"It is far from being demonstrated," he continues, "that mediumship is a pathological phenomenon. It is abnormal, no doubt, in the sense of being rare, exceptional; but rarity is not morbidity. The few years during which these phenomena have been seriously and scientifically studied have not been enough to allow us to pronounce on their true nature. It is interesting to note that in the countries where these studies have been pushed the furthest, in England and America, the dominant view among the savants who have gone deepest into the matter is not at all unfavourable to mediumship; and that, far from regarding it as a special case of hysteria, they see in it a faculty superior, advantageous, healthy, of which hysteria is a form of degenerescence, a pathological parody, a morbid caricature."
The phenomena which this sensitive presents (Hélène Smith is Professor Flournoy's pseudonym for her) cover a range which looks at first very wide, although a clearer analysis shows that these varieties are more apparent than real, and that self-suggestion will perhaps account for all of them.
There is, to begin with, every kind of automatic irruption of subliminal into supraliminal life. As Professor Flournoy says (p. 45): "Phenomena of hypermnesia, divinations, mysterious findings of lost objects, happy inspirations, exact presentiments, just intuitions, teleological (purposive or helpful) automatisms, in short, of every kind; she possesses in a high degree this small change of genius—which constitutes a more than sufficient compensation for the inconvenience resulting from those distractions and moments of absence of mind which accompany her visions; and which, moreover, generally pass unobserved."
At séances—where the deeper change has no inconveniences—Hélène undergoes a sort of self-hypnotisation which produces various lethargic and somnambulistic states. And when she is alone and safe from interruption she has spontaneous visions, during which there may be some approach to ecstasy. At the séances she experiences positive hallucinations, and also negative hallucinations, or systematised anæsthesiæ, so that, for instance, she will cease to see some person present, especially one who is to be the recipient of messages in the course of the séance. "It seems as though a dream-like incoherence presided over this preliminary work of disaggregation, in which the normal perceptions are arbitrarily split up or absorbed by the subconscious personality—eager for materials with which to compose the hallucinations which it is preparing." Then, when the séance begins, the main actor is Hélène's guide Léopold (a pseudonym for Cagliostro) who speaks and writes through her, and is, in fact, either her leading spirit-control or (much more probably) her most developed form of secondary personality.
"Leopold," says Professor Flournoy (p. 134), "certainly manifests a very honourable and amiable side of Mlle. Smith's character, and in taking him as her 'guide' she has followed inspirations which are doubtless among the highest in her nature."
The high moral quality of these automatic communications, on which Professor Flournoy thus insists, is a phenomenon worth consideration.
I do not mean that it is specially strange in the case of Mlle. Smith. But the almost universally high moral tone of genuinely automatic utterances has not, I think, been sufficiently noticed or adequately explained.
In evidential messages—where there is real reason to believe that an identified spirit is communicating—there is a marked and independent consensus on such matters as these spirits profess themselves able to discuss.
And again in non-evidential messages—in communications which probably proceed from the automatist's subliminal self—I hold that there is a remarkable and undesigned concordance in high moral tone, and also in avoidance of certain prevalent tenets, which many of the automatists do supraliminally hold as true. But I also insist that these subliminal messages, even when not incoherent, are generally dream-like, and often involve tenets which (though never in my experience base or immoral) are unsupported by evidence, and are probably to be referred to mere self-suggestion.
Prominent among such tenets is one which forms a large part of Mlle. Smith's communications; namely, the doctrine of reincarnation, or of successive lives spent by each soul upon this planet.