and her automatic machinery began to write out their thoughts. If we are talking to a friend in social group, but turn the attention of the hearing to another, though we still avoid betraying our action to the friend with whom we are talking, we will hear the talk of the person we are listening to and not that of the person we are looking at. We have in the two incidents a psychological law exactly that which I have indicated in the conversation with a friend. Attention is the cause of rapport. Once that rapport is established, the automatic machinery of the medium will reproduce the thought which its attention has enabled it to receive.

Now it is the prevention of such anomalies that the control must cause. Or, if not the control, other personalities associated with him or her. The automatic machinery is such that it must respond like a telephone wire to the current. The whole process must be organized and protected in an intelligent way to make systematic communications possible. Then they must at the same time prevent the occurrence of hysteria and obsession. Their work must be done between the two extremes of getting through no message at all and causing insanity to the medium. Any one can indulge his imagination as he pleases on the complications of such a situation. But the process is not one controlled as easily as we control our own speech. It suffers from liabilities of all kinds and this is no place to analyze or develop them fully, either with or without the facts. I can only indicate that twenty-five years of records have produced the facts on which this outline is based.

When the pictographic process is added to this we have still greater complications. The control receives the communicator's thought in the form of phantasms or hallucinations and has to interpret them. The accuracy of the interpretation will depend on the extent to which the mental imagery of the communicator is reported to the control in correct form or in remote

symbols. If the symbols are remote, they will cause all sorts of error in the interpretation. I have witnessed instances in which the medium had great difficulty in finding out what the meaning was of very clear phantasms, and often the sitter or person for whom they were intended could not suspect their meaning until further imagery was transmitted and the message translated by the medium in various ways, often not altogether clear to him.

Now imagine how this would be complicated in the double control, or "driving tandem" as we have called it. A double distortion might take place before the phantasm came to the subconscious of the medium. The communicator's thought becomes a phantasm to Jennie P and she transmits this to G. P. who describes what he sees, though he must do this with the subconscious mechanism of the medium and have his ideas modified by the transmission. How do we ever get anything accurate at all? But this matter of accuracy aside, the main thing of interest is that the process of communicating is not like our own, but the transmission of symbolic phantasms, perhaps by a telepathic process, through two or more minds before it reaches the sitter, and perhaps often through half a dozen or more minds. No physical or neural machinery is employed until the message reaches the subliminal of the medium and we may assume that from that point on the process is like our own. But its initial stage has no resemblance to anything we know except the phantasms which sometimes occur in telepathic phenomena.

Let me briefly summarize the conditions affecting the process of communications between the dead and the living, and in connection with them the main elements of the process, so far as they are known. We, in fact, know very little of them, and such as we do know are barely general outlines of a process which is not especially familiar to normal life.

1. There is a state of dissociation in the medium, some interruption of the normal relation of his or her own consciousness with the organism.

2. Rapport with a transcendental world, whether that be of incarnate or discarnate consciousness. In hypnosis and secondary personality this rapport is usually with the physical world.

3. In some cases a trance on the part of the medium, shutting off the influence of normal consciousness upon the machinery of expression.

4. In some cases the retention of normal consciousness, but the establishment of rapport with the transcendental so that messages may be received and interpreted and then expressed normally.

5. In some cases the interpretation of symbolic messages and consequent liability to distortion and misinterpretation on the part of either medium or control.

6. The existence of a control or guide through whose intervention all messages have to be effected. This control may be single or plural.

7. The existence of pictographic imagery representing the transformation or transmission of the communicator's thoughts into phantasms in the mind of control or medium.

8. The description or interpretation of these phantasms by the control so as to make them intelligible, when they are not self-interpretable, to the sitter.

9. The action of the control on the automatic machinery of the medium either by virtue of echolalia or through the intelligence, conscious or subconscious, of the medium.

10. The inhibition of intruding agencies in order to make the communications systematic and rational.

All these facts show how different the process is from that which we imagine it to be. There are no superficial resemblances or analogies to the intercourse and expression of normal life. If we then add to this

the idea that the spiritual life is a mental one and possibly with no resemblances to the present physical life except what the phantasms represent, we will have decided limits to our knowledge of it, and this also even if we find that the reality of that world resembles the representation as much as a photograph or a retinal image does the actual object from which it is taken. At least we can be certain that the phantasms which characterize the pictographic process do not assure us per se of the reality which they adumbrate. Whatever else that world may be than a mental one will have to be determined by further investigation, but the connection between it and the physical life must be through these mental processes which are based upon memory and the phantasms which it produces and transmits.

I

CHAPTER IX

THE NATURE of a Future Life

Do not propose here to discuss the evidence for a life beyond the grave. The possibility of it was discussed because I wished to remove the usual philosophical objections to it in order to refer merely to the evidence for its being a fact. That evidence consists of two classes of facts. (1) The uniform experience of the race from the earliest times which has given rise to its religions and belief in another life. (2) The recorded results of observation and experiment by the various Societies for Psychical Research. It is the latter facts which have given credibility to human experience and tradition generally, after eliminating the influence of the imagination and superstition that had attached itself to these legends. Tylor's Primitive Culture shows that the universal existence of the same ideas among savages widely distributed and separated from each other and without any possible connections points unmistakably to experiences which the Societies for psychical research have verified as unquestionable facts. I have published in Science and a Future Life, and in Psychic Research and the Resurrection summaries of the scientific evidence for survival after death, and Mr. Frederic W. H. Myers in his Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death has collected a mass of evidence pointing in the same direction. Hence with the accumulated evidence of survival I shall not produce any quantity of it in this volume. I shall treat the hypothesis of survival as scientifically proved.