The Seat of Memory
I am familiar with all the usual analogies drawn between organic habit and memory on the one hand, and the more ready repetition of physical processes by inorganic material on the other. Imperfectly elastic springs, for instance, which show reminiscences of previous bendings or twistings by their subsequent unwindings; and cogs which wear into smooth running by repetition; are examples of this kind. A violin which by long practice becomes more musical in tone, is another; or a path which by being often traversed becomes easier to the feet. A flower-bed recently altered in shape, by being partly grassed over, is liable to exhibit its former outline by aid of bulbs and other half-forgotten growths which come up through the grass in the old pattern.
This last is a striking example of apparent memory, not indeed in the inorganic but in the unconscious world; where indeed it is prevalent, for every one must recognise the memory of animals—there can be no doubt of that. And it would seem that a kind of race-memory must be invoked to account for many surprising cases of instinct; of which the building of specific birds' nests, and the accurate pecking of a newly-hatched chicken, are among the stock instances. No experience can be lodged in the brain of the newly-hatched!
That some sort of stored facility should exist in the adult brain, is in no way surprising; and that there is some physical or physiological concomitant of actual remembrance is plain; but that is a very different thing from asserting that memory itself, or any kind of consciousness, is located in the brain; though truly without the aid of the brain it is, as far as this planet is concerned, latent and inaccessible.
Plotinus puts the matter in an interesting but perhaps rather too extreme form:—
"As to memory, the body is an impediment ... the unstable and fluctuating nature of the body makes for oblivion not for memory. Body is a veritable River of Lethe. Memory belongs to the soul" (Enn. IV. iii. 26).
The actual reproduction or remembrance of a fact—the demonstration or realisation of memory—undoubtedly depends on brain and muscle mechanism; but memory itself turns out to be essentially mental, and is found to exist apart from the bodily mechanism which helped originally to receive and store the impression. And though without that same or some equivalent mechanism we cannot get at it, so that it cannot be displayed to others, yet in my experience it turns out not to be absolutely necessary to use actually the same instrument for its reproduction as was responsible for its deposition: though undoubtedly to use the same is easier and helpful. In the early Edison phonographs the same instrument had to be used for both reception and reproduction; but now a record can readily be transferred from one instrument to another. This may be regarded as a rough mechanical analogy to the telepathic or telergic process whereby a psychic reservoir of memory can be partially tapped through another organism.
But, apart from any consideration of what may be regarded as doubtful or uncertain, there are some facts about the relation of brain to consciousness, which, though universally admitted, are frequently misinterpreted. Injure the brain, and consciousness is lost. 'Lost' is the right word—not 'destroyed.' Repair the lesion, and consciousness may be restored, i.e. normal manifestation of consciousness can once more occur. It is the display of consciousness, in all such cases, that we mean when we speak of the effect of brain injury; the utilisation of bodily organs is necessary for its exhibition. If the bodily organs do not exist, or are too damaged, no normal manifestation is possible. That is the fact which may be misinterpreted.
In general we may say, with fair security, that no receptivity to physical phenomena exists save through sense-organ, nerve, and brain; nor any initiation of physical phenomena, save through brain, nerve, and muscle. Apart from physical phenomena consciousness is isolated and inaccessible: we have no right to say that it is non-existent. In ordinary usage it is not customary or necessary to be always harping on this completer aspect of things: it is only necessary when misunderstanding has arisen from uniformly inaccurate, or rather unguarded, modes of expression.
In an excellent lecture by Dr. Mott on "The Effects of High Explosives upon the Central Nervous System," I find this sentence:—
"It is known that a continuous supply of oxygen is essential for consciousness."
What is intended is clear enough, but analysed strictly this assertion goes far beyond what is known. We do not really know that oxygen, or any form of matter, has anything to do with consciousness: all that we know, and all that Dr. Mott really means to say, I presume, is that without a supply of oxygen consciousness gives no physical sign.
Partial interruptions of physical manifestations of consciousness well illustrate this: as, for instance, when speech-centres of the brain alone are affected. If in such case we had to depend on mouth-muscle alone we should say that consciousness had departed, and might even think that it was non-existent; but the arm-muscle may remain under brain control, and by intelligent writing can show that consciousness is there all the time, and that it is only inhibited from one of the specially easy modes of manifestation. In some cases the inhibition may be complete,—from such cases we do not learn much; but when it is only partial we learn a good deal.
I quote again from Dr. Mott, omitting for brevity the detailed description of certain surgical war-cases, under his care, which precedes the following explanatory interjection and summary:—
"Why should these men, whose silent thoughts are perfect, be unable to speak? They comprehend all that is said to them unless they are deaf; but it is quite clear that [even] in these cases their internal language is unaffected, for they are able to express their thoughts and judgments perfectly well by writing, even if they are deaf. The mutism is therefore not due to an intellectual defect, nor is it due to volitional inhibition of language in silent thought. Hearing, the primary incitation to vocalisation and speech, is usually unaffected, yet they are unable to speak; they cannot even whisper, cough, whistle, or laugh aloud. Many who are unable to speak voluntarily yet call out in their dreams expressions they have used in trench warfare and battle. Sometimes this is followed by return of speech, but more often not. One man continually shouted out in his sleep, but he did not recover voluntary speech or power of phonation till eight months after admission to the hospital for shell-shock."
Very well, all this interesting experience serves among other things to illustrate our simple but occasionally overlooked thesis. For it is through physical phenomena that normally we apprehend, here and now; and it is by aid of physical phenomena that we convey to others our wishes, our impressions, our ideas, and our memories. Dislocate the physical from the psychical, and communication ceases. Restore the connexion, in however imperfect a form, and once more incipient communication may become possible again.
That is the rationale of the process of human intercourse. Do we understand it? No. Do we understand even how our own mind operates on our own body? No. We know for a fact that it does.
Do we understand how a mind can with difficulty and imperfectly operate another body submitted to its temporary guidance and control? No. Do we know for a fact that it does? Aye, that is the question—a question of evidence. I myself answer the question affirmatively; not on theoretical grounds—far from that—but on a basis of straightforward experience. Others, if they allow themselves to take the trouble to get the experience, will come to the same conclusion.
