ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

Illusions in Psychical Research. 5
would be easily proved if it were. On the other hand, if it be
radically different from the world we know or can perceive and
conceive from sensory experience, it can not be rationally
described to us in the terms we expect or demand. Or to put
it briefly, if it be like the present world we can hardly believe
it and if it be radically different we can not prove it. Consequently
those who demand easy, clear information about it do
not know what they ask. Superficial interpretation of the accounts
is not to be tolerated. I mean by this that we cannot take
our ordinary sensory meaning in terms as properly expressive
of the facts. The process of communicating is most probably
a symbolic one, a pictographic process involving the interpretation
by the subconsciousness of the medium of these symbolic
pictures which are not properly representative as in sense
perception supposedly construed, but merely indicative of something
which may have remote analogies with our normal conceptions
and those remote analogies expressible in terms of
mental states and not in terms of physical things. The usual
habi't is to take each statement on its superficial meaning as we
would when interpreting descriptions of the physical world. and
then take offense at anything that seems to contradict it or
that seems preposterous. The fact is that it may turn but that
the apparently or even really preposterous statements will be the
clue to the correct conception of the facts. The reason for
this cannot be gone into here. I can only remark boldly that
I do not flinch at the ribaldry and gibes of the Philistine at this .
point. I accept his challenge and should push him to the wall
on the very things about which he seems most assured. But
we may as well recognize at once that we cannot assume the
same method of interpretation of messages about the nature of
the spiritual world as we do about descriptions of the physical
world unless we first prove that the method of communication
is the same as our sensory process, which we can rather safely
suppose it is not. The construction of our idea of the other
world can be accomplished only by finding a unity in apparent
contradictions, as there is now evidence enough that there is a
unity in records that seem superficially quite chaotic. Here will
lie the solution of the problem.
Digitized by Coogle