THE PROCESS OF COMMUNICATING

 THE popular terms for the method of communicating with the dead are automatic writing, raps, table-tipping, planchette writing, spelling by the ouija board, impressions, and the more technical terms of clairvoyance and clairaudience. All but the last two take their names from the physical instruments or the physical means employed in the work. The last two are names for peculiar phenomena in vision and hearing, which will be more fully described a little later.

 Automatic writing is distinguished from ordinary writing only in being unconscious or involuntary. Only certain tests, such as trance or anaesthesia, or the testimony of a trustworthy subject, will decide whether a person is writing automatically. Many people suppose that automatic writing is always the act of some foreign intelligence, but it is not necessarily so. It may always be the unconscious act of the subject himself, even though we suppose that the instigating cause is foreign. Popularly, however, it is assumed to be due to the direct action of spirits, and even some scientific men maintain that, if spirits are connected with it at all, they are the direct cause of it. The matter, however, is not so simple as it seems, as we shall have occasion to see later. The factor that makes it appear to be the direct act of foreign intelligence is the exclusion of normal consciousness and intention. We naturally assume that anything not done by ourselves voluntarily is not done by ourselves at all, and if our ego were defined by our conscious and voluntary acts, as the Cartesian philosophy would have us believe, this view would be correct. But since the time of Descartes we have learned that there is a whole territory of unconscious actions instigated, at least apparently, by unconscious processes of the mind. These acts may not be due to spirits at all. The subconscious is presumed to lie between the fields of spirit agency and the normally conscious and voluntary actions of the mind. Whether in this region mental states and acts may be originated without foreign stimulus is debatable, but in the absence of evidence for this instigation we have to assume that subconscious acts explain the facts, especially when the knowledge manifested or action performed is entirely within the range of normal acquisition. But if information not normally acquired is conveyed by this automatic writing the subconscious certainly cannot be more than the vehicle or medium of its transmission. It is this foreign origin that gives the impression of direct control by spirits and so leads to the supposed significance of automatic writing.

 But the psychic researcher is interested in automatic writing primarily as a supernormal phenomenon, whatever the source of the information conveyed by it. The process is probably very complex, as even normal writing is; but it involves at least one more factor than normal writing— that the stimulus to it may be not internal but external to the organism. Whenever it is connected with supernormal knowledge, we have to invoke foreign agency as at least one factor in the explanation. What goes on between the original impulse from foreign intelligence and the final act of writing we may not know any more than we know what goes on between the initial volition to write and the actual motion of the muscles of the hand.

 The methods of table-tipping, the planchette and the ouija board are only modifications of automatic writing. Many people suppose that there is some mystery or virtue about the ouija, which enables it to spell out messages from other minds. They do not reflect that the same process is involved in all the methods named. The muscular system of the operators is in action in each of them in the same way. The instrument or means of expression has nothing to do with the result, when the human organism must intervene in the phenomena. There is no mysterious power in the ouija, the planchette, or the table, any more than there is in the pencil. They are all agents or media, as they are in normal action of the same kind. The actual evidence for the supernormal lies, not in the action of automatic writing, of the ouija or planchette, or of the table, but in the contents of the message. If the content represents normally acquired information, we explain the message by subconscious action of the writer's mind. If the content is unmistakably foreign to normal experience, we seek for the external stimulus or mind that may account for it. The method of delivery is of secondary importance.

 Another method of communication is by raps. They are not always connected with the motor action of the psychic. No doubt some raps are simply ordinary automatisms like automatic writing and other unconscious actions. But they are often independent of any intervention by the human organism as revealed to sense-perception. They are used as signals of answers to questions; and, being foreign to either conscious or unconscious action of the organism, another explanation must be sought for them than for automatic writing. The latter assumes at least the intervention of the physical organism with its powers and habits. But raps may involve no such intermediary; and in this case they must be regarded as independent physical phenomena. They can be used only for answers to questions or for spelling out words in various ways. Their method of communication is crude, in the sense that it takes time and trouble to get intelligible messages; but they signify the possibility of communication with an outside world without the mediation of the subconscious or normal machinery of the human organism.

