One or two difficulties may here be briefly referred to:
1. The appearance in Mrs Piper's script of such obvious dream-stuff as messages from Homer, Ulysses, and Telemachus! These are of course absurdities, and no psychical researcher regards them as anything else. But they are no more absurd than many of our own dreams, and we must remember that automatic writing comes from the dream-strata of the medium's mind, these strata seeming to lie _between_ our normal consciousness and the spiritual world. Consequently messages which really seem to come from beyond: _i.e._, which are evidential--are often mixed with subliminal matter from the medium's mind. As a communicator once said: "The medium's dreams get in my way." All this has to be allowed for, but in good mediums there is not much of it. In my friend Wilkinson's case there is none, for he can distinguish. In Mrs Piper's case there is a little, but it does not invalidate the huge mass of real evidence that has come. And it at least testifies to her honesty, for no medium would pretend to get messages from people whom everyone knows to be mythical--messages which are indeed comic and therefore enable opponents to score points with the general public by obvious witticisms.
Huxley is often referred to, as having wisely declined to investigate, knowing beforehand that it was all nonsense. Huxley was busy with his own work, and, believing _à priori_ that alleged psychical phenomena were either fraud or self-delusion, naturally declined to give any time to them. We need not regret his decision, for he was doing work that was more important than psychical investigation would have been, just then. But he was wrong in his _à priori_ belief, or rather unbelief. He had never seen any of these phenomena, but that did not prove that they did not happen. A native of mid-Africa may never have seen snow, but that does not prove that no snow exists.
And it happens that the Dialectical Society went on with its task, appointing committees which investigated without any paid medium. The majority of the investigators were utterly sceptical at first; they were practically all convinced at the finish. I state this merely as a fact, not as a specially important fact; for I find that beginners, when suddenly faced with striking phenomena, are liable to go from the extreme of unbelief to an extreme of belief. When one's materialistic scheme is exploded, there seems no criterion left, and anything may happen. It usually takes an investigator a year or two to adjust himself and to learn to follow the evidence and not overshoot it.