Will they do so best by allowing their own bodies or brains to be utilised? No, that seems not even the best, and certainly not the only way. It may not, for the majority of people, be a possible way. The sensitive or medium who serves us, by putting his or her bodily mechanism at our disposal, is not likely to be best informed concerning the nature of the process. Mediums have perhaps but little conscious information to give us concerning their powers; we must learn from what they do, not from what they say. The outside observer, the experimenter, whose senses are alert all the time and who continues fully conscious without special receptivity or any peculiar power of his own, is in a better position to note and judge what is happening,—at least from the normal and scientific point of view. Let us be as cautious and critical, aye and as sceptical as we like, but let us also be patient and persevering and fair; do not let us start with a preconceived notion of what is possible and what is impossible in this almost unexplored universe; let us only be willing to learn and be guided by facts, not by dogmas; and gradually the truth will permeate our understanding and make for itself a place in our minds as secure as in any other branch of observational science.
CHAPTER IX
LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
The limitation of scope which eminent Professors of a certain school of modern science have laid down for themselves is forcibly expressed by one of the ablest of their champions thus:—
"No sane man has ever pretended, since science became a definite body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope to know or conceive the possibility of knowing whence the mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, or what may be beyond and beside it which our senses are incapable of appreciating. These things are not 'explained' by science and never can be."—Sir E. Ray Lankester.
I should myself hesitate to promulgate such a markedly non-possumus and ignorabimus statement concerning the scope of physical science, even as narrowly and popularly understood; but it illuminates the position taken up by those savants who are commonly known as Materialists, and explains their expressed though non-personal hostility to other scientific men who seek to exceed the boundaries laid down, and investigate things beyond the immediate range of the senses.
Eliminating the future tense from the statement, however, I can agree with it. The instrument of translation from the mental to the physical, and back from the physical to the mental, is undoubtedly the brain, but as to how the translation is accomplished, I venture to say, we have not the inkling of an idea. Nevertheless, hints which may gradually lead towards a partial understanding of psycho-physical processes may be gained by study of exceptional cases: for such study is often more instructive than continued scrutiny of the merely normal.
The fact of human consciousness, though it raises the problem to a high degree of conspicuousness, by no means exhausts the difficulty; for it is one which faces us in connexion with every form of life. The association of life with matter, and of mind with life, are problems of similar order, and a glimmering of understanding of the one may be expected to throw light upon the other. But until we know more of the method by which the simplest and most familiar psycho-physical interaction occurs—until we know enough to see how the gulf between two apparently different Modes of Being is bridged—it is safest to observe and accumulate facts, and to be very chary of making more than the most tentative and cautious of working hypotheses. For to frame even a tentative hypothesis, of any helpful kind, may require some clue which as yet we do not possess.
I have been struck by the position taken by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell in his notable small book Evolution and the War, the early chapters of which, on Germany of the past and present, I would like unreservedly to commend to the reader. Indeed, commendation of a friendly and non-patronising kind may well extend to the whole book, although it must be admitted that here and there mere exposition of Darwinism is suspended, and difficult and debatable questions are touched upon.
On these questions I would not like to be understood as expressing a hasty opinion, either against or for the views of the author. The points at issue between us are more or less fine-drawn, and cannot be dealt with parenthetically; nor do I ever propose to deal with them in a controversial manner. The author, as a biologist of fame, is more than entitled to such expression of his own views as he has cared to give. I quote with admiration, not necessarily with agreement, a few passages from the part dealing with the relation between mind and matter, and especially with the wide and revolutionary difference between man and animal caused by either the evolution or the incoming of free and conscious Choice.
He will not allow, with Bergson and others, that the roots of consciousness, in its lower grades, go deep down into the animal, and even perhaps into the vegetable, kingdom; he has no patience with those who associate elementary consciousness and freedom and indeterminateness not merely with human life but with all life, and who detect rudiments of purpose and intelligence in the protozoa. Nor, on the other hand, does he approve the dogmatic teaching of the 'ultra-scientific' school, which, being obsessed by the idea of man's animal origin, interprets human nature solely in terms of protoplasm. He opposes the possibility of this by saying:—
"However fruitful and interesting it may be to remember that we are rooted deep in the natal mud, our possession of consciousness and the sense of freedom is a vital and overmastering distinction."
On the more interesting of the above-mentioned alternatives Dr. Chalmers Mitchell expresses himself thus:—
"The Bergsonian interpretation does nothing to make consciousness and freedom more intelligible; and by extending them from man, in whom we know them to exist, to animals, in which their presence is at best an inference, it not only robs them of definiteness and reality, but it blurs the real distinction between men and animals, and evades the most difficult problem of science and philosophy. The facts are more truly represented by such phraseology as that animals are instinctive, man is intelligent, animals are irresponsible, man is responsible, animals are automata, man is free; or if you like, that God gave animals a beautiful body, man a rational soul...."
And soon afterwards he continues:—
"Not 'envisaging itself,' not being at once actor, spectator, and critic, 'living in the flashing moment,' not seeing the past and the present and the future separately, this is the highest at which we can put the consciousness of animals, and herein lies the distinction between man and the animals which makes the overwhelming difference.
"Must we then suppose, with Russel Wallace, that somewhere on the upward path from the tropical forests to the groves of Paradise, a soul was interpolated from an outside source into the gorilla-like ancestry of man? I do not think so, although I not only admit but assert that such a view gives a more accurate statement of fact than does either of the fashionable doctrines that I have discussed. I believe with Darwin, that as the body of man has been evolved from the body of animals, so the intellectual, emotional, and moral faculties of man have been evolved from the qualities of animals. I help myself towards the comprehension of the process by reflecting on two phenomena of observation [which he proceeds to cite]. I help myself, and perchance may help others; no more; could I speak dogmatically on what is the central mystery of all science and all philosophy and all thought, my words would roll with the thunder of Sinai."
Let it not be supposed for a moment that this distinguished biologist is in agreement with me on many matters dealt with in the present book. If he were, he would, I believe, achieve a more admirable and eloquent work than is consistent with the technically 'apologetic' tone which, in the present state of the scientific atmosphere, it behoves me to take. To guard against unwelcome misrepresentation of his views, and yet at the same time to indicate their force, I will make one more quotation:—
"Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert as a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as external to man as the starry vault. It has no secure seat in any single man or in any single nation. It is the work of the blood and tears of long generations of men. It is not, in man, inborn or innate, but is enshrined in his traditions, in his customs, in his literature and his religion. Its creation and sustenance are the crowning glory of man, and his consciousness of it puts him in a high place above the animal world. Men live and die; nations rise and fall, but the struggle of individual lives and of individual nations must be measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the debasement or perfection of man's great achievement."
