CHAPTER VIII

MOTOR AUTOMATISM

[Greek: Mêketi monon sumpnein tô periechonti aeri, all' hêdê kai sumphronoin tô periechonti panta noerô.]

--MARCUS AURELIUS.

At this point, one may broadly say, we reach the end of the phenomena whose existence is vaguely familiar to popular talk. And here, too, I might fairly claim, the evidence for my primary thesis,--namely, that the analysis of man's personality reveals him as a spirit, surviving death,--has attained an amplitude which would justify the reader in accepting that view as the provisional hypothesis which comes nearest to a comprehensive co-ordination of the actual facts. What we have already recounted seems, indeed, impossible to explain except by supposing that our inner vision has widened or deepened its purview so far as to attain some glimpses of a spiritual world in which the individualities of our departed friends still actually subsist.

The reader, however, who has followed me thus far must be well aware that a large class of phenomena, of high importance, is still awaiting discussion. _Motor_ automatisms,--though less familiar to the general public than the phantasms which I have classed as _sensory_ automatisms,--are in fact even commoner, and even more significant.

Motor automatisms, as I define them, are phenomena of very wide range. We have encountered them already many times in this book. We met them in the first place in a highly developed form in connection with multiplex personality in Chapter II. Numerous instances were there given of motor effects, initiated by secondary selves without the knowledge of the primary selves, or sometimes in spite of their actual resistance. All motor action of a secondary self is an automatism in this sense, in relation to the primary self. And of course we might by analogy extend the use of the word still further, and might call not only post-epileptic acts, but also maniacal acts, automatic; since they are performed without the initiation of the presumedly sane primary personality. Those degenerative phenomena, indeed, are not to be discussed in this chapter. Yet it will be well to pause here long enough to make it clear to the reader just what motor automatisms I am about to discuss as _evolutive_ phenomena, and as therefore falling within the scope of this treatise;--and what kind of relation they bear to the dissolutive motor phenomena which occupy so much larger a place in popular knowledge.

In order to meet this last question, I must here give more distinct formulation to a thesis which has already suggested itself more than once in dealing with special groups of our phenomena.

_It may be expected that supernormal vital phenomena will manifest themselves as far as possible through the same channels as abnormal or morbid vital phenomena, when the same centres or the same synergies are involved._

To illustrate the meaning of this theorem, I may refer to a remark long ago made by Edmund Gurney and myself in dealing with "Phantasms of the Living," or veridical hallucinations, generated (as we maintained), not by a morbid state of the percipient's brain, but by a telepathic impact from an agent at a distance. We observed that if a hallucination--a subjective image--is to be excited by this distant energy, it will probably be most readily excited in somewhat the same manner as the morbid hallucination which follows on a cerebral injury. We urged that this is _likely_ to be the case--we showed ground for supposing that it _is_ the case--both as regards the mode of evolution of the phantasm in the percipient's brain, and the mode in which it seems to present itself to his senses.

And here I should wish to give a much wider generality to this principle, and to argue that if there be within us a secondary self aiming at manifestation by physiological means, it seems probable that its readiest _path of externalisation_--its readiest outlet of visible action--may often lie along some track which has already been shown to be a line of low resistance by the disintegrating processes of disease. Or, varying the metaphor, we may anticipate that the partition of the primary and the secondary self will lie along some plane of cleavage which the _morbid_ dissociations of our psychical synergies have already shown themselves disposed to follow. If epilepsy, madness, etc., tend to _split up_ our faculties in certain ways, automatism is likely to split them up in ways somewhat resembling these.

But in what way then, it will be asked, do you distinguish the supernormal from the merely abnormal? Why assume that in these aberrant states there is anything besides hysteria, besides epilepsy, besides insanity?

The answer to this question has virtually been given in previous chapters of this book. The reader is already accustomed to the point of view which regards all psychical as well as all physiological activities as necessarily either developmental or degenerative, tending to evolution or to dissolution. And now, whilst altogether waiving any teleological speculation, I will ask him hypothetically to suppose that an evolutionary _nisus_, something which we may represent as an effort towards self-development, self-adaptation, self-renewal, is discernible especially on the psychical side of at any rate the higher forms of life. Our question, Supernormal or abnormal?--may then be phrased, Evolutive or dissolutive? And in studying each psychical phenomenon in turn we shall have to inquire whether it indicates a mere degeneration of powers already acquired, or, on the other hand, the "promise and potency," if not the actual possession, of powers as yet unrecognised or unknown.

Thus, for instance, Telepathy is surely a step in _evolution_.[160] To learn the thoughts of other minds without the mediation of the special senses, manifestly indicates the possibility of a vast extension of psychical powers. And any knowledge which we can amass as to the conditions under which telepathic action takes place will form a valuable starting-point for an inquiry as to the evolutive or dissolutive character of unfamiliar psychical states.[161]

For example, we may learn from our knowledge of telepathy that the superficial aspect of certain stages of psychical evolution, like the superficial aspect of certain stages of physiological evolution, may resemble mere _inhibition_, or mere _perturbation_. But the inhibition may involve latent dynamogeny, and the perturbation may mask evolution. The hypnotised subject may pass through a lethargic stage before he wakes into a state in which he has gained _community of sensation_ with the operator; somewhat as the silkworm (to use the oldest and the most suggestive of all illustrations) passes through the apparent torpor of the cocoon-stage before evolving into the moth. Again, the automatist's hand (as we shall presently see) is apt to pass through a stage of inco-ordinated movements, which might almost be taken for choreic, before it acquires the power of ready and intelligent writing. Similarly the development, for instance, of a tooth may be preceded by a stage of indefinite aching, which might be ascribed to the formation of an abscess, did not the new tooth ultimately show itself. And still more striking cases of a _perturbation which masks evolution_ might be drawn from the history of the human organism as it develops into its own maturity, or prepares for the appearance of the fresh human organism which is to succeed it.

Analogy, therefore, both physiological and psychical, warns us not to conclude that any given psychosis is merely degenerative until we have examined its results closely enough to satisfy ourselves whether they tend to bring about any enlargement of human powers, to open any new inlet to the reception of objective truth. If such there prove to be, then, with whatever morbid activities the psychosis may have been intertwined, it contains indications of an evolutionary _nisus_ as well.

These remarks, I hope, may have sufficiently cleared the ground to admit of our starting afresh on the consideration of such motor automatisms as are at any rate not morbid in their effect on the organism, and which I now have to show to be _evolutive_ in character. I maintain that we have no valid ground for assuming that the movements which are _not_ due to our conscious will must be less important, and less significant, than those that _are_. We observe, of course, that in the organic region the movements which are _not_ due to conscious will are really the most important of all, though the voluntary movements by which a man seeks food and protects himself against enemies are also of great practical importance--he must first live and multiply if he is to learn and know. But we must guard against confusing importance for immediate practical life with importance for science--on which even practical life ultimately depends. As soon as the task of living and multiplying is no longer all-engrossing, we begin to change our relative estimate of values, and to find that it is not the broad and obvious phenomena, but the residual and elusive phenomena, which are oftenest likely to introduce us to new avenues of knowledge. I wish to persuade my readers that this is quite as truly the case in psychology as in physics.

As a first step in our analysis, we may point out certain main characters which unite in a true class all the automatisms which we are here considering--greatly though these may differ among themselves in external form.

In the first place, then, our automatisms are _independent_ phenomena; they are what the physician calls _idiognomonic_. That is to say, they are not merely symptomatic of some other affection, or incidental to some profounder change. The mere fact, for instance, that a man writes messages which he does not consciously originate will not, when taken alone, prove anything beyond this fact itself as to the writer's condition. He may be perfectly sane, in normal health, and with nothing unusual observable about him. This characteristic--provable by actual observation and experiment--distinguishes our automatisms from various seemingly kindred phenomena. Thus we may have to include in our class the occasional automatic utterance of words or sentences. But the continuous exhausting vociferation of acute mania does not fall within our province; for those shouts are merely _symptomatic_; nor, again, does the _cri hydrocéphalique_ (or spontaneous meaningless noise which sometimes accompanies water on the brain); for that, too, is no independent phenomenon, but the direct consequence of a definite lesion. Furthermore, we shall have to include in our class certain simple movements of the hands, co-ordinated into the act of writing. But here, also, our definition will lead us to exclude _choreic_ movements, which are merely symptomatic of nervous malnutrition; or which we may, if we choose, call _idiopathic_, as constituting an independent malady. But our automatisms are not _idiopathic_ but _idiognomonic_; they may indeed be associated with or facilitated by certain states of the organism, but they are neither a symptom of any other malady, nor are they a malady in themselves.

Agreeing, then, that our peculiar class consists of automatisms which are idiognomonic,--whose existence does not necessarily imply the existence of some profounder affection already known as producing them,--we have still to look for some more positive bond of connection between them, some quality common to all of them, and which makes them worth our prolonged investigation.

This we shall find in the fact that they are all of them _message-bearing_ or _nunciative_ automatisms. I do not, of course, mean that they all of them bring messages from sources external to the automatist's own mind. In some cases they probably do this; but as a rule the so-called messages seem more probably to originate within the automatist's own personality. Why, then, it may be asked, do I call them _messages_? We do not usually speak of a man as sending a message to himself. The answer to this question involves, as we shall presently see, the profoundest conception of these automatisms to which we can as yet attain. They present themselves to us as messages communicated from one stratum to another stratum of the same personality. Originating in some deeper zone of a man's being, they float up into superficial consciousness, as deeds, visions, words, ready-made and full-blown, without any accompanying perception of the elaborative process which has made them what they are.

Can we then (we may next ask) in any way predict the possible _range_ of these motor automatisms? Have we any limit assignable _a priori_, outside which it would be useless to look for any externalisation of an impulse emanating from sub-conscious strata of our being?

The answer to this must be that no such limit can be with any confidence suggested. We have not yet learnt with any distinctness even how far the wave from a _consciously_-perceived stimulus will spread, or what changes its motion will assume. Still less can we predict the limitations which the resistance of the organism will impose on the radiation of a stimulus originated within itself. We are learning to consider the human organism as a practically infinite complex of interacting vibrations; and each year adds many new facts to our knowledge of the various transformations which these vibrations may undergo, and of the unexpected artifices by which we may learn to cognise some stimulus which is not directly felt.

