ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

A "Psychometric" Experime11t. 199
be made to the lady's statements, and that would be made to them
.by any well informed psychologist, is that they were too general and
indefinite to be of any value as evidence of supernormal power.
This trait of caution and deliberation could have been remarked by
any intelligent auditor at my lecture, but assuming her truthfulness,
after her introduction to me at the close of the sitting, and Mr.
du Buy's honesty, this explanation can hardly be accessible. It
would be saner to attach no interest at all to the success than to explain
it in this way though the careful experimenter has the right
to demand that the possibility of the lady's knowledge of me by that
method should be excluded before any consideration of the facts
in another connection should be tolerated. But assumipg that the
facts are proof against this objection the general character of the
description was such as makes it useless for scientific evidence. But
this objection was not applicable to that of Prof. Mosley. Too
many of the incidents were so definite and specific that some other
explanation must be applied, though at times there were the same
general observations and descriptions as in my case. Some incidents
in Miss Puffer's case were also free from this objection, as the
narrative will show. But as both Prof. Mosley and Miss Puffer
had been at the place longer than I had been (I having arrived
that day), there was the opportunity to learn more about them.
But if this process had been resorted to it was absurd to be so
general in Miss Puffer's case, and not to have gotten a totally
different kind of facts regarding Prof. Mosley. On the whole, the
affair impressed me as perfectly genuine, though not of the kind
to suggest anything evidential to outsiders, except in the incidents
of Prof. Mosley.
One thing of much interest I noticed. It was that the whole
process seemed to be an interpretation of impressions received by
the lady, impressions that might be called symbolical. She described
certain images she saw, as if apparitions or memory pictures, and her
observations were based upon these. The case of the barrel of
papers in which Miss Puffer was diving; the case of the little girl
in connection with Prof. Mosley; the ploughed field; the unkempt
teacher, etc., are all incidents that I noticed and having asked for the
impression in one case when the lady was making general observations,
I obtained her statement that she usually saw some image of
the sort and used this as her index. It thus seemed to be a case
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