520 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Yet he was much impressed, as he frankly owns : " I, for the time 

 being and for months afterward, assented to the statement of my 

 subliminal that my soul had pre-existed ; I also believed that it 

 knew when and where it had pre-existed. When it therefore 

 stated that I had been sent through the fires of three thousand 

 years of awful transmigration because, as Rameses or Sesostris, 

 my way had not been 'the way of the Lord/ I either had to 

 assent to the inference that my subliminal was a liar, or that it 

 told the truth, or that it was mistaken. As it insisted upon pour- 

 ing into my upper consciousness the loftiest of spiritual advice, I 

 concluded that, if it was such a pure teacher of love and justice, 

 it would make no mistake knowingly about a matter of history." 

 Yet he never lost sight of the fundamental point that, without 

 verification, his automatic utterances were worthless, and he de- 

 liberately set himself the task of verifying or disproving them. 

 He sought the advice of linguists and toiled through many a 

 grammar and lexicon of little known languages with a purely 

 negative result. The languages proved to be nothing more than 

 meaningless combinations of sounds, and the supposed lofty com- 

 munications from the Almighty were found to be the scarcely 

 more intelligent reflection of the ideas with which the air was 

 surcharged. As he himself jokingly phrased it in conversation, 

 " I was like a cat chasing her own tail." I can not do better, in 

 concluding my account of this case, than quote Mr. Myers's com- 

 ment upon it : * " He had the good fortune to meet with a wise 

 and gentle adviser,f and the phenomenon which, if differently 

 treated, might have led on to the delusion of many, and perhaps to 

 the insanity of one, became to the one a harmless experience, and 

 to the world an acquisition of interesting psychological truth." 



The only other outbreak of automatic speech of which any 

 considerable details have been preserved was that which took 

 place among the followers of the Rev. Edward Irving at the close 

 of the first third of the present century. I have not been able to 

 get access to all the extant information about this outbreak, but 

 there can be little doubt that it was precisely analogous to Mr. 

 Le Baron's experience. The "unknown tongues" were usually 

 followed by a " translation," and all witnesses describe them as 

 uttered in strange and unnatural tones. One witness speaks of 

 them as " bursting forth, and that from the lips of a woman, with 

 an astonishing and terrible crash." Says another, "The utter- 

 ance was so loud that I put my handkerchief to my mouth to 

 stop the sound, that I might not alarm the house." Another: 

 " There was indeed in the strange, unearthly sound an extraor- 



* Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii, p. 250. 

 f Mr. Myers has Prof. James in mind. 