A few concrete instances will make my meaning plainer. And my first example shall be taken from those experiments in _muscle-reading_--less correctly termed mind-reading--with which the readers of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R. are already familiar. Let us suppose that I am to hide a pin, and that some accomplished muscle-reader is to take my hand and find the pin by noting my muscular indications.[162] I first hide the pin in the hearth-rug; then I change my mind and hide it in the bookshelf. I fix my mind on the bookshelf, but resolve to make no guiding movement. The muscle-reader takes my hand, leads me first to the rug, then to the bookshelf, and finds the pin. Now, what has happened in this case? What movements have I made?

Firstly, I have made no _voluntary_ movement; and secondly, I have made no _conscious involuntary_ movement. But, thirdly, I have made an _unconscious involuntary_ movement which directly depended on conscious ideation. I strongly thought of the bookshelf, and when the bookshelf was reached in our vague career about the room I made a movement--say rather a tremor occurred--in my hand, which, although beyond both my knowledge and my control, was enough to supply to the muscle-reader's delicate sensibility all the indication required. All this is now admitted, and, in a sense, understood; we formulate it by saying that my conscious ideation contained a motor element; and that this motor element, though inhibited from any conscious manifestation, did yet inevitably externalise itself in a peripheral tremor.

But, fourthly, something more than this has clearly taken place. Before the muscle-reader stopped at the bookshelf he stopped at the rug. I was no longer consciously thinking of the rug; but the idea of the pin in the rug must still have been reverberating, so to say, in my sub-conscious region; and this unconscious memory, this unnoted reverberation, revealed itself in a peripheral tremor nearly as distinct as that which (when the bookshelf was reached) corresponded to the strain of conscious thought.

This tremor, then, was in a certain sense a message-bearing automatism. It was the externalisation of an idea which, once conscious, had become unconscious, though in the slightest conceivable degree--namely, by a mere slight escape from the field of direct attention.

Having, then, considered an instance where the automatic message passes only between two closely-adjacent strata of consciousness, externalising an impulse derived from an idea which has only recently sunk out of consciousness and which could easily be summoned back again;--let us find our next illustration in a case where the line of demarcation between the strata of consciousness through which the automatic message pierces is distinct and impassable by any effort of will.

Let us take a case of _post-hypnotic suggestion_;--say, for instance, an experiment of Edmund Gurney's (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 319). The subject had been trained to write with planchette, after he had been awakened, the statements which had been made to him when in the hypnotic trance. He wrote the desired words, or something like them, but while he wrote them his waking self was entirely unaware of what his hand was writing. Thus, having been told in the trance, "It has begun snowing again," he wrote, after waking, "It begun snowing," while he read aloud, with waking intelligence, from a book of stories, and was quite unconscious of what his hand (placed on a planchette behind a screen) was at the same time writing.

Here we have an automatic message of traceable origin; a message implanted in the hypnotic stratum of the subject's self, and cropping up--like a fault--in the waking stratum,--externalised in automatic movements which the waking self could neither predict nor guide.

Yet once more. In the discussion which will follow we shall have various instances of the transformation (as I shall regard it) of psychical shock into definite muscular energy of apparently a quite alien kind. Such transformations of so-called psychical into physical force--of will into motion--do of course perpetually occur within us.

For example, I take a child to a circus; he sits by me holding my hand; there is a discharge of musketry and his grip tightens. Now in this case we should call the child's tightened grip automatic. But suppose that, instead of merely holding my hand, he is trying with all his might to squeeze the dynamometer, and that the sudden excitation enables him to squeeze it harder--are we then to describe that extra squeeze as automatic? or as voluntary?

However phrased, it is the fact (as amply established by M. Féré and others[163]) that excitations of almost any kind--whether sudden and startling or agreeable and prolonged--do tend to increase the subject's dynamometrical power. In the first place, and this is in itself an important fact, the average of squeezing-power is found to be greater among educated students than among robust labouring men, thus showing that it is not so much developed muscle as active brain which renders possible a sudden concentration of muscular force. But more than this; M. Féré finds that with himself and his friends the mere listening to an interesting lecture, or the mere stress of thought in solitude, or still more the act of writing or of speech, produces a decided increase of strength in the grip, especially of the right hand. The same effect of dynamogeny is produced with hypnotic subjects, by musical sounds, by coloured light, especially red light, and even by a hallucinatory suggestion of red light. "All our sensations," says M. Féré in conclusion, "are accompanied by a development of potential energy, which passes into a kinetic state, and externalises itself in motor manifestations which even so rough a method as dynamometry is able to observe and record."

I would beg the reader to keep these words in mind. We shall presently find that a method apparently even rougher than dynamographic tracings may be able to interpret, with far greater delicacy, the automatic tremors which are coursing to and fro within us. If once we can get a spy into the citadel of our own being, his rudest signalling will tell us more than our subtlest inferences from outside of what is being planned and done within.

And now having to deal with what I define as messages conveyed by one stratum in man to another stratum, I must first consider in what general ways human messages can be conveyed. Writing and speech have become predominant in the intercourse of civilised men, and it is to writing and speech that we look with most interest among the communications of the subliminal self. But it does not follow that the subliminal self will always have such complex methods at its command. We have seen already that it often finds it hard to manage the delicate co-ordinations of muscular movement required for writing,--that the attempt at automatic script ends in a thump and a scrawl.

The subliminal self like the telegraphist begins its effort with full knowledge, indeed, of the alphabet, but with only weak and rude command over our muscular adjustments. It is therefore _a priori_ likely that its easiest mode of communication will be through a repetition of simple movements, so arranged as to correspond to letters of the alphabet.

And here, I think, we have attained to a conception of the mysterious and much-derided phenomenon of "table-tilting" which enables us to correlate it with known phenomena, and to start at least from an intelligible basis, and on a definite line of inquiry.

A few words are needed to explain what are the verifiable phenomena, and the less verifiable hypotheses, connoted by such words as "table-turning," "spirit-rapping," and the like.

If one or more persons of a special type--at present definable only by the question-begging and barbarous term "mediumistic"--remain quietly for some time with hands in contact with some easily movable object, and desiring its movement, that object will sometimes begin to move. If, further, they desire it to indicate letters of the alphabet by its movements,--as by tilting once for _a_, twice for _b_, etc., it will often do so, and answers unexpected by any one present will be obtained.

Thus far, whatever our interpretation, we are in the region of easily reproducible facts, which many of my readers may confirm for themselves if they please.

But beyond the simple movements--or table-turning--and the intelligible responses--or table-tilting--both of which are at least _primâ facie_ physically explicable by the sitters' unconscious pressure, without postulating any unknown physical force at all,--it is alleged by many persons that further physical phenomena occur; namely, that the table moves in a direction, or with a violence, which no unconscious pressure can explain; and also that percussive sounds or "raps" occur, which no unconscious action, or indeed no agency known to us, could produce. These raps communicate messages like the tilts, and it is to them that the name of "spirit-rapping" is properly given. But spiritualists generally draw little distinction between these four phenomena--mere table-turning, responsive table-tilting, movements of inexplicable vehemence, and responsive raps--attributing all alike to the agency of departed spirits of men and women, or at any rate to disembodied intelligences of some kind or other.

I am not at present discussing the physical phenomena of Spiritualism, and I shall therefore leave on one side all the alleged movements and noises of this kind for which unconscious pressure will not account. I do not prejudge the question as to their real occurrence; but assuming that such disturbances of the physical order do occur, there is at least no _primâ facie_ need to refer them to disembodied spirits. If a table moves when no one is touching it; this is not obviously more likely to have been effected by my deceased grandfather than by myself. We cannot tell how _I_ could move it; but then we cannot tell how _he_ could move it either. The question must be argued on its merits in each case; and our present argument is not therefore vitiated by our postponement of this further problem.

M. Richet[164] was, I believe, the first writer, outside the Spiritualistic group, who so much as showed any practical knowledge of this phenomenon, still less endeavoured to explain it. Faraday's well-known explanation of table-turning as the result of the summation of many unconscious movements--obviously true as it is for some of the simplest cases of table-movement--does not touch this far more difficult question of the origination of these intelligent messages, conveyed by distinct and repeated movements of some object admitting of ready displacement. The ordinary explanation--I am speaking, of course, of cases where fraud is not in question--is that the sitter unconsciously sets going and stops the movements so as to shape the word in accordance with his expectation. Now that he unconsciously sets going and stops the movements is part of my own present contention, but that the word is thereby shaped in accordance with his expectation is often far indeed from being the case. To those indeed who are familiar with automatic _written_ messages, this question as to the unexpectedness of the _tilted_ messages will present itself in a new light. If the written messages originate in a source beyond the automatist's supraliminal self, so too may the tilted messages;--even though we admit that the tilts are caused by his hand's pressure of the table just as directly as the script by his hand's manipulation of the pen.

One piece of evidence showing that _written_ messages are not always the mere echo of expectation is a case[165] where _anagrams_ were automatically written, which their writer was not at once able to decipher. Following this hint, I have occasionally succeeded in getting anagrams tilted out for myself by movements of a small table which I alone touched.

This is a kind of experiment which might with advantage be oftener repeated; for the extreme incoherence and silliness of the responses thus obtained does not prevent the process itself from being in a high degree instructive. Here, again (as in automatic writing), a man may hold colloquy with his own dream--may note in actual juxtaposition two separate strata of his own intelligence.

I shall not at present pursue the discussion of these tilted responses beyond this their very lowest and most rudimentary stage. They almost immediately suggest another problem, for which our discussion is hardly ripe, the participation, namely, of several minds in the production of the same automatic message. There is something of this difficulty even in the explanation of messages given when the hands of two persons are touching a planchette; but when the instrument of response is large, and the method of response simple, as with table-tilting, we find this question of the influence of more minds than one imperatively recurring.

Our immediate object, however, is rather to correlate the different attainable modes of automatic response in some intelligible scheme than to pursue any one of them through all its phases. We regarded the table-tilting process as in one sense the simplest, the least differentiated form of motor response. It is a kind of _gesture_ merely, though a gesture implying knowledge of the alphabet. Let us see in what directions the movement of response becomes more specialised,--as gesture parts into pictorial art and articulate speech. We find, in fact, that a just similar divergence of impulses takes place in automatic response. On the one hand the motor impulse specialises itself into _drawing_; on the other hand it specialises itself into _speech_. Of automatic drawing I have already said something (Chapter III.). Automatic speech will receive detailed treatment in Chapter IX. At present I shall only briefly indicate the position of each form of movement among cognate automatisms.