 Clairvoyance and clairaudience are very different processes. Clairaudience is the hearing of apparently foreign messages, by means of voices, usually "internal voices." Possibly they are sometimes apparently external, but since those who experience the facts are not always adept in analyzing and describing the experiences, we are not sure that the experiences are other than subjective or hallucinatory, though the stimulus maybe foreign. Both clairaudience and clairvoyance are sensory phenomena, unconnected with motor action, whereas automatic writing and other forms of communication, except independent raps, are connected with the motor functions.

 Clairvoyance, however, is a term that does duty for three distinct types of phenomena. (1) It denotes generally the power of mediumship in so far as the messages are obtained by impressions or visual pictures. It is even very often used to denote any type of communication with the dead, and so is made synonymous with mediumship, excluding purely physical phenomena. (2) It is more technically used to denote the acquisition of foreign information through visual phantasms, as clairaudience is used to denote auditory hallucinations of the veridical type. (3) Lastly, still more technically, it denotes the perception of concealed physical objects whose whereabouts are not known by any living being. It represents the visual perception, transcendental in nature, of facts or things that cannot be known through telepathy. It presupposes supernormal perception at a distance, and excludes all mind-reading, This is the more technical conception of the process. Telaesthesia is probably a better term for this conception of clairvoyance.

 There is another popular conception of communication with the dead, which gives rise to the errors regarding the physical means of communication. This popular notion is that the communication is quite like our own communication with each other. The circumstance that it comes in speech or writing or some use of the physical organism creates the impression that the process is a mere substitution of the discarnate spirit for our own in the use of the human organism. This is not true, despite the appearances to that effect. Superficial characteristics make it appear as if a spirit simply took hold of the physical organism and used it just as the living personality uses it. On the contrary, the subconscious does not cease to function; and, when the normal consciousness is made the vehicle of the communications, no part of living control is lost. The popular misconception leads to the interpretation of messages as if they were not colored by the mind which serves as the medium of transmission, an assumption which is provably false. There is nothing clearer to investigators than the fact that all messages are affected by the mind of the medium, normal or subliminal, according to the conditions under which communication takes place. If the messages come through normal consciousness, the form of the message will be deeply affected. Memories, interpretation, and language determine the form of the message. To some extent the subconscious will affect it in the same way in a trance, when normal consciousness is suspended. Control of the living organism is either indirect or totally wanting when the communications are going on, except possibly in exceptional cases of possession, such as the "Watseka Wonder." (See Myer's "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death," Volume I, pp. 360-368.) In most cases at least the influence of the living mind on the results is such that it gives rise in the scientific mind to doubts about actual spirit communication, but only because it has borrowed from the popular mind a preconception of what communication would be if it took place at all—namely; that the communication would be direct and like normal intercourse with the living.

 Normal communication among the living is a species of mimicry. This mimicry is not apparent in language; but when language cannot be employed, we quickly resort to some form of symbolism that is a modification of mimicry. In this way we instigate more or less the same thoughts in others as in ourselves; but we do not communicate or transmit thoughts. We transmit only mechanical effects from one organism to another, and the mind connected with that organism interprets the effect in accordance with its own experience in sense-perception.

 The external and superficial characteristics of the phenomena purporting to be communications from the dead, especially automatic writing and automatic speech, very strongly suggest the same process; and, as the popular mind assumes that thoughts and ideas are actually transmitted from one person to another, it very naturally supposes that communication with the dead is direct transmission of ideas. But careful examination of the facts makes it quite dear that there is a radical difference, despite the resemblances between spiritistic and normal communication. The fact that no thoughts are directly transmitted between the living, unless we admit telepathy as an exception, gives us pause in our assumptions about the process, and further examination reveals complications that show the process to be wholly different from normal intercourse.

 We can describe certain steps in the process of normal intercourse or conveyance of ideas. There is first the idea in the mind, which will usually take the form of a mental picture or a series of pictures. Next, there is the volition to express the idea in words.

