ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

12 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
search in some of its aspects. Moreover, he remarks, a fact
which is very interesting to me, that he has often tried and sometimes
succeeded in communicating with me at other places. He
has been my most frequent communicator, and the most ready
one. I have had an extended experience, my mother being
second to him in frequency of communication. Of course I
cannot prove that he has not always succeeded in reaching me
when he has attempted it, but the correctness of the statement
that he has succeeded creates a presumption in favor of the correctness
of the other statement.
The word I received from him on this occasion was much
more complete and coherent and extended than any other that
I have had from him, and it was the only occasion on which I
had been the sole receiver and he the main communicator, and
the apparently direct expression in the automatic writing seemed
to me, as to him, more complete and like his own work. In
one of the other cases where he has often appeared, he has more
of the personal prepossessions of the medium to work through,
as she knew him well in life. and has known me well all my life,
and in a third one, he has never seemed to me to take personal
possession of the instrument but speaks through a guide.
Father's reference to his having less fear than "Mama" about
the possibility of my losing my head over psychic investigation
seems to me fitting to his knowledge and temperament as compared
with Mother's. Her family history was not so closely
related to opportunities for observing the influence of "the
spirit " as his. Moreover, I had taken a larger interest in psychic
matters for a .longer period in her lifetime, for my father
passed out of this life just as my interest was beginning to be
manifest and it became much stronger and more intelligent hefore
my mother's passing, so that she had opportunity to be
anxious over it, tho· I am not aware that she was so in her
lifetime.
In this connection, a curious coincidence may be of interest :
my early training was all in my mother's church, but my inclination
was not harmonious with its teachings. After my father's
death I joined an Evangelical body, neither my mother's nor my
father's but between tl;tem in type, verging more toward mother's
than father's. After some years of membership therein, in which
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