Some of my readers may have seen these so-called "spirit-drawings,"--designs, sometimes in colour, whose author asserts that he drew them without any plan, or even knowledge of what his hand was going to do. This assertion may be quite true, and the person making it may be perfectly sane.[166] The drawings so made will be found curiously accordant with what the view which I am explaining would lead us to expect. For they exhibit a fusion of arabesque with ideography; that is to say, they partly resemble the forms of ornamentation into which the artistic hand strays when, as it were, dreaming on the paper without definite plan; and partly they afford a parallel to the early attempts at symbolic self-expression of savages who have not yet learnt an alphabet. Like savage writing, they pass by insensible transitions from direct pictorial symbolism to an abbreviated ideography, mingled in its turn with writing of a fantastic or of an ordinary kind.

And here, before we enter on the study of automatic writing, I must refer to two great historic cases of automatism, which may serve as a kind of prologue to what is to follow. One case, that of Socrates, is a case of monitory _inhibition_; the other, that of Jeanne d'Arc, of monitory _impulse_.

The Founder of Science himself--the permanent type of sanity, shrewdness, physical robustness, and moral balance--was guided in all the affairs of life by a monitory Voice,--by "the Dæmon of Socrates." This is a case which can never lose its interest, a case which has been vouched for by the most practical, and discussed by the loftiest intellect of Greece,--both of them intimate friends of the illustrious subject;--a case, therefore, which one who endeavours to throw new light on hallucination and automatism is bound, even at this distance of time, to endeavour to explain.[167] And this is the more needful, since a treatise was actually written, a generation ago, as "a specimen of the application of the science of psychology to the science of history," arguing from the records of the [Greek: daimónion] in Xenophon and Plato that Socrates was in fact insane.[168]

I believe that it is now possible to give a truer explanation; to place these old records in juxtaposition with more instructive parallels; and to show that the messages which Socrates received were only advanced examples of a process which, if supernormal, is not abnormal, and which characterises that form of intelligence which we describe as _genius_.

The story of Socrates I take as a signal example of _wise automatism_; of the possibility that the messages which are conveyed to the supraliminal mind from subliminal strata of the personality,--whether as sounds, as sights, or as movements,--may sometimes come from far beneath the realm of dream and confusion,--from some self whose monitions convey to us a wisdom profounder than we know.

Similarly in the case of Joan of Arc, I believe that only now, with the comprehension which we are gradually gaining of the possibility of an impulse from the mind's deeper strata which is so far from madness that it is wiser than our sanity itself,--only now, I repeat, can we understand aright that familiar story.

Joan's condemnation was based on her own admissions; and the Latin _procès-verbal_ still exists, and was published from the MS. by M. Quicherat, 1841-9, for the French Historical Society.[169] Joan, like Socrates, was condemned mainly on the ground, or at least on the pretext of her monitory voices: and her Apology remarkably resembles his, in its resolute insistence on the truth of the very phenomena which were being used to destroy her. Her answers are clear and self-consistent, and seem to have been little, if at all, distorted by the recorder. Few pieces of history so remote as this can be so accurately known.

Fortunately for our purpose, her inquisitors asked her many questions as to her voices and visions; and her answers enable us to give a pretty full analysis of the phenomena which concern us.

I. The voices do not begin with the summons to fight for France. Joan heard them first at thirteen years of age,--as with Socrates also the voice began in childhood. The first command consisted of nothing more surprising than that "she was to be a good girl, and go often to church." After this the voice--as in the case of Socrates--intervened frequently, and on trivial occasions.

II. The voice was accompanied at first by a light, and sometimes afterwards by figures of saints, who appeared to speak, and whom Joan appears to have both seen and felt as dearly as though they had been living persons. But here there is some obscurity; and Michelet thinks that on one occasion the Maid was tricked by the courtiers for political ends. For she asserted (apparently without contradiction) that several persons, including the Archbishop of Rheims, as well as herself, had seen an angel bringing to the King a material crown.[170]

III. The voices came mainly when she was awake, but also sometimes roused her from sleep; a phenomenon often observed in our cases of "veridical hallucination." "Ipsa dormiebat, et vox excitabat eam." (Quicherat, i., p. 62.)

IV. The voice was not always fully intelligible (especially if she was half awake);--in this respect again resembling some of our recorded cases, both visual and auditory, where, on the view taken in _Phantasms of the Living_, the externalisation has been incomplete. "Vox dixit aliqua, sed non omnia intellexit." (Quicherat, i., p. 62.)

V. The predictions of the voice, so far as stated, were mainly fulfilled; viz., that the siege of Orleans would be raised; that Charles VII. would be crowned at Rheims; that she herself would be wounded; but the prediction that there would be a great victory over the English within seven years was not fulfilled in any exact way, although the English continued to lose ground. In short, about so much was fulfilled as an ardent self-devoted mind might have anticipated; much indeed that might have seemed irrational to ordinary observers, but nothing which actually needed a definite prophetic power. Here, again, we are reminded of the general character of the monitions of Socrates. And yet in Joan's case, more probably than in the case of Socrates, there may have been one singular exception to this general rule. She knew by monition that there was a sword "retro altare"--somewhere behind the altar--in the Church of St. Catherine of Fierbois. "Scivit ipsum ibi esse per voces":--she sent for it, nothing doubting, and it was found and given to her. This was a unique incident in her career. Her judges asked whether she had not once found a cup, and a missing priest, by help of similar monitions, but this she denied; and it is remarkable that no serious attempt was made either to show that she had claimed this clairvoyant power habitually, or, on the other hand, to invalidate the one instance of it which she did in effect claim. It would be absurd to cite the alleged discovery of the sword as in itself affording a proof of clairvoyance, any more than Socrates' alleged intimation of the approaching herd of swine.[171] But when we are considering monitions given in more recent times it will be well to remember that it is in this direction that some supernormal extension of knowledge seems possibly traceable.

The cases of Socrates and of Joan of Arc, on which I have just dwelt, might with almost equal fitness have been introduced at certain other points of my discussion. At first sight, at any rate, they appear rather like sensory than like motor automatisms,--like hallucinations of hearing rather than like the motor impulses which we are now about to study. Each case, however, approaches motor automatism in a special way.

In the case of Socrates the "sign" seems to have been not so much a definite voice as a sense of _inhibition_. In the case of Joan of Arc the voices were definite enough, but they were accompanied--as such voices sometimes are, but sometimes are _not_--with an overmastering impulse to _act_ in obedience to them. These are, I may say, palmary cases of inhibition and of impulse: and inhibition and impulse are at the very root of motor phenomena.

They show moreover the furthest extent of the claim that can be made for the agency of the subliminal self, apart from any external influence,--apart from telepathy from the living, or possession by the departed. Each of those other hypotheses will claim its own group of cases; but we must not invoke them until the resources of subliminal wisdom are manifestly overtaxed.

These two famous cases, then, have launched us on our subject in the stress of a twofold difficulty in logical arrangement. We cannot always answer these primary questions, Is the subliminal impulse sensory or motor? is it originated in the automatist's own mind, or in some mind external to him?

In the first place, we must reflect that, if the subliminal self really possesses that profound power over the organism with which I have credited it, we may expect that its "messages" will sometimes express themselves in the form of deep organic modifications--of changes in the vaso-motor, the circulatory, the respiratory systems. Such phenomena are likely to be less noted or remembered as _coincidental_, from their very indefiniteness, as compared, for instance, with a phantasmal appearance; but we have, nevertheless, records of various telepathic cases of deep coenesthetic disturbance, of a profound _malaise_ which must, one would think, have involved some unusual condition of the viscera.[172]

In cases, too, where the telepathic impression has ultimately assumed a definite sensory form, some organic or emotional phenomena have been noted, being perhaps the _first_ effects of the telepathic impact, whether from the living or from the dead.[173]

And here I may mention an experience of Lady de Vesci's, who described to me in conversation a feeling of _malaise_, defining itself into the urgent need of definite action--namely, the despatch of a telegram to a friend who was in fact then dying at the other side of the world.[174] Such an impulse had one only parallel in her experience, which also was telepathic in a similar way.

Similar sensory disturbances are sometimes reported in connection with an important form of motor automatism,--that of "dowsing" or discovering water by means of the movement of a rod held in the hands of the automatist,--already treated of in Appendix V. A.

A small group of cases may naturally be mentioned here. From two different points of view they stand for the most part at the entrance of our subject. I speak of motor inhibitions, prompted at first by subliminal memory, or by subliminal hyperæsthesia, but merging into telæsthesia or telepathy. Inhibitions--sudden arrests or incapacities of action--(more or less of the Socratic type)--form a simple, almost rudimentary, type of motor automatisms. And an inhibition--a sudden check on action of this kind--will be a natural way in which a strong but obscure impression will work itself out. Such an impression, for instance, is that of _alarm_, suggested by some vague sound or odour which is only subliminally perceived. And thus in this series of motor automatisms, just as in our series of dreams, or in our series of sensory automatisms, we find ourselves beginning with cases where the subliminal self merely shows some slight extension of memory or of sensory perception,--and thence pass insensibly to cases where no "cryptomnesia" will explain the facts known in the past, and no hyperæsthesia will explain the facts discerned in the present.

We may most of us have observed that if we perform any small action to which there are objections, which we have once known but which have altogether passed from our minds, we are apt to perform it in a hesitating, inefficient way.

Similarly there are cases where some sudden muscular impulse or inhibition has probably depended on a subliminal perception or interpretation of a sound which had not reached the supraliminal attention. For instance, two friends walking together along a street in a storm just evade by sudden movements a falling mass of masonry. Each thinks that he has received some _monition_ of the fall; each asserting that he heard no noise whatever to warn him. Here is an instance where subliminal perception may have been slightly quicker and more delicate than supraliminal, and may have warned them just in time.

In the case which I now quote (from _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 416) there may have been some subliminal hyperæsthesia of hearing which dimly warned Mr. Wyman of the approach of the extra train.[175]

Mr. Wm. H. Wyman writes to the Editor of the _Arena_ as follows:--

DUNKIRK, N. Y., _June 26th, 1891_.

