There are some things to suggest that if there are post-carnate souls, they can appear as of any age in their experience—and so show their history since separation, to anyone rejoining them.

Edmund Gurney, author of "Phantasms of the Living," and a very active member of the S. P. R. died in 1888. In December, 1889, his ostensible spirit communicated at several sittings with Sir Oliver Lodge through Mrs. Piper. Sir Oliver says (Pr. XXIII, 141f.):

"I learned in this way more about the life and thoughts of Edmund Gurney than I had known in his lifetime."

And Mrs. Piper knew less. Then where did it come from? These Gurney sittings are very interesting and suggestive, but we can use our limited space to better advantage.

Here are some characteristic Phinuit Touches (Pr. VI, 484):

"She remembers more than you do. What do you think she says to me? She says, don't swear, doctor; she did, sure as you live....

"Dr.: 'Do you know who Jerry—J—E—R—R—Y—is?' O. L.: 'Yes. Tell him I want to hear from him.' U[ncle] J[erry. Ed.]: 'Tell Robert, [his brother] Jerry still lives. I will be very glad to hear from me. This is my watch. Uncle Jerry—my watch.'...

"P.: 'I say, Captain, your friends have a lot to tell you, they're just clamoring to get at you. Why the devil don't you give them a chance?' O. L.: 'Well, I will next time.' (Watch handled again. It was a repeater, and happened to go off.) P.: 'Hullo, I didn't do that. Jerry did that, to remind you of him. Here, take it away—it goes springing off—it's alive.' ... 'It was Uncle Jerry, the one that had the fall. I'll bring you some more news of him. Give me back his nine-shooter.' (Meaning the watch.)"

Phinuit and the Lodge family and their next-door neighbors, the Thompsons, got to be great friends. Phinuit had given them much good advice, professional and other, and had really been of considerable service to them, even if only through their imaginations.

At the end of their second series of sittings, Feb. 23, 1890, he said:

"Now, all you people come here. Good-by, Susie. Good-by, Ike. Good-by, Nelly. Now, all clear out and let me talk to Marie. (Long conversation of a paternal kind, with thoroughly sensible advice. Then O. L. returned.) Captain, it's not good-by, it's au revoir, and you shall hear of me when I've gone away.' O. L.: 'How can I?' P.: 'Oh, I will tell some gentleman a message and he will write it for me. You'll see.

"Au revoir, au revoir, &c."

Hodgson's inclination while writing his report, was to attribute the phenomena to telepathy from the sitter. This might account for a part of the knowledge which the medium displayed, but it did not account for knowledge which the sitter never had, but left such knowledge to be accounted for by the vastly less probable hypothesis of teloteropathy from absent persons, which begins to approach the improbability of spiritism itself. But after the medium's possession of the knowledge is accounted for, the main problem is yet to be approached. Knowledge of a particular circumstance is virtually the same in all minds possessing it. But after a medium, say Mrs. Piper, has obtained an item of knowledge from, let it be granted for argument's sake, the sitter's mind, what makes her emotional attitude regarding it not that of the sitter or of herself, but of some departed friend of the sitter? What makes her rejoice in it or regret it as this departed friend, alone among all intelligences, would? What makes the play of her mind regarding it—suggestion, response, appreciation or depreciation, comment and discussion of all kinds, just what would be that of the departed soul which professes to be speaking through her? And what makes all this occur with a fidelity to the character and situation worthy of the greatest dramatists? And how comes that average New England woman to display that supreme dramatic genius virtually every day for a generation? This is not telepathy or teloteropathy. When Hodgson wrote his first report, he and the researchers generally had not got as far as the questions raised by the dramatic features. But he closed with the following mysterious paragraph:

"The foregoing report is based upon sittings not later than 1891. Mrs. Piper has given some sittings very recently which materially strengthen the evidence for the existence of some faculty that goes beyond thought-transference from the sitters, and which certainly primâ facie appear to render some form of the 'spiritistic' hypothesis more plausible. I hope to discuss these among other results in a later article."

The occasion for this paragraph was made plain in his next report, issued in 1898, and published in Pr. S. P. R., Vol. XIII.

A young man alluded to in the S. P. R. reports as George Pelham, had died. He was a member of a very prominent English family, and on the distaff side, of an equally prominent family in New York. He had graduated at Harvard and spent some years as a housemate with the Howards (pseudonym) in Boston, though he died in New York, after some later years passed there. He was well known to the present writer, who finds the utterances of his alleged post-carnate self entirely in character. He was of a very philosophic bent, and no mean writer in both prose and verse. Psychical research was by no means his most prominent interest, or Hodgson his most intimate friend, though he had discussed the subject several times with Hodgson, and been introduced by him, under a pseudonym, for a single sitting with Mrs. Piper. For a month after G. P.'s death Hodgson's regular sittings with Mrs. Piper went on without there being any manifestation professing to come from G. P., when Mr. John Hart (pseudonym) who had been much more intimate with G. P. than Hodgson had, was sitting, in Hodgson's presence, with Mrs. Piper, and after Phinuit had announced a "George," an uncle of Mr. Hart, he went on, as Hodgson reports (Pr. XIII, 297f.):

"There is another George who wants to speak to you. How many Georges are there about you any way? [Hodgson continues. Ed.]

