SOME years ago a well-known college president thought to put an end to psychic research with the public by calling it a return to fetishism. He has lived long enough to learn that calling names does not refute facts, and we no longer need to apologize for the subject. When the work of investigation was first organized, no man's reputation was safe unless be joined in with the persiflage of the Philistine or the skepticism of the scientific world generally. It is easy to understand the accusation that psychic research is connected with fetishism, for its fundamental interest is in a doctrine that had its origin in what is known as animism, which is the spiritualism of savages, among whom it even took the form of regarding inorganic objects as animate. But the attempt to throttle investigation by invoking the contempt heaped on primitive minds was hasty and ill advised. Those who think it dignified to study folklore certainly cannot consider it undignified to pursue inquiries into the real causes of animism. But culture always has its antagonisms, and none is stronger than that which exists in the intellectual classes against ideas supposed to be wholly barbaric. That feeling I myself at one time shared, but Idid not purpose to ignore facts in the opinions that I might hold. Prejudice had to be overcome in the face of what was indisputable, or so widespread as to demand explanation. Primitive minds may have been wrong in their theories, but they seem to have had facts which require consideration, even though we go no further than fraud or hysteria to account for them; and to find these facts is to discover their kinship with those of modern times. But true psychic research took its origin not from any sympathy with the ideas of savages nor from any consciousness that the two stages of culture are connected. It was a very concrete set of incidents that exacted of fairminded men the examination of the facts. Even the types of phenomena did not present themselves clearly at the outset. The most prominent were those claiming to embody some form of communication with the dead; but types of unusual phenomena were soon found that could lay no claim to this character, and as they seemed less clearly to contravene the accepted laws of nature, they offered a ground for compromise between orthodox science and the claims of the supernatural. Among such phenomena were telepathy or mind-reading, dousing, hypnosis, suggestion, muscle-reading, and perhaps a few others. They opened a field for discussion that made the consideration of spiritualism unnecessary, at least for the time, since they were possibly susceptible of (natural) explanation. It was a mistake of scientific skepticism to invoke any preconceived ideas about the explanation of things in order to eliminate the consideration of psychic phenomena. The question of fact, not of explanation, is the first concern of science. In selecting his course, however, the skeptic "posed himself to all the reactions which follow the proof of what he doubts or denies; and we are to-day reaping the harvest of his imprudence. The public is running off into every imaginable philosophy and religion, because of the trust of believer and skeptic alike in religious and philosophic traditions. Sympathy would have given the skeptic the leadership in a course in which he has been outrun; he now appears as the hindrance to knowledge instead of its supporter. A man should never be required to choose between doubt and belief. He should be able to intermingle both in due proportions. The spirit of open-mindedness and impartiality is to the intellectual world what brotherhood is to the ethical world. Woe betide the man who does not see this elementary truth, for he is sure to fall into one dogmatism or the other. The facts that led to the conception of psychic research were a set of phenomena which, at least superficially, appeared to be inexplicable by the ordinary theories of science. They were taboo to normal psychology and psychologists, for no scientific man was prepared to reinstate the traditional idea of the supernatural. The opposition between the natural and the supernatural was so fixed that it was necessary to avoid misunderstanding of the latter term in order to pacify the orthodox psychologist. Hence the terms "psychic research" and "psychic phenomena" were chosen to denominate a borderland set of phenomena that might possibly be resolved into recognized types of events which, though unusual, would not necessitate a revision of orthodox beliefs. Abnormal psychology had come to accept many extraordinary things, but only as exhibitions of acute sensibility or as phenomena of coincidence. It was therefore necessary to make one's peace with this attitude and not to rush off prematurely into the regions of the miraculous. Psychic research thus became a compromise offered by one school of recognized scientists to another in the hope that some means might be found to extend tolerance to certain persistent facts that would not disappear at the command of conjurer or skeptic. The three types of phenomena which gave most offense were telepathy, apparitions, and mediumship. Hypnotism had won recognition, though only after meeting opposition hardly less bitter than that which these more inexplicable facts encountered. Muscle-reading and phenomena due to hyperaesthesia, or acute sensibility, lay on the borderland, and offered to the conservative mind a natural explanation of the facts to which they were relevant. Fraud, coincidence, and suggestion were explanations which further limited or refuted the claims of the supernormal and the supernatural. For this reason psychic research appropriated for its territory all phenomena that might be explained by hyperaesthesia, whether visual, auditory, or tactual: the nature and limits of guessing and.chance coincidence; hypnotism; hallucinations, whether subjective or veridical; apparitions, whether visual or auditory; mediumistic phenomena of all types; the physical phenomena of spiritualism, including raps or knockings, table-tippings, and telekinesis, or the movement of physical objects without contact, as well as the so-called materializations of common fame. Not all of these are of equal value in the study of the problem which came easily to the front; namely, the problem of the existence of discarnate spirits. The theory of spirit agency had been advanced from time immemorial to cover the whole field; but it was the first task of investigators to discriminate among the phenomena and to determine their evidential values. For instance, neither telepathic coincidences nor the movement of objects without physical contact is in itself evidence of spirit agencies. The field had to be mapped out for scientific scrutiny on the basis that many people were not discriminating in the explanation of the facts. Only apparitions and mediumistic phenomena presented any immediately apparent evidence for discarnate spirits. The others, however they might ultimately be explained, offered no manifest evidence for such a hypothesis. But all of them were related at least as unusual phenomena hitherto not explained by ordinary causes, and so constituted a group of facts that had been disregarded by orthodox science. Psychic research simply claimed the field as a new country, possibly like the old, but not superficially so. It challenged science to apply its methods to the facts and, if possible, to reduce them to some sort of natural order. In all ages the discovery of any new fact which is either not easily or not at all reducible to the normal has excited speculations of all kinds. The discovery of galvanic electricity roused all Europe to an interest in metaphysics; even Humboldt wrote a book, which he afterward regretted, that proclaimed magnetic forces to be the basis of cosmic causality. The discovery of radium started a revolution in science, though by this time scientists usually took discoveries of the kind more cautiously. But any new fact alters the perspective of previous knowledge, even when it does not revolutionize it. Psychic research was well adapted to rouse curiosity on the subject of the supersensible. Even telepathy so threatened the stability of materialism that skepticism was irreconcilably opposed to it, though telepathy did not involve spirit agencies. But phenomena that even looked like evidence in favor of spirits excited the most rabid skepticism, because they seemed to threaten all the conquests of physical science over the supernatural. Their recognition seemed to affect the laboriously built fabric of natural science as well as to offer hope and consolation to the human mind. No one objected to the latter, but the sacred structure of physical science must not be touched by hands soiled 'by the supernatural. Consequently, the interest of two opposing parties was strongly aroused by the claims in behalf of the supernormal in so far as these seemed to open the way into a transcendental world, one of support, because of an emotional satisfaction, and the other of hostility, because of the disturbance to the materialism of many years. It was at least impossible to evade the discussion of the doctrine of spiritualism in the face of its claims. No matter what our decision about telepathy, dousing, telekinesis, and hypnotism, the apparent meaning of apparitions and mediumistic phenomena required further consideration; and whether we believed or disbelieved in the spiritistic interpretation, we had to face the issue. The practical and ethical interests of man concentrated attention on this one question and subordinated all others, no matter how vigorously was urged the need of cool scientific investigation. Spiritualism, therefore, gained prominence, and in the course of time challenged any defender of materialistic science to meet it in the arena. Skepticism was asked to consider evidence, and to offer some practical and desirable' alternative to death without resurrection or survival. Skepticism was handicapped in such a debate. It might insist on natural laws, but it was always menaced by the prospect of contending with human needs, which have as much influence in determining many beliefs as any of the rigid standards of evidence that will have nothing to do with the ethical ideals of man. The importance of a belief in survival after death depends partly on the conditions of the age and partly on the conceptions we have of that life. There have been ages in which the idea of immortality exercised little influence on the ethical and social life, and there have been ages and races in which it was central, determining even political institutions. In all cases its value depends on the existing state of knowledge and on belief in many other things. If man's moral nature is rightly developed without the belief in immortality, proof will be more an intellectual than an ethical concern; but in an age when the affections are highly developed, and the intellect has adopted conceptions which virtually nullify the influence of the affections, it will be a matter of some importance to learn whether nature is as careful of personality as it is of atoms and matter. We may play the part of Stoics in this respect when we have no grounds for belief, but Stoicism itself is in most cases a tribute to that which it concedes cannot be obtained. Few natures can live a purely Stoical life. The most ethical impulses are not cast in that mold; and we welcome that attitude only when it conforms to what the affections teach, though it has given up the beliefs that fostered them. It is true that we have to submit if we do not have evidence for either faith or knowledge; but the loss will not be compensated by Stoicism, and most people will seek for light beyond a horizon which seems to hide the future from us. At least there is something to be said for the hope that consciousness may be prolonged beyond the grave. It is as natural and rational as the impulse toward self-preservation. The necessity of discussing the existence of spirits at various points in this work makes it important here at the outset to dispel certain illusions about that term. It is probable that in earlier writings I did not sufficiently allow for these illusions. But here I shall not permit readers to indulge them without taking the responsibility for them. Nearly all the difficulties of most people, except scientific psychologists, in the matter of believing in spirits depend on their conception of the term. In the ancient discussions about idolatry, and, in fact, during the whole period of controversy with materialism, the believers in spirits assumed and kept in the forefront of the argument the fact that spirits represented supersensible realities beyond the field of sensory perception. Even when they conceived them as quasimaterial, they did not forget their inaccessibility to sensation. But when the exigencies of that controversy passed away and materialism again took the helm, there was a return, largely unconscious, perhaps, to the conception of spirits as quasi-material or as representable in the forms of sensation. When the church relaxed its hostility to idolatry, it permitted the introduction of art into its temples and started the materialism which gradually undermined its foundations. In modern times esthetic needs and lack of logical thinking resulted in conveying to men's minds the idea that spirits could be represented in the forms of sense perception. The physical phenomena of spiritualism, especially those of materialization, taught men to think of spirits as sensory forms of some kind; and with sensation as the standard of reality, most people take imagination and newspaper representation as indicating what scientific spiritists believe when they say they believe in spirits. It is this inexcusable error which has to be dispelled. In the present work, as in all that I have written on the subject, as I have often explained in former discussions, the term spirit means nothing more than the stream of consciousness or personality with which we are familiar in every human being. Whether it is accompanied by what is called the "spiritual body" of St. Paul, the "astral body" of the theosophists, or the "ethereal organism" of the Greek materialists and many scientific spiritualists of to-day, is irrelevant to the question, and is not assumed in this work or in any other published work of mine. It may be true that we have "spiritual bodies" not perceptible to sense and only occasionally accessible to supernormal functions of the mind, when conditions are favorable. I am neither upholding nor denying such a view. It is simply no part of the scientific problem before us. Even if one assumes this spiritual body, one does not necessarily accept the spiritistic theory of the mind. What we want to know is whether that spiritual body is conscious or not, and conscious with the same memory that the person had when living his earthly life. If the spiritual body has no memory of the past, if the stream of consciousness or personality does not survive with it, there is little interest in the fact of survival either as a spiritual body or in the form of reincarnation. The interesting and important thing is the survival of personal identity, which consists wholly in the stream of consciousness with its memory of the past, and not in any spiritual body, no matter how necessary this latter may be to the survival of the mental stream itself. The existence of spirit in this discussion means the existence and survival of this stream of consciousness or personality in independence of the physical organism, regardless of how it survives. How such a thing is possible is another and separate problem, unaffected by the evidence of the fact of survival. Personal identity is not accessible to sense perception. It is as transcendental as atoms, ether waves, ions, electrons, and other supersensible realities of physical science, if there are such. The problem of spiritism is the collection of evidence to show that consciousness continues after death; its difficulty lies wholly in the strength of the hypothesis that consciousness is a function of the brain and requires some such structure for its existence. Indeed, the sensory and materialistic conception of it is so strong that many people say to me that they do not see how consciousness can survive without a brain. They are so fixed in the modern theory that consciousness is a mere function or phenomenon of the brain that they cannot conceive of this as an unproved hypothesis. When one makes sense perception the criterion of truth, it is natural to make this assumption, especially when all normal experience shows the constant association of consciousness with a physical organism and reveals no traces of it when the body is dissolved. But the absence of evidence for survival is not evidence of the absence of it; hence only normal experience favors materialism. Supernormal experience, if proved, suggests a very different interpretation; it brings us in contact with the supersensible. In normal life, consciousness in all its forms is a supersensible reality, even when we suppose it to be wholly dependent on the physical organism. In asking people to believe in spirits we ask them only to suspend the dogmatic assurance that materialism has said the last word on the problem; simply to be as skeptical about materialism as they are about spiritism. They may then be in a position to discover the illusions which have affected all their thinking on this subject. If they simply try to understand what psychic research is aiming at, and so disregard the question of a spiritual body; the quasi-material conception of the soul, as not the primary question, and acknowledge that we are only trying to ascertain if personal consciousness survives as a fact, and not how it survives, they will find the problem very much simplified. Consequently, in this work and in all the publications of the Society for Psychical Research the term "spirit" stands for the personal stream of consciousness, whatever else it may ultimately be proved to imply or require; and all the facts bearing on the issue must be conceived as evidence, not necessarily as attesting the nature, or any sensible conception, of spirit. PSYCHIC PHENOMENA IN ANTIQUITY IF it had not been for our present knowledge of psychic phenomena, no matter what the explanation of them, we should be unable to make intelligible most of the stories that have come down to us from ancient times. But present knowledge makes it easy to understand their meaning. Even savages were conversant with psychic phenomena, in the form of superstitions. Savage, no less than civilized imaginations, went far beyond the facts in their efforts to explain them, went so far that science has ever been disposed to cite these imaginings as proof of feeble intellectuality, as superstitions which it has been the achievement of civilization to overthrow. Tylor's "Primitive Culture," Herbert Spencer's works, Frazer's "Belief in Immortality among Savages" and many similar works, as well as the legends of folklore, bear testimony to the existence of psychic phenomena in the earliest times, even though we make due allowance for magic, fraud, hysteria, and morbid conditions. Dreams and sorcery seem to have been the chief forms of manifestation. In dreams the savage mind seemed to find evidence of survival, and in sorcery and magical rites it seemed to find means to invoke the aid of the dead or to propitiate their anger. The study of savage beliefs will some day be deemed as important as it is interesting in this respect, but only as throwing light upon the history of psychic phenomena. In all ages these phenomena participate in the character and preconceptions of the people affected by them. Their form is influenced and shaped by the preconceptions of normal experience. Moreover, savages assumed a reality in their experiences which the modern psychic researcher does not assume. They interpreted occurrences according to superficial appearance; but we have learned from the distinction between subjective and veridical hallucinations that these may have a genuine import even when they are only quasi-material. This is particularly true of apparitions and voices. The significant fact regarding savages is that identical ideas of the soul arose among tribes that had never had any communication with one another, tribes as far separated as the Australians, the New-Zealanders, the South Sea Islanders, the Africans, and the North American Indians. Tradition cannot account for these similarities, but similar experiences can explain them. But we cannot dwell here upon savage customs. They are only the antecedents that help to explain the deviations and survivals of certain ideas and customs in more civilized times. Perhaps we should not know the significance of these primitive customs, were it not for the survival of savages on the boundaries of civilization. But when they are once known, much becomes intelligible that could not easily, if at all, be otherwise unraveled. The more civilized periods arose out of the earlier conditions and were characterized by a revolt against them, which embodied itself now in a philosophy an now in some form of purified religion. A more interesting period is that which followed savage times, in which the superstitions of earlier people were partly outgrown. The ancestorworship of China and Japan is the oldest survival of animism, which is the belief of primitive races. As culture advanced, this worship took various forms. The more intelligent classes dropped the ideas of the more ignorant and substituted respect for the memory of ancestors in place of fear of their influence as spirits. But there were other and rival beliefs. When Buddhism and Confucianism arose, the former denying the existence of spirits and the latter admitting their existence, but disregarding their importance, ancestor-worship underwent modifications. Brahminism, the philosophic upholder of immortality, substituted a supersensible conception of the soul for the quasi-material idea of earlier times. But Buddhism directly attacked Brahminism, and, by denying all survival, including personal immortality as the Brahmins understood it, tended to uproot ancestor-worship. Confucius admitted that spirits exist; but his system was primarily concerned with secular ethics and laid no stress on the doctrine of survival. In political and social problems, all of these religions compromised with animism and made concessions to it. To-day we have every conceivable form of belief among the Oriental races. Ancestor-worship, in most cases simply the spiritualism of the East, survives as the exponent of immortality. Its influence is evident in the widely extended belief of the Chinese in demoniac possession. Judaism in its early period, when it attacked idolatry, was in essence an assault on fetishism or animism. The pure theism of Moses marked an advance in a more philosophic conception of the world, and represented the same intellectual movement as that of Xenophanes and the Eleatics in Greece. In fact, it was more or less synchronous with the rise of Buddhism and other religions in the Orient, and at one period was contemporary with the intellectual development of Greek philosophy. In calling the worship which preceded theism "idolatry," modern minds, if ignorant of the meaning of animism, would mistake the nature of the movement. Animism had various forms, from the most superstitious type to an advanced stage of spiritualism, as represented in mediumship. Its most objectionable form was fetishism. A more familiar form is represented in incidents like that of the Witch of Endor, and, among the common people, in the general recognition of mediumistic phenomena, which it was to the interest of the state religion to persecute. The intellectuals of the age opposed the lower types of belief in the interest of a purer religion or ethics and even identified themselves with what we should now regard as the scientific spirit. Judaistic theism recognized the idea of God as absolute unchangeableness, while fetishism made Him or other discarnate realities altogether