of recent years have given the closest study to the case of Mrs. Piper and other automatists have been led to attach increasing weight to the hypothesis of some form of spirit communication. In any case we have clearly no right to lay down a priori the standard to which spirit communications should conform. Mr. Schiller has some pertinent remarks on the characteristic defects and incoherences of these trance communications: "That spirit communication should be difficult," he says, "is what I should have inferred on physical grounds, that it should be rare and exhibit a gradual diminution of interest in and memory of our concerns is precisely what I should have inferred on the supposition that the human personality takes its known psychological constitution with it. The wonder is rather that the deceased should trouble themselves at all about us and have leisure to devise means of communication with the world they have left. For if we are to conceive them as surviving death at all, it must be as ipso facto entering into a new and engrossing phase of existence (all the more engrossing because of its novelty) and as needing to adapt themselves to new conditions of existence. And it is not unreasonable to suppose that even if they could effectively desire to communicate they might not find the means available. Hence there need be no trace of cynicism in the suggestion that probably the dead forget the living far more rapidly even than the living forget the dead: it merely expresses a psychological necessity. We forget because life
