Psychic Science 581 



repeat the sentence which he had written inside an envelope 

 and handed to me twelve years before his death. Memory 

 of the theme alone was quite insufficient for this particular 

 kind of test. The result has to be counted as a complete 

 failure. 



Psychometry 



Moreover, even if successful, the evidence for survival from 

 a deciphered posthumous letter or package would be inconclusive 

 much more inconclusive than people are apt to suppose. For 

 the contents of packets, or the history of relics belonging to a 

 deceased or distant person, have frequently been said to be de- 

 ciphered by a medium who handles them the process is known 

 as psychometry just as the pages of closed books, even while 

 still in a distant library, have been read. These things do not 

 seem inaccessible to this strange faculty of lucidity; and the 

 appearance is as if the actual objects were able to produce an 

 impression on some mind. 



At any rate, that is the kind of supposition which underlies 

 the hypothetical or tentative explanation of the fixed local variety 

 of ghost. It is supposed that a sort of phonographic or photo- 

 graphic record has been left on, say, the walls or furniture of a 

 room in which a tragedy has occurred, and that this latent im- 

 pression can be psychometrised and disinterred from oblivion, by 

 a person possessing the required faculty, with sufficient vividness 

 to enable that person automatically to reconstruct the scene and 

 describe the figures taking part in the psychical drama, as if 

 they were again present and dreamily active. 



Another alternative is to suppose that the deceased actors 

 in the drama are themselves liable to dream vivid recurrent dreams 

 of the past, and that these dreams act telepathically on the mind 

 of a sensitive. It seems as if this kind of thing could happen 

 between living people. A literary instance of a very vivid and 

 complete experience of this kind a kind of dream experience 



VOL. Ill 2 



