The outbreak of the World War set a large part of the public in all countries hunting up old prophecies to see whether any of them fitted, and some were found to fit quite well after they had received a little judicious alteration. (For a parallel in ancient times see Thucydides, ii. 54 on the oracle supposed to have foretold the plague at Athens.) Many of the prophecies were, however, bad misfits ; a well-known medium, whose super normal powers are undoubted, had several years before the war predicted that in the next war England and America would be leagued against France and Russia, with Germany neutral! The "Forecasts in Scripts concerning the War," published in vol. xxxiii. of S.P.R. Proceedings, derive their interest not so much from the fact that they foretold the war for several years before it occurred (many persons made similar forecasts by the ordinary processes of reasoning) or that they foretold a few particular incidents of the war, e.g., the sinking of the "Lusitania" (which may have been due to chance-coincidence), but from the fact that the forecasts were distributed piecemeal among several automatic writers, each ignorant of the others' scripts, so that they could only be understood by putting all the scripts together; they formed, in fact, a very complicated "cross-correspondence" (see p. 672). The scripts were not confined to forecasting the war; they also foretold certain developments of human affairs not to this date realized : at any rate no one can say they are "prophecies made after the event." Perhaps, however, the case for precognition is strongest where the things foretold are in themselves most trivial, and farthest removed from the probability of normal inference. Instances can be found in any book dealing with "mental" phenomena. The chapter on premonitions in Richet's Traite de Metapsychique is instructive not only for the cases quoted by the author, but for the excellent analysis and classification.
Precognition, if it is a genuine phenomenon, does not fit very easily into any theoretic scheme based on the more generally accepted phenomena, such as telepathy. Some people, however, seem to find modern ideas as to a "space-time complex" of as sistance in enabling them to accept precognition. Dunne's An Experiment with Time is interesting on the theoretical side.
The psychical researcher must, however, politely but firmly in sist that any judgment is premature which ignores the mass of well-attested relevant facts that he has accumulated. He will, of course, base his claim only on such phenomena as are above suspicion of fraud, the mental phenomena in particular, and will candidly admit that these are difficult of interpretation. To meet the objections of a priori materialism, he will have to put the case for telepathy as a non-material process, and will at once be answered that, unless he can put some definite limits to the operation of telepathy between living persons, he has proved too much and left nothing further to be explained.
The issue, therefore, is whether there are any mental phe nomena, ostensibly spiritistic, which cannot be accounted for by telepathy between the living; and the answer depends, largely but not entirely, on whether telepathy be accepted in its widest con ceivable form, a sort of universal subconscious leakage, or whether it is to be confined within the limits, vague as they may be, of the spontaneous and experimental evidence, with a reasonable margin over. Telepathy between the living must not be assigned ad hoc a wider field than would be conceded if the ostensibly spiritistic phenomena had not got to be accounted for. Communications Through Trance-mediums. — Several trance-mediums, whose bona fides, after prolonged investigation by critical sitters is generally accepted, have made correct state ments of verifiable facts which, humanly speaking, were quite outside their normal knowledge, and these statements purport to have been communicated to the medium (through the "control") by discarnate intelligences. Among such mediums may be men tioned Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Leonard.
The verifiable matter is sometimes mixed up with quite non evidential utterances, moral platitudes, descriptions of a future state, etc. A large proportion of "padding" is a sign of an in competent sitter; good sitters are not seriously afflicted with it. In any case the presence of the "padding" does not depreciate the value of the evidential matter, of which there is sufficient on record in the Proceedings of the S.P.R. to satisfy the most diligent student. This may relate to facts present to the sitter's conscious mind ; or facts once known by him and since forgotten; or facts never known to him, but known to persons with whom he is in close touch; or facts which can only be verified by enquiry among persons with whom neither he nor the medium has any close connection. At each stage telepathy between the living can be put forward as a possible explanation, but at each stage with diminishing plausibility, until at the last stage nothing will serve but the hypothesis of universal leakage, which is un supported by any evidence. For a case which raises this problem in an instructive way see S. G. Soal's paper, S.P.R. Proceedings, vol. xxxv.