"The rest of the sitting, until almost the close, was occupied by statements from G. P., Phinuit acting as intermediary. George Pelham's real name was given in full, also the names, both Christian and surname, of several of his most intimate friends, including the name of the sitter. Moreover, incidents were referred to which were unknown to the sitter or myself. One of the pair of studs which J. H. was wearing was given to Phinuit [i. e. to the medium. Ed.].... '(Who gave them to me?) [Throughout these sittings, the sitters' remarks are in parentheses. Ed.] That's mine. Mother gave you that. (No.) Well, father then, father and mother together. You got those after I passed out. Mother took them. Gave them to father, and father gave them to you. I want you to keep them. I will them to you.' Mr. Hart notes: 'The studs were sent to me by Mr. Pelham as a remembrance of his son....

"James and Mary [Mr. and Mrs.] Howard [Pseudonyms. Ed.] were mentioned with strongly specific references, and in connection with Mrs. Howard came the name Katharine. 'Tell her, she'll know. I will solve the problems, Katharine.' Mr. Hart notes: 'George, when he had last stayed with [the Howards], had talked frequently with Katharine (a girl of fifteen years of age) upon such subjects as Time, Space, God, Eternity, and pointed out to her how unsatisfactory the commonly accepted solutions were. He added that some time he would solve the problems.' Mr. Hart added that he was entirely unaware of these circumstances. I was myself unaware of them, and was not at that time acquainted with the Howards.

No telepathy then. Phinuit continues:

"'Who's Rogets? [Phinuit tries to spell the real name.] (Spell that again.) [At the first attempt afterwards Phinuit leaves out a letter, then spells it correctly.] Rogers.... Rogers has got a book of mine. (What is he going to do with it?)'

"[Both Hart and G. P. knew Rogers, who at that time had a certain MS. book of G. P. in his possession. The book was found after G. P.'s death and given to Rogers to be edited. G. P. had promised during his lifetime that a particular disposition should be made of this book after his death. This action ... was here, and in subsequent utterances which from their private nature I cannot quote, enjoined emphatically and repeatedly, and had it been at once carried out, as desired by G. P., much subsequent unhappiness and confusion might have been avoided.]

"During the latter part of the sitting, and without any relevance to the remarks immediately before and after, which were quite clear as expressions from G. P. came the words, 'Who's James? Will—William.' [It must be remembered that Phinuit was reporting G. P. throughout.] This was apparently explained by Phinuit's further remarks at the close of the sitting.

"Phinuit: 'Who's Alice? (What do you want me to say to her?) [To R. H.] Alice in spirit. Alice in spirit says it's all over now and tell Alice in the body all is well. Tell Will I'll explain things later on. He [George] calls Alice, too, in the body. I want her to know me, too, Alice and Katharine.... He won't go till you say good-by. [The hand then wrote: George Pelham. Good day (?) John.] ...'

"[Alice James, the sister of Professor William James, had recently died in England. The first name of Mrs. James is also Alice. Alice, the sister of Katharine, is the youngest daughter of Mr. Howard and was very fond of G. P.]

"As I have already said, the most personal references made at the sitting cannot be quoted; they were regarded by J. H. as profoundly characteristic of Pelham.

This was followed by the most remarkable experiences of the kind that ever occurred before Hodgson himself passed over to the majority and was ostensibly manifested to his surviving friends through Mrs. Piper and other mediums. G. P. sent for his friends the Howards (pseudonym) with whom he had been a housemate in Boston, for his parents, and for other friends. All of these came, very skeptical regarding the genuineness of the manifestations, but Mr. Howard—an eminent scholar of wide experience of the world, became convinced that he was in converse with the postcarnate intelligence of his old friend; the majority of the relatives, who were of a more orthodox habit than Mr. Howard, were brought at least to a condition of agnosticism on the subject, and the arch-critic Hodgson who had exposed more "spiritualistic" frauds than all other men put together, was turned into a militant spiritualist. G. P. was asked.

"(Can't you tell us something he or your mother has done?) 'I saw her brush my clothes and put them away. I was by her side as she did it. I saw her take my sleeve buttons from a small box and give them to my father. I saw him send them to John Hart. I saw her putting papers, etc., into a tin box.'

"The incident of the 'studs' was mentioned at the sitting of Hart. G. P.'s clothes were brushed and put away, as Mrs. Pelham wrote, not by herself, but by 'the man who had valeted George.'"

This incident is used by Mrs. Sidgwick in Pr. XV, 31, in support of the thesis that a medium's communications are influenced by education and social habits. I am disposed entirely to endorse this. The communications seem to me to come from a blending of the control, the medium, and the sitter. Perhaps this utterance will seem less Delphic as we go on.

The following (Pr. XIII, 416f.) does not seem much like telepathy.

"Mrs. Piper [on coming out of the trance. Ed.]: 'There is the man with the beard' [whom she saw in the trance. Ed.] Mrs. Piper then described what she thought was a dream. 'I saw a bright light and a face in it, a gentleman with a beard on his face, and he had a very high forehead and he was writing.' R. H.: 'Would you know it again if you saw it?' Mrs. Piper: 'Oh, yes. I would know it, I think.' R. H.: 'Well, try and recall it....'

