own character as 
 follows. H.H.] He speaks kind of queer. [Then he repeats for 
 W., or W. for himself. H.H.] I want to speak to you. Come 
 here. Well, I never ! I have seen you a great many times since 
 I passed out of the body, but there is one thing I want to tell 
 you of particularly. Listen to me. B-l-r. B-l-r. B-l-r. I 
 can't get that name right. You listen to it and interpret the 
 best you can. Look, here, I want to tell you, my brother, one 
 thing my brother. I wish I had my life in the body over 
 again, I would do differently. (In what way?) In many ways, 
 
 I assure you. Where is L ? L . L . Well, did you 
 
 think I was coming here like this? (The Dr. [Phinuit. H.H.] 
 
 told me. W .) Why didn't you tell me? I had no sooner 
 
 got out than I realized I lived again. But I didn't know this. 
 Did you know this? Why didn't you tell me? You wanted to 
 
 surprise me My sufferings are at an end. ... I want you to 
 
 think of me as being perfectly happy. ... I think father was 
 glad to see me, but you know he didn't think this any more 
 than I did. [And this lifelike picture is telepathy is it? Or a 
 secondary personality of Mrs. Piper? I am afraid the constant 
 demonstration of the inadequacy of these notions may be lead- 
 ing me to remark upon it too often. H.H.] (What did he say 
 about it ? Do you ever talk about coming to see me with father ?) 
 Father has been here [i.e., to the medium. H.H.] before, and 
 he knew it, and he told me about it. But this is the first channel 
 
 that has been open to me No more pain. I am glad to get 
 
 out of it, thank the Lord! I wouldn't go back into the body 
 for all the world and all there is in it. [Remember that he had 
 
 been a great sufferer. H.H.] 
 
 "Phinuit: [smoothing fur on Mrs. T.'s shoulder some time.] 
 Pussie! Pussie! Pussie! [Ruthie used to do so with her 
 mother's fur coat in the last month of her life, and say, Pussie, 
 
 Pussie. This was the first time fur was worn at a sitting 
 
 (H wants to know about the verses he left.) ... Phinuit 
 
 [reporting for Dr. H. ? H.H.] : As I go dreaming along I look 
 back to you with a great deal of happiness. You were my ideals, 
 
 you always will be When you sleep I oftentimes go to you 
 
 and I shall never forget you. And do tell my family so." 
 
 These Thaw sittings, if viewed from the spiritistic side, 
 strike me as full of impossibilities. And these Thaw sittings, 
 if viewed from any other side I can see, also strike me as full 
 of impossibilities. In other words, at present they seem ab- 
 solutely unexplainable. We can only wait for time, or draw
 
 512 Hodgson's Second Piper Report [Bk. II, Pt. IV 
 
 our conclusions on the main question, if we must draw them, 
 and can, from other sources. 
 
 In sittings with other people in later years, Phinuit apolo- 
 gizes for being interrupted by these children, and remarks 
 upon how finely they are growing. He does not go into any 
 explanations to his sitters. His remarks are very casual, and 
 their significance would not be apparent to anybody unfamil- 
 iar with these sittings. I don't know or much care whether 
 my friends Hodgson, James, and Newbold would call this 
 " evidential." To me it seems enormously so. But I fear my 
 use of the word is shamelessly untechnical.
 
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