And in fact the very qualities which are most apt to raise derision are such as the evidence set forth in the earlier chapters of this work might reasonably lead us to expect. For I hold that now for the first time can we form a conception of ghostly communications which shall in any way consist or cohere with more established conceptions; which can be presented as in any way a development of facts which are already experimentally known. Two preliminary conceptions were needed--conceptions in one sense ancient enough; but yet the first of which has only in this generation found its place in science, while the second is as yet awaiting its brevet of orthodoxy. The first conception is that with which hypnotism and various automatisms have familiarised us,--the conception of multiplex personality, of the potential coexistence of many states and many memories in the same individual. The second is the conception of telepathy; of the action of mind on mind apart from the ordinary organs of sense; and especially of its action by means of hallucinations; by the generation of veridical phantasms which form, as it were, messages from men still in the flesh. And I believe that these two conceptions are in this way connected, that the telepathic message generally starts from, and generally impinges upon, a subconscious or submerged stratum in both agent and percipient.[129] Wherever there is hallucination, whether delusive or veridical, I hold that a message of some sort is forcing its way upwards from one stratum of personality to another,--a message which may be merely dreamlike and incoherent, or which may symbolise a fact otherwise unreachable by the percipient personality. And the mechanism seems much the same whether the message's path be continued within one individual or pass between two; whether A's own submerged self be signalling to his emergent self, or B be telepathically stimulating the hidden fountains of perception in A. If anything like this be true, it seems plainly needful that all that we know of abnormal or supernormal communications between minds, or states of the same mind, still embodied in flesh, should be searched for analogies which may throw light on this strangest mode of intercourse between embodied and disembodied minds. A communication (if such a thing exists) from a departed person to a person still on earth is, at any rate, a communication from a mind in one state of existence to a mind in a very different state of existence. And it is, moreover, a communication from one mind to another which passes through some channel other than the ordinary channels of sense, since on one side of the gulf no material sense-organs exist. It will apparently be an extreme instance of both these classes--of communications between state and state,[130] and of telepathic communications; and we ought, therefore, to approach it by considering the less advanced cases of both these types.