capricious and unmoral. In making the Divine unchangeable, the intellectuals identified God with natural law. It was only the later emergence of Christianity, with its appeal to the supernatural, which reinstated the animistic conception of the Divine. Had religion held to the notion of natural law, it might have escaped the consequences of its identification of the Divine with the irregular and capricious. The elder Judaism was virtually identical with the movement of Xenophanes in Greece, in so far as the conception of God was concerned, and represented philosophy versus superstition. The origin of Christianity was associated with psychic phenomena to a marked degree. The story of the transfiguration, and the appearance of Moses and Elias on the mount is a conspicuous instance. It does not make any difference whether it be true or not; it was told, and modern psychic research has made it entirely credible, even though we give it no other import than that of an hallucination, objective or veridical. Furthermore, there is the story of Christ and the woman at the well; and that of Christ walking on the water, which is not regarded as a physical miracle in the New Testament, for it is not his physical body, but his spirit—the revised version says apparition—that is represented as walking on the water. We have the story of the disciples on the way to Emmaus after Christ's crucifixion; the story of St. Paul's vision on the way to Damascus, when he thought he saw his Lord after the crucifixion; the speaking with tongues on the day of Pentecost; the miracles of healing, which have been repeated a thousand times since that period, in more or less striking manner; and lastly the story of the resurrection, which investigation shows was connected with the phenomena of apparitions. The very term is the same as that used for such phenomena by Homer, Herodotus, AEschylus, and Sophocles. Many theologians have held this view independently of and even previous to psychic research. In addition, we have the "spiritual body" doctrine of St. Paul and the remarkable classification of the types of mediumship, or "spiritual gifts," described by him in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth chapters of First Corinthians; the fifteenth chapter of the same book developed his doctrine of the "spiritual body" and the resurrection. What followed among the early Christian fathers, especially among the Greek philosophers who accepted Christianity, proves this genesis of Christianity in psychic phenomena. I shall have occasion to refer to them a little later. But the controversy about the resurrection between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, before the story was told of Christ, indubitably proves that Christianity simply followed the common beliefs of the age and had no antagonist except materialism and orthodox institutions interested in preserving the political fabric at the time. Those familiar with the whole field of psychic phenomena can easily recognize them in the various incidents of real or alleged spiritual healing narrated in the New Testament. Suggestion, trance, mediumship, and telepathy are apparent in the record; were it as perfect as later records are, we might discover still more evidence of this affiliation. Greek philosophy, like all similar movements in the Orient and Palestine, was a protest against the polytheism of the preceding period, with a remote relation to fetishism and animism. When it arose, it seems to have been unaware of fetishism, the worship of "stocks and stones," against which Judaism was directed. Polytheism had succeeded Fetishism, which was either forgotten or ignored without being seriously considered. But the interest in monotheism on the one hand, and in scientific tendencies on the other, evoked an attack by the materialists on polytheism and incidentally on all theistic conceptions. In its inception the movement coincided with the same tendency at that time in other countries. But the earlier philosophers did not wholly escape the influence of animism. Even the Ionian materialists, or physicists, as they are usually called, admitted the existence of souls; and the materialists like Empedocles and Democritus frankly admitted the existence of souls and their survival, one of them even avowing reincarnation. But they did not admit these agencies into causal relations with the cosmos or man. They initiated that conception of the divine which terminated in the more distinctly avowed and logical doctrine of the Epicureans, namely, that the gods, though they exist, have no causal relation to the physical world. They substituted what may be called material causes for efficient causes in the explanation of the cosmos. 'The elements or atoms were held to be the constituent material of things, explaining what things are, their qualitative, though not their temporal, origin. Later thinkers had to compromise with the idea of creative or efficient causes, which Socrates, Anaxagoras, Plato, and Aristotle to some extent acknowledged. In so far as they did so, they either bordered on the recognition of the spiritual, which the physicists and materialists excluded from their explanation of the universe; or they openly avowed this spiritual intervention. But even the earlier thinkers, supposed by most historians of philosophy to have had nothing to do with modern spiritualistic ideas, admitted them in many details, from which students of psychic research can easily reconstruct the whole doctrine. For these thinkers excluded spiritistic ideas only from the interpretation of nature; spiritual realities were held to exist side by side with material phenomena. In this acknowledgment we find the dualism of Greek thought, from which it never escaped until materialism totally denied the existence of spirit of any kind. Plato was familiar with the popular view and embodied it in his celebrated narrative about the destiny of the soul after death; but he distinctly asserted that this story was mythical. His doctrine of immortality was conceived after the analogy of our conservation of energy. He believed in reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, and often expressed himself as if the conception were the same as that of some modern believers,; but he did not assume the survival of personal identity. This theory is what connects his view with our notion of the conservation of energy, by which the form of matter in one condition is not retained in another. He was careful to repudiate the popular ideas and to maintain transmigration as a philosophical doctrine, though it is probable that, just after the death of Socrates, his emotional interest influenced him to hold to personal survival. But when he came to test it by his philosophic doctrine, he adopted a view which is not consistent with personal survival. Aristotle also believed in immortality, but he carefully distinguished between the immortality of the "rational" soul and that of the "animal" soul. He denied the latter. But he was generally so reticent about what he meant that his real doctrine is a matter of conjecture. He believed in premonitory dreams and tried to explain them away in some natural manner, but confessed that he was not sure of success. He was probably familiar with the popular spiritualism; and, if so, we may surmise that his "animal" soul was the "spiritual body" assumed by him and others to be the basis of vital phenomena, but not of consciousness; in this case the "rational" soul would be simply the stream of consciousness, selfconsciousness, which survived in some way that he could not intelligibly represent. But he was not interested in the doctrine and probably referred to it only because philosophy could not escape its consideration. Since he had to leave Athens to escape persecution, he probably veiled his own agnostic views in the distinction mentioned; it may have meant no more than Plato's transmigration, though possibly evoking less hostility. The Stoics believed in some form of immortality, perhaps adopting the view of Aristotle, though they did not always regard it as an essential belief either for explaining the world or for establishing a basis for ethics. The Epicureans admitted the existence of the soul, or "ethereal organism," "spiritual body" of St. Paul, but they denied that it survived death. They were perfectly familiar with the popular spiritualism, but rejected all its beliefs except the doctrine of an "ethereal organism," which they rather inconsistently held to be a fine form of matter, since they affirmed at the same time the indestructibility of matter and the perishability of the soul. Perhaps they preserved consistency by conceiving the "ethereal organism" as complex and assuming that all complex organisms at some time dissolved or perished. This brief outline of Greek ideas shows throughout a thread of animism or primitive spiritualism. The attempt to explain change inevitably introduced the idea of efficient causes; and with these the popular mind, relying on oracles, who were the Greek mediums, fraudulent or otherwise, and on apparitions (anastasis, the Greek term for resurrection), felt secure in defending survival after death. But the philosophic mind, which always opposes the interpretations of naive realism, could protect itself only by an agnostic or hostile attitude toward the doctrines that had their origin in the earlier form of animism. The spiritualistic interpretation of man's destiny survived side by side with these philosophic views. The two doctrines were combined in Neo-Platonism, whose chief followers tried to reconcile philosophic with popular ideas. Whether they succeeded or not it is not necessary to inquire! What we know of Plotinus and his followers shows that they took seriously the phenomena which had given rise to the popular doctrine, and tried to explain them in accordance with the abstruse idealistic metaphysics of the time and of later Christianity. There was a period between Epicureanism and Christianity in which the traces of philosophic and scientific thought were almost lost. No men of special historic note have survived in the records of their contemporaries. Antiquarians might pick up stray evidence of both philosophy and psychic phenomena in that interval, but it was Christianity that precipitated a return to the consideration of the facts. Philosophy had gone to seed. The intellectuals had rejected facts as superstition and had wallowed in speculation and imagination until respectable orthodoxy could do nothing else. The common people again, as usual, raised the issue by an appeal to facts, and occasioned a revival of interest in the popular ideas which Greek philosophy had repudiated just as Old Testament Judaism had rejected animism. This revival manifested itself in Neo-Platonism. Its founder was Ammonius Saccas and its chief representatives Plotinus, Porphyry, and Jamblichus. These men lived in the second and into the third century after Christ. The historians of philosophy say little or nothing about their mysticism, and give an account only of their conclusions, which have no meaning apart from the facts that determined them. The Neo-Platonists were well versed in all the practices of spiritualism; indeed one modern author of great learning maintains that they knew more about it and were in this respect more rational than the moderns, such as judge Edmunds, Andrew Jackson Davis and their followers. Plotinus went into trances, about which little or no information is given us by the orthodox historians of philosophy. Jamblichus gives minute accounts of the forms of psychic phenomena, especially phantasms And materializations, which he, more rational than modern spiritualists, identifies with apparitions. Apollonius of Tyana was more or less an adept in the subject, though, despite acknowledged good traits of character, he passed among skeptics as an impostor. No doubt some of these men did not report their facts in such a way as to escape the skepticism roused by methods of deception, which existed then as they do today. But the ensemble of incidents reported by men of intelligence created a presumption that where there was so much smoke there must have been some fire. This is evident in the essay of Plutarch on "The Cessation of the Oracles." Many of the stories bear the marks of imperfect observation; for this, and for fraud, Plutarch allows. From his account, any one familiar with proved modern psychic phenomena can recognize, after proper discounts, the existence of the same phenomena then as to-day. The author of "The Apocatastasis," a classical scholar in one of the American colleges, who went over the whole subject thoroughly, calls attention to the trial of Apuleius for "witchcraft" before a Roman judge on account of his experiments with an epileptic boy. Isodorus, the philosopher, describes a woman who poured water into a glass vessel and therein beheld phantasms representing future events; this is an instance of crystal gazing. The author just quoted, after canvassing the whole of antiquity upon the subject, summarizes the phenomena in the following manner: "The methods of intercourse between the two worlds and of prying into futurity were by means of oracles, omens, dreams, the lot, astrology, magical divination (the ancient mesmerism), aided by magical statues, tripods, rings, spheres, water, mirrors; and necromancy proper, or the evocation of and direct conversation with the spirits of the dead." He then catalogues all the types of phenomena in relation to modern records. It is a remarkable list. "Physical Lights, both fixed and moved. Halo, encircling the medium. Spectra, luminous, or otherwise visible. Self-visible spirits. Sounds, cries, voices in the air, trumpets, speaking spectres (materializations), musical intonations, musical instruments played. Physiological Trance. Magnetic sleep. Magnetic insensibility. Psychological or Physico-psychological. Spirit speaking, spirit writing. Speaking unknown languages ('speaking with tongues,' echolalia). Answering mental questions. Clairvoyance, in relation to both time and space. Magnetization, by the eye, the hand, music, or water. Spirits answering questions through mediums or without mediums." The author might have added to this list the reading of the contents of sealed letters, of which he reports a case or two. It matters not whether the phenomena were genuine or not. Some of them represent types of occurrences which have good credentials in modern times, though others remain to be proved. Certain physical phenomena still have to prove their claims, but many of the mental type, though they belong to abnormal psychology, have their genuineness established. 'The same author quotes from Plutarch a remarkable statement which shows not only critical acumen on the part of that intelligent Roman, but also a distinct anticipation of the theory of interfusion of the minds of the medium and the spirit in the delivery of messages. It occurs in the account of his observations in connection with the Pythian oracle: "If the verses of the Pythia are inferior to those of Homer, we need not suppose that Apollo is the author of them. He merely gives the impulse whereby each prophetess is moved according to her peculiar disposition. For if the responses were to be given by writing instead of speaking, I do not think the letters (grammata) supposed to be written by the god would be found fault with because they lacked the calligraphy of royal epistles;—for the voice, the intonation, the diction, and the metre, are not the god's but the woman's. He only causes visions and supplies light to the soul in relation to the future." There is evidence in modern investigations that a foreign stimulus is always present to give rise to subconscious recollections and interpretations and that the phenomena are not always, if they are ever, pure invention by the psychic. There is the intermingling of two minds. Transmission of thought is not merely the process of delivering messages verbatim; it is never free from subconscious modification by the medium through which it comes. In the passage from Plutarch we have an observation which is confirmed by modern experiment. Plutarch lived in the first century of the Christian era; his work on this subject therefore coincided with, and may have been influenced by, the new interest created by Christianity in psychic phenomena. But from this time on, the subject was more or less confined, so far as favorable notice of the facts is concerned, to the Christian Fathers. The rising conflict between paganism and the new creed tended to discredit the oracles, one side opposing them because they did not favor Christianity, and the other unable to defend them from the philosophic point of view. Christianity had control of the situation for the long period of its domination; the works of the Fathers are full of stories of the continuance of miracles, though on the whole they rapidly declined in number after the crucifixion, or at least after the end of the first century. On the whole neither this period nor that of the Greek and Roman oracles can be quoted except as evidence that better accredited phenomena in modern times had their antecedents in antiquity; and if we do not reject them as wholly idle tales, it will be because we have proved the existence of the supernormal in the present age. IT is a curious fact that most investigators connected with the English society for Psychical Research have associated modern spiritualism with the Fox sisters almost exclusively, though conceding, with Mr. Andrew Lang, that it has its roots far back in the earliest history of man. There is little excuse for this narrowness of view, though there is no doubt that the Fox sisters gave the subject a popular vogue which it did not have until their experiences excited attention. Modern spiritualism really originated in the work of Swedenborg. The phenomena of Swedenborg were not physical, as were many of those alleged by the Fox sisters. They were of the mental type, consisting of visions with his own interpretation of them—illustrations of the type now called pictographic. While such phenomena have been casually reported in literature ever since the time of the Christian fathers, these reports were given little credence until similar reports by Swedenborg made them seem more credible. He was a man of good education and creditable probity, who never exploited his powers as did the charlatans of the Middle Ages. He was born in 1688 and died in 1772. These dates placed him before the time of the great revolution in philosophic thought brought about by Immanuel Kant. He was educated at the University of Upsala and became a civil engineer. He made himself famous in almost every department of science, and even anticipated Kant and Laplace, according to Grieve, in the nebular hypothesis. He also suggested a flying-machine and produced a model which he knew, and said, would not work, but which he thought would suggest the principles on which such a machine might be constructed. His inventions in other fields were numerous and successful. But we hear less of them than of his philosophical works in the sphere of religion and real or alleged supernormal psychology. "hen he was in London he claimed to have obtained by supernormal means information of a fire in Copenhagen. There was reported of him also the clairvoyant discovery of a lost paper, which strongly impressed Kant. But his "revelations" appealed to more minds than did these trivial supernormal phenomena. These revelations purported to come from discarnate spirits, to reveal the nature of the next life, and to give instruction on all religious matters of importance to human kind. Swedenborg's works abound with evidence that much of his material was influenced by his own mind and its stores of reading, though his diary records the experiences in a form more free from interpretation. The impressiveness of his work affected Immanuel Kant in his early life sufficiently to induce him to write his "Dreams of a Ghost Seer" ("Traume eines Geistessehers"), in which he weighed the speculative arguments for and against spirit communication, leaving the question unsettled. Some writers see in this work an ironical treatment of the problem; but there are too many statements seriously recognizing the possible validity of spiritistic claims to justify such a judgment except to men who are wholly unfamiliar with the evidence for the subnormal. Kant, however, ceased to have interest in the subject, though it was later revived, as the works of Hegel and Schopenhauer show. Both of these philosophers became convinced of the existence of the phenomena; but their attitude toward this subject is disregarded in most discussions of their philosophic systems. Scientific materialism arose as a consequence of the renaissance of science which began with Copernicus. Men had a new interest in nature and the physical universe. They had long been fed on tradition and speculative metaphysics, and the reactions, as shown, both in skepticism and the revival of materialistic tendencies, is apparent in the agnosticism of Kant and in all subsequent philosophy. Swedenborg made an attempt to counteract this materialistic trend of things, though he, perhaps, did not feel the impulse of the materialistic movement so strongly as did many others who had followed in the wake of Cartesian thought. Whether they felt this trend or not, however, believers in immortality were supplied by the method of Swedenborg with scientific evidence. This method was an appeal to facts and to communication with the dead for evidence of another life, and it even went so far as to map out that life. Whether Swedenborg adequately met the demands of scientific method is another matter. There is no doubt that too much was made to depend on his mere probity and his authority as a scientific man and that his system soon developed into the same kind of dogmatism as that of Christian theology. The experiment of continued communication with the dead was not kept up, except as it was practised by people who had abandoned the orthodoxies of both philosophy and religion. Despite its defects, however, the method of Swedenborg represents the right conception of the problem. Materialism and skepticism acknowledged nothing but normal experience for regulating the beliefs of mankind; and that experience does not attest survival. It may stimulate hope and faith, but these sources of belief give no such assurance as the scientific mind requires. With the new criterion of truth set up by scientific investigation, came an increased demand for better evidence for survival than natural science on the one hand and religion the other were capable of supplying. Swedenborg anticipated the method by which this evidence can be obtained; but his followers, like Christian theologians, settled down on the authority of their master and regarded spiritual revelation as closed. Scientific experiment and investigation had to wait another century for recognition, except as the problem was kept alive by sporadic instances of mediumship and other phenomena outside the limits of science, philosophy, theology and even Swedenborgianism. These instances found favor mostly among the common people, but they were ridiculed by the respectable adherents of other beliefs. Events may have justified this attitude of mind on the part of the educated; at any rate these occurrences occasioned no such interest as did the movement initiated by the Fox sisters. The interest in spiritualism after the time of Swedenborg was kept alive by the performances of Mesmer and by the investigators who followed him. Among German authorities of note who investigated the subject, Jung Stilling, a man of university education and standing, is the most important. Contemporary with him were Keiser, Wienholt, Fischer, Kluge, and Baron von Reichenbach; the last, a scientific man of some attainments, experimented and wrote much upon the subject. We cannot go into any notice of his work, and refer to it only to indicate that the phenomena would not have received so much attention, had they been merely sporadic. This