The word is recalled and the vocal organs are moved to convert it into physical sound. There are no doubt intermediate stages between the thought and the vocal expression; but what goes on in the nerve filaments connecting the brain centers with the vocal organism is purely conjectural. When the sound is produced it is conveyed from the person talking to the recipient of the sound, who receives an auditory sensation, which he interprets. The sound is a symbol, which we interpret as meaning the same experience for the communicator as for the listener. In this way we learn his idea, but only by reproducing it from our experience, not by having it directly transmitted to us.

 The process of communication with spirits includes all these and no one knows how many more complications. We need not go beyond telepathy between the living to see that the process is very different from normal communication. Telepathy does not involve any known stimulus upon the sense-organs. What its process is we do not know. We only know that it does not affect the sensory apparatus as does a physical stimulus.

 The various methods recognized by laymen and set up as mysterious do not appear to the psychologist to be of any importance in determining the nature of the process of communicating with the dead; hence he seeks some further characteristic which will make the phenomena intelligible. He notices first that all the phenomena can be reduced to two types, motor and sensory. The motor type is manifested in automatic writing, planchette, ouija board, and table-tipping. The sensory type is exhibited in apparitions, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and other sensory phantasms, whether of touch, taste or smell. The relation between the sensory and the motor types will be the subject of later consideration. At present we need only note that the essential feature of the process is most likely to be found in a characteristic common to the two types of phenomena. We shall first consider the sensory type, and may there find a clue to what goes on in the motor type.

 We cannot read ancient literature, Oriental, Hebrew, Greek, or Roman, without observing evidence of visions, though only in recent times have they become intelligible. The influence of science for several centuries, with its accusation of hallucination and delusion to account for every event inexplicable by material forces, has deprived the term vision of its original meaning. From the beginning of organized psychic research, the idea that a medium saw what she claimed to see was disparaged or ridiculed. The claim was regarded as evidence of fraud, or of hysterical hallucinations or delusions. But psychic researchers found what they called veridical hallucinations, experiences related to external events, often unknown to the subject, in a manner to give the hallucination a significance much more important than that attaching to subjective hallucinations. The psychologist and psychiatrist had always regarded hallucinations as caused by some intraorganic stimulus, and the resultant hallucination was supposed merely to simulate reality. But veridical hallucinations were referable to an external cause to which they bore a relation like that of normal sensation to its stimulus.

 It was discovered very early in the investigation that telepathic subjects had apparently visual perceptions when receiving the impressions presumably created by the thoughts of the agent. The existence of these sensory phantasms is not questioned, though they are probably often subjective instead of veridical. If telepathy of any kind has been proved, the existence of veridical hallucinations has equally been proved. Apparitions illustrate the same phenomenon; and, indeed, from the outset of their investigation it was apparent that many, if not all, of them must be classed as sensory hallucinations, veridical or subjective. Mr. Myers and Mr. Edmund Gurney conceived them after this fashion. On this understanding, we may concede to the skeptic the phantasmal character of the experience, and yet insist on its definite relation to an external cause. The phantasm may not at all adequately represent that objective cause. On this assumption the paradoxes of the situation disappear; for instance, spirit clothes which have been so sore a perplexity to the average man, no longer present any difficulties. To conceive apparitions as veridical hallucinations or phantasms, is only to translate into mental terms what had before seemed to be physical or quasi-physical phenomena. The assurance that there is a foreign or external cause of the appearance, guarantees the existence, though not the characteristics, of spirits.

These considerations prepared the way for a more extensive application of the conception to the problem of communication with the dead. It is probable that Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers fully appreciated the meaning of this new discovery, though they did not develop it into a completely expressed doctrine. However this may be, it is certain that, though I knew that their conception of apparitions and of telepathy involved the idea of veridical hallucinations, I did not see the full significance of the theory until I had communication with Professor James after his death. I then saw what the founders of the Society had meant by their doctrine of veridical hallucinations. I thought at first that the theory was my own, but I soon discovered my mistake; later it became apparent that Swedenborg had anticipated all of us, though he had not worked out his ideas scientifically.

