to Mrs. Chenoweth either in her normal or trance state, that I held such a theory. The remark was not in any way due to anything that I had previously said, so that it was supernormal in so far as it reflected what was actually in my mind. But while we may well conceive the other life as a mental world, a rationalized dream life, it may be more, and the earthbound condition immediately after death is merely a foretaste of the rationalized form of the "dream" life. What else it may be remains to be determined.

This whole matter was briefly outlined in my first report on the Piper case in 1901. Cf. Proceedings Eng. S. P. R., Vol. XVI, pp. 259-262. I did this with much less data on the matter than we now have. It was only a natural implication of the idealistic theory of mind.

The importance of all this lies in the corroboration of the idealistic point of view in the interpretation of the problem. Nor do we first discover this point of view in mediumistic phenomena. It is as old as the distinction between sensory and intellectual activities. In normal life the internal activities of the mind have their own existence and meaning apart from sensory experience, though condemned to work upon it. There is in them the beginning of a spiritual life, the foreshadowing of an independent existence, if I may express it so, and death only liberates the inner life from the shackles of sensation and enhances its creative power. Just postulate this tendency with modifying influences of the subconsciousness of the psychic and the difficulties of transmitting messages of any kind, and you will have a clear explanation of the paradoxes and perplexities of these phenomena.

No doubt there are complications. These may be connected with an objective existence as well as a subjective one on the other side. But that is probably less communicable than the memories of the earthly

life or the inner states of the mind. In the first stages of life there, the memories will probably dominate and ideas of that world must slowly accumulate as with an infant just after birth. The infant cannot have the slightest understanding of its experiences, even though its mental development might be considerable before birth. Time is required to understand the new experience, and it may be the same in a new objective world after death. It has to be adjusted to the physical memories in order to be intelligently discussed in communications and it may even then be impossible to employ more than remote analogies to talk about it. At first the momentum of earthly conceptions may prevail; add to this the marginal character of many messages, the modifying influence of the mind through which the messages come, the necessarily symbolic nature of the pictographic process, and the selective liabilities of the mind delivering the messages: these may all give us the result that seems so perplexing. But the hypothesis of a mental world removes the apparent absurdity of a quasi-material reality for a part of that existence and we can await further investigation for some conception of the objective world implied in many of the communications.

I

CHAPTER X

SEQUELS OF PSYCHIC RESEARCH

T is exceedingly improbable that the phenomena of psychic research should stop with the mere proof of spiritual existence. The processes involved in communication or the transmission of evidence of identity could easily be used for any other purpose, and we might expect any type of invasion imaginable after finding that a discarnate world impinged at all upon the physical. There is a whole field of phenomena that has not been as yet resolved except in the most perfunctory way by scientific men. They have been content with description instead of explanation and hence have neglected the plainest dictates of prudence in regard to the implication of such phenomena as telepathy and spiritistic communications, which imply some sort of causal influence on the mind independently of normal sense perception and motor action. Secondary personality is the doctor's Irish stew. He does not know what it is. In antiquity it was "demoniac obsession." At a later period it was "witchcraft." Today we call it such things as "split consciousness" and think we have solved the problem, when, in fact, we have only thrown dust in people's eyes. We have become so accustomed to paradoxes in human knowledge that almost any impossible combination of terms will receive respectful attention, the more impossible the better. What is split consciousness? We can split wood, iron, pumpkins, political parties; but split consciousness, however convenient a term for describing

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an apparent situation, is a term for our ignorancea most happy term, to confound a group of people who refer every anomalous thing in the universe to spirits, and to make it unnecessary to inquire minutely into the anomalies of personality.

Since the rise of modern science, the one thing that has saved the thinking of most people from the hasty interpretation of mental anomalies, has been the general belief that science has exorcised the "supernatural" from the order of the world, though scarcely anybody knew what the supernatural meant. During all this period secondary personality was unknown, or its apparent significance not appreciated, as a means of reducing the claims of the supernatural. The echoes of witchcraft still remained in the popular consciousness. But the words secondary personality, and their associates, "subliminal," "subconscious," and "hysteria," redeemed the situation, and became an open sesame for the scientific conjurer. Spirits disappeared into the limbo of illusion and mythology.

Ansel Bourne disappeared from home in Providence, R. I., and was given up as lost or the victim of an unknown death; but he suddenly awakened to his normal condition eight weeks afterward in Norristown, Pa., with no memory of the eight weeks interval. Professor James and Dr. Richard Hodgson hypnotized him and traced the events of this period, which he told under hypnosis, and found them true.

Charles Brewin disappeared from his home in Burlington, N. J., and between New York City and Plainfield, N. J., he spent four years in a secondary state, undiscovered by his friends, and ignorant of his own identity; but at last he awakened from his Rip Van Winkle sleep to know nothing about it, and was restored to his family.

Dr. Morton Prince had a case, which he calls Sally Beauchamp, who appeared to be four different per

sons. One of them was a mischievous imp and played all sorts of tricks on the other personalities. She would entice one of them to ride out into the country on the last car, and then awaken her. The poor victim had to walk home exhausted from the trip. Sally would put toads and spiders into a box and leave them on the bureau so that the normal self would go into hysterics when she opened the box. These and similar tricks and escapades it required a volume to tell and explain. Split consciousness, or multiple personality, was the charmed word that was supposed to clear up the mystery. The supernaturalist's theory of spirits was waved aside, and justly enough, for lack of evidence. There were no credentials in the phenomena for such an explanation.

But some years ago I happened upon a case which offered the opportunity for proper investigation and experiment. It was one that had fallen into the hands of a clergyman, also by the name of Dr. Walter F. Prince, for care and cure. After visiting it, I resolved to try an experiment as soon as the condition of the patient permitted. This resolution could not be put into effect for several years.

A child, whom we shall call Doris, when three and a half years of age, was picked up by her drunken father and thrown violently upon the floor. The shock stunned the child, but at the time no more serious effects followed; the next day or so, however, it was found that something had happened. The mother did not understand it, though informed that it was the consequence of a contusion at the base of the brain. From that time on, the case was one of alternating personalities. The chief of these was called Margaret, and events proved that there was another which manifested itself only in the girl's sleep, and was called Sleeping Margaret. But this one was after the mother's death. The normal and primary state was called Real