Some years ago my brother was employed and had charge as conductor and engineer of a working train on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, running between Buffalo and Erie, which passes through this city (Dunkirk, N. Y.). I often went with him to the Grave Bank, where he had his headquarters, and returned on his train with him. On one occasion I was with him, and after the train of cars was loaded, we went together to the telegraph office to see if there were any orders, and to find out if the trains were on time, as he had to keep out of the way of all regular trains. After looking over the train reports and finding them all on time, we started for Buffalo. As we approached near Westfield Station, running about 12 miles per hour, and when within about one mile of a long curve in the line, my brother all of a sudden shut off the steam, and quickly stepping over to the fireman's side of the engine, he looked out of the cab window, and then to the rear of his train to see if there was anything the matter with either. Not discovering anything wrong, he stopped and put on steam, but almost immediately again shut it off and gave the signal for breaks and stopped. After inspecting the engine and train and finding nothing wrong, he seemed very much excited, and for a short time he acted as if he did not know where he was or what to do. I asked what was the matter. He replied that he did not know, when, after looking at his watch and orders, he said that he felt that there was some trouble on the line of the road. I suggested that he had better run his train to the station and find out. He then ordered his flagman with his flag to go ahead around the curve, which was just ahead of us, and he would follow with the train. The flagman started and had just time to flag an extra express train, with the General Superintendent and others on board, coming full 40 [forty] miles per hour. The Superintendent inquired what he was doing there, and if he did not receive orders to keep out of the way of the extra. My brother told him that he had not received orders and did not know of any extra train coming; that we had both examined the train reports before leaving the station. The train then backed to the station, where it was found that no orders had been given. The train despatcher was at once discharged from the road, and from that time to this both my brother and myself are unable to account for his stopping the train as he did. I consider it quite a mystery, and cannot give or find any intelligent reason for it. Can you suggest any?

The above is true and correct in every particular.

In other cases again some subliminal sense of smell may be conjectured.[176]

_Tactile sensibility_, too, must be carefully allowed for. The sense of varying resistance in the air may reach in some seeing persons, as well as in the blind, a high degree of acuteness.[177]

But there are cases of sudden motor inhibition where no warning can well have been received from hyperæsthetic sensation, where we come, as it seems, to telæsthesia or to spirit guardianship.

(From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 459.)

Four years ago, I made arrangements with my nephew, John W. Parsons, to go to my office after supper to investigate a case. We walked along together, both fully determined to go up into the office, but just as I stepped upon the door sill of the drug store, in which my office was situated, some invisible influence stopped me instantly. I was much surprised, felt like I was almost dazed, the influence was so strong, almost like a blow, I felt like I could not make another step. I said to my nephew, "John, I do not feel like going into the office now; you go and read Flint and Aitken on the subject." He went, lighted the lamp, took off his hat, and just as he was reaching for a book the report of a large pistol was heard. The ball entered the window near where he was standing, passed near to and over his head, struck the wall and fell to the floor. Had I been standing where he was, I would have been killed, as I am much taller than he. The pistol was fired by a man who had an old grudge against me, and had secreted himself in a vacant house near by to assassinate me.

This impression was unlike any that I ever had before. All my former impressions were slow in their development, grew stronger and stronger, until the maximum was reached. I did not feel that I was in any danger, and could not understand what the strong impression meant. The fellow was drunk, had been drinking for two weeks. If my system had been in a different condition--I had just eaten supper--I think I would have received along with the impression some knowledge of the character of the danger, and would have prevented my nephew from going into the office.

I am fully satisfied that the invisible and unknown intelligence did the best that could have been done, under the circumstances, to save us from harm.

D. J. PARSONS, M.D., Sweet Springs, Mo.

(The above account was received in a letter from Dr. D. J. Parsons, dated _December 15th, 1891_.)

Statement of Dr. J. W. PARSONS.

About four years ago my uncle, Dr. D. J. Parsons, and I were going to supper, when a man halted us and expressed a desire for medical advice. My uncle requested him to call the next morning, and as we walked along he said the case was a bad one and that we would come back after supper and go to the office and examine the authorities on the subject. After supper we returned, walked along together on our way to the office, but just as we reached the door of the drug store he very unexpectedly, to me, stopped suddenly, which caused me to stop too; we stood there together a few seconds, and he remarked to me that he did not feel like going into the office then, or words to that effect, and told me to go and examine Flint and Aitken. I went, lit the lamp, and just as I was getting a book, a pistol was fired into the office, the ball passing close to my head, struck the east wall, then the north, and fell to the floor.

This 5th day of July, 1891.

JOHN W. PARSONS [Ladonia, Texas.]

In the next group of cases, we reach a class of massive motor impulses which are almost entirely free from any sensory admixture.

Take for instance the case of Mr. Garrison, who left a religious meeting in the evening, and walked eighteen miles under the strong impulse to see his mother, and found her dead. The account is given in the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 125 [§ 825].

In another case, that of Major Kobbé (given in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 288), the percipient was prompted to visit a distant cemetery, without any conscious reason, and there found his father, who had, in fact, for certain unexpected reasons, sent to his son, Major Kobbé, a request (accidentally _not received_) to meet him at that place and hour.

In a third case, Mr. Skirving (see _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 285 [825 A]) was irresistibly compelled to leave his work and go home--_why_, he knew not--at the moment when his wife was in fact calling for him in the distress of a serious accident. See also a case given in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 377, where a bricklayer has a sudden impulse to run home, and arrives just in time to save the life of his little boy, who had set himself on fire.

This special sensibility to the _motor_ element in an impulse recalls to us the special susceptibilities to different forms of hallucination or suggestion shown by different hypnotic subjects. Some can be made to see, some to hear, some to act out the conception proposed to them. Dr. Bérillon[178] has even shown that certain subjects who seem at first quite refractory to hypnotisation are nevertheless at once obedient, even in the waking state, to a motor suggestion. This was the case both with a very strong man, with weak men and women, and with at least one subject actually suffering from locomotor ataxy. Thus the loss of supraliminal motor control over certain muscular combinations may actually lead to _motor suggestibility_ as regards those combinations; just as the loss of supraliminal sensation in some anæsthetic patch may lead to a special subliminal sensitiveness in the very directions where the superficial sensibility has sunk away. On the other hand, a specially well-developed motor control may predispose in a similar way;--as for instance, the subject who can sing already is more easily made to sing by suggestion. We must, then, await further observations before we can pretend to say beforehand with which automatist the messages will take a sensory, and with which a motor form.

Still less can we explain the special predisposition of each experimenter to one or more of the common kinds of motor automatism--as automatic speech, automatic writing, table movements, raps, and so forth. These forms of messages may themselves be variously combined; and the contents of a message of any one of these kinds may be purely dream-like and fantastic, or may be veridical in various ways.

Let us enumerate the modes of subliminal motor message as nearly as we can in order of their increasing specialisation.

1. We may place first the massive motor impulses (like Mr. Garrison's) which mark a kind of transition between coenesthetic affections and motor impulses proper. There was here no impulse to special movement of any limb; but an impulse to reach a certain place by ordinary methods.

2. Next, perhaps, in order of specialisation come the simple subliminal muscular impulses which give rise to table-tilting and similar phenomena.

3. Musical execution, subliminally initiated, might theoretically be placed next; although definite evidence of this is hard to obtain, since the threshold of consciousness with musical performers is notoriously apt to be shifting and indefinite. ("When in doubt, play with your fingers, and not with your head.")

4. Next we may place automatic drawing and painting. This curious group of messages has but seldom a telepathic content, and, as was suggested in Chapter III., is more akin to _genius_ and similar non-telepathic forms of subliminal faculty.[179]

5. Next comes automatic writing, on which much remains to be said in this chapter.

6. Automatic _speech_, which would not seem to be _per se_ a more developed form of motor message than automatic script, is often accompanied by profound changes of memory or of personality which raise the question of "inspiration" or "possession";--for the two words, however different their theological import, mean much the same thing from the standpoint of experimental psychology.

7. I must conclude my list with a class of motor phenomena which I shall here merely record in passing, without attempting any explanation. I allude to raps, and to those telekinetic movements of objects whose real existence is still matter of controversy.

Comparing this list of motor automatisms with the sensory automatisms enumerated in Chapter VI., we shall find a certain general tendency running through each alike. The sensory automatisms began with vague unspecialised sensations. They then passed through a phase of definition, of specialisation on the lines of the known senses. And finally they reached a stage beyond these habitual forms of specialisation: beyond them, as of wider reach, and including in an apparently unanalysable act of perception a completer truth than any of our specialised forms of perception could by itself convey. With motor messages, too, we begin with something of similar vagueness. They, too, develop from modifications of the percipient's general organic condition, or coenesthesia; and the first dim telepathic impulse apparently hesitates between several channels of expression. They then pass through various definitely specialised forms; and finally, as we shall see when automatic script is considered, they, too, merge into an unanalysable act of cognition in which the motor element of the message has disappeared. But these motor messages point also in another even more perplexing direction. They lead, as I have said above, towards the old idea of _possession_;--using the word simply as an expression for some form of temporary manifestation of some veritably distinct and alien personality through the physical organism of some man or woman, as is well exemplified in many cases of automatic writing. In Europe and America the phenomenon of automatic writing first came into notice as an element in so-called "modern spiritualism" about the middle of the nineteenth century; but the writings of W. Stainton Moses--about 1870-80--were perhaps the first continuous series of such messages which could be regarded as worthy of serious attention. Mr. Moses--a man whose statements could not be lightly set aside--claimed for them that they were the direct utterances of departed persons, some of them lately dead, some dead long ago. However they were really to be explained, they strongly impressed Edmund Gurney and myself and added to our desire to work at the subject in as many ways as we could.

It was plain that these writings could not be judged aright without a wide analysis of similar scripts,--without an experimental inquiry into what the human mind, in states of somnambulism or the like, could furnish of written messages, apart from the main stream of consciousness. By his experiments on writing obtained in different stages of hypnotic trance, Gurney acted as the pioneer of a long series of researches which, independently set on foot by Professor Pierre Janet in France, have become of high psychological, and even medical, importance. What is here of prime interest is the indubitable fact that fresh personalities can be artificially and temporarily created, which will write down matter quite alien from the first personality's character, and even matter which the first personality never knew. That matter may consist merely of reminiscences of previous periods when the second personality has been in control. But, nevertheless, if these writings are shown to the primary personality, he will absolutely repudiate their authorship--alleging not only that he has no recollection of writing them, but also that they contain allusions to facts which he never knew. Some of these messages, indeed, although their source is so perfectly well defined--although we know the very moment when the secondary personality which wrote them was called into existence--do certainly look more alien from the automatist in his normal state than many of the messages which claim to come from spirits of lofty type. It is noticeable, moreover, that these manufactured personalities sometimes cling obstinately to their fictitious names, and refuse to admit that they are in reality only aspects or portions of the automatist himself. This must be remembered when the persistent _claim_ to some spiritual identity--say Napoleon--is urged as an argument for attributing a series of messages to that special person.