 So much for the development of the theory. What was necessary in ascertaining the process of communicating was to consider something more than the physical means of delivering the messages. It was evident that the process involved more than the physical instrument, and that something unusual was at the bottom of the process. The most obtrusive fact was that the two general forms of communication, sensory and motor, corresponded to the two channels by which the mind is connected with the physical world. In the sensory field the most conspicuous phenomenon is clairvoyance; but it is apparent to the student of psychology that auditory phenomena represent in reality the same type. The voices are as veridical as the visions. Consequently, all sensory contacts with the discarnate world are simply veridical phantasms, visual, auditory, tactual, olfactory, or gustatory, and, perhaps we may add, emotional. The main point is, that supernormal sensory experiences are all of the same type and reducible to a single law, expressed by the pictographic process. This process means, that the communicator manages to elicit in the living subject a sensory phantasm of his thoughts, representing, but not necessarily directly corresponding to, the reality. The motor process, giving rise to automatic writing, does not represent anything pictographic, though pictographic processes may precede it. What chiefly interests us here, however, is the development of the process which expressed itself in sensory imagery and which, interpreted after the analogies of sense-perception, gave the impression that the spiritual world was a quasi­material reality.

 I must now let the records tell their own story; they will at the same time illustrate the difficulties of communicating. The main object is, to give those facts which are more or less evidential of the pictographic process and its importance, while they also represent actual communications on the question itself.

 A friend of Dr. Hodgson, whom in his report he calls George Pelham, died in 1892, while Dr. Hodgson was carrying on his experiments with Mrs. Piper. She knew nothing about the man, though he had had one sitting with her. By communications begun about two weeks after his death, of which Mrs. Piper was probably uninformed, he finally was able to convince Dr. Hodgson of the scientific truth of the spiritistic theory. G. P., as he is called in the records, gave excellent proof of his personal identity, and showed himself desirous of telling all he could about the problem that Dr. Hodgson was trying to solve. In the course of his account he took up the process of communication and the mistakes and confusions in the messages. The following statement appealed to Dr. Hodgson as having unusual interest.

 "Remember we share and always will have our friends in the dream-life, that is, your life so to speak, which will attract us forever and ever, and so long as we have any friends sleeping in the material world;—you to us are more like as we understand sleep, you look shut up in prison, and in order for us to get into communication with you, we have to enter into your sphere, as one like yourself asleep. This is just why we make mistakes, as you call them, or get confused and muddled, so to put it, H."

 This statement, with its reference to sleep as the condition for communicating, as well as further incidental evidence, induced Dr. Hodgson to apply the hypothesis of a dream-state in the spirit as more or less necessary to communication with the living. He worked out the theory at some length in his report., which I followed with further evidence and defence. Before his death, Professor James knew the hypothesis well and admitted its cogency, but was not convinced of its truth. Very soon after his death and in an early communication through Mrs. Chenoweth, who knew nothing about his views on this specific question, he made the following statements, after referring to the probable interest of the newspapers in his "new revelation":

 "It opens my eyes to some of the real difficulties in the way of actual communication to try the experiment myself."

(Yes, do you find Hodgson and I were right about the difficulties?) "I think so, but it is too early for me to have positive conclusions." (All right, take your own course.)

"I am of the opinion that some of the messages are produced without volition and they are caught by contact. Hence the broken and imperfect utterance on paper. Actual and complete contact would make the circuit and running capacity for trains of thought. Do you understand my expression?"

(Yes, satisfactorily.)

"I desire to have the work complete, less jerky and disjointed than Richard gave us."

 'This characteristic passage, reflecting the personal identity of Professor James, indicates one new fact, abundantly illustrated since that time,

namely, that some messages are involuntary. The cause of this involuntary communication was indicated later in a definite way. Nearly a month later Professor James, through Mrs. Chenoweth, spontaneously took up the matter without a hint from such a question as I had put in the passage quoted above.

 "I seem to be able to reason while I am at work and that pleases me. So much of the work recorded in the past lacked that function."

(That is correct.)

"It always stood between me and my theories of what ought to be and often I said: This seems more like snatches of broken recollections detached and left solitary or wandering brain—" [Pause.]

(Actions?)

"No, photographs. You may recall what I am trying to tell you." (Phantasms?)

"Yes, fugitive phantasms, unreal."

(I understand.)

