877. The experiment which was in this case successful is one (I repeat) which might be tried by everybody (see 877 A). And I may add the remark that it is to experiment with automatic writing, crystal-vision, etc, rather than to spontaneous apparitions, that we must look for any real information as to the degree in which departed spirits retain their knowledge of the things of earth.

Once more I must express my astonishment and regret that amongst some tens - perhaps hundreds - of thousands of persons, scattered over many countries, who already believe that the road of communication between the two worlds is open, there should be so very few who can or will make any serious effort to obtain fresh evidence of so important a fact. But, quite apart from the Spiritist camp, there are now many inquirers who know that automatic writing is a real fact in nature, and who are willing to discuss with an open mind the origin of any message which may thus be given. Let these set themselves to the task, and the result of organised and intelligent effort will soon, as I believe, be made plain.

For aught that we can tell, there may be - I believe that there are - collaborators elsewhere who only await our appeal. Why should not every death-bed be made the starting-point of a long experiment? And why should not every friend who sails forth - into the unknown sea - endeavour to send us news from that bourne from which few travellers, perhaps, have as yet made any adequate or systematic preparation to return?

878. Here, then, let us pause and consider to what point the evidence contained in this chapter has gradually led us. We shall perceive that the motor phenomena have confirmed, and have also greatly extended, the results to which the cognate sensory phenomena had already pointed. We have already noted, in each of the two states of sleep and of waking, the variously expanding capacities of the subliminal self. We have watched a hyperaesthetic intensification of ordinary faculty, - leading up to telaesthesia, and to telepathy from the living and from the departed. Along with these powers, which, on the hypothesis of the soul's independent existence, are at least within our range of analogical conception, we have noted also a precognitive capacity of a type which no fact as yet known to science will help us to explain.

Proceeding to the study of motor automatisms, we have found a third group of cases which independently confirm in each of these lines in turn the results of our analysis of sensory automatisms both in sleep and in waking. Evidence thus convergent will already need no ordinary boldness of negative assumption if it is to be set aside. But motor automatisms have taught us much more than this. At once more energetic and more persistent than the sensory, they oblige us to face certain problems which the lightness and fugitiveness of sensory impressions allowed us in some measure to evade. Thus when we discussed the mechanism (so to call it) of visual and auditory phantasms, two competing conceptions presented themselves for our choice, - the conception of telepathic impact, and the conception of psychical invasion. Either (we said) there was an influence exerted by the agent on the percipient's mind, which so stimulated the sensory tracts of his brain that he externalised that impression as a quasi-percept, or else the agent in some way modified an actual portion of space where (say) an apparition was discerned, perhaps by several percipients at once.

Phrased in this manner, the telepathic impact seemed the less startling, the less extreme hypothesis of the two, - mainly, perhaps, because the picture which it called up was left so vague and obscure. But now instead of a fleeting hallucination we have to deal with a strong and lasting impulse - such, for instance, as the girl's impulse to write, in Dr. Liebeault's case (866):- an impulse which seems to come from the depths of the being, and which (like a post-hypnotic suggestion) may over-ride even strong disinclination, and keep the automatist uncomfortable until it has worked itself out. We may still call this a telepathic impact, if we will, but we shall find it hard to distinguish that term from a psychical invasion. This strong, yet apparently alien, motor innervation corresponds in fact as closely as possible to our idea of an invasion - an invasion no longer of the room only in which the percipient is sitting, but of his own body and his own powers. It is an invasion which, if sufficiently prolonged, would become a possession; and it both unites and intensifies those two earlier conjectures; - of telepathic impact on the percipient's mind, and of "phantasmogenetic presence" in the percipient's surroundings.

What seemed at first a mere impact is tending to become a persistent control; what seemed an incursion merely into the percipient's environment has become an incursion into his organism itself.