chapter vii

, concerning _Phantasms of the Dead_, forming part of Frederick W. H. Myers's _Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death_, and in the two chapters which follow, on _Motor Automatism_, and on _Trance, Possession, and Ecstasy_, all the necessary proofs above noted have been adduced; and the author was thereby one of the very first psychical researchers to have recorded before the world his conversion from the non-animistic hypothesis to the ancient belief that Man is immortal; for he admits his conviction that the human consciousness does incontestably survive the decay of the physical body. Types of some of these well-attested and proved cases offered as evidence by Myers may be briefly summarized as follows:--Repeated apparitions indicating intimate acquaintance with some post-mortem fact like the place of burial; single apparitions with knowledge of the affairs of surviving friends, or of the impending death of a survivor, or of spirits of persons dead after the apparition's decease; cases where professed spirits manifest knowledge of their earth-life, as of some secret compact made with survivors; cases of apparitional appearances near a corpse or a grave; occasional cases of the appearance of the dead to several persons collectively.[588] Under motor automatism, some of the most striking phenomena tending toward proof are cases where automatic writing has announced a death unknown to the persons present; knowledge communicated in a _séance_, not known to any person present, but afterwards proved to have been possessed by the deceased; automatic writing by a child in language unknown to her.

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