Vicit iter durum pietas - Virgil.

900. The appearance of this book has been delayed for several years by several causes, of which it is to be feared that the chief has been that cause which the gods call Sheer Indolence, and men the Pressure of Occupation. What evil may have resulted from the long deferment it is not for the author to say. What counterbalancing good there may have accrued ought to be manifest in the following chapter. For it is in this chapter that the main difference lies between what I should have written ten years ago, and what it seems to me not only permissible, but even urgently necessary to write to-day. It is in what must needs be said about Possession that the great change has come.

Possession, to define it for the moment in the narrowest way, is a more developed form of Motor Automatism. The difference broadly is, that in Possession the automatist's own personality does for the time altogether disappear, while there is a more or less complete substitution of personality; writing or speech being given by a spirit through the entranced organism. The change which has come over this branch of evidence since the present work was first projected, in 1888, is most significant. There existed indeed, at that date, a good deal of evidence which pointed in this direction,1 but for various reasons most of that evidence was still possibly explicable in other ways. Even the phenomena of Mr. W. S. Moses left it possible to argue that the main "controls" under which he wrote or spoke when entranced were self-suggestions of his own mind, or phases of his own deeper personality. I had not then had the opportunity, which the kindness of his executors after his death afforded to me, of studying the whole series of his original note-books, and forming at first-hand my present conviction that spiritual agency was an actual and important element in that long sequence of communications.

On the whole, I did not then anticipate that the theory of possession could be presented as more than a plausible speculation, or as a supplement to other lines of proof of man's survival of death.

1 The cists of Swedenborg, Cahagnet's subject, D. D. Home, and Stainton Moses will be discussed in the course of this chapter.

The position of things, as the reader of the S.P.R. Proceedings knows, has in the last decade undergone a complete change. The trance-phenomena of Mrs. Piper - so long and so carefully watched by Dr. Hodgson and others - formed, I think, by far the most remarkable mass of psychical evidence till then adduced in any quarter. And more recently other series of trance-phenomena with other "mediums" - though still incomplete - have added materially to the evidence obtained through Mrs. Piper. The result broadly is that these phenomena of possession are now the most amply attested, as well as intrinsically the most advanced, in our whole repertory.

901. Nor, again, is the mere increment of direct evidence, important though that is, the sole factor in the changed situation. Not only has direct evidence grown, but indirect evidence, so to say, has moved to meet it. The notion of personality, - of the control of organism by spirit, - has gradually been so modified that Possession, which passed till the other day as a mere survival of savage thought, is now seen to be the consummation, the furthest development, of many lines of experiment, observation, reflection, which the preceding chapters have opened to our view.

Let us then at once consider what the notion of possession does actually claim. It will be better to face that claim in its full extent at once, as it will be seen that the evidence, while rising through various stages, does in the end insist on all that the ancient term implies. The leading modern cases, of which Stainton Moses and Mrs. Piper may be taken as types, are closely analogous, presenting many undesigned coincidences, some of which come out only on close examination.

The claim, then, is that the automatist, in the first place, falls into a trance, during which his spirit partially "quits his body": enters at any rate into a state in which the spiritual world is more or less open to its perception; and in which also - and this is the novelty - it so far ceases to occupy the organism as to leave room for an invading spirit to use it in somewhat the same fashion as its owner is accustomed to use it.

The brain being thus left temporarily and partially uncontrolled, a disembodied spirit sometimes, but not always, succeeds in occupying it; and occupies it with varying degrees of control. In some cases (Mrs. Piper) two or more spirits may simultaneously control different portions of the same organism.

The controlling spirit proves his identity mainly by reproducing, in speech or writing, facts which belong to his memory and not to the automatist's memory. He may also give evidence of supernormal perception of other kinds.

His manifestations may differ very considerably from the automatist's normal personality. Yet in one sense it is a process of selection rather than of addition; the spirit selects what parts of the brain-machinery he will use, but he cannot get out of that machinery more than it is construtted to perform. The spirit can indeed produce facts and names unknown to the automatist; but they must be, as a rule, such facts and names as the automatist could easily have repeated, had they been known to him:- not, for instance, mathematical formulae or Chinese sentences, if the automatist is ignorant of mathematics or of Chinese.

After a time the control gives way, and the automatist's spirit returns. The automatist, awaking, may or may not remember his experiences in the spiritual world during the trance. In some cases (Swedenborg) there is this memory of the spiritual world, but no possession of the organism by an external spirit. In others (Cahagnet's subject) there is utterance during the trance as to what is being discerned by the automatist, yet no memory thereof on waking. In others (Mrs. Piper) there is neither utterance as a rule, or at least no prolonged utterance, by the automatist's own spirit, nor subsequent memory; but there is writing or utterance during the trance by controlling spirits.