attention was centered on mesmerism or animal magnetism, now called hypnotism, an artificial method of inducing trance, which often resulted in supernormal manifestations and mediumistic phenomena. Among the most noted of the somnambules of the period was Frederika Hauffe, called, from her birthplace, the Seer of Prevorst. The poet and physician Kerner published a life of her after her death, which was prior to 1829. Kerner had also another case of which he published some account; but there is no space to discuss these cases. They illustrate the usual phenomena, however explained, and were no doubt accompanied by hysteria, the usual concomitant of such manifestations, but they are of interest as demonstrating that the modern movement began outside of America, and long before 1848 Swedenborg aroused some interest in France, but he had no sectarian following there of any special note. It was Mesmer who created the interest manifested there. His performances in Paris soon after he moved there in 1878 excited great interest, and resulted, as did somnambulism in Germany, in the revival of supernormal phenomena transcending hypnosis. Deleuze was the chief representative of the movement in this period, but he suspended his judgment on spiritistic phenomena. He was interested in the naturalistic interpretation of somnambulism and clairvoyance, though conceding that there were facts which required further, investigation. He had some controversy on the subject with one Billot, who defended the spiritistic theory. Cahagnet aroused some interest, but, as he had no scientific training, his work was without authority; he seemed to have experimented much in various directions and accepted the spiritistic theory. The materialistic tendencies of France, however, after the expulsion of the Huguenots by Louis XIV, created an atmosphere of skepticism about everything supernatural or savoring of spirits, so that the first inclination of all inquirers was toward what they were pleased to call "naturalistic" explanations. Hence spiritualism made little or no progress until long after 1848, In England mesmerism aroused some interest. Elliotson and Esdaille successfully practised it and also met with supernormal experiences. Another student of mesmerism was Braid, but he encountered few, if any, supernormal phenomena. On the whole, spiritualism, at least in so far as public and literary notice are concerned, made little headway in England until after the episode of the Fox sisters. Though the phenomena are very old, as we have seen in the foregoing account, it was the rappings of the Fox sisters that created a world-wide interest in the facts. The manifestations were accompanied by no mesmeric nor hypnotic phenomena. America knew and cared little about mesmerism in the scientific sense. It was chiefly occupied in the organization of a new social and political system, and in the accumulation of wealth. Spiritual interests were confined largely to the orthodox in religion. Consequently, scientific and skeptical people were not fired with interest in the immortality of the soul. The movement broke out in a simple agricultural community, wholly unacquainted with the philosophic and scientific problems of Europe. It boldly proclaimed itself as spiritualism—a word whose history is honorable, but whose meaning has degenerated into a term of contempt with a creed based on certain physical phenomena said to have originated in the presence of the Fox children. These phenomena began in Hydesville, New York. The history of the occurrences is well told in the work of Mrs. Underhill, a sister of the two chief mediums concerned. Her account is a good one and there is no reason to question it, though we may not fully share her enthusiastic interest in the events. She, with many others, thought that they betokened the rise of a new religion, unaware that they only repeated phenomena associated with the early history of Christianity. The enthusiasm was natural; for these people felt that they had found proof, to take the place of the uncertainties of faith. I am convinced that the abuse which has been heaped upon the movement has obscured the value of some of the phenomena—value not necessarily as supernormal occurrences, but as cases of interest to abnormal psychology. It was the confession of Margaret Fox that deprived the movement of both its scientific and its religious interest. She confessed to making the raps with her toe joints. It mattered not that there were other and mental phenomena which were well-attested, and that there was testimony that raps had occurred in localities where action of the toe joints could not be effective. The confession of fraud sufficed to rob the case forever of scientific interest. Other forces also contributed to nullify the importance of the phenomena. A religion dependent on raps and on proved defects in moral character was not likely long to survive. It would have been wiser to leave the significance of the facts to science and to allow religion to obtain its credentials from ethical and spiritual ideals of another type. But the consolation obtained from alleged proof where only faith had previously existed—was too much for uneducated people to withstand, and their emotional reaction discolored the facts. The confession of fraud left no room for apologies; no intelligent person could afterwards feel or express an interest in the phenomena. The spiritualists who endeavored to defend their proteges only weakened their cause and brought it into deserved contempt. There can be no doubt in the mind, of the present writer that the phenomena of the Fox sisters never received their deserved investigation; but the spiritualists did not take a course that would invite the interest of intelligent people. They succeeded only in giving the word spiritualism a meaning that has made it almost impossible to use it in a favorable sense among respectable people. It is worth remarking, however, that all important movements of the kind have originated among common people. The intellectuals have never originated an important ethical or spiritual reform. They have supported art and refinement, but have never founded a religion which rules over the destinies of civilization. Such a religion has always originated among the common people, who have no prejudices against nature nor in favor of aesthetics as the first condition of truth or virtue. This is the excuse for the interest shown in the Fox phenomena. They were intelligible to common understandings, though they did not conform to the more refined conceptions of educated people. It is true that even the actuality of the raps and physical phenomena reported in the case have no bearing on the explanation that aroused enthusiasm and gave consolation. But physical phenomena, like the alleged miracles of Christ, have always attracted the untutored mind; one can therefore understand the interest excited by the movement even when one does not share it. The spiritualists have never made a sustained effort to attract the attention of scientific men to their phenomena or their religion. Their performances are little better than vaudeville and their religion, as an organized affair, little better than a cloak to protect them against the invasions of the police. Recent developments have somewhat modified this situation, but many followers are interested in neither ethics nor religion, but only in a show. Christ deplored the fact that his followers cared more for his miracles than for his ethical teachings; and mankind have ever since justified this rebuke. If spiritualism had organized ethics and practical life and laid less stress on its phenomena, it might long ago have won the world's respect. All religions are judged by their external appearances; if they are vulgar in their appearances and have no redeeming features in ethical and spiritual life, they will not attract the intellectuals. But the spiritualist movement was restored to a measure of respectability by judge Edmunds and Andrew Jackson Davis. Judge Edmunds was a lawyer of sufficient ability to become one of the judges in the supreme court of New York State. His first psychic experiences came through his own daughter; they were private and never exploited as were those of the Fox sisters. His two volumes have great interest for psychology, whatever explanation we give to his data; but he made the mistake of laying little or no stress on supernormal phenomena, giving the prominence to alleged communications from Francis Bacon and Emmanuel Swedenborg. He offered no proof that these philosophic and other revelations came from the source ascribed to them. The same criticism holds true of the work of Andrew Jackson Davis. Both his defenders and his opponents misjudged the facts: his defenders exaggerated Davis's ignorance and his critics exaggerated his knowledge. His work has at least great psychological interest, but his investigation of facts never pursued a method that would lead to convincing interpretations. The author of the "Apocatastasis," mentioned above,* took the right view of the facts. He thought it probable that the phenomena were spiritistic, but he insisted that this conclusion was not a basis for accepting the teachings which the communications contained. He drew the important distinction between the origin and the validity of the contents of the communications. It is one thing to prove that a statement comes from a spirit, but it is another and very different thing to prove that it is true and valid. This distinction is constantly forgotten. A man may exhibit supernormal faculties, but these do not give him insight into reality. Moreover, he may get messages from spirits; but the ability of a spirit to send a message does not guarantee veracity of the sender, any more than the conversation of your neighbor over a telephone assures you of the correctness of his statements. The value of a statement is not determined by its source. It was the mistake of the admirers of judge Edmunds and Andrew Jackson Davis—a mistake shared by these men themselves—to assume that the evidence that spirits were back of the phenomena furnished also a reason for belief in' the contents of the messages. Ignorance, impersonation, confusion of messages, as well as the coloring given by the medium, offer objections to the passive acceptance of messages as true. These facts should have been realized by all who were connected with the cases. It was perhaps pardonable that few or none saw the difficulties involved, because Christian thought, in its whole history, had been based on vindication of the source of teaching as a sufficient criterion of its validity. It required later reflection on he consequences of evolution to discover that the value of facts is established by function, not origin. It would be interesting to follow in detail the history of modern spiritualism through all its vicissitudes, but this would require more than one volume. I have devoted attention to it merely to emphasize the fact that its origin is not recent, but that its phenomena are as old as the human race. Only the scientific investigation of it is modern. This investigation would not have been undertaken, had not Christianity, like paganism, begun to show signs of decay, and had not the triumphs of physical science weakened the faith of mankind and developed an exclusive interest in physical life. Whatever faults the spiritual customs of Christianity had, they always kept alive the serious view of nature and human life, and saved civilization from debauchery in the period following the break up of paganism. That was achievement enough; but had it adjusted itself to the advances of science, it might have held the reins of power still longer. THE SOCIETIES FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH PSYCHIC phenomena finally excited such a world-wide interest that they compelled the attention of scientific men. The phenomena might possibly have remained unnoticed much longer, had it not been for their occurrence in respectable families, sometimes to men and women of intelligence and training. But interest even among intelligent people continued for some time without being strong enough to organize any effort to apply scientific methods to an investigation of the facts. At last, however, a few men concluded that it was the scandal of science that the allegations of centuries had not been taken up and investigated. The persistence of the phenomena, and of the claims for the supernormal, was a perpetual challenge to science; at last this challenge was accepted. John Addington Symonds states in his letters, with a half-sneer at the folly of it, that Professor Sidgwick of Cambridge University was investigating mediums as early as 1867 with the hope of finding evidence of survival after death. This date was fifteen years before the organization of the Society for Psychical Research. The experiences of the Reverend W. Stainton Moses were among the chief incentives to the formation of the society. These experiences were confirmed by other sporadic, remarkable incidents among intelligent people, such as Lord Brougham, Cotter Morison, Andrew Lang, and Sir William Crookes. The Reverend Stainton Moses had been educated at Oxford University and was for a long time a clergyman of the Church of England; but during his intercourse with some skeptical members of his own congregation he was persuaded by them to investigate spiritualism'. He found nothing at first; but he finally developed automatic writing himself, and became convinced by it that the claims of the spiritualist were correct. His unquestioned integrity left intelligent people no choice but to investigate the matter. He was personally known to Professor Sidgwick, Mr. Myers, Edmund Gurney, and others of the same standing. With his case and others challenging science, the men just named organized, in 1882, the English Society for Psychical Research, and obtained the cooperation of other prominent men. Prof. (now Sir) William F. Barrett, however, was probably the chief instigator in the matter. He had independently and individually been investigating the phenomena, especially those of mind-reading, or telepathy, for years, and had brought the matter to the attention of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which would have nothing to do with it. He continued to urge the subject among scientific men, however, until he saw the fruit of his interest and work in the organization of the Society. He was himself one of the vice-presidents in the organization, Professor Henry Sidgwick being the president. Professor Balfour Stewart was also one of the vicepresidents. With them were associated Arthur James Balfour, M. P., Richard Hutton, and the Honorable Roden Noel. The council of the Society was composed of Frederick W. H. Myers, Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore, Charles C. Massey, and others not so well-known in America. These names guaranteed a scientific treatment of the subject. Before this time the Philosophic Society had investigated the phenomena and published a favorable report on them; but its report had not been received by the scientific world with the respect it deserved. The present Society, however, had more than a temporary interest in the subject and was determined to pursue the investigation until some light was thrown upon the phenomena. 'Sir William F. Barrett read the first paper on Thought Reading at the first meeting of the Society, and Professor Sidgwick read his presidential address. A draft of the purposes of the Society was published as a circular; the objects of study included phenomena purporting to represent the influence of "one mind on another apart from any generally recognized mode of perception" (afterward called telepathy), hypnotism, clairvoyance, the experiments of Reichenbach, apparitions, haunted houses, the physical phenomena.of spiritualism, and the collection of existing materials bearing on the history of these subjects. This was an extensive program, but it has been carried on now for more than thirty-five years. The publications of the Society have consisted of a Journal issued monthly and a volume of "Proceedings" issued annually, often in parts distributed through the year. In 1884, two years after the organization of the English Society, an American Society was formed, with Mr. N. D. C. Hodges as secretary. Professor Simon Newcomb was its first president. Its vice-presidents were Professor, now President, G. Stanley Hall of Clark University, Professor George S. Fullerton of the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Edward C. Pickering of the Harvard College Observatory, Dr. Henry P. Bowditch of the Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Charles S. Minot of the Harvard Medical School. At the sixth meeting of the Society, on January 11, 1887, Dr. Richard Hodgson of London, England, was elected secretary. The Society had on its membership list a large number of scientific men. It issued annual reports which, in the course of five years, made a volume. But by this time membership fell off and interest declined, perhaps because the public did not find the expected progress made. The American Society was therefore abandoned and reorganized as an American branch of the English Society. Dr. Richard Hodgson was continued as its Secretary and remained in that office until his death in 1905 A year before the death of Dr. Hodgson, the present author, having resigned his position in Columbia University to recover his health, resolved to organize an independent American Society, with the object of finally merging the American branch with it when the financial support of the work justified it. It was determined not to compete in any way with either the English Society or its American branch. The plan was to make Dr. Hodgson its secretary, as he had expressed his willingness to merge the branch with the new American Society. To effect this merger, effort was concentrated on raising the sum of $25,000 as a fund to guarantee preliminary organization. Just as this money was secured, Dr. Hodgson died. The present author refused to organize the new society on his own responsibility alone, conditioning it on either the cooperation of the English body or the dissolution of the American branch. The latter alternative was adopted by the English Society and the new American Society was organized with Dr. James, H. Hyslop as its Secretary. This was in May, 1906. Its publications did not begin until January, 1907. There are organizations of some sort in both France and Italy under the auspices of scientific men, but their constitutions are not known to the present author. The Psychological Institute in Paris was founded to include psychical research in its field of inquiry. These societies are intended to give scientific character and respectability to the investigation of unusual phenomena bearing on the problems of mind and its survival of bodily death. The prejudice against spiritualism was so strong at the outset that its objects had either to be disguised or ignored. Telepathy, dousing, hypnotism and various phenomena which present no superficial evidence of the intervention of discarnate spirits received the first attention. After the supernormal in some form had been proved, the credentials of spiritualism came under notice. In the course of the work, most of the leading members who have conducted personal investigations have become convinced that man survives bodily death; but it has been regarded as not always good policy to avow the conviction with any missionary zeal. Hence conviction on the point appears to the public to be less strong than it actually is. There are enough questions still unanswered to suggest caution on the subject, especially on aspects of it as yet wholly uninvestigated. But the existence of supernormal phenomena has been so well established by the work of the several groups of investigators that men are fast coming to acknowledge that the subject can no longer be evaded or ridiculed as it was at the outset. Psychic research may now be regarded as having proved its right to a place among the investigations of science. As its first work, the Society undertook experiments on telepathy or thought transference with some success. But some doubt was ultimately cast on two series of the experiments, those with the McCreery sisters and those between a Mr. Blackburn and a Mr. Smith. The McCreery sisters confessed that they had used signals in certain experiments, a circumstance which gave the skeptic opportunity to decry the whole work. But the experimenters soon showed that they had attached no value to any experiments save those in which signalling was impossible. The girls insisted also that they had not used a code in those instances which had seemed most impressive. In the other case, as Mr. Blackburn was proved to be a liar or at least wholly untrustworthy as a witness, even in his own confession of fraud, his testimony even in the latter case could not be accepted at its face value. There were additional and better results on which to base the claims of telepathy; something of the kind seems certainly to be a tenable hypothesis. It is true that since its origin, the meaning of the term has been enlarged to cover many and various processes; consequently all the claims made regarding it have been viewed with suspicion. Telepathy, in its original meaning, was limited to the transference of present states of consciousness; but, for the sake of combatting the evidence for the existence of discarnate spirits, the definition was extended to include subconscious acquisition of memories from others, by a selective process on the part of the person who received the thoughts thus transmitted. No scientific evidence for this theory has been advanced, though there are coincidences which might well suggest it. This, however, is not the place for discussing in detail the meaning of telepathy. Strictly speaking, the term denotes the transmission of thought from one mind to another independently of the recognized channels of sense, or, as the present writer prefers to define it, in order not to suggest any known process, telepathy is a coincidence between the thoughts of two minds, which cannot be explained by chance or normal sense-perception. The facts which it includes are not evidence of the existence of discarnate spirits. This definition leaves undetermined the nature of the process and the directness of transmission. Not all of these qualifications were made in the first stages of the investigation; but they were usually implied. It was the object of the Society to ascertain whether there were any supernormal phenomena that would not excite the antagonism which spiritualists always evoked by their claims. It was apparent that the proof of anything like telepathy would involve the possibility of communications with the dead, given the actual survival of personal consciousness. This method of approach made the hypothesis appear less objectionable to the scientific skeptic. In the course of several years of investigation, two types of phenomena, with perhaps a third, made something like telepathy seem plausible. These were spontaneous coincidences between two persons' thoughts and experimental coincidences, in which the conditions of the result could be regulated and the phenomena repeated more or less at will. The third type consisted of apparitions; since these naturally suggested the agency of spirits, believers in telepathy were interested in attempting to prove the adequacy of that process as an explanation. I shall give a few illustrations of the phenomena. I adduce them, not as a scientific proof of thought transference, but only as illustrations of the kind of cases which were for many years collected, and which, whatever the explanation, very frequently occur. In "Phantasms of the Living," the authors record the following incident. It is partly experimental and partly spontaneous. A gentleman willed that a lady who lived at some distance from him should leave the part of that house in which she was at the time, should go to her bedroom, and should remove a portrait