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Rh conclusions. Of late years individual investigators have pursued their separate lines of research; and it may be thought that the will to live, which was so dominating an element in the personality of F. W. H. Myers and of Richard Hodgson, may unawares have influenced their judgment and so have led them too hastily to exchange the role of investigator for that of propagandist. This, in short, is the danger from within which must always attend upon any enquiry making so intimate and irresistible an appeal to human hopes and affections

A word of caution is perhaps necessary as regards the kind of spirit communication to which the facts to be cited in the following chapters seem to point. If such communication is at all possible, it would seem that it is of rare occurrence and beset with considerable difficulties; and further that the communications themselves are liable to be embarrassed, incoherent, and curiously defective, if not actually evasive. Not only do these characteristics of the communications, which are to be found especially in the trance utterances discussed in Chapter XIII., necessarily make the desired proof much more difficult of attainment, but they inevitably suggest suspicions of their mundane source. Dr. Hodgson was himself satisfied, after an exhaustive study of the trance phenomena, that these suspicious characteristics were not inconsistent with the Spiritualist interpretation; and that in many cases they even lend additional support to that hypothesis; and, speaking generally, those investigators who