evidence that they are not such. We do not need to know how the thing is done. The facts when supernormal demand an extraneous source, whatever their relation to processes by which they are produced.

But when it comes to accepting statements about the nature of a spiritual world it is a different matter. We have then to understand something about the conditions under which information about it comes to us. This general principle is even true about intercourse between the living about the material world, though the difficulties are not so numerous or so perplexing to overcome. When a man tells us that he has made a new discovery in science we require to know how he did it and to ascertain whether the conditions under which he announces the discovery make it truthful or not. And this in a world where we have a tolerably easy command over things. But when it comes to telling us about a transcendental world it is not so easy. It is not enough to get statements about it. We have to confirm them and to know something of the conditions by which they get to us. In proving personal identity it does not make any difference whether communications are distorted or not, so we can recognize that they are not primarily products of the living mind. We are trying, in deciding that issue, only to ascertain whether personality in some way survives, and we do not require to know whether this personality requires a bodily connection of any kind or not. It may be anything you please in so far as that limited issue is concerned. But when we ask whether personality has a spiritual body or not; whether it is a functional stream in the universal energy of the cosmos, or whether it is an attachment of a spaceless point of force, we have a very different situation confronting us.

The difficulties which we encounter in the endeavor to ascertain the nature of a spiritual world manifest themselves even in proving survival; for the messages

are not all of them evidential. They are, many of them, not only non-evidential, but so clearly subconscious that we have to accept the evidential matter under the handicap of subliminal coloring. I have never known a spirit message to come without this coloring. The language and limitations of the medium are always apparent in the best of material. This liability is conceded by spiritualists themselves, but they rarely if ever reckon with it in their treatment of the facts. Besides they do not adequately distinguish in most cases between evidential incidents and subliminal chaff that can make no pretense whatever of spiritistic origin. The conditions may not wholly prevent transmission, but they serve in most cases as a restriction on free communication. What they are we do not know as yet and can only conjecture them along the broadest lines. We can imagine that the analogies of normal experience may enter into them. Thus the individual has to begin at birth to gradually acquire power to move his own organism and after years of patient endeavor to obtain such facility in it as we observe in normal experience. When an accident to the body occurs, like paralysis or illness of any kind that weakens control of the organism, even the living have gradually to recover that power. This is a fact so familiar to all of us that it does not require discusson. Now it is conceivable that a discarnate intelligence, having severed its connection with its own body would encounter tenfold, perhaps a thousandfold, greater difficulties in acquiring power to control a new organism, with other connections and experiences belonging to a living soul, than it would have with its own organism, and these were great enough there, especially when the normal conditions were affected by accident or disease.

Now if we will only add to this difficulty the next one; namely, the necessity, perhaps, that all messages

must either come through the mind of the psychic or be affected by the mental, physical, and moral habits of the psychic, and as a consequence be affected by these conditions, we shall see that we must always have a source of confirmation for our facts. In the study of personal identity, we have the testimony of the living to determine for us whether the communications are true or not, and our own experience in the physical world enables us to interpret their meaning. We find, too, that even the best messages are extremely fragmentary and confused, so that they are not testimony to the total material that was probably sent on its journey to the living. But subconscious coloring and contributions add immensely to the data that passes for spirit messages and we have to select from the mass those incidents which are clearly not subconscious fabrications, but which are verifiable by the living as supernormal information in spite of distortion by the mediumistic mind or organism through which they come. The fact of distortion suggests that all messages are subject to such influences and that proper discount has to be made for messages reporting the nature of a transcendental world.

It is not necessary to suppose that any purpose exists to distort them. It is inevitable, just as it is inevitable that any mind reporting impressions and narratives must act in accordance with its past experience and habits and express its conceptions in the mold of these prejudices, which we may call them. A bell always rings its own tone, no matter with what it is struck. A piece of wood gives its own sound in response to impact. It is the same with any physical object. A mirror reflects images according to the nature of its surface. A bell will not produce an opera; a piece of wood will not ring curfew; a mirror will not sing a song. Each object acts and reacts according to its own nature, and the human mind is no exception

to this law. It must act along the line of its structure and habits. The amount of knowledge which it possesses determines the limits of its power to receive and express ideas. A mind which knows nothing but the commonest sensations cannot be made the vehicle for impressive oratory. It takes a mind of some intelligence to do this. A mediumistic mind must have some qualifications for expressing what comes to it from a transcendental world and its communications with such a world will be limited to its abilities and its experience as a vehicle for ideas of any kind.

If the spiritual world be only a replica of the physical and so expressible in the terms that are intelligible to us in the physical world, the main obstacle will be in getting communications at all. They might be selfexplanatory, if that world could be described in our terms. But suppose it be quite different. The whole process will then encounter difficulties of which people little dream. Some would even go so far as to say that no possible conception of a transcendental world could be obtained, unless it had some points in common with the physical life, and this contention would be hard to refute. Let us take a good analogy.

Suppose that a man born blind but having hearing tried to tell his auditory experiences to a man who had lost his hearing, but retained his vision intact. How would such a person describe his experiences to the blind man? It would be in fact absolutely impossible for him to communicate any intelligible idea of his auditory experiences. There is nothing in common between the sensations of sight and hearing. All that the blind man could say about his auditory sensations, or the deaf man about his visual sensations would convey nothing to the friend who had not the sense which the communicator retained. The only common element in such experiences might be the emotions which each had in his own experience. The visual experiences of

the one might have the same kind of emotions accompanying his visual sensations that the other's hearing had in connection with audition. They could communicate with each other intelligibly only in terms of common emotions. The sensations and their meaning would be wholly absent for each of them, so far as common knowledge is concerned.

The process of communicating anything at all between the living is much the same. We have to possess a common language or we are much isolated from each other as spirits can be supposed to be from the living. Signs, where language does not exist, are no exception to this statement. Language is only an auditory sign as mimicry and imitation are to vision. We have to agree on symbols beforehand in order to communicate at all. Language in that way, combined with imitation on the part of the younger generation, builds up a vast system of symbols of common experiences, where we assume that we are alike in constitution and experiences, and thus we come to be able to symbolize what we know, and the person hearing the symbols can use his own experience for understanding what we mean.

This means that, naturally or normally we cannot communicate with each other at all, even among the living, and that we have had to develop an arbitrary and conventional system of symbols for social and other purposes. And all this is true in spite of the advantages which we enjoy in the possession of a physical organism and sensory relations which do not subsist between the living and the dead. But when a spirit is bodiless, as we know bodies, and without the conditions for producing on the living the same impressions as a living organism and its speech can do, how much more difficult it must be for the dead to communicate with us. It is quite natural to believe it absolutely impossible, but any such belief would be based upon assumptions that might not be true, though we are not familiar