What has now been said may suffice as regards the varieties of mechanism--the different forms of motor automatism--which the messages employ. I shall pass on to consider the _contents_ of the messages, and shall endeavour to classify them according to their apparent sources.

_A._ In the first place, the message may come from the percipient's own mind; its contents being supplied from the resources of his ordinary memory, or of his more extensive subliminal memory; while the _dramatisation_ of the message--its assumption of some other mind as its source--will resemble the dramatisations of dream or of hypnotic trance.

Of course the absence of facts unknown to the writer is not in itself a proof that the message does not come from some other mind. We cannot be sure that other minds, if they can communicate, will always be at the pains to fill their messages with evidential facts. But, equally of course, a message devoid of such facts must not, on the strength of its mere assertions, be claimed as the product of any but the writer's own mind.

_B._ Next above the motor messages whose content the automatist's own mental resources might supply, we may place the messages whose content seems to be derived telepathically from the mind of some other person still living on earth; that person being either conscious or unconscious of transmitting the suggestion.

_C._ Next comes the possibility that the message may emanate from some unembodied intelligence of unknown type--other, at any rate, than the intelligence of the alleged agent. Under this heading come the views which ascribe the messages on the one hand to "elementaries," or even devils, and on the other hand to "guides" or "guardians" of superhuman goodness and wisdom.

_D._ Finally we have the possibility that the message may be derived, in a more or less direct manner, from the mind of the agent--the departed friend--from whom the communication does actually claim to come.

My main effort has naturally been thus far directed to the proof that there are messages which do _not_ fall into the lowest class, _A_--in which class most psychologists would still place them all. And I myself--while reserving a certain small portion of the messages for my other classes--do not only admit but assert that the great majority of such communications represent the subliminal workings of the automatist's mind alone. It does not, however, follow that such messages have for us no interest or novelty. On the contrary, they form an instructive, an indispensable transition from psychological introspection of the old-fashioned kind to the bolder methods on whose validity I am anxious to insist. The mind's subliminal action, as thus revealed, differs from the supraliminal in ways which no one anticipated, and which no one can explain. There seem to be subliminal tendencies setting steadily in certain obscure directions, and bearing as little relation to the individual characteristics of the person to the deeps of whose being we have somehow penetrated as profound ocean-currents bear to waves and winds on the surface of the sea.[180]

Another point also, of fundamental importance, connected with the powers of the subliminal self, will be better deferred until a later chapter. I have said that a message containing only facts normally known to the automatist must not, on the strength of its mere assertions, be regarded as proceeding from any mind but his own. This seems evident; but the converse proposition is not equally indisputable. We must not take for granted that a message which _does_ contain facts not normally known to the automatist must therefore come from some mind other than his own. If the subliminal self can acquire supernormal knowledge at all, it may obtain such knowledge by means other than telepathic impressions from other minds. It may assimilate its supernormal nutriment also by a directer process--it may devour it not only cooked but raw. Parallel with the possibilities of reception of such knowledge from the influence of other embodied or disembodied minds lies the possibility of its own clairvoyant perception, or active absorption of some kind, of facts lying indefinitely beyond its supraliminal purview.

Now, as I have said, the great majority of the nunciative or message-bearing motor automatisms originate in the automatist's own mind, and do not involve the exercise of telepathy or telæsthesia, or any other supernormal faculty; but they illustrate in various ways the coexistence of the subliminal with the supraliminal self, its wider memory, and its independent intelligence.

I need not here multiply instances of the simpler and commoner forms of this type, and I will merely quote in illustration one short case recounted by Mr. H. Arthur Smith (author of _The Principles of Equity_, and a member of the Council of the Society for Psychical Research) who has had the patience to analyse many communications through "Planchette."

(From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. p. 233.)[181] Mr. Smith and his nephew placed their hands on the Planchette, and a purely fantastic name was given as that of the communicating agency.

Q. "Where did you live?" A. "Wem." This name was quite unknown to any of us. I am sure it was to myself, and as sure of the word of the others as of that of any one I know.

Q. "Is it decided who is to be Archbishop of Canterbury?" A. "Yes."

Q. "Who?" A. "Durham." As none of us remembered his name, we asked.

"What is his name?" A. "Lightfoot." Of course, how far the main statement is correct, I don't know. The curiosity at the time rested in the fact that the name was given which none of us could recall, but was found, to be right.

Now, this is just one of the cases which a less wary observer might have brought forward as evidence of spirit agency. An identity, it would be said, manifested itself, and gave an address which none present had ever heard. But I venture to say that there cannot be any real proof that an educated person has never heard of Wem. A permanent recorded fact, like the name of a town which is to be found (for instance) in Bradshaw's Guide, may at any moment have been presented to Mr. Smith's eye, and have found a lodgment in his subliminal memory.

Similarly in the answers "Durham" and "Lightfoot" we are reminded of cases where in a dream we ask a question with vivid curiosity, and are astonished at the reply; which nevertheless proceeds from _ourselves_ as undoubtedly as does the inquiry. The prediction in this case was wrong.

What we have been shown is an independent activity of the subliminal self holding colloquies with the supraliminal, and nothing more. Yet we shall find, if we go on accumulating instances of the same general type, that traces of telæsthesia and telepathy begin insensibly to show themselves; not at first with a distinctness or a persistence sufficient for actual proof, but just in the same gradual way in which indications of supernormal faculty stole in amid the disintegration of split personalities; or in which indications of some clairvoyant outlook stole in amid the incoherence of dream. Many of these faint indications, valueless, as I have said, for purely evidential purposes, are nevertheless of much theoretical interest, as showing how near is the subliminal self to that region of supernormal knowledge which for the supraliminal is so definitely closed.[182]

Mr. Schiller's case (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. pp. 216-224) [832 A] is a good example of these obscure transitions between normal and supernormal, and introduces us to several phenomena which we shall afterwards find recurring again and again in independent quarters. Dramatisation of fictitious personalities, for instance, which forms so marked a feature in Professor Flournoy's celebrated case (to be discussed later), begins in this series of experiments, conducted throughout with a purely scientific aim, and with no sort of belief in the imaginary "Irktomar" and the rest. It seems as though this "objectivation of types" were part of a romance which some inscrutable but childish humorist was bent on making up. The "cryptomnesia" shown in this case through the reproduction of scraps of old French with which the automatist had no conscious acquaintance, reached a point at which (as again in Professor Flournoy's case) one is almost driven to suspect that it was aided by some slight clairvoyance on the part of the subliminal self.

Indeed as the cases become increasingly complex, one wonders to what extent this strange manufacture of inward romances can be carried. There is, I may say, a great deal more of it in the world than is commonly suspected. I have myself received so many cases of these dramatised utterances--as though a number of different spirits were writing in turn through some automatist's hand--that I have come to recognise the operation of some law of dreams, so to call it, as yet but obscurely understood. The alleged personalities are for the most part not only unidentified, but purposely unidentifiable; they give themselves romantic or ludicrous names, and they are produced and disappear as lightly as puppets on a mimic stage. The main curiosity of such cases lies in their very persistence and complexity; it would be a waste of space to quote any of the longer ones in such a way as to do them justice. And, fortunately, there is no need for me to give any of my own cases; since a specially good case has been specially well observed and reported in a book with which many of my readers are probably already acquainted,--Professor Flournoy's _Des Indes à la planète Mars: Etude sur un cas de Somnambulisme avec Glossolalie_ (Paris and Geneva, 1900). I shall here make some comments on that striking record, which all students of these subjects ought to study in detail.

It happens, no doubt, to any group which pursues for many years a somewhat unfamiliar line of inquiry, that those of their points which are first assailed get gradually admitted, so that as they become interested in new points they may scarcely observe what change has taken place in the reception of the old. The reader of early volumes of the _Proceedings_ S.P.R. will often observe this kind of progress of opinion. And now Professor Flournoy's book indicates in a remarkable way how things have moved in the psychology of the last twenty years. The book--a model of fairness throughout--is indeed, for the most part, critically _destructive_ in its treatment of the quasi-supernormal phenomena with which it deals. But what a mass of conceptions a competent psychologist now takes for granted in this realm, which the official science of twenty years ago would scarcely stomach our hinting at!

One important point may be noticed at once as decisively corroborating a contention of my own made long ago, and at a time when it probably seemed fantastic to many readers. Arguing for the potential _continuity_ of subliminal mentation (as against those who urged that there were only occasional flashes of submerged thought, like scattered dreams), I said that it would soon be found needful to press this notion of a continuous subliminal self to the utmost, if we were not prepared to admit a continuous spiritual guidance or possession. Now, in fact, with Professor Flournoy's subject the whole discussion turns on this very point. There is unquestionably a continuous and complex series of thoughts and feelings going on beneath the threshold of consciousness of Mlle. "Hélène Smith." Is this submerged mentation due in any degree or in any manner to the operation of spirits other than Mlle. Smith's own? That is the broad question; but it is complicated here by a subsidiary question: whether, namely, any previous incarnations of Mlle. Smith's--other phases of her own spiritual history, now involving complex relationship with the past--have any part in the crowd of personalities which seem struggling to express themselves through her quite healthy organism.

Mlle. Smith, I should at once say, is not,[183] and never has been, a paid medium. At the date of M. Flournoy's book, she occupied a leading post on the staff of a large _maison de commerce_ at Geneva, and gave séances to her friends simply because she enjoyed the exercise of her mediumistic faculties, and was herself interested in their explanation.

Her organism, I repeat, is regarded, both by herself and by others, as a quite healthy one. Mlle. Smith, says Professor Flournoy, declares distinctly that she is perfectly sound in body and mind--in no way lacking in equilibrium--and indignantly repudiates the idea that there is any hurtful anomaly or the slightest danger in mediumship as she practises it.

"It is far from being demonstrated," he continues, "that mediumship is a pathological phenomenon. It is abnormal, no doubt, in the sense of being _rare_, _exceptional_; but rarity is not morbidity. The few years during which these phenomena have been seriously and scientifically studied have not been enough to allow us to pronounce on their true nature. It is interesting to note that in the countries where these studies have been pushed the furthest, in England and America, the dominant view among the _savants_ who have gone deepest into the matter is not at all unfavourable to mediumship; and that, far from regarding it as a special case of hysteria, they see in it a faculty superior, advantageous, healthy, of which hysteria is a form of degenerescence, a pathological parody, a morbid caricature."

