810. Before M. Richet1 I believe that no writer, outside the Spiritualistic group, so much as showed any practical knowledge of this phenomenon, - still less endeavoured to explain it. Faraday's well-known explanation of table-turning as the result of the summation of many unconscious movements - obviously true as it is for some of the simplest cases of table-movement - does not touch this far more difficult question of the origination of these intelligent messages, conveyed by distinct and repeated movements of some object admitting of ready displacement. The ordinary explanation - I am speaking, of course, of cases where fraud is not in question - is that the sitter unconsciously sets going and stops the movements so as to shape the word in accordance with his expectation. Now that he unconsciously sets going and stops the movements is part of my own present contention, but that the word is thereby shaped in accordance with his expectation is often far indeed from being the case. Several of the examples in the Appendices to this chapter illustrate the bizarre capriciousness of these replies - their want of relation to anything anticipated or desired by the persons in contact with the table.

Similar instances might be indefinitely multiplied; but any one who is really willing to take the requisite trouble can satisfy himself on this point by experiment with a sufficiently varied list of trustworthy friends. To those indeed who are familiar with automatic written messages, this question as to the unexpectedness of the tilted messages will present itself in a new light. If the written messages originate in a source beyond the auto-matist's supraliminal self, so too may the tilted messages; - even though we admit that the tilts are caused by his hand's pressure of the table just as directly as the script by his hand's manipulation of the pen.

One piece of evidence which I have cited (in 830 A) in order to show that written messages were not always the mere echo of expectation, was a case where anagrams were automatically written, which their writer was not at once able to decipher. Following this hint, I have occasionally succeeded in getting anagrams tilted out for myself by movements of a small table which I alone touched. I should add that although, as I have elsewhere mentioned, I have never succeeded in writing automatically, I have nevertheless, after some hundreds of trials, continued over many-years, attained the power of eliciting by unconscious pressure tilted responses which do not emanate from my own conscious self. That they do, however, emanate from some stratum of my being - from that fragmentary and incoherent workshop where dreams are strung together - seems to me, as already indicated, the most probable hypothesis.

1 La Suggestion Mentale (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. ii. pp. 239 sqq.).

The anagrams - or rather jumbles of letters forming a short word - which I have myself obtained, have been of the simplest kind. But occasionally 1 have not at once recognised the word thus given, but have been aware of a distinct interval before the word which my own unconscious muscular action had thus confusedly "tilted out" was grasped by my conscious intelligence. This is a kind of experiment which might with advantage be oftener repeated; for the extreme incoherence and silliness of the responses thus obtained does not prevent the process itself from being in a high degree instructive. Here, again (as in the automatic writing of the "Clelia" case, 830 A), a man may hold colloquy with his own dream - may note in actual juxtaposition two separate strata of his own intelligence.

I shall not at present pursue the discussion of these tilted responses beyond this their very lowest and most rudimentary stage. They almost immediately suggest another problem, for which our discussion is hardly ripe, the participation, namely, of several minds in the production of the same automatic message. There is something of this difficulty, even in the explanation of messages given when the hands of two persons are touching a planchette; but when the instrument of response is large, and the method of response simple, as with table-tilting, we find this question of the influence of more minds than one imperatively recurring.

811. Our immediate object, however, is rather to correlate the different attainable modes of automatic response in some intelligible scheme than to pursue any one of them through all its phases. We regarded the table-tilting process as in one sense the simplest, the least-differentiated form of motor response. It is a kind of gesture merely, though a gesture implying knowledge of the alphabet. Let us see in what directions the movement of response becomes more specialised, - as gesture parts into pictorial art and articulate speech. We find, in fact, that a just similar divergence of impulses takes place in automatic response. On the one hand the motor impulse specialises itself into drawing; on the other hand it specialises itself into speech. Of automatic drawing I have already said something (Chapter III (Genius). 324). Automatic speech will receive detailed treatment in Chapter IX (Trance, Possession And Ecstasy). At present I shall only briefly indicate the position of each form of movement among cognate automatisms.

Some of my readers may have seen these so-called "spirit-drawings," - designs, sometimes in colour, whose author asserts that he drew them without any plan, or even knowledge of what his hand was going to do. This assertion may be quite true, and the person making it may be perfectly sane.1 The drawings so made will be found curiously accordant.

1 See the quotations from Mr. Wilkinson's book in 811 A. But, of course, like other automatic impulses, this impulse to decorative or symbolical drawing is sometimes with what the view which I am explaining would lead us to expect. For they exhibit a fusion of arabesque with ideography; that is to say, they partly resemble the forms of ornamentation into which the artistic hand strays when, as it were, dreaming on the paper without definite plan; and partly they afford a parallel to the early attempts at symbolic self-expression of savages who have not yet learnt an alphabet. Like savage writing, they pass by insensible transitions from direct pictorial symbolism to an abbreviated ideography, mingled in its turn with writing of a fantastic or of an ordinary kind.