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electric bell ! Sir William himself is only too ready to pile up hypothesis on 

 hypothesis, incomprehensible forces, particles of thought stuff, exoneural action of 

 mind, and so forth ; while his attempt to explain the necessity of mediums, on the 

 ground that, for instance, luminous vibrations are impossible without some medium 

 which can be made to vibrate, would have been better omitted, as a piece of 

 special pleading or even verbal jugglery, calculated to impress the ignorant but 

 not worthy of a serious discussion. Unfortunately such lapses do not impress the 

 ignorant alone, but are partly responsible for the neglect and aloofness of which 

 spiritualists complain. 



Mr. Gerald Balfour's contribution forms a part of vol. xxix. of the Proceedings 

 of the Society for Psychical Research. It gives a series of automatic writings by 

 two or three automatists during the last seven years, all seeming to bear on the 

 same point. These scripts (though written by living persons who may or may 

 not be in a trance) purport to be controlled by the well-known scholars, G. H. 

 Butcher and A. W. Verrall, who have devised a literary puzzle, in the hope of 

 proving to us on earth their continued existence and activity. At intervals of 

 months or years there have appeared in the scripts of certain automatists 

 fragmentary references to an eye, an ear, a boot, to Sicily, to Ulysses, and so 

 forth. Afterwards came clearer indications, a quotation from Swinburne's 

 Garden of Proserpine, mention of Polyphemus, word-play about satire and jealousy. 

 At first and for a long time, no connecting clue between the various ideas could 

 be traced ; but, as links were gradually added, connections became visible, and 

 finally all the threads are gathered up and the key found in a rather abstruse 

 quotation. The theory is that the puzzle is so esoteric that only very learned 

 scholars could have invented it, and special touches are claimed as definitely 

 characteristic of the supposed inventors, or one of them, who do of course in the 

 script declare themselves to be its authors. 



The subject of automatic writing has attracted a good deal of attention in 

 recent years ; it is interesting, and fully deserves thorough investigation. It may 

 be the case, as Mr. Balfour claims, that many of the references are beyond the 

 power and knowledge of the automatist. But the step from this to an admission 

 that the puzzle is the work of two dead scholars is considerable. In the first 

 place, allowance must be made for the fact that more ingenuity is needed to solve 

 a conundrum than to invent it. To solve the one in question in the early stages 

 when only a few points are given would be impossible. But if one started with 

 the last quotation given by Mr. Balfour from the Encyclopcedia Britannica, and 

 gradually followed separate lines of thought thence arising, until one got to points 

 so divergent that there was no apparent connection— this does not seem beyond 

 average capacity. Apart from this, the proof, such as it is, depends on the chief 

 automatist's honesty and her lack of learning— her inability to invent such a 

 scheme and her inability to lie about it. 



All these cases ultimately rest on a probability, a presumption of human weak- 

 ness : it is unlikely that this person could do so-and-so ; but it never amounts to 

 absolute impossibility. On the other hand it seems at least unlikely that learned 

 and ingenious men, desirous to communicate with us, cannot hit upon any method 

 of doing so which is not open to so many misunderstandings, and so liable to 

 fraudulent imitation. And if any one asks whether these automatic writings, with 

 their erratic interruptions, their fragmentary incoherences, their feeble jocosities, 

 their surprising lapses of memory— whether these writings bear any resemblance 

 to serious attempts by serious men to prove that they still exist in another world, 

 the only possible answer is : not the slightest. And that is the conclusion of the 