My own view, which in such matters I only put forth with diffidence and brevity, is more in favour of Continuity. I do not trace so catastrophic a break between man and animals, nor between animal and vegetable, perhaps not even between organised and unorganised forms of matter, as does Dr. Chalmers Mitchell.
I would venture to extend the range of the term 'soul' down to a very large denominator,—to cases in which the magnitude of the fraction becomes excessively minute,—and tentatively admit to the possibility of survival, though not individual survival, every form of life. As to Individuality and Personality—they can only survive where they already exist; when they really exist they persist; but bare survival, as an alternative to improbable extinction, may be widespread.
Matter forms an instrument, a means of manifestation, but it need not be the only one possible. We have utilised matter to build up this beautiful bodily mechanism, but, when that is done with, the constructive ability remains; and it can be expected to exercise its organising powers in other than material environment. If this hypothesis be true at all (and admittedly I am now making hypothesis) it must be true of all forms of life; for what the process of evolution has accomplished here may be accomplished elsewhere, under conditions at present unknown.[37] So I venture to surmise that the surroundings of non-material existence will be far more homely and habitual than people in general have been accustomed to think likely.
And how do I know that the visible material body of anything is all the body, or all the existence, it possesses? Why should not things exist also, or have etherial counterparts, in an etherial world? Perhaps everything has already an etherial counterpart, of which our senses tell us the material aspect only. I do not know. Such an idea may be quoted as an absurdity; but if the evidence drives me in that direction, in that direction I will go, without undue resistance. There have been those who do not wait to be driven, but who lead; and the inspired guidance of Plotinus in that direction may secure more attention, and attract more disciples, when the way is illuminated by discoverable facts.
Meanwhile facts await discovery.
Passages from Plotinus, it may be remembered, are eloquently translated by F. W. H. Myers, from the obscure and often ungrammatical Greek, in Human Personality, vol. ii. pp. 289-291; and readers of S.P.R. Proceedings, vol. xxii, pp. 108-172, will remember the development by Mrs. Verall of the [Greek: kai autos ouranos akumôn] motto prefixed to F. W. H. Myers's post-humously published poem on Tennyson in Fragments of Prose and Poetry.
My reference just above to teachings of Plotinus about the kind of things to be met with in the other world, or the etherial world, or whatever it may be called, is due to information from Professor J. H. Muirhead that, roughly speaking, Plotinus teaches that things there are on the same plan as things here: each thing here having its counterpart or corresponding existence there, though glorified and fuller of reality. Not to misrepresent this doctrine, but to illustrate it as far as can be by a short passage, Professor Muirhead has given me the following translation from the Enneads:—
"But again let us speak thus: For since we hold that this universe is framed after the pattern of That, every living thing must needs first be There; and since Its Being is perfect, all must be There. Heaven then must There be a living thing nor void of what are here called stars; indeed such things belong to heaven. Clearly too the earth which is There is not an empty void, but much more full of life, wherein are all creatures that are here called land animals and plants that are rooted in life. And sea is There, and all water in ebb and flow and in abiding life, and all creatures that are in the water. And air is a part of the all that is There, and creatures of the air in accordance with the nature and laws of air. For in the Living how should living things fail? How then can any living thing fail to be There, seeing that as each of the great parts of nature is, so needs must be the living things that therein are? As then Heaven is, and There exists, so are and exist all the creatures that inhabit it; nor can these fail to be, else would those (on earth?) not be."
Enn. VI. vii.
The reason why this strange utterance or speculation is reproduced here is because it seems to some extent to correspond with curious statements recorded in another part of this book; e.g. in Chapter XIV, Part II.
I expect that it would be misleading to suppose that the terms used by Plotinus really signify any difference of locality. It may be nearer the truth to suppose that when freed from our restricting and only matter-revealing senses we become aware of much that was and is 'here' all the time, interfused with the existence which we knew;—forming part indeed of the one and only complete existence, of which our present normal knowledge is limited to a single aspect. We might think and speak of many interpenetrating universes, and yet recognise that ultimately they must be all one. It is not likely that the Present differs from what we now call the Future except in our mode of perceiving it.
Footnotes
[37] I wish to emphasise this paragraph, as perhaps an important one.
CHAPTER X
ON MEANS OF COMMUNICATION
"In scientific truth there is no finality, and there should therefore be no dogmatism. When this is forgotten, then science will become stagnant, and its high-priests will endeavour to strangle new learning at its birth."—R. A. Gregory, Discovery.
How does mind communicate with mind? Our accustomed process is singularly indirect.
Speech is the initiation of muscular movements, under brain and nerve guidance, which result in the production of atmospheric pulsations—alternate condensations and rarefactions—which spread out in all directions in a way that can be likened superficially to the spreading of ripples on a pond. In themselves the aerial pulsations have no psychical connotation, and are as purely mechanical as are those ripples, though like the indentations on the wax of a phonograph their sequence is cunningly contrived; and it is in their sequence that the code lies—a code which anyone who has struggled with a foreign language knows is difficult to learn. Sound waves have in some respects a still closer analogy with the etherial pulsations generated at a wireless-telegraph sending station, which affect all sensitive receiving instruments within range and convey a code by their artificially induced sequence.
Hearing is reception of a small modicum of the above aerial pulsations, by suitable mechanism which enables them to stimulate ingeniously contrived nerve-endings, and so at length to affect auditory centres in the brain, and to get translated into the same kind of consciousness as was responsible for the original utterance. The whole is done so quickly and easily, by the perfect physiological mechanism provided, that the indirect and surprising nature of the process is usually overlooked; as most things are when they have become familiar. Wireless telegraphy is not an iota more marvellous, but, being unfamiliar, it has aroused a sense of wonder.
Writing and Reading by aid of black marks on a piece of paper, perceived by means of the Ether instead of the air, and through the agency of the eye instead of the ear,—though the symbols are ultimately to be interpreted as if heard,—hardly need elaboration in order to exhibit their curiously artificial and complicated indirectness: and in their case an element of delay, even a long time-interval—perhaps centuries—may intervene between production and reception.
Artistic representation also, such as painting or music, though of a less articulate character, less dependent on purely linguistic convention and less limited by nationality, is still truly astonishing when intellectually regarded. An arrangement of pigments designed for the reception and modification and re-emission or reflexion of ether-tremors, in the one case; and, in the other, a continuous series of complicated vibrations excited by grossly mechanical means; intervene between the minds of painter and spectator, of composer and auditor, or, in more general terms, between agent and percipient,—again with possible great lapse of time.