The phenomena which this sensitive presents (Hélène Smith is Professor Flournoy's pseudonym for her) cover a range which looks at first very wide, although a clearer analysis shows that these varieties are more apparent than real, and that self-suggestion will perhaps account for all of them.

There is, to begin with, every kind of automatic irruption of subliminal into supraliminal life. As Professor Flournoy says (p. 45): "Phenomena of hypermnesia, divinations, mysterious findings of lost objects, happy inspirations, exact presentiments, just intuitions, teleological (purposive or helpful) automatisms, in short, of every kind; she possesses in a high degree this small change of genius--which constitutes a more than sufficient compensation for the inconvenience resulting from those distractions and moments of absence of mind which accompany her visions; and which, moreover, generally pass unobserved."

At séances--where the deeper change has no inconveniences--Hélène undergoes a sort of self-hypnotisation which produces various lethargic and somnambulistic states. And when she is alone and safe from interruption she has spontaneous visions, during which there may be some approach to ecstasy. At the séances she experiences positive hallucinations, and also negative hallucinations, or systematised anæsthesiæ, so that, for instance, she will cease to see some person present, especially one who is to be the recipient of messages in the course of the séance. "It seems as though a dream-like incoherence presided over this preliminary work of disaggregation, in which the normal perceptions are arbitrarily split up or absorbed by the subconscious personality--eager for materials with which to compose the hallucinations which it is preparing." Then, when the séance begins, the main actor is Hélène's guide _Léopold_ (a pseudonym for Cagliostro) who speaks and writes through her, and is, in fact, either her leading spirit-control or (much more probably) her most developed form of secondary personality.

"Leopold," says Professor Flournoy (p. 134), "certainly manifests a very honourable and amiable side of Mlle. Smith's character, and in taking him as her 'guide' she has followed inspirations which are doubtless among the highest in her nature."

The high moral quality of these automatic communications, on which Professor Flournoy thus insists, is a phenomenon worth consideration.

I do not mean that it is specially strange in the case of Mlle. Smith. But the almost universally high moral tone of genuinely automatic utterances has not, I think, been sufficiently noticed or adequately explained.

In evidential messages--where there is real reason to believe that an identified spirit is communicating--there is a marked and independent consensus on such matters as these spirits profess themselves able to discuss.

And again in non-evidential messages--in communications which probably proceed from the automatist's subliminal self--I hold that there is a remarkable and undesigned concordance in high moral tone, and also in avoidance of certain prevalent tenets, which many of the automatists do supraliminally hold as true. But I also insist that these subliminal messages, even when not incoherent, are generally dream-like, and often involve tenets which (though never in my experience base or immoral) are unsupported by evidence, and are probably to be referred to mere self-suggestion.

Prominent among such tenets is one which forms a large part of Mlle. Smith's communications; namely, the doctrine of _reincarnation_, or of successive lives spent by each soul upon this planet.

The simple fact that such was probably the opinion both of Plato and of Virgil shows that there is nothing here which is alien to the best reason or to the highest instincts of men. Nor, indeed, is it easy to realise any theory of the _direct creation_ of spirits at such different stages of advancement as those which enter upon the earth in the guise of mortal man. There _must_, one feels, be some kind of continuity--some form of spiritual Past. Yet for reincarnation there is at present no valid evidence; and it must be my duty to show how its assertion in any given instance--Mlle. Smith's included--constitutes in itself a strong argument in favour of self-suggestion rather than extraneous inspiration as the source of the messages in which it appears.

Whenever civilised men have received what they have regarded as a revelation (which has generally been somewhat fragmentary in its first delivery) they have naturally endeavoured to complete and systematise it as well as they could. In so doing they have mostly aimed at three objects: (1) to _understand_ as much as possible of the secrets of the universe; (2) to _justify_ as far as possible Heaven's dealings with men; and (3) to _appropriate_ as far as possible the favour or benefit which the revelation may show as possibly accruing to believers. For all these purposes the doctrine of reincarnation has proved useful in many countries and times. But in no case could it seem more appropriate than in this last revelation (so to term it) through automatic messages and the like. And as a matter of history, a certain vigorous preacher of the new faith, known under the name of Allan Kardec, took up reincarnationist tenets, enforced them (as there is reason to believe) by strong suggestion upon the minds of various automatic writers, and set them forth in dogmatic works which have had much influence, especially among Latin nations, from their clarity, symmetry, and intrinsic reasonableness. Yet the data thus collected were absolutely insufficient, and the _Livre des Esprits_ must simply rank as the premature formulation of a new religion--the premature systematisation of a nascent science.

I follow Professor Flournoy in believing that the teaching of that work must have directly or indirectly influenced the mind of Mlle. Smith, and is therefore responsible for her claim to these incarnations previous to that which she now undergoes or enjoys.

On the general scheme here followed, each incarnation, if the last has been used aright, ought to represent some advance in the scale of being. If one earth-life has been misused, the next earth-life ought to afford opportunity for expiation--or for further practice in the special virtue which has been imperfectly acquired. Thus Mlle. Smith's present life in a humble position may be thought to atone for her overmuch pride in her last incarnation--as Marie Antoinette.

But the mention of Marie Antoinette suggests the risk which this theory fosters--of assuming that one is the issue of a distinguished line of spiritual progenitors; insomuch that, with whatever temporary sets-back, one is sure in the end to find oneself in a leading position.

Pythagoras, indeed, was content with the secondary hero Euphorbus as his bygone self. But in our days Dr. Anna Kingsford and Mr. Edward Maitland must needs have been the Virgin Mary and St. John the Divine. And Victor Hugo, who was naturally well to the front in these self-multiplications, took possession of most of the leading personages of antiquity whom he could manage to string together in chronological sequence. It is obvious that any number of re-born souls can play at this game; but where no one adduces any evidence it seems hardly worth while to go on. Even Pythagoras does not appear to have adduced any evidence beyond his _ipse dixit_ for his assertion that the alleged shield of Euphorbus had in reality been borne by that mythical hero. Meantime the question as to reincarnation has actually been put to a very few spirits who have given some real evidence of their identity. So far as I know, no one of these has claimed to know anything personally of such an incident; although all have united in saying that their knowledge was too limited to allow them to generalise on the matter.

Hélène's controls and previous incarnations--to return to our subject--do perhaps suffer from the general fault of aiming too high. She has to her credit a control from the planet Mars; one pre-incarnation as an Indian Princess; and a second (as I have said) as Marie Antoinette.

In each case there are certain impressive features in the impersonation; but in each case also careful analysis negatives the idea that we can be dealing with a personality really revived from a former epoch, or from a distant planet;--and leaves us inclined to explain everything by "cryptomnesia" (as Professor Flournoy calls submerged memory), and that subliminal inventiveness of which we already know so much.

The _Martian_ control was naturally the most striking at first sight. Its reality was supported by a Martian language, written in a Martian alphabet, spoken with fluency, and sufficiently interpreted into French to show that such part of it, at any rate, as could be committed to writing was actually a grammatical and coherent form of speech.

And here I reach an appropriate point at which to remark that this book of Professor Flournoy's is not the first account which has been published of Mlle. Hélène. Professor Lemaître, of Geneva, printed two papers about her in the _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_: first, a long article in the number for March-April, 1897--then a reply to M. Lefébure in the number for May-June, 1897. In these papers he distinctly claims supernormal powers for Mlle. Hélène, implying a belief in her genuine possession by spirits, and even in her previous incarnations, and in the extra-terrene or ostensibly Martian language. I read these papers at the time, but put them aside as inconclusive, mainly because that very language, on which M. Lemaître seemed most to rely, appeared to me so obviously factitious as to throw doubt on all the evidence presented by an observer who could believe that denizens of another planet talked to each other in a language corresponding in every particular with simple French idioms, and including such words as _quisa_ for _quel_, _quisé_ for _quelle_, _vétèche_ for _voir_, _vèche_ for _vu_;--the fantastic locutions of the nursery. M. Lemaître remarks, as a proof of the consistency and reality of the extra-terrene tongue, "L'un des premiers mots que nous ayons eus, _métiche_, signifiant _monsieur_, se retrouve plus tard avec le sens de _homme_." That is to say, having transmogrified _monsieur_ into _métiche_, Hélène further transmutes _les messieurs_ into _cée métiché_;--in naïve imitation of ordinary French usage. And this tongue is supposed to have sprung up independently of all the influences which have shaped terrene grammar in general or the French idiom in particular! And even after Professor Flournoy's analysis of this absurdity I see newspapers speaking of this Martian language as an impressive phenomenon! They seem willing to believe that the evolution of another planet, if it has culminated in conscious life at all, can have culminated in a conscious life into which we could all of us enter affably, with a suitable Ollendorff's phrase-book under our arms;--"_eni cée métiché oné qudé_,"--"ici les hommes (messieurs) sont bons,"--"here the men are good";--and the rest of it.

To the student of automatisms, of course, all this irresistibly suggests the automatist's own subliminal handiwork. It is a case of "glossolaly," or "speaking with tongues"; and we have no modern case--no case later than the half-mythical Miracles of the Cevennes--where such utterance has proved to be other than gibberish. I have had various automatic hieroglyphics shown to me, with the suggestion that they may be cursive Japanese, or perhaps an old dialect of Northern China; but I confess that I have grown tired of showing these fragments to the irresponsive expert, who suggests that they may also be vague reminiscences of the scrolls in an Oriental tea-tray.

It seems indeed to be a most difficult thing to get telepathically into any brain even fragments of a language which it has not learnt. A few simple Italian, and even Hawaiian, words occur in Mrs. Piper's utterances, coming apparently from departed spirits (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 337 and 384 [960 A and § 961]), but these, with some Kaffir and Chinese words given through Miss Browne (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. pp. 124-127 [871 A]), form, I think, almost the only instances which I know. And, speaking generally, whatever is elaborate, finished, pretentious, is likely to be of subliminal facture; while only things scrappy, perplexed, and tentative, have floated to us veritably from afar.

