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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Human Personality and its Survival of
+Bodily Death, by Frederick W. H. Myers
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death
+
+Author: Frederick W. H. Myers
+
+Editor: Leopold Hamilton Myers
+
+Release Date: January 3, 2012 [EBook #38492]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUMAN PERSONALITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HUMAN PERSONALITY
+
+AND ITS SURVIVAL OF
+BODILY DEATH
+
+BY
+FREDERIC W. H. MYERS
+
+EDITED AND ABRIDGED
+BY HIS SON
+LEOPOLD HAMILTON MYERS
+
+                            _Cessas in vota procesque,
+    Tros, ait, Aenea, cessas? Neque enim ante dehiscent
+    Adtonitoe magna ora domus._--VIRGIL.
+
+    "_Nay!" quoth the Sybil, "Trojan! wilt thou spare
+    The impassioned effort and the conquering prayer?
+    Nay! not save thus those doors shall open roll,--
+    That Power within them burst upon the soul._"
+
+_NEW IMPRESSION_
+
+LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
+39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH
+STREET, NEW YORK BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
+1918
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY
+LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+First Edition, December, 1906
+Reprinted, March, 1907
+October, 1909; April, 1913
+August, 1917; April, 1918
+
+THE PLIMPTON PRESS
+NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A
+
+
+
+
+_DEDICATED_
+TO
+HENRY SIDGWICK
+AND
+EDMUND GURNEY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                          PAGE
+
+EDITOR'S NOTE                              vii
+
+PREFACE                                     ix
+
+GLOSSARY                                  xiii
+
+
+CHAP.
+
+   I. INTRODUCTION                           1
+
+  II. DISINTEGRATIONS OF PERSONALITY        26
+
+ III. GENIUS                                55
+
+  IV. SLEEP                                 93
+
+   V. HYPNOTISM                            116
+
+  VI. SENSORY AUTOMATISM                   168
+
+ VII. PHANTASMS OF THE DEAD                212
+
+VIII. MOTOR AUTOMATISM                     254
+
+  IX. TRANCE, POSSESSION, AND ECSTASY      297
+
+   X. EPILOGUE                             340
+
+APPENDICES TO CHAPTER II                   356
+
+APPENDICES TO CHAPTER IV                   364
+
+APPENDICES TO CHAPTER V                    378
+
+APPENDICES TO CHAPTER VI                   384
+
+APPENDICES TO CHAPTER VII                  400
+
+APPENDICES TO CHAPTER VIII                 430
+
+APPENDICES TO CHAPTER IX                   441
+
+INDEX                                      453
+
+
+
+
+EDITOR'S NOTE
+
+
+Nearly four years have elapsed since the first appearance of my Father's
+book "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death." It cost two
+guineas and was published in two volumes, each of which was little under
+700 pages in length.
+
+The price and dimensions of such a work made the future issue of a more
+popular edition not improbable. Indeed, my Father himself indicated
+briefly the lines on which an abridgment could best be made. In
+accordance with his indications I have endeavoured to keep as closely as
+possible to the original scheme and construction of the book.
+
+The task of abridging, however, must always be an ungrateful one. It is
+inevitable that somewhere or other I should disappoint the reader who,
+already acquainted with the unabridged edition, finds some admired
+passage curtailed in favour of others that are to him of secondary
+interest. This I cannot avoid. All I can hope to do is so to reconcile
+the principles of _omission_ and _condensation_ as least to do violence
+to the style while preserving as far as possible the completeness of the
+exposition.
+
+One half of each volume in the unabridged edition consists of appendices
+containing examples of the various kinds of phenomena discussed and
+analyzed in the text. It has been possible to reduce considerably the
+number of these cases without, I think, detracting much from the value
+of the work for the purposes of the ordinary reader. Those cases,
+however, which are included in this edition are quoted in full, an
+abridged version having very little value.
+
+It must be remembered that the author in his preface insists that "the
+book is an exposition rather than a proof," and the remark naturally
+applies with even greater force to this abridgment. Here the cases must
+be regarded simply as illustrative of the different types of the
+evidence upon which _in its entirety_ the argument of the book
+ultimately rests.
+
+The reader who may feel disposed to study this evidence will find
+numerous references given in the foot-notes. The cases, however, to
+which he is thus referred are scattered in many different publications,
+some of which will probably be less easy of access than the unabridged
+edition. In the many instances, therefore, where a case is quoted in
+the latter its place therein is indicated by means of a number or a
+number and letter in square brackets, thus [434 A]: these being in
+accordance with the plan of arrangement observed in the larger book.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wish to express my sincere thanks to Miss Alice Johnson, who very
+kindly read over the whole of the proof of this abridgment. I have
+profited largely by her advice as well as from that given me by Miss
+Jane Barlow, to whom my thanks are also due.
+
+L. H. M.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+     [This unfinished preface consists of several passages written at
+     different times by the author, who died on January 17th, 1901. In
+     1896 he arranged that the completion of his book should be in the
+     hands of Dr. Richard Hodgson in case of his death before its
+     publication. In the meantime he had entrusted the general
+     supervision of the press work and much of the detail in marshalling
+     the Appendices to Miss Alice Johnson (now Secretary of the Society
+     for Psychical Research), who was therefore associated with Dr.
+     Hodgson also in the editorial work needed for the completion of the
+     book, and much the greater part of the labour involved fell to her
+     share.]
+
+
+The book which is now at last given to the world is but a partial
+presentation of an ever-growing subject which I have long hoped to
+become able to treat in more adequate fashion. But as knowledge
+increases life rolls by, and I have thought it well to bring out while I
+can even this most imperfect text-book to a branch of research whose
+novelty and strangeness call urgently for some provisional
+systematisation, which, by suggesting fresh inquiries and producing
+further accumulation of evidence, may tend as speedily as possible to
+its own supersession. Few critics of this book can, I think, be more
+fully conscious than its author of its defects and its lacunć; but also
+few critics, I think, have yet realised the importance of the new facts
+which in some fashion the book does actually present.
+
+Many of these facts have already appeared in _Phantasms of the Living_;
+many more in the _Proceedings_ of the Society for Psychical Research;
+but they are far indeed from having yet entered into the scientific
+consciousness of the age. In future years the wonder, I think, will be
+that their announcement was so largely left to a writer with leisure so
+scanty, and with scientific equipment so incomplete.
+
+Whatever value this book may possess is in great measure due to other
+minds than its actual author's. Its very existence, in the first place,
+probably depends upon the existence of the two beloved friends and
+invaluable coadjutors to whose memory I dedicate it now.
+
+The help derived from these departed colleagues, Henry Sidgwick and
+Edmund Gurney, although of a kind and quantity absolutely essential to
+the existence of this work, is not easy to define in all its fulness
+under the changed circumstances of to-day. There was indeed much which
+is measurable;--much of revision of previous work of my own, of
+collaborative experiments, of original thought and discovery. Large
+quotations purposely introduced from Edmund Gurney indicate, although
+imperfectly, how closely interwoven our work on all these subjects
+continued to be until his death. But the benefit which I drew from the
+association went deeper still. The conditions under which this inquiry
+was undertaken were such as to emphasise the need of some intimate moral
+support. A recluse, perhaps, or an eccentric,--or a man living mainly
+with his intellectual inferiors, may find it easy to work steadily and
+confidently at a task which he knows that the bulk of educated men will
+ignore or despise. But this is more difficult for a man who feels
+manifold links with his kind, a man whose desire it is to live among
+minds equal or superior to his own. It is hard, I say, for such a man to
+disregard altogether the expressed or implied disapproval of those
+groups of weighty personages to whom in other matters he is accustomed
+to look up.
+
+I need not say that the attitude of the scientific world--of all the
+intellectual world--then was very much more marked than now. Even now I
+write in full consciousness of the low value commonly attached to
+inquiries of the kind which I pursue. Even now a book on such a subject
+must still expect to evoke, not only legitimate criticism of many kinds,
+but also much of that disgust and resentment which novelty and
+heterodoxy naturally excite. But I have no wish to exalt into a deed of
+daring an enterprise which to the next generation must seem the most
+obvious thing in the world. _Nihil ausi nisi vana contemnere_ will
+certainly be the highest compliment which what seemed to us our bold
+independence of men will receive. Yet gratitude bids me to say that
+however I might in the privacy of my own bosom have 'dared to contemn
+things contemptible,' I should never have ventured my amateurish
+acquirements on a publication of this scale were it not for that slow
+growth of confidence which my respect for the judgment of these two
+friends inspired. Their countenance and fellowship, which at once
+transformed my own share in the work into a delight, has made its
+presentation to the world appear as a duty.
+
+My thanks are due also to another colleague who has passed away, my
+brother, Dr. A. T. Myers, F.R.C.P., who helped me for many years in all
+medical points arising in the work.
+
+To the original furnishers of the evidence my obligations are great and
+manifest, and to the Council of the S.P.R. I also owe thanks for
+permission to use that evidence freely. But I must leave it to the book
+itself to indicate in fuller detail how much is owing to how many men
+and women:--how widely diffused are the work and the interest which have
+found in this book their temporary outcome and exposition.
+
+The book, indeed, is an exposition rather than a proof. I cannot
+summarise within my modest limits the mass of evidence already gathered
+together in the sixteen volumes of _Proceedings_ and the nine volumes of
+the _Journal_ of the S.P.R., in _Phantasms of the Living_ and other
+books hereafter referred to, and in MS. collections. The attempt indeed
+would be quite out of place. This branch of knowledge, like others, must
+be studied carefully and in detail by those who care to understand or to
+advance it.
+
+What I have tried to do here is to render that knowledge more
+assimilable by co-ordinating it in a form as clear and intelligible as
+my own limited skill and the nature of the facts themselves have
+permitted. I have tried to give, in text and in Appendices, enough of
+actual evidence to illustrate each step in my argument:--and I have
+constantly referred the reader to places where further evidence will be
+found.
+
+In minor matters I have aimed above all things at clearness and
+readiness in reference. The division of the book into sections, with
+Appendices bearing the same numbers, will, it is hoped, facilitate the
+use both of syllabus and of references in general. I have even risked
+the appearance of pedantry in adding a glossary. Where many unfamiliar
+facts and ideas have to be dealt with, time is saved in the end if the
+writer explains precisely what his terms mean.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+F. W. H. MYERS.
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY
+
+     NOTE.--The words and phrases here included fall under three main
+     heads:--
+
+     (1) Words common only in philosophical or medical use.
+
+     (2) Words or phrases used in psychical research with some special
+     significance.
+
+     (3) A few words, distinguished by an asterisk, for which the author
+     is himself responsible.
+
+
+_Aboulia._--Loss of power of willing.
+
+_After-image._--A retinal picture of an object seen after removing the
+gaze from the object.
+
+_Agent._--The person who seems to initiate a telepathic transmission.
+
+_Agraphia._--Lack of power to write words.
+
+_Alexia_ or _Word-blindness_.--Lack of power to understand words
+written.
+
+_Anćsthesia_, or the loss of sensation generally, must be distinguished
+from _analgesia_, or the loss of the sense of pain alone.
+
+_Analgesia._--Insensibility to pain.
+
+_Aphasia._--Incapacity of coherent utterance, not caused by structural
+impairment of the vocal organs, but by lesion of the cerebral centres
+for speech.
+
+_Aphonia._--Incapacity of uttering sounds.
+
+_Automatic._--Used of mental images arising and movements made without
+the initiation, and generally without the concurrence, of conscious
+thought and will. _Sensory automatism_ will thus include visual and
+auditory hallucinations. _Motor automatism_ will include messages
+written and words uttered without intention (automatic script,
+trance-utterance, etc.).
+
+_Automnesia._--Spontaneous revival of memories of an earlier condition
+of life.
+
+_Autoscope._--Any instrument which reveals a subliminal motor impulse or
+sensory impression, _e.g._, a divining rod, a tilting table, or a
+planchette.
+
+_Bilocation._--The sensation of being in two different places at once,
+namely where one's organism is, and in a place distant from it.
+
+_Catalepsy._--"An intermittent neurosis producing inability to change
+the position of a limb, while another person can place the muscles in a
+state of flexion or contraction as he will." (Tuke's _Dictionary of
+Psychological Medicine_.)
+
+_Centre of Consciousness._--The place where a percipient imagines
+himself to be. The point of view from which he seems to himself to be
+surveying some phantasmal scene.
+
+_Chromatism._--See _Secondary Sensations_.
+
+_Clair-audience._--The sensation of hearing an internal (but in some way
+veridical) voice.
+
+_Clairvoyance_ (_Lucidité_).--The faculty or act of perceiving, as
+though visually, with some coincidental truth, some distant scene.
+
+_Cćnesthesia._--That consensus or agreement of many organic sensations
+which is a fundamental element in our conception of personal identity.
+
+_Control._--This word is used of the intelligence which purports to
+communicate messages which are written or uttered by the _automatist_,
+_sensitive_ or _medium_.
+
+_*Cosmopathic._--Open to the access of supernormal knowledge or emotion.
+
+_Cryptomnesia._--Submerged or subliminal memory of events forgotten by
+the supraliminal self.
+
+_*Dextro-cerebral_ (opposed to _*Sinistro-cerebral_) of left-handed
+persons as employing preferentially the _right_ hemisphere of the brain.
+
+_Diathesis._--Habit, capacity, constitutional disposition or tendency.
+
+_Dimorphism._--In crystals the property of assuming two incompatible
+forms: in plants and animals, difference of form between members of the
+same species. Used of a condition of alternating personalities, in which
+memory, character, etc., present themselves at different times in
+different forms in the same person.
+
+_Discarnate._--Disembodied, opposed to _incarnate_.
+
+_Disintegration of Personality._--Used of any condition where the sense
+of personality is not unitary and continuous: especially when secondary
+and transitory personalities intervene.
+
+_Dynamogeny._--The increase of nervous energy by appropriate stimuli,
+often opposed to _inhibition_.
+
+_Ecmnesia._--Loss of memory of a period of time.
+
+_*Entencephalic._--On the analogy of _entoptic_: of sensations, etc.,
+which have their origin within the brain, not in the external world.
+
+_Eugenics._--The science of improving the race.
+
+_Falsidical._--Of hallucinations _delusive_, _i.e._, when there is
+nothing objective to which they correspond. The correlative term to
+_veridical_.
+
+_Glossolaly._--"Speaking with tongues," _i.e._, automatic utterance of
+words not belonging to any real language.
+
+_Hallucination._--Any sensory perception which has no objective
+counterpart within the field of vision, hearing, etc., is termed a
+hallucination.
+
+_Heterćsthesia._--A form of sensibility decidedly different from any of
+those which can be referred to the action of the known senses.
+
+_Hyperboulia._--Increased power over the organism,--resembling the power
+which we call _will_ when it is exercised over the voluntary
+muscles,--which is seen in the bodily changes effected by
+self-suggestion.
+
+_Hyperćsthesia._--Unusual acuteness of the senses.
+
+_Hypermnesia._--"Over-activity of the memory; a condition in which past
+acts, feelings, or ideas are brought vividly to the mind, which, in its
+normal condition, has wholly lost the remembrance of them." (Tuke's
+_Dict._)
+
+_*Hyperpromethia._--Supernormal power of foresight.
+
+_Hypnagogic._--_Illusions hypnagogiques_ (Maury) are the vivid illusions
+of sight or sound--"faces in the dark," etc.--which sometimes accompany
+the oncoming of sleep. To similar illusions accompanying the _departure_
+of sleep, as when a dream-figure persists for a few moments into waking
+life, I have given the name _*hypnopompic_.
+
+_Hypnogenous zones._--Regions by pressure on which hypnosis is induced
+in some hysterical persons.
+
+_*Hypnopompic._--See _Hypnagogic_.
+
+_Hysteria._--"A disordered condition of the nervous system, the
+anatomical seat and nature of which are unknown to medical science, but
+of which the symptoms consist in well-marked and very varied
+disturbances of nerve-function" (_Ency. Brit._). Hysterical affections
+are not dependent on any discoverable lesion.
+
+_Hysterogenous zones._--Points or tracts on the skin of a hysterical
+person, pressure on which will induce a hysterical attack.
+
+_Ideational._--Used of impressions which display some distinct notion,
+but not of sensory nature.
+
+_Induced._--Of hallucinations, etc., intentionally produced.
+
+_Levitation._--A raising of objects from the ground by supposed
+supernormal means; especially of living persons.
+
+_Medium._--A person through whom communication is deemed to be carried
+on between living men and spirits of the departed. It is often better
+replaced by _automatist_ or _sensitive_.
+
+_Message._--Used for any communication, not necessarily verbal, from one
+to another stratum of the automatist's personality, or from an external
+intelligence to the automatist's mind.
+
+_Metallćsthesia._--A form of sensibility alleged to exist which enables
+some hypnotised or hysterical subjects to discriminate between the
+contacts of various metals by sensations not derived from their ordinary
+properties of weight, etc.
+
+_Metastasis._--Change of the seat of a bodily function from one place
+(_e.g._, brain-centre) to another.
+
+_*Metetherial._--That which appears to lie after or beyond the ether:
+the metetherial environment denotes the spiritual or transcendental
+world in which the soul may be supposed to exist.
+
+_*Methectic._--Of communications between one stratum of a man's
+intelligence and another.
+
+_Mirror-writing_ (_écriture renversée, Spiegel-schrift_).--Writing so
+inverted, or, more exactly, _perverted_, as to resemble writing
+reflected in a mirror.
+
+_Mnemonic chain._--A continuous series of memories, especially when the
+continuity persists after an interruption.
+
+_Motor._--Used of an impulse to action not carrying with it any definite
+idea or sensory impression.
+
+_Negative hallucination_ or _systematised anćthesia_.--Signifies the
+condition of an entranced subject who, as the result of a suggestion, is
+unable to perceive some object or to hear some sound, etc.
+
+_Number forms._--See _Secondary sensations_.
+
+_Objectify._--To externalize a phantom as if it were a material object;
+to see it as a part of the waking world.
+
+_*Panmnesia._--A potential recollection of all impressions.
+
+_Parćsthesia._--Erroneous or morbid sensation.
+
+_Paramnesia._--All forms of erroneous memory.
+
+_Paraphasia._--The erroneous and involuntary use of one word for
+another.
+
+_Percipient._--The correlative term to Agent; the person on whose mind
+the telepathic impact falls; or, more generally, the person who
+perceives any motor or sensory impression.
+
+_Phantasm and Phantom._--Phantasm and phantom are, of course, mere
+variants of the same word; but since phantom has become generally
+restricted to _visual_ hallucinations, it is convenient to take phantasm
+to cover a wider range, and to signify any hallucinatory sensory
+impression, whatever sense--whether sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste,
+or diffused sensibility--may happen to be affected.
+
+_Phantasmogenetic centre._--A point in space apparently modified by a
+spirit in such a way that persons present near it perceive a phantasm.
+
+_Phobies._--Irrational restricting or disabling preoccupations or fears;
+_e.g._, _agoraphobia_, fear of open spaces.
+
+_Photism._--See _Secondary sensations_.
+
+_Point de repčre._--Guiding mark. Used of some (generally inconspicuous)
+real object which a hallucinated subject sometimes sees as the nucleus
+of his hallucination, and the movements of which suggest corresponding
+movements of the hallucinatory object.
+
+_Polyzoism._--The property, in a complex organism, of being composed of
+minor and quasi-independent organisms. This is sometimes called
+"colonial constitution," from animal _colonies_.
+
+_Possession._--A developed form of motor automatism, in which the
+automatist's own personality disappears for a time, while there appears
+to be a more or less complete substitution of personality, writing or
+speech being given by another spirit through the entranced organism.
+
+_Post-hypnotic._--Used of a suggestion given during the hypnotic trance,
+but intended to operate after that trance has ceased.
+
+_Precognition._--Knowledge of impending events supernormally acquired.
+
+_Premonition._--A supernormal indication of any kind of event still in
+the future.
+
+_*Preversion._--A tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a
+further point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet
+been reached; opposed to reversion.
+
+_*Promnesia._--The paradoxical sensation of recollecting a scene which
+is only now occurring for the first time; the sense of the _déjŕ vu_.
+
+_*Psychorrhagy._--A special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the
+phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a
+psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a
+phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space.
+
+_*Psychorrhagic diathesis._--A habit or capacity of detaching some
+psychical element, involuntarily and without purpose, in such a manner
+as to produce a phantasm.
+
+_Psycho-therapeutics._--"Treatment of disease by the influence of the
+mind on the body." (Tuke's _Dict._)
+
+_Reciprocal._--Used of cases where there is both agency and percipience
+at each end of the telepathic chain, so that A perceives P, and P
+perceives A also.
+
+_*Retrocognition._--Knowledge of the past, supernormally acquired.
+
+_Secondary personality._--It sometimes happens, as the result of shock,
+disease, or unknown causes, that an individual experiences an alteration
+of memory and character, amounting to a change of personality, which
+generally seems to have come on during sleep. The new personality is in
+that case termed _secondary_, in distinction to the original, or
+_primary_, personality.
+
+_Secondary sensations_ (_Secunddrempfindungen_, _audition colorée_,
+_sound-seeing_, _synćsthesia_, _etc._).--With some persons every
+sensation of one type is accompanied by a sensation of another type; as
+for instance, a special sound may be accompanied by a special sensation
+of colour or light (_chromatisms_ or _photisms_). This phenomenon is
+analogous to that of _number-forms_,--a kind of diagrammatic mental
+picture which accompanies the conception of a progression of numbers.
+See Galton's _Inquiries into Human Faculty_.
+
+_Shell-hearing._--The induction of hallucinatory voices, etc., by
+listening to a shell. Analogous to crystal-gazing.
+
+_Stigmatisation._--The production of blisters or other cutaneous changes
+on the hands, feet, or elsewhere, by suggestion or self-suggestion.
+
+_Subliminal._--Of thoughts, feelings, etc., lying beneath the ordinary
+_threshold_ (_limen_) of consciousness, as opposed to _supraliminal_,
+lying _above_ the threshold.
+
+_Suggestion._--The process of effectively impressing upon the subliminal
+intelligence the wishes of some other person. _Self-suggestion_ means a
+suggestion conveyed by the subject himself from one stratum of his
+personality to another, without external intervention.
+
+_*Supernormal._--Of a faculty or phenomenon which transcends ordinary
+experience. Used in preference to the word _supernatural_, as not
+assuming that there is anything outside nature or any arbitrary
+interference with natural law.
+
+_Supraliminal._--See _Subliminal_.
+
+_Synćsthesia._--See _Secondary Sensations_.
+
+_Synergy._--A number of actions correlated together, or combined into a
+group.
+
+_Telekinesis._--Used of alleged supernormal movements of objects, not
+due to any known force.
+
+_*Telepathy._--The communication of impressions of any kind from one
+mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.
+
+_*Telćsthesia._--Any direct sensation or perception of objects or
+conditions independently of the recognised channels of sense, and also
+under such circumstances that no known mind external to the percipient's
+can be suggested as the source of the knowledge thus gained.
+
+_*Telergy._--The force exercised by the mind of an agent in impressing a
+percipient,--involving a direct influence of the extraneous spirit on
+the brain or organism of the percipient.
+
+_Veridical._--Of hallucinations, when they correspond to real events
+happening elsewhere and unknown to the percipient.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+    Maior agit deus, atque opera la maiora remittit.
+
+    --VIRGIL.
+
+
+In the long story of man's endeavours to understand his own environment
+and to govern his own fates, there is one gap or omission so singular
+that, however we may afterwards contrive to explain the fact, its simple
+statement has the air of a paradox. Yet it is strictly true to say that
+man has never yet applied to the problems which most profoundly concern
+him those methods of inquiry which in attacking all other problems he
+has found the most efficacious.
+
+The question for man most momentous of all is whether or no he has an
+immortal soul; or--to avoid the word _immortal_, which belongs to the
+realm of infinities--whether or no his personality involves any element
+which can survive bodily death. In this direction have always lain the
+gravest fears, the farthest-reaching hopes, which could either oppress
+or stimulate mortal minds.
+
+On the other hand, the method which our race has found most effective in
+acquiring knowledge is by this time familiar to all men. It is the
+method of modern Science--that process which consists in an
+interrogation of Nature entirely dispassionate, patient, systematic;
+such careful experiment and cumulative record as can often elicit from
+her slightest indications her deepest truths. That method is now
+dominant throughout the civilised world; and although in many directions
+experiments may be difficult and dubious, facts rare and elusive,
+Science works slowly on and bides her time,--refusing to fall back upon
+tradition or to launch into speculation, merely because strait is the
+gate which leads to valid discovery, indisputable truth.
+
+I say, then, that this method has never yet been applied to the
+all-important problem of the existence, the powers, the destiny of the
+human soul.
+
+Nor is this strange omission due to any general belief that the problem
+is in its nature incapable of solution by any observation whatever which
+mankind could make. That resolutely agnostic view--I may almost say that
+scientific superstition--"_ignoramus et ignorabimus_"--is no doubt held
+at the present date by many learned minds. But it has never been the
+creed, nor is it now the creed, of the human race generally. In most
+civilised countries there has been for nearly two thousand years a
+distinct belief that survival has actually been proved by certain
+phenomena observed at a given date in Palestine. And beyond the
+Christian pale--whether through reason, instinct, or superstition--it
+has ever been commonly held that ghostly phenomena of one kind or
+another exist to testify to a life beyond the life we know.
+
+But, nevertheless, neither those who believe on vague grounds nor those
+who believe on definite grounds that the question might possibly be
+solved, or has actually been solved, by human observation of objective
+facts, have hitherto made any serious attempt to connect and correlate
+that belief with the general scheme of belief for which Science already
+vouches. They have not sought for fresh corroborative instances, for
+analogies, for explanations; rather they have kept their convictions on
+these fundamental matters in a separate and sealed compartment of their
+minds, a compartment consecrated to religion or to superstition, but not
+to observation or to experiment.
+
+It is my object in the present work--as it has from the first been the
+object of the Society for Psychical Research, on whose behalf most of
+the evidence here set forth has been collected,--to do what can be done
+to break down that artificial wall of demarcation which has thus far
+excluded from scientific treatment precisely the problems which stand in
+most need of all the aids to discovery which such treatment can afford.
+
+Yet let me first explain that by the word "scientific" I signify an
+authority to which I submit myself--not a standard which I claim to
+attain. Any science of which I can here speak as possible must be a
+_nascent_ science--not such as one of those vast systems of connected
+knowledge which thousands of experts now steadily push forward in
+laboratories in every land--but such as each one of those great sciences
+was in its dim and poor beginning, when a few monks groped among the
+properties of "the noble metals," or a few Chaldean shepherds outwatched
+the setting stars.
+
+What I am able to insist upon is the mere Socratic rudiment of these
+organisms of exact thought--the first axiomatic prerequisite of any
+valid progress. My one contention is that in the discussion of the
+deeper problems of man's nature and destiny there ought to be exactly
+the same openness of mind, exactly the same diligence in the search for
+objective evidence of any kind, exactly the same critical analysis of
+results, as is habitually shown, for instance, in the discussion of the
+nature and destiny of the planet upon which man now moves.
+
+Obvious truism although this statement may at first seem, it will
+presently be found, I think, that those who subscribe to it are in fact
+committing themselves to inquiries of a wider and stranger type than any
+to which they are accustomed;--are stepping outside certain narrow
+limits within which, by ancient convention, disputants on either side of
+these questions are commonly confined.
+
+A brief recall to memory of certain familiar historical facts will serve
+to make my meaning clearer. Let us consider how it has come about that,
+whereas the problem of man's survival of death is by most persons
+regarded as a problem in its nature soluble by sufficient evidence, and
+whereas to many persons the traditional evidence commonly adduced
+appears insufficient,--nevertheless no serious effort has been made on
+either side to discover whether other and more recent evidence can or
+cannot be brought forward.
+
+A certain broad answer to this inquiry, although it cannot be said to be
+at all points familiar, is not in reality far to seek. It is an answer
+which would seem strange indeed to some visitant from a planet peopled
+wholly by scientific minds. Yet among a race like our own, concerned
+first and primarily to live and work with thoughts undistracted from
+immediate needs, the answer is natural enough. For the fact simply is
+that the intimate importance of this central problem has barred the way
+to its methodical, its scientific solution.
+
+There are some beliefs for which mankind cannot afford to wait. "What
+must I do to be saved?" is a question quite otherwise urgent than the
+cause of the tides or the meaning of the marks on the moon. Men must
+settle roughly somehow what it is that from the Unseen World they have
+reason to fear or to hope. Beliefs grow up in direct response to this
+need of belief; in order to support themselves they claim unique
+sanction; and thus along with these specific beliefs grows also the
+general habit of regarding matters that concern that Unseen World as
+somehow tabooed or segregated from ordinary observation or inquiry.
+
+Let us pass from generalities to the actual history of Western
+civilisation. In an age when scattered ritual, local faiths--tribal
+solutions of cosmic problems--were destroying each other by mere contact
+and fusion, an event occurred which in the brief record of man's still
+incipient civilisation may be regarded as unique. A life was lived in
+which the loftiest response which man's need of moral guidance had ever
+received was corroborated by phenomena which have been widely regarded
+as convincingly miraculous, and which are said to have culminated in a
+Resurrection from the dead. To those phenomena or to that Resurrection
+it would at this point be illegitimate for me to refer in defence of my
+argument. I have appealed to Science, and to Science I must go;--in the
+sense that it would be unfair for me to claim support from that which
+Science in her strictness can set aside as the tradition of a
+pre-scientific age. Yet this one great tradition, as we know, has, as a
+fact, won the adhesion and reverence of the great majority of European
+minds. The complex results which followed from this triumph of
+Christianity have been discussed by many historians. But one result
+which here appears to us in a new light was this--that the Christian
+religion, the Christian Church, became for Europe the accredited
+representative and guardian of all phenomena bearing upon the World
+Unseen. So long as Christianity stood dominant, all phenomena which
+seemed to transcend experience were absorbed in her realm--were
+accounted as minor indications of the activity of her angels or of her
+fiends. And when Christianity was seriously attacked, these minor
+manifestations passed unconsidered. The priests thought it safest to
+defend their own traditions, their own intuitions, without going afield
+in search of independent evidence of a spiritual world. Their assailants
+kept their powder and shot for the orthodox ramparts, ignoring any
+isolated strongholds which formed no part of the main line of defence.
+
+Meantime, indeed, the laws of Nature held their wonted way. As ever,
+that which the years had once brought they brought again; and every here
+and there some marvel, liker to the old stories than any one cared to
+assert, cropped up between superstition on the one hand and contemptuous
+indifference on the other. Witchcraft, Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism,
+Spiritism--these especially, amid many minor phenomena, stood out in
+turn as precursory of the inevitable wider inquiry. A very few words on
+each of these four movements may suffice here to show their connection
+with my present theme.
+
+_Witchcraft._--The lesson which witchcraft teaches with regard to the
+validity of human testimony is the more remarkable because it was so
+long and so completely misunderstood. The belief in witches long
+passed--as well it might--as the culminant example of human ignorance
+and folly; and in so comparatively recent a book as Mr. Lecky's "History
+of Rationalism," the sudden decline of this popular conviction, without
+argument or disapproval, is used to illustrate the irresistible melting
+away of error and falsity in the "intellectual climate" of a wiser age.
+Since about 1880, however, when French experiments especially had
+afforded conspicuous examples of what a hysterical woman could come to
+believe under suggestion from others or from herself, it has begun to be
+felt that the phenomena of witchcraft were very much what the phenomena
+of the Salpętričre would seem to be to the patients themselves, if left
+alone in the hospital without a medical staff. And in _Phantasms of the
+Living_, Edmund Gurney, after subjecting the literature of witchcraft to
+a more careful analysis than any one till then had thought it worth
+while to apply, was able to show that practically all recorded
+first-hand depositions (made apart from torture) in the long story of
+witchcraft may quite possibly have been _true_, to the best belief of
+the deponents; true, that is to say, as representing the conviction of
+sane (though often hysterical) persons, who merely made the almost
+inevitable mistake of confusing self-suggested hallucinations with
+waking fact. Nay, even the insensible spots on the witches were no doubt
+really anćsthetic--involved a first discovery of a now familiar clinical
+symptom--the _zones analgésiques_ of the patients of Pitres or Charcot.
+Witchcraft, in fact, was a gigantic, a cruel psychological and
+pathological experiment conducted by inquisitors upon hysteria; but it
+was conducted in the dark, and when the barbarous explanation dropped
+out of credence much of possible discovery was submerged as well.
+
+_Mesmer._--Again, the latent possibilities of "suggestion,"--though not
+yet under that name, and mingled with who knows what else?--broke forth
+into a blaze in the movement headed by Mesmer;--at once discoverer and
+charlatan. Again the age was unripe, and scientific opposition, although
+not so formidable as the religious opposition which had sent witches to
+the stake, was yet strong enough to check for the second time the
+struggling science. Hardly till our own generation--hardly even now--has
+a third effort found better acceptance, and hypnotism and
+psycho-therapeutics, in which every well-attested fact of witchcraft or
+of mesmerism finds, if not its explanation, at least its parallel, are
+establishing themselves as a recognised and advancing method of
+relieving human ills.
+
+This brief sketch of the development as it were by successive impulses,
+under strong disbelief and discouragement, of a group of mental
+tendencies, faculties, or sensibilities now recognised as truly existing
+and as often salutary, is closely paralleled by the development, under
+similar difficulties, of another group of faculties or sensibilities,
+whose existence is still disputed, but which if firmly established may
+prove to be of even greater moment for mankind.
+
+At no time known to us, whether before or since the Christian era, has
+the series of _trance-manifestations_,--of supposed communications with
+a supernal world,--entirely ceased. Sometimes, as in the days of St.
+Theresa, such trance or ecstasy has been, one may say, the central or
+culminant fact in the Christian world. Of these experiences I must not
+here treat. The evidence for them is largely of a subjective type, and
+they may belong more fitly to some future discussion as to the amount of
+confidence due to the interpretation given by entranced persons to their
+own phenomena.
+
+But in the midst of this long series, and in full analogy to many minor
+cases, occurs the exceptional trance-history of Emmanuel Swedenborg. In
+this case, as is well known, there appears to have been excellent
+objective evidence both of clairvoyance or telćsthesia[1] and of
+communication with departed persons;--and we can only regret that the
+philosopher Kant, who satisfied himself of some part of Swedenborg's
+supernormal[2] gift, did not press further an inquiry surpassed in
+importance by none of those upon which his master-mind was engaged.
+Apart, however, from these objective evidences, the mere subject-matter
+of Swedenborg's trance-revelations was enough to claim respectful
+attention. I cannot here discuss the strange mixture which they present
+of slavish literalism with exalted speculation, of pedantic orthodoxy
+with physical and moral insight far beyond the level of that age. It is
+enough to say here that even as Socrates called down philosophy from
+heaven to earth, so in a somewhat different sense it was Swedenborg who
+called up philosophy again from earth to heaven;--who originated the
+notion of science in the spiritual world, as earnestly, though not so
+persuasively, as Socrates originated the idea of science in this world
+which we seem to know. It was to Swedenborg first that that unseen world
+appeared before all things as a realm of law; a region not of mere
+emotional vagueness or stagnancy of adoration, but of definite progress
+according to definite relations of cause and effect, resulting from
+structural laws of spiritual existence and intercourse which we may in
+time learn partially to apprehend. For my own part I regard
+Swedenborg,--not, assuredly, as an inspired teacher, nor even as a
+trustworthy interpreter of his own experiences,--but yet as a true and
+early precursor of that great inquiry which it is our present object to
+advance.
+
+The next pioneer--fortunately still amongst us--whom I must mention even
+in this summary notice, is the celebrated physicist and chemist, Sir W.
+Crookes. Just as Swedenborg was the first leading man of science who
+distinctly conceived of the spiritual world as a world of law, so was
+Sir W. Crookes the first leading man of science who seriously
+endeavoured to test the alleged mutual influence and interpenetration of
+the spiritual world and our own by experiments of scientific
+precision.[3] Beyond the establishment of certain supernormal facts
+Crookes declined to go. But a large group of persons have founded upon
+these and similar facts a scheme of belief known as Modern Spiritualism,
+or Spiritism. Later chapters in this book will show how much I owe to
+certain observations made by members of this group--how often my own
+conclusions concur with conclusions at which they have previously
+arrived. And yet this work of mine is in large measure a critical attack
+upon the main Spiritist position, as held, say, by Mr. A. R. Wallace,
+its most eminent living supporter,--the belief, namely, that all or
+almost all supernormal phenomena are due to the action of spirits of the
+dead. By far the larger proportion, as I hold, are due to the action of
+the still embodied spirit of the agent or percipient himself. Apart from
+speculative differences, moreover, I altogether dissent from the
+conversion into a sectarian creed of what I hold should be a branch of
+scientific inquiry, growing naturally out of our existing knowledge. It
+is, I believe, largely to this temper of uncritical acceptance,
+degenerating often into blind credulity, that we must refer the lack of
+progress in Spiritualistic literature, and the encouragement which has
+often been bestowed upon manifest fraud,--so often, indeed, as to create
+among scientific men a strong indisposition to the study of phenomena
+recorded or advocated in a tone so alien from Science.
+
+I know not how much of originality or importance may be attributed by
+subsequent students of the subject to the step next in order in this
+series of approximations. To those immediately concerned, the feeling of
+a new departure was inevitably given by the very smallness of the
+support which they for a long time received, and by the difficulty
+which they found in making their point of view intelligible to the
+scientific, to the religious, or even to the spiritualistic world. In
+about 1873--at the crest, as one may say, of perhaps the highest wave of
+materialism which has ever swept over these shores--it became the
+conviction of a small group of Cambridge friends that the deep questions
+thus at issue must be fought out in a way more thorough than the
+champions either of religion or of materialism had yet suggested. Our
+attitudes of mind were in some ways different; but to myself, at least,
+it seemed that no adequate attempt had yet been made even to determine
+whether anything could be learnt as to an unseen world or no; for that
+if anything were knowable about such a world in such fashion that
+Science could adopt and maintain that knowledge, it must be discovered
+by no analysis of tradition, and by no manipulation of metaphysics, but
+simply by experiment and observation;--simply by the application to
+phenomena within us and around us of precisely the same methods of
+deliberate, dispassionate, exact inquiry which have built up our actual
+knowledge of the world which we can touch and see. I can hardly even now
+guess to how many of my readers this will seem a truism, and to how many
+a paradox. Truism or paradox, such a thought suggested a kind of effort,
+which, so far as we could discover, had never yet been made. For what
+seemed needful was an inquiry of quite other scope than the mere
+analysis of historical documents, or of the _origines_ of any alleged
+revelation in the past. It must be an inquiry resting primarily, as all
+scientific inquiries in the stricter sense now must rest, upon objective
+facts actually observable, upon experiments which we can repeat to-day,
+and which we may hope to carry further to-morrow. It must be an inquiry
+based, to use an old term, on the uniformitarian hypothesis; on the
+presumption, that is to say, that _if a spiritual world exists, and if
+that world has at any epoch been manifest or even discoverable, then it
+ought to be manifest or discoverable now_.
+
+It was from this side, and from these general considerations, that the
+group with which I have worked approached the subject. Our methods, our
+canons, were all to make. In those early days we were more devoid of
+precedents, of guidance, even of criticism that went beyond mere
+expressions of contempt, than is now readily conceived. Seeking evidence
+as best we could--collecting round us a small group of persons willing
+to help in that quest for residual phenomena in the nature and
+experience of man--we were at last fortunate enough to discover a
+convergence of experimental and of spontaneous evidence upon one
+definite and important point. We were led to believe that there was
+truth in a thesis which at least since Swedenborg and the early
+mesmerists had been repeatedly, but cursorily and ineffectually,
+presented to mankind--the thesis that a communication can take place
+from mind to mind without the agency of the recognised organs of sense.
+We found that this agency, discernible even on trivial occasions by
+suitable experiment, seemed to connect itself with an agency more
+intense, or at any rate more recognisable, which operated at moments of
+crisis or at the hour of death. Edmund Gurney--the invaluable
+collaborator and friend whose loss in 1888 was our heaviest
+discouragement--set forth this evidence in a large work, _Phantasms of
+the Living_, in whose preparation Mr. Podmore and I took a minor part.
+The fifteen years which have elapsed since the publication of this book
+in 1886 have added to the evidence on which Gurney relied, and have
+shown (I venture to say) the general soundness of the canons of evidence
+and the lines of argument which it was his task to shape and to
+employ.[4]
+
+Of fundamental importance, indeed, is this doctrine of telepathy--the
+first law, may one not say?--laid open to man's discovery, which, in my
+view at least, while operating in the material, is itself a law of the
+spiritual or _metetherial_ world. In the course of this work it will be
+my task to show in many connections how far-reaching are the
+implications of this direct and supersensory communion of mind with
+mind. Among those implications none can be more momentous than the light
+thrown by this discovery upon man's intimate nature and possible
+survival of death.
+
+We gradually discovered that the accounts of apparitions at the moment
+of death--testifying to a supersensory communication between the dying
+man and the friend who sees him--led on without perceptible break to
+apparitions occurring after the death of the person seen, but while that
+death was yet unknown to the percipient, and thus apparently due, not to
+mere brooding memory, but to a continued action of that departed spirit.
+The task next incumbent on us therefore seemed plainly to be the
+collection and analysis of evidence of this and other types, pointing
+directly to the survival of man's spirit. But after pursuing this task
+for some years I felt that in reality the step from the action of
+embodied to the action of disembodied spirits would still seem too
+sudden if taken in this direct way. So far, indeed, as the evidence from
+apparitions went, the series seemed continuous from phantasms of the
+living to phantasms of the dead. But the whole mass of evidence _primâ
+facie_ pointing to man's survival was of a much more complex kind. It
+consisted largely, for example, in written or spoken utterances, coming
+through the hand or voice of living men, but claiming to proceed from a
+disembodied source. To these utterances, as a whole, no satisfactory
+criterion had ever been applied.
+
+In considering cases of this kind, then, it became gradually plain to me
+that before we could safely mark off any group of manifestations as
+definitely implying an influence from beyond the grave, there was need
+of a more searching review of the capacities of man's incarnate
+personality than psychologists unfamiliar with this new evidence had
+thought it worth their while to undertake.
+
+It was only slowly, and as it were of necessity, that I embarked on a
+task which needed for its proper accomplishment a knowledge and training
+far beyond what I could claim. The very inadequate sketch which has
+resulted from my efforts is even in its author's view no more than
+preparatory and precursive to the fuller and sounder treatment of the
+same subject which I doubt not that the new century will receive from
+more competent hands. The truest success of this book will lie in its
+rapid supersession by a better. For this will show that at least I have
+not erred in supposing that a serious treatise on these topics is
+nothing else than the inevitable complement and conclusion of the slow
+process by which man has brought under the domain of science every group
+of attainable phenomena in turn--every group save this.
+
+Let me then without further preamble embark upon that somewhat detailed
+survey of human faculty, as manifested during various phases of human
+personality, which is needful in order to throw fresh light on these
+unfamiliar themes. My discussion, I may say at once, will avoid
+metaphysics as carefully as it will avoid theology. I avoid theology, as
+already explained, because I consider that in arguments founded upon
+experiment and observation I have no right to appeal for support to
+traditional or subjective considerations, however important. For
+somewhat similar reasons I do not desire to introduce the idea of
+personality with any historical _résumé_ of the philosophical opinions
+which have been held by various thinkers in the past, nor myself to
+speculate on matters lying beyond the possible field of objective proof.
+I shall merely for the sake of clearness begin by the briefest possible
+statement of two views of human personality which cannot be ignored,
+namely, the old-fashioned or common-sense view thereof, which is still
+held by the mass of mankind, and the newer view of experimental
+psychology, bringing out that composite or "colonial" character which on
+a close examination every personality of men or animals is seen to
+wear.
