For a moment, let us go farther and assume that some of the statements made in the script are not merely incapable of proof, but are found actually inconsistent with facts. Where then do we stand with our theory?
As I have said, until the statements are accepted, no one is deceived unless by his own rashness. All that has happened is that two people having a perfectly honest purpose have attempted to record by automatic process knowledge arrived at by the trained exercise of the subconscious mind, and have obtained—let us say—fiction or romance instead of the fact they sought.
The logical inference from this failure will obviously be that the particular method employed, whilst it may have the value claimed for it of supplementing the ordinary reasoning powers, has proved unreliable where applied for the purpose of procuring statements whose truth does not (as in the case of the Edgar Chapel) depend upon the deductive or inductive probabilities, but upon isolated facts unrelated to others, such as the names of places and people unknown; and that therefore, as a general conclusion, the method is unsuited for the purpose of obtaining such information, and we have used it for an end for which it is not adapted.
Thus may the legitimate bounds of the automatic method be prescribed; Intuition must bring all her results to the bar of Reason for provisional acceptance, and when this test is passed then the matter becomes ripe for further research.
Above all, let us not be superstitious. There is no need to invoke the action of supernatural agencies of a malevolent sort to explain the outcome of our own fallibility. If a man or woman sits down and produces automatically a story which turns out to be fiction, why, I ask, should that fiction be regarded as anything inherently worse in origin than the mass of fiction, good, bad, and indifferent, which writers produce consciously?
Where is the essential difference? The only answer I can find to this question is that the difference lies in the folly of the credulous, who are at all times willing to attach greater importance and credit to a statement made from an unknown source than to one which has a definite human and personal origin. "Omne ignotum pro magnifico."
For the imaginative function, whether working consciously or unconsciously, is the same in either case. Give it truth to feed upon and it will evolve truth. And through the door of truth may enter that which will guide us to a wider knowledge.
[APPENDIX]
THE LORETTO CHAPEL