But this, although a real risk, is by no means the only risk of deception which such messages involve. The communication may conceivably come from some unembodied spirit indeed, but not from the spirit who is claimed as its author.
The reader who wishes to acquaint himself with this new range of problems cannot do better than study the record of the varied experiences of automatic writing which have been intermingled with Miss A.'s crystal-visions, etc.[190]
There is no case that I have watched longer than Miss A.'s;—none where I have more absolute assurance of the scrupulous probity of the principal sensitive herself and of the group who share the experiments;—but none also which leaves me more often baffled as to the unseen source of the information given. There is a knowledge both of the past and of the future, which seems capriciously limited, and is mingled with mistakes, yet on the other hand is of a nature which it is difficult to refer to any individual human mind, incarnate or discarnate. We meet here some of the first indications of a possibility that discarnate spirits communicating with us have occasional access to certain sources of knowledge which even to themselves are inscrutably remote and obscure.
The written diagnoses and prognoses given by the so-called "Semirus," often without Miss A.'s even seeing the patient or hearing the nature of his malady, have become more and more remarkable. Miss A. and her friends do not wish these private matters to be printed, and I cannot therefore insist upon the phenomena here. Yet in view of the amount of telæsthesia which Miss A.'s various automatisms reveal, it should first be noted that human organisms seem especially pervious to such vue à distance. "Semirus," "Gelalius," etc., are obvious pseudonyms; and neither Semirus' prescriptions nor Gelalius' cosmogony contain enough of indication to enable us to grasp their origin.[191]
From the communications of these remote personages I go on to certain messages avowedly coming from persons more recently departed, and into which something more of definite personality seems to enter. One element of this kind is handwriting; there are many cases where resemblance of handwriting is one of the evidential points alleged. Now proof of identity from resemblance of handwriting may conceivably be very strong. But in estimating it we must bear two points in mind. The first is that (like the resemblances of so-called "spirit-photographs" to deceased friends) it is often very loosely asserted. One needs, if not an expert's opinion, at least a careful personal scrutiny of the three scripts—the automatist's voluntary and his automatic script, and the deceased person's script—before one can feel sure that the resemblance is in more than some general scrawliness. This refers to the cases where the automatist has provably never seen the deceased person's handwriting. Where he has seen that handwriting, we have to remember (in the second place) that a hypnotised subject can frequently imitate any known handwriting far more closely than in his waking state; and that consequently we are bound to credit the subliminal self with a mimetic faculty which may come out in these messages without any supraliminal guidance whatever on the automatist's part. In Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 549-65 [864 A], is an account of a series of experiments by Professor Rossi-Pagnoni at Pesaro, into which the question of handwriting enters. The account illustrates automatic utterance as well as other forms of motor automatism, and possibly also telekinetic phenomena. The critical discussion of the evidence by Mr. H. Babington Smith, to whom we are indebted for the account, shows with what complex considerations we have to deal in the questions now before us.
I now cite a few cases where the point of central interest is the announcement of a death unknown to the sitters.[192]
In Appendix VIII. C is given a case which we received from Dr. Liébeault, of Nancy, and which was first published in Phantasms of the Living (vol. i. p. 293), where it was regarded as an example of a spontaneous telepathic impulse proceeding directly from a dying person. I now regard it as more probably due to the action of the spirit after bodily death.
I shall next give a résumé of a case of curious complexity received from M. Aksakof;—an automatic message written by a Mdlle. Stramm, informing her of the death of a M. Duvanel. The principal incidents may here be disentangled as follows:—
Duvanel dies by his own hand on January 15th, 1887, in a Swiss village, where he lives alone, having no relations except a brother living at a distance, whom Mdlle. Stramm had never seen (as the principal witness, M. Kaigorodoff, informs us in a letter of May 1890).
Mdlle. Stramm's father does not hear of Duvanel's death till two days later, and sends her the news in a letter dated January 18th, 1887.