"Unattached, floating in ethereal waves, caught, retained, expressed, as if by subliminal states not able to distinguish between the attached and unattached. The embodied or fugitive phantasms. This I was forced to consider when I would gladly have thrown it away as inadequate.

The sudden reference to "photographs," accepted as phantasms after I had so interpreted the word, was an interesting allusion to the pictographic process, though I did not see its meaning at the time. The qualification of them as "fugitive" was another reference to "involuntary messages." The evident allusion to marginal mental pictures was not apparent to me at the time, nor the meaning of the expression "fugitive phantasms," which was an epitome of both the idea of involuntary messages and of the pictographic process. It remained for G. P. to make the matter clear later.

 Nearly a month later Dr. Hodgson took up the subject and evidently tried to clarify it. He referred to the desire of Professor James in his communications to prevent the disjointed character of which he had to complain when living.

 "His one desire is to be slow and let nothing come that is not his own. No fugitive ideas to float in unawares into the communications. This is not a new phase of thought to you and me. The fugitive expressions you understand."

(Yes, perfectly.)

"But we are seeking to eliminate all that, as far as we can at least, but it is almost impossible to completely inhibit one's self and thought and let nothing but the pure present expression come. Try it yourself in the ordinary conversations of life and see how the fugitive drops in and is constantly bringing misunderstandings of the idea you are trying to express to your most intimate friend."

 The "fugitive" in this instance is evidently what comes from other minds present, when another communicator is trying to send messages; but the second reference is to the phenomenon in the mind of the communicator. The allusion to the inability to control one's own mind assumes the possibility of "fugitive phantasms" from both the mind of the communicator and of others present. While the passage does not explicitly recognize involuntary messages, it implies them. Evidently Dr. Hodgson was not able to make his message clear. Two days later Professor James recurred to the subject and made clearer what he wished to say.

 "I have been making note of things to recall here and it is possible that some will be dropped in without special relevance, but with the statement that it is to be so. You understand."

(Yes I shall.)

"It may look like a French exercise book, but it is to be done with malice aforethought."

(All right, all the malice prepense you like.)

"So it will be absolved from the charge of dreams, dream talk, our old theme, a theory we more than once discussed and discarded and discussed again."

The allusion to "dream talk" was clearly to Dr. Hodgson's hypothesis, suggested by the communication of G. P. quoted above, as an explanation of the confusions and mistakes. The earlier reference to "fugitive phantasms" was an attempt to explain the same fact, but the communicator

got no further with the problem at this time. Some days later he took it up again.

"Not all the evidence need be twaddle nor all the twaddle evidence." (Good.)

"It is the spirit of a man which survives, all that makes up his day, his weeks and years, tone, the quality, and I desire to prove, and not to give you a sample of deteriorated or disintegrated capacity. Have I made it clear?

(Yes, if I assume that you have to overcome a trance on your side.) "I am not entranced."

(All right. Is there danger of going into a trance on your side and thus of preventing communications?)

"On that subject we have had our conversation before." (Yes, how much is true?)

"I passed into this life and we were obliged to assume that such was the case for two reasons. First, we were informed so by Imperator; second, the evidence submitted implied as much in many instances. But I must confess that the trance is absent in my case."

Again we meet with the denial of the trance or dream state as necessary for communications, but the key to the problem is still to come, and it was given by G. P. some months later. I quote his statement in full. I asked a question and G. P. seized the opportunity to go into the subject of immediate response to such queries and the difficulties involved.

"Your question sets thought working, but after a while I will tell you if I can." (All right. Go ahead.)

"One good thing about working with you is your understanding of the difficulties and patience with us and we are never afraid to tell you the exact situation. The mental action is just the same here as with you, becomes visible to you for it expresses in words. The body is a cloak for mental processes. Do you know what I mean?"

(I can get sufficient idea not to worry about that.)

"Every word from another sets a train of thought in motion and if your thoughts find visible or audible expression, you would be thought wandering in your mind the greater part of the time, but the whole process is almost instantaneous, and so you are saved the ignominy of the charge. But with us the thoughts are found on the paper sometimes and before we know it, and so it takes practice and will to keep the line steady and express only what we desire. Much of the past in various quarters can be explained in this statement."

