(4) Next come facts which can be proved, with similar varying degrees of certainty according to the circumstances, never to have been known to the automatist, or recorded in print; but which were known to the alleged spirit and can be verified by the memories of living persons.
(5) Above this again would come that class of experimental messages, or posthumous letters, of which we have as yet very few good examples, where the departed person has before death arranged some special test—some fact or sentence known only to himself, which he is to transmit after death, if possible, as a token of his return.
(6) Thus much for the various kinds of verbal messages, which can be kept and analysed at leisure. We must now turn to evidence of a different and not precisely comparable kind. In point of fact it is not these inferences from written matter which have commonly been most efficacious in compelling the survivor's belief in the reality of the friend's return. Whether logically or no, it is not so much the written message that he trusts, but some phantom of face and voice that he knew so well. It is this familiar convincing presence,—εικτο δἑ θἑσκελον ἁυτὡ,—on which the percipient has always insisted, since Achilles strove in vain to embrace Patroclus' shade.
How far such a phantasm is in fact a proof of any real action on the part of the spirit thus recognised is a problem which has been dealt with already in Chapter VII. The upshot of our evidence to my mind is that although the apparition of a departed person cannot per se rank as evidence of his presence, yet this is not a shape which purely hallucinatory phantasms seem often to assume; and if there be any corroborative evidence, as, for instance, writing which claims to come from the same person, the chance that he is really operative is considerable. In Mr. Moses' case almost all the figures which he saw brought with them some corroboration by writing, trance-utterance, gesture-messages (as where a figure makes signs of assent or dissent), or raps.
(7) And this brings us to a class largely represented in Mr. Moses' series, where writings professing to come from a certain spirit are supported by physical phenomena of which that spirit claims also to be the author. Whether such a line of proof can ever be made logically complete or no, one can imagine many cases where it would be practically convincing to almost all minds. Materialisations of hands, or direct writing in the script of the departed, have much of actual cogency; and these methods, with others like them, are employed by Mr. Moses' "controls" in their efforts to establish their own identities. Physical phenomena in themselves, however, carry no proof of an intelligence outside that of the sensitive himself, and, as I have said, may in many cases be a mere extension of his own ordinary muscular powers, and not due to any external agency at all.
If we confine ourselves to the verbal messages, we find that the cases most fully represented in the records of Mr. Moses are limited to the first three classes mentioned above, and those which come under the fourth class—verifiable facts of which there is no printed record and which it is practically certain that the medium could never have known—are comparatively few. This may partly be accounted for by the small number of sitters with Mr. Moses and the fact that they were his personal friends. The records of Mrs. Piper, on the other hand, to which we now turn, are especially rich in incidents that fall under the fourth heading, and the evidential value of the verbal messages in this case is, therefore, much greater than in the case of Mr. Moses. Whereas for Mr. Moses the identity of many of his communicators rested largely upon their being guaranteed by Imperator and his group of helpers,—in the case of Mrs. Piper the spirits of some recently-departed friends who have given much evidence of their identity appear to maintain the independent reality and guiding control over Mrs. Piper of these same intelligences—Imperator, Rector, Doctor, and others—that Mr. Moses claimed as ruling in his own experience.
The case of Mrs. Piper differs in two important respects from that of W. Stainton Moses or D. D. Home. In the first place no telekinetic phenomena have occurred in connection with her trance-manifestations; and in the second place her supraliminal self shows no traces of any supernormal faculty whatsoever. She presents an instance of automatism of the extreme type where the "possession" is not merely local or partial, but affects, so to say, the whole psychical area,—where the supraliminal self is for a time completely displaced, and the whole personality appears to suffer intermittent change. In other words, she passes into a trance, during which her organs of speech or writing are "controlled" by other personalities than the normal waking one. Occasionally, either just before or just after the trance, the subliminal self appears to take some control of the organism for a brief interval; but with this exception the personalities that speak or write during her trance claim to be discarnate spirits.
Mrs. Piper's trances may be divided into three stages: (1) Where the dominant controlling personality was known as "Dr. Phinuit" and used the vocal organs almost exclusively, communicating by trance-utterance, 1884-91.
(2) Where the communications were made chiefly by automatic writing in the trance under the supervision more particularly of the control known as "George Pelham," or "G. P.," although "Dr. Phinuit" usually communicated also by speech during this period, 1892-96.
(3) Where supervision is alleged to be exercised by Imperator, Doctor, Rector, and others already mentioned in connection with the experiences of Mr. Moses, and where the communications have been mainly by writing, but occasionally also by speech. This last stage, which began early in 1897, still continues, and the final outcome remains to be seen.