+
+The following passage, taken from a work once of much note, Reid's
+"Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man," expresses the simple _primâ
+facie_ view with care and precision, yet with no marked impress of any
+one philosophical school:
+
+     The conviction which every man has of his identity, as far back as
+     his memory reaches, needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it;
+     and no philosophy can weaken it without first producing some degree
+     of insanity.... My personal identity, therefore, implies the
+     continued existence of that indivisible thing which I call myself.
+     Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and
+     deliberates, and resolves, and acts, and suffers. I am not thought,
+     I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and
+     acts, and suffers. My thoughts and actions and feelings change
+     every moment; they have no continued, but a successive existence;
+     but that _self_ or _I_, to which they belong, is permanent, and has
+     the same relation to all succeeding thoughts, actions, and feelings
+     which I call mine.... The identity of a person is a perfect
+     identity; wherever it is real it admits of no degrees; and it is
+     impossible that a person should be in part the same and in part
+     different, because a person is a _monad_, and is not divisible into
+     parts. Identity, when applied to persons, has no ambiguity, and
+     admits not of degrees, or of more and less. It is the foundation of
+     all rights and obligations, and of all accountableness; and the
+     notion of it is fixed and precise.
+
+Contrast with this the passage with which M. Ribot concludes his essay
+on "Les Maladies de la Personnalité."
+
+     It is the organism, with the brain, its supreme representative,
+     which constitutes the real personality; comprising in itself the
+     remains of all that we have been and the possibilities of all that
+     we shall be. The whole individual character is there inscribed,
+     with its active and passive aptitudes, its sympathies and
+     antipathies, its genius, its talent or its stupidity, its virtues
+     and its vices, its torpor or its activity. The part thereof which
+     emerges into consciousness is little compared with what remains
+     buried, but operative nevertheless. The conscious personality is
+     never more than a small fraction of the psychical personality. The
+     unity of the Ego is not therefore the unity of a single entity
+     diffusing itself among multiple phenomena; it is the co-ordination
+     of a certain number of states perpetually renascent, and having for
+     their sole common basis the vague feeling of our body. This unity
+     does not diffuse itself downwards, but is aggregated by ascent from
+     below; it is not an initial but a terminal point.
+
+     Does then this perfect unity really exist? In the rigorous, the
+     mathematical sense, assuredly it does _not_. In a relative sense it
+     is met with,--rarely and for a moment. When a good marksman takes
+     aim, or a skilful surgeon operates, his whole body and mind
+     converge towards a single act. But note the result; under those
+     conditions the sentiment of real personality disappears, for the
+     conscious individual is simplified into a single idea, and the
+     personal sentiment is excluded by the complete unification of
+     consciousness. We thus return by another route to the same
+     conclusion; _the Self is a co-ordination_. It oscillates between
+     two extremes at each of which it ceases to exist;--absolute unity
+     and absolute incoherence.
+
+     The last word of all this is that since the consensus of
+     consciousness is subordinated to the consensus of the organism, the
+     problem of the unity of the Ego is in its ultimate form a problem
+     of Biology. Let Biology explain, if it can, the genesis of
+     organisms and the solidarity of their constituent parts. The
+     psychological explanation must needs follow on the same track.
+
+Here, then, we have two clear and definite views,--supported, the one by
+our inmost consciousness, the other by unanswerable observation and
+inference,--yet apparently incompatible the one with the other. And in
+fact by most writers they have been felt and acknowledged to be even
+hopelessly incompatible. The supporters of the view that "The Self is a
+co-ordination,"--and this, I need hardly say, is now the view prevalent
+among experimental psychologists,--have frankly given up any notion of
+an underlying unity,--of a life independent of the organism,--in a word,
+of a human soul. The supporters of the unity of the Ego, on the other
+hand, if they have not been able to be equally explicit in _denying_ the
+opposite view, have made up for this by the thorough-going way in which
+they have _ignored_ it. I know of no source from which valid help has
+been offered towards the reconcilement of the two opposing systems in a
+profounder synthesis. If I believe--as I do believe--that in the present
+work some help in this direction is actually given, this certainly does
+not mean that I suppose myself capable of stitching the threadbare
+metaphysical arguments into a more stable fabric. It simply means that
+certain fresh evidence can now be adduced, which has the effect of
+showing the case on each side in a novel light;--nay, even of closing
+the immediate controversy by a judgment more decisively in favour of
+_both_ parties than either could have expected. On the one side, and in
+favour of the co-ordinators,--all their analysis of the Self into its
+constituent elements, all that they urge of positive observation, of
+objective experiment, must--as I shall maintain on the strength of the
+new facts which I shall adduce--be unreservedly conceded. Let them push
+their analysis as far as they like,--let them get down, if they can, to
+those ultimate infinitesimal psychical elements from which is upbuilt
+the complex, the composite, the "colonial" structure and constitution of
+man. All this may well be valid and important work. It is only on their
+_negative_ side that the conclusions of this school need a complete
+overhauling. Deeper, bolder inquiry along their own line shows that
+they have erred when they asserted that analysis showed no trace of
+faculty beyond such as the life of earth--as they conceive it--could
+foster, or the environment of earth employ. For in reality analysis
+shows traces of faculty which this material or planetary life could not
+have called into being, and whose exercise even here and now involves
+and necessitates the existence of a spiritual world.
+
+On the other side, and in favour of the partisans of the unity of the
+Ego, the effect of the new evidence is to raise their claim to a far
+higher ground, and to substantiate it for the first time with the
+strongest presumptive proof which can be imagined for it;--a proof,
+namely, that the Ego can and does survive--not only the minor
+disintegrations which affect it during earth-life--but the crowning
+disintegration of bodily death. In view of this unhoped-for ratification
+of their highest dream, they may be more than content to surrender as
+untenable the far narrower conception of the unitary Self which was all
+that "common-sense philosophies" had ventured to claim. The "conscious
+Self" of each of us, as we call it,--the empirical, the supraliminal
+Self, as I should prefer to say,--does not comprise the whole of the
+consciousness or of the faculty within us. There exists a more
+comprehensive consciousness, a profounder faculty, which for the most
+part remains potential only so far as regards the life of earth, but
+from which the consciousness and the faculty of earth-life are mere
+selections, and which reasserts itself in its plenitude after the
+liberating change of death.
+
+Towards this conclusion, which assumed for me something like its present
+shape some fourteen years since,[5] a long series of tentative
+speculations, based on gradually accruing evidence, has slowly conducted
+me. The conception is one which has hitherto been regarded as purely
+mystical; and if I endeavour to plant it upon a scientific basis I
+certainly shall not succeed in stating it in its final terms or in
+supporting it with the best arguments which longer experience will
+suggest. Its validity, indeed, will be impressed--if at all--upon the
+reader only by the successive study of the various kinds of evidence to
+which this book will refer him.
+
+Yet so far as the initial possibility or plausibility of such a widened
+conception of human consciousness is concerned;--and this is all which
+can be dealt with at this moment of its first introduction;--I have not
+seen in such criticism as has hitherto been bestowed upon my theory any
+very weighty demurrer.[6]
+
+"Normally at least," says one critic, summarising in a few words the
+ordinary view, "all the consciousness we have at any moment corresponds
+to all the activity which is going on at that moment in the brain. There
+is one unitary conscious state accompanying all the simultaneous brain
+excitations together, and each single part of the brain-process
+contributes something to its nature. None of the brain-processes split
+themselves off from the rest and have a separate consciousness of their
+own." This is, no doubt, the apparent dictum of consciousness, but it is
+nothing more. And the dicta of consciousness have already been shown to
+need correction in so many ways which the ordinary observer could never
+have anticipated that we have surely no right to trust consciousness, so
+to say, a step further than we can feel it,--to hold that anything
+whatever--even a separate consciousness in our own organisms--can be
+proved _not_ to exist by the mere fact that we--as we know
+ourselves--are not aware of it.
+
+But indeed this claim to a unitary consciousness tends to become less
+forcible as it is more scientifically expressed. It rests on the plain
+man's conviction that there is only one of him; and this conviction the
+experimental psychologist is always tending to weaken or narrow by the
+admission of coexistent localised degrees of consciousness in the brain,
+which are at any rate not obviously reducible to a single state. Even
+those who would stop far short of my own position find it needful to
+resort to metaphors of their own to express the different streams of
+"awareness" which we all feel to be habitually coexistent within us.
+They speak of "fringes" of ordinary consciousness; of "marginal"
+associations; of the occasional perception of "currents of low
+intensity." These metaphors may all of them be of use, in a region where
+metaphor is our only mode of expression; but none of them covers all the
+facts now collected. And on the other side, I need not say, are plenty
+of phrases which beg the question of soul and body, or of the man's own
+spirit and external spirits, in no scientific fashion. There seems to be
+need of a term of wider application, which shall make as few assumptions
+as possible. Nor is such a term difficult to find.
+
+The idea of a _threshold (limen, Schwelle)_, of consciousness;--of a
+level above which sensation or thought must rise before it can enter
+into our conscious life;--is a simple and familiar one. The word
+_subliminal_,--meaning "beneath that threshold,"--has already been used
+to define those sensations which are too feeble to be individually
+recognised. I propose to extend the meaning of the term, so as to make
+it cover _all_ that takes place beneath the ordinary threshold, or say,
+if preferred, outside the ordinary margin of consciousness;--not only
+those faint stimulations whose very faintness keeps them submerged, but
+much else which psychology as yet scarcely recognises; sensations,
+thoughts, emotions, which may be strong, definite, and independent, but
+which, by the original constitution of our being, seldom emerge into
+that _supraliminal_ current of consciousness which we habitually
+identify with _ourselves_. Perceiving (as this book will try to show)
+that these submerged thoughts and emotions possess the characteristics
+which we associate with conscious life, I feel bound to speak of a
+_subliminal_ or _ultra-marginal consciousness_,--a consciousness which
+we shall see, for instance, uttering or writing sentences quite as
+complex and coherent as the supraliminal consciousness could make them.
+Perceiving further that this conscious life beneath the threshhold or
+beyond the margin seems to be no discontinuous or intermittent thing;
+that not only are these isolated subliminal processes comparable with
+isolated supraliminal processes (as when a problem is solved by some
+unknown procedure in a dream), but that there also is a continuous
+subliminal chain of memory (or more chains than one) involving just that
+kind of individual and persistent revival of old impressions, and
+response to new ones, which we commonly call a Self,--I find it
+permissible and convenient to speak of subliminal Selves, or more
+briefly of a subliminal Self. I do not indeed by using this term assume
+that there are two correlative and parallel selves existing always
+within each of us. Rather I mean by the subliminal Self that part of the
+Self which is commonly subliminal; and I conceive that there may
+be,--not only _co-operations_ between these quasi-independent trains of
+thought,--but also upheavals and alternations of personality of many
+kinds, so that what was once below the surface may for a time, or
+permanently, rise above it. And I conceive also that no Self of which we
+can here have cognisance is in reality more than a fragment of a larger
+Self,--revealed in a fashion at once shifting and limited through an
+organism not so framed as to afford it full manifestation.
+
+Now this hypothesis is exposed manifestly to two main forms of attack,
+which to a certain extent neutralise each other. On the one hand it has
+been attacked, as has already been indicated, as being too elaborate for
+the facts,--as endowing transitory moments of subconscious intelligence
+with more continuity and independence than they really possess. These
+ripples over the threshold, it may be said, can be explained by the wind
+of circumstance, without assuming springs or currents in the personality
+deep below.
+
+But soon we shall come upon a group of phenomena which this view will
+by no means meet. For we shall find that the subliminal uprushes,--the
+impulses or communications which reach our emergent from our submerged
+selves,--are (in spite of their miscellaneousness) often
+characteristically different in quality from any element known to our
+ordinary supraliminal life. They are different in a way which implies
+faculty of which we have had no previous knowledge, operating in an
+environment of which hitherto we have been wholly unaware. This broad
+statement it is of course the purpose of my whole work to justify.
+Assuming its truth here for argument's sake, we see at once that the
+problem of the hidden self entirely changes its aspect. Telepathy and
+telćsthesia--the perception of distant thoughts and of distant scenes
+without the agency of the recognised organs of sense;--those faculties
+suggest either incalculable extension of our own mental powers, or else
+the influence upon us of minds freer and less trammelled than our own.
+And this second hypothesis,--which would explain by the agency of
+discarnate minds, or spirits, all these supernormal phenomena,--does at
+first sight simplify the problem, and has by Mr. A. R. Wallace and
+others been pushed so far as to remove all need of what he deems the
+gratuitous and cumbrous hypothesis of a subliminal self.
+
+I believe, indeed, that it will become plain as we proceed that some
+such hypothesis as this,--of almost continuous spirit-intervention and
+spirit-guidance,--is at once rendered necessary if the subliminal
+faculties for which I argue are denied to man. And my conception of a
+subliminal self will thus appear, not as an extravagant and needless,
+but as a limiting and rationalising hypothesis, when it is applied to
+phenomena which at first sight suggest Mr. Wallace's extremer view, but
+which I explain by the action of man's own spirit, without invoking
+spirits external to himself. I do not indeed say that the explanation
+here suggested is applicable in all cases, or to the complete exclusion
+of the spirit-hypothesis. On the contrary, the one view gives support to
+the other. For these faculties of distant communication exist none the
+less, even though we should refer them to our own subliminal selves. We
+can, in that case, affect each other at a distance, telepathically;--and
+if our incarnate spirits can act thus in at least apparent independence
+of the fleshly body, the presumption is strong that other spirits may
+exist independently of the body, and may affect us in similar manner.
+
+The much-debated hypothesis of spirit-intervention, in short, still
+looms behind the hypothesis of the subliminal Self; but that
+intermediate hypothesis should, I think, in this early stage of what
+must be a long inquiry, prove useful to the partisans of either side.
+For those who are altogether unwilling to admit the action of agencies
+other than the spirits of living men, it will be needful to form as
+high an estimate as possible of the faculties held in reserve by these
+spirits while still in the flesh. For those, on the other hand, who
+believe in the influence of discarnate spirits, this scheme affords a
+path of transition, and as it were a provisional intelligibility.
+
+These far-reaching speculations make the element of keenest interest in
+the inquiry which follows. But even apart from its possible bearing on a
+future life, the further study of our submerged mentation,--of the
+processes within us of which we catch only indirect, and as it were,
+refracted glimpses,--seems at this time especially called for by the
+trend of modern research. For of late years we have realised more and
+more fully upon how shifting and complex a foundation of ancestral
+experience each individual life is based. In recapitulation, in summary,
+in symbol, we retraverse, from the embryo to the corpse, the history of
+life on earth for millions of years. During our self-adaptation to
+continually wider environments, there may probably have been a continual
+displacement of the threshold of consciousness;--involving the lapse and
+submergence of much that once floated in the main stream of our being.
+Our consciousness at any given stage of our evolution is but the
+phosphorescent ripple on an unsounded sea. And, like the ripple, it is
+not only superficial but manifold. Our psychical unity is federative and
+unstable; it has arisen from irregular accretions in the remote past; it
+consists even now only in the limited collaboration of multiple groups.
+These discontinuities and incoherences in the Ego the elder
+psychologists managed to ignore. Yet infancy, idiocy, sleep, insanity,
+decay;--these breaks and stagnancies in the conscious stream were always
+present to show us, even more forcibly than more delicate analyses show
+us now, that the first obvious conception of man's continuous and
+unitary personality was wholly insecure; and that if indeed a soul
+inspired the body, that soul must be sought for far beneath these bodily
+conditions by which its self-manifestation was clouded and obscured.
+
+The difference between older and newer conceptions of the unifying
+principle or soul (if soul there be) in man, considered as manifesting
+through corporeal limitations, will thus resemble the difference between
+the older and newer conceptions of the way in which the sun reveals
+himself to our senses. Night and storm-cloud and eclipse men have known
+from the earliest ages; but now they know that even at noonday the
+sunbeam which reaches them, when fanned out into a spectrum, is barred
+with belts and lines of varying darkness;--while they have learnt also
+that where at either end the spectrum fades out into what for us is
+blackness, there stretches onwards in reality an undiscovered
+illimitable ray.
+
+It will be convenient for future reference if I draw out this parallel
+somewhat more fully. I compare, then, man's gradual progress in
+self-knowledge to his gradual decipherment of the nature and meaning of
+the sunshine which reaches him as light and heat indiscernibly
+intermingled. So also Life and Consciousness--the sense of a world
+within him and a world without--come to the child indiscernibly
+intermingled in a pervading glow. Optical analysis splits up the white
+ray into the various coloured rays which compose it. Philosophical
+analysis in like manner splits up the vague consciousness of the child
+into many faculties;--into the various external senses, the various
+modes of thought within. This has been the task of descriptive and
+introspective psychology. Experimental psychology is adding a further
+refinement. In the sun's spectrum, and in stellar spectra, are many dark
+lines or bands, due to the absorption of certain rays by certain vapours
+in the atmosphere of sun or stars or earth. And similarly in the range
+of spectrum of our own sensation and faculty there are many
+inequalities--permanent and temporary--of brightness and definition. Our
+mental atmosphere is clouded by vapours and illumined by fires, and is
+clouded and illumined differently at different times. The psychologist
+who observes, say, how his reaction-times are modified by alcohol is
+like the physicist who observes what lines are darkened by the
+interposition of a special gas. Our knowledge of our conscious spectrum
+is thus becoming continually more accurate and detailed.
+
+But turning back once more to the physical side of our simile, we
+observe that our knowledge of the visible solar spectrum, however
+minute, is but an introduction to the knowledge which we hope ultimately
+to attain of the sun's rays. The limits of our spectrum do not inhere in
+the sun that shines, but in the eye that marks his shining. Beyond each
+end of that prismatic ribbon are ether-waves of which our retina takes
+no cognisance. Beyond the red end come waves whose potency we still
+recognise, but as heat and not as light. Beyond the violet end are waves
+still more mysterious; whose very existence man for ages never
+suspected, and whose ultimate potencies are still but obscurely known.
+Even thus, I venture to affirm, beyond each end of our conscious
+spectrum extends a range of faculty and perception, exceeding the known
+range, but as yet indistinctly guessed. The artifices of the modern
+physicist have extended far in each direction the visible spectrum known
+to Newton. It is for the modern psychologist to discover artifices which
+may extend in each direction the conscious spectrum as known to Plato or
+to Kant. The phenomena cited in this work carry us, one may say, as far
+onwards as fluorescence carries us beyond the violet end. The "X rays"
+of the psychical spectrum remain for a later age to discover.
+
+Our simile, indeed--be it once for all noted--is a most imperfect one.
+The range of human faculty cannot be truly expressed in any linear form.
+Even a three-dimensional scheme,--a radiation of faculties from a centre
+of life,--would ill render its complexity. Yet something of clearness
+will be gained by even this rudimentary mental picture;--representing
+conscious human faculty as a linear spectrum whose red rays begin where
+voluntary muscular control and organic sensation begin, and whose violet
+rays fade away at the point at which man's highest strain of thought or
+imagination merges into reverie or ecstasy.
+
+At both ends of this spectrum I believe that our evidence indicates a
+momentous prolongation. Beyond the _red_ end, of course, we already know
+that vital faculty of some kind must needs extend. We know that organic
+processes are constantly taking place within us which are not subject to
+our control, but which make the very foundation of our physical being.
+We know that the habitual limits of our voluntary action can be far
+extended under the influence of strong excitement. It need not surprise
+us to find that appropriate artifices--hypnotism or self-suggestion--can
+carry the power of our will over our organism to a yet further point.
+
+The faculties that lie beyond the _violet_ end of our psychological
+spectrum will need more delicate exhibition and will command a less
+ready belief. The actinic energy which lies beyond the violet end of the
+solar spectrum is less obviously influential in our material world than
+is the dark heat which lies beyond the red end. Even so, one may say,
+the influence of the ultra-intellectual or supernormal faculties upon
+our welfare as terrene organisms is less marked in common life than the
+influence of the organic or subnormal faculties. Yet it is _that_
+prolongation of our spectrum upon which our gaze will need to be most
+strenuously fixed. It is _there_ that we shall find our inquiry opening
+upon a cosmic prospect, and inciting us upon an endless way.
+
+Even the first stages of this progress are long and labyrinthine; and it
+may be useful to conclude this introductory chapter by a brief summary
+of the main tracts across which our winding road must lie. It will be my
+object to lead by transitions as varied and as gradual as possible from
+phenomena held as normal to phenomena held as supernormal, but which
+like the rest are simply and solely the inevitable results and
+manifestations of universal Law.
+
+Following then on this first or introductory chapter is one containing
+a discussion of the ways in which human personality disintegrates and
+decays. _Alternations of personality_ and hysterical phenomena generally
+are in this connection the most instructive to us.
+
+In the third chapter we utilize the insight thus gained and discuss the
+line of evolution which enables man to maintain and intensify his true
+normality. What type of man is he to whom the epithet of _normal_,--an
+epithet often obscure and misleading,--may be most fitly applied? I
+claim that that man shall be regarded as normal who has the fullest
+grasp of faculties which inhere in the whole race. Among these faculties
+I count subliminal as well as supraliminal powers;--the mental processes
+which take place below the conscious threshold as well as those which
+take place above it; and I attempt to show that those who reap most
+advantage from this submerged mentation are men of _genius_.
+
+The fourth chapter deals with the alternating phase through which man's
+personality is constructed habitually to pass. I speak of _sleep_; which
+I regard as a phase of personality, adapted to maintain our existence in
+the spiritual environment, and to draw from thence the vitality of our
+physical organisms. In this chapter I also discuss certain supernormal
+phenomena which sometimes occur in the state of sleep.
+
+The fifth chapter treats of _hypnotism_, considered as an _empirical
+development of sleep_. It will be seen that hypnotic suggestion
+intensifies the physical recuperation of sleep, and aids the emergence
+of those supernormal phenomena which ordinary sleep and spontaneous
+somnambulism sometimes exhibit.
+
+From hypnotism we pass on in the sixth chapter to experiments, less
+familiar to the public than those classed as hypnotic, but which give a
+still further insight into our subliminal faculty. With these
+experiments are intermingled many spontaneous phenomena; and the chapter
+will take up and continue the spontaneous phenomena of Chapters III. and
+IV. as well as the experiments of Chapter V. Its theme will be the
+messages which the subliminal self sends up to the supraliminal in the
+form of sensory hallucinations:--the visions fashioned internally, but
+manifested not to the inward eye alone; the voices which repeat as
+though in audible tones the utterance of the self within.
+
+These _sensory automatisms_, as I have termed them, are very often
+_telepathic_--involve, that is to say, the transmission of ideas and
+sensations from one mind to another without the agency of the recognised
+organs of sense. Nor would it seem that such transmission need
+necessarily cease with the bodily death of the transmitting agent. In
+the seventh chapter evidence is brought forward to show that those who
+communicated with us telepathically in this world may communicate with
+us telepathically from the other. Thus _phantasms of the dead_ receive a
+new meaning from observations of the phenomena occurring between living
+men.
+
+But besides the hallucinatory hearing or picture-seeing which we have
+classed as sensory automatisms, there is another method by which the
+subliminal may communicate with the supraliminal self.
+
+In Chapter VIII., we consider in what ways _motor automatism_--the
+unwilled activity of hand or voice--may be used as a means of such
+communication. Unwilled writings and utterances furnish the opportunity
+for experiment more prolonged and continuous than the phantasms or
+pictures of sensory automatism can often give, and, like them, may
+sometimes originate in telepathic impressions received by the subliminal
+self from another mind. These motor automatisms, moreover, as the ninth
+chapter shows, are apt to become more complete, more controlling, than
+sensory automatisms. They may lead on, in some cases, to the apparent
+_possession_ of the sensitive by some extraneous spirit, who seems to
+write and talk through the sensitive's organism, giving evidence of his
+own surviving identity.
+
+The reader who may feel disposed to give his adhesion to this
+culminating group of the long series of evidences which have pointed
+with more and more clearness to the survival of human personality, and
+to the possibility for men on earth of actual commerce with a world
+beyond, may feel perhaps that the _desiderium orbis catholici_, the
+intimate and universal hope of every generation of men, has never till
+this day approached so near to fulfilment. There has never been so fair
+a prospect for Life and Love. But the goal to which we tend is not an
+ideal of personal happiness alone. The anticipation of our own future is
+but one element in the prospect which opens to us now. Our inquiry has
+broadened into a wider scope. The point from which we started was an
+analysis of the latent faculties of man. The point towards which our
+argument has carried us is the existence of a spiritual environment in
+which those faculties operate, and of unseen neighbours who speak to us
+thence with slowly gathering power. Deep in this spiritual environment
+the cosmic secret lies. It is our business to collect the smallest
+indications; to carry out from this treasury of Rhampsinitus so much as
+our bare hands can steal away. We have won our scraps of spiritual
+experience, our messages from behind the veil; we can try them in their
+connection with certain enigmas which philosophy hardly hoped to be able
+to put to proof. Can we, for instance, learn anything,--to begin with
+fundamental problems,--of the relation of spiritual phenomena to Space,
+to Time, to the material world?
+
+As to the idea of Space, the evidence which will have been presented
+will enable us to speak with perhaps more clearness than could have been
+hoped for in such a matter. Spiritual life, we infer, is not bound and
+confined by space-considerations in the same way as the life of earth.
+But in what way is that greater freedom attained? It appears to be
+attained by the mere extension of certain licenses (so to call them)
+permitted to ourselves. We on earth submit to two familiar laws of the
+ordinary material universe. A body can only act where it is. Only one
+body can occupy the same part of space at the same moment. Applied to
+common affairs these rules are of plain construction. But once get
+beyond ponderable matter,--once bring life and ether into play, and
+definitions become difficult indeed. The orator, the poet, we say, can
+only act where he is;--but where is he? He has transformed the sheet of
+paper into a spiritual agency;--nay, the mere memory of him persists as
+a source of energy in other minds. Again, we may say that no other body
+can be in the same place as this writing-table; but what of the ether?
+What we have thus far learnt of spiritual operation seems merely to
+extend these two possibilities. Telepathy indefinitely extends the range
+of an unembodied spirit's potential presence. The interpenetration of
+the spiritual with the material environment leaves this ponderable
+planet unable to check or to hamper spiritual presence or operation.
+Strange and new though our evidence may be, it needs at present in its
+relation to space nothing more than an immense extension of conceptions
+which the disappearance of earthly limitations was certain immensely to
+extend.
+
+How, then, does the matter stand with regard to our relation to Time? Do
+we find that our new phenomena point to any mode of understanding or of
+transcending Time fundamentally different from those modes which we have
+at our command?
+
+In dealing with Time Past we have memory and written record; in dealing
+with Time Future we have forethought, drawing inferences from the past.
+
+Can, then, the spiritual knowledge of Past and Future which our evidence
+shows be explained by assuming that these existing means of knowledge
+are raised to a higher power? Or are we driven to postulate something in
+the nature of Time which is to us inconceivable;--some co-existence of
+Past and Future in an eternal Now? It is plainly with Time Past that we
+must begin the inquiry.
+
+The knowledge of the past which automatic communications manifest is in
+most cases apparently referable to the actual memory of persons still
+existing beyond the tomb. It reaches us telepathically, as from a mind
+in which remote scenes are still imprinted. But there are certain scenes
+which are not easily assigned to the individual memory of any given
+spirit. And if it be possible for us to learn of present facts by
+telćsthesia as well as by telepathy;--by some direct supernormal
+percipience without the intervention of any other mind to which the
+facts are already known,--may there not be also a retrocognitive
+telćsthesia by which we may attain a direct knowledge of facts in the
+past?
+
+Some conception of this kind may possibly come nearest to the truth. It
+may even be that some World-Soul is perennially conscious of all its
+past; and that individual souls, as they enter into deeper
+consciousness, enter into something which is at once reminiscence and
+actuality. But nevertheless a narrower hypothesis will cover the actual
+cases with which we have to deal. Past facts are known to men on earth
+not from memory only, but by written record; and there may be records,
+of what kind we know not, which persist in the spiritual world. Our
+retrocognitions seem often a recovery of isolated fragments of thought
+and feeling, pebbles still hard and rounded amid the indecipherable
+sands over which the mighty waters are "rolling evermore."
+
+When we look from Time Past to Time Future we are confronted with
+essentially the same problems, though in a still more perplexing form,
+and with the world-old mystery of Free Will _versus_ Necessity looming
+in the background. Again we find that, just as individual memory would
+serve to explain a large proportion of Retrocognition, so individual
+forethought--a subliminal forethought, based often on profound organic
+facts not normally known to us--will explain a large proportion of
+Precognition. But here again we find also precognitions which transcend
+what seems explicable by the foresight of any mind such as we know; and
+we are tempted to dream of a World-Soul whose Future is as present to it
+as its Past. But in this speculation also, so vast and vague an
+explanation seems for the present beyond our needs; and it is safer--if
+aught be safe in this region which only actual evidence could have
+emboldened us to approach--to take refuge in the conception of
+intelligences not infinite, yet gifted with a foresight which strangely
+transcends our own.
+
+Closely allied to speculations such as these is another speculation,
+more capable of subjection to experimental test, yet which remains still
+inconclusively tested, and which has become for many reasons a
+stumbling-block rather than a corroboration in the spiritual inquiry. I
+refer to the question whether any influence is exercised by spirits upon
+the gross material world otherwise than through ordinary organic
+structures. We know that the spirit of a living man controls his own
+organism, and we shall see reason to conclude that discarnate spirits
+may also control, by some form of "possession," the organisms of living
+persons,--may affect directly, that is to say, some portions of matter
+which we call living, namely, the brain of the entranced sensitive.
+There seems to me, then, no paradox in the supposition that some effect
+should be produced by spiritual agency--possibly through the mediation
+of some kind of energy derived from living human beings--upon inanimate
+matter as well. And I believe that as a fact such effects have been
+observed and recorded in a trustworthy manner by Sir W. Crookes, the
+late Dr. Speer, and others, in the cases especially of D. D. Home and of
+W. Stainton Moses. If, indeed, I call these and certain other records
+still inconclusive, it is mainly on account of the mass of worthless
+narratives with which they have been in some sense smothered; the long
+history of so-called investigations which have consisted merely in an
+interchange of credulity and fraud. For the present the evidence of this
+kind which has real value is better presented, I think, in separate
+records than collected or discussed in any generalised form. All that I
+purpose in this work, therefore, is briefly to indicate the relation
+which these "physical phenomena" hold to the psychical phenomena with
+which my book is concerned. Alongside of the faculty or achievement of
+man's ordinary or supraliminal self I shall demarcate the faculty or
+achievement which I ascribe to his subliminal self; and alongside of
+this again I shall arrange such few well-attested phenomena as seem
+_primâ facie_ to demand the physical intervention of discarnate
+intelligences.
+
+I have traced the utmost limits to which any claim to a scientific basis
+for these inquiries can at present be pushed. Yet the subject-matter has
+not yet been exhausted of half its significance. The conclusions to
+which our evidence points are not such as can be discussed or dismissed
+as a mere matter of speculative curiosity. They affect every belief,
+every faculty, every hope and aim of man; and they affect him the more
+intimately as his interests grow more profound. Whatever meaning be
+applied to ethics, to philosophy, to religion, the concern of all these
+is here.
+
+It would have been inconsistent with my main purpose had I interpolated
+considerations of this kind into the body of this work. For that purpose
+was above all to show that realms left thus far to philosophy or to
+religion,--too often to mere superstition and idle dream,--might in the
+end be brought under steady scientific rule. I contend that Religion and
+Science are no separable or independent provinces of thought or action;
+but rather that each name implies a different aspect of the same
+ideal;--that ideal being the completely normal reaction of the
+individual spirit to the whole of cosmic law.
+
+Assuredly this deepening response of man's spirit to the Cosmos
+deepening round him must be affected by all the signals which now are
+glimmering out of night to tell him of his inmost nature and his endless
+fate. Who can think that either Science or Revelation has spoken as yet
+more than a first half-comprehended word? But if in truth souls departed
+call to us, it is to them that we shall listen most of all. We shall
+weigh their undesigned concordances, we shall analyse the congruity of
+their message with the facts which such a message should explain. To
+some thoughts which may thus be generated I shall try to give expression
+in an Epilogue to the present work.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+DISINTEGRATIONS OF PERSONALITY
+
+  [Greek: Thanatos estin okosa egerthentes oreomen,
+   okosa de eudontes, upnos.]
+
+  --HERACLITUS.
+
+
+Of the race of man we know for certain that it has been evolved through
+many ages and through countless forms of change. We know for certain
+that its changes continue still; nay, that more causes of change act
+upon us in "fifty years of Europe" than in "a cycle of Cathay." We may
+reasonably conjecture that the race will continue to change with
+increasing rapidity, and through a period in comparison with which our
+range of recorded history shrinks into a moment.
+
+The actual nature of these coming changes, indeed, lies beyond our
+imagination. Many of them are probably as inconceivable to us now as
+eyesight would have been to our eyeless ancestors. All that we can do is
+to note so far as possible the structural laws of our personality as
+deduced from its changes thus far; inferring that for some time to come,
+at any rate, its further changes will proceed upon similar lines.
+
+I have already (Chapter I) indicated the general view as to the nature
+of human personality which is maintained in this work. I regard each man
+as at once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely composite, as
+inheriting from earthly ancestors a multiplex and "colonial"
+organism--polyzoic and perhaps polypsychic in an extreme degree; but
+also as ruling and unifying that organism by a soul or spirit absolutely
+beyond our present analysis--a soul which has originated in a spiritual
+or metetherial environment; which even while embodied subsists in that
+environment; and which will still subsist therein after the body's
+decay.
+
+It is, of course, impossible for us to picture to ourselves the way in
+which the individual life of each cell of the body is reconciled with
+the unity of the central life which controls the body as a whole. But
+this difficulty is not created or intensified by the hypothesis of a
+separate and persistent soul. On no hypothesis can we really understand
+the collaboration and subordination of the cell-lives of any
+multicellular animal. It is as mysterious in the starfish as it is in
+Plato; and the "eight brains of Aurelia," with their individual and
+their common life, are as inconceivable as the life of the phagocytes in
+the philosopher's veins, in their relation to his central thought.[7]
+
+I claim, in fact, that the ancient hypothesis of an indwelling soul,
+possessing and using the body as a whole, yet bearing a real, though
+obscure relation to the various more or less apparently disparate
+conscious groupings manifested in connection with the organism and in
+connection with more or less localised groups of nerve-matter, is a
+hypothesis not more perplexing, not more cumbrous, than any other
+hypothesis yet suggested. I claim also that it is conceivably
+provable,--I myself hold it as actually proved,--by direct observation.
+I hold that certain manifestations of central individualities,
+associated now or formerly with certain definite organisms, have been
+observed in operation apart from those organisms, both while the
+organisms were still living, and after they had decayed. Whether or no
+this thesis be as yet sufficiently proved, it is at least at variance
+with no scientific principle nor established fact whatever; and it is of
+a nature which continued observation may conceivably establish to the
+satisfaction of all. The negative thesis, on the other hand, is a thesis
+in unstable equilibrium. It cannot be absolutely proved by any number of
+negative instances; and it may be absolutely disproved by a single
+positive instance. It may have at present a greater scientific
+_currency_, but it can have no real scientific authority as against the
+view defended in these pages.
+
+Leaving these questions, however, aside for the present, we may agree
+that in the organism as we can observe it in common life we have no
+complete or unchanging unity, but rather a complex hierarchy of groups
+of cells exercising vaguely limited functions, and working together with
+rough precision, tolerable harmony, fair success. That these powers ever
+work _perfectly_ together we have no evidence. Our feeling of health is
+but a rough haphazard register of what is passing within us. Nor would
+it ever be possible to define a permanently ideal status in an organism
+in moving equilibrium,--an organism which lives by exploding unstable
+compounds, and which is constantly aiming at new ends at the expense of
+the old.
+
+Many disturbances and disintegrations of the personality must presently
+fall to be discussed. But the reader who may follow me must remember the
+point of view from which I am writing. The aim of my analysis is not to
+destroy but to fulfil;--or say, rather, my hope is that observation of
+the ways in which the personality tends to disintegrate may suggest
+methods which may tend on the other hand to its more complete
+integration.
+
+Such improvements upon the natural conditions of the organism are not
+unknown. Just as the study of hysteria deals mainly with instabilities
+in the threshold of consciousness, so does the study of zymotic disease
+deal mainly with instabilities in the constitution of the blood. The
+ordinary object of the physician is to check these instabilities when
+they occur; to restore healthy blood in the place of vitiated. The
+experimental biologist has a further aim. He wishes to provide men with
+_better_ blood than nature has bestowed; to elicit from virus and decay
+some element whose infusion into the veins may give immunity against
+microbic invasion. As the adult is safer against such attacks than the
+child by dint of his more advanced development, so is the immunised
+adult safer than the common man. The change of his blood which healthy
+maturity has induced has made him safe against whooping-cough. The
+change in his blood which we effect by injecting antitoxin makes him
+temporarily safe against diphtheria. We have improved upon nature;--and
+our artifice has been _prophylactic_ by virtue of being in a certain
+sense _developmental_.
+
+Even such, I trust, may be the achievement of experimental psychology in
+a later day. I shall be well content if in this chapter I can give hints
+for some future colligation of such evolutive phenomena as may lurk amid
+a mass of phenomena mainly dissolutive--phenomena whose records are
+scattered and imperfect, and have as yet only in some few directions,
+and by quite recent writers, been collated or systematised on any
+definite plan.
+
+The discussion of these disintegrations of personality needs, I think,
+some little clearing of the ground beforehand, if it is to avoid
+confusion. It will be needful to speak of concurrent and alternating
+streams of consciousness,--of subliminal and supraliminal strata of
+personality and the like;--phrases which save much trouble when used
+with care, but which need some words of preliminary explanation. It is
+not easy to realise that anything which deserves the name of
+consciousness can be going on within us, apart from that central stream
+of thought and feeling with which we identify ourselves in common life.
+Something of definition is needed;--not indeed of any formal or dogmatic
+kind;--but enough to make clear the sense given to such words as
+consciousness, memory, personality, in the ensuing pages.
+
+I begin, then, with the obvious remark that when we conceive any act
+other than our own as a conscious act, we do so either because we
+regard it as _complex_, and therefore _purposive_, or because we
+perceive that it has been _remembered_. Thus we call the fencer or the
+chess-player fully conscious; or, again, we say, "The man who seemed
+stunned after that blow on the head must really have been conscious all
+the time; for he afterwards recalled every incident." The _memorability_
+of an act is, in fact, a better proof of consciousness than its
+complexity. Thus consciousness has been denied both to hypnotised
+subjects and to dogs; but it is easier to prove that the hypnotised
+subject is conscious than that the dog is conscious. For the hypnotised
+subject, though he may forget the incidents of the trance when he
+awakes, will remember them in the next trance; or he may be trained to
+remember them in the waking state also; while with regard to the dog we
+cannot decide from the mere complexity of his actions how far he is
+conscious of their performance. With him, too, the best line of proof
+lies in his obvious memory of past acts. And yet, although all agree
+that our own memory, broadly speaking, proves our past consciousness,
+some persons would not admit that a dog's memory does so too. The dog's
+organism, they would say, responds, no doubt, in a new manner to a
+second repetition of a previous stimulus; but this is more or less true
+of all living organisms, or parts of organisms, even far below what we
+generally regard as a conscious level.
+
+Reflections of this kind naturally lead to a wider conception of
+consciousness. It is gradually seen that the earlier inquiries which men
+have made about consciousness have been of a merely ethical or legal
+character;--have simply aimed at deciding whether at a given moment a
+man was _responsible_ for his acts, either to a human or to a divine
+tribunal. Commonsense has seemed to encourage this method of definite
+demarcation; we judge practically either that a man is conscious or that
+he is not; in the experience of life intermediate states are of little
+importance.
+
+As soon, however, as the problem is regarded as a psychological one, to
+be decided by observation and experiment, these hard and fast lines grow
+fainter and fainter. We come to regard consciousness as an attribute
+which may possibly be present in all kinds of varying degrees in
+connection with the animal and vegetable worlds; as the psychical
+counterpart of life; as conceivably the psychical counterpart of all
+phenomenal existence. Or, rather, we may say this of _mind_, to which,
+in its more elementary forms, consciousness bears somewhat the same
+relation as self-consciousness bears to consciousness, or some higher
+evolution may bear to self-consciousness.
+
+This being so, I cannot see how we can phrase our definition more simply
+than by saying that any act or condition must be regarded as conscious
+if it is _potentially memorable_;--if it can be recollected, under any
+circumstances, by the subject concerned. It does not seem needful that
+the circumstances under which such recollection may occur should arise
+while the subject is still incarnated on this planet. We shall never on
+this planet remember the great majority of our dreams; but those dreams
+were presumably no less conscious than the dreams which a sudden
+awakening allowed us to keep in memory. Certain hypnotic subjects,
+indeed, who can be made to remember their dreams by suggestion,
+apparently remember dreams previously latent just as easily as dreams
+previously remembered. And we shall have various other examples of the
+unexpected recollection of experiences supposed to have been entirely
+devoid of consciousness.
+
+We are bound, I think, to draw at least this negative conclusion: that
+we must not take for granted that our apparently central consciousness
+is something wholly different in kind from the minor consciousnesses out
+of which it is in some sense elaborated. I do indeed believe it to be in
+an important sense different; but this difference must not be assumed on
+the basis of our subjective sensations alone. We must approach the whole
+subject of split or duplicated personalities with no prepossession
+against the possibility of any given arrangement or division of the
+total mass of consciousness which exists within us.
+
+Before we can picture to ourselves how that mass of consciousness may
+_disintegrate_, we ought, were it possible, to picture to ourselves how
+it is in the first instance _integrated_. That, however, is a difficulty
+which does not begin with the constitution of man. It begins when
+unicellular develop into multicellular organisms. It is, of course, a
+mystery how a single cell can hold together, and what kind of unity it
+can possess. But it is a fresh mystery when several cells cohere in a
+conjoint and independent life. In the collective unity of certain
+"colonial animals" we have a kind of sketch or parody of our own complex
+being. Higher intelligences may possibly see us as we see the
+hydrozoon--a creature split up into different "persons," a "hydriform
+person" who feeds, a "medusiform person" who propagates, and so
+on--elements of the animal differentiated for different
+ends--interconnected from one point of view as closely as our stomach
+and brain, yet from another point of view separable existences, capable
+of detachment and of independent regeneration in all kinds of different
+ways. Still more composite, though less conspicuously composite, is
+every animal that we meet as we rise through the scale; and in man we
+reach the summit both of colonial complexity and of centralised control.
+
+I need hardly say that as regards the inner nature of this close
+co-ordination, this central government, science can at present tell us
+little or nothing. The growth of the nervous mechanism may be to some
+extent deciphered; but how this mechanism is centrally governed; what is
+the tendency which makes for unity; where precisely this unity resides,
+and what is its exact relation to the various parts of the multicellular
+organism--all these are problems in the nature of _life_, to which as
+yet no solution is known.
+
+The needed clue, as I believe, can be afforded only by the discovery of
+laws affecting primarily that unseen or spiritual plane of being where I
+imagine the origin of life to lie. If we can suppose telepathy to be a
+first indication of a law of this type, and to occupy in the spiritual
+world some such place as gravitation occupies in the material world, we
+might imagine something analogous to the force of cohesion as operating
+in the psychical contexture of a human personality. Such a personality,
+at any rate, as the development of higher from lower organisms shows,
+involves the aggregation of countless minor psychical entities, whose
+characteristics still persist, although in a manner consistent with the
+possibility that one larger psychical entity, whether pre-existent or
+otherwise, is the unifying continuum of which those smaller entities are
+fragments, and exercises over them a pervading, though an incomplete,
+control.
+
+It is plainly impossible to say beforehand what will be the relation to
+the ordinary stream of consciousness of a personality thus composed. We
+have no right to assume that all our psychical operations will fall at
+the same time, or at any time, into the same central current of
+perception, or rise above what we have called the ordinary conscious
+threshold. We can be sure, in fact, that there will be much which will
+not so rise; can we predict what _will_ rise?