"After Mrs. Piper comes out of [a second. Ed.] trance she is shown a collection of thirty-two photographs, nine of them being of men, from which she selects the picture of the person whom she saw when coming out of trance the first time. The photograph that she first picked out was an excellent likeness of G. P. She afterwards picked out another photograph of him. She stated that she never knew the gentleman when living."

Within twenty-four hours of this experience, or some other reported elsewhere, the dream recollection had, like dream recollections generally, faded away: she could not recognize the photograph. We can talk about telopsis here, if we want to, but telopsis of what? Of that photograph? Nonsense! And as strange as anything else about it, is that there is nothing strange about it. In my own dreams I see any number of people I never saw before, just as plainly as I see any number on the street, and if photographs were handed me, as those were to Mrs. Piper, immediately on awaking, I could identify them. This identification is nothing out of the ordinary course of nature, only the wit to see that it is, has but just come.

But with any sitter, Mrs. Piper may have had telepathically just as definite an idea as the sitter has, or she may always have been telepathically impressed in her dream by the post-carnate man himself. Each one of us will have to fumble to his own conviction, if he ever reaches one.

Hodgson continues (Pr. XIII, 321-2):

"It was during this sitting [Dec. 22, 1892] that perhaps the most dramatic incident of the whole series occurred....

"Mr. Howard: 'Tell me something that you and I alone know, something in our past that you and I alone know.' G. P.: 'Do you doubt me, dear old fellow?' Mr. H.: 'I simply want something—you have failed to answer certain questions that I have asked—now I want you to give me the equivalent of the answers to those questions in your own terms....' G. P.: 'You used to talk to me about....'

"The writing which followed ... contains too much of the personal element in G. P.'s life to be reproduced here. Several statements were read by me, and assented to by Mr. Howard, and then was written 'private' and the hand gently pushed me away. I retired to the other side of the room, and Mr. Howard took my place close to the hand where he could read the writing. He did not, of course, read it aloud, and it was too private for my perusal. The hand, as it reached the end of each sheet, tore it off from the block-book, and thrust it wildly at Mr. Howard, and then continued writing. The circumstances narrated, Mr. Howard informed me, contained precisely the kind of test for which he had asked, and he said that he was 'perfectly satisfied, perfectly.'

"Characteristic also of the living G. P. was the remark made to me later, apparently with reference to the circumstances of the private statements:

"'Thanks, Hodgson, for your kind help and reserved manners, also patience in this difficult matter.'"

All this, I suppose, is mere telepathy or the subliminal self, or divided self, or some other self, of an average New England housewife!

In this report the sittings take up some two hundred pages, and Hodgson devoted about fifty pages to his reasons for accepting the spiritistic hypothesis regarding them. James said: "I know of no more masterly handling anywhere of so unwieldy a mass of material"; and yet he never squarely agreed with Hodgson, though he often says he was tempted to.

Hodgson's reasons cannot be fairly understood without familiarity with the evidence. They are very ingenious and interesting, and would give the most skeptical reader pause, but we have space for only a few generalizations.

"The manifestations of this G. P. communicating have not been of a fitful and spasmodic nature, they have exhibited the marks of a continuous living and persistent personality ... what change has been discernible is a change not of any process of disintegration, but rather of integration and evolution...."

"That G. P. could get into some closer relation with his father and the Howards than with Miss M. or myself is intelligible; but it is not so obvious why Mrs. Piper's secondary personality should...."

"... The mixtures of truth and error bear no discernible relation to the consciousness of the sitters, but suggest the action of another intelligence groping confusedly among its own remembrances."

"We get all varieties of communication; some of them, purporting to come from persons who when living were much mentally disturbed, suggesting the incoherency of delirium; others of them, purporting to come from persons who have been dead very many years, suggesting a fainter dreaminess [or more remoteness. Ed.]; others purporting to come from persons recently deceased whose minds have been clear, showing a corresponding clearness. My own conclusion ... is forced upon me by experience, and strengthened by various statements of the communicators themselves concerning the causes of confusion."

"Again, that persons just 'deceased' should be extremely confused and unable to communicate directly, or even at all, seems perfectly natural after the shock and wrench of death.

"Of such confusions as I have indicated above I cannot find any satisfactory explanation in 'telepathy from the living,' but they fall into a rational order when related to the personalities of the 'dead.'"

"In cases where we should a priori be led to expect that the communicators would certainly not be confused, or, if they were confused, the confusion would not make much difference, Phinuit was particularly successful. The cases I refer to are those of little children recently deceased."

This seems to me a very strong point. Its force will be realized by most of those who read the Sutton and Thaw sittings in Pr. XIII. Phinuit, the "preposterous old scoundrel," is eminently "the children's friend." Hodgson continues:

"Having tried the hypothesis of telepathy from the living for several years, and the 'spirit' hypothesis also for several years, I have no hesitation in affirming with the most absolute assurance that the 'spirit' hypothesis is justified by its fruits, and the other hypothesis is not."

"Since Phinuit's 'departure' [explained below. Ed.] the voice has been used on a few rare occasions only, and almost exclusively by communicators who purported to be relatives of the sitters, and who had used the voice before Phinuit's 'departure.' ... But there never seemed to be any confusion between the personality using the hand, whether this was 'clear' or not, and the personality using the voice."

This consideration and those before associated with it seem to me more for the spiritistic hypothesis than any others which we have met so far.