That ideas and feelings, thus indirectly and mechanically transmitted or stored, can affect the sensitive soul in unmistakable fashion, is a fact of experience; but that deposits in matter are competent to produce so purely psychic an effect can surely only be explained in terms of the potentialities and previous experience of the mind or soul itself. No emotional influence can be expressed, or rendered intelligible, in terms of matter. Matter is an indirect medium of communication between mind and mind. That direct telepathic intercourse should be able to occur between mind and mind, without all this intermediate physical mechanism, is therefore not really surprising. It has to be proved, no doubt, but the fact is intrinsically less puzzling than many of those other facts to which we have grown hardened by usage.
Why should telepathy be unfamiliar to us? Why should it seem only an exceptional or occasional method of communication? There is probably, as M. Bergson has said, an evolutionary advantage in our present almost exclusive limitation to mechanical and physical methods of communication; for these are under muscular control and can be shut off. We can isolate ourselves from them, if not in a mechanical, then in a topographical manner: we can go away, out of range. We could not thus protect ourselves against insistent telepathy. Hence probably the practical usefulness of the inhibiting and abstracting power of the brain; a power which in some lunatics is permanently deficient.
Physical things can reach consciousness—if at all—only through the brain; that remains true as regards physical things, however much we may admit telepathy from other minds; and, conversely, only through the brain can we operate with conscious purpose on the material world. To any more direct mental or spiritual intercourse we are, unless specially awakened, temporarily dead or asleep. There is some inversion of ordinary ideas here, for a state of trance appears to rouse or free the dormant faculties, and to render direct intercourse more possible. At any rate it does this for some people. For we find here and there, a few perfectly sane individuals, from whom, when in a rather exceptional state, the customary brain-limitation seems to be withdrawn or withdrawable. Their minds cease to be isolated for a time, and are accessible to more direct influences. Not the familiar part of their minds, not the part accustomed to operate and to be operated on by the habitually used portion of brain, no, but what is called a subliminal stratum of mind, a part only accessible perhaps to physical things through an ordinarily unused and only subconscious portion of the brain.
The occurrence of such people, i.e. of people with such exceptional and really simple faculties, could not have been predicted or expected on a basis of everyday experience; but if evidence is forthcoming for their existence—even although it be not quite of an ordinary character—and if we can make examination of the subject-matter and criticise the statements of fact which are thus receivable, there is no sort of sense in opposing the facts by adducing preconceived negative opinions about impossibility, and declining to look into the evidence or judge of the results. There were people once who would not look at the satellites of Jupiter, lest their cherished convictions should be disturbed. There was a mathematician not long ago who would not see an experimental demonstration of conical refraction, lest if it failed his confidence in refined optical theory should be upset. And so, strange to say, there are people to-day who deny the fact, and condemn the investigation, of any manner of communication outside the realm of ordinary commonplace experience: having no ground at all for their denial save prejudice.
Well, like other little systems, they have their day and cease to be. We need not attend to them overmuch. If the facts of the Universe have come within our contemplation, a certain amount of contemporary blindness, though it may surprise, need not perplex us. The study of the material side of things, under the limitations appropriate thereto, has done splendid service. Only gradually can mental scope be enlarged to take in not only all this but more also.
In so far as those who are open to the less well-defined and more ambitious region are ignorant or unresponsive to what has been achieved in the material realm, it is no wonder that their asserted enlargement of scope is not credited. It does not seem likely that a new revelation has been vouchsafed to them, when they are so ignorant concerning the other and already recognised kind of Natural knowledge. They cannot indeed have attained information through the same channels, or in the same way. And it is this dislocation of knowledge, this difference of atmosphere, this barely reconcilable attitude of two diverse groups of people—though occasionally, by the device of water-tight compartments, the same individual has breathed both kinds of air and belonged to both groups—it is this bifurcation of method that has retarded mutual understanding. There are pugnacious members of either group who try to strengthen their own position by decrying the methods of the other; and were it not for the occurrence from time to time of a Wallace or a Crookes, i.e. of men who combine in their own persons something of both kinds of knowledge, attained not by different but by similar methods—all their theses being maintained and justified on scientific grounds, and after experimental inquiry—the chances for a reasonable and scientific outlook into a new region, and ultimately over the border-line into the domain of religion, would not be encouraging. The existence of such men, however, has given the world pause, has sometimes checked its facile abuse, and has brought it occasionally into a reflective, perhaps now even into a partially receptive, mood. We need not be in any hurry, though we can hardly help hoping for quick progress if the new knowledge can in any way alleviate the terrible amount of sorrow in the world at present; moreover, if a new volume is to be opened in man's study of the Universe, it is time that the early chapters were being perused.
It may be asked, do I recommend all bereaved persons to devote the time and attention which I have done to getting communications and recording them? Most certainly I do not. I am a student of the subject, and a student often undertakes detailed labour of a special kind. I recommend people in general to learn and realise that their loved ones are still active and useful and interested and happy—more alive than ever in one sense—and to make up their minds to live a useful life till they rejoin them.
What steps should be taken to gain this peaceful assurance must depend on the individual. Some may get it from the consolations of religion, some from the testimony of trusted people, while some may find it necessary to have first-hand experience of their own for a time. And if this experience can be attained privately, with no outside assistance, by quiet and meditation or by favour of occasional waking dreams, so much the better.
What people should not do, is to close their minds to the possibility of continued existence except in some lofty and inaccessible and essentially unsuitable condition; they should not selfishly seek to lessen pain by discouraging all mention, and even hiding everything likely to remind them, of those they have lost; nor should they give themselves over to unavailing and prostrating grief. Now is the time for action; and it is an ill return to those who have sacrificed all and died for the Country if those left behind do not throw off enervating distress and helpless lamentation, and seek to live for the Country and for humanity, to the utmost of their power.
Any steps which are calculated to lead to this wholesome result in any given instance are justified; and it is not for me to offer advice as to the kind of activity most appropriate to each individual case.
I have suggested that the new knowledge, when generally established and incorporated with existing systems, will have a bearing and influence on the region hitherto explored by other faculties, and considered to be the domain of faith. It certainly must be so, whether the suggested expansion of scientific scope is welcomed or not. Certainly the conclusions to which I myself have been led by one mode of access are not contradictory of the conclusions which have been arrived at by those who (naturally) seem to me the more enlightened theologians; though I must confess that with some of the ecclesiastical superstructure which has descended to us from a bygone day, a psychic investigator can have but little sympathy. Indeed he only refrains from attacking it because he feels that, left to itself, it will be superseded by higher and better knowledge, and will die a natural death. There is too much wheat mingled with the tares to render it safe for any but an ecclesiastical expert to attempt to uproot them.
