752. Here, then, is a natural place of pause in our inquiry. We have worked as far as we can on the data which we have had under our view. The sensory automatisms with which we have dealt in this and the preceding chapter have proved to us, in my view, the connection of definite apparitions with individual men, both during bodily life and after bodily death. They have, in short, proved by logical reasoning the existence and the persistence of a spirit in man.

But great as this achievement is, it opens out more problems than it solves; it leaves us even more eager than at first for a fuller insight into this new dim-lit world. We crave for some wider field of induction, for some more potent engine of analysis. We feel that, important though the facts of phantasmal appearances may be, they yet are in a sense somewhat jejune and external; we want to get deeper, to reach some psychological discussion not dependent on time-coincidences nor on the details of some evanescent observation. We instinctively seek, in short, just that knowledge which will now be in some measure afforded to us through the study of that wide range of phenomena which I have classed together as motor automatisms.

The line of demarcation indeed between sensory and motor automatisms is by no means distinct. Neither class, to begin with, is more veridical, more inspired from without than the other. In neither case have we any clear subjective criterion as to the origin of the message; whether it comes merely from the automatist's own mind, or from minds of the living, or from minds of the departed. Even in mere external form, again, the two groups are often closely mixed. It makes little difference whether one sees words written in a crystal, or writes them oneself with unknowing hand. But nevertheless it must on the whole be admitted that motor automatisms have thus far been, and seem likely to continue, the more instructive of the two classes. The suddenness, the brevity of an apparition may be actually an evidential aid if we are simply establishing, say, a death coincidence. But when we have proceeded to a somewhat further stage - when we are looking for information from the inside as to the nature of spiritual operations - then, as I have said, the power of question and answer, of prolonged scrutiny, becomes all-important. We certainly cannot, I repeat, claim any more universal trustworthiness for motor than for sensory automatisms.

The proportion of misleading to veridical written messages is probably even greater than the proportion of merely subjective to veridical apparitions. But while the apparition is gone in a moment, the written or spoken matter may renew itself for years, allowing us to test both its authenticity and its truthfulness - two different matters - with every touchstone which our leisure can devise.

It must be, then, on the study of motor automatisms that our general view of the metetherial world now opening to us must mainly be based. Those longer colloquies of automatic speech and script will introduce us to points of philosophy which fleeting apparitions cannot teach.