+
+We can only reply that the perception of stimuli by the supraliminal
+consciousness is a kind of exercise of function; and that here, as in
+other cases where a function is exercised, part of its range will
+consist of such operation as the primary structure of the organism
+obliges it to perform, and part will consist of such operation as
+natural selection (after the structure has come into being) has trained
+it to perform. There will be something which is structurally inevitable,
+and something which was not structurally inevitable, but which has
+proved itself practically advantageous.
+
+Thus it may be inevitable--a necessary result of nervous structure--that
+consciousness should accompany unfamiliar cerebral combinations;--that
+the "fraying of fresh channels" should carry with it a perceptible
+tingle of novelty. Or it is possible, again, that this vivid
+consciousness of new cerebral combinations may be a later acquisition,
+and merely due to the obvious advantage of preventing new achievements
+from stereotyping themselves before they have been thoroughly
+practised;--as a musician will keep his attention fixed on a difficult
+novelty, lest his execution should become automatic before he has learnt
+to render the piece as he desires. It seems likely, at any rate, that
+the greater part of the contents of our supraliminal consciousness may
+be determined in some such fashion as this, by natural selection so
+operating as to keep ready to hand those perceptions which are most
+needed for the conduct of life.
+
+The notion of the upbuilding of the personality here briefly given is of
+use, I think, in suggesting its practical tendencies to dissolution.
+Subjected continually to both internal and external stress and strain,
+its ways of yielding indicate the grain of its texture.
+
+It is possible that if we could discern the minute psychology of this
+long series of changes, ranging from modifications too minute to be
+noted as abnormal to absolute revolutions of the whole character and
+intelligence, we might find no definite break in all the series; but
+rather a slow, continuous detachment of one psychical unit or element of
+consciousness after another from the primary synthesis. It is possible,
+on the other hand, that there may be a real break at a point where there
+appears to our external observation to be a break, namely, where the
+personality passes into its new phase through an interval of sleep or
+trance. And I believe that there is another break, at a point much
+further advanced, and not to be reached in this chapter, where some
+external intelligence begins in some way to possess the organism and to
+replace for a time the ordinary intellectual activity by an activity of
+its own. Setting, however, this last possibility for the present aside,
+we must adopt some arrangement on which to hang our cases. For this
+purpose the appearance of sleep or trance will make a useful, although
+not a definite, line of demarcation.
+
+We may begin with localised psychical hypertrophies and
+isolations,--terms which I shall explain as we proceed; and then pass on
+through hysterical instabilities (where intermediate periods of trance
+may or may not be present) to those more advanced sleep-wakings and
+dimorphisms which a barrier of trance seems always to separate from the
+primary stream of conscious life. All such changes, of course, are
+generally noxious to the psychical organism; and it will be simpler to
+begin by dwelling on their noxious aspect, and regarding them as steps
+on the road--on one of the many roads--to mental overthrow.
+
+The process begins, then, with something which is to the psychical
+organism no more than a boil or a corn is to the physical. In
+consequence of some suggestion from without, or of some inherited
+tendency, a small group of psychical units set up a process of
+exaggerated growth which shuts them off from free and healthy
+interchange with the rest of the personality.
+
+The first symptom of disaggregation is thus the _idée fixe_, that is to
+say, the persistence of an uncontrolled and unmodifiable group of
+thoughts or emotions, which from their brooding isolation,--from the
+very fact of deficient interchange with the general current of
+thought,--become alien and intrusive, so that some special idea or image
+presses into consciousness with undue and painful frequency.
+
+The fixed idea, thus originating, may develop in different ways. It may
+become a centre of explosion, or a nucleus of separation, or a beginning
+of death. It may induce an access of hysterical convulsions, thus acting
+like a material foreign body which presses on a sensitive part of the
+organism. Or it may draw to its new parasitic centre so many psychical
+elements that it forms a kind of secondary personality, co-existing
+secretly with the primary one, or even able at times (as in some
+well-known cases) to carry the whole organism by a _coup-de-main_. (Such
+changes, it may be noted in passing, are not always for the _worse_.)
+Or, again, the new quasi-independent centres may be merely _anarchical_;
+the revolt may spread to every cell; and the forces of the environment,
+ever making war upon the organism, may thus effect its total decay.
+
+Let us dwell for a few moments on the nature of these fixed or insistent
+ideas. They are not generally or at the first outset extravagant
+fancies,--as that one is made of glass or the like. Rather will "fixed
+ideas" come to seem a mere expression for something in a minor degree
+common to most of us. Hardly any mind, I suppose, is wholly free from
+tendencies to certain types of thought or emotion for which we cannot
+summon any adequate check--useless recurrent broodings over the past or
+anxieties for the future, perhaps traces of old childish experience
+which have become too firmly fixed wholly to disappear. Nay, it may well
+be that we must look even further back than our own childhood for the
+origin of many haunting troubles. Inherited tendencies to terror,
+especially, seem to reach far back into a prehistoric past. In a recent
+"Study of Fears," which Professor Stanley Hall has based on a wide
+statistical collection,[8] it would seem that the fears of childhood
+often correspond to no existing cause for uneasiness, but rather to the
+vanished perils of primitive man. The fear of darkness, for instance,
+the fear of solitude, the fear of thunder-storms, the fear of the loss
+of orientation, speak of primitive helplessness, just as the fear of
+animals, the fear of strangers, suggest the fierce and hazardous life of
+early man. To all such instinctive feelings as these a morbid
+development is easily given.
+
+Of what nature must we suppose this morbid development to be? Does it
+fall properly within our present discussion? or is it not simply a
+beginning of brain-disease, which concerns the physician rather than the
+psychologist? The psychologist's best answer to this question will be to
+show cases of fixed ideas _cured_ by psychological means.[9] And indeed
+there are few cases to show which have been cured by any methods
+_except_ the psychological; if hypnotic suggestion does not succeed with
+an _idée fixe_, it is seldom that any other treatment will cure it. We
+may, of course, say that the brain troubles thus cured were functional,
+and that those which went on inevitably into insanity were organic,
+although the distinction between functional and organic is not easily
+demonstrable in this ultra-microscopic realm.
+
+At any rate, we have actually on record,--and that is what our argument
+needs,--a great series of _idées fixes_, of various degrees of
+intensity, cured by suggestion;--cured, that is to say, by a subliminal
+setting in action of minute nervous movements which our supraliminal
+consciousness cannot in even the blindest manner manage to set to work.
+Some such difference as exists on a gross scale between striped and
+unstriped muscle seems to exist on a minute scale among these smallest
+involved cells and fibres, or whatever they be. Some of them obey our
+conscious will, but most of them are capable of being governed only by
+subliminal strata of the self.
+
+If, however, it be the subliminal self which can reduce these elements
+to order, it is often probably the subliminal self to which their
+disorder is originally due. If a fixed idea, say agoraphobia, grows up
+in me, this may probably be because the proper controlling
+co-ordinations of thought, which I ought to be able to summon up at
+will, have sunk below the level at which will can reach them. I am no
+longer able, that is to say, to convince myself by reasoning that there
+is no danger in crossing the open square. And this may be the fault of
+my subliminal self, whose business it is to keep the ideas which I need
+for common life easily within my reach, and which has failed to do this,
+owing to some enfeeblement of its grasp of my organism.
+
+If we imagine these obscure operations under some such form as this, we
+get the advantage of being able to connect these insistent ideas in a
+coherent sequence with the more advanced phenomena of hysteria. We have
+seen that the presence of insistent ideas implies an instability of the
+conscious threshold; and this, in its turn, indicates a disorderly or
+diseased condition of the hypnotic stratum,--of that region of the
+personality which, as we shall see, is best known to us through the fact
+that it is reached by hypnotic suggestion.
+
+Now we shall find, I think, that all the phenomena of hysteria are
+reducible to the same general conception. To understand their many
+puzzles we have to keep our eyes fixed upon just these psychological
+notions--upon a threshold of ordinary consciousness above which certain
+perceptions and faculties ought to be, but are not always, maintained,
+and upon a "hypnotic stratum" or region of the personality to which
+hypnotic suggestion appeals; and which includes faculty and perception
+which surpass the supraliminal, but whose operation is capricious and
+dreamlike, inasmuch as they lie, so to say, in a debateable region
+between two rules--the known rule of the supraliminal self, adapted to
+this life's experience and uses, and the conjectured rule of a fuller
+and profounder self, rarely reached by any artifice which our present
+skill suggests. Some of these conscious groupings have got separated
+from the ordinary stream of consciousness. These may still be unified in
+the subliminal, but they need to be unified in the supraliminal also.
+The normal relation between the supraliminal and the subliminal may be
+disturbed by the action of _either_.
+
+Let us now see how far this view, which I suggested in the S.P.R.
+_Proceedings_ as far back as 1892,[10] fits in with those modern
+observations of hysteria, in Paris and Vienna especially, which are
+transforming all that group of troubles from the mere opprobrium of
+medicine into one of the most fertile sources of new knowledge of body
+and mind.
+
+First, then, let us briefly consider what is the general type of
+hysterical troubles. Speaking broadly, we may say that the symptoms of
+hysteria form, in the first place, a series of phantom copies of real
+maladies of the nervous system; and, in the second place, a series of
+fantasies played upon that system--of unreal, dreamlike ailments, often
+such as no physiological mechanism can be shown to have determined.
+These latter cases are often due, as we shall see, not to purely
+physiological, but rather to intellectual causes; they represent, not a
+particular pattern in which the nervous system tends of itself to
+disintegrate, but a particular pattern which has been imposed upon it by
+some intellectual process;--in short, by some form of self-suggestion.
+
+Let us briefly review some common types of hysterical
+disability,--taking as our first guide Dr. Pierre Janet's admirable
+work, _L'Etat Mental des Hystériques_ (Paris, 1893).
+
+What, then, to begin with, is Dr. Janet's general conception of the
+psychological states of the advanced hysteric? "In the expression _I
+feel_," he says (_L'Etat Mental_, p. 39), "we have two elements: a small
+new psychological fact, 'feel,' and an enormous mass of thoughts already
+formed into a system 'I.' These two things mix and combine, and to say
+_I feel_ is to say that the personality, already enormous, has seized
+and absorbed this small new sensation; ... as though the _I_ were an
+amoeba which sent out a prolongation to suck in this little sensation
+which has come into existence beside it." Now it is in the assimilation
+of these elementary sensations or affective states with the _perception
+personnelle_, as Janet terms it, that the advanced hysteric fails. His
+field of consciousness is so far narrowed that it can only take in the
+minimum of sensations necessary for the support of life. "One must needs
+have consciousness of what one sees and hears, and so the patient
+neglects to perceive the tactile and muscular sensations with which he
+thinks that he can manage to dispense. At first he could perhaps turn
+his attention to them, and recover them at least momentarily within the
+field of personal perception. But the occasion does not present itself,
+and the _psychological bad habit_ is formed.... One day the patient--for
+he is now veritably a patient--is examined by the doctor. His left arm
+is pinched, and he is asked whether he feels the pinch. To his surprise
+the patient realises that he can no longer feel consciously, can no
+longer bring back into his personal perception sensations which he has
+neglected too long--he has become anćsthetic.... Hysterical anćsthesia
+is thus a fixed and perpetual distraction, which renders its subjects
+incapable of attaching certain sensations to their personality; it is a
+restriction of the conscious field."
+
+The proof of these assertions depends on a number of observations, all
+of which point in the same direction, and show that hysterical
+anćsthesia does not descend so deep into the personality, so to say, as
+true anćsthesia caused by nervous decay, or by the section of a nerve.
+
+Thus the hysteric is often _unconscious_ of the anćsthesia, which is
+only discovered by the physician. There is none of the distress caused
+by true anćsthesia, as, for instance, by the "tabetic mask," or
+insensibility of part of the face, which sometimes occurs in _tabes
+dorsalis_.
+
+An incident reported by Dr. Jules Janet illustrates this peculiarity. A
+young woman cut her right hand severely with broken glass, and
+complained of insensibility in the palm. The physician who examined her
+found that the sensibility of the right palm was, in fact, diminished
+by the section of certain nerves. But he discovered at the same time
+that the girl was hysterically anćsthetic over the whole left side of
+her body. She had never even found out this disability, and the doctor
+twitted her with complaining of the small patch of anćsthesia, while she
+said nothing of that which covered half her body. But, as Dr. Pierre
+Janet remarks, she might well have retorted that these were the facts,
+and that it was for the man of science to say why the small patch
+annoyed her while the large one gave her no trouble at all.
+
+Of similar import is the ingenious observation that hysterical
+anćsthesia rarely leads to any accident to the limb;--differing in this
+respect, for instance, from the true and profound anćsthesia of
+syringomyelitis, in which burns and bruises frequently result from the
+patient's forgetfulness of the part affected. There is usually, in fact,
+a supervision--a _subliminal_ supervision--exercised over the hysteric's
+limbs. Part of her personality is still alive to the danger, and
+modifies her movements, unknown to her supraliminal self.
+
+This curious point, I may remark in passing, well illustrates the kind
+of action which I attribute to the subliminal self in many phases of
+life. Thus it is that the hypnotised subject is prevented (as I hold)
+from committing a real as opposed to a fictitious crime; thus it is that
+fresh ideas are suggested to the man of genius; thus it is--I will even
+say--that in some cases monitory hallucinations are generated, which
+save the supraliminal self from some sudden danger.
+
+I pass on to another peculiarity of hysterical anćsthesić;--also in my
+eyes of deep significance. The anćsthetic belts or patches do not
+always, or even generally, correspond with true anatomical areas, such
+as would be affected by the actual lesion of any given nerve. They
+follow arbitrary arrangements;--sometimes corresponding to rough popular
+notions of divisions of the body,--sometimes seeming to reflect a merely
+childish caprice.
+
+In these cases what is only a silly fancy seems to produce an effect
+which is not merely fanciful;--which is objective, measurable, and
+capable of causing long and serious disablement. This result, however,
+is quite accordant with my view of what I have termed the _hypnotic
+stratum_ of the personality. I hold, as our coming discussion of
+hypnotism will more fully explain, that the region into which the
+hypnotic suggestion gives us access is one of strangely mingled strength
+and weakness;--of a faculty at once more potent and less coherent than
+that of waking hours. I think that in these cases we get at the
+subliminal self only somewhat in the same sense as we get at the
+supraliminal self when the "highest-level centres" are for the time
+inoperative (as in a dream) and only "middle-level centres" are left to
+follow their own devices without inhibition or co-ordination. I hold
+that this is the explanation of the strange contrasts which hypnosis
+makes familiar to us--the combination of profound power over the
+organism with childish readiness to obey the merest whims of the
+hypnotiser. The intelligence which thus responds is in my view only a
+fragmentary intelligence; it is a dreamlike scrap of the subliminal
+self, functioning apart from that self's central and profounder control.
+
+What happens in hypnotism in obedience to the hypnotiser's caprice
+happens in hysteria in obedience to the caprice of the hypnotic stratum
+itself. Some middle-level centre of the subliminal self (to express a
+difficult idea by the nearest phrase I can find) gets the notion that
+there is an "anćsthetic bracelet," say, round the left wrist;--and lo,
+this straight-way is so; and the hysteric loses supraliminal sensation
+in this fantastic belt. That the notion does not originate in the
+hysteric's supraliminal self is proved by the fact that the patient is
+generally unaware of the existence of the bracelet until the physician
+discovers it. Nor is it a chance combination;--even were there such a
+thing as chance. It is a dream of the hypnotic stratum;--an incoherent
+self-suggestion starting from and affecting a region below the reach of
+conscious will. Such cases are most instructive; for they begin to show
+us divisions of the human body based not upon local innervation but upon
+ideation (however incoherent);--upon intellectual conceptions like "a
+bracelet," "a cross,"--applied though these conceptions may be with
+dreamlike futility.
+
+In this view, then, we regard the fragments of perceptive power over
+which the hysteric has lost control as being by no means really
+extinguished, but rather as existing immediately beneath the threshold,
+in the custody, so to say, of a dreamlike or hypnotic stratum of the
+subliminal self, which has selected them for reasons sometimes
+explicable as the result of past suggestions, sometimes to us
+inexplicable. If this be so, we may expect that the same kind of
+suggestions which originally cut off these perceptions from the main
+body of perception may stimulate them again to action either below or
+above the conscious threshold.
+
+We have already, indeed, seen reason to suppose that the submerged
+perceptions are still at work, when Dr. Janet pointed out how rare a
+thing it was that any accident or injury followed upon hysterical loss
+of feeling in the limbs. A still more curious illustration is afforded
+by the condition of the field of vision in a hysteric. It often happens
+that the field of vision is much reduced, so that the hysteric, when
+tested with the perimeter, can discern only objects almost directly in
+front of the eye. But if an object which happens to be particularly
+exciting to the hypnotic stratum--for instance the hypnotiser's finger,
+used often as a signal for trance--is advanced into that part of the
+hysteric's normal visual field of which she has apparently lost all
+consciousness, there will often be an instant subliminal
+perception,--shown by the fact that the subject promptly falls into
+trance.
+
+In such cases the action of the submerged perceptions, while provoked by
+very shallow artifices, continues definitely _subliminal_. The patient
+_herself_, as we say, does not know why she does not burn her anćsthetic
+limbs, or why she suddenly falls into a trance while being subjected to
+optical tests.
+
+But it is equally easy to devise experiments which shall call these
+submerged sensations up again into supraliminal consciousness. A
+hysteric has lost sensation in one arm: Dr. Janet tells her that there
+is a caterpillar on that arm, and the reinforcement of attention thus
+generated brings back the sensibility.
+
+These hysterical anćsthesić, it may be added here, may be not only very
+definite but very profound. Just as the reality,--though also the
+impermanence,--of the hysterical retrenchment of field of vision of
+which I have been speaking can be shown by optical experiments beyond
+the patient's comprehension, so the reality of some profound organic
+hysterical insensibilities is sometimes shown by the progress of
+independent disease. A certain patient feels no hunger or thirst: this
+indifference might be simulated for a time, but her ignorance of severe
+inflammation of the bladder is easily recognisable as real. Throw her
+into hypnosis and her sensibilities return. The disease is for the first
+time felt, and the patient screams with pain. This result well
+illustrates one main effect of hypnosis, viz., to bring the organism
+into a more normal state. The deep organic anćsthesia of this patient
+was dangerously abnormal; the missing sensibility had first to be
+restored, although it might be desirable afterwards to remove the
+painful elements in that sensibility again, under, so to say, a wiser
+and deeper control.
+
+What has been said of hysterical defects of sensation might be repeated
+for motor defects. There, too, the powers of which the supraliminal self
+has lost control continue to act in obedience to subliminal promptings.
+The hysteric who squeezes the dynamometer like a weak child can exert
+great muscular force under the influence of emotion.
+
+Very numerous are the cases which might be cited to give a notion of
+dissolutive hysterical processes, as now observed with closer insight
+than formerly, in certain great hospitals. But, nevertheless, these
+hospital observations do not exhaust what has recently been learnt of
+hysteria. Dealing almost exclusively with a certain class of patients,
+they leave almost untouched another group, smaller, indeed, but equally
+instructive for our study.
+
+Hysteria is no doubt a disease, but it is by no means on that account an
+indication of initial weakness of mind, any more than an Arctic
+explorer's frost-bite is an indication of bad circulation. Disease is a
+function of two variables: power of resistance and strength of injurious
+stimulus. In the case of hysteria, as in the case of frost-bite, the
+inborn power of resistance may be unusually great, and yet the stimulus
+may be so excessive that that power may be overcome. Arctic explorers
+have generally, of course, been among the most robust of men. And with
+some hysterics there is an even closer connection between initial
+strength and destructive malady. For it has often happened that the very
+feelings which we regard as characteristically civilised,
+characteristically honourable, have reached a pitch of vividness and
+delicacy which exposes their owners to shocks such as the selfish clown
+can never know. It would be a great mistake to suppose that all
+psychical upsets are due to vanity, to anger, to terror, to sexual
+passion. The instincts of personal cleanliness and of feminine modesty
+are responsible for many a breakdown of a sensitive, but not a
+relatively _feeble_ organisation. The love of one's fellow-creatures and
+the love of God are responsible for many more. And why should it not be
+so? There exist for many men and women stimuli far stronger than
+self-esteem or bodily desires. Human life rests more and more upon ideas
+and emotions whose relation to the conservation of the race or of the
+individual is indirect and obscure. Feelings which may once have been
+utilitarian have developed wholly out of proportion to any advantage
+which they can gain for their possessor in the struggle for life. The
+dangers which are now most shudderingly felt are often no real risks to
+life or fortune. The aims most ardently pursued are often worse than
+useless for man regarded as a mere over-runner of the earth.
+
+There is thus real psychological danger in fixing our conception of
+human character too low. Some essential lessons of a complex
+perturbation of personality are apt to be missed if we begin with the
+conviction that there is nothing before us but a study of decay. As I
+have more than once found need to maintain, it is his steady advance,
+and not his occasional regression, which makes the chief concern of man.
+
+To this side of the study of hysteria Drs. Breuer and Freud have made
+valuable contribution. Drawing their patients not from hospital wards,
+but from private practice, they have had the good fortune to encounter,
+and the penetration to understand, some remarkable cases where unselfish
+but powerful passions have proved too much for the equilibrium of minds
+previously well-fortified both by principle and by education.[11]
+
+"Wax to receive and marble to retain"; such, as we all have felt, is the
+human mind in moments of excitement which transcend its resistant
+powers. This may be for good or for evil, may tend to that radical
+change in ethical standpoint which is called _conversion_, or to the
+mere setting-up of some hysterical disability. Who shall say how far we
+desire to be susceptible to stimulus? Most rash would it be to assign
+any fixed limit, or to class as inferior those whose main difference
+from ourselves may be that they feel sincerely and passionately what we
+feel torpidly, or perhaps only affect to feel. "The term degenerate,"
+says Dr. Milne Bramwell, "is applied so freely and widely by some modern
+authors that one cannot help concluding that they rank as such all who
+do not conform to some primitive, savage type, possessing an imperfectly
+developed nervous system." Our "degenerates" may sometimes be in truth
+_progenerate_; and their perturbation may mask an evolution which we or
+our children needs must traverse when they have shown the way.
+
+Let us pause for a moment and consider what is here implied. We are
+getting here among the _hystériques qui mčnent le monde_. We have
+advanced, that is to say, from the region of _idées fixes_ of a paltry
+or morbid type to the region of _idées fixes_ which in themselves are
+reasonable and honourable, and which become morbid only on account of
+their relative intensity. Here is the debateable ground between hysteria
+and genius. The kind of genius which we approach here is not, indeed,
+the purely intellectual form. Rather it is the "moral genius," the
+"genius of sanctity," or that "possession" by some altruistic idea which
+lies at the root of so many heroic lives.
+
+The hagiology of all religions offers endless examples of this type.
+That man would hardly be regarded as a great saint whose conduct seemed
+completely reasonable to the mass of mankind. The saint in consequence
+is apt to be set unduly apart, whether for veneration or for ridicule.
+He is regarded either as inspired or as morbid; when in reality all that
+his mode of life shows is that certain _idées fixes_, in themselves of
+no unworthy kind, have obtained such dominance that their impulsive
+action may take and retake, as accident wills, the step between the
+sublime and the ridiculous.
+
+Martyrs, missionaries, crusaders, nihilists,--enthusiasts of any kind
+who are swayed by impulses largely below the threshold of ordinary
+consciousness,--these men bring to bear on human affairs a force more
+concentrated and at higher tension than deliberate reason can generate.
+They are virtually carrying out self-suggestions which have acquired the
+permanence of _idées fixes_. Their fixed ideas, however, are not so
+isolated, so encysted as those of true hysterics. Although more deeply
+and immutably rooted than their ideas on other matters, these subliminal
+convictions are worked in with the products of supraliminal reason, and
+of course can only thus be made effective over other minds. A deep
+subliminal horror, generated, say, by the sight of some loathsome
+cruelty, must not only prompt hallucinations,--as it might do in the
+hysteric and has often done in the reformer as well,--it must also, if
+it is to work out its mission of reform, be held clearly before the
+supraliminal reason, and must learn to express itself in writing or
+speech adapted to influence ordinary minds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We may now pass from the first to the second of the categories of
+disintegration of personality suggested at the beginning of this
+chapter. The cases which I have thus far discussed have been mainly
+cases of _isolation_ of elements of personality. We have not dealt as
+yet with _secondary personalities_ as such. There is, however, a close
+connection between these two classes. There are cases, for example,
+where a kind of secondary state at times intervenes--a sort of
+bewilderment arising from confluent _idées fixes_ and overrunning the
+whole personality. This new state is often preceded or accompanied by
+something of somnambulic change. It is this new feature of which we have
+here a first hint which seems to me of sufficient importance for the
+diagnosis of my second class of psychical disintegrations. This second
+class starts from sleep-wakings of all kinds, and includes all stages of
+alternation of personality, from brief somnambulisms up to those
+permanent and thorough changes which deserve the name of dimorphisms.
+
+We are making here a transition somewhat resembling the transition from
+isolated bodily injuries to those subtler changes of diathesis which
+change of climate or of nutrition may induce. Something has happened
+which makes the organism react to all stimuli in a new way. Our best
+starting-point for the study of these secondary states lies among the
+phenomena of _dream_.
+
+We shall in a later chapter discuss certain rare characteristics of
+dreams; occasional manifestations in sleep of waking faculty heightened,
+or of faculty altogether new. We have now to consider ordinary dreams
+in their aspect as indications of the structure of our personality, and
+as agencies which tend to its modification.
+
+In the first place, it should be borne in mind that the dreaming state,
+though I will not call it the normal form of mentation, is nevertheless
+the form which our mentation most readily and habitually assumes. Dreams
+of a kind are probably going on within us both by night and by day,
+unchecked by any degree of tension of waking thought. This
+view--theoretically probable--seems to me to be supported by one's own
+actual experience in momentary dozes or even momentary lapses of
+attention. The condition of which one then becomes conscious is that of
+swarming fragments of thought or imagery, which have apparently been
+going on continuously, though one may become aware of them and then
+unaware at momentary intervals;--while one tries, for instance, to
+listen to a speech or to read a book aloud between sleep and waking.
+
+This, then, is the kind of mentation from which our clearer and more
+coherent states may be supposed to develop. Waking life implies a
+fixation of attention on one thread of thought running through a tangled
+skein. In hysterical patients we see some cases where no such fixation
+is possible, and other cases where the fixation is involuntary, or
+follows a thread which it is not desirable to pursue.
+
+There is, moreover, another peculiarity of dreams which has hardly
+attracted sufficient notice from psychologists, but which it is
+essential to review when we are dealing with fractionations of
+personality.[12] I allude to their _dramatic_ character. In dream, to
+begin with, we have an environment, a surrounding scene which we have
+not wittingly invented, but which we find, as it were, awaiting our
+entry. And in many cases our dream contains a _conversation_ in which we
+await with eagerness and hear with surprise the remarks of our
+interlocutor, who must, of course, all the time represent only another
+segment or stratum of ourselves. This duplication may become either
+painful or pleasant. A feverish dream may simulate the confusions of
+insanity--cases where the patient believes himself to be two persons at
+once, and the like. [See R. L. Stevenson's dream, given in Appendix II.
+A] These complications rarely cause the dreamer any surprise. One may
+even say that with the first touch of sleep the superficial unity of
+consciousness disappears, and that the dream world gives a truer
+representation than the waking world of the real fractionation or
+multiplicity existing beneath that delusive simplicity which the glare
+of waking consciousness imposes upon the mental field of view.
+
+Bearing these analogies in mind, we shall see that the development of
+somnambulism out of ordinary dream is no isolated oddity. It is parallel
+to the development of a secondary state from _idées fixes_ when these
+have passed a certain pitch of intensity. The sleep-waking states which
+develop from sleep have the characteristics which we should expect from
+their largely subliminal origin. They are less coherent than waking
+secondary personalities, but richer in supernormal faculty. It is in
+connection with displays of such faculty--hyperćsthesia or
+telćsthesia--that they have been mainly observed, and that I shall, in a
+future chapter, have most need to deal with them. But there is also
+great interest simply in observing what fraction of the sleep-waker's
+personality is able to hold intercourse with other minds. A trivial
+instance of such intercourse reduced to its lowest point has often
+recurred to me. When I was a boy another boy sleeping in the same room
+began to talk in his sleep. To some slight extent he could answer me;
+and the names and other words uttered--_Harry, the boat_, etc.--were
+appropriate to the day's incidents, and would have been enough to prove
+to me, had I not otherwise known, who the boy was. But his few coherent
+remarks represented not facts but dreaming fancies--_the boat is
+waiting_, and so forth. This trivial jumble, I say, has since recurred
+to me as precisely parallel to many communications professing to come
+from disembodied spirits. There are other explanations, no doubt, but
+one explanation of such incoherent utterances would be that the spirit
+was speaking under conditions resembling those in which this sleeping
+boy spoke.
+
+There are, of course, many stages above this. Spontaneous somnambulistic
+states become longer in duration, more coherent in content, and may
+gradually merge, as in the well-known case of Félida X. (see Appendix
+II. C) into a continuous or dimorphic new personality.
+
+The transition which has now to be made is a very decided one. We have
+been dealing with a class of secondary personalities consisting of
+elements _emotionally selected_ from the total or primary personality.
+We have seen some special group of feelings grow to morbid intensity,
+until at last it dominates the sufferer's mental being, either fitfully
+or continuously, but to such an extent that he is "a changed person,"
+not precisely insane, but quite other than he was when in normal mental
+health. In such cases the new personality is of course dyed in the
+morbid emotion. It is a kind of dramatic impersonation, say, of
+jealousy, or of fear, like the case of "demoniacal possession," quoted
+from Dr. Janet in Appendix II. B. In other respects the severance
+between the new and the old self is not very profound. Dissociations of
+memory, for instance, are seldom beyond the reach of hypnotic
+suggestion. The cleavage has not gone down to the depths of the
+psychical being.
+
+We must now go on to cases where the origin of the cleavage seems to us
+quite arbitrary, but where the cleavage itself seems even for that very
+reason to be more profound. It is no longer a question of some one
+morbidly exaggerated emotion, but rather of a scrap of the personality
+taken at random and developing apart from the rest.
+
+The commonest mode of origin for such secondary personalities is from
+some access of sleep-waking, which, instead of merging into sleep again,
+repeats and consolidates itself, until it acquires a chain of memories
+of its own, alternating with the primary chain.[13]
+
+And now, as an illustration of a secondary condition purely
+degenerative, I may first mention _post-epileptic_ states, although they
+belong too definitely to pathology for full discussion here.
+Post-epileptic conditions may run parallel to almost all the secondary
+phases which we have described. They may to all outward semblance
+closely resemble normality,--differing mainly by a lack of rational
+_purpose_, and perhaps by a recurrence to the habits and ideas of some
+earlier moment in the patient's history. Such a condition resembles some
+hypnotic trances, and some factitious personalities as developed by
+automatic writing. Or, again, the post-epileptic state may resemble a
+suddenly developed _idée fixe_ triumphing over all restraint, and may
+prompt to serious crime, abhorrent to the normal, but premeditated in
+the morbid state. There could not, in fact, be a better example of the
+unchecked rule of middle-level centres;--no longer secretly controlled,
+as in hypnotic trance, by the higher-level centres,--which centres in
+the epileptic are in a state not merely of psychological abeyance, but
+of physiological exhaustion.[14]
+
+The case of Ansel Bourne is interesting in this connection.[15] Subject
+from childhood to fits of deep depression, and presenting in later life
+symptoms suggestive of epilepsy, Ansel Bourne was struck down in his
+thirty-first year by what was supposed to be a severe sunstroke.
+Connected with this event were circumstances which led to a profound
+religious conversion. At sixty-one years of age, being at that time an
+itinerant preacher, and living in the small town of Greene, in the State
+of Rhode Island, Ansel Bourne disappeared one morning, whilst apparently
+in his usual state of health, and remained undiscovered for a period of
+two months. At the end of this time he turned up at Norristown,
+Pennsylvania, where for the previous six weeks he had been keeping a
+small variety store under the name of A. J. Brown, appearing to his
+neighbours and customers as an ordinary normal person, but being, as it
+would seem, in a somnambulistic condition all the while. When he
+regained his ordinary waking consciousness, Ansel Bourne lost all memory
+of his actions while in his secondary state. In the year 1890, however,
+having been hypnotised by Professor James, he was able while in the
+trance state to give an account of his doings during the eight weeks
+that the Brown personality lasted.
+
+In this case it is perhaps safest to regard the change of personality as
+_post-epileptic_, although I know of no recorded parallel to the length
+of time during which the influence of the attack must have continued.
+The effect on mind and character would suit well enough with this
+hypothesis. The "Brown" personality showed the narrowness of interests
+and the uninquiring indifference which is common in such states. But on
+this theory the case shows one striking novelty, namely, the recall by
+the aid of hypnotism of the memory of the post-epileptic state. It is
+doubtful, I think, whether any definite post-epileptic memory had ever
+previously been recovered. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether
+serious recourse had ever been had at such times to hypnotic methods,
+whose increasing employment certainly differentiates the latter from the
+earlier cases of split personality in a very favourable way. And this
+application of hypnotism to post-epileptic states affords us possibly
+our best chance--I do not say of directly checking epilepsy, but of
+getting down to the obscure conditions which predispose to each attack.
+
+Next we may mention two cases reported by Dr. Proust and M. Boeteau. Dr.
+Proust's patient,[16] Emile X., aged thirty-three, was a barrister in
+Paris. Although of good ability and education in classical studies, both
+as a boy and at the university he was always nervous and over sensitive,
+showing signs, in fact, of _la grande hystérie_. During his attacks he
+apparently underwent no loss of consciousness, but would lose the
+memory of all his past life during a few minutes or a few days, and in
+this condition of secondary consciousness would lead an active and
+apparently normal life. From such a state he woke suddenly, and was
+entirely without memory of what had happened to him in this secondary
+state. This memory was, however, restored by hypnotism.
+
+M. Boeteau's patient, Marie M.,[17] had been subject to hysterical
+attacks since she was twelve years old. She became an out-patient at the
+Hôpital Andral for these attacks: and on April 24, 1891, being then
+twenty-two years old, the house physician there advised her to enter the
+surgical ward at the Hôtel-Dieu, as she would probably need an operation
+for an internal trouble. Greatly shocked by this news, she left the
+hospital at ten A.M., and lost consciousness. When she recovered
+consciousness she found herself in quite another hospital--that of Ste.
+Anne--at six A.M. on April 27. She had been found wandering in the
+streets of Paris, in the evening of the day on which she left the
+Hôpital Andral. On returning to herself, she could recollect absolutely
+nothing of what had passed in the interval. While she was thus perplexed
+at her unexplained fatigue and footsoreness, and at the gap in her
+memory, M. Boeteau hypnotised her. She passed with ease into the
+hypnotic state, and at once remembered the events which filled at least
+the earlier part of the gap in her primary consciousness.
+
+These two cases belong to the same general type as Ansel Bourne's. There
+does not seem, however, to be any definite evidence that the secondary
+state was connected with epileptic attacks. It was referred rather by
+the physicians who witnessed it to a functional derangement analogous to
+hysteria, though it must be remembered that there are various forms of
+epilepsy which are not completely understood, and some of which may be
+overlooked by persons who are not familiar with the symptoms.
+
+Another remarkable case is that of the Rev. Thomas C. Hanna,[18] in whom
+complete amnesia followed an accident. By means of a method which Dr.
+Sidis (who studied the case) calls "hypnoidisation," he was able to
+prove that the patient had all his lost memories stored in his
+subliminal consciousness, and could temporarily recall them to the
+supraliminal. By degrees the two personalities which had developed
+since the accident were thus fused into one and the patient was
+completely cured.
+
+For another case of the ambulatory type, like Ansel Bourne's, but
+remarkable in that it was associated with a definite physical lesion--an
+abscess in the ear--the cure of which was followed by the rapid return
+of the patient to his normal condition, see Dr. Drewry's article in the
+_Medico-Legal Journal_ for June 1896 [228 A].
+
+Again, in a case reported by Dr. David Skae,[19] the secondary state
+seems to owe its origin to a kind of tidal exhaustion of vitality, as
+though the repose of sleep were not enough to sustain the weakened
+personality, which lapsed on alternate days into exhaustion and
+incoherence.
+
+The secondary personalities thus far dealt with have been the
+spontaneous results of some form of _misčre psychologique_, of defective
+integration of the psychical being. But there are also cases where, the
+cohesion being thus released, a slight touch from without can effect
+dissociations which, however shallow and almost playful in their first
+inception, may stiffen by repetition into phases as marked and definite
+as those secondary states which spring up of themselves, that is to say,
+from self-suggestions which we cannot trace. In Professor Janet's
+_L'Automatisme Psychologique_ the reader will find some instructive
+examples of these fictitious secondary personalities [230 A and B].
+
+Up to this point the secondary states which we have considered; however
+startling to old-fashioned ideas of personality, may, at any rate, be
+regarded as forms of mental derangement or decay--varieties on a theme
+already known. Now, however, we approach a group of cases to which it is
+difficult to make any such definition apply. They are cases where the
+secondary state is _not_ obviously a degeneration;--where it may even
+appear to be in some ways an _improvement_ on the primary; so that one
+is left wondering how it came about that the man either originally was
+what he was, or--being what he was--suddenly became something so very
+different. There has been a shake given to the kaleidoscope, and no one
+can say why either arrangement of the component pieces should have had
+the priority.
+
+In the classical case of Félida X. the second state is, as regards
+health and happiness, markedly superior to the first. (See Appendix II.
+C.)
+
+The old case of Mary Reynolds[20] is again remarkable in respect of the
+change of character involved. The deliverance from gloomy
+preoccupations--the childish insouciance of the secondary state--again
+illustrates the difference between these _allotropic_ changes or
+reconstructions of personality and that mere predominance of a morbid
+factor which marked the cases of _idée fixe_ and hysteria. Observe,
+also, in Mary Reynolds's case the tendency of the two states gradually
+to _coalesce_ apparently in a third phase likely to be preferable to
+either of the two already known.
+
+We now come to spontaneous cases of multiple personality, of which Louis
+Vivé's is one of the best known. Louis Vivé exhibited an extraordinary
+number and variety of phases of personality, affording an extreme
+example of dissociations dependent on _time-relations_, on the special
+epoch of life in which the subject was ordered to find himself.[21]
+Among various conditions of his organism--all but one of them implying,
+or at least simulating, some grave central lesion--any given condition
+could be revived in a moment, and the whole gamut of changes rung on his
+nervous system as easily as if one were setting back or forward a
+continuous cinematograph. It is hard to frame a theory of memory which
+shall admit of these sudden reversions,--of playing fast and loose in
+this manner with the accumulated impressions of years.
+
+Yet if Louis Vivé's case thus strangely intensifies the already puzzling
+notion of _ecmnesia_--as though the whole organism could be tricked into
+forgetting the events which had most deeply stamped it--what are we to
+say to Dr. Morton Prince's case of "Sally Beauchamp,"[22] with its
+grotesque exaggeration of a subliminal self--a kind of hostile bedfellow
+which knows everything and remembers everything--which mocks the
+emotions and thwarts the projects of the ordinary reasonable self which
+can be seen and known? The case must be studied in full as it stands;
+its later developments may help to unravel the mysteries which its
+earlier stages have already woven.[23]
+
+I quote in full in the text the next case, reported by Dr. R. Osgood
+Mason (in a paper entitled "Duplex Personality: its Relation to
+Hypnotism and to Lucidity," in the _Journal of the American Medical
+Association_, November 30th, 1895). Dr. Mason writes:--
+
+     Alma Z. was an unusually healthy and intellectual girl, a strong
+     and attractive character, a leading spirit in whatever she
+     undertook, whether in study, sport, or society. From overwork in
+     school, and overtaxed strength in a case of sickness at home, her
+     health was completely broken down, and after two years of great
+     suffering suddenly a second personality appeared. In a peculiar
+     child-like and Indian-like dialect she announced herself as
+     "Twoey," and that she had come to help "Number One" in her
+     suffering. The condition of "Number One" was at this time most
+     deplorable; there was great pain, extreme debility, frequent
+     attacks of syncope, insomnia, and a mercurial stomatitis which had
+     been kept up for months by way of medical treatment and which
+     rendered it nearly impossible to take nourishment in any form.
+     "Twoey" was vivacious and cheerful, full of quaint and witty talk,
+     never lost consciousness, and could take abundant nourishment,
+     which she declared she _must_ do for the sake of "Number One." Her
+     talk was most quaint and fascinating, but without a trace of the
+     acquired knowledge of the primary personality. She gave frequent
+     evidence of supranormal intelligence regarding events transpiring
+     in the neighbourhood. It was at this time that the case came under
+     my observation, and has remained so for the past ten years. Four
+     years later, under depressing circumstances, a third personality
+     made its appearance and announced itself as "The Boy." This
+     personality was entirely distinct and different from either of the
+     others. It remained the chief alternating personality for four
+     years, when "Twoey" again returned.
+
+     All these personalities, though absolutely different and
+     characteristic, were delightful each in its own way, and "Twoey"
+     especially was, and still is, the delight of the friends who are
+     permitted to know her, whenever she makes her appearance; and this
+     is always at times of unusual fatigue, mental excitement, or
+     prostration; then she comes and remains days at a time. The
+     original self retains her superiority when she is present, and the
+     others are always perfectly devoted to her interest and comfort.
+     "Number One" has no personal knowledge of either of the other
+     personalities, but she knows them well, and especially "Twoey,"
+     from the report of others and from characteristic letters which are
+     often received from her; and "Number One" greatly enjoys the spicy,
+     witty, and often useful messages which come to her through these
+     letters and the report of friends.
+
+Dr. Mason goes on to say:--
+
+     Here are three cases [the one just given, that of another patient
+     of his own, and that of Félida X.] in which a second
+     personality--perfectly sane, thoroughly practical, and perfectly in
+     touch and harmony with its surroundings--came to the surface, so to
+     speak, and assumed absolute control of the physical organisation
+     for long periods of time together. During the stay of the second
+     personality the primary or original self was entirely blotted out,
+     and the time so occupied was a blank. In neither of the cases
+     described had the primary self any knowledge of the second
+     personality, except from the report of others or letters from the
+     second self, left where they could be found on the return of the
+     primary self to consciousness. The second personality, on the other
+     hand, in each case, knew of the primary self, but only as another
+     person--never as forming a part of, or in any way belonging to
+     their own personalities. In the case of both Félida X. and Alma Z.,
+     there was always immediate and marked improvement in the physical
+     condition when the second personality made its appearance.
+
+The case of Mollie Fancher,[24] which, had it been observed and recorded
+with scientific accuracy, might have been one of the most instructive of
+all, seems to stand midway between the transformations of Louis
+Vivé--each of them frankly himself at a different epoch of life--and the
+"pseudo-possessions" of imaginary spirits with which we shall in a later
+chapter have to deal.
+
+The case of Anna Winsor[25] goes so far further in its suggestion of
+interference from without that it presents to us, at any rate, a
+contrast and even conflict between positive insanity on the part of the
+organism generally with wise and watchful sanity on the part of a single
+limb, with which that organism professes to have no longer any concern.
+
+The last case[26] that I shall mention is that of Miss Mary Lurancy
+Vennum, the "Watseka Wonder."
+
+The case briefly is one of alleged "possession," or "spirit-control."
+The subject of the account, a girl nearly fourteen years old, living at
+Watseka, Illinois, became apparently controlled by the spirit of Mary
+Roff, a neighbour's daughter, who had died at the age of eighteen years
+and nine months, when Lurancy Vennum was a child of about fifteen months
+old. The most extraordinary feature in the case was that the control by
+Mary Roff lasted almost continuously for a period of four months.
+
+For the present we must consider this case as a duplication of
+personality--a pseudo-possession, if you will--determined in a
+hysterical child by the suggestion of friends, but at a later stage, and
+when some other wonders have become more familiar than now, we may find
+that this singular narrative has further lessons to teach us.
