ate.

_Myers' Theory of Mediumship_

F.W.H. Myers undertakes to describe how this may be done from the point
of view of the spirit. "Seeking then for some open avenue, it discerns
something which corresponds to a _light_--a glimmer of translucency in
the confused darkness of our material world. This 'light' indicates a
_sensitive_--a human organism so constituted that a spirit can
temporarily _inform_ or _control_ it, not necessarily interrupting the
stream of the sensitive's ordinary consciousness; perhaps using a hand
only, or perhaps, as in Mrs. Piper's case, using voice as well as hand,
and occupying all the sensitive's channels of self-manifestation."

There are, naturally, in all this unescapable elements of speculation.
As a matter of fact anything which we may imagine about the discarnate
life may be almost unbelievably wide of the mark. Memory more than
anything else is the binding force in personality. We know ourselves to
be in the morning what we were when we went to sleep the night before,
simply because memory reassembles immediately the continuing elements of
our individual existences. More than that, we are greatly helped by our
surroundings; everything which meets us in the morning has associations
by which memory is served and, therefore, by the almost automatic
process of putting together what we remember and surrendering ourselves
to the suggestions of what we see and meet we find our places in a
waking, working world and go about our business.

If we were to awake in a totally strange world where nothing was in any
degree at all similar to the world in which we went to sleep, we might
find ourselves so sadly puzzled as to doubt our own identity, even
though memory persisted in its identifying suggestion. And if in
addition to this we found ourselves without the contribution of physical
sensation to which we have always been used--sightless, soundless,
touchless--one can easily imagine a shock in the face of which even the
most strongly centered personality would give way. And yet such changes
as this probably only faintly indicate the adjustments which the
discarnate are called upon to meet. It is as if we were asked to argue
or to imagine from one dimension to another.

These are difficulties, of course, which attend any conception of
immortality, but we usually escape them by refusing to follow through
what they involve and taking refuge in a free poetic imagination
sustained by faith and e