I need not here go into the details of the Hindow preincarnation or of the more modern and accessible characterisation of Marie Antoinette, but will pass on to certain minor, but interesting phenomena, which Professor Flournoy calls _teleological automatisms_. These are small acts of helpfulness--_beneficent synergies_, as we might term them, in contrast with the _injurious synergies_, or combined groups of _hurtful_ actions, with which hysteria has made us familiar.[184]

"One day," says Professor Flournoy (p. 35), "Miss Smith, when desiring to lift down a large and heavy object which lay on a high shelf, was prevented from doing so because her raised arm remained for some seconds as though petrified in the air and incapable of movement. She took this as a warning, and gave up the attempt. At a subsequent séance Leopold stated that it was he who had thus fixed Hélène's arm to prevent her from grasping this object, which was much too heavy for her and would have caused her some accident.

"Another time, a shopman, who had been looking in vain for a certain pattern, asked Hélène if by chance she knew what had become of it. Hélène answered mechanically and without reflection--'Yes, it has been sent to Mr. J.' (a client of the house). At the same time she saw before her the number 18 in large black figures a few feet from the ground, and added instinctively, 'It was sent eighteen days ago.' [This was in the highest degree improbable, but was found to be absolutely correct.] Leopold had no recollection of this, and does not seem to have been the author of this cryptomnesic automatism."

A similar phenomenon has also been noted (p. 87) when warning is conveyed by an actual phantasmal figure. Mlle. Smith has seen an _apparition_ of Leopold, barring a particular road, under circumstances which make it probable that Mlle. Smith would on that day have had cause to regret taking that route.

This case of Professor Flournoy's, then--this classical case, as it may already be fairly termed--may serve here as our culminant example of the free scope and dominant activity of the unassisted subliminal self. The telepathic element in this case, if it exists, is relatively small; what we are watching in Mlle. Hélène Smith resembles, as I have said, a kind of exaggeration of the submerged constructive faculty,--a hypertrophy of genius--without the innate originality of mind which made even the dreams of R. L. Stevenson a source of pleasure to thousands of readers.

In reference to the main purpose of this work, such cases as these, however curious, can be only introductory to automatisms of deeper moment. In our attempt to trace an evolutive series of phenomena indicating ever higher human faculty, the smallest telepathic incident,--the most trivial proof, if proof it be, of communication received without sensory intermediation from either an incarnate or a discarnate mind outweighs in importance the most complex ramifications and burgeonings of the automatist's own submerged intelligence.

I pass on, then, to evidence which points, through motor automatisms, to supernormal faculty; and I shall begin by referring the reader to certain experiments (due to Professor Richet) in the simplest of all forms of motor automatism, viz., table-tilting, with results which only telepathy can explain. (See Appendix VIII. A.)

Trivial though they seem, such experiments may with a little care be made absolutely conclusive. Had Professor Richet's friends, for example, been willing to prolong this series, we might have had a standing demonstration of telepathy, reproducible at will.[185]

And now I pass on to some experiments with Planchette, in which an element of telepathy was shown. The following account from Mrs. Alfred Moberly, Tynwald, Hythe, Kent, is corroborated, with some additional examples, by two other ladies present at the time.

(From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. p. 235.)

_May 9th, 1884._

The operators were placed out of sight of the rest of the company, who selected--in silence--a photograph, one of an albumful, and fixed their attention on it. We--the operators--were requested to keep our minds a blank as far as possible and follow the first involuntary motion of the Planchette. In three out of five cases it wrote the name or initial or some word descriptive of the selected portrait. We also obtained the signatures to letters selected in the same manner. We both knew perfectly well that _we_ were writing--not the spirits, as the rest of the company persist to this day in believing--but had only the slightest idea what the words might prove to be.

We have tried it since, and generally with some curious result. A crucial test was offered by two gentlemen in the form of a question to which we couldn't possibly guess the answer. "Where's Toosey?" The answer came, "In Vauxhall Road." "Toosey," they explained, was a pet terrier who had disappeared; suspicion attaching to a plumber living in the road mentioned, who had been working at the house and whose departure coincided with Toosey's.

Of course, in the case of the inquiry after the lost dog, we may suppose that the answer given came from the questioner's own mind. Mrs. Moberly and her friends seem to have been quite aware of this; and were little likely to fall into the not uncommon error of asking Planchette, for instance, what horse will win the Derby, and staking, perhaps, some pecuniary consideration on the extremely illusory reply.[186]

And now we come to the palmary case of the late Rev. P. H. Newnham, Vicar of Maker, Devonport, who was personally known to Edmund Gurney and myself, and was a man in all ways worthy of high respect. The long series of communications between Mr. Newnham and his wife, which date back to 1871, and whose contemporaneous written record is preserved in the archives of the S.P.R., must, I think, always retain their primacy as early and trustworthy examples of a telepathic transference where the percipient's automatic script answers questions penned by the agent in such a position that the percipient could not in any normal manner discern what those questions were. No part of our evidence seems to me more worthy of study than this.[187]

It must be distinctly understood that Mrs. Newnham did not see or hear the questions which Mr. Newnham wrote down.[188] The fact, therefore, that her answers bore any relation to the questions shows that the sense of the questions was telepathically conveyed to her. This is the leading and important fact. The _substance_ of the replies written is also interesting, and Mr. Newnham has some good comments thereon. But even had the replies contained no facts which Mrs. Newnham could not have known, this would not detract from the main value of the evidence, which consists in the fact that _Mrs. Newnham's hand wrote replies clearly and repeatedly answering questions which she neither heard nor saw_.

In this case we have the advantage of seeing before us the entire series of questions and answers, and thus of satisfying ourselves that the misses (which in that case are very few) are marked as well as the hits, and consequently that the coincidences between question and answer are at any rate not the result of chance. In several other cases which I have known, where the good faith of the informants has been equally above question, the possibility of an explanation by chance alone has been a more important element in the problem. All our evidence has tended to show that the telepathic power itself is a variable thing; that it shows itself in flashes, for the most part spontaneously, and seldom persists through a series of deliberate experiments. And if an automatist possessing power of this uncertain kind has exercised it at irregular moments and with no scientific aim;--and has kept, moreover, no steady record of success and failure;--then it becomes difficult to say that even some brilliant coincidences afford cogent proof of telepathic action.[189]

I pass on to a small group of cases which form a curious transition from these communications _inter vivos_ to communications which I shall class as coming from the dead. These are cases where the message professes to come from a deceased person, but shows internal evidence of having come, telepathically, from the mind of some one present, or, indeed, from some living person at a distance. (See the case given in Appendix VIII. B.)

But this, although a real risk, is by no means the only risk of deception which such messages involve. The communication may conceivably come from some unembodied spirit indeed, but not from the spirit who is claimed as its author.

The reader who wishes to acquaint himself with this new range of problems cannot do better than study the record of the varied experiences of automatic writing which have been intermingled with Miss A.'s crystal-visions, etc.[190]

There is no case that I have watched longer than Miss A.'s;--none where I have more absolute assurance of the scrupulous probity of the principal sensitive herself and of the group who share the experiments;--but none also which leaves me more often baffled as to the unseen source of the information given. There is a knowledge both of the past and of the future, which seems capriciously limited, and is mingled with mistakes, yet on the other hand is of a nature which it is difficult to refer to any individual human mind, incarnate or discarnate. We meet here some of the first indications of a possibility that discarnate spirits communicating with us have occasional access to certain sources of knowledge which even to themselves are inscrutably remote and obscure.

The written diagnoses and prognoses given by the so-called "Semirus," often without Miss A.'s even seeing the patient or hearing the nature of his malady, have become more and more remarkable. Miss A. and her friends do not wish these private matters to be printed, and I cannot therefore insist upon the phenomena here. Yet in view of the amount of telæsthesia which Miss A.'s various automatisms reveal, it should first be noted that human organisms seem especially pervious to such _vue à distance_. "Semirus," "Gelalius," etc., are obvious pseudonyms; and neither Semirus' prescriptions nor Gelalius' cosmogony contain enough of indication to enable us to grasp their origin.[191]

From the communications of these remote personages I go on to certain messages avowedly coming from persons more recently departed, and into which something more of definite personality seems to enter. One element of this kind is _handwriting_; there are many cases where resemblance of handwriting is one of the evidential points alleged. Now proof of identity from resemblance of handwriting may conceivably be very strong. But in estimating it we must bear two points in mind. The first is that (like the resemblances of so-called "spirit-photographs" to deceased friends) it is often very loosely asserted. One needs, if not an expert's opinion, at least a careful personal scrutiny of the three scripts--the automatist's voluntary and his automatic script, and the deceased person's script--before one can feel sure that the resemblance is in more than some general scrawliness. This refers to the cases where the automatist has provably never seen the deceased person's handwriting. Where he _has_ seen that handwriting, we have to remember (in the second place) that a hypnotised subject can frequently imitate any known handwriting far more closely than in his waking state; and that consequently we are bound to credit the subliminal self with a mimetic faculty which may come out in these messages without any supraliminal guidance whatever on the automatist's part. In _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 549-65 [864 A], is an account of a series of experiments by Professor Rossi-Pagnoni at Pesaro, into which the question of handwriting enters. The account illustrates automatic utterance as well as other forms of motor automatism, and possibly also telekinetic phenomena. The critical discussion of the evidence by Mr. H. Babington Smith, to whom we are indebted for the account, shows with what complex considerations we have to deal in the questions now before us.

I now cite a few cases where the point of central interest is the announcement of a death unknown to the sitters.[192]

In Appendix VIII. C is given a case which we received from Dr. Liébeault, of Nancy, and which was first published in _Phantasms of the Living_ (vol. i. p. 293), where it was regarded as an example of a spontaneous telepathic impulse proceeding directly from a dying person. I now regard it as more probably due to the action of the spirit after bodily death.

I shall next give a _résumé_ of a case of curious complexity received from M. Aksakof;--an automatic message written by a Mdlle. Stramm, informing her of the death of a M. Duvanel. The principal incidents may here be disentangled as follows:--

Duvanel dies by his own hand on January 15th, 1887, in a Swiss village, where he lives alone, having no relations except a brother living at a distance, whom Mdlle. Stramm had never seen (as the principal witness, M. Kaigorodoff, informs us in a letter of May 1890).

Mdlle. Stramm's father does not hear of Duvanel's death till two days later, and sends her the news in a letter dated January 18th, 1887.

Five hours after Duvanel's death an automatic message announcing it is written at the house of M. Kaigorodoff, at Wilna in Russia, by Mdlle. Stramm, who had certainly at that time received no news of the event.

