918. There are three strong currents of expectation of which we find constant traces, but with which the phenomena do not comply. The failure of compliance, indeed, leads to indifference or even to ridicule.

(1.) There is the orthodox or traditional line of expectation. This leads people to expect an immediate vision of Jesus Christ, or of angels or devils; or some marked and definite division of good and evil souls; - or at least some foresight of the Last Judgment. There is not, however, so far as I know, any confirmation at all, from apparitions or messages, of any of these anticipations.

Perhaps the most striking part of this negative evidence is the absence, in well-attested cases, of any mention of evil spirits other than human.1 The belief in devils has played an enormous part in almost all human creeds, and it was undoubtedly strong in the minds of many of the persons with whom communication has been held. Unhappy figures have been seen; regret and remorse have been expressed. But of evil spirits other than human there is no news whatever.

Here is a definite case in which I venture to hope that theological dogma will be insensibly modified by fresh information, and that an error which has caused much misery will cease to trouble mankind.

(2.) The strain of religious anticipation merges gradually into what I have called the romantic. Men are tempted to think that the apparition or message of a departed friend is a special privilege; - directly granted by Providence, or won in some way by strength of affection. In actual experience we find that although affection may help by inspiring the wish to communicate, the power is something quite independent of affection; - something which love may lack and indifference possess. Nay, it is by no means certain that any act of will need be involved in the apparition, which may very probably occur in automatic fashion.

This has been made a subject of ridicule, - as though it were a meaningless thing that B should appear to A who cares nothing about him. Of course the meaning belongs to the realm of science, not of romance.

(3.) Again, there seems to be a common notion that messages from the next world ought to subserve some practical purpose in this. In fact, such a result seldom occurs: and its absence has been a frequent ground for doubting or deriding the message. Yet the coarseness of such a view hardly needs exposition.

919. The foregoing remarks may, I hope, have prepared the reader to consider the problems of possession with the same open-mindedness which has been needed for the study of previous problems attacked in the present work. I have shown indeed that this new problem may be regarded as the natural sequence or development of the old. I have shown that in the movements or utterances of the possessed organism we have motor automatism carried to its furthest stage; that in the incursion of the possessing spirit we have telepathic invasion achieving its com-pletest victory. And I have uttered, too, an initial warning against certain misconceptions which have in past time deterred men from serious study of the messages received through such channels.

1 See Chapter VII (Phantasms Of The Dead)., section 753.

It is time, then, to proceed to the actual evidence, to detail the various proofs which we have as yet collected to show that such possession has in fact occurred. When this shall have been done, we must again look round us; - and we shall find that in describing this complete or "mediumistic" form of trance, we have opened up analogies with other forms of trance also, which will be discerned as elements in a continuous and mutually corroborative chain of psychological facts.

920. Yet there must needs be one more delay. There is another aspect of possession which must be explained before we can go further; - involving a group of phenomena which have in various ways done much to confuse and even to retard our main inquiry, but which, when properly placed and understood, are seen to form an inevitable part of any scheme which strives to discover the influence of unseen agencies in the world we know.

In our discussion of all telepathic and other supernormal influence I have thus far regarded it mainly from the psychological and not from the physical side. I have spoken as though the field of supernormal action has been always the metetherial world. Yet true as this dictum may be in its deepest sense, it cannot represent the whole truth "for beings such as we are, in a world like the present." For us every psychological fact has (so far as we know) a physical side; and metetherial events, to be perceptible to us, must somehow affect the world of matter.

In sensory and motor automatisms, then, we see effects, supernormally initiated, upon the world of matter.

Imprimis, of course, and in ordinary life our own spirits (their existence once granted) affect our own bodies and are our standing examples of spirit affecting matter. Next, if a man receives a telepathic impact from another incarnate spirit which causes him to see a phantasmal figure, that man's brain has, we may suppose, been directly affected by his own spirit rather than by the spirit of the distant friend. But it may not always be true even in the case of sensory automatisms that the distant spirit has made a suggestion merely to the percipient's spirit which the percipient's own spirit carries out; and in motor automatisms, as they develop into possession, there are indications, as I have already pointed out, that the influence of the agent's spirit is telergic rather than telepathic, and that we have extraneous spirits influencing the human brain or organism. That is to say, they are producing movements in matter; - even though that matter be organised matter and those movements molecular.

921. So soon as this fact is grasped, - and it has not always been grasped by those who have striven to establish a fundamental difference between spiritual influence on our spirits and spiritual influence on the material world, - we shall naturally be prompted to inquire whether inorganic matter as well as organic ever shows the agency of extraneous spirits upon it. The reply which first suggests itself is, of course, in the negative. We are constantly dealing with inorganic matter, and no hypothesis of spiritual influence exerted on such matter is needed to explain our experiments. But this is a rough general statement, hardly likely to cover phenomena so rare and fugitive as many of those with which in this inquiry we deal. Let us begin, so to say, at the other end; not with the broad experience of life, but with the delicate and exceptional cases of possession of which we have lately been speaking.

Suppose that a discarnate spirit, in temporary possession of a living organism, is impelling it to motor automatisms. Can we say a priori what the limits of such automatic movements of that organism are likely to be, in the same way as we can say what the limits of any of its voluntary movements are likely to be? May not this extraneous spirit get more motor power out of the organism than the waking man himself can get out of it? It would not surprise us, for example, if the movements in trance showed increased concentration; if a dynamometer (for instance) was more forcibly squeezed by the spirit acting through the man than by the man himself. Is there any other way in which one would imagine that a spirit possessing me could use my vital force more skilfully than I could use it myself?

I do not know how my will moves my arm; but I know by experience that my will generally moves only my arm and what my arm can touch;- whatever objects are actually in contact with the "protoplasmic skeleton" which represents the life of my organism. Yet I can sometimes move objects not in actual contact, as by melting them with the heat or (in the dry air of Colorado) kindling them with the electricity, which my fingers emit. I see no very definite limit to this power. I do not know all the forms of energy which my fingers might, under suitable training, emit.