“You seem to find a certain amount of amusement in it,” he remarked, drily. “The scientific reasons you ask for so easily are highly controversial. But many of the phenomena are undoubtedly genuine--automatic writing, for instance. It is a fact that persons of a certain type find their hand can write, entirely independent of their conscious attention, coherent sentences whose meaning is utterly strange to them. They need not even deliberately make their mind a blank. They may be surprised by their hand suddenly writing on its own initiative when their consciousness is fixed upon some other occupation, such as entering up an account-book. Always they have a vivid feeling that not their own but another distinctly separate intelligence guides the pen. This feeling is not evidence, of course. It may be an illusion; probably is. “The best-analyzed reincarnation story is probably that dealt with by Professor Flournoy in his study of the famous medium Hélène Smith of Geneva. This lady sincerely believed herself to be a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette--and in her trance-state she acted the part with astonishing fidelity and dramatic power. In her normal condition she certainly possessed neither so much detailed knowledge of the life of the ill-fated queen nor so much histrionic ability. She also wrote automatically, and some of her productions were amazing, to say the least of them. Well, Professor Flournoy’s psychological investigations proved clearly to my thinking that it was a case of her subconscious mind dramatizing, with that wonderful faculty of impersonation which characterizes it, a few hints accidentally dropped into it and combining with her subconscious memory, which forgets nothing it has ever heard or read or even casually glanced at, to produce an almost perfect representation of Marie Antoinette. Also he proved that her automatic writing emanated from her own subconscious mind and nowhere else. “Now, I am not going to say that discarnate spirits do not communicate through this subconscious activity of which one form is automatic writing. I am not going to say that we do not become reincarnated through an endless cycle of lives. I do not know enough about it to assert such a negative--no one does. All I know about the human mind is that we know very little about it. It is like the moon, of which you never see more than the small end. Infinite possibilities lie in the shadow. You are only conscious of a small fraction of your own personality. The subconscious--the unillumined portion of your soul--is incomputably vast. It learns everything, forgets nothing; possibly it even goes on from life to life. When it is tapped by any of those traditional means which nowadays we call spiritualistic one may--or may not--come across buried treasure.” “But you yourself do not believe in the truth of spiritualism as an actual fact, doctor?” queried one of the group, a trace of aggression in his tone. The doctor shrugged his shoulders.