Again—­

’In the trances of this medium I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes, ears, and wits.

’The trances have broken down, for my own mind, the limits of the admitted order of nature.’

M. Paul Bourget (who is not superstitious), after consulting Mrs. Piper, concludes: 

’L’esprit a des procedes de connaitre non soupconnes par notre analyse.’[20]

In this treatise I may have shown ‘the will to believe’ in an unusual degree; but, for me, the interest of Mrs. Piper is purely anthropological.  She exhibits a survival or recrudescence of savage phenomena, real or feigned, of convulsion and of secondary personality, and entertains a survival of the animistic explanation.

Mrs. Piper’s honesty and excellent character, in her normal condition, are vouched for by her friends and observers in England and America; nor do I impeach her normal character.  But ‘secondary personalities’ have often more of Mr. Hyde than of Dr. Jekyll in their composition.  It used to be admitted that, when ‘possessed,’ Mrs. Piper would cheat when she could—­that is to say, she would make guesses, try to worm information out of her sitter, describe a friend of his, alive or dead, as ‘Ed.,’ who may be Edgar, Edmund, Edward, Edith, or anybody.  She would shuffle, and repeat what she had picked up in a former sitting with the same person; and the vast majority of her answers started from vague references to probable facts (as that an elderly man is an orphan), and so worked on to more precise statements.  Professor Macalister wrote: 

’She is quite wide-awake enough all through to profit by suggestions.  I let her see a blotch of ink on my finger, and she said that I was a writer....  Except the guess about my sister Helen, who is alive, there was not a single guess which was nearly right.  Mrs. Piper is not anaesthetic during the so-called trance, and if you ask my private opinion, it is that the whole thing is an imposture, and a poor one.’[21]

Mr. Barkworth said that, as far as his experience went, ’Mrs. Piper’s powers are of the ordinary thought-reading [i.e. muscle-reading] kind, dependent on her hold of the visitor’s hand.’  Each of these gentlemen had only one ‘sitting.’  M. Paul Bourget also informed me, in conversation, that Mrs. Piper held his hand while she told the melancholy tale connected with a key in his possession, and that she did not tell the story promptly and fluently, but very slowly and hesitatingly.  Even so, he declared that he did not feel able to account for her performance.