G. P. soon developed into the Mercury of the spiritistic Pantheon, turned up at almost all sittings, went to seek the friends of the sitters in the "spirit-world," and acted as intermediary for those who were new to the conditions of communication or had not enough of the psychokinetic power which was alleged to be necessary to use them effectively.

It should be noted that during G. P.'s life, telepathy from the sitter had been reluctantly conceded as a defense against the spiritistic hypothesis, but it was not till after his death that teloteropathy from persons at a distance had been conceded; and it was not until 1909—seven years later, that James, one of the most steadfast holders of the conservative fort, in his report on the communications from Hodgson's alleged spirit, in Pr. XXIII, admitted, as among the possible "sources other than R. H.'s surviving spirit for the veridical communications from the Hodgson control," "access to some cosmic reservoir, where the memory of all mundane facts is stored and grouped around personal centers of association."

James had a subtler mind than mine or almost anybody's. Mine is not subtle enough to be very seriously impressed by the difference between "memory of mundane facts stored and grouped around personal centers of association," and a surviving personality; and what difference does impress me, is pretty well filled up when the "personal center" also has "grouped around" it, the initiative, response, repartee and emotional and dramatic elements that, as shown not only by the G. P. control, but, years later, by the Hodgson control, and by hundreds of others, make a gallery of characters more vivid than those depicted by all the historians. But even claiming them to be historical, as in a sense they are, would not be claiming them to be surviving. Many historical characters have put in that claim through Mrs. Piper and other mediums, and while our greatest psychologist knew as much as anybody about the claims, and seemed somewhat on the road to admitting them to be from surviving personalities, he did not live to go farther than memories "stored and grouped around personal centers of association."

But à bas the "memories"! one is tempted to say; credit them all to telepathy if you will: what are they beside the active and spontaneous emotions and responses?

Meantime in 1892 our old acquaintance Stainton Moses had "passed over," and in 1895 had ostensibly appeared through Mrs. Piper to Professor Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania, and Professor Newbold asked him to bring his friends Imperator, Rector, etc. These high-toned personages—none high-toneder, as John Hay of blessed memory, puts it—nor more bombastic or long-winded, had manifested before only through Moses (for convenience I am using the simple phraseology that would attend their genuineness, but do not mean to convey any opinion), and when they came through Mrs. Piper, they professed to find her in a very bad way because of the "earth-bound" Phinuit, and they professed to remove him to a higher sphere where he would be purified and disinfected and sanctified and turned from a genial sympathetic, humorous and, it must be admitted, occasionally slangy and profane soul, into a prig of purest ray serene. Rector now generally took his place with Mrs. Piper, which he had done to some extent before. The gang was very well satisfied with G. P., however, and he appeared for some years as their valued friend and collaborator, until in 1897 they declared his work done, and his proper place a "higher sphere." He bade his friends here affectionate farewells, but has occasionally sent back messages, and has once or twice spoken himself. Mind, I am throughout speaking only provisionally; but I would defy any writer to escape the verisimilitude, and even if that were possible, it would involve intolerable verbiage.

Imperator & Co. now proposed to do most of the talking themselves, and they did a frightful amount of it; and occasionally really said something.

Moreover, they took charge of Mrs. Piper and Hodgson too, in their goings and comings and all their ways, dictated their diet and exercise, and even whom they should have at sittings, giving the preference to people of exceptionally high character, and to those in deep distress from loss of friends, and eager to communicate with them.

The present writer and some others are tempted to think that these autocratic personages are products telepathically conveyed to Mrs. Piper from the unconscious imagination of Hodgson and his recollection of Moses' writings, with perhaps a little involuntary dash of Prof. Newbold. But if they are, the imagination is expanded to a degree entirely outside of ordinary experience, and its study must enlarge our conception of the range of human faculty. Whatever they were, if only an allegorized form of faith cure, there is no question about their beneficial effect on the clearness of the sittings, and on the health and happiness of Mrs. Piper and Hodgson.

James says something which goes to the root of the whole business, and which, though it is episodic to the Hodgson narrative, may as well be considered here (Pr. XXIII, 3):

"Dr. Hodgson was disposed to admit the claim to reality of Rector and of the whole Imperator-Band, ... while I have rather favored the idea of their all being dream-creations of Mrs. Piper.... I can see no contradiction between Rector's being on the one hand an improvised creature of this sort, and his being on the other hand the extraordinarily impressive personality which he unquestionably is.... Critical and fastidious sitters have recognized his wisdom, and confess their debt to him as a moral adviser. With all due respect to Mrs. Piper, I feel very sure that her own waking capacity for being a spiritual adviser, if it were compared with Rector's, would fall greatly behind."

"With all due respect" for Professor James's opinion, I think I do "see [a] contradiction," and I see the contradiction because, with Professor James, "I feel very sure that her own waking capacity for being a spiritual adviser, if it were compared with Rector's, would fall greatly behind." If the Imperator band were merely, as James suggests, "dream creations," ... and if "her own waking capacity ... compared with Rector's, would fall greatly behind," how could she make anything so superior to herself? How can she do better as Rector than she can as herself? The whole scheme seems to me akin to the Du-Prel and Myers scheme of making a man lift himself higher than his head by his own boot-straps; and beside it the spiritistic hypothesis seems simplicity and probability themselves.

