125. Much more, indeed, than would at first seem likely can be learnt by mere prolonged observation of spontaneous phantasms of the dead. Yet here as everywhere, - here more than anywhere, - the need of actual experiment is felt. For experiment here would mean the conversion of the scarce decipherable flash which flits before our spectroscope into a steady glow; it would mean the enlistment of the departed in conscious and willing co-operation, - the long-desired opportunity to hear and to answer; - veras audire et reddere voces. And in fact such experiment turns out to be actually feasible. It is feasible in connection with each of the four forms of communication, of verbalisation, with which human life is familiar. There is a possibility of inducing a spiritual hearing and a spiritual picture-seeing or reading; and also a spiritually-guided writing and speech. Both our sensory automatism and our motor automatism may be initiated and directed by intelligence outside our own.

In Chapter VI (Sensory Automatism)., on Sensory Automatism, we shall already have discussed the passive methods in which communications of this kind may be awaited. We have now (in Chapter VIII (Motor Automatism).), to consider in what ways Motor Automatism, - the unwilled activity of hand or voice, - may be used to convey messages which come to the automatist as though from without himself.

As though from without himself, I say; but of course their apparent externality does not prove that they have not originated in submerged strata of his own mind. In most cases, indeed, with motor as with sensory automatism, this is probably what really occurs. We find that a tendency to automatic writing is by no means uncommon among sane and healthy persons. But we also find that the messages thus given do not generally rise above the level of an incoherent dream. They seem to emerge from a region where scraps of thought and feeling exist confusedly, with no adequate central control. Yet sometimes the vague scrawling changes its character. It becomes veridical; it begins to convey a knowledge of actual facts of which the automatist has no previous information; it indicates some subliminal activity of his own, or some telepathic access to an external mind. Apparitions may flash their signals; the automatic script will lay the wire. For however inchoate and ill-controlled these written messages may be, if once they have been received at all we can assign no limit to their development as the expression of thought that passes incorporeally from mind to mind.

From mind to mind, as we have already seen ground to hope, independently of the question whether both minds, or one only, be still clad in flesh. There will often be great difficulty of interpretation; great perplexity as to the true relation between a message and its alleged source. But every year of late has added, - every year ought to add, - both to the mass of matter and to the feasibility of interpretation. These are not the hieroglyphs of the dead, but the hieroglyphs of the living.