e
scattered recollections of the sitters, should be thus reconstituted
only at long intervals, suddenly, often without apparent cause, and
always with the same characteristics. This unity of consciousness and
character is particularly evident in the controls--that is, in such of
the communicators as have appeared uninterruptedly for years, on account
of their acting as intermediaries for others, and helping them with
their experience. If it cannot reasonably be admitted that the
occasional communicators are only secondary personalities of the medium,
the impossibility must be extended to the controls. Either all the
communicators are, without exception, secondary personalities, or none
of them are; for all give the same impression of intense life-likeness
and reality. If they are indeed secondary personalities, science has
hitherto studied none like them. I have already sketched Phinuit's
character, which has remained consistently the same during twelve years.
The reader should also have a sufficiently clear notion of George
Pelham's individuality, which is also consistent; even now, when George
Pelham appears, we find him unchanged.

The individualities of the present controls are even more marked, and
not less consistent. None of those who, up to the present time, have
communicated through Mrs Piper have in the least resembled Imperator and
his assistants. The principal traits of Imperator's character are a
profound and sincere religious sentiment, much gravity and seriousness,
great benevolence, an infinite pity for man incarnate on account of the
miseries of this life of darkness and chaos; and with this, an imperious
temper, so that he does well to call himself Imperator; he commands, and
will be obeyed, but he wills only the right. The other spirits who
gravitate around him--Rector, Doctor, Prudens, and George Pelham--pay
him profound respect. This character of Imperator is quite the same as
we find in the works of Stainton Moses. Those who decline to accept the
spiritualist hypothesis on any terms may say that Mrs Piper has drawn
the character from this source. She must at least know the book we have
mentioned--_Spirit Teachings_. When the effort to communicate with
Stainton Moses was made, and nothing was obtained but incoherence and
falsehood, Dr Hodgson, wishing to discover what influence the normal Mrs
Piper's knowledge of Stainton Moses's works might have upon the
secondary personality calling itself Stainto