The simplest individual, incarnate (or discarnate?), of course manifests himself in a way that the most skillful dramatist could not equal, and it may well be questioned whether it is not more rational to assume that the hundreds of alleged personalities dramatized in the words and gestures of Mrs. Piper are manifestations by the personalities themselves, than that they are creations of some as yet unknown kind of genius residing in some layer of Mrs. Piper's consciousness, and getting its material from fragments among her own memories or by telepathy from those of other living persons, present or remote.

Hodgson closes his report (Pr. XIII, 409):

"It has been stated repeatedly that the 'channel is not yet clear,' that the machine is still in process of repair; and it has been prophesied that I shall myself return eventually to America and spend several years further in the investigation of Mrs. Piper's trance, and that more remarkable evidence of identity will be given than any heretofore obtained."

He did return and continue his beloved work for several years. But the next time we meet him it will be as an alleged denizen of the spirit world, and perhaps his testimony in that capacity was part of the "more remarkable evidence of identity" promised.

These influences, whatever their fundamental character, having made a saint of Hodgson, as was alleged by a friend who did not believe that the influences were from a post-carnate world, the drama took a new turn on December 20, 1905, in the death which Hodgson had eagerly awaited, and his ostensible reappearances through Mrs. Piper and other mediums. The principal report of them is made by his friends Professor William James, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, Mr. J. G. Piddington and Sir Oliver Lodge in Pr. XXIII, and occupies some 170 octavo pages, most of them literal reports of sittings. Other manifestations appear in the heteromatic writing of Mrs. Holland (Pr. XX) and elsewhere. Of course but a few entirely inadequate scraps can be given here.

As in the case of G. P., the first appearance did not take place until, on Dec. 28th, a peculiarly close and congenial friend of Hodgson happened to have a sitting—an argument of course for telepathy from the friend, but an equal argument for a genuine communication that had to await a congenial sitter.

To avoid constant circumlocution, I will provisionally write as if Hodgson were really speaking. Indeed, I doubt if I could persistently do otherwise: for the utterances are so natural that all the editors of the Pr. S. P. R. unconsciously fall into that way of expression.

James says (Pr. XXIII, 7) that the first alleged appearance of Hodgson:

"was at Miss Theodate Pope's sitting on Dec. 28th, 1905 [the eighth day after Hodgson's death. Ed.] ... Rector had been writing, when the hand dropped the pencil and worked convulsively several seconds in a very excited manner.

"Miss P.: 'What is the matter?' [The hand, shaking with apparently great excitement, wrote the letter H, ... bearing down so hard on the paper that the point of the pencil was broken. It then wrote 'Hodgson.']

Was all this a "put-up job?" And if so, who put it up, and why?

"Miss P.: 'God bless you!' [The hand writes 'I am'—followed by rapid scrawls, as if regulator of machine were out of order.] Miss P.: 'Is this my friend?' [Hand assents by knocking five times on paper-pad.] (Rector): 'Peace, friends, he is here, it was he, but he could not remain, he was so choked. He is doing all in his power to return.... Better wait for a few moments until he breathes freer again.'"

Do spirits require a supply of oxygen, or is the expression metaphorical for something not accurately communicable to our intelligence? It occurs several times. Frequently the "spirits" say they are tired, especially in the transition from the body. The expression "choked" may be purely metaphorical, yet it hardly reinforces the argument for spiritism.

James says (Pr. XXIII, 13f.):

"The R. H. control suddenly wrote: 'Give ring to Margaret back to Margaret.' [Mrs. Lyman's name [pseudonym. Ed.] is not Margaret.] Miss P.: 'Who is Margaret?' R. H.: 'I was with her in summer.' Miss P.: 'All right, but the ring has not been found yet. Can you find out where it is?' R. H.: 'The undertaker got it....'"

"On January 24th, Mrs. Lyman had her first sitting. As soon as Hodgson appeared he wrote: 'The ring. You gave it me on my fiftieth birthday. When they asked I didn't want to say you gave it me.... Two palm-leaves joining each other—Greek. [Here followed an illegible word. The palms truly described the ring, which Mrs. Piper probably had seen; but it bore no Greek inscription....]' Mrs. L.: 'Yes, Dick, where is it now?' R. H.: '... They took it off my finger after I was gone.' Mrs. L.: 'No, they didn't find it on your finger.' R. H.: 'Pocket, it was in my pocket. I'll find it, you shall have it.'

"On January 29th, Mrs. L. had another sitting. The Hodgson control wrote: 'I have been trying to make clear about that ring. It is on my mind all the time. I thought if I could get Margaret B. to get it for me, I would get it to you through her, then no one would understand. I could not tell Miss Pope about you.' [Then a possible attempt to draw a symbol engraved on the ring.] 'No one living knows this but myself and yourself.' [Note the term 'living' as applied to himself. Ed.] Mrs. L.: 'That is true, but what was the motto in the ring?' R. H.: 'All will be clear to me in time. Do not ask me test questions now....'"

His failure to remember it is one of the most knock-down anti-evidential arguments, but it is equally anti-telepathic. His never speaking of the ring to other friends, the Jameses, and Mr. Dorr, seems very evidential.

