956. I do not propose here to discuss the hypothesis of fraud in this case, since it has been fully discussed in the articles referred to in my Appendices and elsewhere, eg. by Dr. Hodgson, Professor William James, Professor Newbold of Pennsylvania University, Dr. Walter Leaf, and Sir Oliver Lodge. I merely quote, as a summary of the argument, a few words of Professor James, from The Psychological Review, July, 1898, pp. 421-22:-

Dr. Hodgson considers that the hypothesis of fraud cannot be seriously maintained. I agree with him absolutely. The medium has been under observation, much of the time under close observation, as to most of the conditions of her life, by a large number of persons, eager, many of them, to pounce upon any suspicious circumstance for [nearly] fifteen years. During that time, not only has there not been one single suspicious circumstance remarked, but not one suggestion has ever been made from any quarter which might tend positively to explain how the medium, living the apparent life she leads, could possibly collect information about so many sitters by natural means. The scientist who is confident of "fraud" here, must remember that in science as much as in common life a hypothesis must receive some positive specification and determination before it can be profitably discussed, and a fraud which is no assigned kind of fraud, but simply "fraud" at large, fraud in abstracto, can hardly be regarded as a specially scientific explanation of concrete facts.

I give some further statements and references on this point in 956 A and B.

957. Nor shall I discuss at any length the character of the Phinuit personality. An excellent analysis of this, which I quote in 957 A, was given by Sir Oliver Lodge. According to my own experience, during Mrs. Piper's visit to England in 1889-90, different trances, and different parts of the same trance, varied greatly in quality. There were some interviews throughout which Phinuit hardly asked any question, and hardly stated anything which was not true. There were others throughout which his utterances showed not one glimmer of real knowledge, but consisted wholly of fishing questions and random assertions. The trances could not always be induced at pleasure. A state of quiet expectancy would usually bring one on; but sometimes the attempt altogether failed. The trance when induced usually lasted about an hour, and there was often a marked difference between the first few minutes of a trance and the remaining time. On such occasions almost all that was of value would be told in the first few minutes; and the remaining talk would consist of vague generalities or mere repetitions of what had already been given.

Phinuit always professed himself to be a spirit communicating with spirits; and he used to say that he remembered their messages for a few minutes after "entering into the medium," and then became confused. He was not, however, apparently able to depart when his budget of facts was empty. There seemed to be some irresponsible letting-off of energy which must continue until the original impulse was lost in incoherence. My own general conclusion at that time was that Phinuit's utterances must be judged as but one item in the long roll of automatic messages of many kinds which were only then beginning to be collected and analysed. I regarded it as proved that these phenomena afforded evidence of large extensions - telepathic or clairvoyant - of the normal powers of the human spirit, and thought it possible that Phinuit's knowledge was thus derived from a telepathic or clairvoyant faculty, latent in Mrs. Piper, and manifesting itself in ways with which previous experiment had not made us familiar. On the other hand, the automatic messages which we had already studied included phenomena of very various types, some of which certainly pointed prima facie to the intervention - perhaps the very indirect intervention - of the surviving personalities of the dead, and I held that if such instances of communication from extra-terrene minds should ultimately find acceptance with science, then Phinuit's messages, with all their drawbacks and all their inconsistency, would have fair claim to be added to the number.

I need hardly say that it is this last hypothesis which I have since adopted, and although it is obvious that the difficulties concerning Phinuit's identity have not been solved, it seems possible to regard him as an intelligence extraneous to Mrs. Piper, - as, in fact, a discarnate spirit. It must not be forgotten, however, that he entirely failed in his professed attempts to establish his personal identity, and could not succeed even in substantiating his claim to be a French doctor. Unfortunately we have no contemporary records of what occurred during Mrs. Piper's earliest trances; nor practically any information as to the first manifestations of the Phinuit personality. It seems clear at least that the name Phinuit was the result of suggestion at these earliest trances (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 46-58), and many may think it most probable that the Phinuit "control" was nothing more than a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper. But, according to the statements (of which there is of course no evidence) made by "Imperator," Phinuit was an "earth-bound" or inferior spirit, who had become confused and bewildered in his first attempts at communication, and had, as we say, "lost his consciousness of personal identity." That such an occurrence is not uncommon in this life is plain from the cases to which I have drawn attention in Chapter II (Disintegrations Of Personality). of this book, and we cannot prove it to be impossible that profound memory disturbances should be produced in an inexperienced discarnate spirit when first attempting to communicate with us through a material organism.

Be that as it may, the Phinuit personality has not manifested either directly or indirectly since January 1897, when "Imperator" claimed the supervision of Mrs. Piper's trances.