Meanwhile, although some of the official exponents of Christian doctrine condemn any attempt to explore things of this kind by secular methods; while others refrain from countenancing any results thus obtained; there are many who would utilise them in their teaching if they conscientiously could, and a few who have already begun to do so, on the strength of their own knowledge, however derived, and in spite of the risk of offending weaker brethren.[38]
Footnotes
[38] For instance, a book called The Gospel of the Hereafter, by Dr. J. Paterson Smyth, of Montreal, may be brought to the notice of anyone who, while clinging tightly to the essential tenets of orthodox Christianity, and unwilling or unable to enter upon a course of study, would gladly interpret eastern and mediæval phrases in a sense not repugnant to the modern spirit.
CHAPTER XI
ON THE FACT OF SUPERNORMAL COMMUNICATION
"But he, the spirit himself, may come
Where all the nerve of sense is numb."
Tennyson, In Memoriam
HOWEVER it be accomplished, and whatever reception the present-day scientific world may give to the assertion, there are many now who know, by first-hand experience, that communication is possible across the boundary—if there is a boundary—between the world apprehended by our few animal-derived senses and the larger existence concerning which our knowledge is still more limited.
Communication is not easy, but it occurs; and humanity has reason to be grateful to those few individuals who, finding themselves possessed of the faculty of mediumship, and therefore able to act as intermediaries, allow themselves to be used for this purpose.
Such means of enlarging our knowledge, and entering into relations with things beyond animal ken, can be abused like any other power: it can be played with by the merely curious, or it can be exploited in a very mundane and unworthy way in the hope of warping it into the service of selfish ends, in the same way as old and long accessible kinds of knowledge have too often been employed. But it can also be used reverently and seriously, for the very legitimate purpose of comforting the sorrowful, helping the bereaved, and restoring some portion of the broken link between souls united in affection but separated for a time by an apparently impassable barrier. The barrier is turning out to be not hopelessly obdurate after all; intercourse between the two states is not so impossible as had been thought; something can be learnt about occurrences from either side; and gradually it is probable that a large amount of consistent and fairly coherent knowledge will be accumulated.
Meanwhile broken ties of affection have the first claim; and early efforts at communication from the departed are nearly always directed towards assuring survivors of the fact of continued personal existence, towards helping them to realise that changed surroundings have in no way weakened love or destroyed memory, and urging upon their friends with eager insistence that earthly happiness need not be irretrievably spoiled by bereavement. For purposes of this kind many trivial incidents are recalled, such as are well adapted to convince intimate friends and relatives that one particular intelligence, and no other, must be the source from which the messages ultimately spring, through whatever intermediaries they have to be conveyed. And to people new to the subject such messages are often immediately convincing.
Further thought, however, raises difficulties and doubts. The gradually recognized possibility of what may be called normal telepathy, or unconscious mind-reading from survivors, raises hesitation—felt most by studious and thoughtful people—about accepting such messages as irrefragable evidence of persistent personal existence; and to overcome this curious and unexpected and perhaps rather artificial difficulty, it is demanded that facts shall be given which are unknown to anyone present, and can only subsequently be verified. Communications of this occasional and exceptional kind are what are called, by psychic investigators, more specifically 'evidential': and time and perhaps good fortune may be required for their adequate reception and critical appreciation. For it is manifest that most things readily talked about between two friends, and easily reproducible in hasty conversation, will naturally be of a nature common to both, and on subjects well within each other's knowledge.
The more recent development of an elaborate scheme of 'cross-correspondence,' entered upon since the death of specially experienced and critical investigators of the S.P.R., who were familiar with all these difficulties, and who have taken strong and most ingenious means to overcome them, has made the proof, already very strong, now almost crucial. The only alternative, in the best cases, is to imagine a sort of supernormal mischievousness, so elaborately misleading that it would have to be stigmatised as vicious or even diabolical.
In most cases complete proof of this complicated and cold-blooded kind is neither forthcoming nor is necessary: indeed it can hardly be appreciated or understood by non-studious people. Effective evidence is in most cases of a different kind, and varies with the personality concerned. It often happens that little personal touches, incommunicable to others in their full persuasiveness, sooner or later break down the last vestiges of legitimate scepticism. What goes on beyond that will depend upon personal training and interest. With many, anything like scientific inquiry lapses at this point, and communication resolves itself into emotional and domestic interchange of ordinary ideas. But in a few cases the desire to give new information is awakened; and when there is sufficient receptivity, and, what is very important, a competent and suitable Medium for anything beyond commonplace messages, instructive and general information may be forthcoming. An explanation or description of the methods of communication, for instance, as seen from their side; or some information concerning the manner of life there; and occasionally even some intelligent attempt to lessen human difficulties about religious conceptions, and to give larger ideas about the Universe as a whole,—all these attempts have been made. But they always insist that their information is but little greater than ours, and that they are still fallible gropers after truth,—of which they keenly feel the beauty and importance, but of which they realise the infinitude, and their own inadequacy of mental grasp, quite as clearly as we do here.
These are what we call the 'unverifiable' communications; for we cannot bring them to book by subsequent terrestrial inquiry in the same way as we can test information concerning personal or mundane affairs. Information of the higher kind has often been received, but has seldom been published; and it is difficult to know what value to put upon it, or how far it is really trustworthy.
I am inclined to think, however—with a growing number of serious students of the subject—that the time is getting ripe now for the production and discussion of material of this technically unverifiable kind; to be scrutinised and tested by internal consistency and inherent probability, in the same sort of way as travellers' tales have to be scrutinised and tested. But until humanity as a whole has taken the initial step, and shown itself willing to regard such communications as within the range of possibility, it may be unwise to venture far in this more ambitious direction.
It has nevertheless been suggested, from a philosophic point of view, that strict proof of individual survival must in the last resort depend on examination and collation of these 'travellers' tales,' rather than on any kind of resuscitation of the past; because, until we know more about memory, it is possible to conjecture, as I think Professor Bergson does, that all the past is potentially accessible to a super-subliminal faculty for disinterring it. And so one might, in a sceptical mood, when confronted with records of apparently personal reminiscence, attribute them to an unconscious exercise of this faculty, and say with Tennyson
"I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past."
