should be noticed that this very view of it is admitted or asserted by the controls in the case under consideration. They do not deny the existence of secondary personality, where we might naturally suppose that the prejudices of the psychic were inclined to apply foreign influences to the explanation of everything. Foreign influences will follow the lines of least resistance, and, where they may overcome the subconscious altogether, they will dominate the ideas and impulses of the subject. They may never be transmitted intact, unless at odd moments, but may usually be nothing more than instigative, like a match setting off an explosion. The match is not the cause of the effect, but is the occasional cause for releasing the pent-up energy of the subject exploding. You may stimulate a man's mind by alcohol or other stimulant, but we do not think of referring the action of the mind affected to the transmissive power of the alcohol. Utter a sentence to a man, and it may recall many associations which are not transmitted to his mind by the sound, or by the ideas of the man who utters the sentence. A man dreamed of walking in his bare feet on the ice of the north pole, to awaken and find that his feet were not under the bedclothes on a cold night. There was no correlation between the stimulus and the sensation in respect of kind, which was the sensible effect of interpretation and imagination, not of tactual reaction to the real cause. The same law may act in spiritistic stimulus. It may only incite action of the mind affected, as in a dream, and not transmit to it the exact thought or impulse in the mind of the foreign agent. In some cases, of course, we find the ideas and impulses transmitted more or less intact, and in such cases we may find the evidence for the obsession in the personal identity of the agent. But in cases of dissociation which distinctly represent subconscious factors, the only evidence for the obsession can come

by the method of cross-reference. Such is the case before us. There was no evidence whatever for foreign invasion in the girl's experiences, cross-reference yielded this evidence in abundance.

The chief interest in such cases is their revolutionary effect in the field of medicine. The present case shows clearly what should have been done with Sally Beauchamp, and, in fact, plays havoc with the usual interpretations of that case, without setting aside the secondary or multiple personality there. It is probable that thousands of cases diagnosed as paranoia would yield to this sort of investigation and treatment. It is high time for the medical world to wake up and learn something. It is so saturated with dogmatic materialism that it will require some medical Luther or Kant to arouse it. This everlasting talk about secondary personality, which is very useful for hiding one's ignorance or merely describing the facts, should no longer prevent investigation. It is very easy to find out what is the matter if you will only accept the method which has thrown so much light upon such cases. Nor will the method stop with dissociation. It will extend to many functional troubles which now baffle the physician. There is too much silly fear of the “supernatural," and reverence for the "natural" which has quite as much lost its significance as has the “supernatural." Spirits, as we may, at least for convenience, call certain aggregations of phenomena, are no more mysterious things than is consciousness and, one could add, no more mysterious than atoms or electrons. Perhaps they are less so. They are certainly as legitimate objects of interest as drugs and pills or similar means of experiment.

I

CHAPTER XI

GENERAL QUESTIONS AND VALUES

HAVE discussed the whole problem of a future life purely as a scientific question. I have not invoked human interests as an argument or an influence for determining conviction. I have appealed strictly to the nature of the problem and the facts which are relevant to its solution. Human interests often affect the convictions of the individual on this subject as well as many or all others, but it is the purpose of the scientific spirit to eliminate emotional influences from the solution of all questions of fact. It is hard, of course, to dissociate our interests from any problem, and though we have to deprecate their undue influence on conviction, there is always a reason for recognizing that they have a place in final meaning of any fact. The pragmatic philosophy is founded on the recognition of this place for the emotions, and religion has been affected by them more perhaps than any other body of beliefs. The "will to believe" has all along been a powerful factor in determining the direction in which belief goes, and the skeptical, usually also the scientific man, deprecates this, but the will to disbelieve is just as much the danger of the skeptic as the "will to believe" is of the believer. One class is as much tarred and feathered with the use of the will in its problems as the other. It is the duty of both, while they admit a place for the will in both belief and disbelief, to adjust it to the facts, and that is true scientific method.

There is also a bias in previous opinions affecting

the challenge to change our ideas at any stage of our development and that bias may consist in fixed ideas or a fixed attitude of will, both perhaps being always associated together in greater or less degree of one or the other factor. But an intellectual bias is more easily conquered than an emotional and volitional one. Facts offer the mind no chance to escape their cogency, and we can only deceive ourselves by equivocating when asked to revise beliefs, if we do not wish to run up against stone walls. Scientific men and skeptics do not always escape this bias. The unsophisticated believer in any doctrine is less affected by this bias than the educated man. He may refuse, often rightly enough, to allow the sophisticated scientist to make a football of his beliefs, but this is because he rightly enough clings to practical problems which are for him the meaning of the intellectual ones, and he does not separate the two fields as does the scientific man and philosopher. With such we have no dispute. They do not require to unravel paradoxes.

When it comes to the belief in survival after death, which is convertible with the belief in the existence of discarnate spirits, there are two superficial difficulties which most believers have to face in the matter, difficulties which the sophisticated man always urges against the belief. They are (1) the illusion about the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and (2) the conflict between the cultured and the uncultured man in the interpretation of the world. Each of these must be examined.

The first impulse of most scientific men is to oppose the belief in spirits because they seem to be a restoration of the idea of the supernatural. For more than three centuries the supernatural has been excluded from scientific recognition of any kind, and with most men of that class it is like a red rag to a bull. In the present age, however, there is no excuse for this hostility.

There was a time when the opposition between the "natural" and the "supernatural" had a meaning of some importance, but it has none any more. The conception of the "natural" has so changed that it either includes all that had formerly been denominated by the "supernatural" or it does not prevent the "supernatural" from existing alongside of it. The antithesis between the two ideas has changed from age to age and as a result one term has altered its import as much as the other. The first meaning of the term "natural" was the physical. This served to define the "supernatural" as the spiritual. Christianity asserted the opposition most clearly, as it set up the theistic system with the idea of spirit as wholly unphysical. In Greek thought the "supernatural," if we could use the term at all in it, was the supersensible physical world and mind or spirit was only a kind of matter more refined than the coarser type affecting the senses. But Christianity assigned none of the material attributes to spirit, and thus altered the conception both of the "natural" and the "supernatural."

When the scientific spirit arose, however, it relegated metaphysics, including the physical speculations of philosophers, to the limbo of the imagination and the "natural" became the uniform, whether in matter or mind. Before this, mind was essentially "supernatural," but now that the uniformities of mind were recognized as like those of matter, it was not so easy to confine the "natural" to matter and the phenomena of mind were no longer regarded as "supernatural." As in the miracles the "supernatural" became convertible with the capricious or lawless; that is, irregular and unpredictable. The antithesis was no longer between the physical and the spiritual, but between the uniform and the capricious, and the scientific man denied that there was any caprice in "nature." This meant that there was no "supernatural" at all, and as he reduced.