830. I quote in 830 A a more complex case ("Clelia") furnished by a gentleman whom I there call Mr. A. It is a very good instance of the capricious half-nonsense which has often been referred to the agency of spirits. The indisputable evidence for complex subliminal mentation which this case seems to me to furnish lies in the fact that here Mr. A.'s pen wrote not only unintelligible abbreviations, but absolute anagrams of sentences; anagrams, indeed, of the crudest kind, consisting of mere transpositions of letters, but still puzzles which the writer had to set himself to decipher ab extra. The chances against drawing a group of letters at random which will form several definite words and leave no letters over are, of course, very great.

831. I add another case, precisely parallel with "Clelia," with which the late Professor Sidgwick furnished me, from his own experience with an intimate friend. The account was written in 1885.

(From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 25).

The experiences which I mentioned to you as similar to those described in your paper - so far as the mere effects of unconscious cerebration are concerned - occurred about twenty years ago. An intimate friend of mine who had interested himself somewhat in Spiritualism, and had read Kardec's book, discovered almost by accident that his hand could write, without any conscious volition on his part, words conveying an intelligible meaning - in fact, what purported to be communications of departed spirits. He asked me to come and stay with him, in order to investigate the phenomenon; he had been rather struck by some things in Kardec's book, and was quite disposed to entertain the hypothesis that the writing might be due to something more than unconscious cerebration, if it should turn out that it could give accurate information on facts unknown to him. The experiments, however, that we made in order to test this always failed to show anything in the statements written down that might not have been due to the working of his own brain; and at the end of my visit we were both agreed that there was no ground for attributing the phenomenon to any other cause but unconscious cerebration.

At the same time we were continually surprised by evidences of the extent to which his unconscious self was able to puzzle his conscious mind. As a rule, he knew what he was writing, though he wrote involuntarily; but from time to time he used to form words or conjunctions of letters which we were unable to make out at first, though they had a meaning which we ultimately discovered.

Thus one evening, just as we were about to break up, the capital letters KHAIRETE were written; their meaning will not be obscure to you, but it so happened that it did not at first occur to us that K H represented the Greek x, so that we had no idea what the letters meant, and tried various solutions till the true signification ("Farewell") suddenly flashed upon my mind. On another occasion I asked a question of the supposed communicating intelligence, and requested that the answer might be given in German, a language which my friend was unable to read or write, though he had learnt to speak one or two words while travelling in the country. His hand proceeded to write what was apparently one long word, which seemed to him absolutely without meaning; but when I came to read it I could see that it was composed of a number of German words, though put together without proper grammatical terminations; and that these words suggested - though they could hardly be said to convey - what would have been a proper and significant answer to my question.

The words were all common words, such as he might have heard in conversation; and when I had separated them, and told him their meaning, he seemed faintly to recognise some of them.

Sometimes, again, when we tried to get correct information as to facts unknown to either of us, the result was curious as showing an apparently elaborate attempt on the part of my friend's unconscious self to deceive his conscious self. I remember (e.g.) that one night we got written down what purported to be the first sentence in a leading article of the Times that had just been written and would appear next morning. The sentence was in the familiar style of Printing House Square; but I need not say that when we came down to breakfast next morning we did not find it in the printed columns. My friend immediately placed his hand on a piece of paper; and there came, involuntarily written in the usual way, a long rigmarole of explanation to the effect that the article originally written, containing the sentence that we had got the night before, had been cancelled at the last moment by the editor in consequence of some unexpected political exigency, and another article hastily substituted. And similarly in other cases when statements involuntarily written were ascertained to be false, explanations were written exhibiting the kind of ingenuity which a fairly inventive hoaxer might show when driven into a corner.

If I had not had absolute reliance on my friend's bona fides, I might have supposed that he was mystifying me; but I could not doubt that his curiosity as to the result of the experiments was greater than mine, and that he had no conscious desire to make me believe that the phenomenon was anything more than the result of unconscious cerebration.

I am sorry that the notes I took at the time have been destroyed; but I have no doubt that what I have just written is accurately remembered.

I have said that the writer usually knew what he was writing. This was not the case in his first trials, when the writing came in an abrupt, jerky, and irregular way, and he rarely knew what he had written till he looked at it. But after the first few trials, the flow of unconscious action became even and steady, like that of ordinary conscious handwriting; and then he generally - though not always - knew just before each word was written what it would be; so that when the statements made were entirely contrary to our expectation - as was often the case - his surprise used to come just before the word was actually written. H. Sidgwick.