from her dressing-table. When the gentleman next saw her, she told him that, at the time in question, she had felt strongly impelled to go up to her room and remove something from her dressingtable. She did remove an article, though it was not the portrait. In this case, the man's act was experimental; the lady's act, since she did not know that the experiment was being made, was spontaneous. The following, in the form of a dream by the percipient, is spontaneous on both sides: "I dreamt I was looking out of a window, when I saw father driving a Spids sledge, followed in another by my brother. They had to pass a crossroads, on which another traveller was driving very fast, also in a sledge with one horse. Father seemed to drive on without observing the other fellow, who would without fail have driven over father if he had not made his horse rear, so that I saw my father drive under the hoofs of the horse. Every moment I expected the horse to fall down and crush him. I called out 'Father! Father!' and woke in great fright. The next morning my father and brother returned. I said to him, 'I am so glad to see you arrive quite safely, as I had such a dreadful dream about you last night.' My brother said, 'You could not have been in greater fright about him than I was,' and then related to me what had happened, which tallied exactly with my dream. My brother in his fright, when he saw the feet of the horse over father's head, called out, 'Oh, father, father!'" Thousands of such coincidences have occurred, many of them under conditions and with confirmation that seem to prove the reality of telepathy. It is difficult to believe that they are due to chance. But I am not concerned to prove anything by these incidents, which are only illustrations of what, if performed under proper conditions, would be regarded as proof of the supernormal transfer of mental states or pictures. The Society carried on experiments for a long time and in large numbers, besides recording as evidence spontaneous incidents as good as or better than that quoted. It felt justified in maintaining, despite the objections of a critical scientific world, that the existence of telepathy has been proved. Of course, part of the difficulty in carrying conviction arose from the lack of an exact definition of telepathy or thought transference. If the Society had held to a negative conception of the term, assuming neither its value as an explanation nor the directness of transfer between the two minds, it might have aroused less criticism. But it and the public used the term as if it explained certain occurrences, and as if it necessarily implied direct transmission. We have no evidence to justify these conclusions; we proved only the existence of certain coincidences not due to chance nor to normal sense-perception, and not evidence of the discarnate. The controversy with the spiritualists, however, gave the term in relation to spiritistic theories a meaning that it should never have had. Two other types of occurrence, however, made it necessary to ask whether spiritual beings exist: namely, apparitions and mediumistic phenomena. The Society then began to investigate phantasms or apparitions; the two volumes published on that subject, together with the volume entitled "A Census of Hallucinations," I announced the unanimous conclusion of the committee that these apparitions were not due to chance. The committee regarded this conclusion as proved, regardless of the explanation, which many assumed to be telepathy. As the census was limited to phantasms of the living or of persons at the moment of death, the hypothesis had its plausibility. Apparitions of the dead were not considered in this report. Mediumistic phenomena strengthened the case of the spiritualists. Soon after the announcement of the conclusions regarding telepathy and apparitions, the Society discovered Mrs. Piper, through Professor William James, who had reported on her phenomena as early as in 1885. In 1887, Dr. Richard Hodgson became acquainted with the case; in the course of eighteen years of work with Mrs. Piper he, together with some other members of the Society, became convinced of the spiritistic theory. After Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall, Mrs. Holland and others exhibited the same type of phenomena. The American Society has investigated Mrs. Smead, Mrs. Quentin, Mrs. Chenoweth and a few others. There can be no doubt, whatever the explanation, that supernormal information has been obtained through them. In the meantime other fields of inquiry were opened. The original Society unsuccessfully tried to repeat the experiments of Reichenbach. Sir William Barrett spent much time in investigating dousing, and issued two reports, in which he announced the conclusion that the finding of water by the divining-rod is possible. Hypnotic phenomena were to some extent investigated, particularly with a view to inducing conditions for proving telepathy; some remarkable experiments were performed by Edmund Gurney. In the course of thirty years of work, the Society collected an immense amount of data, which leaves the scientist no excuse for ignoring the immemorial claims of a supernormal element in human experience. The American Society has been handicapped in its work by the need of funds and a laboratory for scientific work, and of cooperators in the field. It has succeeded in raising an endowment of $160,000 for its work, but the income from this, together with membership fees, guarantees only its publications and the running expenses of its office. It has made no experiments in telepathy, and has had only limited opportunity to investigate spontaneous phenomena. But it has managed to do some work in the mediumistic field, and maintains its "journal" and "Proceedings" with such material as it can secure from personal reports and the experiments with a few psychics. It has not yet exercised any such influence over the public as has the English Society. Academic and scientific support, probably on account of the avowed spiritistic sympathies of its secretary, has been weak. The work, however, is well established, and probably in the future will not be neglected. Enough has been accomplished to make scientific neglect of the problem inexcusable, although much work remains to be done, to overcome prejudices of our materialistic age. When the fact is commonly recognized that psychic research is concerned not with a metaphysical theory, but with the collection of facts which may establish a great truth, the bias of the scientific world will be overcome. The Societies have done much to further this progress; and it is probable that the immediate future will see the barriers of prejudice broken down, with the serious investigation of questions more far reaching than those in any field of physical science. MOST unsophisticated people have no difficulty in believing in a life after death, especially if they have been taught this belief in infancy. In that period of simple trust in their superiors, children will accept what they are taught, and in most instances, the beliefs adopted at that time remain stable. In many people the beliefs formed in childhood cannot be shaken; in others, if the old beliefs are destroyed, the change proves disastrous. The effect of the change, however, depends on the importance which the belief holds in the economy of the personal life. If it be the one belief that has organized all a man's hopes and ideals, any rude shock given it will demolish the whole fabric of character. The immortality of the soul is so central to the hopes of many people, especially of the uneducated, that they will cling to it against all odds and resist all argument to give it up. Taken in with the mother's milk, so to speak, and organizing about it all the fundamental interests of life, it will either resist argument of any kind or yield to it only with the surrender of human ideals. There are many, of course, who can shift the pivot of interest to ideals of the present life. But they have some ability to think, and have sufficiently strong will to shake off the sense of dependence which characterizes the child. Many people remain children all their lives; it is they who suffer most from the shock of change of belief. But those who grow to independence of judgment may readily stand the shock of skepticism and do so whenever they can substitute another interest for the one that was lost. This class, however, represents the minority of the human race, and usually comprises its leaders. Some of them boldly adopt skepticism and its consequences. Others attempt to justify their primitive beliefs in the name of philosophy. The unsophisticated classes will follow one or another of these leaders according to their temperaments. If they cling to the interests which have centered about immortality, they accept that belief on faith, or authority. But if they are rebellious or conscious of the real difficulties in believing it, they doubt it or give it up. 'The one consideration which determines the attitude of mind towards this and all other beliefs is the criterion of reality. To the unsophisticated mind this criterion is sense-perception; even when it believes in what transcends sensation, it tries to conceive this assumed reality as still like that of sense in all but constant accessibility to perception. This conception, of course, goes to show that the unsophisticated easily abandon their most natural standard of reality. But they cannot give a consistent account of their procedure; and are at the mercy of those who rigidly insist on sense-perception as the test of reality. It is characteristic of the scientific mind to accept this same criterion of truth; in this respect it is like the unsophisticated mind. But they differ in the greater tenacity with which the scientific mind consciously clings to the standard. It is true that scientific men also readily abandon this standard for one which acknowledges realities transcending sense-perception—for example, atoms, ions, electrons, ether; but these men differ from the unsophisticated in adopting the maxim that all provable truth rests upon sense-perception. To them provable truth is what they can make another person believe by reproducing in him sensations which compel belief. The unsophisticated mind has no such rigid standard of evidence. It accepts as subjectively true much that does not appeal to sense. If the mind can see the truth for itself it will not require proof in sensory processes; but if it cannot see the truth without external proof, such objective evidence requires sense-perception. Herein lies the whole difference between the unsophisticated and the scientific mind. For uncertainty, according to the scientific mind, attaches to every belief or statement which cannot vouch for itself in terms of sense-perception. It may be true, but it is not provable, unless represented in sense-pictures or experiences. Science may accept facts not directly represented in sensation, but they must be logically involved in what sensation attests. The final test for science is some sensation constant or easily produced, under proper conditions, which will enforce the conclusion. The unsophisticated mind, however, does not consciously abandon sense-perception as its standard of truth. It simply has not analyzed the processes which determine conviction. There are many degrees between these two extremes. The half scientific and half unsophisticated mind will combine the standards of belief in all sorts of ways; and it is in this intermediate class that all the perplexities arise. The scientific mind that does not care for consequences, moral or otherwise, can accept without compunction or remorse the limits which sense-perception prescribes to belief. But ethical minds, less pugnacious and more sensitive, halt before accepting the guidance of skepticism, and struggle with might and main to save their ideals and beliefs from the corrosion of doubt. I have stated the case with some care, allowing for the criticism always made against wide generalizations. It would be easier and perhaps would satisfy certain skeptical minds, if I asserted that the test of all truth is sense-perception as that is naively understood. Those who wish to perplex the naive mind may make this contention feeling secure that unsophisticated persons will not contest it. But while it is true that the test of reality is always sense-perception, it is true with a qualification. This qualification is, that sensation is not so simple a matter as the skeptic would like us to believe. Besides simple or pure sensations there are other mental states, which we usually represent by the term judgment. This term was rendered necessary by the existence of illusions. While an illusion is in fact an error of judgment or inference, it is so closely connected with sense-perception that our normal habit is to represent sense-perception as needing correction by judgment. The meaning of sensation is therefore limited to the simple occurrence of reaction upon external stimulus through one of the sensory end-organs; so defined it is not a complete standard of truth at all, but the elemental datum which gives rise to knowledge. Processes of judgment on constant and variable sensory experiences enable us to ascertain the meaning of things much more accurately than do the separate sensations. The naive, uncritical mind does not go beyond the most elementary use of judgment. It discovers few illusions and ignores those which it does discover. The critical scientific mind endeavors to find unity in a variable experience, as better evidence of truth than that found in unorganized experience. In studying the question of a future life, the unsophisticated mind follows authority or its wishes, or, if it relies on experience at all, accepts what the more critical mind resolves into illusions and hallucinations. The primitive savage accepted dreams and apparitions as satisfactory proof of another life, thus relying on real or apparent sensory data. But when the critical or philosophical mind approached the problem, difficulties arose, which obliged the belief in a future life to seek refuge in some transcendental philosophy or be abandoned. In all countries where philosophic habits of mind arose, one of the first dogmas questioned was that of the immortality of the soul; with the growth of materialism the doubt thus raised was strengthened. Previous teaching had maintained that matter and spirit are two independent realities, and that spirit survives death. But philosophy distrusted the idea of two independent substances or realities, especially if one of them seemed to interfere with the fixed order of nature. There is no doubt that primitive believers in spirits thought them capricious and as mischievous as any power over nature might be. Those who observed certain regularities in the world, certain fixed laws, either had to deny any interference with them or to assign to spirit a place in the world which would make it seem ineffectual and unrelated to the causal series of events. With sense-perception as the criterion of truth, the critical mind had a tendency to accept matter as the fundamental reality of the world; if it conceded the existence of spirit at all, it did so, not in response to the evidence, but in order to avoid trouble. In accordance with its standard of belief, it usually denied the evidence or dogmatically asserted the non-existence of spirit; this is the position of both materialism and agnosticism. Agnosticism means that we have no basis for either a positive or a negative conclusion; it admits that we cannot know that spirit does not exist. This, in fact, is the only tenable position for any intelligent skeptic. It follows from his maintenance of sense-perception as the test of reality. The absence of sense-perception of spirit does not prove that spirit does not exist, if we define spirit as transcending sense-perception. Such absence merely shows that the belief lacks satisfactory evidence. But materialism denies the reality of spirit, on what it supposes to be satisfactory evidence that mental phenomena are but products of the brain. It is this theory, firmly rooted in many minds, that disturbs the belief in a future life. Materialism has a long history and stands for two rather distinct conceptions. In the present age, it is the result of several sets of facts, which we can only briefly state. Materialism has two forms: sensational materialism and philosophical materialism. The first of these is opposed to idealism and the second to spiritualism. If spiritualism and idealism were identical there would be but one form of materialism; but they are far from identical, as every philosopher well knows. Most materialistic philosophers evade the real issue by contrasting materialism with idealism, and allow the layman to think that they are quite orthodox on the doctrine of immortality, though they are careful to leave their teaching on this point indefinite. This sensational materialism is founded on the naive view of the world as presented to sense-perception. The idealist has become convinced that knowledge and reality are not adequately expressed in senseexperience; and as the material world is supposed to be represented by sense-perception (though the scientific view of the material world is not so expressed) the idealist calls that view of the world materialism which is more or less interchangeable with naive realism: namely, the view that sensation rightly represents the nature world of matter and hence of reality. The idealist denies materialism thus conceived, by asserting that some sort of transcendental reality exists behind sensation. But a man may be at the same time an idealist and a philosophical materialist. Philosophical materialism is based upon as supersensible a conception of matter as that maintained by any spiritualism or theism. Like idealism, it does not rely upon sense-perception as the test of truth. It regards the real nature of things as hidden from the senses. It bases the whole sensible world upon supersensible realities as its elements or cause. This philosophic materialism began at the time of Empedocles and Democritus and was developed by the Epicureans. The atoms which constitute the basis of the whole sensory world were regarded as supersensible: it was their combination in the various forms of things that affects the senses and explains the world as we know it in sense perception. These earlier materialists, however, admitted the existence of souls, as fine material or "ethereal" organism. But some of them denied the survival of this ethereal organism, which corresponded to the astral body of the theosophists and the "spiritual body" of St. Paul. Christianity tried to prove by the story of the resurrection that this soul did not perish, though its theory of the bodily resurrection made the belief only more difficult and required a most elaborate philosophy to sustain it. The real conception of the resurrection at the time, at least among most intelligent people, as indicated in the New Testament, was that of apparitions, the visible appearance of the "spiritual body" after death. Christianity thus directly denied the materialist's view of death as the end of all. It did not deny the existence of atoms; it simply affirmed the survival and reappearance of the "spiritual body," which, for all practical purposes, was synonymous with the soul. The materialist was challenged either to abandon or to modify his theory. In the course of time the materialist chose the latter course. He gave up the hypothesis of an ethereal organism as the source of consciousness, and connected consciousness directly with the body or brain as a collection of atoms. Consciousness thus became a function of a complex organism rather than a function of a spirit or soul; and, as all functions of the physical body perish, the same fate was held to await consciousness. This view seems to be satisfactorily upheld by normal experience. Mental states are accompanied by physical structure; when this structure is dissolved by death there are no traces, at least in normal experience, of the independent existence of consciousness. It was quite natural to infer that it does not survive. It is true that the conclusion is not absolutely assured, but if there is no evidence whatever on the contrary side, we have at least to confess total ignorance; and the certainty that all other functions of the organism perish will establish a strong probability that consciousness is no exception to the rule. Its survival can be proved only by showing that it is not a function similar to those that manifestly perish, or by bringing forward actual instances of such survival. This outline of the situation created by modern materialism shows just how we have to attack the problem. We have to adduce evidence that consciousness is not a function of the physical body. We can no longer rely on the philosophical method, which was based on the theory that consciousness is a unique phenomenon, which cannot be reduced to mechanical equivalents, nor conceived as a by-product of the physical organism. It is true enough that consciousness has not been reduced to mechanical laws nor identified with any chain of physical events. But this failure is no proof that consciousness is not derived from physical phenomena. The burden of proof is thrown on the man who affirms that it is so derived, but the question is left open. Common sense could not believe that light and sound are vibrations, but science proved that they are, even though the senses do not directly reveal the fact. If, therefore, light and sound can be reduced to supersensible physical phenomena, may not consciousness be similarly explained? At any rate the philosopher could not dogmatize on the subject, and the nature of consciousness had to remain an open question; yet the philosophic proof for the existence of the soul depended on the assumption that we know enough of its nature to deny its physical character. The whole problem was shifted over to science, which is occupied primarily with facts and only secondarily with the nature of reality. Philosophy tried to explain consciousness and to infer its survival from a theory of its nature. Science let its nature alone and tried to study its behavior. It is concerned primarily with evidence and secondarily with explanation, while philosophy in the past has been too much occupied with explanations and too little with evidence. Science begs no questions as to the nature of anything. It first ascertains the facts and then expresses the nature of a thing in accordance with those facts as its effects or manifestations. When the philosophic method of proving immortality broke down, there was nothing left but to apply to science for the solution. Philosophy, in all its development, had depended on science for its premises, though it was disposed to admit this dependence only very grudgingly, if at all. The success of science, however, in overthrowing many philosophic beliefs, and especially religious beliefs, gave that method the highest authority in the determination of truth. As it pronounced in favor of materialism, it aroused the most determined opposition of all who were interested in preserving such a belief as survival after death, whether they undertook to defend it by religion and faith or by philosophy. But there is no escape from the verdict of science; on it depends the proof or disproof of survival. Theology and philosophy are now discredited authorities; if science cannot ascertain facts to prove immortality the belief is negligible. We may still insist on hoping for survival, but our hope will not have the credentials that the present age requires for all its beliefs. In ages when wishes and hopes are accepted as adequate reasons for belief, faith may survive; but when the demand for assured evidence is made, science must take up the task of making a negative or an affirmative decision. That task involves the question, whether individual consciousness can be isolated from its apparently fixed, but really temporary, connection with the body. The fact is, that science has never proved that we do not survive. It has but established a theory on which the doubt or denial seems natural. While it knows that, in normal experience, consciousness is associated with an organism and that, when the organism perishes, there seem to be no traces of this consciousness, it knows only that in normal experience it simply is without evidence for survival. It does not have proof of annihilation. Its theory is but a working hypothesis, one of great strength, it is true, and convincing in proportion to the neglect of phenomena which appear to suggest the survival of consciousness. Yet it has not demonstrated the destruction of consciousness. Nor is it easy to do so, while certain phenomena continue to throw doubt on the conclusions of materialism. The present strength of materialism is due entirely to its neglect of these phenomena. It has considered the facts which fit its theory and has disregarded all that are inconsistent with it; and now psychic research, employing the same scientific method, has become the Nemesis of materialism. Psychic research endeavors to isolate an individual consciousness, or to ascertain facts which prove that isolation, by the same method that a chemist uses when he proves the existence of a new element. The facts purporting to attest survival are apparitions and alleged communication with the dead. There are other supernormal phenomena of great interest, but they do not directly prove the existence of spirit, and perhaps would not even suggest it to critical minds. Apparitions and mediumistic phenomena, on the contrary, if their validity can be proved, certainly conform to the scientific demand for the isolation of an individual consciousness. They at least are the kind of phenomena which we might expect if spirits exist and can produce any effect in the physical world. They show that it is not necessary to decide the nature of consciousness before believing in survival, that we may prove or show to be probable the fact of survival, while leaving the nature of consciousness wholly unexamined. The result may give rise to a philosophy, but does not depend on it. Before the adoption of the scientific method, men paid the penalty for being less thorough than the situation required. They exposed their belief to the corrosive influence of the doubt cast by further knowledge. We have arrived at a stage of culture in which the faiths of the past have lost their power. The triumphs of science have established the confidence of men in its practical value and in its ability to explain the universe. 