946. I now pass on to consider briefly the nature of the evidence that the alleged spirits were what they purported to be, as described, in the first place, in Mr. Moses' books of automatic writing. The contents of these books consist partly of messages tending to prove the identity of communicating spirits; partly of discussions or explanations of the physical phenomena; and partly of religious and moral disquisitions.

These automatic messages were almost wholly written by Mr. Moses' own hand, while he was in a normal waking state. The exceptions are of two kinds. (1) There is one long passage, alleged by Mr. Moses to have been written by himself while in a state of trance. (2) There are, here and there, a few words alleged to be in "direct writing"; - written, that is to say, by invisible hands, but in Mr. Moses' presence; as several times described in the notes of seances where other persons were present.

Putting these exceptional instances aside, we find that the writings generally take the form of a dialogue, Mr. Moses proposing a question in his ordinary thick, black handwriting. An answer is then generally, though not always, given; written also by Mr. Moses, and with the same pen, but in some one of various scripts which differ more or less widely from his own. Mr. Moses' own description of the process, as given in the preface to Spirit Teachings, may be studied with advantage. I quote this in 946 A.

A prolonged study of the MS. books has revealed nothing inconsistent with this description. I have myself, of course, searched them carefully for any sign of confusion or alteration, but without finding any; and I have shown parts of them to various friends, who have seen no points of suspicion. It seems plain, moreover, that the various entries were made at or about the dates to which they are ascribed. They contain constant references to the seances which went on concurrently, and whose dates are independently known; and in the later books, records of some of these seances are interspersed in their due places amongst other matter. The MSS. contain also a number of allusions to other contemporaneous facts, many of which are independently known to myself.

I think, moreover, that no one who had studied these entries throughout would doubt the originally private and intimate character of many of them. The tone of the spirits towards Mr. Moses himself is habitually courteous and respectful. But occasionally they have some criticism which pierces to the quick, and which goes far to explain to me Mr. Moses' unwillingness to have the books fully inspected during his lifetime. He did, no doubt, contemplate their being at least read by friends after his death; and there are indications that there may have been a still more private book, now doubtless destroyed, to which messages of an intimate character were sometimes consigned.

947. The questions at issue, in short, as to these messages, refer not so much to their genuineness as to their authenticity, in the proper sense of those words. That they were written down in good faith by Mr. Moses as proceeding from the personages whose names are signed to them, there can be little doubt. But as to whether they did really proceed from those personages or no there may in many cases be very great doubt; - a doubt which I, at least, shall be quite unable to remove. By the very conditions of the communication they cannot show commanding intellect, or teach entirely new truths, since their manifestations are ex hypothesi limited by the capacity - not by the previous knowledge, but by the previous capacity - of the medium. And if they give facts not consciously known to the medium - facts however elaborate - it may, of course, be suggested that these facts have been subliminally acquired by the medium through some unconscious passage of the eye over a printed page, or else that they are clairvoyantly learnt, without the agency of any but the medium's own mind, though acting in a supernormal fashion.

This is no merely fanciful hypothesis; nor is it a hypothesis derogatory to Mr. Moses' own probity. On the contrary, as will be presently seen, he himself prominently puts forth the circumstance (Rector's copying from a closed book, an account of which I give in 947 A), which tells most strongly for the view that the alleged remote identities may not really be concerned at all. Nay, the guides themselves expressly state - a propos of some brief accounts of musicians said to be interested in Mr. Charlton Speer - that spirits can refer to books, e. g. their own biographies, and refresh their memory thereby. This admission of course leaves us with nothing more than the word of Imperator to prove that, say, Robert of Gloucester, or Geoffrey of Monmouth (who merely give facts about their own writings), were in reality present. Such guarantee - sometimes only indirectly implied - was enough for Mr. Moses at the time; especially since these remoter spirits came in intermixture with nearer spirits, whose identity he believed could be better proved.

But in a serious talk with me on the matter in 1886 he withdrew much of this certainty; - saying that in the case of some of the musical spirits especially he had had no inward sensation of a spirit's presence, - such as he had in some other cases of "nearer" spirits. He repudiated, however, the idea of subconscious memory on his part of words actually seen by himself; feeling sure that some of the facts automatically written had never been beneath his eyes. This may very well be the case; as he had not, I think, more than a mere schoolmaster's acquaintance with English literature and history; not, indeed, so much as would nowadays be expected from an English master in a school as good as that where he held a post. I judge this largely from the "Notes by the Way," which he contributed to Light for many years, and in which he was certainly not minimising his actual store of knowledge. But be this as it may, I cannot find in these historical communications any provable fact which might not have been drawn from some fairly accessible printed source.

There were certain stanzas from Lydgate, written by the alleged Zachary Gray [or Grey], which Mr. Percival verified in the British Museum. But these are to be found in Warton's English Poetry; from which they reproduce (as Professor Skeat has kindly pointed out to me) a philological error of Warton's own. The power of reading closed books was expressly attributed to Zachary Grey; and if he really possessed it he probably exercised it here; giving thereby, of course, no particular proof that he was Zachary Grey rather than any other spirit.