+
+We have now briefly surveyed a series of disintegrations of personality
+ranging from the most trifling _idée fixe_ to actual alternations or
+permanent changes of the whole type of character. All these form a kind
+of continuous series, and illustrate the structure of the personality in
+concordant ways. There do exist, it must be added, other forms of
+modified personality with which I shall not at present deal. Those are
+cases where some telepathic influence from outside has been at work, so
+that there is not merely dissociation of existing elements, but apparent
+introduction of a novel element. Such cases also pass through a long
+series, from small phenomena of motor automatism up to trance and
+so-called possession. But all this group I mention here merely in order
+to defer their discussion to later chapters.
+
+The brief review already made will suffice to indicate the complex and
+separable nature of the elements of human personality. Of course a far
+fuller list might have been given; many phenomena of actual insanity
+would need to be cited in any complete conspectus. But hysteria is in
+some ways a better dissecting agent than any other where delicate
+psychical dissociations are concerned. Just as the microscopist stains a
+particular tissue for observation, so does hysteria stain with
+definiteness, as it were, particular synergies--definite complexes of
+thought and action--more manifestly than any grosser lesion, any more
+profound or persistent injury could do. Hysterical mutism, for instance
+(the observation is Charcot's[27]), supplies almost the only cases where
+the faculty of vocal utterance is attacked in a quite isolated way. In
+aphasia dependent upon organic injury we generally find other
+word-memories attacked also,--elements of agraphy, of word-blindness, of
+word-deafness appear. In the hysteric the incapacity to speak may be the
+single symptom. So with anćsthesić; we find in hysteria a separation of
+sensibility to heat and to pain, possibly even a separate subsistence of
+electrical sensibility. It is worth remarking here that it was during
+the hypnotic trance, which in delicacy of discriminating power resembles
+hysteria, that (so far as I can make out) the distinctness of the
+temperature-sense from the pain-sense was first observed. Esdaile, when
+removing tumours under mesmerism in Calcutta, noticed that patients, who
+were actually undergoing capital operations without a murmur, complained
+if a draught blew in upon them from an open window.
+
+Nor is it only as a dissecting agent that hysteria can aid our research.
+There are in hysteria frequent _acquisitions_ as well as _losses_ of
+faculty. It is not unusual to find great hyperćsthesia in certain
+special directions--of touch, hearing, perception of light,
+etc.--combined with hysterical loss of sensation of other kinds. This
+subject will be more conveniently treated along with the hyperćsthesia
+of the hypnotic trance. But I may note here that just such occasional
+quickenings of faculty were, in my view, almost certain to accompany
+that instability of psychical threshold which is the distinguishing
+characteristic of hysteria, since I hold that subliminal faculty
+habitually overpasses supraliminal. These also are a kind of capricious
+_idées fixes_; only the caprice in such cases raises what was previously
+submerged instead of exaggerating what was previously emergent.
+
+And from this point it is that our inquiries must now take their fresh
+departure. We in this work are concerned with changes which are the
+_converse_ of hysterical changes. We are looking for integrations in
+lieu of disintegrations; for intensifications of control, widenings of
+faculty, instead of relaxation, scattering, or decay.
+
+Suppose, then, that in a case of instability of the psychical
+threshold,--ready _permeability_, if you will, of the psychical
+diaphragm separating the supraliminal from the subliminal self,--the
+elements of emergence tend to increase and the elements of submergence
+to diminish. Suppose that the permeability depends upon the force of the
+uprushes from below the diaphragm rather than on the tendency to sink
+downwards from above it. We shall then reach the point where the vague
+name of _hysteria_ must give place to the vague name of _genius_. The
+uprushes from the subliminal self will now be the important feature; the
+down-draught from the supraliminal, if it still exists, will be trivial
+in comparison. The content of the uprush will be congruous with the
+train of voluntary thought; and the man of genius will be a man more
+capable than others of utilising for his waking purposes the subliminal
+region of his being.
+
+Next in order to the uprushes of genius will come the uprushes of dream.
+All men pass normally and healthily into a second phase of personality,
+alternating with the first. That is _sleep_, and sleep is characterised
+by those incoherent forms of subliminal uprush which we know as dreams.
+It is here that our evidence for telepathy and telćsthesia will first
+present itself for discussion. Sleep will indicate the existence of
+submerged faculty of a rarer type than even that to which genius has
+already testified.
+
+There are, moreover, other states, both spontaneous and induced,
+analogous to sleep, and these will form the subject of the fifth
+chapter, that on Hypnotism. Hypnotism, however, does not mean trance or
+somnambulism only. It is a name, if not for the whole _ensemble_, yet
+for a large group of those artifices which we have as yet discovered for
+the purpose of eliciting and utilising subliminal faculty. The results
+of hypnotic suggestion will be found to imitate sometimes the subliminal
+uprushes of genius, and sometimes the visions of spontaneous
+somnambulism; while they also open to us fresh and characteristic
+accesses into subliminal knowledge and power.
+
+Further than this point our immediate forecast need not go. But when we
+have completed the survey here indicated, we shall see, I think, how
+significant are the phenomena of hysteria in any psychological scheme
+which aims at including the hidden powers of man. For much as the
+hysteric stands in comparison to us ordinary men, so perhaps do we
+ordinary men stand in comparison with a not impossible ideal of faculty
+and of self-control.
+
+But apart from these broader speculations, it has become evident that
+disturbances of personality are not mere empty marvels, but
+psycho-pathological problems of the utmost interest:--no one of them
+exactly like another, and no one of them without some possible _aperçu_
+into the intimate structure of man.
+
+The purpose of this book, of course, is not primarily practical. It aims
+rather at the satisfaction of scientific curiosity as to man's psychical
+structure; esteeming _that_ as a form of experimental research which the
+more urgent needs of therapeutics have kept in the background too long.
+Yet it may not have been amiss to realise thus, on the threshold of our
+discussion, that already even the most delicate speculations in this
+line have found their justification in helpful act; that strange
+bewilderments, paralysing perturbations, which no treatment could
+alleviate, no drug control, have been soothed and stablished into sanity
+by some appropriate and sagacious mode of appeal to a _natura
+medicatrix_ deep-hidden in the labouring breast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+GENIUS
+
+    Igneus est ollis vigor et coelestis origo
+    Seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant
+    Terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra.
+
+    --VIRGIL.
+
+
+In my second chapter I made no formal attempt to define that human
+personality which is to form the main subject of this book. I was
+content to take the conception roughly for granted, and to enter at once
+on the study of the lapses of personality into abnormal
+conditions,--short of the lowest depths of idiocy or madness. From that
+survey it appeared that these degenerations could be traced to some
+defect in that central control which ought to clasp and integrate into
+steady manhood the hierarchies of living cells which compose the human
+organism. This insight into the Self's decay was the needed prerequisite
+to our present task--that of apprehending its true normality, and
+thereafter of analysing certain obscurer faculties which indicate the
+line of its evolution during and after the life of earth.
+
+Strength and concentration of the inward unifying control--_that_ must
+be the true normality which we seek; and in seeking it we must remember
+how much of psychical operation goes on below the conscious threshold,
+imperfectly obedient to any supraliminal appeal. What advance can we
+make in inward mastery? how far extend our grasp over the whole range of
+faculty with which we are obscurely endowed?
+
+"Human perfectibility" has been the theme of many enthusiasts; and many
+utopian schemes of society have been and still are suggested, which
+postulate in the men and women of the future an increase in moral and
+physical health and vigour. And it is plain that in a broad and general
+way natural selection, sexual selection, and the advance of science are
+working together towards improvements of these kinds. But it is plain
+also that these onward tendencies, at least in comparison with our
+desires and ideals, are slow and uncertain; and it is possible to argue
+that the apparent advance in our race is due merely to the improvement
+which science has affected in its material environment, and not to any
+real development, during the historical period, in the character or
+faculties of man himself. Nay, since we have no means of knowing to what
+extent any genus has an inward potentiality of improvement, it is
+possible for the pessimist to argue that the _genus homo_ has reached
+its fore-ordained evolutionary limit; so that it cannot be pushed
+further in any direction without risk of nervous instability, sterility,
+and ultimate extinction. Some dim apprehension of this kind lends
+plausibility to many popular diatribes. Dr. Max Nordau's works afford a
+well-known example of this line of protest against the present age as an
+age of overwork and of nervous exhaustion. And narrowing the vague
+discussion to a somewhat more definite test, Professor Lombroso and
+other anthropologists have discussed the characteristics of the "man of
+genius"; with the result of showing (as they believe) that this
+apparently highest product of the race is in reality not a culminant but
+an aberrant manifestation; and that men of genius must be classed with
+criminals and lunatics, as persons in whom a want of balance or
+completeness of organisation has led on to an over-development of one
+side of the nature;--helpful or injurious to other men as accident may
+decide.
+
+On this point I shall join issue; and I shall suggest, on the other
+hand, that Genius--if that vaguely used word is to receive anything like
+a psychological definition--should rather be regarded as a power of
+utilising a wider range than other men can utilise of faculties in some
+degree innate in all;--a power of appropriating the results of
+subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought;--so
+that an "inspiration of Genius" will be in truth a _subliminal uprush_,
+an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously
+manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but
+which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of
+his being. I shall urge that there is here no real departure from
+normality; no abnormality, at least in the sense of degeneration; but
+rather a fulfilment of the true norm of man, with suggestions, it may
+be, of something _supernormal_;--of something which transcends existing
+normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress transcends an
+earlier stage.
+
+But before proceeding further I wish to guard against a possible
+misapprehension. I shall be obliged in this chapter to dwell on valuable
+aid rendered by subliminal mentation; but I do not mean to imply that
+such mentation is _ipso facto superior_ to supraliminal, or even that it
+covers a large proportion of practically useful human achievement. When
+I say "The differentia of genius lies in an increased control over
+subliminal mentation," I express, I think, a well-evidenced thesis, and
+I suggest an important inference,--namely, that the man of genius is for
+us the best type of the normal man, in so far as he effects a successful
+co-operation of an unusually large number of elements of his
+personality--reaching a stage of integration slightly in advance of our
+own. Thus much I wish to say: but my thesis is not to be pushed
+further:--as though I claimed that all our best thought was subliminal,
+or that all that was subliminal was potentially "inspiration."
+
+It is true, however, that the range of our subliminal mentation is more
+extended than the range of our supraliminal. At one end of the scale we
+find _dreams_,--a normal subliminal product, but of less practical value
+than any form of sane supraliminal thought. At the other end of the
+scale we find that the rarest, most precious knowledge comes to us from
+outside the ordinary field,--through the eminently subliminal processes
+of telepathy, telćsthesia, ecstasy. And between these two extremes lie
+many subliminal products, varying in value according to the dignity and
+trustworthiness of the subliminal mentation concerned.
+
+This last phrase--inevitably obscure--may be illustrated by reference to
+that hierarchical arrangement of _supraliminal_ action and perception
+which Dr. Hughlings Jackson has so used as to clear up much previous
+confusion of thought. Following him, we now speak of highest-level
+nerve-centres, governing our highest, most complex thought and will; of
+middle-level centres, governing movements of voluntary muscles, and the
+like; and of lowest-level centres (which from my point of view are
+purely subliminal), governing those automatic processes, as respiration
+and circulation, which are independent of conscious rule, but necessary
+to the maintenance of life. We can roughly judge from the nature of any
+observed action whether the highest-level centres are directing it, or
+whether they are for the time inhibited, so that middle-level centres
+operate uncontrolled.
+
+Thus ordinary speech and writing are ruled by highest-level centres. But
+when an epileptic discharge of nervous energy has exhausted the
+highest-level centres, we see the middle-level centres operating
+unchecked, and producing the convulsive movements of arms and legs in
+the "fit." As these centres in their turn become exhausted, the patient
+is left to the guidance of lowest-level centres alone;--that is to say,
+he becomes comatose, though he continues to breathe as regularly as
+usual.
+
+Now this series of phenomena,--_descending_ in coherence and
+coordination from an active consensus of the whole organism to a mere
+automatic maintenance of its most stably organised processes,--may be
+pretty closely paralleled by the series of subliminal phenomena also.
+
+Sometimes we seem to see our subliminal perceptions and faculties acting
+truly in unity, truly as a Self;--co-ordinated into some harmonious
+"inspiration of genius," or some profound and reasonable hypnotic
+self-reformation, or some far-reaching supernormal achievement of
+clairvoyant vision or of self-projection into a spiritual world.
+Whatever of subliminal personality is thus acting corresponds with the
+highest-level centres of supraliminal life. At such moments the
+_subliminal_ represents (as I believe) most nearly what will become the
+_surviving_ Self.
+
+But it seems that this degree of clarity, of integration, cannot be long
+preserved. Much oftener we find the subliminal perceptions and faculties
+acting in less co-ordinated, less coherent ways. We have products which,
+while containing traces of some faculty beyond our common scope,
+involve, nevertheless, something as random and meaningless as the
+discharge of the uncontrolled middle-level centres of arms and legs in
+the epileptic fit. We get, in short, a series of phenomena which the
+term _dream-like_ seems best to describe.
+
+In the realm of genius,--of uprushes of thought and feeling fused
+beneath the conscious threshold into artistic shape,--we get no longer
+masterpieces but half-insanities,--not the Sistine Madonna, but Wiertz's
+Vision of the Guillotined Head; not _Kubla Khan_, but the disordered
+opium dream. Throughout all the work of William Blake (I should say) we
+see the subliminal self flashing for moments into unity, then
+smouldering again in a lurid and scattered glow.
+
+In the realm of hypnotism, again, we sink from the reasonable
+self-suggestion to the "platform experiments,"--the smelling of ammonia,
+the eating of tallow candles;--all the tricks which show a _profound_
+control, but not a _wise_ control, over the arcana of organic life. I
+speak, of course, of the subject's _own_ control over his organism; for
+in the last resort it is _he_ and not his hypnotiser who really
+exercises that directive power. And I compare these tricks of
+middle-level subliminal centres to the powerful yet irrational control
+which the middle-level centres ruling the epileptic's arms and legs
+exercise over his muscles in the violence of the epileptic attack.
+
+And so again with the _automatisms_ which are, one may say, the
+subliminal self's peculiar province. Automatic script, for instance, may
+represent highest-level subliminal centres, even when no extraneous
+spirit, but the automatist's own mind alone, is concerned. It will then
+give us true telepathic messages, or perhaps messages of high moral
+import, surpassing the automatist's conscious powers. But much oftener
+the automatic script is regulated by what I have called middle-level
+subliminal centres only;--and then, though we may have scraps of
+supernormal intelligence, we have confusion and incoherence as well. We
+have the falsity which the disgusted automatist is sometimes fain to
+ascribe to a devil; though it is in reality not a devil, but a dream.
+
+And hence again, just as the epileptic sinks lower and lower in the
+fit,--from the incoordinated movements of the limbs down to the mere
+stertorous breathing of coma,--so do these incoherent automatisms sink
+down at last, through the utterances and drawings of the degenerate and
+the paranoiac,--through mere fragmentary dreams, or vague impersonal
+bewilderment,--into the minimum psychical concomitant, whatever that be,
+which must coexist with brain-circulation.
+
+Such is the apparent parallelism; but of course no knowledge of a
+hierarchy of the familiar forms of nervous action can really explain to
+us the mysterious fluctuations of subliminal power.
+
+When we speak of the highest-level and other centres which govern our
+supraliminal being, and which are fitted to direct this planetary life
+in a material world, we can to some extent point out actual
+brain-centres whose action enables us to meet those needs. What are the
+needs of our cosmic life we do not know; nor can we indicate any point
+in our organism (as in the "solar plexus," or the like), which is
+adapted to meet them. We cannot even either affirm or deny that such
+spiritual life as we maintain while incarnated in this material envelope
+involves any physical concomitants at all.
+
+For my part, I feel forced to fall back upon the old-world conception of
+a _soul_ which exercises an imperfect and fluctuating control over the
+organism; and exercises that control, I would add, along two main
+channels, only partly coincident--that of ordinary consciousness,
+adapted to the maintenance and guidance of earth-life; and that of
+subliminal consciousness, adapted to the maintenance of our larger
+spiritual life during our confinement in the flesh.
+
+We men, therefore, _clausi tenebris et carcere cćco_, can sometimes
+widen, as we must sometimes narrow, our outlook on the reality of
+things. In mania or epilepsy we lose control even of those highest-level
+supraliminal centres on which our rational earth-life depends. But
+through automatism and in trance and allied states we draw into
+supraliminal life some rivulet from the undercurrent stream. If the
+subliminal centres which we thus impress into our waking service
+correspond to the _middle-level_ only, they may bring to us merely error
+and confusion; if they correspond to the highest-level, they may
+introduce us to previously unimagined truth.
+
+It is to work done by the aid of some such subliminal uprush, I say once
+more, that the word "genius" may be most fitly applied. "A work of
+genius," indeed, in common parlance, means a work which satisfies two
+quite distinct requirements. It must involve something original,
+spontaneous, unteachable, unexpected; and it must also in some way win
+for itself the admiration of mankind. Now, psychologically speaking, the
+first of these requirements corresponds to a real class, the second to a
+purely accidental one. What the poet feels while he writes his poem is
+the psychological fact in _his_ history; what his friends feel while
+they read it may be a psychological fact in _their_ history, but does
+not alter the poet's creative effort, which was what it was, whether any
+one but himself ever reads his poem or no.
+
+And popular phraseology justifies our insistence upon this subjective
+side of genius. Thus it is common to say that "Hartley Coleridge" (for
+example) "was a genius, although he never produced anything worth
+speaking of." Men recognise, that is to say, from descriptions of
+Hartley Coleridge, and from the fragments which he has left, that ideas
+came to him with what I have termed a sense of subliminal uprush,--with
+an authentic, although not to us an instructive, inspiration.
+
+As psychologists, I maintain, we are bound to base our definition of
+genius upon some criterion of this strictly psychological kind, rather
+than on the external tests which as artists or men of letters we should
+employ;--and which consider mainly the degree of delight which any given
+achievement can bestow upon other men. The artist will speak of the
+pictorial genius of Raphael, but not of Haydon; of the dramatic genius
+of Corneille, but not of Voltaire. Yet Haydon's Autobiography--a record
+of tragic intensity, and closing in suicide--shows that the tame yet
+contorted figures of his "Raising of Lazarus" flashed upon him with an
+overmastering sense of direct inspiration. Voltaire, again, writes to
+the president Hénault of his unreadable tragedy _Catilina_: "Five acts
+in a week! I know that this sounds ridiculous; but if men could guess
+what enthusiasm can do,--how a poet in spite of himself, idolising his
+subject, devoured by his genius, can accomplish in a few days a task for
+which without that genius a year would not suffice;--in a word, _si
+scirent donum Dei_,--_if they knew the gift of God_,--their astonishment
+might be less than it must be now." I do not shrink from these extreme
+instances. It would be absurd, of course, to place Haydon's "Raising of
+Lazarus" in the same _artistic_ class as Raphael's "Madonna di San
+Sisto." But in the same _psychological_ class I maintain that both
+works must be placed. For each painter, after his several kind, there
+was the same inward process,--the same sense of subliminal uprush;--that
+extension, in other words, of mental concentration which draws into
+immediate cognisance some workings or elements of the hidden self.
+
+Let me illustrate this conception by a return to the metaphor of the
+"conscious spectrum" to which I introduced my reader in the first
+chapter. I there described our conscious spectrum as representing but a
+small fraction of the _aurai simplicis ignis_, or individual psychical
+ray;--just as our visible solar spectrum represents but a small fraction
+of the solar ray. And even as many waves of ether lie beyond the red
+end, and many beyond the violet end, of that visible spectrum, so have I
+urged that much of unrecognised or subliminal faculty lies beyond the
+red (or organic) end, and much beyond the violet (or intellectual) end
+of my imaginary spectrum. My main task in this book will be to prolong
+the psychical spectrum beyond either limit, by collecting traces of
+latent faculties, organic or transcendental:--just as by the bolometer,
+by fluorescence, by other artifices, physicists have prolonged the solar
+spectrum far beyond either limit of ordinary visibility.
+
+But at present, and before entering on that task of rendering manifest
+supernormal faculty, I am considering what we ought to regard as the
+normal range of faculty from which we start;--what, in relation to man,
+the words _norm_ and _normal_ should most reasonably mean.
+
+The word _normal_ in common speech is used almost indifferently to imply
+either of two things, which may be very different from each
+other--conformity to a standard and position as an average between
+extremes. Often indeed the average constitutes the standard--as when a
+gas is of normal density; or is practically equivalent to the
+standard--as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to
+living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living
+organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor. To
+assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank at a
+flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal
+standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is
+tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of
+the future. Human evolution is not so simple or so conspicuous a thing
+as the evolution of the pouter pigeon. But it would be rash to affirm
+that it is not even swifter than any variation among domesticated
+animals. Not a hundred generations separate us from the dawn of
+history;--about as many generations as some microbes can traverse in a
+month;--about as many as separate the modern Derby-winner from the
+war-horse of Gustavus Adolphus. Man's change has been less than the
+horse's change in physical contour,--probably only because man has not
+been specially bred with that view;--but taking as a test the power of
+self-adaptation to environment, man has traversed in these thirty
+centuries a wider arc of evolution than separates the racehorse from the
+eohippus. Or if we go back further, and to the primal germ, we see that
+man's ancestors must have varied faster than any animal's, since they
+have travelled farthest in the same time. They have varied also in the
+greatest number of directions; they have evoked in greatest multiplicity
+the unnumbered faculties latent in the irritability of a speck of slime.
+Of all creatures man has gone furthest both in differentiation and in
+integration; he has called into activity the greatest number of those
+faculties which lay potential in the primal germ,--and he has
+established over those faculties the strongest central control. The
+process still continues. Civilisation adds to the complexity of his
+faculties; education helps him to their concentration. It is in the
+direction of a still wider range, a still firmer hold, that his
+evolution now must lie. I shall maintain that this ideal is best
+attained by the man of genius.
+
+Let us consider the way in which the maximum of faculty is habitually
+manifested; the circumstances in which a man does what he has never
+supposed himself able to do before. We may take an instance where the
+faculty drawn upon lies only a little way beneath the surface. A man, we
+say, outdoes himself in a great emergency. If his house is on fire, let
+us suppose, he carries his children out over the roof with a strength
+and agility which seem beyond his own. That effective impulse seems more
+akin to instinct than to calculation. We hardly know whether to call the
+act reflex or voluntary. It is performed with almost no conscious
+intervention of thought or judgment, but it involves a new and complex
+adaptation of voluntary muscles such as would need habitually the man's
+most careful thought to plan and execute. From the point of view here
+taken the action will appear to have been neither reflex nor voluntary
+in the ordinary sense, but _subliminal_;--a subliminal uprush, an
+emergence of hidden faculty,--of nerve co-ordinations potential in his
+organism but till now unused,--which takes command of the man and guides
+his action at the moment when his being is deeply stirred.
+
+This stock instance of a man's possible behaviour in moments of great
+physical risk does but illustrate in a gross and obvious manner, and in
+the motor region, a phenomenon which, as I hold, is constantly occurring
+on a smaller scale in the inner life of most of us. We identify
+ourselves for the most part with a stream of voluntary, fully conscious
+ideas,--cerebral movements connected and purposive as the movement of
+the hand which records them. Meantime we are aware also of a substratum
+of fragmentary automatic, _liminal_ ideas, of which we take small
+account. These are bubbles that break on the surface; but every now and
+then there is a stir among them. There is a rush upwards as of a
+subaqueous spring; an inspiration flashes into the mind for which our
+conscious effort has not prepared us. This so-called inspiration may in
+itself be trivial or worthless; but it is the initial stage of a
+phenomenon to which, when certain rare attributes are also present, the
+name of genius will be naturally given.
+
+I am urging, then, that where life is concerned, and where, therefore,
+change is normality, we ought to place our norm somewhat ahead of the
+average man, though on the evolutionary track which our race is
+pursuing. I have suggested that that evolutionary track is at present
+leading him in the direction of greater complexity in the perceptions
+which he forms of things without, and of greater concentration in his
+own will and thought,--in that response to perceptions which he makes
+from within. Lastly I have argued that men of genius, whose perceptions
+are presumably more vivid and complex than those of average men, are
+also the men who carry the power of concentration furthest;--reaching
+downwards, by some self-suggestion which they no more than we can
+explain, to treasures of latent faculty in the hidden Self.
+
+I am not indeed here assuming that the faculty which is at the service
+of the man of genius is of a kind different from that of common men, in
+such a sense that it would need to be represented by a prolongation of
+either end of the conscious spectrum. Rather it will be represented by
+such a brightening of the familiar spectrum as may follow upon an
+intensification of the central light. For the spectrum of man's
+conscious faculty, like the solar spectrum, is not continuous but
+banded. There are groups of the dark lines of obstruction and
+incapacity, and even in the best of us a dim unequal glow.
+
+It will, then, be the special characteristic of genius that its uprushes
+of subliminal faculty will make the bright parts of the habitual
+spectrum more brilliant, will kindle the dim absorption-bands to fuller
+brightness, and will even raise quite dark lines into an occasional
+glimmer.
+
+But, if, as I believe, we can best give to the idea of genius some
+useful distinctness by regarding it in some such way as this, we shall
+find also that genius will fall into line with many other sensory and
+motor automatisms to which the word could not naturally be applied.
+Genius represents a narrow selection among a great many cognate
+phenomena;--among a great many uprushes or emergences of subliminal
+faculty both within and beyond the limits of the ordinary conscious
+spectrum.
+
+It will be more convenient to study all these together, under the
+heading of sensory or of motor automatism. It will then be seen that
+there is no kind of perception which may not emerge from beneath the
+threshold in an indefinitely heightened form, with just that convincing
+suddenness of impression which is described by men of genius as
+characteristic of their highest flights. Even with so simple a range of
+sensation as that which records the lapse of time there are subliminal
+uprushes of this type, and we shall see that a man may have a sudden and
+accurate inspiration of what o'clock it is, in just the same way as
+Virgil might have an inspiration of the second half of a difficult
+hexameter.
+
+For the purpose of present illustration of the workings of genius it
+seems well to choose a kind of ability which is quite indisputable, and
+which also admits of some degree of quantitative measurement. I would
+choose the higher mathematical processes, were data available; and I may
+say in passing how grateful I should be to receive from mathematicians
+any account of the mental processes of which they are conscious during
+the attainment of their highest results. Meantime there is a lower class
+of mathematical gift which by its very specialisation and isolation
+seems likely to throw light on our present inquiry.
+
+During the course of the present century,--and alas! the scientific
+observation of unusual specimens of humanity hardly runs back further,
+or so far,--the public of great cities has been from time to time
+surprised and diverted by some so-called "calculating boy," or
+"arithmetical prodigy," generally of tender years, and capable of
+performing "in his head," and almost instantaneously, problems for which
+ordinary workers would require pencil and paper and a much longer time.
+In some few cases, indeed, the ordinary student would have no means
+whatever of solving the problem which the calculating boy unriddled with
+ease and exactness.
+
+The especial advantage of the study of arithmetical prodigies is that in
+their case the subjective impression coincides closely with the
+objective result. The subliminal computator feels that the sum is right,
+and it _is_ right. Forms of real or supposed genius which are more
+interesting are apt to be less undeniable.
+
+An American and a French psychologist[28] have collected such hints and
+explanations as these prodigies have given of their methods of working;
+methods which one might naturally hope to find useful in ordinary
+education. The result, however, has been very meagre, and the records
+left to us, imperfect as they are, are enough to show that the main and
+primary achievement has in fact been subliminal, while conscious or
+supraliminal effort has sometimes been wholly absent, sometimes has
+supervened only after the gift has been so long exercised that the
+accesses between different strata have become easy by frequent
+traversing. The prodigy grown to manhood, who now recognises the
+arithmetical artifices which he used unconsciously as a boy, resembles
+the hypnotic subject trained by suggestion to remember in waking hours
+the events of the trance.
+
+In almost every point, indeed, where comparison is possible, we shall
+find this computative gift resembling other manifestations of subliminal
+faculty,--such as the power of seeing hallucinatory figures,--rather
+than the results of steady supraliminal effort, such as the power of
+logical analysis. In the first place, this faculty, in spite of its
+obvious connection with general mathematical grasp and insight, is found
+almost at random,--among non-mathematical and even quite stupid persons,
+as well as among mathematicians of mark. In the second place, it shows
+itself mostly in early childhood, and tends to disappear in later
+life;--in this resembling visualising power in general, and the power of
+seeing hallucinatory figures in particular; which powers, as both Mr.
+Galton's inquiries and our own tend to show, are habitually stronger in
+childhood and youth than in later years. Again, it is noticeable that
+when the power disappears early in life it is apt to leave behind it no
+memory whatever of the processes involved. And even when, by long
+persistence in a reflective mind, the power has become, so to say,
+adopted into the supraliminal consciousness, there nevertheless may
+still be flashes of pure "inspiration," when the answer "comes into the
+mind" with absolutely no perception of intermediate steps.
+
+I subjoin a table, compiled by the help of Dr. Scripture's collection,
+which will broadly illustrate the main points above mentioned. Some more
+detailed remarks may then follow.
+
+  TABLE OF PRINCIPAL ARITHMETICAL PRODIGIES.
+
+  +-----------------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+
+  |        Name           | Age when gift |  Duration of  |               |
+  |  (alphabetically).    | was observed. |     gift.     | Intelligence. |
+  +-----------------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+
+  |Ampčre                 |      4        |       ?       |    eminent    |
+  |Bidder                 |     10        |  through life |      good     |
+  |Buxton                 |      ?        |       ?       |      low      |
+  |Colburn                |      6        |   few years   |    average    |
+  |Dase [or Dahse]        |   boyhood     |  through life |    very low   |
+  |Fuller                 |   boyhood     |       ?       |      low      |
+  |Gauss                  |      3        |       ?       |    eminent    |
+  |Mangiamele             |     10        |   few years   |    average?   |
+  |Mondeux                |     10        |   few years   |      low      |
+  |Prolongeau             |      6        |   few years   |      low      |
+  |Safford                |      6        |   few years   |      good     |
+  |"Mr. Van R., of Utica" |      6        |   few years   |    average?   |
+  |Whately                |      3        |   few years   |      good     |
+  +-----------------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+
+
+Now among these thirteen names we have two men of transcendent, and
+three of high ability. What accounts have they given us of their
+methods?
+
+Of the gift of Gauss and Ampčre we know nothing except a few striking
+anecdotes. After manifesting itself at an age when there is usually no
+continuous supraliminal mental effort worth speaking of, it appears to
+have been soon merged in the general blaze of their genius. With Bidder
+the gift persisted through life, but grew weaker as he grew older. His
+paper in Vol. XV. of the _Proceedings of the Institute of Civil
+Engineers_, while furnishing a number of practical hints to the
+calculator, indicates also a singular readiness of communication between
+different mental strata. "Whenever," he says (p. 255) "I feel called
+upon to make use of the stores of my mind, they seem to rise with the
+rapidity of lightning." And in Vol. CIII. of the same _Proceedings_, Mr.
+W. Pole, F.R.S., in describing how Mr. Bidder could determine mentally
+the logarithm of any number to 7 or 8 places, says (p. 252): "He had an
+almost miraculous power of seeing, as it were, intuitively what factors
+would divide any large number, not a prime. Thus, if he were given the
+number 17,861, he would instantly remark it was 337×53.... He could not,
+he said, explain how he did this; it seemed a natural instinct to him."
+
+Passing on to the two other men of high ability known to have possessed
+this gift, Professor Safford and Archbishop Whately, we are struck with
+the evanescence of the power after early youth,--or even before the end
+of childhood. I quote from Dr. Scripture Archbishop Whately's account of
+his powers.
+
+     There was certainly something peculiar in my calculating faculty.
+     It began to show itself at between five and six, and lasted about
+     three years.... I soon got to do the most difficult sums, always in
+     my head, for I knew nothing of figures beyond numeration. I did
+     these sums much quicker than any one could upon paper, and I never
+     remember committing the smallest error. _When I went to school, at
+     which time the passion wore off, I was a perfect dunce at
+     ciphering, and have continued so ever since._
+
+Still more remarkable, perhaps, was Professor Safford's loss of power.
+Professor Safford's whole bent was mathematical; his boyish gift of
+calculation raised him into notice; and he is now a Professor of
+Astronomy. He had therefore every motive and every opportunity to retain
+the gift, if thought and practice could have retained it. But whereas at
+ten years old he worked correctly in his head, in one minute, a
+multiplication sum whose answer consisted of 36 figures, he is now, I
+believe, neither more nor less capable of such calculation than his
+neighbours.
+
+Similar was the fate of a personage who never rises above initials, and
+of whose general capacity we know nothing.
+
+"Mr. Van R., of Utica," says Dr. Scripture on the authority of Gall, "at
+the age of six years distinguished himself by a singular faculty for
+calculating in his head. At eight he entirely lost this faculty, and
+after that time he could calculate neither better nor faster than any
+other person. _He did not retain the slightest idea of the manner in
+which he performed his calculations in childhood._"
+
+Turning now to the stupid or uneducated prodigies, Dase alone seems to
+have retained his power through life. Colburn and Mondeux, and
+apparently Prolongeau and Mangiamele, lost their gift after childhood.
+
+On the whole the ignorant prodigies seldom appear to have been conscious
+of any continuous logical process, while in some cases the separation of
+the supraliminal and subliminal trains of thought must have been very
+complete. "Buxton would talk freely whilst doing his questions, that
+being no molestation or hindrance to him."[29] Fixity and clearness of
+inward visualisation seems to have been the leading necessity in all
+these achievements; and it apparently mattered little whether the mental
+blackboard (so to say) on which the steps of the calculation were
+recorded were or were not visible to the mind's eye of the supraliminal
+self.
+
+I have been speaking only of visualisation; but it would be interesting
+if we could discover how much actual mathematical insight or
+inventiveness can be subliminally exercised. Here, however, our
+materials are very imperfect. From Gauss and Ampčre we have, so far as I
+know, no record. At the other end of the scale, we know that Dase
+(perhaps the most successful of all these prodigies) was singularly
+devoid of mathematical grasp. "On one occasion Petersen tried in vain
+for six weeks to get the first elements of mathematics into his head."
+"He could not be made to have the least idea of a proposition in Euclid.
+Of any language but his own he could never master a word." Yet Dase
+received a grant from the Academy of Sciences at Hamburg, on the
+recommendation of Gauss, for mathematical work; and actually in twelve
+years made tables of factors and prime numbers for the seventh and
+nearly the whole of the eighth million,--a task which probably few men
+could have accomplished, without mechanical aid, in an ordinary
+lifetime. He may thus be ranked as the only man who has ever done
+valuable service to Mathematics without being able to cross the Ass's
+Bridge.
+
+No support is given by what we know of this group to the theory which
+regards subliminal mentation as necessarily a sign of some morbid
+dissociation of physical elements. Is there, on the other hand, anything
+to confirm a suggestion which will occur in some similar cases, namely,
+that,--inasmuch as the addition of subliminal to supraliminal mentation
+may often be a completion and integration rather than a fractionation or
+disintegration of the total individuality,--we are likely sometimes to
+find traces of a more than common activity of the _right_ or less used
+cerebral hemisphere? Finding no mention of ambidexterity in the meagre
+notices which have come down to us of the greater "prodigies," I begged
+the late Mr. Bidder, Q.C., and Mr. Blyth, of Edinburgh (the well-known
+civil engineer and perhaps the best living English representative of
+what we may call the calculating diathesis), to tell me whether their
+left hands possessed more than usual power. And I find that in
+these--the only two cases in which I have been able to make
+inquiry--there is somewhat more of dextro-cerebral capacity than in the
+mass of mankind.
+
+We may now pass on to review some further instances of subliminal
+co-operation with conscious thought;--first looking about us for any
+cases comparable in _definiteness_ with the preceding; and then
+extending our view over the wider and vaguer realm of creative and
+artistic work.
+
+But before we proceed to the highly-specialised senses of hearing and
+sight, we must note the fact that there are cases of subliminal
+intensification of those perceptions of a less specialised kind which
+underlie our more elaborate modes of cognising the world around us. The
+sense of the _efflux of time_, and the sense of _weight_, or of
+muscular resistance, are amongst the profoundest elements in our organic
+being. And the sense of time is indicated in several ways as a largely
+subliminal faculty. There is much evidence to show that it is often more
+exact in men sleeping than in men awake, and in men hypnotised than in
+men sleeping. The records of spontaneous somnambulism are full of
+predictions made by the subject as to his own case, and accomplished,
+presumably by self-suggestion, but without help from clocks, at the
+precise minute foretold. Or this hidden knowledge may take shape in the
+imagery of dream, as in a case published by Professor Royce, of
+Harvard,[30] where his correspondent describes "a dream in which I saw
+an enormous flaming clock-dial with the hands standing at 2.20. Awaking
+immediately, I struck a match, and upon looking at my watch found it was
+a few seconds past 2.20."
+
+Similarly we find cases where the uprush of subliminal faculty is
+concerned with the deep organic sensation of muscular resistance. We
+need not postulate any direct or supernormal knowledge,--but merely a
+subliminal calculation, such as we see in the case of "arithmetical
+prodigies," expressing itself supraliminally, sometimes in a phantasmal
+picture, sometimes as a mere "conviction," without sensory clothing.[31]
+
+Passing on here to subliminal products of _visual_ type, I am glad to be
+able to quote the following passage which seems to me to give in germ
+the very theory for which I am now contending on the authority of one of
+the most lucid thinkers of the last generation.
+
+The passage occurs in an article by Sir John Herschel on "Sensorial
+Vision," in his _Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects_, 1816. Sir
+John describes some experiences of his own, "which consist in the
+involuntary production of visual impressions, into which geometrical
+regularity of form enters as the leading character, and that, under
+circumstances which altogether preclude any explanation drawn from a
+possible regularity of structure in the retina or the optic nerve."[32]
+Twice these patterns appeared in waking daylight hours,--with no illness
+or discomfort at the time or afterwards. More frequently they appeared
+in darkness; but still while Sir John was fully awake. They appeared
+also twice when he was placed under chloroform; "and I should observe
+that I never lost my consciousness of being awake and in full
+possession of my mind, though quite insensible to what was going on....
+Now the question at once presents itself--What _are_ these Geometrical
+Spectres? and how, and in what department of the bodily or mental
+economy do they originate? They are evidently not dreams. The mind is
+not dormant, but active and conscious of the direction of its thoughts;
+while these things obtrude themselves on notice, and by calling
+attention to them, _direct_ the train of thought into a channel it would
+not have taken of itself.... If it be true that the conception of a
+regular geometrical pattern implies the exercise of thought and
+intelligence, it would almost seem that in such cases as those above
+adduced we have evidence of a _thought_, an intelligence, working within
+our own organisation distinct from that of our own personality." And Sir
+John further suggests that these complex figures, entering the mind in
+this apparently arbitrary fashion, throw light upon "the suggestive
+principle" to which "we must look for much that is determinant and
+decisive of our volition when carried into action." "It strikes me as
+not by any means devoid of interest to contemplate cases where, in a
+matter so entirely abstract, so completely devoid of any moral or
+emotional bearing, as the production of a geometrical figure, we, as it
+were, seize upon that principle in the very act, and in the performance
+of its office."
+
+From my point of view, of course, I can but admire the acumen which
+enabled this great thinker to pierce to the root of the matter by the
+aid of so few observations. He does not seem to have perceived the
+connection between these "schematic phantasms," to borrow a phrase from
+Professor Ladd,[33] and the hallucinatory figures of men or animals seen
+in health or in disease. But even from his scanty data his inference
+seems to me irresistible;--"we have evidence of a _thought_, an
+intelligence, working within our own organisation, distinct from that of
+our own personality." I shall venture to claim him as the first
+originator of the theory to which the far fuller evidence now accessible
+had independently led myself.
+
+Cases observed as definitely as those just quoted are few in number; and
+I must pass on into a much trodden--even a confusedly
+trampled--field;--the records, namely, left by eminent men as to the
+element of subconscious mentation, which was involved in their best
+work. Most of these stories have been again and again repeated;--and
+they have been collected on a large scale in a celebrated work,--to me
+especially distasteful, as containing what seems to me the loose and
+extravagant parody of important truth. It is not my business here to
+criticise Dr. Von Hartmann's _Philosophy of the Unconscious_ in detail;
+but I prefer to direct my readers' attention to a much more modest
+volume, in which a young physician has put together the results of a
+direct inquiry addressed to some Frenchmen of distinction as to their
+methods especially of imaginative work.[34] I quote a few of the replies
+addressed to him, beginning with some words from M. Sully Prudhomme,--at
+once psychologist and poet,--who is here speaking of the subconscious
+clarification of a chain of abstract reasoning. "I have sometimes
+suddenly understood a geometrical demonstration made to me a year
+previously without having in any way directed thereto my attention or
+will. It seemed that the mere spontaneous ripening of the conceptions
+which the lectures had implanted in my brain had brought about within me
+this novel grasp of the proof."
+
+With this we may compare a statement of Arago's--"Instead of obstinately
+endeavouring to understand a proposition at once, I would admit its
+truth provisionally;--and next day I would be astonished at
+understanding thoroughly that which seemed all dark before."
+
+Condillac similarly speaks of finding an incomplete piece of work
+finished next day in his head.
+
+Somewhat similarly, though in another field, M. Retté, a poet, tells Dr.
+Chabaneix that he falls asleep in the middle of an unfinished stanza,
+and when thinking of it again in the morning finds it completed. And M.
+Vincent d'Indy, a musical composer, says that he often has on waking a
+fugitive glimpse of a musical effect which (like the memory of a dream)
+needs a strong immediate concentration of mind to keep it from
+vanishing.
+
+De Musset writes, "On ne travaille pas, on écoute, c'est comme un
+inconnu qui vous parle ŕ l'oreille."
+
+Lamartine says, "Ce n'est pas moi qui pense; ce sont mes idées qui
+pensent pour moi."
+
+Rémy de Gourmont: "My conceptions rise into the field of consciousness
+like a flash of lightning or like the flight of a bird."
+
+M. S. writes: "In writing these dramas I seemed to be a spectator at the
+play; I gazed at what was passing on the scene in an eager, wondering
+expectation of what was to follow. And yet I felt that all this came
+from the depth of my own being."
+
+Saint-Saens had only to listen, as Socrates to his Dćmon; and M. Ribot,
+summing up a number of similar cases, says: "It is the unconscious which
+produces what is vulgarly called inspiration. This condition is a
+positive fact, accompanied with physical and psychical characteristics
+peculiar to itself. Above all, it is impersonal and involuntary, it acts
+like an instinct, when and how it chooses; it may be wooed, but cannot
+be compelled. Neither reflection nor will can supply its place in
+original creation.... The bizarre habits of artists when composing tend
+to create a special physiological condition,--to augment the cerebral
+circulation in order to provoke or to maintain the unconscious
+activity."
+
+In what precise way the cerebral circulation is altered we can hardly at
+present hope to know. Meantime a few psychological remarks fall more
+easily within our reach.
+
+In the first place, we note that a very brief and shallow submergence
+beneath the conscious level is enough to infuse fresh vigour into
+supraliminal trains of thought. Ideas left to mature unnoticed for a few
+days, or for a single night, seem to pass but a very little way beneath
+the threshold. They represent, one may say, the first stage of a process
+which, although often inconspicuous, is not likely to be
+discontinuous,--the sustenance, namely, of the supraliminal life by
+impulse or guidance from below.
+
+In the second place, we see in some of these cases of deep and fruitful
+_abstraction_ a slight approach to duplication of personality. John
+Stuart Mill, intent on his _Principles of Logic_, as he threaded the
+crowds of Leadenhall Street, recalls certain morbid cases of hysterical
+_distraction_;--only that with Mill the process was an integrative one
+and not a dissolutive one--a gain and not a loss of power over the
+organism.