I do not myself regard this impersonal memory as a reasonable hypothesis, I think that the simpler view is likely to be the truer one, so I attach importance to trivial reminiscences and characteristic personal touches; but I do agree that abstention from recording and publishing, however apologetically, those other efforts has had the effect of making ill-informed people—i.e. people with very little personal experience—jump to the conclusion that all communications are of a trivial and contemptible nature.
CHAPTER XII
ON THE CONTENTION THAT ALL PSYCHIC COMMUNICATIONS
ARE OF A TRIVIAL NATURE
AND DEAL WITH INSIGNIFICANT TOPICS
THAT such a contention as that mentioned at the end of the preceding chapter is false is well known to people of experience; but so long as the demand for verification and proof of identity persists—and it will be long indeed before they can be dispensed with—so long are trifling reminiscences the best way to achieve the desired end. The end in this case amply explains and justifies the means. Hence it is that novices and critics are naturally and properly regaled with references to readily remembered and verifiable facts; and since these facts, to be useful, must not be of the nature of public news, nor anything which can be gleaned from biographical or historical records, they usually relate to trifling family affairs or other humorous details such as seem likely to stay in the memory. It can freely be admitted that such facts are only redeemed from triviality by the affectionate recollections interlinked with them, and by the motive which has caused them to be reproduced. For their special purpose they may be admirable; and there is no sort of triviality about the thing to be proven by them. The idea that a departed friend ought to be occupied wholly and entirely with grave matters, and ought not to remember jokes and fun, is a gratuitous claim which has to be abandoned. Humour does not cease with earth-life. Why should it?
It should be evident that communications concerning deeper matters are not similarly serviceable as proof of identity, though they may have a value and interest of their own; but it is an interest which could not be legitimately aroused until the first step—the recognition of veridical intercourse—had been taken; for, as a rule, they are essentially unverifiable. Of such communications a multitude could be quoted; and almost at random I select a few specimens from the automatic writings of the gentleman and schoolmaster known to a former generation as M.A.Oxon.[39] Take this one, which happens to be printed in a current issue of Light (22 April 1916), with the statement that it occurs in one of M.A.Oxon.'s subliminally written and private notebooks, under date 12 July 1873—many others will be found in the selections which he himself extracted from his own script and published in a book called Spirit Teachings:—
"You do not sufficiently grasp the scanty hold that religion has upon the mass of mankind, nor the adaptability of what we preach to the wants and cravings of men. Or perhaps it is necessary that you be reminded of what you cannot see clearly in your present state and among your present associations. You cannot see, as we see, the carelessness that has crept over men as to the future. Those who have thought over their future have come to know that they can find out nothing about it, except, indeed, that what man pretends to tell is foolish, contradictory, and unsatisfying. His reasoning faculties convince him that the Revelation of God contains very plain marks of human origin; that it will not stand the test of sifting such as is applied to works professedly human; and that the priestly fiction that reason is no measure of revelation, and that it must be left on the threshold of inquiry and give place to faith, is a cunningly planned means of preventing man from discovering the errors and contradictions which throng the pages of the Bible. Those who reason discover this soon; those who do not, betake themselves to the refuge of Faith, and become blind devotees, fanatical, irrational, and bigoted; conformed to a groove in which they have been educated and from which they have not broken loose simply because they have not dared to think. It would be hard for man to devise a means [more capable] of cramping the mind and dwarfing the spirit's growth than this persuading of a man that he must not think about religion. It is one which paralyses all freedom of thought and renders it almost impossible for the soul to rise. The spirit is condemned to a hereditary religion whether suited or not to its wants. That which may have suited a far-off ancestor may be quite unsuited to a struggling soul that lives in other times from those in which such ideas had vitality. The spirit's life is so made a question of birth and of locality. It is a question over which he can exercise no control, whether he is Christian, Mohammedan, or, as ye say, heathen: whether his God be the Great Spirit of the Red Indian, or the fetish of the savage; whether his prophet be Christ or Mahomet or Confucius; in short, whether his notion of religion be that of East, West, North, or South; for in all these quarters men have evolved for themselves a theology which they teach their children to believe.
"The days are coming when this geographical sectarianism will give place before the enlightenment caused by the spread of our revelation, for which men are far riper than you think. The time draws nigh apace when the sublime truths of Spiritualism, rational and noble as they are when viewed by man's standard, shall wipe away from the face of God's earth the sectarian jealousy and theological bitterness, the anger and ill-will, the folly and stupidity, which have disgraced the name of religion and the worship of God; and man shall see in a clearer light the Supreme Creator and the spirit's eternal destiny.
"We tell you, friend, that the end draws nigh; the night of ignorance is passing fast; the shackles which priestcraft has strung round the struggling souls shall be knocked off, and in place of fanatical folly and ignorant speculation and superstitious belief, ye shall have a reasonable religion and a knowledge of the reality of the spirit-world and of the ministry of angels with you. Ye shall know that the dead are alive indeed, living as they lived on earth, but more truly, ministering to you with undiminished love, animated in their perpetual intercourse with the same affection which they had whilst yet incarned."
Any one of these serious messages can be criticised and commented upon with hostility and suspicion; they are not suited to establish the first premise of the argument for continuance of personality; and if they were put forward as part of the proof of survival, then perhaps the hostility would be legitimate. It ought to be clear that they are not to be taken as oracular utterances, or as anything vastly superior to the capabilities of the medium through whom they come,—though in fact they often are superior to any known power of a given medium, and are frequently characteristic of the departed personality, as we knew him, who is purporting to be the Communicator: though this remark is not applicable to the particular class of impersonal messages here selected for quotation. Yet in all cases they must surely be more or less sophisticated by the channel, and by the more or less strained method of communication, and must share some of its limitations and imperfections.
However that may be, it is proper to quote them occasionally, as here; not as specially profound utterances, but merely in contradiction of the imaginary and false thesis that only trivial and insignificant subjects are dealt with in automatic writings and mediumistic utterances. For such utterances—whatever their value or lack of value—are manifestly conclusive against that gratuitous and ignorant supposition. Whatever is thought of them, they are at least conceived in a spirit of earnestness, and are characterised by a genuine fervour that may be properly called religious.
I now quote a few more of the records published in the book cited above,—in this case dealing with Theological questions and puzzles in the mind of the automatic writer himself:—
"All your fancied theories about God have filtered down to you through human channels; the embodiments of human cravings after knowledge of Him; the creation of minds that were undeveloped, whose wants were not your wants, whose God, or rather whose notions about God are not yours. You try hard to make the ideas fit in, but they will not fit, because they are the product of divers degrees of development...."
