972. Yet even this very difficulty and fragmentariness of communication ought in the end to be for us full of an instruction of its own. We are here actually witnessing the central mystery of human life, unrolling itself under novel conditions, and open to closer observation than ever before. We are seeing a mind use a brain. The human brain is in its last analysis an arrangement of matter expressly adapted to being acted upon by a spirit; but so long as the accustomed spirit acts upon it the working is generally too smooth to allow us a glimpse of the mechanism. Now, however, we can watch an unaccustomed spirit, new to the instrument, installing itself and feeling its way. The lessons thus learnt are likely to be more penetrating than any which mere morbid interruptions of the accustomed spirit's work can teach us. In aphasia, for instance, we can watch with instruction special difficulties of utterance, supervening on special injuries to the brain. But in possession we perceive the controlling spirit actually engaged in overcoming somewhat similar difficulties - writing or uttering the wrong word, and then getting hold of the right one - and sometimes even finding power to explain to us something of the minute verbal mechanism (so to term it) through whose blocking or dislocation the mistake has arisen.

We may hope, indeed, that as our investigations proceed, and as we on this side of the fateful gulf, and the discarnate spirits on the other, learn more of the conditions necessary for perfect control of the brain and nervous system of intermediaries, - the communications will grow fuller and more coherent, and reach a higher level of unitary consciousness. Many the difficulties may be, but is there to be no difficulty in linking flesh with spirit - in opening to man, from his prisoning planet, a first glimpse into cosmic things? If in such speech as this there be any reality, it is not stumblings or stammerings that should stop us. Nay, already on certain occasions there has been no stumble or stammer - when some experienced communicator has poured out an intimate message under strong emotion. Such, for instance, was a private message written by G. P. to "Mr. Howard," who is, by the way, a well-known and able man of professorial status, and who was a definite disbeliever in a future life until G. P. convinced him. The "holding turn" to that conviction was given by the message which Dr. Hodgson thus describes.

It was written in response to a request for some incident, which certainly no one save G. P. and Mr. Howard, his most intimate elder friend and adviser, could possibly have known.

"The transcription here of the words written by G. P. conveys, of course, no proper impression of the actual circumstances. The inert mass of the upper part of Mrs. Piper's body turned away from the right arm, and sagging down, as it were, limp and lifeless over Mrs. Howard's shoulder, but the right arm, and especially hand, mobile, intelligent, deprecatory, then impatient and fierce in the persistence of the writing which followed, which contains too much of the personal element in G. P.'s life to be reproduced here. Several statements were read by me, and assented to by Mr. Howard, and then was written ' private,' and the hand gently pushed me away. I retired to the other side of the room, and Mr. Howard took my place close to the hand where he could read the writing. He did not, of course, read it aloud, and it was too private for my perusal. The hand, as it reached the end of each sheet, tore it off from the block-book, and thrust it wildly at Mr. Howard, and then continued writing. The circumstances narrated, Mr. Howard informed me, contained precisely the kind of test for which he had asked, and he said that he was 'perfectly satisfied - perfectly.'" (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xiii., p. 322).

973. In this way we may explain certain facts as to the mode of communication which are likely to be at first misinterpreted, and to create an impression of pain or strangeness where, in my view, there is nothing beyond wholesome effort in the normal course of evolution among both incarnate and discarnate men. One touch of pathos, indeed - though not of tragedy - stands out to my recollection from the trances which I have watched - a kind of savage and immemorial emotion which takes one back to many an old-world legend, and to the Odyssey of Homer above all. Odysseus, at the entrance of the under-world, poured the blood of victims into a trench, that the dim spirits of the dead might drink of it and have force to speak and hear. But it was to learn from Teiresias that he came, and until he had spoken with Teiresias he suffered none of the thronging spirits to draw anigh. There sat he - as Polygnotus' picture showed him - on a heap of stones in the grey light beside the trench, his drawn sword laid betwixt him and his mother's soul; since, "not even thus, tho' sick at heart, would I suffer her to come nigh the blood, ere I had heard the tale Teiresias had to tell".

Even in such fashion, through Mrs. Piper's trances, the thronging multitude of the departed press to the glimpse of light. Eager, but untrained, they interject their uncomprehended cries; vainly they call the names which no man answers; like birds that have beaten against a lighthouse, they pass in disappointment away. At first this confusion gravely interfered with coherent messages, but through the second and third stages of Mrs. Piper's trances, under the watchful care apparently of supervising spirits, it has tended more and more to disappear.

All this must needs be so; yet I, at least, had not realised beforehand that the pressure from that side was likely to be more urgent than from this. Naturally; since often on this side something of inevitable doubt - nay, of shuddering prejudice and causeless fear - curdles the stream of love; while for them the imperishable affection flows on unchecked and full. They yearn to tell of their bliss, to promise their welcome at the destined hour. A needless scruple, indeed, which dreads to call or to constrain them ! We can bind them by no bonds but of love; they are more ready to hear than we to pray; of their own act and grace they visit our spirits in prison.