+
+And thirdly, in some of these instances we see the man of genius
+achieving spontaneously, and unawares, much the same result as that
+which is achieved for the hypnotic subject by deliberate artifice. For
+he is in fact co-ordinating the waking and the sleeping phases of his
+existence. He is carrying into sleep the knowledge and the purpose of
+waking hours;--and he is carrying back into waking hours again the
+benefit of those profound assimilations which are the privilege of
+sleep. Hypnotic suggestion aims at co-operations of just this kind
+between the waking state in which the suggestion, say, of some
+functional change, is planned and the sleeping state in which that
+change is carried out,--with benefit persisting anew into waking life.
+The hypnotic trance, which is a _developed_ sleep, thus accomplishes for
+the ordinary man what ordinary sleep accomplishes for the man of genius.
+
+The coming chapters on Sleep and Hypnotism will illustrate this point
+more fully. But I may here anticipate my discussion of _dreams_ by
+quoting one instance where dreams, self-suggested by waking will,
+formed, as one may say, an integral element in distinguished genius.
+
+The late Robert Louis Stevenson, being in many ways a typical man of
+genius, was in no way more markedly gifted with that integrating
+faculty--that increased power over all strata of the personality--which
+I have ascribed to genius, than in his relation to his dreams (see "A
+Chapter on Dreams" in his volume _Across the Plains_). Seldom has the
+essential analogy between dreams and inspiration been exhibited in such
+a striking way. His dreams had always (he tells us) been of great
+vividness, and often of markedly _recurrent_ type. But the point of
+interest is that, when he began to write stories for publication, the
+"little people who managed man's internal theatre" understood the change
+as well as he.
+
+     When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought
+     amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had
+     dozed off in his box-seat, his little people continued their
+     evolutions with the same mercantile designs.... For the most part,
+     whether awake or asleep, he is simply occupied--he or his little
+     people--in consciously making stories for the market....
+
+     The more I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world
+     my question: "Who are the Little People?" They are near connections
+     of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries
+     and have an eye to the bank book; they share plainly in his
+     training; ... they have plainly learned like him to build the
+     scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive
+     order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond
+     doubt,--they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial,
+     and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim....
+
+     That part [of my work] which is done while I am sleeping is the
+     Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am
+     up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to
+     show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.
+
+Slight and imperfect as the above statistics and observations admittedly
+are, they seem to me to point in a more useful direction than do some of
+the facts collected by that modern group of anthropologists who hold
+that genius is in itself a kind of nervous malady, a disturbance of
+mental balance, akin to criminality or even to madness.
+
+It is certainly not true, as I hold, either that the human race in
+general is nervously degenerating, or that nervous degeneration tends to
+a maximum in its most eminent members. But it can be plausibly
+maintained that the proportion of nervous to other disorders tends to
+increase. And it is certain that not nervous degeneration but nervous
+change or development is now proceeding among civilised peoples more
+rapidly than ever before, and that this self-adaptation to wider
+environments must inevitably be accompanied in the more marked cases by
+something of nervous instability. And it is true also that from one
+point of view these changes might form matter for regret; and that in
+order to discern what I take to be their true meaning we have to regard
+the problem of human evolution from a somewhat unfamiliar standpoint.
+
+The nervous system is probably tending in each generation to become more
+complex and more delicately ramified. As is usual when any part of an
+organism is undergoing rapid evolutive changes, this nervous progress is
+accompanied with some instability. Those individuals in whom the
+hereditary or the acquired change is the most rapid are likely also to
+suffer most from a _perturbation which masks evolution_--an occasional
+appearance of what may be termed "nervous sports" of a useless or even
+injurious type. Such are the fancies and fanaticisms, the bizarre likes
+and dislikes, the excessive or aberrant sensibilities, which have been
+observed in some of the eminent men whom Lombroso discusses in his book
+on the Man of Genius. Their truest analogue, as we shall presently see
+more fully, lies in the oddities or morbidities of sentiment or
+sensation which so often accompany the development of the human organism
+into its full potencies, or precede the crowning effort by which a fresh
+organism is introduced into the world.
+
+Such at least is my view; but the full acceptance of this view must
+depend upon some very remote and very speculative considerations bearing
+upon the nature and purport of the whole existence and evolution of man.
+Yet however remote and speculative the thesis which I defend may be, it
+is not one whit remoter or more speculative than the view which, _faute
+de mieux_, is often tacitly assumed by scientific writers.
+
+In our absolute ignorance of the source from whence life came, we have
+no ground for assuming that it was a purely planetary product, or that
+its unknown potentialities are concerned with purely planetary ends. It
+would be as rash for the biologist to assume that life on earth can only
+point to generations of further life on earth as it would have been for
+some cosmic geologist to assume--before the appearance of life on
+earth--that geological forces must needs constitute all the activity
+which could take place on this planet.
+
+Since the germ of life appeared on earth, its history has been a history
+not only of gradual _self-adaptation_ to a known environment, but of
+gradual _discovery_ of an environment, always there, but unknown. What
+we call its primitive simple irritability was in fact a dim panćsthesia;
+a potential faculty, as yet unconscious of all the stimuli to which it
+had not yet learnt to respond. As these powers of sensation and of
+response have developed, they have gradually revealed to the living germ
+environments of which at first it could have no conception.
+
+It is probable, to begin with, that the only environment which the vast
+majority of our ancestors knew was simply hot water. For the greater
+part of the time during which life has existed on earth it would have
+been thought chimerical to suggest that we could live in anything else.
+It was a great day for us when an ancestor crawled up out of the
+slowly-cooling sea;--or say rather when a previously unsuspected
+capacity for directly breathing air gradually revealed the fact that we
+had for long been breathing air in the water;--and that we were living
+in the midst of a vastly extended environment,--the atmosphere of the
+earth. It was a great day again when another ancestor felt on his
+pigment-spot the solar ray;--or say rather when a previously unsuspected
+capacity for perceiving light revealed the fact that we had for long
+been acted upon by light as well as by heat; and that we were living in
+the midst of a vastly extended environment,--namely, the illumined
+Universe that stretches to the Milky Way. It was a great day when the
+first skate (if skate he were) felt an unknown virtue go out from him
+towards some worm or mudfish;--or say rather when a previously
+unsuspected capacity for electrical excitation demonstrated the fact
+that we had long been acted upon by electricity as well as by heat and
+by light; and that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless
+environment,--namely, an ether charged with infinite energy, overpassing
+and interpenetrating alike the last gulf of darkness and the extremest
+star. All this,--phrased perhaps in some other fashion,--all men admit
+as true. May we not then suppose that there are yet other environments,
+other interpretations, which a further awakening of faculty still
+subliminal is yet fated by its own nascent response to discover? Will it
+be alien to the past history of evolution if I add: It was a great day
+when the first thought or feeling flashed into some mind of beast or man
+from a mind distant from his own?--when a previously unsuspected
+capacity of telepathic percipience revealed the fact that we had long
+been acted upon by telepathic as well as by sensory stimuli; and that we
+were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment,--a
+thought-world or spiritual universe charged with infinite life, and
+interpenetrating and overpassing all human spirits,--up to what some
+have called World-Soul, and some God?
+
+And now it will be easily understood that one of the corollaries from
+the conception of a constantly widening and deepening perception of an
+environment infinite in infinite ways, will be that the faculties which
+befit the material environment have absolutely no primacy, unless it be
+of the merely chronological kind, over those faculties which science has
+often called _by-products_, because they have no manifest tendency to
+aid their possessor in the struggle for existence in a material world.
+The higher gifts of genius--poetry, the plastic arts, music, philosophy,
+pure mathematics--all of these are precisely as much in the central
+stream of evolution--are perceptions of new truth and powers of new
+action just as decisively predestined for the race of man--as the
+aboriginal Australian's faculty for throwing a boomerang or for swarming
+up a tree for grubs. There is, then, about those loftier interests
+nothing exotic, nothing accidental; they are an intrinsic part of that
+ever-evolving response to our surroundings which forms not only the
+planetary but the cosmic history of all our race.
+
+What inconsistencies, what absurdities, underlie that assumption that
+evolution means nothing more than the survival of animals fittest to
+conquer enemies and to overrun the earth. On that bare hypothesis the
+genus _homo_ is impossible to explain. No one really attempts to explain
+him except on the tacit supposition that Nature somehow tended to evolve
+intelligence--somehow needed to evolve joy; was not satisfied with such
+an earth-over-runner as the rabbit, or such an invincible conqueror as
+the influenza microbe. But _how much_ intelligence, _what_ kind of joy
+Nature aimed at--is this to be left to be settled by the instinct of
+_l'homme sensuel moyen?_ or ought we not rather to ask of the best
+specimens of our race what it is that they live for?--whether they
+labour for the meat that perisheth, or for Love and Wisdom? To more and
+more among mankind the need of food is supplied with as little conscious
+effort as the need of air; yet these are often the very men through whom
+evolution is going on most unmistakably--who are becoming the typical
+figures of the swiftly-changing race.
+
+Once more. If this point of view be steadily maintained, we shall gain
+further light on some of those strangenesses and irregularities of
+genius which have led to its paradoxical juxtaposition with insanity as
+a divergence from the accepted human type. The distinctive
+characteristic of genius is the large infusion of the subliminal in its
+mental output; and one characteristic of the subliminal in my view is
+that it is in closer relation than the supraliminal to the spiritual
+world, and is thus nearer to the primitive source and extra-terrene
+initiation of life. And earthly Life itself--embodied as it is in
+psycho-physically individualised forms--is, on the theory advanced in
+these pages, a product or characteristic of the etherial or metetherial
+and not of the gross material world. Thence in some unknown fashion it
+came; there in some unknown fashion it subsists even throughout its
+earthly manifestation; thither in some unknown fashion it must after
+earthly death return. If indeed the inspirations of genius spring from
+a source one step nearer to primitive reality than is that specialised
+consensus of faculties which natural selection has lifted above the
+threshold for the purposes of working-day existence, then surely we need
+not wonder if the mind and frame of man should not always suffice for
+smooth and complete amalgamation; if some prefiguration of faculties
+adapted to a later stage of being should mar the symmetry of the life of
+earth.
+
+And thus there may really be something at times _incommensurable_
+between the inspirations of genius and the results of conscious logical
+thought. Just as the calculating boy solves his problems by methods
+which differ from the methods of the trained mathematician, so in
+artistic matters also that "something of strangeness" which is in "all
+excellent beauty," may be the expression of a real difference between
+subliminal and supraliminal modes of perception. I cannot help thinking
+that such a difference is perceptible in subliminal relations to speech;
+that the subliminal self will sometimes surpass conscious effort, if it
+is treating speech as a branch of Art, in Poetry;--or else in some sense
+will fall short of conscious effort, when it is merely using words as an
+unavoidable medium to express ideas which common speech was hardly
+designed to convey.
+
+Thus, on the one hand, when in presence of one of the great verbal
+achievements of the race--say the _Agamemnon_ of Ćschylus--it is hard to
+resist the obscure impression that some form of intelligence other than
+supraliminal reason or conscious selection has been at work. The result
+less resembles the perfection of rational choice among known data than
+the imperfect presentation of some scheme based on perceptions which we
+cannot entirely follow.
+
+But, on the other hand, even though words may thus be used by genius
+with something of the mysterious remoteness of music itself, it seems to
+me that our subliminal mentation is less closely bound to the faculty of
+speech than is our supraliminal. There is a phrase in common use which
+involves perhaps more of psychological significance than has yet been
+brought out. Of all which we can call genius, or which we can ally with
+genius--of art, of love, of religious emotion--it is common to hear men
+say that they _transcend the scope of speech_. Nor have we any reason
+for regarding this as a mere vague sentimental expression.
+
+There is no _a priori_ ground for supposing that language will have the
+power to express all the thoughts and emotions of man. It may indeed be
+maintained that the inevitable course of its development tends to
+exhibit more and more clearly its inherent limitations. "Every
+language," it has been said, "begins as poetry and ends as algebra." To
+use the terms employed in this work, every language begins as a
+subliminal uprush and ends as a supraliminal artifice. Organic instincts
+impel to primitive ejaculation; unconscious laws of mind shape early
+grammar. But even in our own day--and we are still in the earth's
+infancy--this naďveté of language is fast disappearing. The needs of
+science and of commerce have become dominant, and although our
+vocabulary, based as it is on concrete objects and direct sensations, is
+refined for the expression of philosophic thought, still we cannot
+wonder if our supraliminal manipulation leaves us with an instrument
+less and less capable of expressing the growing complexity of our whole
+psychical being.
+
+What then, we may ask, is the attitude and habit of the subliminal self
+likely to be with regard to language? Is it not probable that other
+forms of symbolism may retain a greater proportional importance among
+those submerged mental operations which have not been systematised for
+the convenience of communication with other men?
+
+I think that an intelligent study of visual and motor automatism will
+afford us sufficient proof that symbolism, at any rate pictorial
+symbolism, becomes increasingly important as we get at the contents of
+those hidden strata. Telepathic messages, especially, which form, as we
+shall see, the special prerogative or characteristic of subliminal
+communication, seem to be conveyed by vague impression or by inward or
+externalised picture oftener than by articulate speech. And I may so far
+anticipate later discussion of _automatic writings_ (whether
+self-inspired or telepathic) as to point out a curious linguistic
+quality which almost all such writings share. The "messages" of a number
+of automatists, taken at random, will be sure to resemble each other
+much more closely than do the supraliminal writings of the same persons.
+Quite apart from their general correspondence in _ideas_--which belongs
+to another branch of our subject--there is among the automatic writings
+of quite independent automatists a remarkable correspondence of literary
+style. There is a certain quality which reminds one of a _translation_,
+or of the compositions of a person writing in a language which he is not
+accustomed to talk. These characteristics appear at once in automatic
+script, even of the incoherent kind; they persist when there is no
+longer any dream-like incoherence; they are equally marked, even when,
+as often happens, the automatic script surpasses in intelligence, and
+even in its own kind of eloquence, the products of the waking or
+supraliminal mind.
+
+And side by side and intercurrent with these written messages come those
+strange meaningless arabesques which have been baptized as
+"spirit-drawings"--though they rarely show any clear trace of the
+operation of an external intelligence.[35] These complex and fanciful
+compositions--often absolutely automatic--appear to me like a stammering
+or rudimentary symbolism; as though the subliminal intelligence were
+striving to express itself through a vehicle perhaps more congenial to
+its habits than articulate language.
+
+Returning, then, from these illustrations drawn from actual _automatism_
+to our proper subject of _genius_,--that happy mixture of subliminal
+with supraliminal faculty,--we may ask ourselves in what kind of
+subliminal uprush this hidden habit of wider symbolism, of
+self-communion beyond the limits of speech, will be likely to manifest
+itself above the conscious threshold.
+
+The obvious answer to this question lies in the one word Art. The
+inspiration of Art of all kinds consists in the invention of precisely
+such a wider symbolism as has been above adumbrated. I am not speaking,
+of course, of symbolism of a forced and mechanical kind--symbolism
+designed and elaborated as such--but rather of that pre-existent but
+hidden concordance between visible and invisible things, between matter
+and thought, between thought and emotion, which the plastic arts, and
+music, and poetry, do each in their own special field discover and
+manifest for human wisdom and joy.
+
+In using these words, I must repeat, I am far from adopting the formulć
+of any special school. The symbolism of which I speak implies nothing of
+mysticism. Nor indeed, in my view, can there be any real gulf or deep
+division between so-called realistic and idealistic schools. All that
+exists is continuous; nor can Art symbolise any one aspect of the
+universe without also implicitly symbolising aspects which lie beyond.
+
+And thus in the Arts we have symbolism at every stage of transparency
+and obscurity; from symbolisms which merely summarise speech to
+symbolisms which transcend it. Sometimes, as with Music, it is worse
+than useless to press for too close an interpretation. Music marches,
+and will march for ever, through an ideal and unimaginable world. Her
+melody may be a mighty symbolism, but it is a symbolism to which man has
+lost the key. Poetry's material, on the other hand, is the very language
+which she would fain transcend. But her utterance must be subliminal and
+symbolic, if it is to be poetry indeed; it must rise (as has been
+already hinted) from a realm profounder than deliberate speech; it must
+come charged, as Tennyson has it, with that "charm in words, a charm no
+words can give."
+
+Here, too, we must dwell for a moment upon another and higher kind of
+internal visualisation. I have spoken of the arithmetical prodigy as
+possessing a kind of internal blackboard, on which he inscribes with
+ease and permanence his imaginary memoranda. But blackboards are not the
+only surfaces on which inscriptions can be made. There are other
+men--prodigies of a different order--whose internal _tabula_ is not of
+blackened wood, but of canvas or of marble; whose inscriptions are not
+rows of Arabic numerals but living lines of colour, or curves of
+breathing stone. Even the most realistic art is something more than
+transcript and calculation; and for art's higher imaginative
+achievements there must needs be moments of inward idealisation when
+visible beauty seems but the token and symbol of beauty unrevealed; when
+Praxiteles must "draw from his own heart the archetype of the Eros that
+he made;" when Tintoret must feel with Heraclitus that "whatsoever we
+see waking is but deadness, and whatsoever sleeping, is but dream."
+
+But when we reach this point we have begun (as I say) to transcend the
+special province to which, in Chapter I, I assigned the title of
+_genius_. I there pointed out that the influence of the subliminal on
+the supraliminal might conveniently be divided under three main heads.
+When the subliminal mentation co-operates with and supplements the
+supraliminal, without changing the apparent phase of personality, we
+have _genius_. When subliminal operations change the apparent phase of
+personality from the state of waking in the direction of trance, we have
+_hypnotism_. When the subliminal mentation forces itself up through the
+supraliminal, without amalgamation, as in crystal-vision, automatic
+writing, etc., we have _sensory or motor automatism_. In accordance with
+this definition, the _content_ of the inspirations of genius is supposed
+to be of the same general type as the content of ordinary thought. We
+have regarded genius as crystallising fluid ideas; or, if you will, as
+concentrating and throwing upwards in its clear fountain a maze of
+subterranean streams. But we have not regarded it as modifying, in such
+operation, the ordinary alert wakefulness of the thinker, nor as
+providing bun with any fresh knowledge, obtainable by supernormal
+methods alone.
+
+It is plain, however, that such distinctions as those which I have drawn
+between genius, trance, automatism, cannot possibly be rigid or
+absolute. They are distinctions made for convenience between different
+phases of what must really be a continuous process--namely, the
+influence of the Self below the threshold upon the Self above it.
+Between each of these definite phases all kinds of connections and
+intermediate stages must surely exist.
+
+Connections between _trance_ and _automatism_, indeed, are obvious
+enough. The difficulty has rather lain in their clear separation.
+Trance, when habitual, is pretty sure to lead to automatic speech or
+writing. Automatism, when prolonged, is similarly apt to induce a state
+of trance.
+
+The links between _Genius_ and these cognate states are of a less
+conspicuous kind. They do, however, exist in such variety as to confirm
+in marked fashion the analogies suggested above.
+
+And first, as to the connection between genius and automatism, one may
+say that just as anger is a brief madness, so the flash of Genius is
+essentially a brief automatism.
+
+Wordsworth's moments of inspiration, when, as he says,
+
+    "Some lovely image in the song rose up
+     Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea,"
+
+were in effect moments of automatic utterance; albeit of utterance held
+fast in immediate co-operation with the simultaneous workings of the
+supraliminal self. Such a sudden poetic creation, like the calculating
+boy's announcement of the product of two numbers, resembles the sudden
+rush of planchette or pencil, in haste to scrawl some long-wished-for
+word.
+
+Now extend this momentary automatism a little further. We come then to
+what is called the faculty of improvisation. How much is meant by this
+term? Is the extempore oration, "the unpremeditated lay," in truth a
+subliminal product? or have we to do merely with the rapid exercise of
+ordinary powers?
+
+In the first place, it is clear that much of what is called
+improvisation is a matter of memory. The so-called secondary automatism
+which enables the pianist to play a known piece without conscious
+attention passes easily into improvisations which the player himself may
+genuinely accept as original; but which really consist of remembered
+fragments united by conventional links of connection. Thus also the
+orator, "thinking on his legs," trusts himself at first to the automatic
+repetition of a few stock phrases, but gradually finds that long periods
+flow unforeseen and unremembered from his tongue.
+
+We thus get beyond the range of stereotyped synergies, of habituations
+of particular groups of nerve-centres to common action. There is some
+adaptability and invention; some new paths are traversed; adjustments
+are made for which no mere recurrence to old precedents will suffice.
+
+The problem here resembles that well-known difficulty of explaining what
+goes on during the restoration or "substitution" of function after an
+injury to the brain. In that case, the brain-elements which remain
+uninjured slowly assume functions which they apparently never exercised
+before,--rearranging paths of cerebral communication in order to get the
+old efficiency out of the damaged and diminished brain-material. This
+recovery is not rapid like an extemporisation, but gradual, like a
+healing or re-growth, and it therefore does not suggest an intelligent
+control so much as a physiological process, like the re-budding on a
+certain pre-ordained pattern of the severed claw of a crab. Of course
+this restoration of brain-functions is inexplicable, as all growth is at
+present inexplicable. We may call it indeed with some reason the highest
+process of human growth. So viewed, it forms a kind of middle term
+between ordinary growth of bone or muscle, always on a predetermined
+plan, and that sudden creation of new cerebral connections or pathways
+which is implied in an inspiration of genius. Such a juxtaposition need
+not weaken my claim that the inspirations of genius represent a
+co-operant stream of submerged mentation, fully as developed in its own
+way as the mentation of which we are conscious above the threshold. The
+nature and degree of subliminal faculty must of course be judged by its
+highest manifestations. And this analogy between the hidden operations
+of _genius_ and of _growth_ would rather support me in regarding organic
+growth also as controlled by something of intelligence or memory, which
+under fitting conditions--as in the hypnotic trance--may be induced to
+co-operate with the waking will.
+
+Moreover, the talent of improvisation, which suggested these analogies,
+will sometimes act much more persistently than in the case of the orator
+or the musician. There is reason to believe (both from internal style
+and from actual statements) that it plays a large part in imaginative
+literature. Various passages from George Sand's life-history,
+corroborated by the statements of other persons familiar with her
+methods of working, reveal in her an unusual vigour and fertility of
+literary outflow going on in an almost dream-like condition; a condition
+midway between the actual inventive dreams of R. L. Stevenson and the
+conscious labour of an ordinary man's composition.
+
+What George Sand felt in the act of writing was a continuous and
+effortless flow of ideas, sometimes with and sometimes without an
+apparent _externalisation_ of the characters who spoke in her romances.
+And turning to another author, as sane and almost as potent as George
+Sand herself, we find a phenomenon which would have suggested to us
+actual insanity if observed in a mind less robust and efficient. If the
+allusions to the apparent independence of Dickens's characters which are
+scattered through his letters be read with our related facts in view, it
+will no longer be thought that they are intended as a mystification.
+Mrs. Gamp, his greatest creation, spoke to him, he tells us (generally
+in church) as with an inward monitory voice.
+
+And note further that as scientific introspection develops we are likely
+to receive fuller accounts of these concurrent mental processes, these
+partial externalisations of the creatures of the romancer's brain. One
+such account, both definite and elaborate, has been published by M.
+Binet in _L'Année Psychologique_ for 1894.[36]
+
+This account,--contributed as serious evidence, as M. Binet's long
+article shows,--is thoroughly concordant with several other cases
+already known to us. It comes midway between Stevenson's dreams and the
+hysteric's _idées fixes_.
+
+I have thus far endeavoured to show that Genius represents not only the
+crystallisation of ideas already existing in floating form in the
+supraliminal intelligence, but also an independent, although concurrent,
+stream of mentation, spreading often to wider range, although still
+concerned with matters in themselves cognisable by the normal
+intelligence.
+
+Let us proceed to push the inquiry a step further. It has been claimed
+in this work for subliminal uprushes generally that they often contain
+knowledge which no ordinary method of research could acquire. Is this
+supernormal knowledge--we ought now to ask--ever represented in the
+uprushes to which we give the name of Genius?
+
+What is the relation, in short, of the man of Genius to the sensitive?
+
+If the man of Genius be, as I have urged, on the whole the completest
+type of humanity, and if the sensitive's special gift be in itself one
+of the most advanced forms of human faculty, ought not the inspirations
+of genius to bring with them flashes of supernormal knowledge as
+intimate as those which the sensitive--perhaps in other respects a
+commonplace person--from time to time is privileged to receive?
+
+Some remarkable instances of this kind undoubtedly do exist. The most
+conspicuous and most important of all cannot, from motives of reverence,
+be here discussed. Nor will I dwell upon other founders of religions, or
+on certain traditional saints or sages. But among historical characters
+of the first mark the names of Socrates and of Joan of Arc are enough to
+cite. I believe that the monitions of the Dćmon of Socrates--the
+subliminal self of a man of transcendent genius--have in all probability
+been described to us with literal truth: and did in fact convey to that
+great philosopher precisely the kind of telćsthetic or precognitive
+information which forms the sensitive's privilege to-day. We have thus
+in Socrates the ideal unification of human powers.
+
+It must, however, be admitted that such complete unification is not the
+general rule for men of genius; that their inspirations generally stop
+short of telepathy or of telćsthesia. I think we may explain this
+limitation somewhat as follows. The man of genius is what he is by
+virtue of possessing a readier communication than most men possess
+between his supraliminal and his subliminal self. From his subliminal
+self, he can only draw what it already possesses; and we must not assume
+as a matter of course that the subliminal region of any one of us
+possesses that particular sensitivity--that specific transparency--which
+can receive and register _definite facts_ from the unseen. _That_ may be
+a gift which stands as much alone--in independence of other gifts or
+faculties--in the subliminal region as, say, a perfect musical ear in
+the supraliminal. The man of genius may draw much from those hidden
+wells of being without seeing reflected therein any actual physical
+scene in the universe beyond his ordinary ken.
+
+And yet neither must we hastily assume that because the man of genius
+gets no _definite_ impression of a world beyond our senses he does not
+therefore get any _true_ impression, which is all his own.
+
+I believe, on the contrary, that true, though vague, impressions of a
+world beyond the range of sense are actually received--I do not say by
+all men of genius, but by men of genius of certain types.[37]
+
+A dim but genuine consciousness of the spiritual environment; that (it
+seems) is the degree of revelation which artistic or philosophic genius
+is capable of conferring. Subliminal uprushes, in other words, so far as
+they are intellectual, tend to become _telćsthetic_. They bring with
+them indefinite intimations of what I hold to be the great truth that
+the human spirit is essentially capable of a deeper than sensorial
+perception, of a direct knowledge of facts of the universe outside the
+range of any specialised organ or of any planetary view.
+
+But this conclusion points the way to a speculation more important
+still. Telćsthesia is not the only spiritual law, nor are subliminal
+uprushes affairs of the intellect alone. Beyond and above man's innate
+power of world-wide perception, there exists also that universal link of
+spirit with spirit which in its minor earthly manifestations we call
+telepathy. Our submerged faculty--the subliminal uprushes of genius--can
+expand in that direction as well as in the direction of telćsthesia.
+The emotional content, indeed, of those uprushes is even profounder and
+more important than the intellectual;--in proportion as Love and
+Religion are profounder and more important than Science or Art.
+
+That primary passion, I repeat, which binds life to life, which links us
+both to life near and visible and to life imagined but unseen;--_that_
+is no mere organic, no mere planetary impulse, but the inward aspect of
+the telepathic law. Love and religion are thus _continuous_; they
+represent different phases of one all-pervading mutual gravitation of
+souls. The flesh does not conjoin, but dissever; although through its
+very severance it suggests a shadow of the union which it cannot bestow.
+We have to do here neither with a corporeal nor with a purely human
+emotion. Love is the energy of integration which makes a Cosmos of the
+Sum of Things.
+
+But here there is something of controversy to traverse before a revived
+Platonic conception of love can hope to be treated by the physiologist
+as more than a pedantic jest. And naturally so; since there is no
+emotion subliminal over so wide a range of origin,--fed so obscurely by
+"all thoughts, all passions, all delights,"--and consequently so
+mysterious even to the percipient himself. At one end of its scale love
+is based upon an instinct as primitive as the need of nutrition; even if
+at the other end it becomes, as Plato has it, the [Greek: hermęneuon
+kai] "the Interpreter and Mediator between God and Man." The controversy
+as to the planetary or cosmical scope of the passion of Love is in fact
+central to our whole subject.
+
+It will give clearness to the question in dispute if I quote here a
+strong expression of each view in turn. For the physiological or
+materialist conception of the passion of love,--where love's subliminal
+element is held to be of the organic type,--set forth in no light or
+cynical spirit, but with the moral earnestness of a modern Lucretius, I
+can turn to no better authority than Professor Pierre Janet. The passage
+which follows is no mere _boutade_ or paradox; it is a kind of
+culminating expression of the theory which regards the supraliminal man
+as the normal man, and distrusts all deep disturbance of his accustomed
+psychical routine.
+
+     It is commonly said that love is a passion to which man is always
+     liable, and which may surprise him at any moment of his life from
+     15 to 75. This does not seem to me accurate; and a man is not
+     throughout all his life and at every moment susceptible of falling
+     in love (_de devenir amoureux_). When a man is in good physical and
+     moral health, when he has easy and complete command of all his
+     ideas, he may expose himself to circumstances the most capable of
+     giving rise to a passion, but he will not feel it. His desires will
+     be reasonable and obedient to his will, leading the man only so far
+     as he wishes to go, and disappearing when he wishes to be rid of
+     them. On the other hand, if a man is morally below the mark
+     (_malade au moral_),--if in consequence of physical fatigue or
+     excessive intellectual work, or of violent shocks and prolonged
+     sorrow, he is exhausted, melancholy, distracted, timid, incapable
+     of controlling his ideas,--in a word, _depressed_,--then he will
+     fall in love, or receive the germ of some kind of passion, on the
+     first and most trivial occasion.... The least thing is then enough;
+     the sight of some face, a gesture, a word, which previously would
+     have left us altogether indifferent, strikes us, and becomes the
+     starting point of a long amorous malady. Or more than this, an
+     object which had made no impression on us, at a moment when our
+     mind was healthier and not capable of inoculation, may have left in
+     us some insignificant memory which reappears in a moment of morbid
+     receptivity. That is enough; the germ is sown in a favourable soil;
+     it will develop itself and grow.
+
+     There is at first, as in every virulent malady, a period of
+     incubation; the new idea passes and repasses in the vague reveries
+     of the enfeebled consciousness; then seems for a few days to have
+     disappeared and to leave the mind to recover from its passing
+     trouble. But the idea has done its work below the surface; it has
+     become strong enough to shake the body; and to provoke movements
+     whose origin lies outside the primary consciousness. What is the
+     surprise of a sensible man when he finds himself piteously
+     returning beneath the windows of his charmer, whither his wandering
+     feet have taken him without his knowledge;--or when in the midst of
+     his daily work he hears his lips murmuring perpetually the
+     well-known name!... Such is passion in its reality; not as
+     idealised by fantastic description, but reduced to its essential
+     psychological characteristics. (_L'Automatisme Psychologique_, p.
+     466.)
+
+On the other side I will appeal to Plato himself, giving a brief sketch
+merely of one of the leading passages (_Symposium_, 192-212) where the
+Platonic conception of love is set forth.[38]
+
+Plato begins by recognising, as fully as pessimist or cynic could do,
+the absolute inadequacy of what is called on earth the satisfaction of
+this profound desire. Lovers who love aright will feel that no physical
+nearness can content them, but what _will_ content them they cannot say.
+"Their soul," says Plato, "is manifestly desiring something else; and
+what it is she cannot tell, only she darkly prophesies thereof and
+guesses it from afar. But if Hephćstus with his forging fire were to
+stand beside that pair and say: 'Is this what ye desire--to be wholly
+one? to be together by night and day?--for I am ready to melt you
+together and to make you grow in one, so that from two ye shall become
+one only, and in this life shall be undivided, and dying shall die
+together, and in the underworld shall be a single soul';--there is no
+lover who would not eagerly accept the offer, and acknowledge it as the
+expression of the unknown yearning and the fulfilment of the ancient
+need." And through the mouth of Diotima, Plato insists that it is an
+unfailing sign of true love that its desires are _for ever_; nay, that
+love may be even defined as the desire of the _everlasting_ possession
+of the good. And in all love's acts he finds the impress of man's
+craving for immortality,--for immortality whose only visible image for
+us on earth is the birth of children to us as we ourselves decay,--so
+that when the slow self-renewal of our own everchanging bodies has worn
+out and ceased, we may be renewed in brighter, younger bodies which we
+desire to be born to us from whomsoever we find most fair. "And then,"
+says Plato, rising, as ever, from visible to invisible things, "if
+active _bodies_ have so strong a yearning that an endless series of
+lovely images of themselves may constitute, as it were, an earthly
+immortality for them when they have worn away, how greatly must creative
+_souls_ desire that partnership and close communion with other souls as
+fair as they may bring to birth a brood of lofty thoughts, poems,
+statues, institutions, laws,--the fitting progeny of the soul?
+
+"And he who in his youth hath the need of these things in him, and grows
+to be a godlike man, wanders about in search of a noble and
+well-nurtured soul; and finding it, and in presence of that beauty which
+he forgets not night or day, brings forth the beautiful which he
+conceived long ago; and the twain together tend that which he hath
+brought forth, and are bound by a far closer bond than that of earthly
+children, since the children which are born to them are fairer and more
+immortal far. Who would not choose to have Homer's offspring rather than
+any sons or daughters of men? Who would not choose the offspring which
+Lycurgus left behind him, to be the very salvation of Lacedćmon and of
+Greece? or the children of Solon, whom we call Father of our Laws? or of
+other men like these, whether Greeks or barbarians, who by great deeds
+that they have done have become the begetters of every kind of
+virtue?--ay, and to these men's children have temples been set up, and
+never to any other progeny of man...."
+
+"He, then, who to this end would strive aright, must begin in youth to
+seek fair forms, and should learn first to love one fair form only, and
+therein to engender noble thoughts. And then he will perceive that the
+beauty of one fair form is to the beauty of another near akin; and that
+if it be Beauty's self he seek, it were madness not to account the
+beauty of all forms as one same thing; and considering this, he will be
+the lover of all lovely shapes, and will abate his passion for one shape
+alone, despising and deeming it but a little thing. And this will lead
+him on to see that the beauty of the soul is far more precious than any
+beauty of outward form, so that if he find a fair soul, though it be in
+a body which hath but little charm, he will be constant thereunto, and
+bring to birth such thoughts as teach and strengthen, till he lead that
+soul on to see the beauty of actions and of laws, and how all beauty is
+in truth akin, and the body's beauty is but a little matter; and from
+actions he will lead him on to sciences, that he may see how sciences
+are fair; and looking on the abundance of beauty may no longer be as the
+slave or bondman of one beauty or of one law; but setting sail into the
+ocean of beauty, and creating and beholding many fair and glorious
+thoughts and images in a philosophy without stint or stay, he may thus
+at last wax strong and grow, and may perceive that there is one science
+only, the science of infinite beauty.
+
+"For he who hath thus far had intelligence of love, and hath beheld all
+fair things in order and aright,--he drawing near to the end of things
+lovable shall behold a BEING marvellously fair; for whose sake in truth
+it is that all the previous labours have been undergone: One who is from
+everlasting, and neither is born nor perisheth, nor can wax nor wane,
+nor hath change or turning or alteration of foul and fair; nor can that
+beauty be imagined after the fashion of face or hands or bodily parts
+and members, nor in any form of speech or knowledge, nor as dwelling in
+aught but in itself; neither in beast nor man nor earth nor heaven nor
+any other creature; but Beauty only and alone and separate and eternal,
+which, albeit all other fair things partake thereof and grow and perish,
+itself without change or increase or diminution endures for everlasting.
+And whoso being led on and upward by human loves begins to see that
+Beauty, he is not far, I say, from reaching the end of all. And surely
+then, O Socrates (said that guest from Mantinea), man's life is worth
+the living, when he beholds that Primal Fair; which when thou seest it
+shall not seem to thee to be made after the fashion of gold or raiment
+or those forms of earth,--whom now beholding thou art stricken dumb, and
+fain, if it were possible, without thought of meat or drink, wouldst
+look and love for ever. What would it be, then, were it granted to any
+man to see Very Beauty clear;--incorruptible and undefiled, not mingled
+with colour or flesh of man, or with aught that can consume away, but
+single and divine? Could man's life, in that vision and beatitude, be
+poor or low? or deemest thou not (said she), that then alone it will be
+possible for this man, discerning spiritual beauty with those eyes by
+which it is spiritually discerned, to beget no shadows of virtue, since
+that is no shadow to which he clings, but virtue in very truth, since he
+hath the very Truth in his embrace? and begetting and rearing Virtue as
+his child, he must needs become the friend of God; and if there be any
+man who is immortal, that man is he."
+
+Between the aspects of love here expressed in extreme terms,--the
+planetary aspect, if I may so term it, and the cosmical,--the choice is
+momentous. I do not indeed say that in our estimate of love is involved
+our estimate of Religion; for Religion should mean the sane response of
+the spirit to all that is known of Cosmic Law. But Religion in the sense
+in which it is often used,--our emotional and ethical attitude towards
+Life Unseen;--this is in reality too closely parallel to Platonic Love
+to allow the psychologist who denies reality in the one to assume
+reality in the other. For the Platonic lover the image of the Beloved
+one--no longer a matter of conscious summons and imagination--has become
+the indwelling and instinctive impulse to noble thought and deed. Even
+such to a Francis or to a Theresa is the image of the Divinity whom they
+adore; and if they claim that sometimes in moments of crisis they feel a
+sway, a guidance, a _communicatio idiomatum_ with the Divine, we may
+point in reply to the humbler, but more tangible, evidence which assures
+us that even between souls still inhabiting and souls who have quitted
+the flesh there may exist a telepathic intercommunication and an
+impalpable confluence from afar.
+
+Brief as this survey has been, it has served to indicate that the
+psychical type to which we have applied the name of genius may be
+recognized in every region of thought and emotion, as in each direction
+a man's every-day self may be more or less permeable to subliminal
+impulses. Coming, then, to the question, "What is the origin of genius?"
+I cannot accept the ordinary explanation that it is a mere "sport" or
+mental by-product, occurring as physical "sports" do in the course of
+evolution. The view which I hold,--the view which I am here suggesting,
+is in some sort a renewal of the old Platonic "reminiscence," in the
+light of that fuller knowledge which is common property to-day. I hold
+that in the protoplasm or primary basis of all organic life there must
+have been an inherent adaptability to the manifestation of all faculties
+which organic life has in fact manifested. I hold, of course, that
+"sports" or variations occur, which are at present unpredictable, and
+which reveal in occasional offspring faculties which their parents
+showed no signs of possessing. But I differ from those who hold that the
+faculty itself thus manifested is now for the first time initiated in
+that stock by some chance combination of hereditary elements. I hold
+that it is not initiated, but only revealed; that the "sport" has not
+called a new faculty into being, but has merely raised an existing
+faculty above the threshold of supraliminal consciousness.
+
+This view, if pushed back far enough, is no doubt inconsistent with the
+way in which evolution is generally conceived. For it denies that all
+human faculties must have been evoked by terrene experience. It assumes
+a subliminal self, with unknown faculties, originated in some unknown
+way, and not merely by contact with the needs which the terrene organism
+has had to meet. It thus seems at first sight to be introducing a new
+mystery, and to be introducing it in a gratuitous way.
+
+To this I reply in the first place that so far as the origin of man's
+known powers is concerned, no fresh mystery is in fact introduced. All
+human powers, to put the thing broadly, have somehow or other to be got
+into protoplasm and then got out again. You have to explain first how
+they became implicit in the earliest and lowest living thing, and then
+how they have become thus far explicit in the latest and highest. All
+the faculties of that highest being, I repeat, existed _virtually_ in
+the lowest, and in so far as the admitted faculties are concerned, the
+difference between my view and the ordinary view may be said to be
+little more than a difference as to the sense which that word
+_virtually_ is here to assume.
+
+The real difference between the two views appears when the faculties
+which I have called unknown come to be considered. If they are held to
+be real, my view is certainly the better able to embrace them. I hold
+that telepathy and telćsthesia do in fact exist--telepathy, a
+communication between incarnate mind and incarnate mind, and perhaps
+between incarnate minds and minds unembodied; telćsthesia, a knowledge
+of things terrene which overpasses the limits of ordinary perception,
+and which perhaps also achieves an insight into some other than terrene
+world. And these faculties, I say, cannot have been acquired by natural
+selection, for the preservation of the race, during the process of
+terrene evolution; they were (as we may phrase it) the products of
+extra-terrene evolution. And if they were so, man's other powers may
+well have been so also. The specialised forms of terrene perception were
+not real novelties in the universe, but imperfect adaptations of
+protoplasm to the manifestation of the indwelling general perceptive
+power. The mathematical faculty, for instance (we may, perhaps, say
+with Plato), pre-existed. When Dase solved all those sums in his head,
+his power of solving them was not a fresh development in his ancestral
+stock, but depended on the accidental adaptation of his organism to the
+manifestation of the indwelling computative power. I do not indeed
+venture to follow Plato in his ontogenetic argument--his claim that the
+individual computator has had already an individual training in
+computation. I do not say that Dase himself learnt or divined the
+multiplication-table in some ideal world. I only say that Dase and all
+the rest of us are the spawn or output of some unseen world in which the
+multiplication-table is, so to speak, in the air. Dase trailed it after
+him, as the poet says of the clouds of glory, when he "descended into
+generation" in a humble position at Hamburg.
+
+In him and in his ancestors were many faculties which were called out by
+the struggle for existence, and became supraliminal. But there were many
+faculties also which were not thus called out, and which consequently
+remained subliminal. To these faculties, as a rule, his supraliminal
+self could get no access. But by some chance of evolution--some sport--a
+vent-hole was opened at this one point between the different strata of
+his being, and a subliminal uprush carried his computative faculty into
+the open day.
+
+Two things, of course, are assumed in this argument for which Science
+offers no guarantee. I assume in the man a soul which can draw strength
+and grace from a spiritual Universe, and conversely I assume in the
+Universe a Spirit accessible and responsive to the soul of man. These
+are familiar postulates. Every religion has claimed them in turn;
+although every religion in turn has so narrowed their application as
+grievously to narrow the evidence available for their support. But that
+which religions have claimed for their Founders or for their Saints--and
+what is sanctity but the genius of the ethical realm?--Psychology must
+claim for every form of spiritual indrawing, every form of spiritual
+response; for sleeping vision, for hypnotic rejuvenation, for sensory
+and motor automatisms, for trance, for ecstasy. The philosopher who has
+cried with Marcus Aurelius "Either Providence or atoms!"--who has
+declared that without this basis in the Unseen, "the moral Cosmos would
+be reduced to a Chaos";--should he not welcome even the humblest line of
+research which fain would gather from every unsolved problem some hint
+as to the spiritual law unknown which in time may give the solution of
+all?
+
+We know not in what directions--directions how definitely
+predetermined--even physical organisms can vary from the common type. We
+know not what amount of energy any given plant or animal can absorb and
+incorporate from earth and air and sun. Still less can we predict or
+limit the possible variations of the soul, the fulness which it may
+receive from the World-Soul, its possible heritage of grace and truth.
+But in genius we can watch at each stage the processes of this celestial
+nurture. We can imagine the outlook of joyous trustfulness; we can
+almost seem, with Wordsworth, to remember the child's soul entering into
+the Kingdom of Heaven. Childhood is genius without capacity; it makes
+for most of us our best memory of inspiration, and our truest outlook
+upon the real, which is the ideal, world.
+
+From a greater distance we can watch the inward stir of mighty thought,
+the same for Ćschylus, for Newton, for Virgil;--a stir independent of
+worldly agitation; like the swing and libration of the tide-wave across
+the ocean, which takes no note of billow or of storm.
+
+Nay, we can see against the sun "the eagle soaring above the tomb of
+Plato," and in Paul, as in Plotinus, we can catch that sense of
+self-fulfilment in self-absorption, of rapture, of deliverance, which
+the highest minds have bequeathed to us as the heritage of their highest
+hours.