 I saw at a flash what this remarkable statement meant. If our thoughts, which are realized in mental images, whether central or marginal or both, were to become visible or audible to a friend in conversation with us, as they would if they were transmitted to him as veridical phantasms, they would make him think that we were "wandering in our minds." This idea, taken with the denial that the communicator was in a dream state and that the communicator could not inhibit the expression of his thoughts, together with the reference to "fugitive phantasms" or marginal thoughts whether of one's own mind or that of others present, explains the confusion in messages and shows that pictographic phenomena are the clue to the understanding of the problem. I saw the whole meaning of the theory of Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers about veridical phantasms. If we add the idea that G. P. clearly perceives what is going on all the time in all minds, living or dead, to the idea that transmission takes the form of hallucinations or mental pictures, we have an explanation of clairvoyance and a clear idea of the process of communicating.

 It required but an extension of this principle to the other senses, to render the whole field intelligible, in so far as sensory functions are concerned. It still remained to be ascertained whether the pictographic process lies back of communication by motor expression. The process is less clearly apparent in motor phenomena; but further communications have rendered it probable that mental pictures lie behind the motor expression, and that automatic writing may involve special difficulties in transmitting the thoughts of the communicator. If the medium have the habit of interpreting in speech her own visual imagery, she may be qualified to transmit in automatic writing the thought that comes to her mind in pictures.

 This pictographic process is what G. P. probably meant in the passage quoted from his communications through Mrs. Piper; the message was possibly distorted in the transmission. He was apparently describing the similarity between the living and the deceased mind in the comparison with the "dream life." This is not evident on the surface of his statement; but, when we consider that the spirits have access to our minds through the subconscious, which is well described as the "dream-life," and that the subliminal of Mrs. Piper either did not catch the true meaning of his message or distorted it by abbreviation, we can realize that he may have been trying to show that the panoramic stream of images in the communicator's mind, both central and marginal, voluntary and involuntary, is transmitted to the mind of the medium and there has to undergo either abbreviation or interpretation and selection. In this way arises confusion which we do not experience in ordinary intercourse with each other in normal life, because we can inhibit what we do not wish conveyed to our friend in conversation.

 It is impossible to go into the significance of this pictographic process with adequate detail. Though we can only name it without describing the intimate nature of the process, we can understand that it makes communication more intelligible than does the study of the mechanical devices or methods of communication. We are nearer the heart of the problem when we are able to recognize a psychological process in it. We do not know in detail all that goes on, but when we can conceive that a mental picture in the mind of a communicator is transmitted, perhaps telepathically, to the psychic or to the control; even though we do not know how this occurs, we can understand why the message takes the form that it does in the mind of the psychic and why the whole process assumes the form of a description of visual, or a report of auditory images. The whole mass of facts is thus systematized as a single process, whose specific form of transmission is determined by the sense through which it is expressed.

 The pictographic process was not apparent in the work of Mrs. Piper, except in the transition from the subliminal to the normal state. Here she was a spectator of transcendental events or of the phantasms transmitted to her mind and taken for realities. But in her deep trance the visual functions apparently were not employed.

A careful examination of the records shows that, in the deep trance for automatic writing, she was the recipient of auditory, rather than visual impressions, and hence there was no distinct evidence of the pictographic process in the automatic writing. Now Mrs. Chenoweth is par excellence a visuel only and nothing of an audile. Mrs. Chenoweth showed no aptitude for auditory phantasms; it took two or three years of training to elicit any of them to help out the meaning of the visual images, which she received with comparative ease. The association of the two is a great help in the interpretation of messages, as it is in ordinary experience.

 The popular mind fails to appreciate the real complexity of the problem. It assumes that, if the medium is honest or unconscious of the communications, the whole material comes from the spirit,; it does not take into account the subconscious of the psychic, the various processes of the mind going on under the threshold of consciousness. But when we introduce into the problem the pictographic process, we are able to concentrate attention on a better conception of the problem.

 It is apparent that the pictographic process introduces into the communications various sources of mistake and confusion, and thus explains much that the ordinary man with his view of the messages cannot understand. Mental pictures have to be interpreted, either by the control or by the subconscious of the psychic, probably by both. But whether interpreted or not, and whether the subconscious is as important a factor in the result as the mind of the control, interest is centered in the pictographic process itself, with its measure of identity between the thought of the communicator and of the percipient, with its aptitude for bringing confusion and mistake into the ultimate form of the messages.

 I have referred to the control as another mind than that of the psychic. Laymen usually assume that the whole process is one between the spirit and the medium, or., if the medium is in a trance, between the spirit and the sitter. The process is in reality much more complex. The pictographic process is but one factor in a complex situation, which involves not only the mind of the medium, conscious and subconscious, but also the mind of the control. A study of the records will give overwhelming evidence of this modifying influence on all messages.

 In the work of Mrs. Chenoweth, the guides distinguish between what they call the direct and the indirect method of communicating. The direct method seems superficially to be automatic writing, though it is more than that; the indirect method is always the use of the pictographic process, which requires the control to act as an intermediary between the communicator and the medium. The communicator simply allows his mind to run over his memories in a panoramic form; these are transmitted to the control as veridical phantasms, and are there interpreted, and either transferred directly by automatic writing through the psychic or again through her subconscious by mental pictures and reinterpreted there. When we add to this situation the fact that the communicator cannot determine just what shall be transmitted to the control or the subconscious of the psychic, and that marginal images in the mind of the communicator may be picked up instead of the central or intended ones, we can understand why the messages do not always give the impression of perfect rationality and why so much real or apparent confusion occurs. Every message has to run the gauntlet of selection in the mind that sends it and in the mind that receives the pictographic images, and then be subject to the liabilities of misinterpretation and distortion, by the minds both of the control and of the psychic.

 But the complexities do not end here. As the process of transmission is not always under the complete regulation of either control or psychic, there are evident in many messages phenomena like "crossed wires" on the telephone. Sometimes A, communicating to B on the telephone, unconsciously transmits his message to some one else whose wire "crosses" with A's, and without intention on the part of either A or the unknown receiver that this latter should obtain the message; mechanical conditions accidentally arise in which the words of A are picked up and transmitted to some one else. Something analogous to this often occurs in spiritistic messages. Conditions accidentally arise in which the thoughts of some one other than the intended communicator are picked up and transmitted without the knowledge of either the control or the medium that it is the wrong message. This phenomenon occurred frequently under the Phinuit regime with Mrs. Piper. Those near at the time had their thoughts unwittingly picked up and transmitted, with a resulting impression of false or irrelevant messages. Sometimes, with Mrs. Piper, there would come to a sitter messages that were wholly false to him; but, on inquiry of a previous sitter, it was found that the statements were true of that person. Whether they were subliminal resurgences of previously received messages, or the accidental transmission of present thoughts by a previous communicator who happened to be present, is immaterial.

 Here are two instances in my work with Mrs. Chenoweth: On one occasion, as she began to go into the trance, in the subliminal stage when she sees pictographic phantasms and describes them, she saw a lady whom she had never seen or known, and identified her by name; a moment later she remarked that Dr. Hodgson was standing beside her. She went slowly over what Dr. Hodgson was saying to her, then reached for the pencil, and wrote a message from Dr. Hodgson, who said that it had not been his intention to communicate. In the other instance, a lady was having a sitting. On previous days her father and mother had communicated. On this day, however, some one else began a series of very intimate messages. As soon as the sitting was over I asked the lady if the messages were relevant; she said that they were wholly meaningless. I knew the communicator by the signature of his pet name and wrote to his widow to ask whether the messages were correct. Her reply was that they were, and as none of us present knew about the incidents communicated, they had much evidential value, though they were wholly irrelevant to the sitter.

 In both these instances, it was probably the diversion of the medium's subconscious attention from the persons wanted to the person in whom she was interested, that established rapport and gave rise to irrelevant messages. It is the business of the controls to prevent or inhibit such phenomena, but they may be unsuccessful, either because of the diverted attention of the psychic or of the greater intensity of some other personality.