Hodgson (or the control, if you prefer, whatever that may mean), kept worrying about the ring through several sittings, and got so far as to imagine that he had seen it on the finger of a man who stole it. It was eventually found in Hodgson's waistcoat pocket. James comments on the case:

"The whole incident lends itself easily to a naturalistic interpretation. Mrs. Piper or her trance-consciousness may possibly have suspected the source of the ring. Mrs. Lyman's manner may have confirmed the suspicion. The manner in which the first misleading reference to 'Margaret' was afterwards explained away may well have been the cunning of a 'control' trying plausibly to cover his tracks and justify his professed identity."

But, please, what is a "control"? And why does one want to be taken for somebody else? Is this explanation "naturalistic"? It seems to my poor wits to grant the whole case, and reminds me of the deniers of telepathy availing themselves of it to explain away spiritism. Or does James mean a control faked by Mrs. Piper? If he had not already grown past that, he gave indications that he had later. He continues:

"The description of the house and of the man to whom he ascribes its [the ring's. Ed.] present possession sounds like vague groping, characteristic also of control-cunning."

But why should there be "control-cunning"? Is it anything like commentator-cunning?

James proceeds without any "cunning:"

"On the other hand, if the hypothesis be seriously entertained that Hodgson's spirit was there in a confused state, using the permanent Piper automatic machinery to communicate through, the whole record is not only plausible but natural. It presents just that mixture of truth and groping which we ought to expect. Hodgson has the ring 'on his mind' just as Mrs. Lyman has. Like her, he wishes its source not to be bruited abroad. He describes it accurately enough, truly tells of his taking it to the fatal boat-club [He died while playing hand-ball there. Ed.], and of putting it into his waistcoat-pocket there, of the waistcoat being taken from the locker, and vaguely, but not quite erroneously, indicates its present position."

And why should it not be even "quite erroneously"? Nearly all the reasoning I have seen on these matters is vitiated by the entirely gratuitous traditional assumption that if a soul survives death, it enters at once into measureless wisdom. Hodgson (?) and the rest seem pretty much the same sort of people that they were here, and I for one am glad of it.

In the sittings of many others of Hodgson's friends the control showed a similar abundant knowledge of their experiences with Hodgson living, and, most important of all, it seems to me, all of Hodgson's exceptionally marked habits of thought and expression. We have room for but little more. James says (Pr. XXIII, 36):

"Hodgson was distinguished during life by great animal spirits. He was fond of argument, chaff, and repartee, a good deal of a gesticulator, and a great laugher.... Chaff and slang from a spirit have an undignified sound for the reader, but to the interlocutors of the R. H. control they seem invariably to have been elements of verisimilitude."

God save me from a heaven where there is no "chaff and slang"! I should fail to recognize some of my best friends among the loftiest souls who have escaped the flesh, Hodgson not the least. However intense the interest heretofore taken in a future world, I doubt if it has ever been thoroughly healthy, or ever will be before we get our conceptions of that world off stilts. James continues (pp. 37-8):

"This, however, did not exclude very serious talk with the same persons—quite the reverse sometimes, as when one sitter of this class notes: 'Then came words of kindness which were too intimate and personal to be recorded, but which left me so deeply moved that shortly afterwards, at the sitting's close, I fainted dead away—it had seemed as though he had in all reality been there and speaking to me.'"

If James ran any one of his virtues into the ground, perhaps it was his modesty concerning anything connected with himself. Instance the following introduction and what it introduces:

W. J.'s Sitting. (May 21st, 1906). (Pr. XXIII, 8of.)

"[J.] The evidence is so much the same sort of thing throughout, and makes such insipid reading, that I hesitate to print more of it in full. But I know that many critics insist on having the largest possible amount of verbatim material on which to base their conclusions, so I select a specimen of the R. H. control's utterances when he was less 'strong.' The reader, I fear, will find it long and tedious, but he can skip.

"(R. H. enters, saying:) 'Well, well, well, well! Well, well, well, that is—here I am. Good morning, good morning, Alice.' Mrs. W. J.:'Good morning, Mr. Hodgson.' R. H.: 'I am right here. Well, well, well! I am delighted!' W. J.: 'Hurrah! R. H.! Give us your hand!' R. H.: 'Hurrah, William! God bless you. How are you?' W. J.: 'First rate.' R. H.: 'Well, I am delighted to see you. Well, have you solved those problems yet?' W. J.: 'Which problems do you refer to?' R. H.: 'Did you get my messages?' W. J.: 'I got some messages about your going to convert me.' ... [R. H. had already sent me, through other sitters, messages about my little faith. W. J.] W. J.: 'Yes.' R. H.: 'Well, it has amounted to this,—that I have learned by experience that there is more truth than error in what I have been studying.' W. J.: 'Good!' R. H.: 'I am so delighted to see you to-day that words fail me.' W. J.: 'Well, Hodgson, take your time and don't be nervous.' R. H.: 'No. Well, I think I could ask the same of you! Well, now, tell me,—I am very much interested in what is going on in the society, and Myers and I are also interested in the society over here. You understand that we have to have a medium on this side, while you have a medium on your side, and through the two we communicate with you.' ... W. J.: 'You don't mean Rector?' R. H.: 'No, not at all. It is——do you remember a medium whom we called Prudens?' 'Yes.'"

From one point of view, his not naming G. P. or Rector gives food for skepticism. But why didn't Mrs. Piper do the job consistently, if it was she who did it?

