966. We must now try to form some more definite idea - based not on preconceived theories but on our actual observation of trances - of the processes of possession; though it is hardly necessary to say that the most adequate conception that we can reach at present must be restricted and distorted by the limitations of our own material existence, and can only be expressed by the help of crude analogies.

I may say at the outset that this singular union between two widely different human beings - this possession of the organism - has in it nothing whatever that is weird or alarming. In Mrs. Piper's case the processes of entering and leaving the trance, which used to be accompanied, in Professor James' words, by "a good deal of respiratory disturbance and muscular twitching," are now as tranquil as the acts of going to sleep and awaking; and no result of the trance upon her waking state is evident, except a passing fatigue if the trance has been too far prolonged, or, on the other hand, a state of vague diffused happiness such as sometimes follows the awaking from a pleasant dream. There has been no harmful influence on health - possibly a beneficial influence. At any rate, after serious injury from a sleigh accident, and consequent operations, Mrs. Piper is now "a thoroughly healthy woman." In character she has always belonged to a quiet domestic New England type, much occupied with her household and her children.1 In Dr. Hodgson's view, her control by intelligences above her own has increased her stability and serenity.

If we look, in fact, at the fiesh-and-blood side of this strange converse, we seem to watch a process of natural evolution opening upon us with unexpected ease; so that our main duty is carefully to search for and train such other favoured individuals as already show this form of capacity - always latent, perhaps, and now gradually emergent in the human race. Die Geisterwelt ist nicht ver-schlossen; these sensitives have but to sink into a deep recueillement, a guarded slumber, and that gate stands manifestly ajar. It is rather on the other side of the gulf that the difficulties, the perplexities, come thick and fast.

967. Let us try to realise what kind of feat it is which we are expecting the disembodied spirit to achieve. Such language, I know, again suggests the medicine-man's wigwam rather than the study of the white philosopher. Yet can we feel sure that the process in our own minds which has (as we think) refined and spiritualised man's early conceptions of an unseen world has been based upon any observed facts?

In dealing with matters which lie outside human experience, our only clue is some attempt at continuity with what we already know. We cannot, for instance, form independently a reliable conception of life in an unseen world. That conception has never yet been fairly faced from the standpoint of our modern ideas of continuity, conservation, evolution. The main notions that have been framed of such survival have been framed first by savages and then by a priori philosophers. To the man of science the question has never yet assumed enough of actuality to induce him to consider it with scientific care. He has contented himself, like the mass of mankind, with some traditional theory, some emotional preference for some such picture as seems to him satisfying and exalted. Yet he knows well that this subjective principle of choice has led in history to the acceptance of many a dogma which to more civilised perceptions seems in the last degree blasphemous and cruel.

The savage, I say, made his own picture first. And he at any rate dimly felt after a principle of continuity; although he applied it in crudest fashion. Yet the happy hunting-ground and the faithful dog were conceptions not more arbitrary and unscientific than that eternal and unimaginable worship in vacuo which more accredited teachers have proclaimed. And, passing on to modern philosophic conceptions, one may say that where the savage assumed too little difference between the material and the spiritual world the philosopher has assumed too much. He has regarded the gulf as too unbridgeable; he has taken for granted too clean a sweep of earthly modes of thought. Trying to shake off time, space, and definite form, he has attempted to transport himself too magically to what may be in reality an immensely distant goal.

1 She was married in 1881 and has two daughters, one seventeen, the other eighteen years old.

968. Have we new philosophical conceptions solid enough to withstand the impact of even a small mass of actual evidence? Have our notions of the dignified and undignified in nature - the steady, circular motion of the planets, for instance, as opposed to the irregular and elliptical - guided us in the discovery of truth? Would not Aristotle, divinising the fixed stars by reason of their very remoteness, have thought it undignified to suppose them compacted of the same elements as the stones under his feet? May not disembodied souls, like stars, be of a make rather closer to our own than we have been wont to imagine?

What, then, is to be our conception of identity prolonged beyond the tomb? In earth-life the actual body, in itself but a subordinate element in our thought of our friend, did yet by its physical continuity override as a symbol of identity all lapses of memory, all changes of the character within. Yet it was memory and character, - the stored impressions upon which he reacted, and his specific mode of reaction, - which made our veritable friend. How much of memory, how much of character, must he preserve for our recognition?

Do we ask that either he or we should remember always, or should remember all? Do we ask that his memory should be expanded into omniscience and his character elevated into divinity? And, whatever heights he may attain, do we demand that he should reveal to us? Are the limitations of our material world no barrier to him?