I find myself more in accord with the writer than reviews had led me to expect, for he disclaims 'the action of discarnate intelligences from the outside upon the physical or nervous organisation of the sitters' (p. 19).
The automatic writing is apparently controlled by Richard Bere, Johannes, and other influences which would be welcomed by spiritualists as 'objective entities'; but the writer gives his opinion regarding Johannes (p. 50) as follows: 'Whether we are dealing with a singularly vivid imaginative picture or with the personality of a man no one can really decide.'
Here I must differ and claim to have decided, for myself at least, that no personality other than that of the actual writer was concerned. The record of hysterical phenomena contains so many similar 'personalities' that I find no reason to call in the supernatural to account for this one. If a natural explanation is available we must not appeal to the supernatural; I am sure that F. B. B. is not unacquainted with Occam's razor—miracles must not be unnecessarily multiplied.
Since the writer does not stress the supernatural, and allows me to credit to his unconscious the poetical imaginings produced in the script and the 'veridical passages' concerning the discoveries of the Edgar Chapel, I have no need to criticise them, especially as he is scrupulous in giving credit to the conscious predictions of others when they hit the mark.
The book is a record of an experiment—successful from the psychological point of view—carried out by two Dissociates who knew what they were doing; the dissociated streams were entirely out of their control, and although I must, from the psychological standpoint, class the experiment with the other dissociations described in this book, yet it is far from my purpose to class the experimenters with 'Feda' and others of her kind.
The earlier chapters of this book were written before I read The Gate of Remembrance, but whoever reads the conclusion in the latter book will find many opinions in agreement with those in my chapter on the unconscious.
Table-turning, water-divining, automatic writing, thought-reading, and the use of the pendulum are examples of a psychological automatism in which the agent is conscious neither of the muscular movements concerned nor, what is more important, of the mental processes producing them.
They can be cultivated to provide amazing results in tapping the memories of the unconscious, and if the agents remain in ignorance of their true mechanism a systematised delusion is built up and accepted as proof of the supernatural.