324 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. 



about spiritualistic phenomena, disembodied spirits, and the like, 

 in a way that implies independence of all material conditions. 

 Like all our experience, this, too, requires some means or instru- 

 ment of conveyance and expression, and has therefore its phy- 

 sical as well as its psychical aspect. Telepathy, for example, is 

 almost, if not quite, certainly interpretable as the transmission of 

 impressions from one brain to another by means of ethereal 

 vibrations. This does not mean that the material or physical 

 is ultimately different from the mental or psychical, but only 

 that supernormal psychical phenomena, like all others, have 

 objective conditions and a relatively mechanical aspect that w411 

 be found capable of being stated in terms of law or tendency. 



The same consideration helps to explain the place of the 

 medium in psychic phenomena. The medium plays the part of 

 the automatist, that is, the sufficiently passive and at the same 

 time sufficiently sensitive subject who is the instrument of trans- 

 mission or communication. The limitations of the medium, not 

 only as regards passivity and sensitivity, but also as regards 

 mental equipment and individual character, form one of the 

 obstacles or impediments of communication and expression. In 

 other words, just as the individual bodily organization is, in our 

 habitual experience, a condition limiting the influences that reach 

 the individual (and just as thought requires language, whether 

 speech or gesture, as a vehicle for its expression), so it is in 

 psychic phenomena, and equally whether there is a living medium 

 or not. The living medium or automatist is simply the highest 

 fonn of autoscope, that is, the instrument of the expression of 

 psychophysical processes that are too deep-lying for manifes- 

 tation by the ordinary channels of sense. The so-called magic 

 pendulum, the forked twig or other instrument used in dowsing, 

 the planchette, the crystal, the thought-reader, the hypnotic sub- 

 ject, the medium or psychic, entranced or not, are all so many 

 forms of autoscope or automaton which enable the manifesta- 

 tion of psychic activities too deep for the ordinan^ avenues of 

 expression and communication. Or, to bring the matter still 

 more into relation with the recognized conditions of our nonnal 

 physical world, just as the microscope and telescope enable us 

 to see what is otherwise unseen in the physical world around 

 us, or as the photographic plate or the thermoscope render visible 

 rays of light that are otherwise invisible, so the autoscope, 

 animate or inanimate, is, in general, the condition of those 

 glimpses into the unseen psychic world that is ever about us. 



With regard to the difficult question of survival, my own 

 view has long been that here, too, we get the best clue to the 

 mystery by following up the suggestions of our actual experience. 

 We know the soul or self, whether our own or that of others, 

 only in part and only through the medium of bodily impression 

 and expression of some kind. What psychical research suggests 

 is the survival of personality beyond the present life under con- 



