edium.
Now some medium was to reveal to her the mysterious text of her sister's
letter. That was enough to bring the recollection of the letter into the
foreground of her consciousness, where the medium may have read it
telepathically.

But again, there are an infinite number of other cases which telepathy
does not explain at all, or only insufficiently. I shall try to show
this by repeating some of the arguments put forward by Dr Hodgson in his
remarkable report in 1898, and in the chapter entitled "Indications that
the 'Spirit' Hypothesis is True."[44]

The most important of these arguments is founded upon the communications
of persons whose mental faculties had been impaired by illness for a
more or less long period before their deaths. A long series of
concordant observations inspired Dr Hodgson with this argument. It is as
follows:--"If we had to do with telepathy, the communications should be
most clear and abundant in the cases where the memories of the dead are
most clear and abundant in the minds of the living."

But experience shows that this is not so. When the self-styled
communicator has suffered from mental illness before his death, the
communications repeat the trouble feature by feature; they are full of
confusion and incoherence. This confusion and incoherence is all the
graver, as the mental trouble preceding death was graver. It disappears
slowly, but sometimes traces of it appear years after. Telepathy does
not explain this. If there is madness in the mind of the dead person,
there is none in the minds of the living who remember him. On the other
hand, if we introduce the spiritualist hypothesis, the fact is quite
admissible, either because the mental trouble may only slowly disappear,
or because (and the controls assert this) the mere fact of the
disincarnated spirits plunging again into the atmosphere of a human
organism temporarily reproduces the trouble.

Besides, there is always more or less incoherence in the communications
made very shortly after death, even when the communicator has kept his
full mental faculties up to his last moments. But if the communicator
were really what he says he is, we should expect this, for three
reasons--the violent shock of disincarnation must trouble the mind; the
arrival in an entirely new environment, where he must at first be unable
to distinguish much, should trouble him still more; and lastly, these
first attempts at communication may be impeded by his