It is interesting as a psychological theory, but in point of fact I hold it to be entirely wrong. We argued it out a good deal together, but experiments in psychic science can seldom be repeated, and, as I say, Carthew refused to submit to any further attempt to evoke Tregarthen. As a man I sympathize with him, and he was really very grateful to us--but as a scientist I would have liked to try again in order to attempt to convince Miller. FOOTNOTE: [1] All names of people and places have been changed, but Dr. Miller’s cures of “shell shock” during the war have shown that one’s estimate of his powers was perfectly correct. CHAPTER II THE AUTOMATIST A well-known psychic investigator once jokingly complained to me that the telephone service of the spirit world seemed to be as unreliable and badly damaged as that of Great Britain. Certainly, communication is often freakish and intermittent, and the ethical value of the teachings received at great length and painstakingly transcribed is often completely valueless. It must be remembered that we who are conducting research in psychic matters have a poor range of instruments or tools to work with. There must inevitably be the human medium, and long experience has taught me that in the case of automatic writing one must be prepared to recognize the intrusion of the medium’s own thought-processes into the record received from the spirit world. That these interpolated writings are conscious frauds by the mediums we can unhesitatingly deny, but they appear to be either unconscious records of the medium’s own thoughts or else the re-transmitted subconscious thought-processes of the medium echoed back by the control. I have hopes that in the future we shall be able to devise an appliance for the recording of automatic writing in which the function of the medium will be purely that of a bridge between the two planes and in which the physical act of writing will be mechanically performed.[2] The difficulty in automatic writing lies in the association of ideas, and one word written by a planchette or spelt out by an ouija traverser leads to the stimulation of a train of thought in the subconscious mind even though the conscious brain may be in the trance state. The difficulty is to piece together what can be termed the true spirit messages out of the mass of pseudo-communications that surround them. The analysis of the familiar examples of “cross-correspondence” are a valuable guide in the complexities that are involved in the question. A popular idea of the difficulty of communication can be gained by imagining a man in a telephone exchange in London trying to talk to Newcastle. He can go from instrument to instrument and speak through, but all the instruments keep on going out of order, so that only disconnected fragments of communication pass over one wire.