And why should it not be even "_quite_ erroneously"? Nearly all the reasoning I have seen on these matters is vitiated by the entirely gratuitous traditional assumption that if a soul survives death, it enters at once into measureless wisdom. Hodgson (?) and the rest seem pretty much the same sort of people that they were here, and I for one am glad of it.
In the sittings of many others of Hodgson's friends the control showed a similar abundant knowledge of their experiences with Hodgson living, and, most important of all, it seems to me, all of Hodgson's exceptionally marked habits of thought and expression. We have room for but little more. James says (Pr. XXIII, 36):
"Hodgson was distinguished during life by great animal spirits. He was fond of argument, chaff, and repartee, a good deal of a gesticulator, and a great laugher.... Chaff and slang from a spirit have an undignified sound for the reader, but to the interlocutors of the R. H. control they seem invariably to have been elements of verisimilitude."
God save me from a heaven where there is no "chaff and slang"! I should fail to recognize some of my best friends among the loftiest souls who have escaped the flesh, Hodgson not the least. However intense the interest heretofore taken in a future world, I doubt if it has ever been thoroughly healthy, or ever will be before we get our conceptions of that world off stilts. James continues (pp. 37-8):
"This, however, did not exclude very serious talk with the same persons--quite the reverse sometimes, as when one sitter of this class notes: 'Then came words of kindness which were too intimate and personal to be recorded, but which left me so deeply moved that shortly afterwards, at the sitting's close, I fainted dead away--it had seemed as though he had in all reality been there and speaking to me.'"
If James ran any one of his virtues into the ground, perhaps it was his modesty concerning anything connected with himself. Instance the following introduction and what it introduces:
_W. J.'s Sitting._ (May 21st, 1906). (Pr. XXIII, 8of.)
"[J.] The evidence is so much the same sort of thing throughout, and makes such insipid reading, that I hesitate to print more of it in full. But I know that many critics insist on having the largest possible amount of _verbatim_ material on which to base their conclusions, so I select a specimen of the R. H. control's utterances when he was less 'strong.' The reader, I fear, will find it long and tedious, but he can skip.