As has been said before in these pages, considerable attention to the topics covered by “Psychical Research” has given us a very strong suspicion that the autonomy of each mind is telepathically shared by other minds, and farther that this is due to a degree of identity of all mind somewhat similar to the identity of all force and all matter—this identity of force and matter being now well recognized, despite the individual manifestations of all three in our personalities.
Between minds a degree of identity—or at least of telepathic connection or intermingling, is abundantly manifested by the appearance of several personalities, or seeming personalities, through the sensitive persons generally called mediums, and this whether the personalities additional to the medium’s ordinary one are incarnate or apparently postcarnate.
From these indications follows very directly the guess that such dreams as our contributor recounts are not really of his construction, but are constructed outside of him, and not necessarily by excarnate agencies, or even by deliberate agencies. How or where or by whom must be left for future knowledge to indicate.
We have had dreams of the nature of those described by our contributor, and have correlated them with others entirely beyond construction by our own capacities.—Editor.
CORRESPONDENCE
More Freedom from Hereditary Bias
8 State Circle, Annapolis, Md.,
9 February, 1918.Gentlemen:
I have your printed circular of 25 January, with an enclosed bill for a subscription to the Unpopular Review through 1918. I have, perhaps unfortunately, not received the January issue of the review, which you say you sent me. This is no doubt due to my removal from Princeton, New Jersey, and to the lethargic Princeton post-office.
I had several reasons for not renewing my subscription. One was a need for economy, and the feeling that I could better do without the Unpopular than without such a periodical as the New Republic. Of the two, the Unpopular mirrors much the more closely some of my own convictions and principles; but I find the New Republic indispensable if I am to keep in touch with the aims and purposes of present-day American Liberalism.
Another reason I had for not renewing was that the Unpopular, starting its career with the very greatest promise, had, to my humble mind, managed very quickly to run up various side-tracks and blind alleys of opinion, and has since—amiably but with complacency—stuck there. And there I am content to leave it, for in losing reality it has lost life.
The lightness of touch which its editor has creditably sought to impart to its contents will not do as a substitute for life. And even that attempt has failed; it has resulted too often in mere pertness or a lumbering buffoonery never agreeable to contemplate, and least of all when invoked in aid of a cause that demands above all earnest conviction and anything but a stupid complacency from its adherents.
Yours faithfully,
(signed) Robert Shafer.
It may be interesting to compare with this a letter from another correspondent with a German name, printed in Number 17.