"R. H.: 'What I want to know first of all is about the society. I am sorry that it could not go on.' W. J.: 'There was nobody to take your place....' R. H.: 'William, can't you see, don't you understand, and don't you remember how I used to walk up and down before that open fireplace trying to convince you of my experiments?' W. J.: 'Certainly, certainly.' R. H.: 'And you would stand with your hands in your trousers pockets. You got very impatient with me sometimes, and you would wonder if I was correct. I think you are very skeptical.' W. J.: 'Since you have been returning I am much more near to feeling as you felt than ever before.' R. H.: 'Good! Well, that is capital.' W. J.: 'Your "personality" is beginning to make me feel as you felt.' R. H.: 'If you can give up to it, William, and feel the influence of it and the reality of it, it will take away the sting of death.... Now tell me a little bit more about the Society. That will help me keep my thoughts clear. I think, William—are you standing?' W. J.: 'Yes, I am standing.' R. H.: 'Well, can't you sit?' W. J.: 'Yes.' R. H.: 'Well, sit. Let's have a nice talk.'..."

There is nothing "evidential" about the last couple of lines in the scientific sense, but there are several kinds of sense. James continues:

(Pr. XXIII, 109): "The following incident belongs to my wife's and Miss Putnam's sitting of June 12th, 1906:—Mrs. J. said: 'Do you remember what happened in our library one night when you were arguing with Margie [Mrs. J.'s sister]?'—'I had hardly said "remember,"' she notes, 'in asking this question, when the medium's arm was stretched out and the fist shaken threateningly,' then these words came:

"R. H.: 'Yes, I did this in her face. I couldn't help it. She was so impossible to move. It was wrong of me, but I couldn't help it.' [I myself well remember this fist-shaking incident, and how we others laughed over it after Hodgson had taken his leave. What had made him so angry was my sister-in-law's defense of some slate-writing she had seen in California.—W. J.]"

(Pr. XXIII, 112): "On Jan. 30, 1906, Mrs. M. had a sitting. Mrs. M. said:

"'Do you remember our last talk together, at N., and how, in coming home we talked about the work?' (R. H.): 'Yes, yes.' Mrs. M.: 'And I said if we had a hundred thousand dollars—'R. H.: 'Buying Billy!!' Mrs. M.: 'Yes, Dick, that was it—"buying Billy."' R. H.: 'Buying only Billy?' Mrs. M.: 'Oh no—I wanted Schiller too. How well you remember!'

"Mrs. M., before R. H.'s death, had had dreams of extending the American Branch's operations by getting an endowment, and possibly inducing Prof. Newbold (Billy) and Dr. Schiller to co-operate in work.

This buying Billy and Schiller brought Podmore squarely around, for the first time, I think, from his previous life-long fight against telepathy. He says (Newer Spiritualism, p. 222):

"It is impossible to doubt that we have here proof of a supernormal agency of some kind—either telepathy by the trance intelligence from the sitter or some kind of communication with the dead."

Two pages farther on, however, appears the advocatus diaboli (Op. Cit., p. 224):

"When asked to give the contents of any sealed letters written in his life-time for the express purpose of being read by him after death the two sentences were given: 'There is no death' and 'out of life into life eternal' (p. 102). Whatever Hodgson may have written, it was surely not quite so commonplace as that."

To my gullible apprehension, it seems eminently appropriate.

Among the interesting phenomena investigated by the S. P. R., have been the automatic, or I should prefer to say heteromatic, writing of Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland, which were not made in trance. Vol. XX of the Proceedings is entirely given up to the consideration of it by Mrs. Verrall. She is the wife of a professor in Cambridge, and herself lecturer in Newnham College. The phenomena themselves are of moderate interest beside most of those described in these pages, but their evidential value is high, and their implications most important, and the treatment of them is pervaded by wide scholarship, and is charming. The experiences, however, do not connect with the main Moses—Piper—G. P.—Hodgson—Myers thread on which these brief extracts have naturally strung themselves, and I will not attenuate that thread to make room for this outside strand. I especially commend Mrs. Verrall's volume, however, to anybody who combines with an interest in Psychical Research, an interest in really "elegant letters."

The following scrap relating to Hodgson is from an account by Miss Johnson (Research officer of the S. P. R.) of Mrs. Holland (pseudonym) (Pr. XXI, 303f.):

"In February, 1905 ... Mrs. Holland found that the automatic writing was beginning to make her feel faint or sleepy. The condition was obviated at the time.... It now began to recur. [This sort of thing is noted in several places as preceding the advent of a new, and especially a strong control. Ed.]

"Mrs. Holland learned of Hodgson's death on January 2, 1906. Her script on Friday, February 9, 1906, 9 P. M., is as follows (Pr. XXI, 304):

"... S j d i b s e I p e h t p o—Only one letter further on—

18	8
9	15
3	4
8	7
1	19
18	15
4	14
—	—

"They are not haphazard figures read them as letters—....

"K. 57. [a Christian name]—Gray paper—

"I found that in spite of the rather obvious hints....—'Only one letter further on' and 'Not haphazard figures read them as letters,'—Mrs. Holland had not deciphered the initial conundrums. The first letters are formed from the name 'Richard Hodgson' by substituting for each letter of the name the letter following it in the alphabet; the numbers represent the same name by substituting for each letter the number of its place in the alphabet.