'The intelligence of the world is on its side; and mankind must follow intelligence always, if it is to gain its ends. Evidence, proof, reason, fact instead of faith, hope and desire influence belief. Whatever value these latter have, rests on the basis of proved truth, not on imagination and arbitrary hopes originating in the emotions and the will. The problem is, therefore, not to bolster up faith without science, but to establish the truth by science, so that faith will become either unnecessary or rational. The authority of the priesthood is lost. If it acknowledges the conclusions of science, it can regain its power, but only on that condition. The intelligent world no longer takes its ipse dixit [an assertion made but not proved] as final, but asks for evidence, which science alone can furnish. Materialism also must no longer select for consideration only the phenomena which support its preconceived theories, based upon a partial view of nature. It must take into account the exceptional phenomena as well as the regular routine of experience. If it fails to do this, it is exposed to the same criticism that it has directed against faith. It is only another dogmatism to neglect the rare facts of nature, a dogmatism the less excusable because science professes to found its, beliefs on facts and not on preconceptions. Even in physical science, the exceptional phenomena of nature have deeper significance than ordinary occurrences. The discovery of Roentgen rays was due to an accident. The discovery of argon was due to the observation of an anomaly in the behavior of nitrogen, the neglect of which would have resulted in a false conception of that element. It is, therefore, not beyond the function of science to study the unexplained phenomena of mind. They cannot be explained as merely abnormal events. Whatever place abnormality may have in them, there is a relation between some of them and events not known to the subject, which makes some new explanation imperative. The facts have to be explained, and they are not explained by the usual theories. To deny the facts is not to explain them. The question is: do they demonstrate the isolation of consciousness from the body? Of course, to laymen, the problem does not seem so technical. They follow public opinion in their conception of the issues. In all ages, being unable to investigate or philosophize for themselves, they have relied on the intelligent members of the community to furnish them their science and their philosophy. They have accepted all ideas on authority. When the intelligent classes were priests and philosophers and believed in immortality, the laymen felt assured of the truth of the belief. But when these same classes of men doubt or deny it, the laymen either follow them into skepticism, or allow the belief to atrophy. They may not have the courage to deny it altogether, but they feel their inability to defend it except by sheer force of will or faith. Niceties of scientific method do not enter into their processes of fixing their beliefs. They simply seize the easiest way of deciding the question, either yielding to authority on one side or the other, or stubbornly standing by their emotional preferences. But wishes and hopes cannot remove the doubts which critical minds thrust at us. We have to overcome emotional bias, or the belief which has exercised such a powerful influence on the past will decay as all inadequately supported doctrines have done. We must invoke the method which has destroyed so much, and insist that it shall do constructive instead of destructive work. It must take account of all the facts, instead of neglecting some in the interest of a theory which selects what it likes and lays more stress on the uniformities of nature than does nature herself. We must show that consciousness can actually be dissociated from matter, instead of inferring our conclusion from insufficient premises. The isolation of an individual consciousness involves getting into some form of communication with discarnate personality, or demonstrating facts which indicate the influence of discarnate mind upon the animate or the inanimate world. It will not be enough to prove that the brain cannot altogether account for consciousness. We have to prove the survival of personal identity; that is, of a personal stream of consciousness with its memories of past earthly life. A soul might lose its identity or its selfconsciousness and continue to exist like an atom, without manifesting the properties apparent in a previous combination or "incarnation." Hence we require to know whether it is the same mind that manifests itself after death as before. Facts which present (1) supernormal knowledge, due neither to chance nor to normal sense-perception, and (2) evidence of the personal identity or the personal memories of the deceased, are the data needed to prove the isolation of an individual consciousness from its physical organism. THE present chapter is closely connected with the preceding, for the nature of the problem largely determines the nature of the evidence. But the problem has been so complicated by concern with religion and magic that these subjects are inevitably brought into the discussion; various problems of abnormal psychology are also involved. So many facts are erroneously claimed by unsophisticated minds to be proof of the intervention of spirits, that a very large field has to be canvassed in the search for evidential material. Besides, the sifting of evidence is a very complex matter. A fact in relation to another fact may be evidence, but out of that relation the same fact might not be evidence at all. It is therefore necessary briefly to examine the law of evidence. Let me take some concrete illustrations. A human body is found with a bullet hole in the head and a revolver lying near the body. If nothing is known about the person either suicide or murder may account for the situation. If the man is known to have been despondent, to have failed in business or some other project, or to have been generally disappointed with life, the suspicion of suicide becomes stronger, and anything like knowledge of a previous threat of it would weaken the hypothesis of murder. On the other hand, if the man is known to have been an upright person in the community, a religious man, successful in business, with a happy family and nothing to make him unhappy, the theory of suicide would be less tenable. Not the mere fact of death by a bullet wound decides the question, but other general facts in the person's life are included in the evidence. Suppose, however, that we know nothing about the man and his life and have to seek evidence from other sources. If, then, we find that the revolver was purchased at a certain store, not by the victim, this discovery would provide circumstantial evidence that the man had not committed suicide. It would not constitute proof, as the victim might have secured the weapon after its purchase. Suppose, however, that finger prints on the weapon are those not of the victim but those of the purchaser. This fact would greatly strengthen the suspicion of murder. Only an alibi or proof that these same finger marks had been observed on the revolver before the man's death could remove that suspicion. If now we should discover boot tracks near the body, and these tracks could be identified with those of the purchaser of the weapon, we should have additional, though not conclusive, evidence of his guilt. If to this we could add evidence that he had previously threatened the man with death, had been a personal enemy, and had actually been in the vicinity at the time, the case would be very nearly established. The convergence of a large number of incidents, each of which alone might look like chance coincidence, would prove the deed. All the facts must consist with the hypothesis. Mere coincidence between two events does not prove a connection between them, though it may suggest a hypothesis. This coincidence must be associated with a number of others, all of which hang together. But the uneducated mind rests content with a single coincidence and in this way is led into all sorts of errors. When it considers evidence for the existence of spirits the untrained mind has always been accustomed to appeal to every "wonderful" occurrence as proper evidence. It frequently regards any unusual fact as an incentive to apply explanations that do not fit. It is not merely the unusual character of a fact that gives it evidential interest or force. It must be unusual if it is to be evidence of a fact hitherto unknown, but it need not be any more unusual than the fact which it attests. This is perhaps a truism; but, because prejudiced people try to represent as miraculous or supernatural the facts which psychic research adduces as evidence of spirits, it is necessary to make clear two things: (1) that no one regards as supernatural the new discoveries constantly being made in physical science; (2) that the idea of spirits is no more strange than that of a new element in chemistry. They are but the continuation of the consciousness we formerly knew as embodied. It was the work of the Society for Psychical Research to discriminate among the phenomena it was investigating. Its first task was to classify them and to distinguish between those relevant to the hypothesis of spirits and those that have no bearing on the subject. The spiritualists had classed together all unusual phenomena, physical and mental, claiming all of them as spiritistic. Before we have any right to assert or suppose the existence of spirits, we must adduce facts that imply supernormal knowledge, and this supernormal knowledge must be such as could be obtained only by communication from the dead. The term normal is purely relative. We can best give its meaning by illustrations. For instance, we can normally see a house some miles distant, but we could not normally see a fly at the same distance. The term normal is relative to the conditions limiting the activity of our senses. The existence of the normal, as well as of the supernormal, has to be proved by evidence. Only because this proof is easily within the reach of every one, we forget the grounds on which it rests. The limits of the supernormal are also determined by evidence, not by definition. If a man in America should have an accurate vision of events in Europe, we should call his perception supernormal, whatever the process involved. Whether such a vision has actually occurred is only a matter of evidence; we cannot say that it is impossible. But before we admit the existence of anything so unusual we require that the evidence be critically tested and that the facts be inexplicable by any known law. To call such a phenomenon as the vision of events in Europe clairvoyance, is to give the fact a name, not an explanation. If the claim to the vision could not be confirmed by testimony from some one else than the visionary, we should not regard it as proved. The veracity of the person might not be questioned, but some illusion or mistake of judgment might stand in the way of our accepting his statement. If the reporter and subject of the experience were a scientific man, the statement would have more weight than if he were an ignorant layman, simply because the scientific man has the habit of accurate observation and statement. But even then there would be the possibility of error unless his account could be confirmed by the testimony of others. If a scientific man were to relate such an experience in a detailed manner, before the objective facts could become known to him and those in his vicinity, corroboration by others would exempt him from the suspicion of error, illusion, or mendacity. The facts would then stand out as unusual, and perhaps as requiring a new law to explain them. Conclusive evidence of an hypothesis must exclude every interpretation except the one supposed; it must conform to two conditions, one positive and the other negative. The exclusion of a given interpretation is negative evidence; the applicability of the hypothesis to the facts is positive evidence. Thus the exclusion of fraud would be negative evidence for spiritism, if that were the theory in question. But the fitness of the facts to prove the special theory concerned, say the survival of personal identity, would be positive evidence. If spirits are to be proved to exist, the facts must indicate the continued personal identity of deceased persons, must be verified by living people, and provably supernormal in their origin. In estimating the alleged evidence for the existence of spirits we have first to eliminate the explanations grouped under the name of fraud. This may take the form of lying about the facts, or trickery in performing feats claimed to be of spirit origin. But we must be exact in our conception of fraud. Fraud is not the act performed, but the motive of the act. It implies the conscious purpose to deceive, whether by false statements or by acts calculated to lead one to form incorrect judgments as to the facts. If a man should make a false statement in his sleep, or in a trance, or under hypnosis, I should have no right to ascribe lying or fraud to him. He himself might be deceived by dreams, hallucinations, or illusions. Hence many actions and statements are exempt from the suspicion of fraud, for instance, all actions and statements during somnambulism, trance, hysteria (if of an automatic type), ordinary sleep, intoxication, insanity (if of the hallucinatory type), and similar abnormal mental conditions. We must have proof that the person is normally conscious in order to attribute fraud to him. Moreover we must not confuse the deception of the observer with the purpose of the actor. The fraudulent person aims at deception by misrepresentation. The deception of the conjurer, on the other hand, is legitimate enough, because he does not claim any supernormal elements in his exhibitions. The observer lets himself be deceived by what the conjurer frankly avows is a trick. But the fraudulent person maintains that the apparent facts are real, despite his knowledge to the contrary. If the person is normal, his honesty may be judged by his acts; but if the subject is abnormal, the phenomena are in the domain of abnormal psychology, not of trickery. We are concerned, however, solely with the cause and the explanation of experiences, not with the motive of the subject. That cause may be subjective or objective. If the experience has no discoverable sensory stimulus and yet coincides with some objective event out of the reach of normal sense-perception it is supernormal. Honesty has no importance in determining the nature of the phenomena. Only tests to exclude normal knowledge and sensation can decide whether the facts are supernormal or not. For this reason the scientist does not care whether he is dealing with frauds or not, if only he can determine the conditions under which the phenomena are produced. The fraudulent person, of course, will not usually, if ever, permit this sort of experiment. But if the dishonest subject will submit to scientific conditions we shall not enter into the consideration of character or motives. However, in the work of persuading the public it is important to be assured that the subject of experiment is honest, because the public wrongly assumes that phenomena are genuine if the subject is honest. But we have not satisfied all the conditions of evidence for the supernormal merely by removing the fact or the relevance of fraud. We must reckon with the subconscious or subliminal functions of the mind. At one time subconscious mental activities were as yet undiscovered. We could not then reckon with subconscious action as an alternative to genuine supernormal experience. The choice lay between the fraudulent and the genuine in all normal persons. But the discovery that the mind has subconscious activities has completely altered the situation. We have all along known what we called "unconscious," by which we meant merely involuntary, actions, whose meaning we ourselves learned as they proceeded. Here lies the borderland of the subconscious. Strictly speaking, subconscious or subliminal actions are those of which the subject is wholly unaware. Our thoughts and actions in sleep, hypnosis, or trance are illustrations. In our normal state, we have no recollection of them. The distinctive marks of subconscious activities are anaesthesia and amnesia, i.e., insensibility and inability to remember. In sleep, trance, somnambulism, hysteria and various forms of insanity these phenomena are constant. They show the continuance of mental action after normal sensibility or consciousness has been suppressed. Now we may exclude fraud from the explanation of alleged supernormal phenomena and yet have subconscious action of the subject to reckon with in explaining them. If apparently supernormal phenomena can be explained by the resurrection of subconscious memories or the production of automatic actions the claims of supernormality must be abandoned. Suppose, for instance, that John Smith reported to us that he had seen the ghost of Mary Jones. Having established his honesty, we should then wish to know whether he knew that Mary Jones was dead. If he did, we might explain the circumstance as a casual hallucination or a dream. The operation of memory would suffice to explain it, or to classify it with known facts. If Mary Jones were found to be alive, the case would be strengthened. If Mary Jones had died without John Smith's knowledge, we might still consider the vision a chance coincidence. It would be more difficult to explain it thus, if we found that the apparition occurred very close to the time of death. The time element is always an important factor in eliminating chance; close correspondence of the experience with the event indicated by it strengthens the case. But the question of chance coincidence and guessing enters only after we have eliminated the subconscious. Many visions and hallucinations are referable to the subconscious, because their content can be reduced to previous experiences. We cannot assume that there are supernormal dreams or visions until we have eliminated the influence of previous experience upon the contents of the incidents. Hence, until we can report dreams or visions of verifiable facts not previously known to the subject, we are obliged to suspect subconscious memory as a sufficient explanation. We must remember, however, that the nature and limits of the subconscious have not been accurately determined. This is both an advantage and a difficulty to the defender of the supernormal. It is an advantage because it challenges the advocate of subconscious action to show whether the process has been proved to include cases of the kind in question. It is a disadvantage, however, because the defender of the subconscious as an explanation may insist that its unassigned limits permit him to suppose its power to be unlimited. Scientific method, however, does not allow us to use the subconscious as an explanation beyond its proved capacities. We have no evidence that the subliminal, of its own power and apart from normal sensory stimuli, can acquire any knowledge. It has no known transcendental powers. It is a name for mental action below the threshold of consciousness, or above it, if you wish to include hyperaesthetic conditions, but it is always dependent on normal stimuli for its contents, unless the supernormal be at once granted as a fact. Its capacity is thus as limited as that of the normal mind, and it exhibits no functions other than those of the normal mind, even when real or alleged supernormal phenomena filter through it. This limitation of subliminal activity is a restriction on the skeptic who wishes to apply it as a universal explanation. He must first show the relevance of the application, which depends on showing that the previous knowledge supplied the subject with the data for subliminal use; and his application must be strictly limited by the proved capacities and habits of the subconscious. It is important to note that the subconscious may be the vehicle for the transmitting supernormal knowledge. It may be the medium between the transcendental world, if there be such a thing, and the physical world, and so may respond to stimuli from both sources. This view of the subconscious makes it the medium or vehicle for the acquisition of supernormal knowledge; the only refuge of the skeptic is to deny the source of the contents claimed to be supernormal. If he proves that the contents have been sub consciously acquired from normal experience, he can disqualify the evidence for the supernormal. In fact it is contents that must furnish the evidence. No assumption or discussion of the powers of the subliminal will decide the matter. If the phenomena are not traceable to physical stimuli, their explanation must be sought in the transcendental. The conditions under which the facts occur can alone decide the question, not the assumed or proved functions of the mind, conscious or subconscious. It will thus be seen that we have to define carefully what we mean by the subconscious before we employ it as an explanation of the alleged supernormal. The believer in the supernormal has to prove that the normal senses were not the source or vehicle of the facts. The conditions under which the phenomena occur will determine this. The appeal to the subconscious will be irrelevant unless previous normal experience accounts for the special facts which appear to be supernormal. If these facts are based on such experience the