an alleged communicator may be manufactured either in part or altogether.) The others in the cross-correspondences were private individuals, one in India, several in England. They practiced "automatic" writing. This is an important form of dissociation in which the sensitive, who may or may not be in trance, writes without consciously moving her own hand or at least without seeming to know where the words come from. Sometimes a word or two ahead is known, sometimes not till the word is written, then the writer promptly forgets it.
Generally one finds out something about what is going on in one's subconscious, indeed some psycho-analysts32 use automatic writing as a method of investigation, but paranormal knowledge has also been obtained in this way. In the celebrated cross-correspondence cases, the automatic "scripts" were sent to the Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, who, on comparing them, found that they contained evidences of classical scholarship, not at all comprehensible to the writers, but quite comprehensible as communications from the deceased F. W. H. Myers, who purported to be sending them. The references were not alike, nor were they telepathic echoes of each other. "Myers" in fact stated that he expressly guarded against that. But they were "parts of an integrated message," and, later on, when the classical scholar Dr. A. W. Verrall died, messages began to come of an even greater complexity, purporting to be the result of Dr. Verrall's coöperation with Professor Henry Butcher, also deceased. They came through one very remarkable automatist, known as Mrs. Willett (since for private reasons she did not want her identity known), but they contained material completely unknown to her, and, until the clue was given by the alleged communicators, no one else, scholars though they were, could put the puzzle together correctly.
Professor Gardner Murphy's brilliant résumés of the best arguments for and against survival can only be briefly touched on. His general conclusion is that in asking, "Does personality survive bodily death or not?" we are asking the wrong kind of question. In his paper on "Field Theory and Survival," 33 he points to the fact that "paranormal events appear to depend . . . on powers set free by the relations between persons: they are interpersonal."
