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Judged by the foregoing specimens, the literature of what we are provisionally considering as hypnotic telepathy would not be regarded as very cheerful.  As a whole, however, the pictures it presents from an alleged postcarnate life, are cheerful, and some of them very attractive.

Below are some from an alleged George Eliot.  They are from notes of Piper sittings kindly placed at our disposal by Professor Newbold.

To my taste the matter savors very little of the reputed author.  And yet assuming for the moment that our great authors survive in a fuller life, presumably they would have to communicate under very embarrassing conditions:  for not only would they have to cramp themselves to produce work comprehensible here, but the System of Things would have to limit them, lest their competition should upset the whole system of our literary development, or rather would have involved a different one from the beginning.

My first reading of the alleged George Eliot matter inclined me to scout it entirely.  It is certainly not in all particulars what that great soul would have sent from a better world if she had been permitted to communicate anything more profound than we have been left to find out for ourselves, or even if she had had the commonplace chance to revise her manuscript.  But on reflection I realized that, although the matter came through Mrs. Piper, it could not have come from her, wherever it came from; and that if George Eliot were communicating tidings naturally within our comprehension, and merely descriptive of superficial experience as distinct from reflection, and were communicating, through a poor telephone, words to be recorded by an indifferent scribe, this material would not seem absolutely incongruous with its alleged source, and to a reader knowing that the stuff claimed to be hers, might possibly suggest the weakest possible dilution or reflection of her.  Yet in ways which I have no space for, it abounds in the sort of anthropomorphism that might be expected from the average medium or average sitter, but not from George Eliot.

And now, since writing the last paragraph and going through the material half a dozen times more, I have about concluded, or perhaps worked myself up to the conclusion, that if a judicious blue pencil were to take from it what could be attributed to imperfect means of communication, and what could be considered as having slopped over from the medium, there would be a pretty substantial and not unbeautiful residuum which might, without straining anything, be taken for a description by George Eliot, of the heaven she would find if, as begins to seem possible, she and the rest of us, have or are to have heavens to suit our respective tastes.  But what would have to be taken out is often ludicrously incongruous with George Eliot, and taking it out would certainly be open to serious question.