The answer, also, was of course unknown to her primary self, but her subliminal self, in addition to its own private and constant stock of knowledge and opinions, had the advantage of more subtle means of securing other knowledge necessary for a proper answer, and so sought it in her husband’s mind, or wherever it could be obtained. The sources of information accessible to the subliminal self, through means analogous to those which have been named—thought-transference and telepathy—are certainly various, and their limit is not yet known. We may mention, however, in this connection, besides the mind of the automatic writer—the mind of the questioner, and also the minds of other persons present, in any or all of which may be stored up knowledge or impressions of which the ordinary consciousness or memory retains no trace; it may be a scene witnessed in childhood; a newspaper paragraph read many years ago; a casual remark overheard, but not even noticed—all these and many more are sources of information upon which the subliminal self may draw for answers, which, when written out by the automatist, seem absolutely marvellous, not to say miraculous or supernatural.
Thus, the prayer at the ceremony of the advancement of a Mark Master Mason, although language entirely unfamiliar to Mrs. Newnham, was perfectly familiar to her husband, who was himself a Mason, and, I believe, a chaplain in the order; and while the form was not one actually used, it contained strictly accurate technicalities, and would have been perfectly appropriate to such an occasion.
The messages written by Mr. Wedgwood and Mrs. R. profess to come directly from the spirit of Colonel Gurwood; but without absolutely discarding that theory, having the key to which I have referred, let us see if such a supposition is necessary to explain the facts.
It may be conceded at once that neither Mr. Wedgwood nor either of the ladies with whom he wrote had any conscious knowledge of Col. Gurwood—his military career, or his sad taking off; but they were all intelligent people. John Gurwood, as it turned out, was a noted man; he was an officer in the Peninsular War, under the Duke of Wellington, performed an act of special bravery and daring, in the performance of which he was severely wounded, and for which he was afterward granted a coat of arms. He was also afterward chosen to edit the duke’s dispatches. All this was recorded in the Annual Register for 1845, soon after Gurwood’s death, together with a description in the language of heraldry of the crest or coat of arms which had been granted him many years before.
It is scarcely possible that such an event would not have been noticed in the newspapers at the time of Gurwood’s death, and nothing is more probable than that some of these intelligent persons had read these accounts, or as children heard them read or referred to, though they may now have been entirely absent from their ordinary consciousness and memory. At all events, the subliminal self or secondary consciousness of Mrs. R., whom Planchette designates as “the medium,” or of Mr. Wedgwood, may have come into relationship with the sources of information necessary to furnish the messages which it communicated, and these sources may have been the knowledge or impressions unconsciously received many years before by some of those present, the generally diffused knowledge of these facts which doubtless prevailed in the community at the time of Gurwood’s death, and the full printed accounts of these events, many copies of which were extant.
From the description of Gurwood’s coat of arms the idea could easily have been obtained which Planchette rudely represented in drawing, constituting what is called a test, and also the other knowledge concerning his military career and death which appeared in the various messages.
Regarding cases coming under my own observation, the incident relating to Peter Stuyvesant’s pear tree was well known to us both, and had only recently been a matter of general conversation, and all of those present had a more or less distinct idea of Peter Stuyvesant himself, derived from Irving’s “Knickerbocker’s History of New York.”
Of the cases observed with Miss V., as before stated, nearly all the names given of “authorities,” as we called them, were evidently fictitious, scarcely one being recognized, and none were of persons with whom we had any connection, and some did not claim any other origin than our subliminal consciousness, as was also the case with messages written by Mrs. Newnham.
If, then, some of the messages are surely the work of the subliminal self of the writer, aided by its more acute and more far-reaching perceptions, and if nearly all may be accounted for in the same way, the probability that all such messages have the same origin is greatly increased, and in the same degree the necessity for the spiritualistic theory is diminished, since it is evident that of two theories for explaining a new fact we should accept that one which better harmonizes with facts already established.