claims for the supernormal are vitiated. All this is perhaps obvious to most people; but I thought it was necessary carefully to analyze the problem. We now have made it clear that when conscious fraud has been eliminated, we have still to test the claim of any alleged supernormal phenomenon, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, mediumistic communications with the dead, and dousing, by their relation to the normal knowledge and process of the subject. All precautions must be taken to exclude these normal processes when we assert that we have a transcendental fact to be explained. Proximity in time or space of the subject to the fact supernormally known may raise doubts of its authenticity, though these can be settled by a number of conditions. But great distance in time and space and all the conditions that will exclude previous normal knowledge by the subject will make an appeal to subliminal memories of doubtful value. The use of strangers and the employment of controlled experiments will dislodge the doubts attachable to spontaneous phenomena, and will easily disprove the presumption of subconscious influences, especially when the facts are provably unknown by the subject. But assume that we have eliminated the subconscious from the explanation of the facts. The exclusion of subconscious influences will not prove that each individual phenomenon is genuine. There are still the possibilities of chance coincidence, or guessing. This, however, can easily be eliminated by any intelligent person. Bring two strangers together, and record what happens. Let A be the psychic and B the sitter. If A, without knowing the person present, without questions, without even seeing the person, who may have come for the first time from the other side of the globe, should give the sitter's name, state that he was a diamond miner, that his father's name was Chelmsford and that both his father and mother were dead, that the mother had given him a special picture of a little church on the corner of the street opposite their home—if these incidents should occur under such circumstances, we should have facts that would at least appear to exclude chance and guessing. Indeed it is easy to eliminate the supposition of coincidence by repeating the experiments. They may be exposed, though hardly in the present supposed circumstances, to the suspicion of fraud and subconscious knowledge; but they are not explicable by chance coincidence or guessing. Nevertheless we have always to think of these possibilities in estimating the value of the facts purporting to be supernormal. Isolated instances of these facts may be explained by chance or guessing, but a large collective mass of them, such as have appeared in the publications of the Societies for Psychical Research, cannot be so explained. The four objections previously mentioned are the four most usual objections to belief in supernormal experience. We may, perhaps, regard secondary personality as a fifth. But secondary or multiple personality is only an organized form of subconscious action. Ordinary subconscious actions are isolated and do not represent another person in their collective meaning. But the secondary personality presents all the appearance of a complete and different self. Illustrations of this are the Ansel Bourne, the Charles Brewin, the Sally Beauchamp, and the Wilson cases. I might add, too, the French cases, those of Lucie and Leonie. In them the person went into states resembling hypnosis, as completely separated from the normal personality as another human being would be. The normal self did not remember anything about the subnormal self, though in some cases the secondary personality was aware of the primary self as another person. In others the amnesia was complete on both sides. When any phenomena purporting to be spiritistic can be explained by dual or multiple personality, we have to exclude the hypothesis of spirits from the explanation. Other forms of the supernormal are not connected with secondary personality, or if connected with it, are not explicable by it. Many, perhaps most, cases of secondary personality have nothing to do with the question of the existence of spirits. Sometimes the claim is made of spirit agency; but if the contents of the subject's statements could be obtained by normal experience, the hypothesis of spirits is not legitimate. Any objection to spiritistic claims based on this form of phenomena is but an application of the explanation by subconscious influences, and we need to mention the fact only because it is not generally understood that dual personality is an example of the subconscious mind. But we have not decided the case in behalf of the supernormal when we have excluded fraud, chance, and guessing, subconscious action, secondary personality, hysteria and forms of insanity. We do, however, establish the possibility of it when we have excluded them; its proof thereafter depends on the quantity and quality of positive evidence. The exclusion of alternative explanation is only negative evidence; the possession 'of certain facts relevant to the kind of process supposed is required for positive evidence. We may indeed prove dousing, telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and perhaps some other forms of the supernormal without admitting the existence of the discarnate; these facts may even be used in opposing spiritistic theories, as in the case of telepathy, which has been invoked to displace spiritistic interpretations. So long as it is conceivably applicable to the phenomena, it will stand as an objection to the hypothesis of spirits. When coincidence between the thoughts of two persons can account for the facts without the assumption of the personal identity of the dead, the hypothesis of telepathy is an objection to the application of spiritistic explanations. Telepathy, therefore, has the force of an objection in certain cases. The facts taken as evidence for spirits must run the gauntlet of all the previous objections named, whether these objections take the form of normal or supernormal explanations. Spiritistic evidence consists of facts which can be explained only by the continued personal identity of deceased persons, involving memories possessed by the deceased person and transmitted to the living by supernormal means. That is, we cannot believe in the existence of spirits until they are able to prove their personal identity, their conscious memory, by transmitting facts of their terrestrial lives to the living by apparitions, mediums, telekinesis, or some other supernormal method. The one best means of proving this personal identity is the transmission of facts, for these are least likely to be referable to normal channels of knowledge. The more trivial the better; that is, the more likely to characterize the one person whose identity is concerned. A single trivial incident will not suffice. There must be a number of them which articulate rightly and have had a psychological or other interest for the person claiming to communicate. If a man should enumerate the books he had written, the statement would have no value at all, as it would be obtainable from the normal knowledge of the psychic or person offering it as evidence. The man's important deeds or the conspicuous events of his life are worthless as evidence of his survival, unless you can prove they were not known to the psychic. It is more difficult to prove ignorance of these events than of private and trivial facts of his career. Trivial incidents are the best evidence of identity. The ridicule applied to the triviality of communications from the dead is therefore unjustified. The reason why most people object to the triviality of the facts adduced is that they assume that these communications indicate the character of life in the spiritual world. But in proving the existence of spirits we are not concerned about their status or life in the transcendental world. We are not investigating that problem. We are trying to prove that spirits exist, not that they are wise or exalted in their intelligence; and the materialistic theory itself prescribes for us, as we have seen, the nature of the problem and of the evidence for its solution. We have long been taught that the next life is an idyllic one, a life which throws off the limitations of the present. This may be true or it may not be true. With that question we have no concern in the scientific problem of a spiritual existence. We are trying to ascertain whether consciousness survives, not whether it is transcendentally exalted in intelligence or placed in an ideal world. Materialism makes it necessary to prove the survival of personal identity as the condition of any spiritual existence at all. Nothing but trivial facts will prove this; they are not brought forward as evidence in any respect of the spirit's intelligence. The popular objections to triviality in the evidence explains why so many run after revelations of the nature of the future life. They suppose that, if communication between the spiritual and the physical world is possible at all, all sorts of revelations and communications about it are accessible. But no revelation of such a world can be evidence of its existence, unless verifiable by methods which will show that it is trustworthy. Thousands accept such revelations as evidence and pay no attention to trivial facts in proof of identity or scientific methods of investigation and criticism. They are only preparing to be deceived. Verification is an important feature of evidence, and verification is possible only by the testimony of the living or by a vast system of cross references and repetitions of messages impossible now to carry out. In proving identity, especially if we wish to exclude telepathy from the explanation, we must not only have trivial facts of a supernormal kind and illustrative of personal identity, but they must be verified by living people. This connects the past personality with a present consciousness and readily verifies the statement of the psychic. But any fact which cannot be verified by a living person is not worth a penny as evidence. Revelations are not verifiable by individual testimony of living people and occupy no place whatever in the scientific problem as affecting the existence of spirits. Telekinesis, or movement of physical objects without contact, is usually regarded as conclusive evidence of the existence of spirits; but, in reality, it is not evidence of it at all. Only mental phenomena will prove the existence of spirits. Physical phenomena unaccompanied by mental phenomena showing intelligence or personal identity are absolutely worthless as evidence. They may be very interesting phenomena, and they may arouse the lethargic physicist to revise some of his previous views, but they cannot be adduced in evidence of spirits until the existence of the latter has been otherwise proved and their association with telekinesis also proved. This examination of evidential problems in general prepares the way for a consideration of the facts adduced in proof of the supernormal and of the existence of spirits. We have only been outlining problems here and showing how complicated are the conditions necessary to the admission of any supernormal experiences whatever and especially the existence of discarnate spirits—though I am inclined to think that it ought to be easier, in the light of the facts on record, to admit the existence of spirits than to admit the claims of telepathy. But with that question we have nothing to do at present. We have been concerned with determining the principles of evidence in any field and the special conditions which affect it in psychic research. We have excluded fraud, subconscious mental action, secondary personality, chance coincidence, guessing, hysteria and other kindred phenomena as explanations of the apparently supernormal; we have then excluded several types of the supernormal from the evidence for discarnate spirits. Positive evidence for the discarnate we have shown to be supernormal knowledge indicating the continued personal identity of the dead. THERE are three distinct meanings for the term "personality," two of them general and popular and the third technical and philosophical. The first and most general meaning is that personality is the sum of the characteristics which make up physical and mental being. These include appearance, manners, habits, tastes and moral character. The second meaning emphasizes the characteristics that distinguish one person from another. The two meanings overlap or merge into each other, as the first considers all characteristics pertaining to the individual, without comparing him with others, while the second sees the same facts in relation to the outside world and fixes attention mainly upon the features that distinguish the subject from his fellows. This second meaning is equivalent to individuality. It represents a widely prevalent conception of the term. But the third meaning is the most important, and is the only conception of any value to the psychic researcher and the philosopher or psychologist. This conception of personality is concerned only with mental characteristics; it makes no distinction between common and specific marks. In fact it connotes mental processes rather than fixed qualities. The capacity for having mental states, or the fact of having them, constitutes personality for the psychologist and the philosopher. Personality is thus the stream of consciousness, regardless of the question whether any special state is constant or casual, essential or unessential. Physical marks will have no place in this conception, unless they may serve as symbols of mental states. It abstracts from them and denotes only the stream of mental phenomena. This third meaning is so radically different from the other two that it gives rise to perpetual misunderstandings between the philosopher and the public. These misunderstandings arise particularly in the discussion of survival after death. The layman with his conception of personality, looks for physical phenomena of some kind to illustrate or prove it. Consequently, if interested in psychic phenomena at all, he prefers materialization, which best satisfies his conception of personality. He cannot take the point of view of the psychologist or the philosopher, who neglects these purely sensory characteristics, and fixes his attention on mental states as the proper conception of the personality which may survive. Materialization would supply the very characteristics which the layman fixes upon to represent personality. But precisely the fact that mental states are not presented to sense, leads the philosopher to conceive of immortality as possible. If the layman's conception were correct the philosopher and psychologist would deny the possibility of survival with entire confidence, as a necessary implication of bodily dissolution. The day could be saved only by the doctrine of a "spiritual body," an It astral body," or an "ethereal organism," supposedly a replica of the physical organism in its spatial and other characteristics. These represent personality after the manner or analogy of the physical body. The real spirit may indeed have a transcendental bodily form; but the stream of consciousness remains the same whether there is any "spiritual body" or "ethereal organism" or not. This is the fundamental element in all conceptions of spiritual reality. It is not necessary to decide the question of a "spiritual body" or "ethereal organism" as the condition of believing in the existence of spirits. That is another and perhaps a secondary problem. What we need to know is, whether the stream of consciousness survives, whether the personal memory continues, not how it continues. The fact of survival is to be considered first and the condition of it afterwards. We have to determine the survival of personality in the same way that we determine whether another person in the body is conscious. We are so accustomed to think that we have direct knowledge of other personalities, that we forget the exceedingly complicated nature of the process of ascertaining whether other people are conscious. That this process is the same as that of ascertaining the existence of discarnate spirits will be apparent from the following considerations: 1. I have direct knowledge of ray own existence both bodily and mental. I reach knowledge of my body by sensation and of my mental states by introspection. In fact, introspection is at the basis of my consciousness of bodily as well as mental existence. In both cases my knowledge of my own existence is direct and is not a matter of inference from facts which are capable of various interpretations. 2. I have no direct knowledge of any other consciousness in the world than my own. I have knowledge of other bodies only through my interpretation of sensations, and I have no direct knowledge that consciousness inhabits those bodies. I have to ascertain that fact by inference from certain phenomena occurring in conjunction with those bodies; for instance, behavior that seems to indicate in others the same kind of mental states as those behind my own acts. I observe certain motor or muscular phenomena precisely like my own, and I infer the same cause for them. 3. Death is only slightly different from paralysis or catalepsy. It involves the permanent lapse of consciousness, so far as our normal observation is concerned. In time the body also ceases to function and is dissolved. The materialist assumes that personality or consciousness disappears with it and can never reappear. Believing, as he does, that personality is a function of the organism, he consistently assumes that it does not exist after the death of the body. But he does not know directly that this is a fact. He never saw personality, nor have any of us seen it, as we see our own bodies or the bodies of others; and the materialist assumes that the only way to know anything directly is through sense-perception. In catalepsy and paralysis personality or consciousness seems to have disappeared. The recovery of normal consciousness in such cases shows that there it suffered only a lapse; followed by the resumption of organic functions. But there is no such resumption of functions after death, and the materialist therefore concludes that consciousness has become non-existent, like digestion, circulation, secretion and other functions of the organism. These undoubtedly disappear never to reappear: and, if personality is a similar function of the body, it too must disappear. Since we have no direct knowledge of this personality in others, even in life, and since we cannot from normal experience infer its continued existence after death, we have to fall back upon facts derived from abnormal conditions or processes different from sensory experience, if we are to infer its survival. Now psychic research is occupied with the effort to find facts from which we can infer the survival of personality. So we have seen in the previous chapter, fraud, subconscious' actions, chance coincidence, guessing, and, telepathy must be excluded as explanations before we can accept this evidence for survival. Assuming that this exclusion has been effected in any case, as in veridical apparitions and test mediumistic phenomena, we can only infer that personality has continued to exist after death, as it existed in paralysis and catalepsy when we had supposed it destroyed. Death has interrupted its causal action in the world; therefore, unless at some point it can resume that causal action on or through the living, we should have to remain without scientific evidence for its continuance after death. To summarize the argument: (1) We know personality or consciousness directly or introspectively only in ourselves. (2) We know the existence of personality or consciousness in others only indirectly or by inference from behavior manifested in some form of action. (3) Catalepsy and paralysis in some cases involve a disappearance of personality similar to that of death, but its reappearance shows that it was still present when it was supposed to be non-existent. (4) Death offers a situation only slightly different from that of catalepsy and paralysis. Consciousness ceases to function, and we should remain in total ignorance of its continued existence, unless we ascertain facts which necessitate the inference of its persistence. It is the stream of consciousness that is of primary importance in the question of survival. There might be "spiritual bodies," it astral bodies," or "ethereal organisms" without personality; it only defers the real problem to assume or prove their existence. Ultimately we are driven to the discovery of facts which will prove the continuance of personality as a stream of consciousness, by the method here used—namely, the isolation of consciousness from the body or the production of facts from which an inference can be drawn that this personality has persisted beyond death and is not a function of the physical body. If there is anything at all perplexing about personality, the perplexity lies in the consideration of "split personality," "alternations of personality," "secondary personality," "dual personality" or "multiple personality," all of which are interchangeable terms. In former times, the personality or soul was held to be an indivisible unit. In its early history the dogma of the immortality of the soul was based upon this unity. For so long as the soul was believed to be indivisible its survival was assured, under the doctrine of the imperishability of the atoms or elements. But if consciousness is after all divisible into several selves, the argument for its immortality from its unity falls to the ground. I shall not undertake at this juncture to solve the problem. I am here only explaining the perplexity which the alternation of personality offers to those who have based their belief in survival upon the unity of consciousness. What we must do is to prove survival independently of the question whether personality is simple and indivisible or not. It might be as complex in a spiritual world as it is here. Metaphysics will not settle the matter. We must have argument based on proved facts, not on mere beliefs. The appeal to the unity of personality affected only those who were bred in the old metaphysics, before the establishment of scientific method. In any case the problem of survival after death must depend on the question of fact, not on the nature of personality as conceived by traditional metaphysics. TELEPATHY is a process now very widely assumed as an alternative to the spiritistic hypothesis. It is more or less synonymous with "mind reading" or "thought transference," which were the expressions in use before the more technical term was coined and adopted. It would have had little or no recognition if it had not been useful in displacing the supposition of spirits in the interpretation of certain phenomena. It was a group of spontaneous experiences, called "mind-reading," which attracted the attention of investigators. But most people used the expression to mean more than the facts justified. They assumed some supernormal ability to read the mind without the use of normal senseperception and interpretation. That is, they made the phenomena more unusual and exceptional than they were, or at least more evidential than they actually were. The exhibitions of Cumberland and Bishop, as well as of persons imitating them, can be explained as muscle-reading. It is necessary to discriminate between unusually delicate sensations, and the imparting of knowledge without any sense-perception. Muscle-reading depends on detecting unconscious acts of a person by a performer, and any conditions of contact that make muscle-reading possible under the circumstances discredits the phenomena as evidence for anything more. Muscle-reading may be defined as the interpretation by the operator of unconscious muscular movements in the subject experimented on. It is evident therefore that phenomena referable to it are not evidence of any agency transcending sense-perception. The term telepathy was coined to express exactly