Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/213

XV ] latter, usually rather vapid, may be elements from the medium's subconscious, or, not impossibly, also from Jones's subconscious.

A kind of composite personality would thus be formed, which might, Mr. Carington says, harden into a stereotyped pattern, and that might account for the "horrid banality" of so many "communications."

It is an error, however, which Mr. Carington certainly does not share, to suppose that all "spirit communications" are horribly banal. Like attracts like in the psychon kind of world, and if really intelligent "sitters," working with an honest medium (of whom there are some), try to get "in touch" with really intelligent and interested discarnate entities some remarkable results may be obtained.

At Duke University a female medium was isolated in a room and a person unknown to her was put in another. The medium went into "trance," and her "control" was asked to tell all "he" could about the unknown near-by person. "He" responded by telling about deceased relatives. The experimenter made a list of the alleged facts and had the sitter check them, true or false. He also tried the experiment of giving a list of facts communicated by the medium to a person for whom they were not intended. This was tried often enough to show that the number of chance hits thus obtained was far less than the hits obtained with the person for whom the communication was intended.30

Nevertheless, the wondrously elastic association theory of telepathy could account for such communications. But there are others in which it seems to snap, unless one is willing to include in the "common subconscious" the psychon-systems of those who are no longer in the material body, or whatever euphemism one prefers for "dead."

Those are the "cross-correspondence" cases.31 After certain leaders of the English Society for Psychical Research died, messages began to come to various sensitives, some of them thousands of miles apart. One was a trance medium in the United States, professional, but one who had never been caught in any fraud. (Incidentally, "fraud" may also be unconscious or subconscious. Given the theatrical abilities of the "producer" level of the personality, which is probably the one which becomes dissociated as a "control,"