"God! Ye know Him not! One day, when the Spirit stands within the veil which shrouds the spirit world from mortal gaze, you shall wonder at your ignorance of Him whom you have so foolishly imagined! He is far other than you have pictured Him. Were He such as you have pictured Him, were He such as you think, He would avenge on presumptuous man the insults which he puts on his Creator. But He is other, far other than man's poor grovelling mind can grasp, and He pities and forgives the ignorance of the blind mortal who paints Him after a self-imagined pattern.... When you rashly complain of us that our teaching to you controverts that of the Old Testament, we can but answer that it does indeed controvert that old and repulsive view ... but that it is in fullest accord with that divinely inspired revelation of Himself which He gave through Jesus Christ—a revelation which man has done so much to debase, and from which the best of the followers of Christ have so grievously fallen away."
And again, in answer to other doubts and questions in the mind of the automatist as to the legitimacy of the means of communication, and his hesitation about employing a means which he knew was sometimes prostituted by knaves to unworthy and frivolous or even base objects,—very different from those served by humorous and friendly family messages, about which no one with a spark of human feeling has a word to say when once they have realised their nature and object,—the writing continued thus:—
"If there be nought in what we say of God and of man's after-life that commends itself to you, it must be that your mind has ceased to love the grander and simpler conceptions which it had once learned to drink in...."
"Cease to be anxious about the minute questions which are of minor moment. Dwell much on the great, the overwhelming necessity for a clearer revealing of the Supreme; on the blank and cheerless ignorance of God and of us which has crept over the world: on the noble creed we teach, on the bright future we reveal. Cease to be perplexed by thoughts of an imagined Devil. For the honest, pure, and truthful soul there is no Devil nor Prince of Evil such as theology has feigned.... The clouds of sorrow and anguish of soul may gather round [such a man] and his spirit may be saddened with the burden of sin—weighed down with consciousness of surrounding misery and guilt, but no fabled Devil can gain dominion over him, or prevail to drag down his soul to hell. All the sadness of spirit, the acquaintance with grief, the intermingling with guilt, is part of the experience, in virtue of which his soul shall rise hereafter. The guardians are training and fitting it by those means to progress, and jealously protect it from the dominion of the foe.
"It is only they who, by a fondness for evil, by a lack of spiritual and excess of corporeal development, attract to themselves the congenial spirits of the undeveloped who have left the body but not forgotten its desires. These alone risk incursion of evil. These by proclivity attract evil, and it dwells with them at their invitation. They attract the lower spirits who hover nearest Earth, and who are but too ready to rush in and mar our plans, and ruin our work for souls. These are they of whom you speak when you say in haste, that the result of Spiritualism is not for good. You err, friend. Blame not us that the lower spirits manifest for those who bid them welcome. Blame man's insensate folly, which will choose the low and grovelling rather than the pure and elevated. Blame his foolish laws, which daily hurry into a life for which they are unprepared, thousands of spirits, hampered and dragged down by a life of folly and sin, which has been fostered by custom and fashion. Blame the ginshops, and the madhouses, and the prisons, and the encouraged lusts and fiendish selfishness of man. This it is which damns legions of spirits—not, as ye fancy, in a sea of material fire, but in the flames of perpetuated lust, condemned to burn itself out in hopeless longing till the purged soul rises through the fire and surmounts its dead passions. Yes, blame these and kindred causes, if there be around undeveloped intelligences who shock you by their deception, and annoy you by frivolity and falsehood."
I suppose that the worst that can be said about writing of this kind is that it consists of 'sermon-stuffe' such as could have been presumably invented—whether consciously or unconsciously—by the automatic writer himself. And the fact that with some of it he tended to disagree, proves no more than the corresponding kind of unexpected argumentation experienced by some dreamers. (Cf. L. P. Jacks, Hibbert Journal, July, 1916.) The same kind of explanation may serve for both phenomena, but I do not know what that explanation is.
Footnotes
[39] The Rev. Stainton Moses (M. A. Oxon) was one of the masters at University College School in London. He wrote automatically, i.e. subconsciously, in private notebooks at a regular short time each day for nearly twenty years, and felt that he was in touch with helpful and informing intelligences.
CHAPTER XIII
ON THE MANNER OF COMMUNICATION
PERHAPS the commonest and easiest method of communication is what is called 'automatic writing'—the method by which the above examples were received—i.e. writing performed through the agency of subconscious intelligence; the writer leaving his or her hand at liberty to write whatever comes, without attempting to control it, and without necessarily attending at the time to what is being written.
That a novice will usually get nothing, or mere nonsense or scribbling, in this way is obvious: the remarkable thing is that some persons are thus able to get sense, and to tap sources of information outside their normal range. If a rudiment of such power exists, it is possible, though not always desirable, to cultivate it; but care, pertinacity, and intelligence are needed to utilise a faculty of this kind. Unless people are well-balanced and self-critical and wholesomely occupied, they had better leave the subject alone.
In most cases of fully-developed automatism known to me the automatist reads what comes, and makes suitable oral replies or comments to the sentences as they appear: so that the whole has then the effect of a straightforward conversation of which one side is spoken and the other written—the speaking side being usually rather silent and reserved, the writing side free and expansive.
Naturally not every person has the power of cultivating this simple form of what is technically known as motor automatism, one of the recognised subliminal forms of activity; but probably more people could do it if they tried; though for some people it would be injudicious, and for many others hardly worth while.
The intermediate mentality employed in this process seems to be a usually submerged or dream-like stratum of the automatist whose hand is being used. The hand is probably worked by its usual physiological mechanism, guided and controlled by nerve centres not in the most conscious and ordinarily employed region of the brain. In some cases the content or subject-matter of the writing may emanate entirely from these nerve centres, and be of no more value than a dream; as is frequently the case with the more elementary automatism set in action by the use of instruments known as 'planchette' and 'ouija,' often employed by beginners. But when the message turns out to be of evidential value it is presumably because this subliminal portion of the person is in touch, either telepathically or in some other way, with intelligences not ordinarily accessible,—with living people at a distance perhaps, or more often with the apparently more accessible people who have passed on, for whom distance in the ordinary sense seems hardly to exist, and whose links of connexion are of a kind other than spatial. It need hardly be said that proof of communion of this kind is absolutely necessary, and has to be insisted on; but experience has demonstrated that now and again sound proof is forthcoming.
