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coercive proof is not possible — it never is in inductive science — 

 and that alternative hypotheses may always be devised. No one 

 need be afraid of having to believe against his will ! 



These trance-phenomena are closely paralleled by the "normal 

 clairvoyance " of a medium well known to me for many years. 

 This man, apparently quite normal, and certainly not in trance, 

 will sometimes reel off correct descriptions and names of one's 

 deceased relatives as fast as they can be taken down in short- 

 hand ; also intimate family details of the sitter's history which 

 he could not have obtained by detective work ; also, sometimes, 

 things which the sitter did not know, and never had known — so 

 far as he was aware — but which, on inquiry, turned out true. 

 My friends and 1 have carried out long series of experiments 

 with this medium, introducing strangers from distant towns — 

 non-spiritualists, people with no interest in these matters — and 

 devising various other tests. We began as unbelievers, but the 

 facts beat us. Something out of the common is at work, of that 

 we are sure. What it is we do not know. Perhaps it is partly 

 telepathy, but some of the evidence seems to go beyond that. 1 



Automatic Writing 



Of late years the main interest of the Society has centred in 

 the automatic scripts of certain persons, mostly of high social 

 and academic position, and not spiritualists or mediums in any 

 current sense of that objectionable and question-begging word, 

 who receive messages purporting to come from the surviving 

 minds of some former leaders of the S.P.R., notably Edmund 

 Gurney, Richard Hodgson, F. W. H. Myers, and Henry 

 Sidgwick. Once more we may say that much of this may be 

 due to subliminal fabrication plus telepathy, so I waive the 

 portion which is possibly thus explicable. But the more recent 

 developments cannot be ascribed to any telepathy that I can 

 believe in. In the cross-correspondences, fragmentary and in- 

 comprehensible messages came through Mrs. Verrall at Cam- 

 bridge, Mrs. Holland in India, Mrs. Forbes in the North of 

 England, and Mrs. Piper in America, but when the bits were 

 pieced together by the Society's Research Officer, they were 

 found to " make sense," and sense characteristic of the ostensible 



1 For details of this and other cases I may mention my New Evidences in 

 Psychical Research (Rider, London) and Spiritualism and Psychical Research 

 (T. C. & E. C. Jack's "People's Books"). 



