ong, against the
hypothesis of telepathy. Subjects in the hypnotic state, and the
secondary personalities which appear in this hypnotic state, according
to the precise and decisive experiments made by modern science, have an
extremely definite notion of time. If you tell a hypnotised subject to
perform an action in a year, at such an hour and minute, he will never
fail, so to speak, although when he is awakened there remains in his
memory no trace of the order. Now the communicators, in the phenomena we
are studying, have an extremely vague notion of time, because, they say,
time is not a concept of the world in which they live. How is it that
telepathy, which can do so much, owns itself incapable, or nearly so, of
determining the moment when an action has been performed? What prevents
it from reading the idea of time, as well as any other idea, in the
minds of the persons present, since the notion of time is as clear and
precise in them at least as any other notion?

To conclude, I should say that we are entirely ignorant of the point
where the powers of telepathy begin and end. What I have just said makes
the telepathic hypothesis an unlikely explanation; but, as Boileau said
long ago, "Le vrai peut quelque fois n'etre pas vraisemblable"--Truth
may sometimes be unlikely.

CHAPTER XVII

Some considerations which strongly support the spiritualistic
hypothesis--Consciousness and character remain unchanged--Dramatic
play--Errors and confusions.

The unity of character and consciousness in the communicators is one of
the reasons which most strongly support the spiritualistic hypothesis.
If we were dealing with Mrs Piper's secondary personalities, the first
difficulty would be found in their great number. I do not know the exact
number of communicators who have asserted their appearance by means of
her organism. But several hundreds may be found in the Reports of the
Society for Psychical Research, and they are certainly far from being
all mentioned. Now each communicator has kept the same character
throughout, to such an extent that, with a little practice, it is
possible to recognise the communicator at the first sentence he utters,
if he has already communicated. Some of the communicators only appear at
long intervals, but nevertheless they remain unchanged. But, on the
telepathic hypothesis, it is not easy to understand that a self-styled
communicator, a merely ephemeral consciousness reconstituted out of th