From what mind are we to suppose that this information came?

(1) We may first attempt to account for Mdlle. Stramm's message on the theory of _latency_. We may suppose that the telepathic message came from the dying man, but did not rise into consciousness until an opportunity was afforded by Mdlle. Stramm's sitting down to write automatically.

But to this interpretation there is an objection of a very curious kind. The message written by Mdlle. Stramm was not precisely accurate. Instead of ascribing Duvanel's death to suicide, it ascribed it to a stoppage of blood, "un engorgement de sang."

And when M. Stramm, three days after the death, wrote to his daughter in Russia to tell her of it, he also used the same expression, "un engorgement de sang," thus disguising the actual truth in order to spare the feelings of his daughter, who had formerly refused to marry Duvanel, and who (as her father feared) might receive a painful shock if she learnt the tragic nature of his end. There was, therefore, a singular coincidence between the automatic and the normally-written message as to the death;--a coincidence which looks as though the same mind had been at work in each instance. But that mind cannot have been M. Stramm's ordinary mind, as he was not supraliminally aware of Duvanel's death at the time when the first message was written. It may, however, be supposed that his subliminal self had received the information of the death telepathically, had transmitted it in a deliberately modified form to his daughter, while it remained latent in himself, and had afterwards influenced his supraliminal self to modify the information in the same way when writing to her.

(2) But we must also consider the explanation of the coincidence given by the intelligence which controlled the automatic writing. That intelligence asserted itself to be a brother of Mdlle. Stramm's, who died some years before. And this "Louis" further asserted that he had himself influenced M. Stramm to make use of the same euphemistic phrase, with the object of avoiding a shock to Mdlle. Stramm; for which purpose it was needful that the two messages should agree in ascribing the death to the same form of sudden illness.

Now if this be true, and the message did indeed come from the deceased "Louis," we have an indication of continued existence, and continued knowledge of earthly affairs, on the part of a person long dead.

But if we consider that the case, as presented to us, contains no proof of "Louis'" identity, so that "Louis" may be merely one of those arbitrary names which the automatist's subliminal intelligence seems so prone to assume; then we must suppose that Duvanel was actually operative on two occasions after death, first inspiring in Mdlle. Stramm the automatic message, and then modifying in M. Stramm the message which the father might otherwise have sent.

I next quote a case in Appendix VIII. D which illustrates the continued terrene knowledge on the part of the dead of which other instances were given in the last chapter.

And lastly, I give in Appendix VIII. E a case which in one respect stands alone. It narrates the success of a direct experiment,--a test-message planned before death, and communicated after death, by a man who held that the hope of an assurance of continued existence was worth at least a resolute effort, whatever its result might be. His tests, indeed, were two, and both were successful. One was the revealing of the place where, before death, he hid a piece of brick marked and broken for special recognition, and the other was the communication of the contents of a short letter which he wrote and sealed before death. We may say that the information was certainly not possessed supraliminally by any living person. There are two other cases (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 353-355, and _op. cit._ vol viii. pp. 238-242 [876 A and B]) where information given through automatists may hypothetically be explicable by telepathy from the living, although, indeed, in my own view, it probably emanated from the deceased as alleged. In one of these cases the place where a missing will had been hidden was revealed to the automatist, but it is not clear whether the will was actually discovered or not before the automatic writing was obtained (although the automatist was unaware of its discovery), and in any case, apparently, its whereabouts was known to some living person who had hidden it, and may not have been known to the deceased before death.

In the other case the whereabouts of a missing note of hand was revealed to the automatists, and even if this could be regarded as absolutely unknown supraliminally to any living person, it is not by any means certain that the fact was known before death to the deceased person from whom the message purported to come.

These cases, therefore, are not such strong evidence for personal identity as the one to which I have referred above, and which I have given, as recording what purports to be the successful accomplishment of an experiment which every one may make;--which every one _ought_ to make;--for, small as may be the chances of success, a few score of distinct successes would establish a presumption of man's survival which the common sense of mankind would refuse to explain away.

Here, then, let us pause and consider to what point the evidence contained in this chapter has gradually led us. We shall perceive that the motor phenomena have confirmed, and have also greatly extended, the results to which the cognate sensory phenomena had already pointed. We have already noted, in each of the two states of sleep and of waking, the variously expanding capacities of the subliminal self. We have watched a hyperæsthetic intensification of ordinary faculty,--leading up to telæsthesia, and to telepathy, from the living and from the departed. Along with these powers, which, on the hypothesis of the soul's independent existence, are at least within our range of analogical conception, we have noted also a precognitive capacity of a type which no fact as yet known to science will help us to explain.

Proceeding to the study of motor automatisms, we have found a _third_ group of cases which independently confirm in each of these lines in turn the results of our analysis of sensory automatisms both in sleep and in waking. Evidence thus convergent will already need no ordinary boldness of negative assumption if it is to be set aside. But motor automatisms have taught us much more than this. At once more energetic and more persistent than the sensory, they oblige us to face certain problems which the lightness and fugitiveness of sensory impressions allowed us in some measure to evade. Thus when we discussed the mechanism (so to call it) of visual and auditory phantasms, two competing conceptions presented themselves for our choice,--the conception of _telepathic impact_, and the conception of _psychical invasion_. Either (we said) there was an influence exerted by the agent on the percipient's mind, which so stimulated the sensory tracts of his brain that he externalised that impression as a quasi-percept, or else the agent in some way modified an actual portion of space where (say) an apparition was discerned, perhaps by several percipients at once.

Phrased in this manner, the telepathic impact seemed the less startling, the less extreme hypothesis of the two,--mainly, perhaps, because the picture which it called up was left so vague and obscure. But now instead of a fleeting hallucination we have to deal with a strong and lasting impulse--such, for instance, as the girl's impulse to _write_, in Dr. Liébeault's case (Appendix VIII. C):--an impulse which seems to come from the depths of the being, and which (like a post-hypnotic suggestion) may override even strong disinclination, and keep the automatist uncomfortable until it has worked itself out. We may still call this a _telepathic impact_, if we will, but we shall find it hard to distinguish that term from a _psychical invasion_. This strong, yet apparently alien, motor innervation corresponds in fact as closely as possible to our idea of an _invasion_--an invasion no longer of the room only in which the percipient is sitting, but of his own body and his own powers. It is an invasion which, if sufficiently prolonged, would become a _possession_; and it both unites and intensifies those two earlier conjectures;--of telepathic impact on the percipient's mind, and of "phantasmogenetic presence" in the percipient's surroundings. What seemed at first a mere impact is tending to become a persistent control; what seemed an incursion merely into the percipient's environment has become an incursion into his organism itself.

As has been usual in this inquiry, this slight forward step from vagueness to comparative clearness of conception introduces us at once to a whole series of novel problems. Yet, as we have also learnt to expect, some of our earlier phenomena may have to be called in with advantage to illustrate phenomena more advanced.

In cases of split personality, to begin with, we have seen just the same phenomena occurring where certainly no personality was concerned save the percipient's own. We have seen a section of the subliminal self partially or temporarily dominating the organism; perhaps controlling permanently one arm alone;[193] or perhaps controlling intermittently the whole nervous system;--and all this with varying degrees of displacement of the primary personality.

Similarly with post-hypnotic suggestion. We have seen the subliminal self ordered to write (say) "It has left off raining"--and thereupon writing the words without the conscious will of the automatist--and again with varying degrees of displacement of the waking self. The step hence to such a case as Mrs. Newnham's is thus not a very long one. Mrs. Newnham's subliminal self, exercising supernormal faculty, and by some effort of its own, acquires certain facts from Mr. Newnham's mind, and uses her hand to write them down automatically. The great problem here introduced is how the subliminal self acquires the facts, rather than how it succeeds in writing them down when it has once acquired them.

But as we go further we can no longer limit the problem in this way,--to the activities of the automatist's subliminal self. We cannot always assume that some portion of the automatist's personality gets at the supernormal knowledge by some effort of its own. Our evidence, as we know, has pointed decisively to telepathic impacts or influences from without. What, then, is the mechanism here? Are we still to suppose that the automatist's subliminal self executes the movements--obeying somehow the bidding of the impulse from without? or does the external agent, who sends the telepathic message, himself execute the movements also, directly using the automatist's arm? And if telekinetic movements accompany the message (a subject thus far deferred, but of prime importance), are we to suppose that these also are effected by the percipient's subliminal self, under the guidance of some external spirit, incarnate or discarnate? or are they effected directly by that external spirit?

We cannot really say which of these two is the easier hypothesis.

From one point of view it may seem simpler to keep as long as we can to that acknowledged _vera causa_, the automatist's subliminal self; and to collect such observations as may indicate any power on its part of producing physical effects outside the organism. Such scattered observations occur at every stage, and even Mrs. Newnham (I may briefly observe in passing) thought that her pencil, when writing down the messages telepathically derived from her husband, was moved by something other than the ordinary muscular action of the fingers which held it. On the other hand, there seems something very forced in attributing to an external spirit's agency impulses and impressions which seem intimately the automatist's own, and at the same time refusing to ascribe to that external agency phenomena which take place outside the automatist's organism, and which present themselves to him as objective facts, as much outside his own being as the fall of the apple to the ground.

Reflecting on such points--and once admitting this kind of interaction between the automatist's own spirit and an external spirit, incarnate or discarnate--we find the possible combinations presenting themselves in perplexing variety;--a variety both of agencies on the part of the invading spirit, and of effects on the part of the invaded spirit and organism.

What is that which invades? and what is that which is displaced or superseded by this invasion? In what ways may two spirits co-operate in the possession and control of the same organism?

These last words--control and possession--remind us of the great mass of vague tradition and belief to the effect that spirits of the departed may exercise such possession or control over the living. To those ancient and vague beliefs it will be our task in the next chapter to give a form as exact and stable as we can. And observe with how entirely novel a preparation of mind we now enter on that task. The examination of "possession" is no longer to us, as to the ordinary civilised inquirer, a merely antiquarian or anthropological research into forms of superstition lying wholly apart from any valid or systematic thought. On the contrary, it is an inquiry directly growing out of previous evidence; directly needed for the full comprehension of known facts as well as for the discovery of facts unknown. We need, (so to say), to analyse the spectrum of helium, as detected in the sun, in order to check and correct our spectrum of helium as detected in the Bath waters. We are obliged to seek for certain definite phenomena in the spiritual world in order to explain certain definite phenomena of the world of matter.