and technically this transmission of thought from one mind to another without sensory perception even of the hyperaesthetic type. Whether such transmission actually exists was yet to be proved; hence the term represented only an hypothesis, not a demonstrated fact It was meant to exclude every form of sense-perception including the subconscious. It might be easy to exclude conscious sense-perception, even hyperaesthesia, but it was not so easy to exclude subliminal sensibility. There was abundant evidence that subconsciously perceived stimuli existed. But we had to suppose that even subliminal perceptions were excluded from anything called telepathy; and the stimulus must be mere thought on the part of the sender, or agent. As thought is not a physical stimulus, any reception of it by another person could be said to be a phenomenon not involving normal sense-perception or even the interpretation of unconscious sensory stimuli. It is very important to take all these facts into account, because the term telepathy has been very widely used to denote a process that would explain much more than the phenomena which it was coined merely to describe. The founders of the English Society defined the term as the "transmission of thought independently of the recognized channels of sense." I have preferred to define telepathy as "coincidence, excluding normal senseperception, between the thoughts of two minds." There is no essential difference between this definition and that by the English Society. The original founders of the Society probably did not intend that the term should imply or express a definite process of explanation; but the use of the term "transmission" and the assumption, at least for scientific cautiousness, that this "transmission" was a direct process between living minds and not in any way connected with the action of spirits, soon gave the term an implication which it did not originally have. All that we strictly know is that A's thought gets into the mind of B, without reference to the process by which this effect was brought about. We know only the fact of a coincidence inexplicable by chance or normal sense-perception. We have no reason to assume that it is a process exclusively between living people and not permitting the intervention of the dead, if the discarnate exist and can act on the living. It thus became necessary to define very exactly the meaning of the term telepathy, absolutely excluding either the evidence or the action of the discarnate, or both, or else defining it with such breadth as to include any undiscovered process of transcendental action between minds of any kind, whether incarnate or discarnate. Only the former meaning of the term would bring it into rivalry with the spiritistic theory, while the latter would permit the employment of the term to describe the action of discarnate as well as incarnate minds. There has been a, growing tendency among some of the members of the English Society to extend the meaning of the term so that it might include transmission of thoughts between the living and the dead and between different discarnate minds, without fully realizing that they have cut off the right to use the term as excluding spiritistic interpretations of any or all of the phenomena involving transcendental transmission of thought. In its only proper meaning, telepathy is a term to name facts which are not evidence for the existence of spirits, and it implies no explanation whatever of the facts so named. The process, if we knew it, might include a relation between the incarnate and the discarnate, and between different discarnate minds, if such exist. But the term itself is only a name for facts whose explanation we do not know. The first object of the English Society was the estimation of evidence, not the application of explanatory hypotheses. Telepathy involves no assumption of any known or hypothetical process to explain the coincidences cited as evidence of a supernormal relation between two minds. The phenomena cited to prove the existence of telepathy represent the thoughts of A and the simultaneous acquisition or perception of them by B. There are no doubt coincidences between A's thoughts yesterday or ten years ago and those of B to-day or five years ago. But such coincidences would be no evidence of telepathy. But there has been a very marked tendency, even among supposed scientific students and investigators, to extend the import of the term to include coincidences between what may be a mere subconscious memory of A and the present thought of B. This extension of the meaning of telepathy has been adopted as an explanation of apparent spirit communications; that is, the messages which seem to indicate continued personal existence of the dead are regarded as a selection from among the sitter's subconscious memories, on the part of the medium. But no evidence whatever has ever been produced to prove that B can select memories from the subconscious of A. There may be, as I think there are, some coincidences which look very like selection from the subconscious rather than the direct action of the agent upon the percipient; but these are too often complicated with associated incidents indicative of spirit agencies, to be disposed of as selective telepathy from the subconscious. Mediumistic phenomena too often suggest the action of spirits, to be cited as direct evidence for telepathy. The possibility of telepathy is only a ground for disqualifying an incident as evidence for the existence of spirits; but the fact that it is a possible alternative explanation is no proof that is the correct explanation. The possibility of spirits and the fact that an incident is appropriate to illustrate the personal identity of a deceased person forbids using it as positive evidence for telepathy. One can only insist that one theory is as good as the other to account for the facts. The possibility of telepathy in the case may nullify the value of the fact as evidence for spirits, but it does not exclude the hypothetical explanation of the fact by spirits, if the incident involves a proved memory of a deceased person. But when facts arise which both indicate the continued personal identity of the dead and are not explicable by telepathy, the spiritistic theory must be conceded. Of course, the believer in telepathy replies that the proof for spirits has not been given and that telepathy still has the right of preference as a theory. But in order to make telepathy applicable to the facts, its defenders have unwarrantably extended its meaning. At first it was limited to the present active states of the agent and the percipient; that is, the present thoughts of A were received by B. Then, in order to avoid the acceptance of spiritism, its opponents invented, but did not prove, a selective telepathy. The meaning of the term was altered and extended to mean the selection by B from the subconscious of A, of the facts necessary to impersonate the deceased C. This selective process has not in any case been proved. But even the hypothesis of such telepathy is excluded when facts are obtained which B does not know about C, but which are verifiable from the mind of D, who is not present Hence, when one finds an incident that excludes both ordinary telepathy with the normal consciousness and selective telepathy with the subliminal consciousness of the person present, one must either abandon telepathy as an explanation or extend the meaning of the term to include selection from the mind of the absent D. This sort of telepathy has been supposed, but no evidence has been adduced for it, and I do not see how it would be possible to adduce such evidence. Every extension of the term beyond coincidences between the mental states of two persons is wholly without warrant. The introduction of the assumption that this coincidence is due to a direct transmission from one living mind to another has never been justified, and as there is no known process whatever associated with the coincidences, we are permitted to use the term only in a descriptive, not in an explanatory sense. An hypothesis may indeed explain facts that are not in themselves evidence of that hypothesis, but only after adequate evidence has already been adduced for it. An hypothesis may thus be applied to facts that are consistent with it but are not convincing evidence of it; and then associated incidents, not directly explained by the main hypothesis, will come under it as due to subsidiary causes consistent with it. But telepathy explains nothing—certainly not those associated incidents which might be due to spiritistic causes, though not primary evidence of them. It is only a discriminating device in the estimation of the evidential problem and so serves to postpone the final judgment of the case. It has no relevance to those attendant phenomena which might naturally follow the influence of a transcendental agent, especially on the supposition that it retains its identity,—for example, constitutional habits of the mind and organism that are often imitated by a medium, sometimes described as physical impersonation of the discarnate person. Very often the best proof of identity comes from this phenomenon, which bears no relation to telepathy. Let me summarize the position we have reached in the scientific investigation of unusual phenomena: 1. There are in human experience a large number of coincidences inexplicable by fraud, secondary personality or subconscious creation, chance, or guessing. This general statement covers the whole field of psychic research, including telekinesis, or the movement of physical objects without contact, if we slightly stretch the meaning of the term coincidence. It includes, regardless of explanation, apparently spiritistic as well as telepathic experiences, and the phenomena of dousing. Apparitions may be classed as either telepathic or spiritistic. Some explanation of these coincidences must be made. The coincidences are so numerous and so well accredited that no hypothesis which does not go as far as telepathy can have any standing whatever. But telepathy, if applicable, must be used in an explanatory and theoretical, instead of in a descriptive, sense. If telepathy is supposed to have powers of infinite selection and of impersonation, it may be invoked to oppose spiritistic explanations. But without this extension of meaning, it is powerless to explain the facts. The spiritualists, of course, at the outset applied the spiritistic hypothesis to the whole field, and were as negligent of the analysis of the problem as the telepathists. The telepathists, in their turn, showed the same carelessness, in attempting to explain everything mediumistic by telepathy. Neither party has fully realized the importance of subsidiary circumstances in the phenomena. The public assumes that spirits are beings that have all the apparent properties of a living person except visibility and tangibility. The scientific man simply thinks of them as personal streams of consciousness, whatever else they may turn out to be; and capable of initiating or causing events in the physical world in cooperation with all sorts of bodily conditions and perhaps transcendental influences other than themselves. The scientific spiritist recognizes different kinds of phenomena, and uses the term spirits only when he wishes it understood that they are the chief cause of the series of phenomena manifested. He may not know in the least how this cause operates; he simply treats the facts as evidence of the existence of spirits and their undefined causal relation to the phenomena, whatever other causes or complicating circumstances may be present. 2. The rigidly scientific man has not yet accepted telepathy of any kind, unless as a possible hypothesis, which has to be eliminated before the spiritistic theory can be admitted even as an hypothesis But he well knows, when he concedes such a possibility, that it implies no explanation whatever of the facts. It merely classifies them as inexplicable and mysterious. The public seems not to regard them as mysterious at all, as it assumes that telepathy is a mere common-place, when in reality it involves considerations far more mysterious to scientific men than the spiritistic theory can possibly be. 3. The experimental evidence for telepathy, as presented in the publications of the English Society, is still under dispute by scientific men, and some of its best data have apparently been discredited. I myself am not convinced of anything more than coincidences excluding chance and guessing, though I am willing to concede the point for the sake of argument. But there are many striking incidents in the Piper phenomena which, though not evidence to the continued personal existence of deceased persons, are undoubtedly supernormal. Similar incidents occur in the work of Mrs. Chenoweth. Scientific men would have to go at least as far as the admission of telepathy, in order to escape the spiritistic theory in the explanation of them. Even if the experimental evidence of the English Society were nullified, these incidents would make out an experimental case for telepathy of some kind. But so many of them imply the continued personal identity of the dead that telepathy is by no means the obvious explanation of them. 4. Whatever real or alleged evidence there is for telepathy limits it to present active states of consciousness between agent and percipient. There is no scientific evidence for any of the following conceptions of it: (1) Telepathy as a process of selecting from the contents of the subconscious of any person in the presence of the percipient. (2) Telepathy as a process of selecting from the contents of the mind of some distant person by the percipient and constructing these acquired facts into a complete simulation of a given personality. (3) Telepathy as a process of selecting memories from any living people to impersonate the dead. (4) Telepathy as implying the transmission of the thoughts of all living people to all others individually, with the selection of the necessary facts for impersonation from the sitter present. (5) Telepathy as involving a direct process between agent and percipient. (6) Telepathy as explanatory in any sense whatever, implying any known cause. Such unsupported assumptions as these induce the scientific man to neglect the whole subject; but unless they can be sustained, there can be no appeal to telepathy as a rival of spiritistic hypotheses. There are facts which justify entertaining the possibility of telepathy as a precaution against haste in accepting the spiritistic theory, but it has no relevance when these facts are incompatible with it, or have been otherwise accounted for. There is an interesting tendency of many minds to extend the application of telepathy until it coincides with the reading from other minds anything known by a living person. This is the fourth type mentioned before. It includes the conception also that even the memories or thoughts of some dead people could also be acquired in this way without the supposition that they were obtained from the dead. Thus as Mr. Smith, who is living, receives telepathically the thoughts of all living people he has received the thoughts of all dead people who were more or less contemporary with him but died previously, and hence with them the thoughts of all dead people, prior to his own existence, but contemporary with those dead from whom he received his telepathic impressions. This theory would involve access to the memories of all dead people whatsoever back to the origin of the human race, and perhaps the impressions and states of consciousness of all animate life! While those who regard telepathy as operative on any fact known by the living are not conscious that they imply this extension of it, the assumption only awaits formulation to be recognized as virtually present. It means that no verifiable fact can be taken as evidence of the discarnate, and that we should have to accept unverifiable facts as data for proof! That is, if telepathy can reach all the thoughts of every living person, we could treat as evidence for spirits only facts outside its range—that is, facts not known by any living person, and such facts could not be verified. But according to the extension of telepathy just explained, there are no unknown facts whatever, as presumably the thoughts of all living people would have been telepathically impressed on every other living person and with them also all the thoughts of the dead who impressed their thoughts on some living person before their death. Such telepathy needs no serious consideration. But it is the logical result of the unverified and unverifiable hypotheses with which even psychic researchers play ducks and drakes with scientific method. If the simplest form of telepathy is still a subject of doubt for scientific men, what becomes of such a stupendous hypothesis as the one just defined? No intelligent man is called upon to take account of such extended hypotheses until the evidence is produced that they are probably facts or reasonably supposable. Their magnitude itself tells in favor of the spiritistic theory, because the latter hypothesis is the simplest explanation of the facts as observed and recorded. The telepathy assumed is both infinite and finite: infinite by implication and finite by the evidence of the facts. The failures in experiments to read the present active states of the agent and the inability to verify any thoughts outside those states, in the opinion of science, is so finite that its very existence is doubted, while the extended hypothesis requires us to believe in its infinity without evidence! But the natural and pertinent selectiveness of characteristics relevant to the personal identity of deceased persons, and the absence of selectiveness relevant to the identity of living people; the mixed success and error in the facts obtained; the fact that a pictographic process explains so easily the mixture of success and error in many of the facts; the fragmentary character of the data, with confusion so easily explicable by misinterpretation of stimuli and the evident rapidity of the process; the difficulty in getting proper names, though this varies with the psychological constitution of the psychic; the frequently symbolic nature of the phenomena, showing intelligence in the selection of them, whereas telepathy is conceived after mechanical analogies; all these are so inconsistent with telepathy in any form in which it can be imagined, that no intelligent person who has critically examined and analyzed the facts would be tempted to use it as explanatory of the phenomena on record, though he might admit it as a convenient term for distinguishing between types of evidence for supernormal experience. As a name for the facts, with suspended judgment regarding explanation, it is tolerable; but there can be no doubt that spirits explain certain facts, while telepathy explains nothing. At least as an hypothesis, therefore, the spiritistic theory has the priority and the burden of proof rests upon the telepathic theory.
INSTANCES OF TELEPATHY AND SIMILAR PHENOMENA
EXPERIENCES OF WELL-KNOWN PERSONS
EXPERIMENT is always the most important resource of science when it wants to obtain assurance on any point. Spontaneous phenomena are exposed to unexpected objections, often when we feel most sure about them, while the fear that malobservation may have vitiated some conclusions keeps the judgment in suspense, until experiment, in which we can determine conditions, has supplied us with the evidential desideratum. The phenomena of psychic research, which are sporadic even under the most favorable circumstances and more so under test conditions, offer special difficulties in the way of either their reproduction or discovery under evidential conditions. Whatever the difficulties, however, science insists on experimental production of the phenomena for better observation and security as to their genuineness and significance. For some years experimental results have been obtained by investigators all over the world. There is to-day such a mass of well-authenticated facts affording a selection of incidents having the desired evidential value, as to make any other than the spiritistic hypothesis exceedingly improbable. Facts intelligently selected with reference to proving the personal identity of the deceased are not of the kind exhibited in telepathy. They are usually such as would most naturally express the mind of the alleged communicator, and, with various other characteristics of the phenomena themselves, they so commend themselves to a spiritistic theory, that no other view of them can be rational. In such a summary of the facts as I give I cannot be expected to tell all the circumstances which exclude normal knowledge as the source of the messages. The detailed records do this quite fully. The reader will have to he content with the general statement that no incident which has not stood that test has been selected and that I have endeavored to eliminate all bias in recording and selecting the facts here used. I am primarily interested in their importance for establishing supernormal knowledge and the personal identity of the communicator. In some cases the very description of the facts will be a half-guarantee of genuineness, and often very little will have to be said to protect them against skepticism. The first incident that I select is strong and complicated. It involves what is called a "cross-correspondence." There is a technical distinction between "cross-correspondence" and "cross-reference." The former implies the latter, but "cross-correspondence" involves the completion through a second psychic of a message obtained through another, or an increment that is relevant and not given at the first station. "Cross-reference" need be no more than the delivery of the same message from two independent sources. For our purposes there need be little difference between them, though the "cross-correspondence" appears to many people to be the more cogent. The incident is not fully reported in the paper by Mrs. Verrall in the "Proceedings" of the English Society, and hence for the part which pertains to what Dr. Hodgson did I shall have to depend on my memory. He told me that, at a sitting with Mrs. Piper, in which Mr. Myers purported to communicate, Mr. Myers referred to Miss Helen Verrall as the daughter of Mrs. Verrall and remarked that she was "a better light than the mother," adding that he had got her to see a vision of a hand and a book. Dr. Hodgson, seeing an opportunity to get a cross-reference, and knowing nothing about the daughter, asked the communicator to make her see a hand and a spear, varying the picture as little as possible. Rector, the control, to whom the request was given, did not understand the word "spear" and interpreted it as "sphere." Dr. Hodgson corrected it and spelled the word "spear" and then Rector caught it, repeating the word "spear," and asking Dr. Hodgson if he meant some flying weapon. Dr. Hodgson said that he did, and there the matter stood, so far as events in Boston were concerned. This was on January 28, 1901. When he made inquiries later as to what had happened in England, he ascertained that the daughter, Miss Helen Verrall, had received no vision of either a hand and book or a hand and spear. But Mrs. Verrall's record of automatic writing on January 31, 1902, three days after Dr. Hodgson had sent the message, contained the following script in Latin and Greek, the first word being a mongrel of neither language.
On February 4, the
communicator through Mrs. Piper said that he had succeeded in getting "Sphear"
through to the daughter Helen. This statement is not correct; but it is
apparent that Mrs. Verrall got the exact idea, except for the hand, in
the words "volatile ferrum—pro telo," with the word The significant
point here is, that what was started in English was translated into
Greek and Latin when delivered in England, with the same mistake there that had been made in Boston. Volatile ferrum is the
Latin for "flying iron," or arrow, and telum (ablative
telo)
is the Latin for javelin or spear.