+
+These our spiritual ancestors are no eccentrics nor degenerates; they
+have made for us the sanest and most fruitful experiment yet made by
+man; they have endeavoured to exalt the human race in a way in which it
+can in truth be exalted; they have drawn on forces which exist, and on a
+Soul which answers; they have dwelt on those things "by dwelling on
+which it is," as Plato has it, "that even God is divine."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SLEEP
+
+  [Greek: olbia d' hapantes aisa lysiponon metanissontai teleutan.
+  kai sôma men pantôn hepetai thanatô peristhenei,
+  zôon d' eti leipetai aiônos eidôlon; to gar esti monon
+  ek theôn; heudei de prassontôn meleôn, atar heudontessin en pollois oneirois
+  deiknysi terpnôn epserpoisan chalepôn te krisin.]
+
+  --PINDAR.
+
+
+The preceding chapters have carried us two steps upon our way. In
+Chapter II. we gained some insight into the structure of human
+personality by analysing some of the accidents to which it is subject;
+in the third chapter we viewed this personality in its normal waking
+state, and considered how that norm should be defined, and in what
+manner certain fortunate persons had integrated the personality still
+further by utilising uprushes of subliminal faculty to supplement or to
+crystallise the products of supraliminal thought.
+
+The review of these two chapters indicates clearly enough what my next
+step must be. It is obvious that in my review of phases or alternations
+of personality I have left out of sight the most constant, the most
+important alternation of all. I have thus far said nothing of _sleep_.
+Yet _that_ change of personality, at least, has been borne in on every
+one's notice;--not, certainly, as a morbid curiosity, but as an
+essential part of life.
+
+Let us then consider the specific characteristics of sleep. The
+definition of sleep is an acknowledged _crux_ in physiology. And I would
+point out that the increased experience of hypnotic sleep which recent
+years have afforded has made this difficulty even more striking than
+before. A physiological explanation must needs assume that some special
+bodily condition,--such, for instance, as the clogging of the brain by
+waste-products,--is at least the usual antecedent of sound sleep. But it
+is certain, on the other hand, that with a large percentage of persons
+profound and prolonged sleep can be induced, in _any_ bodily condition,
+by simple suggestion. Hypnosis, indeed (as Wetterstrand and others have
+shown) may be prolonged, with actual benefit to the sleeper, far beyond
+the point which the spontaneous sleep of a healthy subject ever reaches.
+A good subject can be awakened and thrown into hypnosis again almost at
+pleasure, and independently of any state either of nutrition or of
+fatigue. Such sleep belongs to those phenomena which we may call nervous
+if we will, but which we can observe or influence from the psychological
+side alone.
+
+We can hardly hope, from the ordinary data, to arrive at a definition of
+sleep more satisfactory than others have reached. We must defer that
+attempt until we have collected something more than the ordinary
+evidence as to what occurs or does not occur during the abeyance of
+waking life. One point, however, is plain at once. We cannot treat
+sleep,--as it has generally been treated,--in its purely _negative_
+aspect. We cannot be content merely to dwell, with the common
+text-books, on the mere _absence_ of waking faculties;--on the
+diminution of external perception, the absence of controlling
+intelligence. We must treat sleep _positively_, so far as we can, as a
+definite phase of our personality, co-ordinate with the waking phase.
+Each phase, as I believe, has been differentiated alike from a primitive
+indifference;--from a condition of lowly organisms which merited the
+name neither of sleep nor of waking. Nay, if there were to be a contest
+as to which state should be deemed primary and which secondary, sleep
+might put forward its claim to be regarded as the more primitive phase.
+It is sleep rather than vigilance which prenatal and infantile life
+suggest; and even for us adults, however much we may associate ourselves
+in thought with the waking state alone, that state has at least thus
+much of secondary and adventitious that it is maintained for short
+periods only, which we cannot artificially lengthen, being plainly
+unable to sustain itself without frequent recourse to that fuller influx
+of vitality which slumber brings.
+
+Out of slumber proceeds each fresh arousal and initiation of waking
+activities. What other activities may in slumber be aroused and
+initiated the evidence to be set forth in this chapter should help us to
+say. To some extent at least the abeyance of the supraliminal life must
+be the liberation of the subliminal. To some extent the obscuration of
+the noonday glare of man's waking consciousness must reveal the
+far-reaching faint corona of his unsuspected and impalpable powers.
+
+Entering, then, upon a review of sleeping faculty, thus inevitably
+imperfect, we may best begin from the red end of our spectrum of
+consciousness;--the red end which represents the deepest power which
+waking effort can exert upon our physical organism.
+
+Our survey of the efficacy of sleep, indeed, must make its beginning
+_beyond_ that limit. For assuredly in sleep some agency is at work which
+far surpasses waking efficacy in this respect. It is a fully admitted,
+although an absolutely unexplained fact, that the regenerative quality
+of healthy sleep is something _sui generis_, which no completeness of
+waking quiescence can rival or approach. A few moments of sleep--a mere
+blur across the field of consciousness--will sometimes bring a
+renovation which hours of lying down in darkness and silence would not
+yield. A mere bowing of the head on the breast, if consciousness ceases
+for a second or two, may change a man's outlook on the world. At such
+moments,--and many persons, like myself, can fully vouch for their
+reality,--one feels that what has occurred in one's
+organism,--alteration of blood-pressure, or whatever it be,--has been in
+some sense discontinuous; that there has been a break in the inward
+_régime_, amounting to much more than a mere brief ignoring of stimuli
+from without. The break of consciousness is associated in some way with
+a potent physiological change. That is to say, even in the case of a
+moment of ordinary sleep we already note the appearance of that special
+recuperative energy which is familiar in longer periods of sleep, and
+which, as we shall presently see, reaches a still higher level in
+hypnotic trance.
+
+This recuperative power, then, lies just beyond the red end of our
+spectrum of waking faculty. In that obscure region we note only added
+power; an increased control over organic functions at the foundation of
+bodily life. But when we pass on within the limits of our spectrum of
+waking consciousness;--when we come to control over voluntary muscles,
+or to sensory capacity, we find that our comparison between sleeping and
+waking faculty is no longer a simple one. On the one hand, there is of
+course a general blank and abeyance of control over the realm of waking
+energies;--or in partial sleep a mere fantastic parody of those energies
+in incoherent dream. On the other hand, we find that sleep is capable of
+strange developments,--and that night can sometimes suddenly outdo the
+most complex achievements of day.
+
+Take first the degree of control over the voluntary muscles. In ordinary
+sleep this is neither possessed nor desired; in nightmare its loss is
+exaggerated, in quasi-hysterical fashion, into an appalling fear; while
+in somnambulism,--a kind of new personality developed _ad hoc_,--the
+sleeper (as we shall see later on) walks on perilous ridges with steady
+feet. I have already said that morbid somnambulism bears to sound sleep
+a relation something like that which hysteria bears to normal life. But
+between the healthy somnambulist and the subject of nightmare we find
+from another point of view a contrast resembling that between the man
+of genius and the hysteric. The somnambulist, like the man of genius,
+brings into play resources which are beyond ordinary reach. On the other
+hand, just as in many hysterics certain ordinary powers of movement have
+lapsed below voluntary control, so also the dreamer who dimly wishes to
+move a constrained limb is often unable to send thither a sufficient
+current of motor energy to effect the desired change of position. That
+nightmare inability to move, which we thus feel in dream,--"when neither
+he that fleeth can flee, nor he that pursueth pursue,"--that sensation
+which both Homer and Virgil have selected as the type of paralysing
+bewilderment,[39]--this is just the _aboulia_ of the hysteric;--the
+condition when it takes a man half an hour to put on his hat, or when a
+woman sits all the morning looking at her knitting, but unable to add a
+stitch.
+
+"Somnambulism," however, is too vague and undefined a term for our
+present discussion. It will only be by a comparison with hypnotism, in
+the next chapter, that we can hope to get some clearer notion of
+"sleep-waking" states.
+
+Let us pass on to consider _entencephalic sensory faculty_,--"mind's
+eye" faculty,--as shown in sleep or dream. Here too we shall find the
+same rule to prevail as with motor faculty. That is to say, on the whole
+the sensory faculty is of course dimmed and inhibited by sleep; but
+there are nevertheless indications of a power subsisting as vividly as
+ever, or with even added acuteness.
+
+Baillarger in France and Griesinger in Germany (both about 1845) were
+among the first to call attention to the vivid images which rise before
+the internal vision of many persons, between sleep and waking. M. Alfred
+Maury, the well-known Greek scholar and antiquary, gave to these images
+a few years later the title of _illusions hypnagogiques_, and published
+a remarkable series of observations upon himself. Mr. Galton has further
+treated of them in his _Inquiry into Human Faculty_; and cases will be
+found in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i, pp. 390, 473, etc.
+
+These visions may be _hypnopompic_ as well as _hypnagogic_;--may appear,
+that is to say, at the moment when slumber is departing as well as at
+the moment when it is coming on;--and in either case they are closely
+related to dreams; the "hypnagogic illusions" or pictures being
+sometimes repeated in dream (as with Maury), and the hypnopompic
+pictures consisting generally in the persistence of some dream-image
+into the first moments of waking. In either case they testify to an
+intensified power of inward visualisation at a very significant
+moment;--a moment which is actually or virtually one of sleep, but which
+yet admits of definite comparison with adjacent moments of waking. We
+may call the condition one of cerebral or "mind's eye"
+hyperćsthesia,--an exalted sensibility of special brain-centres in
+response to those unknown internal stimuli which are always giving rise
+to similar but fainter inward visions even in broadly waking hours.
+
+For those who are already good visualisers such phenomena as these,
+though striking enough, present no quite unique experience. For bad
+visualisers, on the other hand, the vividness of these hypnagogic
+pictures may be absolutely a revelation.
+
+The degree of acuteness, not of the visualising faculty alone, but of
+all the senses in dream, is a subject for direct observation, and
+even--for persons who can at all control their dreams--for direct
+experiment. Some correspondents report a considerable apparent accession
+of sensory power in dream. Others again speak of the increased vividness
+of dramatic conception, or of what has been called in a hypnotic subject
+"objectivation of types." "In each of these dreams," writes one lady, "I
+was a man;--in one of them a low brute, in the other a dipsomaniac. I
+never had the slightest conception of how such persons felt or thought
+until these experiences." Another correspondent speaks of dreaming two
+disconnected dreams,--one emotional and one
+geometrical,--simultaneously, and of consequent sense of confusion and
+fatigue.
+
+The "Chapter on Dreams," in R. L. Stevenson's volume, _Across the
+Plains_ (already referred to in the last chapter), contains a
+description of the most successful dream-experiments thus far recorded.
+By self-suggestion before sleep Stevenson could secure a visual and
+dramatic intensity of dream-representation which furnished him with the
+motives for some of his most striking romances. His account, written
+with admirable psychological insight, is indispensable to students of
+this subject. I am mentioning these well-known phenomena, as the reader
+will understand, with a somewhat novel purpose--to show, namely, that
+the internal sensory perceptions or imaginative faculty of sleep may
+exceed that of vigilance in something the same way as the recuperative
+agency of sleep surpasses the _vis medicatrix_ of waking hours.
+
+I pass on to a less frequent phenomenon, which shows us at once intense
+imagination during sleep, and a lasting imprint left by these
+imaginations upon the waking organism;--an unintended self-suggestion
+which we may compare with Stevenson's voluntary self-suggestion
+mentioned just above.
+
+The permanent result of a dream, I say, is sometimes such as to show
+that the dream has not been a mere superficial confusion of past waking
+experiences, but has had an unexplained potency of its own,--drawn, like
+the potency of hypnotic suggestion, from some depth in our being which
+the waking self cannot reach. Two main classes of this kind are
+conspicuous enough to be easily recognised--those, namely, where the
+dream has led to a "conversion" or marked religious change, and those
+where it has been the starting-point of an "insistent idea" or of a fit
+of actual insanity.[40] The dreams which convert, reform, change
+character and creed, have of course a _primâ facie_ claim to be
+considered as something other than ordinary dreams; and their discussion
+may be deferred till a later stage of our inquiry. Those, on the other
+hand, which suddenly generate an insistent idea of an irrational type
+are closely and obviously analogous to post-hypnotic self-suggestions,
+which the self that inspired them cannot be induced to countermand. Such
+is the dream related by M. Taine,[41] where a gendarme, impressed by an
+execution at which he has assisted, dreams that he himself is to be
+guillotined, and is afterwards so influenced by the dream that he
+attempts suicide. Several cases of this kind have been collected by Dr.
+Faure;[42] and Dr. Tissié, in his interesting little work, _Les Ręves_,
+has added some curious instances from his own observation.
+
+A striking illustration may be drawn from the following incident in the
+story of Krafft-Ebing's patient,[43] Ilma S., the genuineness of whose
+stigmata seems proved by that physician's care in observation, and by
+the painfulness of certain experiments performed upon her by students as
+practical jokes and against her will:--
+
+     _May 6th, 1888._--The patient is disturbed to-day. She complains to
+     the sister of severe pain under the left breast, thinks that the
+     professor has burnt her in the night, and begs the sister to obtain
+     a retreat for her in a convent, where she will be secure against
+     such attacks. The sister's refusal causes a hystero-epileptic
+     attack. [At length, in the hypnotic trance] the patient gives the
+     following explanation of the origin of the pain: "Last night an old
+     man came to me; he looked like a priest and came in company with a
+     Sister of Charity, on whose collet there was a large golden B. I
+     was afraid of her. The old man was amiable and friendly. He dipped
+     a pen in the sister's pocket, and with it wrote a W and B on my
+     skin under the left breast. Once he dipped his pen badly and made a
+     blot in the middle of the figure. This spot and the B pain me
+     severely, but the W does not. The man explained the W as meaning
+     that I should go to the M church and confess at the W
+     confessional."
+
+     After this account the patient cried out and said, "There stands
+     the man again. Now he has chains on his hands."
+
+     When the patient woke into ordinary life she was suffering pain in
+     the place indicated, where there were "superficial losses of
+     substance, penetrating to the corium, which have a resemblance to a
+     reversed W and B," with "a hyperćmic raised spot between the two."
+     Nowhere in this peculiar neurotrophic alteration of the skin, which
+     is identical with those previously produced experimentally, are
+     there traces of inflammation. The pain and the memory of the dream
+     were removed by the doctor's suggestion; but the dream
+     self-suggestion to confess at the M church persisted; and the
+     patient, without knowing why, did actually go and confess to the
+     priest of her vision.
+
+In this last case we have a dream playing the part of a powerful
+post-hypnotic suggestion. The meaning of this vague term "suggestion" we
+shall have to discuss in a later chapter. It is enough to notice here
+the great power of a subliminal suggestion which can make an impression
+so much stronger not only than the usual evanescent touch of dream, but
+than the actual experiences of waking day.
+
+But this case may also serve to lead us on to further reflections as to
+the connection between dream-memory and hypnotic memory, a connection
+which points, as we shall presently see, towards the existence of some
+subliminal continuity of memory, lying deeper down than the evocable
+memory of common life--the stock of conscious reminiscences on which we
+can draw at will.
+
+With regard to memory, as with regard to sensation, we seem in waking
+life to be dealing with a selection made for purposes of earthly use.
+From the pre-conscious unselective memory which depends on the mere
+organisation of living matter, it is the task of consciousness, as it
+dawns in each higher organism, to make its own appropriate selection and
+to develop into distinctness certain helpful lines of reminiscence. The
+question of self-preservation--What must I needs be aware of in order to
+escape my foes?--involves the question, What must I needs remember in
+order to act upon the facts of which I am aware? The selected currents
+of memory follow the selected avenues of sensation; what by disuse I
+lose the power of noticing at the time, I also lose the power of
+recalling afterwards.
+
+For simpler organisms this rule may perhaps suffice. Man needs a more
+complex formula. For it may happen, as we have already seen, that two or
+more phases of personality in one man may each select from the mass of
+potential reminiscences a special group of memories of its own. These
+special groups, moreover, may bear to one another all kinds of
+relations; one may include another, or they may alternate and may be
+apparently co-exclusive.
+
+From these dissociations and alternations of memory there will be many
+lessons to learn. The lesson which here presents itself is not the least
+important. What is the relation of the sleeping state to these
+dissociated, these parallel or concentric memories? Is it the case that
+when one memory includes another it is the waking memory--as one might
+expect from that state's apparently superior vividness--which shows
+itself the deeper, the more comprehensive record?
+
+The answer of actual experience to these questions is unexpectedly
+direct and clear. In every recorded instance--so far at least as my
+memory serves me, where there has been any _unification_ between
+alternating states, so as to make comparison possible--it is the memory
+furthest from waking life whose span is the widest, whose grasp of the
+organism's upstored impressions is the most profound. Inexplicable as
+this phenomenon has been to observers who have encountered it without
+the needed key, the independent observations of hundreds of physicians
+and hypnotists have united in affirming its reality. The commonest
+instance, of course, is furnished by the ordinary hypnotic trance. The
+degree of intelligence, indeed, which finds its way to expression in
+that trance or slumber varies greatly in different subjects and at
+different times. But whensoever there is enough of alertness to admit of
+our forming a judgment, we find that in the hypnotic state there is a
+considerable memory--though not necessarily a complete or a reasoned
+memory--of the waking state; whereas with most subjects in the waking
+state--unless some special command be imposed upon the hypnotic
+self--there is no memory whatever of the hypnotic state. In many
+hysterical conditions also the same general rule subsists; namely, that
+the further we get from the surface the wider is the expanse of memory
+which we encounter.
+
+If all this be true, there are several points on which we may form
+expectations definite enough to suggest inquiry. Ordinary sleep is
+roughly intermediate between waking life and deep hypnotic trance; and
+it seems _a priori_ probable that its memory will have links of almost
+equal strength with the memory which belongs to waking life and the
+memory which belongs to the hypnotic trance. And this is in fact the
+case; the fragments of dream-memory are interlinked with both these
+other chains. Thus, for example, without any suggestion to that effect,
+acts accomplished in the hypnotic trance may be remembered in dream; and
+remembered under the illusion which was thrown round them by the
+hypnotiser. Thus Dr. Auguste Voisin suggested to a hypnotised subject
+to stab a patient--really a stuffed figure--in the neighbouring bed.[44]
+The subject did so; and of course knew nothing of it on waking. But
+three days afterwards he returned to the hospital complaining that his
+dreams were haunted by the figure of a woman, who accused him of having
+stabbed and killed her. Appropriate suggestion laid this ghost of a
+doll.
+
+Conversely, dreams forgotten in waking life may be remembered in the
+hypnotic trance. Thus Dr. Tissié's patient, Albert, dreamt that he was
+about to set out on one of his somnambulic "fugues," or aimless
+journeys, and when hypnotised mentioned to the physician this dream,
+which in his waking state he had forgotten.[45] The probable truth of
+this statement was shown by the fact that he did actually set out on the
+journey thus dreamt of, and that his journeys were usually preceded and
+incited by remembered dreams.
+
+I need not dwell on the existence, but at the same time the
+incompleteness, of our dream-memory of waking life; nor on the
+occasional formation of a separate chain of memory, constructed from
+successive and cohering dreams. It should be added that we do not really
+know how far our memory in dream of waking life may have extended; since
+we can only _infer_ this from our notoriously imperfect waking memory of
+past dreams.
+
+A cognate anticipation to which our theory will point will be that
+dream-memory will occasionally be found to fill up gaps in waking
+memory, other than those due to hypnotic trance; such so-called
+"ecmnesic" periods, for instance, as sometimes succeed a violent shock
+to the system, and may even embrace some space of time _anterior_ to the
+shock. These periods themselves resemble prolonged and unremembered
+dreams. Such accidents, however, are so rare, and such dream-memory so
+hard to detect, that I mention the point mainly for the sake of
+theoretical completeness; and must think myself fortunate in being able
+to refer the reader to a recent case of M. Charcot's which affords an
+interesting confirmation of the suggested view.[46]
+
+I pass on to the still more novel and curious questions involved in the
+apparent existence of a dream-memory which, while accompanying the
+memory of ordinary life, seems also to have a wider purview, and to
+indicate that the record of external events which is kept within us is
+far fuller than we know.
+
+Let us consider what stages such a memory may show.
+
+I. It may include events once known to the waking self, but now
+definitely forgotten.
+
+II. It may include facts which have fallen within the sensory field, but
+which have never been supraliminally "apperceived" or cognised in any
+way. And thus also it may indicate that from this wider range of
+remembered facts dream-_inferences_ have been drawn;--which inferences
+may be _retrospective_, _prospective_, or,--if I may use a word of
+Pope's with a new meaning, _circumspective_,--that is to say, relating
+not to the past or to the future, but to the present condition of
+matters beyond the range of ordinary perception. It is plain that
+inferences of this kind (if they exist) will be liable to be mistaken
+for direct retrocognition, direct premonition, direct clairvoyance;
+while yet they need not actually prove anything more than a perception
+on the part of the subliminal self more far-reaching,--a memory more
+stable,--than is the perception or the memory of the supraliminal self
+which we know.
+
+These hypermnesic dreams, then, may afford a means of drawing our lines
+of evidence more exactly; of relegating some marvellous narratives to a
+realm of lesser marvel, and at the same time of realising more clearly
+what it is in the most advanced cases which ordinary theories are really
+powerless to explain.
+
+As to the _first_ of the above-mentioned categories no one will raise
+any doubt. It is a familiar fact--or a fact only sufficiently unfamiliar
+to be noted with slight surprise--that we occasionally recover in sleep
+a memory which has wholly dropped out of waking consciousness.
+
+In such cases the original piece of knowledge has at the time made a
+definite impress on the mind,--has come well within the span of
+apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness. Its reappearance after
+however long an interval is a fact to which there are already plenty of
+parallels. But the conclusion to which some cases seem to me to point is
+one of a much stranger character. I think that there is evidence to show
+that many facts or pictures which have never even for a moment come
+within the apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness are
+nevertheless retained by the subliminal memory, and are occasionally
+presented in dreams with what seems a definite purpose. I quote an
+interesting case in Appendix IV. A.[47]
+
+The same point, as we shall hereafter see, is illustrated by the
+phenomena of crystal-vision. Miss Goodrich-Freer,[48] for example, saw
+in the crystal the announcement of the death of a friend;--a piece of
+news which certainly had never been apprehended by her ordinary
+conscious self. On referring to the _Times_, it was found that an
+announcement of the death of some one of the same unusual name was
+contained in a sheet with which she had screened her face from the
+fire;--so that the words may have fallen within her range of vision,
+although they had not reached what we broadly call her waking mind.
+
+This instance was of value from the strong probability that the news
+could never have been supraliminally known at all;--since it was too
+important to have been merely glanced at and forgotten.
+
+In these cases the dream-self has presented a significant scene,--has
+chosen, so to say, from its gallery of photographs the special picture
+which the waking mind desired,--but has not needed to draw any more
+complex inference from the facts presumably at its disposal. I have now
+to deal with a small group of dreams which reason as well as
+remember;--if indeed in some of them there be not something more than
+mere reasoning on facts already in some way acquired,--something which
+overpasses the scheme prescribed for the present chapter.
+
+In the first place we cannot doubt that definite data already known may
+sometimes be treated in somnambulism or ordinary dream with more than
+waking intelligence. Such are the cases of mathematical problems solved
+in somnambulism, or of the skeletal arrangement discovered by Agassiz in
+common sleep for scattered bones which had baffled his waking skill. I
+give in Appendix IV. B. the striking case of Professor Hilprecht where
+dream-intelligence is carried to its highest point. Professor Romaine
+Newbold (who records the case) is well versed in the analysis of
+evidence making for supernormal powers, and his explanation of the
+vision as the result of "processes of associative reasoning analogous to
+those of the upper consciousness" must, I think, be taken as correct.
+But had the incident occurred in a less critical age of the world,--in
+any generation, one may say, but _this_,--how majestic a proof would the
+phantasmal Babylonian's message be held to have afforded of his
+veritable co-operation with the modern _savant_ in the reconstruction of
+his remote past!
+
+I repeat that with this case of Professor Hilprecht's we seem to have
+reached the utmost intensity of sleep faculty within the limits of our
+ordinary spectrum. In almost every region of that spectrum we have
+found that the sleeper's faculty, under its narrow conditions, shows
+scattered signs of at least a potential equality with the faculty of
+waking hours.
+
+We have already seen this as regards muscular movements, as regards
+inward vision and audition, and as regards memory; and these last
+records complete the series by showing us the achievement in sleep of
+intellectual work of the severest order. Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_ had
+long ago shown the world that a great poet might owe his masterpiece to
+the obscuration of waking sense.[49] And the very imperfection of _Kubla
+Khan_--the memory truncated by an interruption--may again remind us how
+partial must ever be our waking knowledge of the achievements of sleep.
+
+May I not, then, claim a real analogy between certain of the
+achievements of _sleep_ and the achievements of _genius_? In both there
+is the same triumphant spontaneity, the same sense of drawing no longer
+upon the narrow and brief endurance of nerves and brain, but upon some
+unknown source exempt from those limitations.
+
+Thus far, indeed, the sleep-faculties which we have been considering,
+however strangely intensified, have belonged to the same class as the
+normal faculties of waking life. We have now to consider whether we can
+detect in sleep any manifestation of _supernormal_ faculty--any
+experience which seems to suggest that man is a cosmical spirit as well
+as a terrestrial organism, and is in some way in relation with a
+spiritual as well as with a material world. It will seem, in this view,
+to be natural that this commerce with a spiritual environment should be
+more perceptible in sleep than in waking. The dogma which my point of
+view thus renders probable is perhaps, as a mere matter of history, the
+dogma of all dogmas which has been most universally believed by mankind.
+
+"_Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_"--for how many narrow
+theological propositions have we not heard this proud claim--that they
+have been believed everywhere, and by everybody, and in every age? Yet
+what can approach the antiquity, the ubiquity, the unanimity of man's
+belief in the wanderings of the spirit in dream? In the Stone Age, the
+sceptic would have been rash indeed who ventured to contradict it. And
+though I grant that this "palćolithic psychology" has gone out of
+fashion for the last few centuries, I do not think that (in view of the
+telćsthetic evidence now collected) we can any longer dismiss as a mere
+_bizarrerie_ of dream-imagery the constant recurrence of the idea of
+visiting in sleep some distant scene,--with the acquisition thereby of
+new facts not otherwise accessible.
+
+Starting, then, not from savage authority, but from the evidential
+scrutiny of modern facts, we shall find, I think, that there are
+coincidences of dream with truth which neither pure chance nor any
+subconscious mentation of an ordinary kind will adequately explain. We
+shall find that there is a perception of concealed material objects or
+of distant scenes and also a perception of a communion with the thoughts
+and emotions of other minds. Both these phenomena have been noted
+sporadically in many ages and countries, and were observed with serious
+attention especially by the early French mesmerists. The first group of
+phenomena was called _clairvoyance_ or _lucidité_, and the second
+_communication de pensées_, or in English, _thought-transference_. These
+terms are scarcely comprehensive enough to satisfy a more systematic
+study. The distant perception is not _optical_, nor is it confined even
+to the apparent sense of sight alone. It extends to all the senses, and
+includes also impressions hardly referable to any special sense.
+Similarly the communication between distant persons is not a
+transference of thought alone, but of emotion, of motor impulses, and of
+many impressions not easy to define. I ventured in 1882 to suggest the
+wider terms _telćsthesia_, sensation at a distance, and _telepathy_,
+fellow-feeling at a distance, and shall use these words in the present
+work. But I am far from assuming that these terms correspond with
+definite and dearly separated groups of phenomena, or comprise the whole
+field of supernormal faculty. On the contrary, I think it probable that
+the facts of the metetherial world are far more complex than the facts
+of the material world; and the ways in which spirits perceive and
+communicate, apart from fleshly organisms, are subtler and more varied
+than any perception or communication which we know.
+
+I have halted above at another line of demarcation which the dreamer's
+own sensations suggest,--the distinction between active psychical
+excursion or invasion and the passive reception of psychical invasion
+from without. But even here, as was also hinted, a clear line of
+division is hard to draw. For whether we are dealing with
+dream-perceptions of distant material scenes, or of distant living
+persons, or of discarnate spirits, it is often impossible for the
+dreamer himself to say either from what point he is himself observing,
+or where the scene of the vision is laid.
+
+For the present I must confine myself to a brief sketch of some of the
+main types of supernormal dreams, arranged in a kind of ascending order.
+I shall begin with such dreams as primarily suggest a kind of
+heightening or extension of the dreamer's own innate perceptive powers,
+as exercised on the world around him. And I shall end with dreams which
+suggest his entrance into a spiritual world, where commerce with
+incarnate or discarnate spirits is subject no longer to the conditions
+of earthly thought.
+
+I begin, then, with some dreams which seem to carry perceptive faculty
+beyond the point at which some unusual form of common vision can be
+plausibly suggested in explanation. Mr. Lewis's dream of the
+landing-order (Appendix IV. A) may be taken as an instance of such a
+dream.[50]
+
+I will next refer to certain cases where the sleeper by clairvoyant
+vision discerns a scene of direct interest to a mind other than his
+own;--as the danger or death of some near friend. Sometimes there is a
+flash of vision, which seems to represent correctly the critical scene.
+Sometimes there is what seems like a longer gaze, accompanied, perhaps
+by some sense of _communion_ with the invaded person. And in some few
+cases--the most interesting of all--the circumstances of a death seem to
+be symbolically _shown_ to a dreamer, as though by the deceased person,
+or by some intelligence connected with him. (See Mrs. Storie's narrative
+p. 109.)
+
+One of the best instances of the flash of vision is Canon Warburton's,
+which I quote from _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 338--a case
+whose remoteness is rendered less of a drawback than usual by the
+character of the narrator and the simplicity and definiteness of the
+fact attested.
+
+The following is his account:--
+
+
+THE CLOSE, WINCHESTER, _July 16th, 1883_.
+
+     Somewhere about the year 1848 I went up from Oxford to stay a day
+     or two with my brother, Acton Warburton, then a barrister, living
+     at 10 Fish Street, Lincoln's Inn. When I got to his chambers I
+     found a note on the table apologising for his absence, and saying
+     that he had gone to a dance somewhere in the West End, and intended
+     to be home soon after one o'clock. Instead of going to bed, I dozed
+     in an arm-chair, but started up wide awake exactly at one,
+     ejaculating "By Jove! he's down!" and seeing him coming out of a
+     drawing-room into a brightly illuminated landing, catching his foot
+     in the edge of the top stair, and falling headlong, just saving
+     himself by his elbows and hands. (The house was one which I had
+     never seen, nor did I know where it was.) Thinking very little of
+     the matter, I fell a-doze again for half an hour, and was awakened
+     by my brother suddenly coming in and saying, "Oh, there you are! I
+     have just had as narrow an escape of breaking my neck as I ever had
+     in my life. Coming out of the ballroom, I caught my foot, and
+     tumbled full length down the stairs."
+
+     That is all. It may have been "only a dream," but I always thought
+     it must have been something more.
+
+W. WARBURTON.
+
+In a second letter Canon Warburton adds:--
+
+
+  _July 20th, 1883._
+
+     My brother was hurrying home from his dance, with some little
+     self-reproach in his mind for not having been at his chambers to
+     receive his guest, so the chances are that he was thinking of me.
+     The whole scene was vividly present to me at the moment, but I did
+     not note particulars any more than one would in real life. The
+     general impression was of a narrow landing brilliantly illuminated,
+     and I remember verifying the correctness of this by questions at
+     the time.
+
+     This is my sole experience of the kind.
+
+     [The last words are in answer to the question whether he had had
+     similar vivid visions which had _not_ corresponded with any real
+     event.]
+
+The impression here produced is as though a jerk were given to some
+delicate link connecting the two brothers. The brother suffering the
+crisis thinks vividly of the other; and one can of course explain the
+incident, as we did on its first publication, as the endangered man's
+projection of the scene upon his brother's mind. The passive dozing
+brother, on the other hand, feels as though he were suddenly _present_
+in the scene,--say in response to some sudden call from the brother in
+danger,--and I am here bringing into relief _that_ aspect of the
+incident, on account of its analogy with cases soon to be quoted. But
+the main lesson no doubt may be that no hard and fast line can be drawn
+between the two explanations.[51]
+
+And here I feel bound to introduce a sample of a certain class of
+dreams,--more interesting, perhaps, and certainly more perplexing than
+any;--but belonging to a category of phenomena which at present I can
+make no attempt to explain. I mean precognitive dreams;--pictures or
+visions in which future events are foretold or depicted, generally with
+more or less of symbolism,--and generally also in a mode so remote from
+the previsions of our earthly sagacity that we shall find ourselves
+driven, in a later discussion, to speak in vague terms of glimpses into
+a cosmic picture-gallery;--or of scenic representations composed and
+offered to us by intelligences higher and more distant than any spirit
+whom we have known. I give in Appendix IV. C, a thoroughly
+characteristic example;--characteristic alike in its definiteness, its
+purposelessness, its isolated unintelligibility.
+
+Dr. Bruce's narrative, which I next give in Appendix IV. D, written by
+an intelligent man, while the facts were yet fresh, seems to me of high
+importance. If we accept the rest of his story, we must, I think,
+suppose that the sense of spiritual presence with which the incident
+began was more than a mere subjective fancy. Shall we refer it to the
+murdered man's wife;--with whom the dreamer seemed afterwards to be in
+telepathic relation? Or shall we interpret it as a kind of summons from
+the dying man, drawing on, as it were, his friend's spirit to witness
+the actual murder and the subsequent scene? The fact that another
+friend, in another locality apparently, had a vision of similar nature,
+tells somewhat in favour of the supposition that the decedent's spirit
+was operative in both cases; since we very seldom--if ever--find an
+agent producing an impression in two separate places at once--or nearly
+so--except at or just after the moment of death.
+
+In this view, the incident resembles a scene passing in a spiritual
+world. The dying man summons his brother-in-law; the brother-in-law
+visits the scene of murder, and there spiritually communicates with his
+sister, the widow, who is corporeally in that scene, and then sees
+further details of the scene after death, which he does not understand,
+and which are not explained to him.
+
+Fantastic though this explanation seems, it is not easy to hit on a
+simpler one which will cover the facts as stated. Could we accept it, we
+should have a kind of transition between two groups of cases, which
+although apparently so different may form parts of a continuous series.
+I mean the cases where the dreamer visits a distant scene, and the cases
+where another spirit visits the dreamer.
+
+Taking, then, Dr. Bruce's case to bridge the interval between these two
+groups, I go on to a case which properly belongs to the _second_, though
+it still has much in common with the _first_. I shall quote Mrs.
+Storie's narrative at full length in the text; because the case is, in
+my judgment, both evidentially very strong, and also, in the naiveté of
+its confusion, extremely suggestive of the way in which these psychical
+communications are made. Mrs. Storie, who is now dead, was, by the
+testimony of Edmund Gurney, Professor Sidgwick, and others, a witness
+eminently deserving of trust; and, besides a corroboration from her
+husband of the manifestation of a troubled dream, before the event was
+known, we have the actual notes written down by her, as she informed us,
+the day, or the day after, the news of the fatal accident arrived,
+solely for her own use, and unmistakably reflecting the incoherent
+impressiveness of the broken vision. These notes form the narrative
+given in _Phantasms of the Living_ (vol. i. p. 370) which I reproduce
+here. The fact that the deceased brother was a _twin_ of Mrs. Storie's
+adds interest to the case, since one clue (a vague one as yet) to the
+causes directing and determining telepathic communications lies in what
+seems their exceptional frequency between _twins_;--the closest of all
+relations.
+
+
+HOBART TOWN, _July 1874_.
+
+     On the evening of the 18th July, I felt unusually nervous. This
+     seemed to begin [with the occurrence of a small domestic annoyance]
+     about half past eight o'clock. When I went to my room I even felt
+     as if some one was there. I fancied, as I stepped into bed, that
+     some one _in thought_ tried to stop me. At 2 o'clock I woke from
+     the following dream. It seemed like in dissolving views. In a
+     twinkle of light I saw a railway, and the puff of the engine. I
+     thought, "What's going on up there? Travelling? I wonder if any of
+     us are travelling and I dreaming of it." _Some one_ unseen by me
+     answered, "No; something quite different--something wrong." "I
+     don't like to look at these things," I said. Then I saw behind and
+     above my head William's upper half reclining, eyes and mouth half
+     shut; his chest moved forward convulsively, and he raised his right
+     arm. Then he bent forward, saying, "I suppose I should move out of
+     this." Then I saw him lying, eyes shut, on the ground, flat. The
+     chimney of an engine at his head. I called in excitement, "That
+     will strike him!" The _some one_ answered "Yes--well, here's what
+     it was"; and immediately I saw William sitting in the open
+     air--faint moonlight--on a raised place sideways. He raised his
+     right arm, shuddered, and said, "I can't go on, or back, _No_."
+     Then he seemed lying flat. I cried out, "Oh! Oh!" and others seemed
+     to echo, "Oh! Oh!" He seemed then upon his elbow, saying, "Now it
+     comes." Then as if struggling to rise, turned twice round quickly,
+     saying, "Is it the train? _the train, the train_," his right
+     shoulder reverberating as if struck from behind. He fell back like
+     fainting; his eyes rolled. A large dark object came between us like
+     panelling of wood, and rather in the dark something rolled over,
+     and like an arm was thrown up, and the whole thing went away with a
+     _swish_. Close beside me on the ground there seemed a long dark
+     object. I called out, "They've left something behind; it's like a
+     man." It then raised its shoulders and head, and fell down again.
+     The same _some one_ answered, "_Yes, sadly_." [? "_Yes_," sadly.]
+     After a moment I seemed called on to look up, and said, "Is that
+     _thing_ not away yet?" Answered, "_No_." And in front, in light,
+     there was a railway compartment in which sat Rev. Mr. Johnstone, of
+     Echuca. I said, "What's he doing there?" Answered, "He's there." A
+     railway porter went up to the window asking, "Have you seen any
+     of----." I caught no more, but I _thought_ he referred to the
+     _thing_ left behind. Mr. Johnstone seemed to answer "_No_"; and the
+     man went quickly away--I thought to look for it. After all this the
+     _some one_ said close to me, "Now I'm going." I started, and at
+     once saw
+     {a tall dark figure at my head}
+     {William's back at my side. } He put his right hand (in grief) over
+     his face, and the other almost touching my shoulder, he crossed in front,
+     looking stern and solemn. There was a flash from the eyes, and I
+     caught a glimpse of a fine pale face like ushering him along, and
+     indistinctly another. I felt frightened, and called out, "Is he angry?"
+     "Oh, no." "Is he going away?" Answered, "_Yes_," by the same _some one_,
+     and I woke with a loud sigh, which woke my husband, who said, "What is
+     it?" I told him I had been dreaming "something unpleasant"--named a
+     "railway," and dismissed it all from my mind as a dream. As I fell
+     asleep again I fancied the _some one_ said, "It's all gone," and another
+     answered, "I'll come and remind her."
+
+     The news reached me one week afterwards. The accident had happened
+     to my brother on the same night about half past 9 o'clock. Rev. Mr.
+     Johnstone and his wife were actually in the train which struck him.
+     He was walking along the line which is raised two feet on a level
+     country. He seemed to have gone 16 miles--must have been tired and
+     sat down to take off his boot, which was beside him, dozed off and
+     was very likely roused by the sound of the train; 76 sheep-trucks
+     had passed without touching him, but some wooden projection, likely
+     the step, had touched the _right_ side of his head, bruised his
+     right shoulder, and killed him instantaneously. The night was very
+     dark. I believe now that the _some one_ was (from something in the
+     _way_ he spoke) William _himself_. The face with him was white as
+     alabaster and something like this [a small sketch pasted on] in
+     profile. There were many other thoughts or words seemed to pass,
+     but they are too many to write down here.
+
+     The voice of the _some one_ unseen seemed _always above_ the figure
+     of William which I saw. And when I was shown the compartment of the
+     carriage with Mr. Johnstone, the _some one_ seemed on a line
+     between me and it--_above_ me.
+
+     [In an account-book of Mrs. Storie's, on a page, headed July 1874,
+     we find the 18th day marked, and the words, "Dear Willie died," and
+     "Dreamed, dreamed of it all," appended.
+
+     The first letter, from the Rev. J. C. Johnstone to the Rev. John
+     Storie, announcing the news of the accident, is lost. The following
+     are extracts from his second and third letters on the subject:--]
+
+
+ECHUCA, _10th August 1874_.
+
+     The place where Hunter was killed is on an open plain, and there
+     was consequently plenty of room for him to escape the train had he
+     been conscious; but I think Meldrum's theory is the correct one,
+     that he had sat down to adjust some bandages on his leg and had
+     thoughtlessly gone off to sleep. There is only one line of rails,
+     and the ground is raised about 2 feet--the ground on which the
+     rails rest. He had probably sat down on the edge, and lain down
+     backwards so as to be within reach of some part of the train. It
+     was not known at the time that an accident had occurred. Mrs.
+     Johnstone and myself were in the train. Meldrum says he was not
+     very much crushed. The top of the skull was struck off, and some
+     ribs were broken under the armpit on one side. His body was found
+     on the Sunday morning by a herd-boy from the adjoining station.
+
+
+_August 29th, 1874._
+
+     The exact time at which the train struck poor Hunter must have been
+     about 9.55 P.M., and his death must have been instantaneous.
+
+     [The above corresponds with the account of the inquest in the
+     _Riverine Herald_ for July 22nd. The _Melbourne Argus_ also
+     describes the accident as having taken place on the night of
+     Saturday, the 18th.
+
+     The following remarks are taken from notes made by Professor
+     Sidgwick, during an interview with Mrs. Storie, in April 1884, and
+     by Mrs. Sidgwick after another interview in September 1885:--]
+
+     Mrs. Storie cannot regard the experience exactly as a dream, though
+     she woke up from it. She is sure that it did not grow more definite
+     in recollection afterwards. She never had a series of scenes in a
+     dream at any other time; and she has never had anything like a
+     hallucination. They were introduced by a voice in a whisper, not
+     recognised as her brother's. He had sat on the bank as he appeared
+     in the dream. The engine she saw behind him had a chimney of
+     peculiar shape, such as she had not at that time seen; and she
+     remembers that Mr. Storie thought her foolish about insisting on
+     the chimney--unlike (he said) any which existed; but he informed
+     her when he came back from Victoria, where her brother was, that
+     engines of this kind had just been introduced there. She had no
+     reason to think that any conversation between the porter and the
+     clergyman actually occurred. The persons who seemed to lead her
+     brother away were not recognised by her, and she only saw the face
+     of one of them.
+
+     Mr. Storie confirms his wife having said to him at the time of the
+     dream, "What is that light?" Before writing the account first
+     quoted, she had just mentioned the dream to her husband, but had
+     not described it. She desired not to think of it, and also was
+     unwilling to worry him about it because of his Sunday's work. This
+     last point, it will be observed, is a confirmation of the fact that
+     the dream took place on the Saturday night; and "it came out
+     clearly" (Mrs. Sidgwick says) "that her recollection about the
+     Saturday night was an independent recollection, and not read back
+     after the accident was known." The strongly nervous state that
+     preceded the dream was quite unique in Mrs. S.'s experience. But as
+     it appeared that, according to her recollection, it commenced at
+     least an hour before the accident took place, it must be regarded
+     as of no importance evidentially. The feeling of a presence in the
+     room was also quite unique.
+
+"Here," says Gurney, "the difficulty of referring the true elements of
+the dream to the agent's mind [is very great]. For Mr. Hunter was
+asleep; and even if we can conceive that the image of the advancing
+engine may have had some place in his mind, the presence of Mr.
+Johnstone could not have been perceived by him. But it is possible, of
+course, to regard this last item of correspondence as accidental, even
+though the dream was telepathic. It will be observed that the dream
+followed the accident by about four hours; such _deferment_ is, I
+think, a strong point in favour of telepathic, as opposed to
+independent, clairvoyance."
+
+I propose as an alternative explanation,--for reasons which I endeavour
+to justify in later chapters,--that the deceased brother, aided by some
+other dimly discerned spirit, was endeavouring to present to Mrs. Storie
+a series of pictures representing his death--as realised _after_ his
+death. I add this last clause, because one of the marked points in the
+dream was the presence in the train of Mr. Johnstone of Echuca--a fact
+which (as Gurney remarks) the dying man could not possibly know.
