m "scoundrel" does not clear up everything
to the depths as it did for our forefathers. The first automatic
writing I ever saw was forty years ago. I unhesitatingly thought of it
as deceit, although it contained vague elements of supernormal
knowledge. Since then I have come to see in automatic writing one
example of a department of human activity as vast as it is enigmatic.
Every sort of person is liable to it, or to something equivalent to it;
and whoever encourages it in himself finds himself personating someone
else, either signing what he writes by fictitious name, or, spelling
out, by ouija-board or table-tips, messages from the departed. Our
subconscious region seems, as a rule, to be dominated either by a crazy
"will to make-believe," or by some curious external force impelling us
to personation. The first difference between the psychical researcher
and the inexpert person is that the former realizes the commonness and
typicality of the phenomenon here, while the latter, less informed,
thinks it so rare as to be unworthy of attention. _I wish to go on
record for the commonness_.

The next thing I wish to go on record for is _the presence_, in the
midst of all the humbug, _of really supernormal knowledge_. By this I
mean knowledge that cannot be traced to the ordinary sources of
information--the senses namely, of the automatist. In really strong
mediums this knowledge seems to be abundant, though it is usually
spotty, capricious and unconnected. Really strong mediums are
rarities; but when one starts with them and works downwards into less
brilliant regions of the automatic life, one tends to interpret many
slight but odd coincidences with truth as possibly rudimentary forms of
this kind of knowledge.

What is one to think of this queer chapter in human nature? It is odd
enough on any view. If all it means is a preposterous and inferior
monkey-like tendency to forge messages, systematically embedded in the
soul of all of us, it is weird; and weirder still that it should then
own all this supernormal information. If on the other hand the
supernormal information be the key to the phenomenon, it ought to be
superior; and then how ought we to account for the "wicked partner,"
and for the undeniable mendacity and inferiority of so much of the
performance? We are thrown, for our conclusions, upon our instinctive
sense of the dramatic probabilities of nature. My own dramatic sense
tends instinctively to