The remainder of the message shows the filling that comes through
the transmitter or the subconscious of Mrs. Verrall. The chief points
lie in the coincidences between the words "spear" and "sphere" at one
end of the line and volatile ferrum—pro telo and
A similar mistake in regard to the personality through whom a message was intended to be delivered was made in the St. Paul cross-correspondence. Dr. Hodgson purported to be communicating through Mrs. Piper in England when Sir Oliver J. Lodge was present as sitter. It was the communicator, Dr. Hodgson, that proposed the name of St. Paul as an experiment, saying that he would go to Mrs. Holland and deliver this message at once. This was on November 15, 1906. But no reference to St. Paul appeared in the work of Mrs. Holland. By this time, however, Miss Helen Verrall, like her mother, was doing automatic writing in foreign languages. On January 12, Miss Verrall received the following in her automatic writing. It began in Latin and ended with the statement wholly unconnected with it: "The name is not right, robbing Peter to pay Paul? sanctus nomine quod efficit nil continens petatur subveniet." There is the mention of the name St. Paul here to suggest the possibilities, but it does not prove the intention. But, on February 26, the following came, making rather evident the intention of the reference. Readers should notice how it is buried in a mass of apparently irrelevant matter. The first passage shows that a peculiar device had to be adopted to get the name through, if it refers to the cross-reference at all, and I have several times observed in the work of Mrs. Chenoweth a similar circuitous method. Here is the second passage. "A tangle of flowers with green grass between wall flowers, pansies, which such hurry. Did you know that the second way was shorter. You have not understood about Paul. Ask Lodge. Quibus eruditis advocatis rein explicabis non nisi ad unam norman refers hoc satis alia vana. A tower of ancient masonry with battlements." The intention here is unmistakable, especially since the reference has no logical connection with its environment, save as this environment is explanatory. In connection with the reference to St. Paul on January 12, Mr. Piddington, who writes the article, translates the Latin to mean: "Holy in name (i. e. with the title of saint) what she (or he) is doing is of no use (i.e. by itself). Let the point (continens) be looked for; it will help." The Latin words of February 26 he translates to mean as follows: "By calling to your aid what learned men will you explain the matter? (You will not explain it) unless you refer to one standard. This is enough; more is useless." Mr. Piddington adds that the names Peter and Paul do not occur elsewhere in the automatic writing of Miss Verrall, so that it seems reasonable to suppose that the cross-reference is intentional. As stated above, the writing of Mrs. Holland did not contain the name St. Paul, but Sir Oliver Lodge notes that, on December 31, there is an approach to the subject, which is thought to suggest an explanation of the words in Miss Verrall's script. The statement in the writing of Mrs. Holland was: "II Peter 1: 15. This witness is true. It is now time that the shadow should be lifted from your spirit—'Let patience have her perfect work.' 'This is a faithful saying."' The verse II Peter 1:15 is: "Moreover I wilt endeavor that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance." It is quite apparent that this verse is not relevant to the name of St. Paul, though the references and quotations following it are more or less relevant. This fact was noted by Mr. Piddington and the relevance of the remainder of the statements. But Rev. Dr. Walter F. Prince, in a review of the whole crosscorrespondence in connection with the name of St. Paul, calls attention to a possible mistake in the reference to the Epistle of Peter by showing that, if it had been "II Peter III:15" the reference would have been extraordinarily apt. He assumes that the mistake was "one" for "three," or "first" for "third," assuming an auditory transmission. The verse reads: "And account that the long-suffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given unto him, has written unto you." Dr. Prince notes that this reference to St. Paul is not only direct, but also that it is "the one verse in the midst of 166 Petrine verses, and that it is likewise the only verse mentioning him out of 734 which make up the body of the non-Pauline epistles." The possible significance of this fact is apparent when we note that the other several passages referred to have special relevance to St. Paul. The expression, "This witness is true," Dr. Prince notes, is in St. Paul's Epistle to Titus, 1:13, though similar expressions are found in St. John. "This is a faithful saying" occurs at least three times in St. Paul's Epistles, according to Dr. Prince, and he adds a fourth instance. He also explains how the other two statements are reminiscent of St. Paul, but we need not emphasize the fact beyond recording Dr. Prince's opinion. As the main coincidence is clear, we need not stress the more enigmatical coincidences. It is only our knowledge that such circuitous methods are often employed that allows or requires us to tolerate or admit the cogency of the connection. The instance is the least cogent of the crosscorrespondences. Another instance may be briefly cited. At a sitting on January 16, 1907, with Mrs. Piper, Mr. Piddington asked the communicator, who happened to be Mr. Myers, to attach a sign to any message he got through as a crosscorrespondence, and suggested that this sign be something like a circle and a triangle. "A circle and a triangle inside it appeared in the script of Mrs. Verrall at the foot of a remarkable communication embodying a successful cross-correspondence" on January 28, 1907, just twelve days later than the date of Mr. Piddington's suggestion. As he had mentioned Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland as subjects for the experiment, this coincidence has much value, especially as showing that the circle and the triangle were signs of a cross-correspondence message. The automatic writing of Mrs. Holland did not show any circle and triangle in it; but on May 8, 1907, it did show geometrical figures, among which were a circle and a triangle, though the triangle was not in the circle. Mrs. Piper was in London, Mrs. Verrall in Cambridge, and Mrs. Holland in India. This instance, however, as we have noted, is connected with the next, which is so complex that its meaning is unmistakable to all careful readers. It is called the "Hope, Star and Browning" incident. It will be apparent also that more than one personality is probably concerned in it. On February 11, 1907, came the following at a sitting with Mrs. Piper, Mr. Piddington being the sitter and Mr. Myers the supposed communicator. Did she [Mrs. Verrall] receive the word "evangelical"? (" Evangelical"?) Yes. (I don't know, but I will inquire.) I referred also to Browning again. (Do you remember what your exact reference to Browning was?) I referred to Hope and Browning. I also said "star." [Interruption.] (Now, Myers, I must say good-by, as the friend is here.) Meanwhile look out for "Hope," "Star," and "Browning." On returning from the sitting, Mr. Piddington examined the record of Mrs. Verrall and found there on an earlier date, January 28, 1907, evidence of allusion to this cross-correspondence. On the next day, February 12, he asked Mr. Myers, the communicator, about the word "evangelical," as it had no meaning to him. Mr. Myers explained, without any suggestion from Mr. Piddington, that it was an attempt to give the name, Evelyn Hope. He then quotes from the two records of January 23 and 29, 1907, to show the reference to "Hope, Star and Browning," though in an indirect and enigmatical form, showing evidence of the presence and influence of Dr. Hodgson. I quote first the record of January 23, 1907. "Justice holds the scales. That gives the words, but an anagram would be better. Tell him that—rats, star, tars and so on. Try this. It has been tried before. RTATS, rearrange these five letters, or again t e a r s, s t a r e: s e a m, s a m e, and so on. Skeat, takes, Kate's, Keats, stake, steak. But the letters you would give to-night are not so many—only three—a s t." The explanation of these anagrams will follow the next quotation, as a similar process is involved in that record. It is the sitting of January 28, 1907.
"A s t e r [star],
"Then there is Blake
and mocked my loss of liberty. But it is all the same thing—the winged
desire, [Then follows an arc with the triangle in it, and then a full circle with the triangle in it.]
Both
these passages are in the records of Mrs. Verrall. The indication
that Browning is meant lies in the allusion to Abt Vogler. Mrs. Verrall
recognized this allusion, but did not know what it meant, not knowing
that any cross-correspondence had been attempted. Note that this
occurred on January 23, nineteen days before the matter was alluded to
through Mrs. Piper on February II. The passage from Browning is not
correctly quoted in the
message. The word "hope" is in it, but instead the word "passion" is
in Browning. This idea is recognized in the Greek word for "love" or the
god of love. The line in Browning is:" The passion that left the ground
to lose itself in the sky." Mrs. Verrall queried if
The anagrams contain a remarkable intimation that Dr. Hodgson was behind a part of the cross-correspondence. They had no meaning to Mr. Piddington, but finally he remembered having seen something of the kind among the papers of Dr. Hodgson when he was in America settling the affairs of the American Branch. He found on investigation that he had kept a paper on which several of these very anagrams were made by Dr. Hodgson himself while living. Several papers containing them had been destroyed, but he had happened to keep one of them. On it is the list of words: "Star, tars, rats, arts, tras." Besides it contains "tears" and it stare," and the word "aster," which is the English for a species of flower, and the Greek word for "star," which comes out through Mrs. Verrall, is an anagram play in the Greek on the word for wonder or sign, serving at the same time for a transition to Browning. It throws much light on the process and the subliminal action of the medium's mind. But the cross-correspondence did not stop here. Miss Verrall had not been told what was happening. One day she got in her automatic writing the drawing of a star with the following:
That was the sign she will understand when she sees it. diapason,
It was Browning who wrote the "Pied Piper of Hamelin," and in the Passage quoted there is not only a definite allusion to "star," but there is also the allusion to "rats" and "arts," two words in the anagrams mentioned through Mrs. Verrall. For brevity's sake I omitted one statement in the quotation which, in Greek as it was given, means "' a foreign physician "; the "Pied Piper" cured Hamelin of its plague of rats. The same circuitous reference to Browning, apparent in the automatic writing of Mrs. Verrall, appears here. We have then three psychics alluding to the same complex group of ideas; the circumstances not only prove the cross-correspondence, but also show very clearly the difficulties in communicating. The evidence for cross-correspondence is not the best. If it were as direct and meaningful as desired, there could be no skepticism based on the ground that the connections are fantastic and circuitous, or dependent on the interpretation of the reader. But, while some concession must be made to critical readers, the difficulty is not very apparent in the next instance, which is called that of "Crossing the Bar." It requires some preliminary explanation. Mrs. Verrall
had been struck with some indication of the personality communicating in
the messages of Mrs. Piper; and, knowing that her personal acquaintance
with Mr. Myers before his death precluded trusting her own messages reflecting his personal characteristics, she resolved
on a test which would
eliminate the subconscious knowledge of Mrs. Piper and perhaps strengthen the evidence for the presence of Mr. Myers. She looked
about for something to use at
a sitting with Mrs. Piper, that might provoke a significant reaction
from the alleged Myers as communicator. She required a sentence or words
which Mr. Myers would naturally recognize and which Mrs. Piper would not
understand. Finally she hit upon a few words from a passage in Plotinus,
used as a motto to a poem by Mr. Myers himself. The words were
1. A translation into English of the three words. 2. A reference to Myers's poem on Tennyson. 3. A reference to Plotinus and the latter part of "'Human Personality," the title of Myers's great work. On January 30, at the sitting with Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall received an allusion to a "haven of rest," purporting to come from Mr.' Myers; and it was thought that it contained a remote reference to what was wanted. But this is only conjectural, as it may be a plainer English version of the expression "celestial halcyon days," another cross-reference having some associations with the present subject. Not until March 6, were distinct traces of the translation noticeable. In the meantime, Mrs. Verrall's automatic writing had taken up the subject and discoursed about it in a remarkable manner with results that seem evidential in some instances, though much of the matter is exposed to the suspicion of being subconscious production. The details would make too long a story here. But the messages purporting to come from Mr. Myers through her script refer to Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and his poem on Lucretius, both of which in some passages have affinities to thoughts in Plotinus. Though Mrs. Verrall had read Tennyson's "In Memoriam" in her college days, she had no suspicion that there were passages in it referring to Plotinus, until she re-read the poem in order to discover them. Passages from Tennyson's "Lucretius" were introduced very directly into the automatic script; they were almost a literal translation of the ideas in the three Greek words she had given Mr. Myers at the sitting with Mrs. Piper. This circumstance, of course, is not evidential; but these very ideas came back through Mrs. Piper, who knew nothing about either the Greek words or the relation of "In Memoriam" and "Lucretius" to their meaning. These records extend from February 12 to March 11, while the communicator was silent on the matter all this time, in so far as Mrs. Piper's communications were concerned, except that on March 6 Mrs. Piper's trance personalities began the translation and the system of pertinent cross-correspondences. I quote Mr. Piddington. He alone was at the sitting. "On March 6, Myers, in the course of announcing various crosscorrespondences which he claimed to have transmitted to Mrs. Verrall, gave without explanation three words, 'Cloudless, Sky, Horizon,' followed by the phrase: 'a cloudless sky beyond the horizon.' In the waking stage Mrs. Piper uttered the words: 'moaning at the bar when I put out to sea.' A little later she pronounced the name 'Arthur Hallam'; then almost directly said it again: 'Arthur Hallam. Good-by. Margaret,' Margaret being Mrs. Verrall's Christian name." The mention of Arthur Hallam, the subject of "In Memoriam," was very pertinent here. Mr. Piddington adds in his remarks:
"Though no claim was made to have
given a translation of the words of the test question in the phrase 'cloudless
sky beyond the horizon' it would be difficult to suppose that chance had
furnished so satisfactory a paraphrase I this of
Mr. Piddington then quotes the whole of the original passage from which the three words were taken and shows that the Greek word for "air" preceded that for "heaven" and that the latter meant what was beyond the air; as we in English often use "sky" for the region occupied by the air, the phrase "beyond the sky" points to a knowledge of the whole passage. At this time Mrs. Verrall had not consciously grasped the meaning of her own automatic writing in connection with the references to "Arthur Hallam" and "Crossing the Bar." It was March 12 before she saw the connection. On March 13, at a sitting with Mrs. Piper by Mr. Piddington, Myers communicating drew lines which were said to represent a bar, evidently referring to Tennyson's poem or indicating an attempt to make a sign at the end of a crosscorrespondence. But nothing more of importance seems to have come until April 29, when Mrs. Verrall herself was present. At this sitting the only item of interest in this connection was a reference to "azure" and "blue sea," perhaps not as cogent as may be desired, but apparent to careful students of the record. No allusion was made to Plotinus or to "Human Personality." On April 30, however, when Miss Johnson was present at a sitting with Mrs. Piper, Rector, the control, said: "I have seen Mr. Myers and he gave me his reply to your Greek words and I gave them to the other lady before you appeared. Tell her to speak them. All right. Homer's 'Iliad."' Later in the sitting Mrs. Verrall came in; she was given the name Socrates and was told that it reminded the communicator of Homer. At first Mrs. Verrall thought the allusion to Socrates and Homer's "Iliad" was nonsense. "But later in the day," says Mr. Piddington, "a dim impression came to Mrs. Verrall, after thinking it over, that in the second volume of "Human personality," close to the passage about the vision of Plotinus in which occurs the translation of the words kai autos ouranos akumon (Greek letters given in original) was an allusion to the famous vision of Socrates, in which the woman of Phthia addressed him in a line from the 'Iliad."' An unmistakable allusion in Mrs. Verrall's own script of the next day, May 1, to the "eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato"—a phrase descriptive of Plotinus, quoted in the ninth chapter, of "Human Personality"—led her to investigate further with the following results. "In the last two chapters of 'Human Personality,' twice and twice only, is the word 'vision' used; the first time, of the vision which came to Socrates in the prison house, when the 'fair and white-robed woman' had 'given to Achilles's words'—'On the third day hence thou comest to Phthia's fertile shore'—'a more sacred meaning'; and the second time of the vision of Plotinus." It should be added that the passage is translated in "Human Personality," but the words of it were not mentioned in the book, so that any supposed reading of the book by Mrs. Piper is not a valid criticism. But one more message was required to complete the reference desired by Mrs. Verrall, and that was the name of Plotinus. She told Mrs. Sidgwick and Miss Johnson of this defect; and, just when Mrs. Sidgwick intended to tell the trance personality at her sitting of May 6 that the name of the author was wanted, Mr. Myers, purporting to communicate, said. "Will you say to Mrs. Verrall—Plotinus." The last word was not deciphered by Mrs. Sidgwick, and was thereupon repeated in large letters, PLOTINUS. Mrs. Sidgwick then asked: "What is that?" and Myers replied: "My answer to autos ouranos akumen." [akumon]. This completes the data necessary to clinch the cross-correspondence, and, whatever readers may think of its evidentiality, it bears unmistakable indications in its complications and indirections of being what it claims to be, though I can quite understand that the incident may seem inconclusive to those who assume that communication with the dead should be more direct and obvious, if it is to be convincing. The next instance of cross-correspondence is especially interesting because it involves the giving of the contents of a posthumous letter before the person who wrote it had died. By a posthumous letter we mean one written by a living person and sealed, so that no living person normally knows the contents; the intention is, if possible, to reveal the contents after death. The contents in this case purported to be given by Mr. Myers while he made an experiment in cross-correspondence with the contents. To understand the significance of the case, we should know some preliminary facts. Mr. Myers, when he read the work of Stainton Moses, was impressed by one incident, very important if genuine. Mr. Moses, when doing some automatic writing, asked Rector, the control, if he could read the contents of a book; on his answering in the affirmative, Mr. Moses put him to the test, and, if we accept the account of Mr. Moses, he succeeded in a remarkable manner. Mr. Moses named the book, the shelf on which it stood, the number of the book and the page from which be wanted some passage read. Mr. Moses did not himself know what was on the page. When Mr. Myers heard of this phenomenon, he at once thought that, if such a thing were possible, it would be very difficult to prove the identity of any discarnate spirit who gave the contents of any document as evidence. He at once saw the relation of the possibility to posthumous letters, and came to the conclusion that the proof of survival would depend upon the concordant results of a large number of insignificant facts from different sources. He, therefore, based his method of deciding the question upon a system of cross-correspondences which should rightly articulate in illustrating the personal identity of a given person. After this' discovery he did not attach so much value to posthumous letters as he had done before. After his death, evidently with some sense of humor, he proceeded to prove his theory by giving messages which illustrate cross-correspondence and the obtaining of the contents of a posthumous letter. I summarize the facts in tabular form. On July 13, 1904, Mr. Piddington sat down in the office of the Society and wrote out his posthumous letter, which contained references to the number seven, and expressions including it., He said that he would try, after death, to communicate a written number seven, adding: "I should try to communicate such things as: 'The seven lamps of architecture,' 'The seven sleepers of Ephesus,' 'unto seventy times seven,' 'We are seven,' and so forth." He went on to say that he seemed to have an organic interest in the number seven, and that it might have made such an impression on his mind that he would be able to recall it as a spirit, if he survived. With this explanation and the date of the letter, the following table will explain itself. It represents the dates and contents of automatic writing through the several psychics named. The force of the coincidences referring to Mr. Piddington's letter will be more apparent if we quote the whole of the passage that came through Mrs. Verrall on July 13th, 1904. The whole passage runs: "It is something contemporary that you are to record—note the hour—in London; in London half the message has come." Then after referring to the posthumous letters of Mr. Myers and Professor Sidgwick, the passage ends with a reference to Mr. Piddington as follows: "Surely Piddington will see that this is enough and should be acted upon." (1) THE POSTHUMOUS LETTER. |
,
which is the Greek for "sphere," representing the misunderstanding in
Boston of the word "spear," which Dr. Hodgson had given and which had
been mistaken for "sphere."
at the other end. No serious
difficulty is met in the mistake about "sphear" in the sitting with Mrs.
Piper on February 4th. That is a natural error on the part of the
subconscious, which had started with the impression that Miss Verrall
was the subject of the experiment. In fact, this mistake and that of
transforming the word "spear" into "sphere" and putting it in Greek in
England is in favor of a spiritistic interpretation of the coincidences,
as it would be natural in the complicated circumstances under which such
a message has to be transmitted. But the reader can judge of all this
for himself.
[wonder or sign].
The world's wonder, and all a wonder and a wild desire—A WINGED DESIRE 
[winged love].
[passion] the hope that
leaves the earth for the sky—Abt Vogler for earth, too hard, that found
itself or lost itself in the sky. On the earth the broken sounds,
threads, in the sky the perfect arc. The C major of this life.
But your recollection is at fault."
was an attempt at "bird," as it means
it "winged," and did not remark what Mr. Piddington notes, namely, that
'bird' is suggested by the line in Browning, which runs, "O lyric Love,
half angel and half bird." This line in Browning precedes the words in
Mrs. Verrall's record, namely, "And all a wonder and a wild desire." Thus the passage is packed
with Browning, and the word "hope" is found in one of the statements.
[rhythm through it
all]. No arts avail. The heavenly harmony
[as Plato says]. The mystic three and a star above it all,
rats
everywhere in Hamelin town. Now do you understand. Henry."
or, spelled in English,
kai autos ouranos
akumon, meaning "the very
heavens calm." Mrs. Piper did not know Greek, and so she would not be
able even subconsciously to know the meaning of the terms when uttered to
her control in the trance. Armed with these Greek words, Mrs. Verrall
went to Mrs. Piper on January 29, 1907, and gave three of the words to
the supposed Myers, omitting the first of the four,
kai.
She expected some reference to the
following:
(kai autos akumon); but Vpavo
preceded as the phrase was by references to Mrs. Verrall and followed by
the quotation from 'Crossing the Bar' and the name 'Arthur Hallam,' it
is practically impossible to attribute its appropriateness to chance.
Moreover, this paraphrase seems to indicate knowledge not only of the
meaning of the three words of the test question but also of their
original context."