But perhaps I had better summarise our earlier conversation for you. There was, I may say, a somewhat long and distinctly complicated misunderstanding between myself and the spirit before the real interest of the message begins; a misunderstanding due to my complete misapprehension of our respective parts. You see, it is unhappily true—however much we may deplore the fact and try to guard against it—that even in psychical research we form habits of thought and method, but particularly of thought. And I had got into the habit of regarding communications from spirits as referring to what we assume to be the future life. Well, this communication didn't. The spirit with whom I was talking had not, in short, ever been incarnated. He was what the Spiritualists and Theosophists, and so on, call an "Elemental." And to him, I represented the future state. I was, so to speak, the communicating spirit and he the psychical researcher. He was, I inferred, very far advanced on his own plane and expecting very shortly to "pass over," as he put it. Also, I gathered that he was in his own world by way of being an intellectual; keenly interested in the future—that is, in our present state; and that the Slipperton phenomena were entirely due to the experiments he had been carrying out ("on strictly scientific lines," he assured me) to try and ascertain the conditions of life on this plane.
Perhaps I can, now, illustrate his attitude by a few quotations from our conversation. For example:
Spirit. "Are you happy where you are?"
Myself. "Moderately. At times. Some of us are."
Spirit. "Are you yourself happy?"
Myself. "I may say so. Yes."
Spirit. "What do you do? Try and give me some idea of life on your plane."
Myself. "It varies so immensely with the individual and the set in which one lives. But we—oh! we have a great variety of what we call 'interests' and occupations, and most of us, of course, have to work for our livings."
Spirit. "I don't understand that. What are your livings, and how do you work for them?"
Myself. "We can't live without food, you see. We have to eat and drink and sleep; protect ourselves against heat and cold and the weather generally, which means clothes and shelter—garments to wear and houses to live in, that is."