Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/273

evidence of this hypothesis, but what are now described as phenomena of multiple personality, automatic writing, etc., which if not thoroughly understood, have surely been shown to bear no such interpretation as that involved with the spiritistic hypothesis.

So it seems probable that in twenty-five years from now many more of these recorded facts above spoken of will appear similarly explicable without resort to this spiritistic hypothesis.

Of such of these facts as then remain unexplained, a very small part may be interpreted as fraudulent, but a very large part indeed as due to perfectly honest but false judgments, or to illusions of forgetfulness, and especially to illusions of memory.

The small remnant of these facts which still remain unexplained on well established psychological principles, if they seem tangible enough to point to anything at all, will surely not point to the existence of disembodied human spirits; but rather to the existence of consciousnesses other than human consciousnesses similar to those of which we have just spoken; consciousnesses, as we have said of forms very different from those known to us in our own experience, but which may occasionally attach themselves to ours in such a way as to produce modifications of our consciousnesses which seem to point to influences from outside of such human forms of consciousness as are familiar to us.

If they are found to point to anything, they will surely not point to the existence of disembodied human consciousnesses as I have just said; nor to the existence of disembodied consciousnesses at all: but rather to the existence of consciousnesses so differently embodied that, in Royce's words above quoted, 'we can not adjust ourselves to a live appreciation of their inward fluency, although our consciousnesses do make us aware of their presence.'

I do not hesitate to agree that such influences very probably do affect us, and as evidence in favor of such a view I shall close by quoting the mature convictions of Professor Wm. James, who will be acknowledged to be one of the most acute of introspectionists the world has known.

Referring to certain early experiments of his he says:^[1]

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness; whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

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1. 'Varieties of Religious Experience,' p. 388.