+
+I have dwelt on these two cases of Dr. Bruce and Mrs. Storie, because
+the reader will, I think, come to feel, as our evidence unrolls itself,
+that he has here complex experiences which are confirmed at various
+points by simpler experiences, in such a way as to make these stories
+seem a confused but an intimate transcript of what other narratives show
+in hints and glimpses alone.
+
+In Mrs. Storie's case the whole experience, as we have seen, presented
+itself as a _dream_; yet as a dream of quite unusual type, like a series
+of pictures presented to the sleeper who was still conscious that she
+was lying in bed. In other cases the "psychical invasion" of the spirit
+either of a living or of a deceased person seems to set up a variety of
+sleep-waking states--both in agent and percipient. In one bizarre
+narrative a man dreaming that he has returned home is _heard_ in his
+home calling for hot water--and has himself a singular sense of
+"bilocation" between the railway carriage and his bedroom.[52] In
+another curious case is recorded a kind of _encounter_ in dreamland,
+apparently more or less remembered by both persons.[53]
+
+An invasion of this type coming upon a sleeping person is apt to induce
+some change in the sleeper's state, which, even if he regards it as a
+complete awakening, is generally shown not to be so in fact by the
+dreamlike character of his own recorded feelings and utterances. Gurney
+called these "Borderland Cases," and the whole collection in _Phantasms
+of the Living_ will repay perusal. I introduce one such case in Appendix
+IV. E, as being at once very perplexing and, I think, very strongly
+attested. I knew Mr. and Mrs. T., who certainly were seriously anxious
+for complete accuracy, and who had (as the narrative shows) made a
+brief memorandum and consulted various persons on the incident at the
+time.
+
+These cases of invasion by the spirits of living persons pass on into
+cases of invasion by the dying, the impression being generally that of
+the presence of the visitant in the percipient's surroundings.[54]
+Sometimes the phantasm is seen as nearly as can be ascertained at the
+time of death. But there is no perceptible break in the series at this
+point. Some appear shortly after death, but before the death is known to
+the percipient. [See Appendix IV. F]. Finally, there are cases when the
+appearance takes place some time after death, but presents features
+unknown to the percipient.[55]
+
+We have now briefly reviewed certain phenomena of sleep from a
+standpoint somewhat differing from that which is commonly taken. We have
+not (as is usual) fixed our attention primarily on the _negative_
+characteristics of sleep, or the extent to which it lacks the capacities
+of waking hours. On the contrary, we have regarded sleep as an
+independent phase of personality, existing with as good a right as the
+waking phase, and dowered with imperfectly expressed faculties of its
+own. In investigating those faculties we have been in no wise deterred
+by the fact of the apparent uselessness of some of them for our waking
+ends. _Useless_ is a pre-scientific, even an anti-scientific term, which
+has perhaps proved a greater stumbling-block to research in psychology
+than in any other science. In science the _use_ of phenomena is to prove
+laws, and the more bizarre and trivial the phenomena, the greater the
+chance of their directing us to some law which has been overlooked till
+now. In reviewing the phenomena of sleep, then, we found in the first
+place that it possesses a specific recuperative energy which the
+commonly accepted data of physiology and psychology cannot explain. We
+saw that in sleep there may be an increased co-ordination or
+centralisation of muscular control, and also an increased vividness of
+entencephalic perception, indicating a more intimate appreciation of
+intra-peripheral changes than is manifest in waking life. In accordance
+with this view, we found that the dreaming self may undergo sensory and
+emotional experiences apparently more intense than those of vigilance,
+and may produce thereby lasting effects upon the waking body and mind.
+Similarly again, we saw that that specific impress on body and mind
+which we term memory may in sleeping or hypnotic states be both wider in
+range and fuller in content than the evocable memory of the waking day.
+Nay, not memory only, but power of inference, of argument, may be thus
+intensified, as is shown by the solution in sleep of problems which have
+baffled waking effort.
+
+All these are fragmentary indications,--useless for practical purposes
+if you will,--of sleeping faculty exercised on the same order of things
+as waking faculty, and with comparable or even superior power. But we
+were bound to push our inquiry further still--we were bound to ask
+whether the self of sleep showed any faculty of a quite different order
+from that by which waking consciousness maintains the activity of man.
+We found that this was so indeed; that there was evidence that the
+sleeping spirit was susceptible of relations unfettered by spatial
+bonds; of telćsthetic perception of distant scenes; of telepathic
+communication with distant persons, or even with spirits of whom we can
+predicate neither distance nor nearness, since they are released from
+the prison of the flesh.
+
+The inference which all this evidence suggests is entirely in accordance
+with the hypothesis on which my whole work is based.
+
+I have assumed that man is an organism informed or possessed by a soul.
+This view obviously involves the hypothesis that we are living a life in
+two worlds at once; a planetary life in this material world, to which
+the organism is intended to react; and also a cosmic life in that
+spiritual or metetherial world, which is the native environment of the
+soul. From that unseen world the energy of the organism needs to be
+perpetually replenished. That replenishment we cannot understand: we may
+figure it to ourselves as a protoplasmic process;--as some relation
+between protoplasm, ether, and whatever is beyond ether, on which it is
+at present useless to speculate.
+
+Admitting, for the sake of argument, these vast assumptions, it will be
+easy to draw the further inference that it may be needful that the
+soul's attention should be frequently withdrawn from the business of
+earthly life, so as to pursue with greater intensity what we may call
+its protoplasmic task,--the maintenance of the fundamental, pervading
+connection between the organism and the spiritual world. Nay, this
+profounder condition, as responding to more primitive, more fundamental
+needs, will itself be more primitive than the waking state. And this is
+so: sleep is the infant's dominant phase: the pre-natal state resembles
+sleep rather than waking; and so does the whole life-condition of our
+lowly ancestors. And as the sleeping state is the more _primitive_, so
+also is it the more _generalised_, and the more _plastic_. Out of this
+dreamy abeyance between two worlds, the needs of the material world are
+constantly developing some form of alert activity, some faculty which
+was _potential_ only until search for food and the defence against
+enemies compelled a closer heed to "the life of relation," lest the
+relation should become only that of victim to devourer.
+
+We shall thus have two phases of personality developing into separate
+purposes and in separate directions from a parent stem. The waking
+personality will develop external sense organs and will fit itself
+progressively for the life of relation to the external world. It will
+endeavour to attain an ever completer control over the resources of the
+personality, and it will culminate in what we term _genius_ when it has
+unified the subliminal as far as possible with the supraliminal in its
+pursuit of deliberate waking ends.
+
+The sleeping personality will develop in ways less easy to foresee.
+What, on any theory, will it aim at, beyond the familiar intensification
+of recuperative power? We can only guess, on my theory, that its
+development will show some increasing trace of the soul's less exclusive
+absorption in the activity of the organism. The soul has withdrawn from
+the specialised material surface of things (to use such poor metaphor as
+we can) into a realm where the nature of the connection between matter
+and spirit--whether through the intermediacy of the ether or
+otherwise--is more profoundly discerned. That same withdrawal from the
+surface which, while it diminishes power over complex muscular
+processes, increases power over profound organic processes, may at the
+same time increase the soul's power of operating in that spiritual world
+to which sleep has drawn it nearer.
+
+On this view of sleep, be it observed, there will be nothing to surprise
+us in the possibility of increasing the proportion of the sleeping to
+the waking phase of life by hypnotic suggestion. All we can say is that,
+while the soul must insist on at least the minimum quantity of sleep
+needful to keep the body alive, we can see no superior limit to the
+quantity of sleep which it may choose to take,--the quantity of
+attention, that is, which it may choose to give to the special
+operations of sleep as compared with those of waking life.
+
+At this point we must for the present pause. The suggested hypothesis
+will indeed cover the actual facts as to sleep adduced in this chapter.
+But it covers them by virtue of assumptions too vast to be accepted
+without further confirmation. It must necessarily be our duty in later
+chapters to trace the development of the sleeping personality in both
+the directions indicated above;--in the direction of organic
+recuperation through the hypnotic trance, and in the direction of the
+soul's independent operation through that form of trance which leads to
+possession and to ecstasy. We shall begin at once in the next chapter to
+trace out that great experimental modification of sleep, from which,
+under the names of mesmerism or of hypnotism, results of such
+conspicuous practical value have already been won.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HYPNOTISM
+
+    [Greek: eileto de rhabdon, tu t' andrôn dmmata thelgei,
+    On ethelei, tout d aute kaě upnôontas egeírei.]
+
+    --HOMER.
+
+
+In the last chapter we were led on to adopt a conception of sleep which,
+whether or not it prove ultimately in any form acceptable by science, is
+at any rate in deep congruity with the evidence brought forward in this
+work. Our human life, in this view, exists and energises, at the present
+moment, both in the material and in the spiritual world. Human
+personality, as it has developed from lowly ancestors, has become
+differentiated into two phases; one of them mainly adapted to material
+or planetary, the other to spiritual or cosmic operation. The subliminal
+self, mainly directing the sleeping phase, is able either to rejuvenate
+the organism by energy drawn in from the spiritual world;--or, on the
+other hand, temporarily and partially to relax its connection with that
+organism, in order to expatiate in the exercise of supernormal
+powers;--telepathy, telesthćsia, ecstasy.
+
+Such were the suggestions of the evidence as to dream and vision; such,
+I may add, will be seen to be the suggestions of _spontaneous
+somnambulism_, which has not yet fallen under our discussion. Yet claims
+so large as these demand corroboration from observation and experiment
+along many different lines of approach. Some such corroboration we have,
+in anticipatory fashion, already acquired. Discussing in Chapter II. the
+various forms of disintegration of personality, we had frequent glimpses
+of beneficent subliminal powers. We saw the deepest stratum of the self
+intervening from time to time with a therapeutic object, or we caught it
+in the act of exercising, even if aimlessly or sporadically, some
+faculty beyond supraliminal reach. And we observed, moreover, that the
+agency by which these subliminal powers were invoked was generally the
+_hypnotic trance_. Of the nature of that trance I then said nothing; it
+was manifest only that here was some kind of induced or artificial
+somnambulism, which seemed to systematise that beneficial control of
+the organism which spontaneous sleep-waking states had exercised in a
+fitful way. It must plainly be our business to understand _ab initio_
+these hypnotic phenomena; to push as far as may be what seems like an
+experimental evolution of the sleeping phase of personality.
+
+Let us suppose, then, that we are standing at our present point, but
+with no more knowledge of hypnotic phenomena than existed in the boyhood
+of Mesmer. We shall know well enough what, as experimental
+psychologists, we desire to do; but we shall have little notion of how
+to set about it. We desire to summon at our will, and to subdue to our
+use, these rarely emergent sleep-waking faculties. On their physical
+side, we desire to develop their inhibition of pain and their
+reinforcement of energy; on their intellectual side, their concentration
+of attention; on their emotional side, their sense of freedom,
+expansion, joy. Above all, we desire to get hold of those supernormal
+faculties--telepathy and telćsthesia--of which we have caught fitful
+glimpses in somnambulism and in dream.
+
+Yet to such hopes as these the so-called "experience of ages" (generally
+a very short and scrappy induction!) will seem altogether to refuse any
+practical outcome. History, indeed,--with the wonted vagueness of
+history,--will offer us a long series of stories of the strange sanative
+suggestion or influence of man on man;--beginning, say, with David and
+Saul, or with David and Abishag, and ending with Valentine
+Greatrakes,--or with the Stuarts' last touch for the King's evil. But in
+knowledge of how actually to set about it, we should still be just on
+the level of the Seven Sages.[56]
+
+And now let the reader note this lesson on the unexhausted possibilities
+of human organisms and human life. Let him take his stand at one of the
+modern centres of hypnotic practice,--in Professor Bernheim's
+hospital-ward, or Dr. van Renterghem's _clinique_; let him see the
+hundreds of patients thrown daily into hypnotic trance, in a few
+moments, and as a matter of course; and let him then remember that this
+process, which now seems as obvious and easy as giving a pill, was
+absolutely unknown not only to Galen and to Celsus, but to Hunter and to
+Harvey; and when at last discovered was commonly denounced as a
+fraudulent fiction, almost up to the present day. Nay, if one chances to
+have watched as a boy some cure effected in Dr. Elliotson's Mesmeric
+Hospital, before neglect and calumny had closed that too early effort
+for human good;--if one has seen popular indifference and professional
+prejudice check the new healing art for a generation;--is not one likely
+to have imbibed a deep distrust of all _a priori_ negations in the
+matter of human faculty;--of all _obiter dicta_ of eminent men on
+subjects with which they do not happen to be acquainted? Would not one,
+after such an experience, rather choose (with Darwin) "the fool's
+experiment" than any immemorial ignorance which has stiffened into an
+unreasoning incredulity?
+
+Mesmer's experiment was almost a "fool's experiment," and Mesmer himself
+was almost a charlatan. Yet Mesmer and his successors,--working from
+many different points of view, and following many divergent
+theories,--have opened an ever-widening way, and have brought us now to
+a position where we can fairly hope, by experiments made no longer at
+random, to reproduce and systematise most of those phenomena of
+spontaneous somnambulism which once seemed to lie so tantalisingly
+beyond our grasp.
+
+That promise is great indeed; yet it is well to begin by considering
+precisely how far it extends. We must not suppose that we shall at once
+be subduing to our experiment a central, integrated, reasonable Self.
+
+We must be content (at first at any rate) if we can affect the
+personality in the same limited way as hysteria and somnambulism have
+affected it; but yet can act deliberately and usefully where these have
+acted hurtfully and at random. It is enough to hope that we may inhibit
+pain, as it is inhibited for the hysteric; or concentrate attention, as
+it is concentrated for the somnambulist; or change the tastes and
+passions, as these are changed in alternating personalities; or (best of
+all) recover and fix something of that supernormal faculty of which we
+have caught fugitive glimpses in vision and dream. Our proof of the
+origination of any phenomenon in the deeper strata of our being must lie
+in the intrinsic nature of the faculty exhibited;--not in the wisdom of
+its actual direction. _That_ must often depend on the order given from
+above the threshold; just as the magic mill of the fable continues
+magical, although, for lack of the proper formula to stop it, it be
+still grinding out superfluous salt at the bottom of the sea.
+
+This brief introduction will, I hope, show that hypnotism is no
+disconnected or extraneous insertion into experimental psychology, but
+rather a summary name for a group of necessary, though empirical and
+isolated, attempts to bring under control that range of submerged
+faculty which has already from time to time risen into our observation.
+The inquiry has been mainly the work of a few distinguished men, who
+have each of them pushed some useful ideas as far as they could, but
+whose work has not been adequately supported by successors.
+
+I should much doubt whether there have been a hundred men in all
+countries together, at the ordinary level of professional intelligence,
+who during the century since Mesmer have treated hypnotism as the
+serious study of their lives. Some few of the men who have so treated it
+have been men of great force and strong convictions; and it will be
+found that there has consequently been a series of sudden developments
+of groups of phenomena, differing much from each other, but
+corresponding with the special beliefs and desires of the person who
+headed each movement in turn. I will mention some of the chief examples,
+so as to show the sporadic nature of the efforts made, and the great
+variety of the phenomena elicited.
+
+The first name that must be mentioned is, of course, that of Mesmer
+himself. He believed primarily in a sanative effluence, and his method
+seems to have been a combination of passes, suggestion, and a supposed
+"metallotherapy" or "magneto-therapy"--the celebrated _baquet_--which no
+doubt was merely a form of suggestion. His results, though very
+imperfectly described, seem to have been peculiar to himself. The
+_crise_ which many of his patients underwent sounds like a hysterical
+attack; but there can be no doubt that rapid improvement in symptoms
+often followed it, or he would not have made so great an impression on
+_savants_ as well as on the fashionable world of Paris. To Mesmer, then,
+we owe the first conception of the therapeutic power of a sudden and
+profound nervous change. To Mesmer, still more markedly, we owe the
+doctrine of a nervous influence or effluence passing from man to man,--a
+doctrine which, though it must assume a less exclusive importance than
+he assigned to it, cannot, in my view, be altogether ignored or denied.
+
+The leading figure among his immediate successors, the Marquis de
+Puységur, seems from his writings[57] to have been one of the ablest and
+most candid men who have practised mesmerism; and he was one of the very
+few who have conducted experiments, other than therapeutic, on a large
+scale. The somnambulic state may also be said to have been his
+discovery; and he obtained clairvoyance or telćsthesia in so many
+instances, and recorded them with so much of detail, that it is hard to
+attribute all to mal-observation, or even to telepathy from persons
+present. Other observers, as Bertrand, a physician of great promise,
+followed in the same track, and this brief period was perhaps the most
+fertile in disinterested experiments that our subject has yet known.
+Much was then done in Germany also; and there, too, there is scattered
+testimony to supernormal powers.[58]
+
+Next came the era of Elliotson in England, and of Esdaile in his
+hospital at Calcutta. Their method lay in mesmeric passes, Elliotson's
+object being mostly the direct cure of maladies, Esdaile's a deep
+anćsthesia, under which he performed hundreds of serious operations. His
+success in this direction was absolutely unique;--was certainly (setting
+aside supernormal phenomena) the most extraordinary performance in
+mesmeric history. Had not his achievements been matters of official
+record, the apparent impossibility of repeating them would probably by
+this time have been held to have disproved them altogether.
+
+The next great step which hypnotism made was actually regarded by
+Elliotson and his group as a hostile demonstration. When Braid
+discovered that hypnosis could be induced without passes, the mesmerists
+felt that their theory of a sanative effluence was dangerously attacked.
+And this was true; for that theory has in fact been thrown into the
+shade,--too completely so, in my opinion,--first by the method used in
+Braid's earlier work of the production of hypnotic phenomena by means of
+the upward and inward squint, and secondly, by the much wider and more
+important discovery of the efficacy of mere _suggestion_, set forth in
+his later writings. Braid's hypnotic experience differed much from that
+of hypnotists before and after him. His early method of the convergent
+squint produced results which no one else has been able to produce; and
+the state which it induced appeared in his view to arrest and dissipate
+even maladies of which neither hypnotist nor patient had thought as
+capable of cure. But he afterwards abandoned this method in favour of
+simple verbal suggestion, as he found that what was required was merely
+to influence the ideas of his patients. He showed further that all
+so-called phrenological phenomena and the supposed effects of magnets,
+metals, etc., could be produced equally well by suggestion.[59] He also
+laid stress on the subject's power both of resisting the commands of the
+operator and of inducing hypnotic effects in himself without the aid of
+an operator. To my mind the most important novelty brought out by Braid
+was the possibility of self-hypnotisation by concentration of will. This
+inlet into human faculty, in some ways the most important of all, has
+been as yet but slackly followed. But it is along with Braid's group of
+ideas that I should place those of an able but much inferior
+investigator, Dr. Fahnestock, although it is not clear that the latter
+knew of Braid's work. His book, _Statuvolism, or Artificial
+Somnambulism_ (Chicago, 1871), has received less attention than it
+merits;--partly perhaps from its barbarous title, partly from the
+crudities with which it is encumbered, and partly from the fact of its
+publication at what was at that date a town on the outskirts of
+civilisation. Fahnestock seems to have obtained by self-suggestion with
+healthy persons results in some ways surpassing anything since recorded.
+
+There is no reason to doubt these results, except the fact that they
+have not yet been repeated with equal success; and my present purpose is
+to show how little importance can as yet be attached in the history of
+hypnotic experiment to the mere absence thus far of successful
+repetition.
+
+The next great stage was again strikingly different. It was mainly
+French; the impulse was given largely by Professor Charles Richet, whose
+work has proved singularly free from narrowness or misconception; but
+the movement was developed in a special and a very unfortunate direction
+by Charcot and his school. It is a remarkable fact that although Charcot
+was perhaps the only man of eminence whose professional reputation has
+ever been raised by his dealings with hypnotism, most of his work
+thereon is now seen to have been mistaken and aberrant,--a mere
+following of a blind alley, from which his disciples are now gradually
+returning. Charcot's leading phenomena (as with several of his
+predecessors above mentioned) were of a type which has seldom since been
+obtained. The once celebrated "three stages" of the _grand hypnotisme_
+are hardly anywhere now to be seen. But in this case the reason is not
+that other hypnotists could not obtain the phenomena if they would; it
+is rather (as I have already indicated) that experience has convinced
+them that the sequences and symptoms on which Charcot laid stress were
+merely very elaborate products of the long-continued, and, so to say,
+endemic suggestions of the Salpętričre.
+
+We come next to the movement which is now on the whole dominant, and to
+which the greatest number of cures may at present be credited. The
+school of Nancy--which originated with Liébeault, and which is now
+gradually merging into a general consensus of hypnotic practice--threw
+aside more and more decisively the supposed "somatic signs" of
+Charcot,--the phenomena of neuro-muscular irritability and the like,
+which he regarded as the requisite proof of hypnosis;--until Bernheim
+boldly affirmed that hypnotic trance was no more than sleep, and that
+hypnotic suggestion was at once the sole cause of hypnotic
+responsiveness and yet was undifferentiated from mere ordinary advisory
+speech. This was unfortunately too good to be true. Not one sleep in a
+million is really hypnosis; not one suggestion in a million reaches or
+influences the subliminal self. If Bernheim's theories, in their extreme
+form, were true, there would by this time have been no sufferers left to
+heal.
+
+What Bernheim has done is to cure a number of people without mesmeric
+passes, and without any special predisposing belief on either
+side,--beyond a trust in his own power. And this is a most valuable
+achievement, especially as showing how much may be _dispensed with_ in
+hypnotic practice--to how simple elements it may be reduced.
+
+"Hypnotic trance," says Bernheim, in effect, "is ordinary sleep;
+hypnotic suggestion is ordinary command. You tell the patient to go to
+sleep, and he goes to sleep; you tell him to get well, and he gets well
+immediately." Even thus (one thinks) has one heard the conjuror
+explaining "how it's done,"--with little resulting hope of emulating his
+brilliant performance. An ordinary command does _not_ enable an ordinary
+man to get rid of his rheumatism, or to detest the previously too
+acceptable taste of brandy. In suggestion, in short, there must needs be
+something more than a name; a profound nervous change must needs be
+started by some powerful nervous stimulus from without or from within.
+Before contenting ourselves with Bernheim's formula, we must consider
+yet again what change we want to effect, and whether hypnotists have
+actually used any form of stimulus which was likely to effect it.
+
+According to Bernheim we are all naturally suggestible, and what we want
+to effect through suggestion is increased suggestibility. But let us get
+rid for the moment of that oracular word. What it seems to mean here is
+mainly a readier obedience of the organism to what we wish it to do. The
+sleep or trance with which hypnotism is popularly identified is not
+essential to our object, for the subliminal modifications are sometimes
+attained without any trace of somnolence. Let us consider, then, whether
+any known nervous stimuli, either massive or specialised, tend to
+induce--not mere sleep or catalepsy--but that kind of ready
+modifiability,--of _responsiveness_ both in visible gesture and in
+invisible nutritive processes,--for the sake of which hypnosis is in
+serious practice induced.
+
+Now of the external stimuli which influence the whole nervous system the
+most conspicuous are narcotic drugs. Opium, alcohol, chloroform,
+cannabis indica, etc., affect the nerves in so many strange ways that
+one might hope that they would be of use as hypnotic agents. And some
+observers have found that slight chloroformisation rendered subjects
+more suggestible. Janet has cited one case where suggestibility was
+developed during recovery from delirium tremens. Other hypnotisers (as
+Bramwell) have found chloroform fail to render patients hypnotisable;
+and alcohol is generally regarded as a positive hindrance to hypnotic
+susceptibility. More experiment with various narcotics is much needed;
+but thus far the scantiness of proof that narcotics help towards
+hypnosis goes rather against the view that hypnosis is a direct
+physiological sequence from any form of external stimulus.
+
+The apparent resemblance, indeed, between narcosis and hypnosis
+diminishes on a closer analysis. A stage may occur both in narcotised
+and in hypnotised subjects where there is incoherent, dream-like
+mentation; but in the narcotised subject this is a step towards
+inhibition of the whole nervous energy--the highest centres being
+paralysed first; whereas in hypnosis the inhibition of supraliminal
+faculty seems often at least to be merely a necessary preliminary to the
+liberation of fresh faculty which presently manifests itself from a
+profounder region of the self.
+
+Next take another group of massive effects produced on the nervous
+system by external stimuli;--those forms, namely, of trance and
+cataplexy which are due to sudden shock. With human beings this
+phenomenon varies from actual death from failure of heart-action, or
+paralysis, or _stupor attonitus_ (a recognised form of insanity), any of
+which may result from a mere alarming sight or unwelcome announcement,
+down to the cataleptic immobility of a Salpętričre patient, when she
+hears a sudden stroke on the gong.
+
+Similar phenomena in certain animals, as frogs, beetles, etc., are well
+known. It is doubtful, however, whether any of these sudden disablements
+should be classed as true hypnoses. It has not, I think, been shown that
+in any case they have induced any real responsiveness to control, or
+power of obeying suggestion; unless it be (as in some Salpętričre cases)
+a form of suggestion so obvious and habitual that the obedience thereto
+may be called part of the actual cataplexy itself. Thus the "wax-like
+flexibility" of the cataleptic, whose arms remain in the position where
+you place them, must not be regarded as a readier obedience to control,
+but rather as a state which involves not a more but a less alert and
+capable responsiveness of the organism to either external or internal
+stimuli.
+
+So with regard to animals--crocodiles, frogs, and the like. I hold
+theoretically that animals are probably hypnotisable and suggestible;
+and the records of Rarey's horse-taming, etc., seem to point in that
+direction.[60] But in the commoner experiments with frogs, where mere
+passivity is produced, the resemblance seems to extend only to the
+lethargic stage in human beings,[61] and what relation that lethargy
+bears to suggestibility is not, I think, really known; although I shall
+later on suggest some explanation on psychological grounds.
+
+It seems plain, at any rate, that it must be from stimuli applied to men
+and not to animals, and from stimuli of a special and localised rather
+than of a massive kind, that we shall have to learn whatever can be
+learnt as to the genesis of the true hypnotic control.
+
+Now there exists a way of inducing hypnosis in some hysterical persons
+which seems intermediate between massive and localised stimulations. It
+is indeed a local stimulation; but there seems no reason beyond some
+deep-seated caprice of the organism why the special tract which is thus
+sensitive should have become developed in that direction.
+
+I speak of the induction of trance in certain subjects by pressure upon
+so-called _hypnogenous zones_. These zones form a curious development of
+hysterical _cliniques_. Their starting-point is the well-known
+phenomenon of patches of anćsthesia found upon hysterical subjects--the
+"witch-marks" of our ancestors.
+
+So far as we at present know, the situation of these "marks" is
+altogether capricious. It does not apparently depend, that is to say,
+upon any central lesion, in the same way as do the "referred pains,"
+familiar in deep-seated organic complaints, which manifest themselves by
+superficial patches of tenderness, explicable by the distribution of
+nerve-trunks. The anćsthetic patches are an example of what I have
+called the irrational self-suggestions of the hypnotic
+stratum;--determined by dream-like fancies rather than necessitated by
+purely physiological antecedents.
+
+Quite in accordance with this view, we find that under favourable
+conditions--especially in a hospital of hysterics--these anomalous
+patches or zones develop and specialise themselves in various ways.
+Under Dr. Pitres at Bordeaux (for example), we have _zones
+hystérogčnes_, _zones hypnogčnes_, _zones hypnofrénatrices_, etc.; that
+is to say, he finds that pressure on certain spots in certain subjects
+will bring on or will check hysterical accesses, or accesses of what is
+ranked as hypnotic sleep. There is no doubt that this sleep does in
+certain subjects follow instantly upon the pressure of certain
+spots,--constant for each subject, but different for one subject and for
+another;--and this without any conscious co-operation, or even
+foreknowledge, on the patient's part. Stated thus nakedly, this seems
+the strongest possible instance of the induction of hypnosis by
+localised stimulus. The reader, however, will at once understand that in
+my view there is here no simple physiological sequence of cause and
+effect. I must regard the local pressure as a mere _signal_--an appeal
+to the pre-formed capacities of lawlessly acting centres in the hypnotic
+stratum. A scrap of the self has decided, in dreamlike fashion, that
+pressure on a certain point of the body's surface shall produce
+sleep;--just as it has decided that pressure on that same point or on
+some other point shall _not_ produce pain. Self-suggestion, and no mere
+physiological nexus, is responsible for the sleep or the hysterical
+access which follows the touch. The anćsthetic patches are here a
+direct, but a capriciously chosen avenue to the subliminal being, and
+the same random self-suggestiveness which is responsible for frequent
+determinations that hysterical subjects shall _not_ be hypnotised has in
+this case decided that they _shall_ be hypnotised, if you go about it in
+exactly the right way.
+
+Next in order among forms of localised stimulus used for inducing
+hypnosis may be placed _monotonous stimulation_,--to whatever part of
+the body it be applied. It was at one time the fashion to attribute
+almost all hypnotic phenomena to this cause, and Edmund Gurney and I
+endeavoured to point out the exaggeration.[62] Of this presently; but
+first let us consider the few cases where the monotonous stimulation has
+undoubtedly been of a kind to affect the organism strongly. The late Dr.
+Auguste Voisin, of Paris, was perhaps more markedly successful than any
+physician in producing hypnosis in extreme cases;--in maniacal persons
+especially, whose attention it seemed impossible to fix. He often
+accomplished this by holding their eyes open with the blepharostat, and
+compelling them to gaze, sometimes for hours together, at a brilliant
+electric light. Exhaustion produces tranquillity and an almost comatose
+sleep--in which the physician has often managed to give suggestions of
+great value. This seems practically the only class of cases where a
+directly physiological antecedent for the sleep can be proved; and even
+here the provable effect is rather the exhaustion of morbid excitability
+than any direct induction of suggestibility. This dazzling process is
+generally accompanied with vigorous verbal suggestion; and it is, of
+course, quite possible that the patients might have been thrown into
+hypnosis by that suggestion alone, had their minds been capable at first
+of sufficient attention to receive it.
+
+Braid's upward and inward squint has an effect of the same deadening
+kind as the long gazing at a light, and helps in controlling wandering
+attention; but Braid himself in later years (as mentioned above)
+attributed his hypnotic successes wholly to _suggestion_.
+
+From monotonous excitations which, whatever their part in inducing
+hypnosis, are, at any rate, such as can sensibly affect the organism, I
+come down to the trivial monotonies of watch-tickings, "passes," etc.,
+which are still by a certain school regarded as capable of producing a
+profound change in the nervous condition of the person before whose face
+the hypnotiser's hands are slowly waved for ten or twenty minutes. I
+regard this as a much exaggerated view. The clock's ticking, for
+instance, if it is marked at all, is at least as likely to irritate as
+to soothe; and the constant experience of life shows that continued
+monotonous stimuli, say the throbbing of the screw at sea, soon escape
+notice and produce no hypnotic effect at all. It is true, indeed, that
+monotonous rocking sends some babies to sleep; but other babies are
+merely irritated by the process, and such soporific effect as rocking
+may possess is probably an effect on spinal centres or on the
+semicircular canals. It depends less on mere monotony than on massive
+movement of the whole organism.
+
+I think, then, that there is no real ground for supposing that the
+trivial degree of monotonous stimulation produced by passes often
+repeated can induce in any ordinary physiological manner that "profound
+nervous change" which is recognised as the prerequisite condition of any
+hypnotic results. I think that passes are effectual generally as mere
+suggestions, and must _primâ facie_ be regarded in that light, as they
+are, in fact, regarded by many experienced hypnotisers (as Milne
+Bramwell) who have employed them with good effect. Afterwards, when
+reason is given for believing in a telepathic influence or impact
+occasionally transmitted from the operator to the subject at a distance,
+we shall consider whether passes may represent some other form of the
+same influence, operating in close physical contiguity.
+
+First, however, let us consider the point which we have now reached. We
+have successively dismissed various supposed modes of physiologically
+inducing hypnotic trance. We stand at present in the position of the
+Nancy school;--we have found nothing but _suggestion_ which really
+induces the phenomena.
+
+But on the other hand we cannot possibly regard the word suggestion as
+any real answer to the important question _how_ the hypnotic
+responsiveness is induced, on _what_ conditions it depends.[63]
+
+It must be remembered that many of the results which follow upon
+suggestion are of a type which no amount of willingness to follow the
+suggestion could induce, since they lie quite outside the voluntary
+realm. However disposed a man may be to believe me, however anxious to
+please me, one does not see how that should enable him, for instance, to
+govern the morbidly-secreting cells in an eruption of erysipelas. He
+already fruitlessly wishes them to stop their inflammation; the mere
+fact of my expressing the same wish can hardly alter his cellular
+tissue.
+
+Here, then, we come to an important conclusion which cannot well be
+denied, yet is seldom looked fully in the face. Suggestion from without
+must for the most part resolve itself into suggestion from within.
+Unless there be some telepathic or other supernormal influence at work
+between hypnotiser and patient (which I shall presently show ground for
+believing to be sometimes, though not often, the case), the hypnotiser
+can plainly do nothing by his word of command beyond starting a train of
+thought which the patient has in most cases started many times for
+himself with no result; the difference being that now at last the
+patient starts it again, and it _has_ a result. But _why_ it thus
+succeeds on this particular occasion, we simply do not know. We cannot
+predict when the result will occur; still less can we bring it about at
+pleasure.
+
+Nay, we do not even know whether it might not be possible to dispense
+altogether with suggestion from outside in most of the cases now treated
+in this way, and merely to teach the patient to make the suggestions for
+himself. If there be no "mesmeric effluence" passing from hypnotiser to
+patient, the hypnotiser seems little more than a mere _objet de
+luxe_;--a personage provided simply to impress the imagination, who must
+needs become even absurdly useless so soon as it is understood that he
+has no other function or power.
+
+Self-suggestion, whatever this may really mean, is thus in most cases,
+whether avowedly or not, at the bottom of the effect produced. It has
+already been used most successfully, and it will probably become much
+commoner than it now is;--or, I should rather say (since every one no
+doubt suggests to himself when he is in pain that he would like the pain
+to cease), I anticipate that self-suggestion, by being in some way
+better directed, will become more _effective_, and that the average of
+voluntary power over the organism will rise to a far higher level than
+it at present reaches. I believe that this is taking place even now; and
+that certain _schemes of self-suggestion_, so to call them, are coming
+into vogue, where patients in large masses are supplied with effective
+conceptions, which they thus impress repeatedly upon themselves without
+the need of a hypnotiser's attendance on each occasion. The "Miracles
+of Lourdes" and the cures effected by "Christian Science" fall, in my
+view, under this category. We have here suggestions given to a quantity
+of more or less suitable people _en masse_, much as a platform
+hypnotiser gives suggestions to a mixed audience, some of whom may then
+be affected without individual attention from himself. The suggestion of
+the curative power of the Lourdes water, for instance, is thus thrown
+out, partly in books, partly by oral addresses; and a certain percentage
+of persons succeed in so persuading themselves of that curative efficacy
+that when they bathe in the water they are actually cured.
+
+These _schemes of self-suggestion_, as I have termed them, constitute
+one of the most interesting parts of my subject, but space forbids that
+I should enter into a discussion of them here. It is sufficient to point
+out that in order to make self-suggestion operative, no strong belief or
+enthusiasm, such as those schemes imply, is really necessary. No
+recorded cases of self-suggestion, I think, are more instructive than
+those published by Dr. Hugh Wingfield in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v.
+p. 279. (The paper was printed anonymously.) Dr. Wingfield was a
+Demonstrator in Physiology in the University of Cambridge, and his
+subjects were mainly candidates for the Natural Sciences Tripos. In
+these cases there was no excitement of any kind, and no previous belief.
+The phenomena occurred incidentally during a series of experiments on
+other points, and were a surprise to every one concerned. The results
+achieved were partly automatic writing and partly phenomena of
+neuro-muscular excitability;--stiffening of the arms, and so forth. "It
+seems probable," says Dr. Wingfield, "that all phenomena capable of
+being produced by the suggestion of the hypnotiser can also be produced
+by self-suggestion in a self-suggestive subject."
+
+Experiments like these--confirming with modern care the conclusions
+reached by Fahnestock and others at various points in hypnotic
+history--seem to me to open a new inlet into human faculty, as
+surprising in its way as those first wild experiments of Mesmer himself.
+Who would have supposed that a healthy undergraduate could "by an effort
+of mind" throw his whole body into a state of cataleptic rigidity, so
+that he could rest with his heels on one chair and his head on another?
+or that other healthy young men could "close their own eyes so that they
+were unable to open them," and the like? The trivial character of these
+laboratory experiments makes them physiologically the more remarkable.
+There is the very minimum of predisposing conditions, of excited
+expectation, or of external motive prompting to extraordinary effort.
+And the results are not subjective merely--relief of pain and so
+on--but are definite neuro-muscular changes, capable (as in the case of
+the head and heels on separate chairs) of unmistakable test.
+
+Yet, important though these and similar experiments in self-suggestion
+may be, they do not solve our problem as to the ultimate origin and
+distribution of the faculty thus displayed. We know no better with
+self-suggestion than with suggestion from outside _why_ it is that one
+man succeeds where others fail, or why a man who succeeds once fails in
+his next attempt. Within the ordinary range of physiological
+explanations nothing (I repeat) has as yet been discovered which can
+guide us to the true nature or exciting causes of this characteristic
+responsiveness of hypnosis. If we are to find any light, it must be in
+some direction which has as yet been little explored.
+
+The hint which I have to offer here involves, I hope, something more
+than a mere change of appellation. I define suggestion as "successful
+appeal to the subliminal self";--not necessarily to that self in its
+most central, most unitary aspect; but to some one at least of those
+strata of subliminal faculty which I have in an earlier chapter
+described. I do not indeed pretend that my explanation can enable us to
+reduce hypnotic success to a certainty. I cannot say why the process
+should be so irregular and capricious; but I can show that this puzzle
+is part and parcel of a wider mystery;--of the obscure relationships and
+interdependencies of the supraliminal and the subliminal self. In split
+personalities, in genius, in dreams, in sensory and motor automatisms,
+we find the same fitfulness, the same apparent caprice.
+
+Leaving perforce this problem for the present unsolved, let us consider
+the various ways in which this conception of subliminal operation may
+throw light on the actual phenomena of hypnotism;--phenomena at present
+scattered in bewildering confusion.
+
+The word _hypnotism_ itself implies that some kind of _sleep_ or trance
+is regarded as its leading characteristic. And although so-called
+hypnotic suggestions do often take effect in the waking state,[64] our
+usual test of the hypnotiser's success lies in the slumber--light or
+deep--into which his subject is thrown. It is, indeed, a slumber which
+admits at times of strange wakings and activities; but it is also
+manifestly profounder than the sleep which we habitually enjoy.
+
+If sleep, then, be the phase of personality specially consecrated to
+subliminal operation, it follows that any successful appeal to the
+subliminal self will be likely to induce some form of sleep. And
+further, if that form of sleep be in fact not an inevitable result of
+physiological needs, but a response to a psychological appeal, it seems
+not unlikely that we should be able to communicate with it without
+interrupting it;--and should thus be able to guide or supplement
+subliminal operations, just as in genius the subliminal self guided or
+supplemented supraliminal operations.
+
+Now I hold that in all the varied trances, lethargies, sleep-waking
+states, to which hypnotism introduces us, we see the subliminal self
+coming to the surface in ways already familiar, and displacing just so
+much of the supraliminal as may from time to time be needful for the
+performance of its own work. That work, I say, will be of a character
+which we know already; the difference is that what we have seen done
+spontaneously we now see done in response to our appeal.
+
+Armed with this simplifying conception,--simplifying in spite of its
+frank admission of an underlying mystery,--we shall find no added
+difficulty in several points which have been the subjects of eager
+controversy. The _sequence_ of hypnotic phenomena, the question of the
+_stages_ of hypnotism, is one of these. I have already briefly described
+how Charcot propounded his three stages--lethargy, catalepsy,
+somnambulism--as though they formed the inevitable development of a
+physiological law;--and how completely this claim has now had to be
+withdrawn. Other schemes have been drawn out, by Liébeault, etc., but
+none of them seems to do more than reflect the experience of some one
+hypnotist's practice. The simplest arrangement is that of Edmund Gurney,
+who spoke only of an "alert stage" and a "deep stage" of hypnosis; and
+even here we cannot say that either stage invariably precedes the other.
+The alert stage, which often came first with Gurney's subjects, comes
+last in Charcot's scheme; and it is hardly safe to say more than that
+hypnotism is apt to show a series of changes from sleep-waking to
+lethargy and back again, and that the advanced stages show more of
+subliminal faculty than the earlier ones. There is much significance in
+an experiment of Dr. Jules Janet, who, by continued "passes," carried on
+Wittman, Charcot's leading subject, beyond her usual somnambulic state
+into a new lethargic state, and out again from thence into a new
+sleep-waking state markedly superior to the old.
+
+Gurney held the view that the main distinction of kind between his
+"alert" and his "deep" stage of hypnosis was to be found in the domain
+of memory, while memory also afforded the means for distinguishing the
+hypnotic state as a whole from the normal one. As a general rule (though
+with numerous exceptions), the events of ordinary life are remembered
+in the trance, while the trance events are forgotten on waking, but tend
+to recur to the memory on rehypnotisation. But the most interesting part
+of his observations consisted in showing alternations of memory in the
+alert and deep stages of the trance itself;--the ideas impressed in the
+one sort of state being almost always forgotten in the other, and as
+invariably again remembered when the former state recurs. (_Proceedings_
+S.P.R. vol. ii., pp. 61 _et seq._ [523 A].) On experimenting further, he
+met with a stage in which there was a distinct third train of memory,
+independent of the others;--and this, of course, suggests a further
+doubt as to there being any fixed number of stages in the trance. The
+later experiments of Mrs. Sidgwick [523 B] on the same subject, in which
+eight or nine distinct trains of memory were found--each recurring when
+the corresponding stage of depth of the trance was reached--seem to show
+conclusively that the number, may vary almost indefinitely. We have
+already seen that in cases of alternating personalities the number of
+personalities similarly varies, and the student who now follows or
+repeats Gurney's experiments, with the increased knowledge of split
+personalities which recent years have brought, cannot fail to be struck
+with the analogies between Gurney's artificial light and deep
+states,--with their separate chains of memory,--and those morbid
+alternating personalities, with their complex mnemonic cleavages and
+lacunć, with which we dealt in Chapter II. The hypnotic stages are in
+fact secondary or alternating personalities of very shallow type, but
+for that very reason all the better adapted for teaching us from what
+kinds of subliminal disaggregation the more serious splits in
+personality take their rise.
+
+And beneath and between these awakenings into limited, partial alertness
+lies that profound hypnotic trance which one can best describe as a
+scientific or purposive rearrangement of the elements of sleep;--a
+rearrangement in which what is helpful is intensified, what is merely
+hindering or isolating is removed or reduced. A man's ordinary sleep is
+at once unstable and irresponsive. You can wake him with a pin-prick,
+but if you talk to him he will not hear or answer you, until you rouse
+him with the mere noise. That is sleep as the needs of our timorous
+ancestors determined that it should be.
+
+Hypnotic sleep, on the contrary, is at once stable and responsive;
+strong in its resistance to such stimuli as it chooses to ignore; ready
+in its accessibility to such appeals as it chooses to answer.
+
+Prick or pinch the hypnotised subject, and although some stratum of his
+personality may be aware, in some fashion, of your act, the sleep will
+generally remain unbroken. But if you speak to him,--or even speak
+before him,--then, however profound his apparent lethargy, there is
+something in him which will hear.[65]
+
+All this is true even of earlier stages of trance. Deeper still lies the
+stage of highest interest;--that sleep-waking in which the subliminal
+self is at last set free,--is at last able not only to receive but to
+respond: when it begins to tell us the secrets of the sleeping phase of
+personality, beginning with directions as to the conduct of the trance
+or of the cure, and going on to who knows what insight into who knows
+what world afar?
