Such are some of the questions which our evidence suggests. And I may point out that the very fact that such bizarre problems should present themselves at every turn does in a certain sense tend to show that these apparitions are not purely subjective things,—do not originate merely in the percipient's imagination. For they are not like what any man would have imagined. What man's mind does tend to fancy on such topics may be seen in the endless crop of fictitious ghost stories, which furnish, indeed, a curious proof of the persistence of preconceived notions. For they go on being framed according to canons of their own, and deal with a set of imaginary phenomena quite different from those which actually occur. The actual phenomena, I may add, could scarcely be made romantic. One true "ghost story" is apt to be very like another, and most of them to be fragmentary and apparently meaningless. Their meaning, that is to say, lies in their conformity, not to the mythopœic instinct of mankind, which fabricates and enjoys the fictitious tales, but to some unknown law, not based on human sentiment or convenience at all.
And thus, absurdly enough, we sometimes hear men ridicule the phenomena which actually do happen, simply because those phenomena do not suit their preconceived notions of what ghostly phenomena ought to be;—not perceiving that this very divergence, this very unexpectedness, is in itself no slight indication of an origin outside the minds which obviously were so far from anticipating anything of the kind.
And in fact the very qualities which are most apt to raise derision are such as the evidence set forth in the earlier chapters of this work might reasonably lead us to expect. For I hold that now for the first time can we form a conception of ghostly communications which shall in any way consist or cohere with more established conceptions; which can be presented as in any way a development of facts which are already experimentally known. Two preliminary conceptions were needed—conceptions in one sense ancient enough; but yet the first of which has only in this generation found its place in science, while the second is as yet awaiting its brevet of orthodoxy. The first conception is that with which hypnotism and various automatisms have familiarised us,—the conception of multiplex personality, of the potential coexistence of many states and many memories in the same individual. The second is the conception of telepathy; of the action of mind on mind apart from the ordinary organs of sense; and especially of its action by means of hallucinations; by the generation of veridical phantasms which form, as it were, messages from men still in the flesh. And I believe that these two conceptions are in this way connected, that the telepathic message generally starts from, and generally impinges upon, a subconscious or submerged stratum in both agent and percipient.[129] Wherever there is hallucination, whether delusive or veridical, I hold that a message of some sort is forcing its way upwards from one stratum of personality to another,—a message which may be merely dreamlike and incoherent, or which may symbolise a fact otherwise unreachable by the percipient personality. And the mechanism seems much the same whether the message's path be continued within one individual or pass between two; whether A's own submerged self be signalling to his emergent self, or B be telepathically stimulating the hidden fountains of perception in A. If anything like this be true, it seems plainly needful that all that we know of abnormal or supernormal communications between minds, or states of the same mind, still embodied in flesh, should be searched for analogies which may throw light on this strangest mode of intercourse between embodied and disembodied minds.
A communication (if such a thing exists) from a departed person to a person still on earth is, at any rate, a communication from a mind in one state of existence to a mind in a very different state of existence. And it is, moreover, a communication from one mind to another which passes through some channel other than the ordinary channels of sense, since on one side of the gulf no material sense-organs exist. It will apparently be an extreme instance of both these classes—of communications between state and state,[130] and of telepathic communications; and we ought, therefore, to approach it by considering the less advanced cases of both these types.
On what occasions do we commonly find a mind conversing with another mind not on the same plane with itself?—with a mind inhabiting in some sense a different world, and viewing the environment with a difference of outlook greater than the mere difference of character of the two personages will account for?
The first instance of this sort which will occur to us lies in spontaneous somnambulism, or colloquy between a person asleep and a person awake. And observe here how slight an accident allows us to enter into converse with a state which at first sight seems a type of incommunicable isolation. "Awake, we share our world," runs the old saying, "but each dreamer inhabits a world of his own." Yet the dreamer, apparently so self-enclosed, may be gently led, or will spontaneously enter, into converse with waking men.
The somnambulist, or rather the somniloquist—for it is the talking rather than the walking which is the gist of the matter—is thus our first natural type of the revenant.
And observing the habits of somnambulists, we note that the degree in which they can communicate with other minds varies greatly in different cases. One sleep-waker will go about his customary avocations without recognising the presence of any other person whatever; another will recognise certain persons only, or will answer when addressed, but only on certain subjects, his mind coming into contact with other minds only on a very few points. Rarely or never will a somnambulist spontaneously notice what other persons are doing, and adapt his own actions thereto.
Next let us turn from natural to induced sleep-waking, from idiopathic somnambulism to the hypnotic trance. Here, too, throughout the different stages of the trance, we find a varying and partial (or elective) power of communication. Sometimes the entranced subject makes no sign whatever; sometimes he seems able to hear and answer one person, or certain persons, and not others; sometimes he will talk freely to all; but, however freely he may talk, he is not exactly his waking self, and as a rule he has no recollection, or a very imperfect recollection, in waking life of what he has said or done in his trance.
Judging, then, from such analogy as communications from one living state to another can suggest to us, we shall expect that the communication of a disembodied or discarnate person with an incarnate, if such exist, will be subject to narrow limitations, and very possibly will not form a part of the main current of the supposed discarnate consciousness.