

-'SPIRIT" WRITING. 511 



writing being illegible just to that degree which at first baffles 

 the reader, but which afterward leaves no more doubt as to its 

 having been correctly deciphered than if it were print. And 

 there the line indubitably stood : 'A little more than kin and less 

 than kind.' Now, as neither of us had been thinking of this line, 

 or of any line (for we had been wholly occupied with the strag- 

 gling movements of the instrument), the result, though not de- 

 monstrative, is at any rate strongly suggestive of a true under- 

 ground psychosis." 



At other times the information conveyed is at once true and 

 quite unknown to the subject. Some of these cases are undoubt- 

 edly due to the automatic reproduction of memories which can 

 not at the time be recalled a common phenomenon in all forms 



of automatism. Thus, in the case of B , to which I shall refer 



at greater length hereafter, it was stated that a man named 

 Parker Howard had lived at a certain number on South Sixteenth 

 Street, Philadelphia. Upon going to the house, I found that a man 

 named Howard not Parker Howard, however had lived there 

 some time, but had moved away about two months before. More- 

 over, the whole Howard incident proved to be mythical ; no such 



person as Parker Howard ever existed. But B told me that 



after his hand had mentioned the name, and before the address 

 was given, he stepped into a shop and looked through a directory 

 for the name. Probably, as he glanced over the list of Howards, 

 his eye had fallen upon the address which his hand afterward 

 wrote, but he had no recollection of it. 



Many other cases are certainly due to accidental coincidence. 



B , for example, wrote long accounts of events happening at a 



distance from him, which were afterward found to be in the main 

 correct ; but that this was a mere matter of chance was abundantly 



proved to B 's own satisfaction. The chances of coincidence 



are much increased by the extremely illegible character of much 

 of the script, which leaves wide room for " interpretation." I can 

 not but suspect that the " anagrams " sometimes written auto- 

 matically often owe their existence to this kind of " interpreta- 

 tion." Yet, after making all allowances for coincidence and for- 

 gotten memories, nearly all investigators admit that there remains 

 a residuum which can not plausibly be explained by any accepted 

 theory. I can not discuss this residuum here; it is enough to 

 point to its existence, with the caution that no theory can be 

 regarded as final unless it can explain all the facts. 



The importance of this material from a psychological point of 

 view can not be overestimated. If the man's hand can write 

 messages without the co-operation of the man's consciousness, we 

 are forced upon the one horn or the other of a very perplexing 

 dilemma. Either these utterances stand for no consciousness at 