Another method, and one that turns out to be still more powerful, is for the automatist not only to take off his or her attention from what is being transmitted through his or her organism, but to become comprehensively unconscious and go into a trance. In that case it appears that the physiological mechanism is more amenable to control, and is less sophisticated by the ordinary intelligence of the person to whom it normally belongs; so that messages of importance and privacy may be got through. But the messages have to be received and attended to by another person; for in such cases, when genuine, the entranced person on waking up is found to be ignorant of what has been either written or uttered. In this state, speech is as common as writing, probably more common because less troublesome to the recipient, i.e. the friend or relative to whom or for whom messages are being thus sent. The communicating personality during trance may be the same as the one operating the hand without trance, and the messages may have the same general character as those got by automatic writing, when the consciousness is not suspended but only in temporary and local abeyance; but in the trance state a dramatic characterisation is usually imparted to the proceedings, by the appearance of an entity called a 'Control,' who works the body of the automatist in the apparent absence of its customary manager. This personality is believed by some to be merely the subliminal self of the entranced person, brought to the surface, or liberated and dramatised into a sort of dream existence, for the time. By others it is supposed to be a healthy and manageable variety of the more or less pathological phenomenon known to physicians and psychiatrists as cases of dual or multiple personality. By others again it is believed to be in reality the separate intelligence which it claims to be.
But however much can be and has been written on this subject, and whatever different opinions may be held, it is universally admitted that the dramatic semblance of the control is undoubtedly that of a separate person,—a person asserted to be permanently existing on the other side, and to be occupied on that side in much the same functions as the medium is on this. The duty of controlling and transmitting messages seems to be laid upon such a one—it is his special work. The dramatic character of most of the controls is so vivid and self-consistent, that whatever any given sitter or experimenter may feel is the probable truth concerning their real nature, the simplest way is to humour them by taking them at their face value and treating them as separate and responsible and real individuals. It is true that in the case of some mediums, especially when overdone or tired, there are evanescent and absurd obtrusions every now and then, which cannot be seriously regarded. Those have to be eliminated; and for anyone to treat them as real people would be ludicrous; but undoubtedly the serious controls show a character and personality and memory of their own, and they appear to carry on as continuous an existence as anyone else whom one only meets occasionally for conversation. The conversation can be taken up at the point where it left off, and all that was said appears to be remarkably well remembered by the appropriate control; while usually memory of it is naturally and properly repudiated by another control, even when operating through the same medium; and the entranced medium knows nothing of it afterwards after having completely woke up.
So clearly is the personality of the control brought out, in the best cases, so clear also are the statements of the communicators that the control who is kindly transmitting their messages is a real person, that I am disposed to accept their assertions, and to regard a control, when not a mere mischievous and temporary impersonation, as akin on their side to the person whom we call a medium on ours.
The process of regular communication—apart from the exceptional more direct privilege occasionally vouchsafed to people in extreme sorrow—thus seems to involve normally a double medium of communication, and the activity of several people. First there is the 'Communicator' or originator of ideas and messages on the other side. Then there is the 'control' who accepts and transmits the messages by setting into operation a physical organism lent for the occasion. Then there is the 'Medium' or person whose normal consciousness is in abeyance but whose physiological mechanism is being used. And finally there is the 'Sitter'—a rather absurd name—the recipient of the messages, who reads or hears and answers them, and for whose benefit all this trouble is taken. In many cases there is also present a Note-taker to record all that is said, whether by sitters or by or through the medium; and it is clear that the note-taker should pay special attention to and carefully record any hints or information either purposely or accidentally imparted by the sitter.
In scientific and more elaborately conducted cases there is also some one present who is known as the Experimenter in charge—a responsible and experienced person who looks after the health and safety of the medium, who arranges the circumstances and selects the sitters, making provision for anonymity and other precautions, and who frequently combines with his other functions the duties of note-taker.
In oral or voice sittings the function of the note-taker is more laborious and more responsible than in writing sittings; for these latter to a great extent supply their own notes. Only as the trance-writing is blindfold, i.e. done with shut eyes and head averted, it is rather illegible without practice; and so the experimenter in charge frequently finds it necessary to assist the sitter, to whom it is addressed, by deciphering it and reading it aloud as it comes—rather a tiring process; at the same time jotting down, usually on the same paper, the remarks which the sitter makes in reply, or the questions from time to time asked. Unless this is done the subsequent automatic record lacks a good deal of clearness, and sometimes lacks intelligibility.
For a voice-sitting the note-taker must be a rapid writer, and if able to employ shorthand has an advantage. Sometimes a stenographer is introduced; but the presence of a stranger, or of any person not intimately concerned, is liable to hamper the distinctness and fulness of a message; and may prevent or retard the occurrence of such emotional episodes as are from time to time almost inevitable in the cases—alas too numerous at present—where the sitter has been recently and violently bereaved.
It is perhaps noteworthy—though it may not be interesting or intelligible to a novice—that communicators wishing to give private communications seldom or never object to the presence of the actual 'medium'—i.e. the one on our side. That person seems to be regarded as absent, or practically non-existent for a time; the person whose presence they sometimes resent at first is the 'control,' i.e. the intelligence on their side who is ready to receive and transmit their message, somewhat perhaps as an Eastern scribe is ready to write the love-letters of illiterate persons.
As to the presence of a note-taker or third person on our side, such person is taken note of by the control, and when anything private or possibly private is mentioned—details of illnesses or such like—that third person is often ordered out of the room. Sometimes the experimenter in charge is likewise politely dispensed with, and under these circumstances the sitting occasionally takes on a poignant character in which note-taking by the deeply affected sitter becomes a practical impossibility. But this experience is comparatively rare; it must not be expected, and cannot wisely be forced.
Another circumstance which makes me think that the more responsible kind of control is a real person, is that sometimes, after gained experience, the Communicator himself takes control, and speaks or writes in the first person, not only as a matter of first-person-reporting, which frequently occurs, but really in his own proper person and with many of his old characteristics. So if one control is a real person I see no reason against the probability of others being real likewise. I cannot say that the tone of voice or the handwriting is often thus reproduced—though it is, for a few moments, by special effort sometimes; but the unusual physiological mechanism accounts for outstanding or residual differences. Apart from that, the peculiarities, the attitudes, the little touches of manner, are often more or less faithfully reproduced, although the medium may have known nothing of the person concerned. And the characteristic quality of the message, and the kind of subjects dealt with, become still more marked in such cases of actual control, than when everything has to be transmitted through a kindly stranger control, to whom things of a recondite or technical character may appear rather as a meaningless collocation of words, very difficult to remember and reproduce.