The amounts indicated in these statements are of course 132. It was enchanting.
Then, taking the closed book and, without opening it, sliding the paper-knife between the pages, I resumed the conversation, and the result with this last method was always inexact.
I frequently repeated this little experience (curious at any rate); and, every time, I had exact replies when I knew them, inexact when I was ignorant of them. (Section 657 of my Inquiry.)
These examples might be multiplied ad infinitum. Everything leads us to think that it is we who are the actors in these experiments. But it is not so simple as one might suppose, and there is something else in it as well as ourselves. Certain unexplained things take place.
In his remarkable work, Intelligence, Taine explains Spiritualistic communications by a sort of unconscious duplication of our mind, as I said above.
The more singular a fact is [he writes[18]] the more instructive it is. In this respect, Spiritualistic manifestations themselves point the way to discoveries by showing us the coexistence at the same moment in the same individual of two thoughts, two wills, two distinct actions, the one conscious, the other unconscious; the latter he attributes to invisible beings. The brain is, then, a theatre on the stage of which several pieces are being played at once, upon several planes, of which only one is not subliminal. Nothing is more worthy of study than this plurality of the me. I have seen a person who, while speaking or singing, writes, without regard to the paper, consecutive sentences and even entire pages, without any knowledge of what she is writing. In my eyes her sincerity is perfect. Now she declares that at the end of a page she has no idea of what she has written on the paper. When she reads it, she is astonished, sometimes alarmed. The handwriting is different from her ordinary handwriting. The movement of the fingers and of the pencil is stiff and seems automatic. The writing always ends with a signature, that of a deceased person, and bears the mark of intimate thoughts, of a secret and inner reserve of ideas which the author would not like to divulge. Certainly there is proof here of a doubling of the me, the coexistence of two parallel and independent trains of thought, of two centres of action, or, if you wish, of two moral persons existing in the same brain, each one doing his work, and each one a different work, the one upon the stage and the other behind the scenes, the second as complete as the first, since, alone and unwitting of the other, it constructs consecutive ideas and fashions connected sentences in which the other has no part.
This hypothesis is admissible, in the light of numerous observations of double consciousness.[19]
It is applicable to a great number of cases, but not in all. It explains automatic writing. But, as it stands, it is necessary to stretch it considerably to make it explain the rappings (for who raps?), and it does not explain at all the levitations of the table, nor the displacement of objects of which I have spoken in the first chapter, and I do not very well see how it can even explain phrases rapped out backwards or by the strange combinations described above. This hypothesis is admitted and developed in a more unqualified way by Dr. Pierre Janet in his work Psychological Automatism. This author is one of those who have created a narrow circle of observation and study, and who not only never emerge from it, but imagine that they have got the whole universe in their circle. In going over this kind of reasoning, one thinks involuntarily of that old quarrel of the two round eyes who saw everything round and of the two square eyes who saw everything square, and of the history of the Big-endians and of the Little-endians of Gulliver's Travels. An hypothesis is worthy of attention when it explains something. Its value does not increase by the attempt to generalize it and make it explain everything: this is to overpass all reasonable limits.
We may admit that the sub-conscious acts of an abnormal personality, temporarily grafted upon our normal personality, explain the greater part of mediumistic writing communications. We can see in these also the evident effects of auto-suggestion. But these psycho-physiological hypotheses do not explain all observations. There is something else.
We all have a tendency to want to explain everything by the actual state of our knowledge. In the face of certain circumstances, we say to-day: "It is suggestion, it is hypnotism, it is this, it is that." Half a century ago we would not have talked in this way, these theories not having yet been invented. People will no longer talk in the same way half a century, a century, hence, for new words will have been invented. But let us not be put off with words; let us not be in such a hurry.