PART TWO: SUPERNORMAL PORTION
"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
He hath awakened from the dream of life."
Shelley, Adonais.
INTRODUCTION
I HAVE made no secret of my conviction, not merely that personality persists, but that its continued existence is more entwined with the life of every day than has been generally imagined; that there is no real breach of continuity between the dead and the living; and that methods of intercommunion across what has seemed to be a gulf can be set going in response to the urgent demand of affection,—that in fact, as Diotima told Socrates (Symposium, 202 and 203), Love bridges the chasm.
Nor is it affection only that controls and empowers supernormal intercourse: scientific interest and missionary zeal constitute supplementary motives which are found efficacious; and it has been mainly through efforts so actuated that I and some others have been gradually convinced, by direct experience, of a fact which before long must become patent to mankind.
Hitherto I have testified to occurrences and messages of which the motive is intellectual rather than emotional: and though much, very much, even of this evidence remains inaccessible to the public, yet a good deal has appeared from time to time by many writers in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, and in my personal collection called The Survival of Man. No one therefore will be surprised if I now further testify concerning communications which come home to me in a peculiar sense; communications from which sentiment is not excluded, though still they appear to be guided and managed with intelligent and on the whole evidential purpose. These are what I now decide to publish; and I shall cite them as among those evidences for survival for the publication of which some legitimate demand has of late been made, owing to my having declared my belief in continued existence without being able to give the full grounds of that belief, because much of it concerned other people. The portion of evidence I shall now cite concerns only myself and family.