927. The way has now been so far cleared for our cases of Possession that at least the principal phenomena claimed have been (I hope) made intelligible, and shown to be concordant with other phenomena already described and attested. It will be best, however, to consider first some of the more rudimentary cases before going on to our own special instances of possession, - those of Mr. Stainton Moses or Mrs. Piper.

I have reason to believe, both from what I have witnessed myself and from the reports of others, that occasional phenomena of ecstasy or possession are not infrequent in some family circles or groups of intimate friends (see, e.g., the case of Mr. O. in 927 A).

The persons concerned, however, generally do not realise the importance of accurate records; in some cases the manifestations are sporadic in character and scarcely susceptible of any detailed investigation; and often the very occurrence of the phenomena has been sedulously concealed from all outside the circle. Sometimes the sacredness of the manifestations has been pleaded as a sufficient reason for their concealment, or the tendency to trance on the part of the "sensitive" has been regarded as a calamity, to be checked and prohibited as though it were a distressing disease.

There are further occasional cases of the frankly "mediumistic" type (of which I give examples in 927 B and C). But the problems involved are so complicated, and the main question - that of the agency of dis-carnate spirits in the matter - is so difficult of determination, that no collection of such fragmentary material could be of much service to us in our present inquiry unless perhaps to indicate that the fully-developed cases belong, after all, to a not uncommon type.

1 The asterisks indicate the end of the part of this Chapter which was consecutively composed by the author. See Preface. The rest of the Chapter consists chiefly of fragments written by him at different times. In putting these together, the Editors felt it desirable to preserve as much as possible of the original form and to present as much of the material as was complete in itself, at the risk of some lack of transition and even of a certain degree of repetition.

928. We have already seen that there is no great gulf between the sudden incursions, the rapid messages of the dead, with which we are already familiar, and incursions so intimate, messages so prolonged, as to lay claim to a name more descriptive than that of motor automatisms.

And similarly no line of absolute separation can be drawn between the brief psychical excursions previously described, and those more prolonged excursions of the spirit which I would group under the name of ecstasy.

In the earlier part of this book I have naturally dwelt rather on the evidence for supernormal acquisition of knowledge than on the methods of such acquisition, and my present discussion must needs be restricted to a certain extent in the same way. We must, however, attempt some provisional scheme of classification, though recognising that the difficulties of interpretation which I pointed out in Chapter IV (Sleep). (section 419), when endeavouring to distinguish between telepathy and telaesthesia, meet us again in dealing with possession and ecstasy. We may not, that is, be able to say, as regards a particular manifestation, whether it is an instance of incipient possession, or incipient ecstasy, or even whether the organism is being "controlled" directly by some extraneous spirit or by its own incarnate spirit. It is from the extreme cases that we form our categories. But now that we have reached some conception of what is involved in ecstasy and possession, we can interpret some earlier cases in this new light.

Such experiences, for instance, as those of Mr. Mamtchitch (714), Miss Conley (721), Madame X. (833), and Miss A. (859 A), suggest a close kinship to the more developed cases of Mr. Moses and Mrs. Piper.