PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 761 



Premature guesses often retard discovery, by turning our eyes 

 in wrong directions. I doubt very much if the telepathy guess 

 is the true explanation of these cases. 



And sometimes telepathy seems almost or quite excluded. A 

 soi-disant spirit has been known to refer to something which, so 

 far as could be ascertained, was known to no living mind, e.g. 

 something written in an MS. note-book just before death, and not 

 looked at by surviving relatives until the mediumistic com- 

 munication came, alluding to the book and the entry as a test 

 of identity. 1 Nevertheless, though telepathy seems excluded, 

 this does not give us proof of the spiritistic hypothesis. There 

 are several alternatives. It may be a case of deferred telepathy — 

 i.e. the person may have " telepathed " the information before 

 she died, and the medium (a non-professional one) may have 

 picked up its reverberations, or indeed may have received it at 

 once and stored it up for later emergence. Or it may be that 

 objects which have been handled and thought about by human 

 beings somehow retain a sort of dim mentality or memory of 

 their owner, and can afford information about the latter to 

 any one possessing the necessary sensitiveness. Personally, I 

 am convinced by my own experiments that something of the 

 sort is true. A medium whom I have known for many years 

 can describe living people, and can often give the most intimate 

 details of their lives, by handling a lock of hair or a worn 

 garment taken by some other person ; and the explanation is 

 not telepathy from the sitter, for the evidence given often goes 

 far beyond the sitter's knowledge. And if objects do thus carry 

 some sort of memory, an old glove may enable a medium to 

 produce any amount of evidence about its deceased owner. How 

 it comes about, the medium does not know, nor do I. Perhaps 

 dead people's memories stick together for a while, in the 

 psychical world, without any self-conscious survival, as the 

 physical body sticks together for a while in the physical 

 world ; and the worn object may somehow tell the 

 medium's subliminal where to cast its line to fish up some of 

 these recollections. But this is only ingenious guesswork, 

 devised as an alternative to " spirits." I state it in order that 

 all sides of the question may be seen. We cheerfully admit that 



1 Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xvii. p. 183. The whole report (by Mrs. Verrall, 

 classical lecturer at Newnham, and translator of Pausanias) should be read. It 

 is an admirable example of what reports of this kind should be. 