"I asked Mrs. Holland if she had ever played at conundrums of this kind. She told me that as a child in the nursery she had played at a 'secret language' made by using either the letter before or the letter after the real one. But she had never practised or thought of using numbers in this way. She noted afterwards: 'When my hand wrote them I thought they were an addition sum and hoped [my subliminal] would add it very correctly and quickly. [My supraliminal] is very poor at figures.'"

Hodgson in life was very fond of these puzzles.

All this anticipates a scrap of explanation out of a much longer and more interesting manifestation. Mrs. Holland wrote to Miss Johnson (Pr. XXI, 171f.):

"Any automatic writing that comes to me is nearly always in verse, headed—

"'Believe in what thou canst not see,
Until the vision come to thee.'

"The verses, though often childishly simple in wording and jingling in rhyme, are rarely trivial in subject. I once wrote down fourteen poems in little over an hour.... When I write original verse I do so slowly and carefully, with frequent erasures: automatic verse is always as if swiftly dictated and there are never any erasures. I am always fully conscious, but my hand moves so rapidly that I seldom know what words it is forming.

"... I copy one set of verses.... I wrote it down as quickly as it was possible for my hand to move, and was surprised afterwards to find that it had a definite form of its own. It is exactly as it came to me, not 'polished' or altered in the least.

"'I whom he loved, am a ghost,
Wandering weary and lost.
I dare not dawn on his sight,
(Windblown weary and white)
He would shudder in hopeless fright,
He who loved me the best.
I shun the paths he will go,
Because I should frighten him so.
(Weary and lacking rest).

Two stanzas are omitted from lack of space.

"'Should I beat on the window pane,
He would think it the wind and rain,
If he saw my pale face gleam
He would deem it a stray moonbeam
Or the waft of a passing dream.
No thought for the lonely dead,
Buried away out of sight.
And I go from him veiling my head,(1896)
Windblown weary and white.'

"... Automatic verses do not deal much with facts, but once when I was staying in Italy, in an old palazzo I had never before seen, the day after my arrival, and before I had been into the garden, the impulse to write came on me, and I yielded to it, without however ceasing to take part in the conversation of two friends who were with me. One of them, who knew about my automatic writing, asked me to read what had come to me. I did so:—

"'Under the orange tree
Who is it lies?
Baby hair that is flaxen fair,
Shines when the dew on the grass is wet,
Under the iris and violet.
'Neath the orange tree
Where the dead leaves be,
Look at the dead child's eyes!'(1901)

"'This is very curious,' said my friend, 'there is a tradition that a child is buried in the garden here, but I know you have never heard it.'"

These heteromatic poems appear to be but extreme illustrations of the "inspiration" that poets have generally claimed for themselves. The author's modest deprecations seem to me unjust to her own.

Mrs. Holland continues (p. 173f.):

"I have said that automatic verses do not deal much with facts, but once, when I was sensitive after illness, I experienced a new form of automatic writing, in the shape of letters which my hand insisted on writing to a newly-made acquaintance.

"The first of these letters began with a pet name I did not know, and was signed with the full name of someone I had never heard of, and who I afterwards learnt had been dead some years. It was clearly impressed upon me for whom the letter was intended, but thinking it due to some unhealthy fancy of my own, I destroyed it. Having done so I was punished by an agonizing headache, and the letter was repeated, till in self-defense I sent it and the succeeding ones to their destination."

This is perhaps the most "evidential" thing I know.

It has been natural to follow the career of Hodgson both incarnate and alleged post-carnate, without interrupting for the post-carnate career of Myers who had died in 1901, four years before Hodgson. Myers was perhaps the leading English spirit in the S. P. R., and everybody interested in Psychical Research—the skeptical as well as the credulous—was looking with great interest for manifestations professing to come from that spirit in a post-carnate state. As usual, they are a terrible jumble. Myers was not a demonstrative person. He had not, like Hodgson, salient characteristics of manner or expression. In that respect the communicating personality resembles him. His absorbing interests were the S. P. R., poetry, and classical literature. In those respects, too, the personality resembles him.

Mr. George Dorr of Boston got from the Myers control, through Mrs. Piper, a large mass of classical lore which Mr. Dorr asserts he never could have possessed himself, and which certainly Mrs. Piper never did (Pr. XXIV).

Myers' appearances, though of great interest to students, do not make as good general reading as G. P.'s and Hodgson's, and we will make space for only one.

On September 16, 1903, nearly three years after Myers' death and his first alleged appearance through Mrs. Thompson, there was apparently the first appearance of a Myers control through Mrs. Holland. Myers, as his control intimates later, wrote, like Hodgson, for evidential purposes in cryptic ways that the heteromatist probably never would have deliberately used. The writing was, says Miss Johnson (Pr. XXI, 178):

"On two sides of a half-sheet of paper; the first side begins with the initial 'F.,' and the second ends with the initial 'M.'; the whole passage is divided into four short sections, the first three ending respectively in '17/,' '/1' and '/01.' January 17th, 1901, was the date of Mr. Myers's death, mentioned in Human Personality; but the simple device of separating these initials and items from one another was completely effective in its apparent object. I read the passage a good many times before I saw what they meant and I found that the meaning had entirely escaped Mrs. Holland's notice."

This refers to the script containing the notorious stanza (Pr. XXI, 192) which excited the derision of the Philistine world of both continents, and disturbed not a small portion of the enlightened world: