638. The evidence, then, leading me thus unresisting along, has led me to this main difference from our early treatment of veridical phantasms. Instead of starting from a root-conception of a telepathic impulse merely passing from mind to mind, I now start from a root-conception of the dissociability of the self, of the possibility that different fractions of the personality can act so far independently of each other that the one is not conscious of the other's action.

Naturally the two conceptions coincide over much of the ground. Where experimental thought-transference is concerned - even where the commoner types of coincidental phantasms are concerned - the second formula seems a needless and unprovable variation on the first. But as soon as we get among the difficult types - reciprocal cases, clairvoyant cases, collective cases, above all, manifestations of the dead - we find that the conception of a telepathic impulse as a message despatched and then left alone, as it were, to effect its purpose needs more and more of straining, of manipulation, to fit it to the evidence. On the other hand, it is just in those difficult regions that the analogies of other splits of personality recur, and that phantasmal or automatic behaviour recalls to us the behaviour of segments of personality detached from primary personality, but operating through the organism which is common to both.

The innovation which we are here called upon to make is to suppose that segments of the personality can operate in apparent separation from the organism. Such a supposition, of course, could not have been started without proof of telepathy, and could with difficulty be sustained without proof of survival of death. But, given telepathy, we have some psychical agency connected with man operating apart from his organism. Given survival, we have an element of his personality - to say the least of it - operating when his organism is destroyed. There is therefore no very great additional burden in supposing that an element of his personality may operate apart from his organism, while that organism still exists.

Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte. If we have once got a man's thought operating apart from his body - if my fixation of attention on the two of diamonds does somehow so modify another man's brain a few yards off that he seems to see the two of diamonds floating before him - there is no obvious halting-place on his side till we come to "possession" by a departed spirit, and there is no obvious halting-place on my side till we come to "travelling clairvoyance," with a corresponding visibility of my own phantasm to other persons in the scenes which I spiritually visit. No obvious halting-place, I say; for the point which at first seems abruptly transitional has been already shown to be only the critical point of a continuous curve. I mean, of course, the point where consciousness is duplicated - where each segment of the personality begins to possess a separate and definite, but contemporaneous stream of memory and perception. That these can exist concurrently in the same organism our study of hypnotism has already shown, and our study of motor automatisms will still further prove to us.

Here, then, we see in operation just the kind of split which would have seemed most definitely improbable beforehand. "Whatever " (the objector might have thought) "may be the vagaries of spirit, if spirit exist, it is hard to suppose that a brain, constructed to give expression to one single intelligence, accustomed to co-ordinate many minor impulses under one central control, can express two concurrent streams of intelligence, the secondary intelligence showing no sign of disorganisation, but being often at least the equal of the first." We know, however, that this kind of mental analogue of duplex telegraphy is not found in practice a difficulty. Whether the secondary intelligence represent another phase of the primary or be the manifestation of some extraneous mind, it seems at any rate to have plenty of room to work in. Nay, more than two streams of intelligence have in this book already been seen, and will be again seen later on, to be able to operate through the same organism, with imperfections apparently merely due to defect of external muscular modes of self-expression.

639. Such, then, being the observed facts, we cannot suppose that they have already revealed to us all the ways in which dissociations of personality may take place. On the principle of continuity we might even expect to find something intermediate between the dissociations which express themselves through the brain and that great dissociation in which the brain is at last discarded for good and all in what we know as Death. Already in a certain sense a man is in two places at once when his brain is acting as two centres for two different groups of the elements of character and memory. There is already what the schoolmen called a "bilo-cation," although it is hidden among unseen cells. And before we reach the supreme dissociation of death, we shall be prepared by this line of argument for evidence which shows spiritual activity at a distance during the comatose condition which often precedes and merges into death. That phenomenon will present itself as a form of dissociation, with some analogies to death on the one hand, and some analogies to the hypnotic trance on the other.