+
+Without, then, entering into more detail as to the varying forms which
+hypnosis at different stages may assume, I have here traced its central
+characteristic;--the development, namely, of the sleeping phase of
+personality in such fashion as to allow of some supraliminal guidance of
+the subliminal self.
+
+We have here a definition of much wider purview than any which has been
+habitually applied to the process of hypnotisation or to the state of
+hypnosis. To test its validity, to explain its scope, we need a survey
+of hypnotic results much wider in range than any enumeration of the kind
+at present usual in text-books. Regarding hypnotic achievements mainly
+in their _mental_ aspects, I must seek for some broad principle of
+classification which on the one hand may not be so exclusively moral as
+to be physiologically untranslatable,--like the distinction between vice
+and virtue;--or on the other hand so exclusively physiological as to be
+morally untranslatable,--like the distinction between cerebral anćmia
+and hyperćmia.
+
+Perhaps the broadest contrast which is expressible in both moral and
+physiological terms is the contrast between check and stimulus,--between
+_inhibition_ and _dynamogeny_. Not, indeed, that such terms as _check_
+and _stimulus_ can be pressed in detail. The central power,--the ruling
+agency within the man which gives the command,--is no doubt the same in
+both cases. But the common contrast between negative and positive
+exhortations,--"this you shall _not_ do," "this you _shall_ do,"--will
+help to give clearness to our review of the influences of hypnotism in
+its bearings on intelligence and character,--its psychological efficacy.
+
+The most rudimentary form of restraint or inhibition lies in our effort
+to preserve the infant or young child from acquiring what we call "bad
+tricks." These morbid affections of motor centres, trifling in their
+inception, will sometimes grow until they are incurable by any régime or
+medicament;--nay, till an action so insignificant as sucking the thumb
+may work the ruin of a life.
+
+In no direction, perhaps, do the results of suggestion appear more
+inexplicable than here. Nowhere have we a more conspicuous touching of a
+spring;--a more complete achievement, almost in a single moment, of the
+deliverance which years of painful effort have failed to effect.[66]
+
+These cases stand midway between ordinary therapeutics and moral
+suasion. No one can here doubt the importance of finding the shortest
+and swiftest path to cure. Nor is there any reason to think that cures
+thus obtained are less complete or permanent than if they had been
+achieved by gradual moral effort. These facts should be borne in mind
+throughout the whole series of the higher hypnotic effects, and should
+serve to dispel any anxiety as to the possible loss of moral training
+when cure is thus magically swift. Each of these effects consists, as we
+must suppose, in the modification of some group of nervous centres; and,
+so far as we can tell, that is just the same result which moral effort
+made above the conscious threshold more slowly and painfully attains.
+This difference, in fact, is like the difference between results
+achieved by diligence and results achieved by genius. Something valuable
+in the way of training,--some exercise in patience and resolve,--no
+doubt may be missed by the man who is "suggested" into sobriety;--in the
+same way as it was missed by the schoolboy Gauss,--writing down the
+answers to problems as soon as set, instead of spending on them a
+diligent hour. But moral progress is in its essence as limitless as
+mathematical; and the man who is thus carried over rudimentary struggles
+may still find plenty of moral effort in life to train his character and
+tax his resolution.
+
+Among these morbid tricks _kleptomania_ has an interest of its own, on
+account of the frequent doubt whether it is not put forward as a mere
+excuse for pilfering. It may thus happen that the cure is the best proof
+of the existence of the disease; and certain cures indicate that the
+impulse has veritably involved a morbid excitability of motor centres,
+acted on by special stimuli,--an _idée fixe_ with an immediate outcome
+in act.[67]
+
+Many words and acts of _violence_ fall under the same category, in cases
+where the impulse to swear or to strike has acquired the unreasoning
+automatic promptness of a _tic_, and yet may be at once inhibited by
+suggestion. Many undesirable impulses in the realm of _sex_ are also
+capable of being thus corrected or removed.
+
+The stimulants and narcotics, to which our review next leads us, form a
+standing menace to human virtue. By some strange accident of our
+development, the impulse of our organisms towards certain
+drugs--alcohol, opium, and the like--is strong enough to overpower, in a
+large proportion of mankind, not only the late-acquired altruistic
+impulses, but even the primary impulses of self-regard and
+self-preservation. We are brought back, one may almost say, to the
+"chimiotaxy" of the lowest organisms, which arrange themselves
+inevitably in specific relation to oxygen, malic acid, or whatever the
+stimulus may be. We thus experience in ourselves a strange conflict
+between moral responsibility and molecular affinities;--the central will
+overborne by dumb unnumbered elements of our being. With this condition
+of things hypnotic suggestion deals often in a curious way. The
+suggestion is not generally felt as a strengthening of the central will.
+It resembles rather a molecular redisposition; it leaves the patient
+indifferent to the stimulus, or even disgusted with it. The man for whom
+alcohol has combined the extremes of delight and terror now lives as
+though in a world in which alcohol did not exist at all.[68]
+
+Even for the slave of morphia the same sudden freedom is sometimes
+achieved. It has been said of victims to morphia-injection that a cure
+means death;--so often has suicide followed on the distress caused by
+giving up the drug. But in certain cases cured by suggestion it seems
+that no craving whatsoever has persisted after the sudden disuse of the
+drug. There is something here which is in one sense profounder than
+moral reform. There is something which suggests a spirit within us less
+injured than we might have feared by the body's degradation. The
+morphinomaniac _character_--the lowest type of subjection to a ruling
+vice--disappears from the personality in proportion as the drug is
+eliminated from the system. The shrinking outcast turns at once into the
+respectable man.[69]
+
+But apart from troubles consequent on any intelligible instinct, any
+discoverable stimulus of pleasure, there are a multitude of impulses,
+fears, imaginations, one or more of which may take possession of persons
+not otherwise apparently unhealthy or hysterical, sometimes to an extent
+so distressing as to impel to suicide.
+
+Some of these "phobies" have been often described of late years,--as,
+for instance, _agoraphobia_, which makes a man dread to cross an open
+space; and its converse _claustrophobia_, which makes him shrink from
+sitting in a room with closed doors; or the still more distressing
+_mysophobia_, which makes him constantly uneasy lest he should have
+become dirty or defiled.
+
+All these disorders involve a kind of displacement or cramp of the
+attention; and for all of them, one may broadly say, hypnotic suggestion
+is the best and often the only cure. Suggestion seems to stimulate
+antagonistic centres; to open clogged channels; to produce, in short,
+however we imagine the process, a rapid disappearance of the insistent
+notion.
+
+I have spoken of this effect as though it were mainly to be valued
+intellectually, as a readjustment of the dislocated attention. But I
+must note also that the moral results may be as important here as in the
+cases of inhibition of dipsomania and the like, already mentioned. These
+morbid fears which suggestion relieves may be ruinously degrading to a
+man's character. The ingredients of antipathy, of jealousy, which they
+sometimes contain, may make him dangerous to his fellows as well as
+loathsome to himself. One or two cases of the cure of morbid jealousy
+are to my mind among the best records which hypnotism has to show.[70]
+
+But this is not all. The treasure of memory is mixed with rubbish; the
+caution which experience has taught has often been taught too well;
+philosophic calm has often frozen into apathy. Plato would have the old
+men in his republic plied well with wine on festal days, that their
+tongues might be unloosed to communicate their wisdom without reserve.
+"Accumulated experience," it has been said with much truth in more
+modern language,[71] "hampers action, disturbs the logical reaction of
+the individual to his environment. The want of control which marks the
+decadence of mental power is [sometimes] itself undue control, a
+preponderance of the secondary over the primary influences."
+
+Now the removal of shyness, or _mauvaise honte_, which hypnotic
+suggestion can effect, is in fact a _purgation of memory_,--inhibiting
+the recollection of previous failures, and setting free whatever group
+of aptitudes is for the moment required. Thus, for the boy called on to
+make an oration in a platform exhibition, hypnotisation sets free the
+_primary_ instinct of garrulity without the restraining fear of
+ridicule. For the musical executant, on the other hand, a similar
+suggestion will set free the _secondary_ instinct which the fingers have
+acquired, without the interference of the learner's puzzled, hesitating
+thoughts.
+
+I may remark here (following Gurney and Bramwell) how misleading a term
+is _mono-ideism_ for almost any hypnotic state. There is a _selection_
+of ideas to which the hypnotic subject will attend, and there is a
+_concentration_ upon the idea thus selected; but those ideas themselves
+may be both complex and constantly shifting, and indeed this is just one
+of the ways in which the hypnotic trance differs from the
+somnambulic--in which it may happen that only a relatively small group
+of brain-centres are awake enough to act. The somnambulic servant-girl,
+for instance, may persist in laying the tea-table, whatever you say to
+her, and this may fairly be called mono-ideism; but the hypnotic subject
+(as Bramwell has justly insisted) can be made to obey simultaneously a
+greater number of separate commands than he could possibly attend to in
+waking life.
+
+From these inhibitions of memory,--of attention as directed to the
+experiences of the past,--we pass on to attention as directed to the
+experiences of the present. And here we are reaching a central point; we
+are affecting the _macula lutea_ (as it has been well called) of the
+mental field. Many of the most important of hypnotic results will be
+best described as modifications of _attention_.
+
+Any modification of attention is of course likely to be at once a check
+and a stimulus;--a check to certain thoughts and emotions, a stimulus to
+others. And in many cases it will be the _dynamogenic_ aspect of the
+change--the new vigour supplied in needed directions--which will be for
+us of greatest interest. Yet from the _inhibitive_ side also we have
+already had important achievements to record. All these arrests and
+destructions of _idées fixes_, of which so much has been said, were
+powerful modifications of attention, although the limited field which
+they covered made it simpler to introduce them under a separate heading.
+
+And even now it may not be without surprise that the reader finds
+described under the heading of _inhibition of attention_ a phenomenon so
+considerable and so apparently independent as _hypnotic suppression of
+pain_. This induced _analgesia_ has from the first been one of the main
+triumphs of mesmerism or hypnotism. All have heard that mesmerism will
+stop headaches;--that you can have a tooth out "under mesmerism" without
+feeling it. The rivalry between mesmerism and ether, as anćsthetic
+agents in capital operations, was a conspicuous fact in the medical
+history of early Victorian times. But the ordinary talk, at any rate of
+that day, seemed to assume that if mesmerism produced an effect at all
+it was an effect _resembling_ that produced by narcotics--a modification
+of the intimate structure of the nerve or of the brain which rendered
+them for the time incapable of transmitting or of feeling painful
+sensations. The state of a man's nervous system, in fact, when he is
+poisoned by chloroform, or stunned by a blow, or almost frozen to death,
+or nearly drowned, etc., is such that a great part of it is no longer
+fit for its usual work,--is no longer capable of those prolongations of
+neurons, or whatever they be, which constitute its specific nervous
+activity. We thus get rid of pain by getting rid for the time of a great
+deal of other nervous action as well; and we have to take care lest by
+pushing the experiment too far we get rid of life into the bargain. But
+on the other hand, a man's nervous system, when hypnotic suggestion has
+rendered him incapable of pain, is quite as active and vigorous as
+ever,--quite as capable of transmitting and feeling pain,--although
+capable also of inhibiting it altogether. In a word, the hypnotic
+subject is _above_ instead of _below_ pain.
+
+To understand this apparent paradox we must remind ourselves that pain
+probably originated as a warning of danger,--a warning which, while
+useful to active creatures with miscellaneous risks, has become only a
+mixed advantage to beings of more advanced intelligence and
+sensitivity. There are many occasions when, knowing it to be useless, we
+wish to shut off pain, to rise as definitely _above_ it as our earliest
+ancestors were _below_ it, or as the drunken or narcotised man is below
+it. This is just what hypnotic suggestion enables us to do.
+
+Hypnotism attacks the real _origo mali_;--not, indeed, the pressure on
+the tooth-nerve, which can only be removed by extraction, but the
+representative power of the central sensorium which converts that
+pressure for us into pain. It _diverts attention_ from the pain, as the
+excitement of battle might do; but diverts it without any competing
+excitement whatever. To this topic of _influence on attention_ we shall
+have to recur again and again. For the present it may suffice if I refer
+the reader to a few cases--chosen from among some thousands where
+hypnotic practice has removed or obviated the distress or anguish till
+now unmistakably associated with various bodily incidents--from the
+extraction of a tooth to the great pain and peril of childbirth.[72]
+
+This suppression of pain has naturally been treated from the therapeutic
+point of view, as an end in itself; and neither physician nor patient
+has been inclined to inquire exactly _what_ has occurred;--what
+physiological or psychological condition has underlain this great
+subjective relief. Yet in the eye of experimental psychology the matter
+is far from a simple one. We are bound to ask _what_ has been altered.
+Has there been a total _ablation_, or some mere _translation_ of pain?
+What objective change on the bodily side has occurred in nerve or
+tissue? and, on the mental side, how far does the change in
+consciousness extend? How deep does it go? Does any subliminal knowledge
+of the pain persist?
+
+The very imperfect answers which can at present be given to these
+questions may, at any rate, suggest directions for further inquiry.
+
+(1) In the first place, it seems clear that when pain is inhibited in
+any but the most simple cases, a certain group of changes is produced
+whose _nexus_ is psychological rather than physiological. That is to
+say, one suggestion seems to relieve at once all the symptoms which form
+one idea of pain or distress in the patient's mind; while another
+suggestion is often needed to remove some remaining symptom, which the
+patient regards as a different trouble altogether. The suggestion thus
+differs both from a specific remedy, which might relieve a specific
+symptom, and from a general narcotisation, which would relieve all
+symptoms equally. In making suggestions, moreover, the hypnotiser finds
+that he has to consider and meet the patient's own subjective feelings,
+describing the intended relief as the patient wishes it to be described,
+and not attempting technical language which the patient could not
+follow. In a word, it is plain that in this class, as in other classes
+of suggestion, we are addressing ourselves to a _mind_, an
+_intelligence_, which can of itself select and combine, and not merely
+to a tissue or a gland responsive in a merely automatic way.
+
+(2) It will not then surprise us if,--pain being thus treated as a
+psychological entity,--there shall prove to be a certain psychological
+complexity in the response to analgesic suggestion.
+
+By this I mean that there are occasional indications that some memory of
+the pain, say, of an operation has persisted in some stratum of the
+personality;--thus apparently indicating that there was somewhere an
+actual consciousness of the pain when the operation was performed.[73]
+We find accounts of the revival of pain in dreams after operations
+performed under chloroform.[74]
+
+(3) Such experiences, if more frequent, might tempt us to suppose that
+the pain is not wholly abrogated, but merely translated to some stratum
+of consciousness whose experiences do not enter into our habitual chain
+of memories. Yet we possess (strangely enough) what seems direct
+evidence that the profoundest organic substratum of our being is by
+suggestion wholly freed from pain. It had long been observed that
+recoveries from operations performed in hypnotic trance were unusually
+benign;--there being less tendency to inflammation than when the patient
+had felt the knife. The same observation--perhaps in a less marked
+degree--has since been made as to operations under chemical anćsthesia.
+The shock to the system, and the irritation to the special parts
+affected, are greatly diminished by chloroform. And more recently
+Professor Delboeuf, by an experiment of great delicacy on two
+symmetrical wounds, of which one was rendered painless by suggestion,
+has distinctly demonstrated that pain tends to induce and keep up
+inflammation.[75]
+
+Thus it seems that pain is abrogated at once on the highest and on the
+lowest level of consciousness; yet possibly in some cases (though not
+usually[76]) persists obscurely in some stratum of our personality into
+which we gain only occasional and indirect glimpses. And if indeed this
+be so, it need in no way surprise us. We need to remember at every point
+that we have no reason whatever to suppose that we are cognisant of all
+the trains of consciousness, or chains of memory, which are weaving
+themselves within us. I shall never attain on earth--perhaps I never
+shall in any world attain--to any complete conspectus of the variously
+interwoven streams of vitality which are, in fact, obscurely present in
+my conception of myself.
+
+It is to hypnotism in the first place that we may look for an increased
+power of analysis of these intercurrent streams, these irregularly
+super-posed strata of our psychical being. In the meantime, this power
+of _inhibiting_ almost any fraction of our habitual consciousness at
+pleasure gives for the first time to the ordinary man--if only he be a
+suggestible subject--a power of concentration, of _choice_ in the
+exercise of faculty, such as up till now only the most powerful
+spirits--a Newton or an Archimedes--have been able to exert.
+
+The man who sits down in his study to write or read,--in perfect safety
+and intent on his work,--continues nevertheless to be involuntarily and
+inevitably armed with all that alertness to external sights and sounds,
+and all that sensibility to pain, which protected his lowly ancestors at
+different stages of even pre-human development. It is much as though he
+were forced to carry about with him all the external defences which his
+forefathers have invented for their defence;--to sit at his
+writing-table clad in chain-mail and a respirator, and grasping an
+umbrella and a boomerang. Let him learn, if he can, inwardly as well as
+outwardly, to get rid of all that, to keep at his command only the half
+of his faculties which for his purpose is worth more than the whole.
+Dissociation and choice;--dissociation between elements which have
+always hitherto seemed inextricably knit;--choice between faculties
+which till now we have had to use all together or not at all;--such is
+the promise, such is the incipient performance of hypnotic plasticity in
+its aspect of _inhibitive suggestion_.
+
+I come now to the division of hypnotic achievement with which I next
+proposed to deal, namely, the _dynamogenic_ results of hypnotic
+suggestion. These I shall arrange in an order resembling that which we
+try to follow in education:--proceeding from external senses to internal
+sensory and other central operations; and thence again to attention and
+will, and so to character which is a kind of resultant of all these.
+
+I will begin, then, with what seems the most external and measurable of
+these different influences--the influence, namely, of suggestion upon
+man's _perceptive_ faculties;--its power to educate his external organs
+of sense.
+
+This wide subject is almost untouched as yet; and there is no direction
+in which one could be more confident of interesting results from further
+experiment.
+
+The exposition falls naturally into three parts, as suggestion effects
+one or other of the three following objects:
+
+    (1) Restoration of ordinary senses from some deficient condition.
+    (2) Verification of ordinary senses;--hyperćsthesić.
+    (3) Development of new senses;--heterćsthesić.
+
+(1) The first of these three headings seems at first sight to belong to
+therapeutics rather than to psychology. It is, however, indispensable as
+a preliminary to the other two heads; since by learning how and to what
+extent suggestion can repair _defective_ senses we have the best chance
+of guessing at its _modus operandi_ when it seems to excite the
+_healthy_ senses to a point beyond their normal powers.[77]
+
+Two points may be mentioned here. Improvement of _vision_ seems
+sometimes to result from relaxation of an involuntary ciliary spasm,
+which habitually over-corrects some defect of the lens. This is
+interesting, from the analogy thus shown in quite healthy persons to the
+fixed ideas, the subliminal errors and fancies characteristics of
+hysteria. The stratum of self whose business it is to correct the
+mechanical defect of the eye has in these instances done so amiss, and
+cannot set itself right. The corrected form of vision is as defective as
+the form of vision which it replaced. But if the state of trance be
+induced, or if it occur spontaneously, it sometimes happens that the
+error is suddenly righted; the patient lays aside spectacles; and since
+we must assume that the original defect of mechanism remains, it seems
+that that defect is now perfectly instead of imperfectly met. This shows
+a subliminal adjusting power operating during trance more intelligently
+than the supraliminal intelligence had been able to operate during
+waking life.
+
+Another point of interest lies in the effect of increased attention, as
+stimulated by suggestion, upon the power of hearing. Dr. Liébeault[78]
+records two cases which are among the most significant that I know. If
+such susceptibility to self-suggestion could be reached by patients
+generally, there might be, with no miracle at all, a removal of perhaps
+half the annoyance which deafness inflicts on mankind.
+
+I pass on to cases of the production by suggestion or self-suggestion of
+hyperćsthesia,--of a degree of sensory delicacy which overpasses the
+ordinary level, and the previous level of the subject himself.
+
+The rudimentary state of our study of hypnotism is somewhat strangely
+illustrated by the fact that most of the experiments which show
+hyperćsthesia most delicately have been undertaken with a view of
+proving something else--namely, mesmeric _rapport_, or the mesmerisation
+of objects, or telepathy. In these cases the proof of _rapport_,
+telepathy, etc., generally just falls short,--because one cannot say
+that the action of the ordinary senses might not have reached the point
+necessary for the achievement, though there is often good reason to
+believe that the subject was supraliminally ignorant of the way in which
+he was, in fact, attaining the knowledge in question.
+
+In these extreme cases, indeed, the explanation by hyperćsthesia is not
+always proved. There _may_ have been telepathy, although one has not the
+right to assume telepathy, in view of certain slighter, but still
+remarkable, hyperćsthetic achievements, which are common subjects of
+demonstration. The ready recognition of _points de repčre_, on the back
+of a card or the like, which are hardly perceptible to ordinary eyes, is
+one of the most usual of these performances.
+
+In this connection the question arises as to the existence of
+physiological limits to the exercise of the ordinary senses. In the case
+of the eye a _minimum visibile_ is generally assumed; and there is
+special interest in a case of clairvoyance versus cornea-reading, where,
+if the words were read (as appears most probable) from their reflection
+upon the cornea of the hypnotiser, the common view as to the _minimum
+visibile_ is greatly stretched.[79]
+
+With regard to the other senses, whose mechanism is less capable of
+minute dissection, one meets problems of a rather different kind. What
+are the definitions of smell and touch? Touch is already split up into
+various factors--tactile, algesic, thermal; and thermal touch is itself
+a duplicate sense, depending apparently on one set of nerve-terminations
+adapted to perceive heat, and another set adapted to perceive cold.
+Taste is similarly split up; and we do not call anything taste which is
+not definitely referred to the mouth and adjacent regions. Smell is
+vaguer; and there are cognate sensations (like that of the presence of a
+cat) which are not referred by their subject to the nose. The study of
+hyperćsthesia does in this sense prepare the way for what I have termed
+heterćsthesia; in that it leaves us more cautious in definition as to
+what the senses are, it accustoms us to the notion that people become
+aware of things in many ways which they cannot definitely realise.
+
+Let us now consider the evidence for heterćsthesia;--for the existence,
+that is to say, under hypnotic suggestion, of any form of sensibility
+decidedly different from those with which we are familiar. It would
+sound more accurate if one could say "demanding some end-organ different
+from those which we know that we possess." But we know too little of the
+range of perceptivity of these end-organs in the skin which we are
+gradually learning to distinguish--of the heat-feeling spots,
+cold-feeling spots, and the like--to be able to say for what purposes a
+new organ would be needed. For certain heterćsthetic sensations, indeed,
+as the perception of a magnetic field, one can hardly assume that any
+end-organ would be necessary. It is better, therefore, to speak only of
+modes of sensibility.
+
+Looking at the matter from the evolutionary point of view, the question
+among sensations was one of the development of the fittest; that is to
+say that, as the organism became more complex and needed sensations more
+definite than sufficed for the protozoon, certain sensibilities got
+themselves defined and stereotyped upon the organism by the evolution of
+end-organs.[80] Others failed to get thus externalised; but may, for
+aught we know, persist nevertheless in the central organs;--say, for
+instance, in what for man are the optic or olfactory tracts of the
+brain. There will then be no apparent reason why these latent powers
+should not from time to time receive sufficient stimulus, either from
+within or from without, to make them perceptible to the waking
+intelligence, or perceptible at least in states (like trance) of narrow
+concentration.
+
+As the result of these considerations, I approach alleged heterćsthesić
+of various kinds with no presumption whatever against their real
+occurrence. Yet on the other hand, my belief in the extent of possible
+_hyperćsthesia_ continually suggests to me that the apparently new
+perceptions may only consist of a mixture of familiar forms of
+perception, pushed to a new extreme, and centrally interpreted with a
+new acumen, while there is no doubt that many experiments supposed to
+furnish evidence of such new perceptions merely illustrate the effect of
+suggestion or self-suggestion.
+
+Without, however, presuming to criticise past evidence wholesale, I yet
+hope that the experience now attained may lead to a much greater number
+of well-guarded experiments in the near future. In Appendix V.A, I very
+briefly present the actual state of this inquiry. In default of any
+logical principle, I shall there divide these alleged forms of
+sensibility according as they are excited by inorganic objects on the
+one hand, or by organisms (dead or living) on the other.
+
+In the meantime I pass on to that group of the dynamogenic effects of
+suggestion which affect the more central vital operations--either the
+vaso-motor system, or the neuro-muscular system, or the central sensory
+tracts. The effects of suggestion on character--induced changes to which
+we can hardly guess the nervous concomitant--will remain to be dealt
+with later.
+
+First, then, as to the effects of suggestion on the vaso-motor system.
+Simple effects of this type form the commonest of "platform
+experiments." The mesmerist holds ammonia under his subject's nose, and
+tells him it is rose-water. The subject smells it eagerly, and his eyes
+do not water. The suggestion, that is to say, that the stinging vapour
+is inert has inhibited the vaso-motor reflexes which would ordinarily
+follow, and which no ordinary effort of will could restrain. _Vice
+versâ_, when the subject smells rose-water, described as ammonia, he
+sneezes and his eyes water. These results, which his own will could not
+produce, follow on the mesmerist's word. No one who sees these simple
+tests applied can doubt the genuineness of the influence at work. We
+find then, as might be expected, that action on glands and secretions
+constitutes a large element in hypnotic therapeutics. The literature of
+suggestion is full of instances where a suppressed secretion has been
+restored at a previously arranged moment, almost with "astronomical
+punctuality." And yet to what memory is that command retained? by what
+signal is it announced? or by what agency obeyed?
+
+In spite of this underlying obscurity, common to every branch of
+suggestion, these vaso-motor phenomena are by this time so familiar that
+no further description of them is necessary.
+
+This delicate responsiveness of the vaso-motor system has given rise to
+some curious spontaneous phenomena, and has suggested some experiments,
+which are probably as yet in their infancy. The main point of interest
+is that at this point spontaneous self-suggestion, and subsequently
+suggestion from without, have made a kind of first attempt at the
+modification of the human organism in what may be called fancy
+directions,--at the production of a change which has no therapeutic aim,
+and so to say, no physiological unity; but which is guided by an
+intellectual caprice along lines with which the organism is not
+previously familiar. I speak of the phenomenon commonly known as
+"stigmatisation," from the fact that its earliest spontaneous
+manifestations were suggested by imaginations brooding on the stigmata
+of Christ's passion;--the marks of wounds in hands and feet and side.
+This phenomenon, which was long treated both by _savants_ and by
+devotees as though it must be either fraudulent or miraculous,--_ou
+supercherie, ou miracle_,--is now found (like a good many other
+phenomena previously deemed subject to that dilemma) to enter readily
+within the widening circuit of natural law. Stigmatisation is, in fact,
+a form of vesication; and suggested vesication--with the quasi-burns and
+real blisters which obediently appear in any place and pattern that is
+ordered--is a high development of that same vaso-motor plasticity of
+which the ammonia-rose-water experiment was an early example.[81]
+
+The group of suggestive effects which we reach next in order is a wide
+and important one. The education of the _central sensory faculties_,--of
+our power of inwardly representing to ourselves sights and sounds,
+etc.,--is not less important than the education of the external senses.
+The powers of construction and combination which our central organs
+possess differ more widely in degree in different healthy individuals
+than the degrees of external perception itself. And the stimulating
+influence of hypnotism on _imagination_ is perhaps the most conspicuous
+phenomenon which the whole subject offers; yet it has been little dwelt
+upon, save from one quite superficial point of view.
+
+Every one knows that a hypnotised subject is easily hallucinated;--that
+if he is told to see a non-existent dog, he sees a dog,--that if he is
+told _not_ to see Mr. A., he sees everything in the room, Mr. A.
+excepted. Common and conspicuous, I say, as this experiment is, even the
+scientific observer has too often dealt with it with the shallowness of
+the platform lecturer. The lecturer represents this induced
+hallucinability simply as an odd illustration of his own power over the
+subject. "I tell him to forget his name, and he forgets his name; I tell
+him that he has a baby on his lap, and he sees and feels and dandles
+it." At the best, such a hallucination is quoted as an instance of
+"mono-ideism." But the real kernel of the phenomenon is not the
+inhibition but the dynamogeny;--not the abstraction of attention or
+imagination from other topics, but the increased power which imagination
+gains under suggestion;--the development of faculty, useless, if you
+will, in that special form of imagining the baby, but faculty mentally
+of a high order--faculty in one shape or another essential to the
+production of almost all the most admired forms of human achievement.
+
+On this theme I shall have much to say; yet here again it will be
+convenient to defer fuller discussion until I review what I have termed
+"sensory automatism" in a more general way. We shall then see that this
+quickened imaginative faculty is not educed by hypnosis alone; that it
+is a part of the equipment of the subliminal self, and will be better
+treated at length in connection with other spontaneous manifestations.
+Enough here to have pointed out the main fact; for when pointed out it
+can hardly be disputed, although its significance for the true
+comprehension of hypnotic phenomena has been too often overlooked.
+
+Yet here, and in direct connection with hypnotism, certain special
+features of hallucinations need to be insisted upon, both as partly
+explaining certain more advanced hypnotic phenomena, and also as
+suggesting lines of important experiment. The first point is this.
+
+Post-hypnotic hallucinations can be _postponed_ at will. That is to say,
+a constant watchfulness is exercised by the subject, so that if, for
+example, the hypnotiser tells him that he will (when awakened) poke the
+fire when the hypnotiser has coughed three times, the awakened subject,
+although knowing nothing of the order in his waking state, will be on
+the look-out for the coughs, amid all other disturbances, and will poke
+the fire at the fore-ordained signal.[82] Moreover, when the
+post-hypnotic suggestion is executed there will often be a slight
+momentary relapse into the hypnotic state, and the subject will not
+afterwards be aware that he _has_ (for instance) poked the fire at all.
+This means that the suggested act belongs properly to the hypnotic, not
+to the normal chain of memory; so that its performance involves a brief
+reappearance of the subliminal self which received the order.
+
+Another characteristic of these suggested hallucinations tells in
+exactly the same direction. It is possible to suggest no mere isolated
+picture,--a black cat on the table, or the like,--but a whole complex
+series of responses to circumstances not at the time predictable. This
+point is well illustrated by what are called "negative hallucinations"
+or "systematised anćsthesić." Suppose, for instance, that I tell a
+hypnotised subject that when he awakes there will be no one in the room
+with him but myself. He awakes and remembers nothing of this order, but
+sees me alone in the room. Other persons present endeavour to attract
+his attention in various ways. Sometimes he will be quite unconscious of
+their noises and movements; sometimes he will perceive them, but will
+explain them away, as due to other causes, in the same irrational manner
+as one might do in a dream. Or he may perceive them, be unable to
+explain them, and feel considerable terror until the "negative
+hallucination" is dissolved by a fresh word of command. It is plain, in
+fact, throughout, that some element in him is at work all the time in
+obedience to the suggestion given,--is keeping him by ever fresh
+modifications of his illusion from discovering its unreality. Nothing
+could be more characteristic of what I have called a "middle-level
+centre" of the subliminal self--of some element in his nature which is
+potent and persistent without being completely intelligent;--a kind of
+dream-producer, ready at any moment to vary and defend the dream.
+
+Another indication of the subliminal power at work to produce these
+hallucinations is their remarkable _range_--a range as wide, perhaps, as
+that over which therapeutic effects are obtainable by suggestion. The
+post-hypnotic hallucination may affect not sight and hearing alone (to
+which spontaneous hallucinations are in most cases confined), but all
+kinds of vaso-motor responses and organic sensations--cardiac,
+stomachic, and the like--which no artifice can affect in a waking
+person. The legendary flow of perspiration with which the flatterer
+sympathises with his patron's complaint of heat--_si dixeris "Ćstuo,"
+sudat_--is no exaggeration if applied to the hypnotic subject, who will
+often sweat and shiver at your bidding as you transplant him from the
+Equator to frosty Caucasus.
+
+Well, then, given this strength and vigour of hallucination, one sees a
+possible extension of knowledge in more than one direction. To begin
+with, by suggestion to the subject that he is feeling or doing something
+which is beyond his normal range of faculties, we may perhaps enable him
+to perceive or to act as thus suggested.
+
+What we need is to address to a sensitive subject a series of strong
+suggestions of the increase of his sensory range and power. We must
+needs begin by suggesting hallucinatory sensations:--the subject should
+be told that he perceives some stimulus which is, in fact, too feeble
+for ordinary perception. If you can make him _think_ that he perceives
+it, he probably will after a time perceive it; the direction given to
+his attention heightening either peripheral or central sensory faculty.
+You may then be able to attack the question as to how far his
+specialised end-organs are really concerned in the perception;--and it
+may then be possible to deal in a more fruitful way with those alleged
+cases of _transposition of senses_ which have so great a theoretical
+interest as being apparently intermediate between hyperćsthesia and
+telćsthesia or clairvoyance. If we once admit (as I, of course, admit)
+the reality of telćsthesia, it is just in some such way as this that we
+should expect to find it beginning.
+
+I start from the thesis that the perceptive power within us precedes and
+is independent of the specialised sense-organs, which it has developed
+for earthly use.
+
+[Greek: nous ora kai nous akouei talla kôpha kai typhla.]
+
+I conceive further that under certain circumstances this primary
+telćsthetic faculty resumes direct operations, in spite of the fleshly
+barriers which are constructed so as to allow it to operate through
+certain channels alone. And I conceive that in thus resuming exercise of
+the wider faculty, the incarnate spirit will be influenced or hampered
+by the habits or self-suggestions of the more specialised faculty; so
+that there may be apparent _compromises_ of different kinds between
+telćsthetic and hyperćsthetic perception,--as the specialised senses
+endeavour, as it were, to retain credit for the perception which is in
+reality widening beyond their scope.
+
+In this attitude of mind, then, I approach the recorded cases of
+transposition of special sense.[83]
+
+Two main hypotheses have been put forward as a general explanation of
+such cases, neither of which seems to me quite satisfactory. (1) The
+common theory would be that these are merely cases of erroneous
+self-suggestion;--that the subject really sees with the eye, but thinks
+that he sees with the knee, or the stomach, or the finger-tips. This may
+probably have been so in many, but not, I think, in all instances. (2)
+Dr. Prosper Despine and others suppose that, while the accustomed
+cerebral centres are still concerned in the act of sight, the finger-end
+(for example) acts for the nonce as the end-organ required to carry the
+visual sensation to the brain. I cannot here get over the mechanical
+difficulty of the absence of a lens. However hyperćsthetic the
+finger-end might be (say) to light and darkness, I can hardly imagine
+its acting as an organ of definite sight.
+
+My own suggestion (which, for aught I know, may have been made before)
+is that the finger-end is no more a true organ of sight than the
+arbitrary "hypnogenous zone" is a true organ for inducing trance. I
+think it possible that there may be actual telćsthesia,--not necessarily
+involving any perception by the bodily organism;--and that the spirit
+which thus perceives in wholly supernormal fashion may be under the
+impression that it is perceiving through some bizarre corporeal
+channel--as the knee or the stomach. I think, therefore, that the
+perception may not be _optical_ sight at all, but rather some
+generalised telćsthetic perception represented as visual, but
+_incoherently_ so represented; so that it may be referred to the knee
+instead of the retina. And here again, as at several previous points in
+my argument, I must refer the reader to what will be said in my chapter
+on _Possession_ by external spirits (Chapter IX.) to illustrate the
+operation even of the subject's own spirit acting without external aid.
+
+And now I come to the third main type of the dynamogenic efficacy of
+suggestion: its influence, namely, on _attention_, on _will_, and on
+_character_--character, indeed, being largely a resultant of the
+direction and persistence of voluntary attention.
+
+It will be remembered that for convenience' sake I have discussed the
+dynamogenic effect of suggestion first upon the external senses, then
+upon the internal sensibility,--the mind's eye, the mind's ear, and the
+imagination generally;--and now I am turning to similar effects
+exercised upon that central power which reasons upon the ideas and
+images which external and internal senses supply, which chooses between
+them, and which reacts according to its choice. These are "highest-level
+centres," which I began by saying that the hypnotist could rarely hope
+to reach;--since those spontaneous somnambulisms which the hypnotic
+trance imitates and develops do so seldom reach them. We have, however,
+already found a good deal of intelligence of a certain kind in hypnotic
+phenomena; what we do here is to pass from one stage to another and
+higher stage of consciousness of intelligent action.
+
+To explain this statement, let us dwell for a moment upon the degree of
+intelligence which is sometimes displayed in those modifications of the
+organism which suggestion effects. Take, for instance, the formation of
+a cruciform blister, as recorded by Dr. Biggs, of Lima.[84] In this
+experiment the hypnotised subject was told that a red cross would appear
+on her chest every Friday during a period of four months. For the
+carrying out of this suggestion an unusual combination of capacities was
+needed;--the capacity of directing physiological changes in a new way,
+and also, and combined therewith, the capacity of recognising and
+imitating an abstract, arbitrary, non-physiological idea, such as that
+of _cruciformity_.
+
+All this, in my view, is the expression of _subliminal_ control over the
+organism--more potent and profound than _supraliminal_, and exercised
+neither blindly nor wisely, but with intelligent caprice.
+
+Bearing this in mind as we go on to suggestions more directly affecting
+central faculty, in which _highest-level_ centres begin to be involved,
+we need not be surprised to find an intermediate stage in which high
+faculties are used in obedience to suggestion, for purely capricious
+ends.
+
+I speak of _calculations_ subliminally performed in the carrying out of
+post-hypnotic suggestions.
+
+These suggestions _ŕ échéance_--commands, given in the trance, to do
+something under certain contingent circumstances, or after a certain
+time has elapsed--form a very convenient mode of testing the amount of
+mentation which can be started and carried out without the intervention
+of the supraliminal consciousness. Experiments have been made in this
+direction by three men especially who have in recent times done some of
+the best work on the psychological side of hypnotism, namely, Edmund
+Gurney, Delboeuf, and Milne Bramwell.
+
+Dr. Milne Bramwell's experiments[85] (to mention these as a sample of
+the rest) were post-hypnotic suggestions involving arithmetical
+calculations; the entranced subject, for instance, being told to make a
+cross when 20,180 minutes had elapsed from the moment of the order.
+Their primary importance lay in showing that a subliminal or hypnotic
+memory persisted across the intervening gulf of time,--days and nights
+of ordinary life,--and prompted obedience to the order when at last it
+fell due. But incidentally, as I say, it became clear that the subject,
+whose arithmetical capacity in common life was small, worked out these
+sums subliminally a good deal better than she could work them out by her
+normal waking intelligence.
+
+Of course, all that was needed for such simple calculations was close
+attention to easy rules; but this was just what the waking mind was
+unable to give, at least without the help of pencil and paper. If we lay
+this long and careful experiment side by side with the accounts already
+given of the solution of problems in somnambulic states, it seems clear
+that there is yet much to be done in the education of subliminal memory
+and acumen as a help to supraliminal work.
+
+Important in this connection is Dr. Dufay's account of help given to an
+actress in the representation of her _rôles_ by hypnotisation.[86] It
+seems obvious that stage-fright is just the kind of nervous annoyance
+from which hypnotisation should give relief. Somewhat similarly I
+believe some persons can secure a cheap substitute for genius on stage
+or platform, evoking by suggestion or self-suggestion a helpful
+subliminal uprush. Here again, the hypnotisation is a kind of extension
+of "secondary automatism,"--of the familiar lapse from ordinary
+consciousness of movements (walking, pianoforte-playing, etc.), which
+have been very frequently performed. The possibilities thus opened up
+are very great: no less than the combination by mankind of the stability
+of instinct with the plasticity of reason. There seems no reason why
+man's range of automatism should not thus be largely increased in two
+main ways: many things now unpleasant to do might be done with
+indifference, and many things now difficult to do might be done with
+ease.
+
+And now let us pass on from these specialised influences of suggestion
+on certain kinds of attention to its influence on attention generally,
+as needed, for instance, in education. If we can arrest the shifting of
+the mental focus to undesired ideational centres in at all the same way
+as we can arrest the choreic or fidgety shiftings of motor impulse to
+undesired motor centres, we shall have done perhaps as much for the
+world's ordinary work as if we had raised the average man's actual
+intelligence a step higher in the scale. We shall have checked waste,
+although we may not have improved quality. The well-known case of Dr.
+Forel's warders,[87] who were enabled by hypnotic suggestion to sleep
+soundly by the side of the patients they had to watch, and wake only
+when the patients required to be restrained, shows us how by this means
+the attention may be concentrated on selected impressions and waste of
+energy be avoided in a way that could hardly be compassed by any
+ordinary exercise of the will.
+
+How far, indeed, we can go in actually _heightening_ intelligence by
+suggestion we have yet to learn. We must not expect to add a cubit to
+intellectual any more than to physical stature. Limitations at birth
+must prevent our developing the common man into a Newton; but there
+seems no reason why we should not bring up his practical achievements
+much nearer than at present to the maximum of his innate capacity.[88]
+
+In passing on from the influence of suggestion on _attention_ to its
+influence on _will_, I am not meaning to draw any but the most every-day
+distinction between these two forms of inward concentration. The point,
+in fact, which I wish now to notice is rather a matter of common
+observation than a provable and measurable phenomenon. I speak of the
+energy and resolution with which a hypnotic suggestion is carried
+out;--the _ferocity_, even, with which the entranced subject pushes
+aside the opposition of much more powerful men. I do not, indeed, assert
+that he would thus risk very serious injury; for I believe (with
+Bramwell and others) that there does exist somewhere within him a
+knowledge that the whole proceeding is a mere experiment. But,
+nevertheless, he actually risks something; he behaves, in short, as a
+confident, resolute man would behave, and this however timid and
+unaggressive his habitual character may be. I believe that much
+advantage may yet be drawn from this confident temper. We can thus
+inhibit the acquired self-distrust and shyness of the supraliminal self,
+and get the subliminal self concentrated upon some task which may be as
+difficult as we please;--which may, if we can adjust it rightly, draw
+out to the uttermost the innate powers of man.
+
+It has been supposed that the mere fact of being hypnotised tended to
+weaken the will; that the hypnotised person fell inevitably more and
+more under the control of the hypnotiser, and even that he could at last
+be induced to commit crimes by suggestion. In his article "What is
+Hypnotism?"[89] Dr. Milne Bramwell shows on how small a foundation of
+fact these fanciful theories have been erected. It may suffice to say
+here that nothing is easier, either for subject or for hypnotiser, than
+to _avert_ undue influence. A trusted friend has only to suggest to the
+hypnotised subject that _no one else_ will be able to affect him, and
+the thing is done. As to the crimes supposed to be committed by
+hypnotised persons under the influence of suggestion, the evidence for
+such crimes, in spite of great efforts made to collect it and set it
+forth, remains, I think, practically _nil_.
+
+This fact, I must add, is quite in harmony with the views expressed in
+the present chapter. For it implies that the higher subliminal centres
+(so to term them) never really abdicate their rule; that they may indeed
+remain passive while the middle centres obey the experimenter's caprice,
+but are still ready to resume their control if such experiment should
+become really dangerous to the individual. And this runs parallel with
+common experience in the spontaneous somnambulisms. The sleeper may
+perform apparently rash exploits; but yet, unless he be suddenly
+awakened, serious accidents are very rare. Nevertheless, both in
+spontaneous and in induced somnambulism, accidents _may_ occur; nor
+should any experiment be undertaken in a careless or jesting spirit.
+
+But the rôle of the hypnotiser, as our command over hypnotic artifice
+increases, is likely to become continually smaller in proportion to the
+rôle played by the subject himself. Especially must this be so where the
+object is to strengthen the subject's own power of will. All that can be
+done from _without_ in such a case is to imbue the man's spirit with the
+sense of its unexhausted prerogatives,--the strength which he may then
+employ, not only to avert pain or anxiety, but in any active direction
+which his original nature itself admits.
+
+These last words may naturally lead us on to our next topic: the
+influence of suggestion on _character_,--on that function of combined
+attention and will, which is, of course, also ultimately a function of
+the possibilities latent in the individual germ.
+
+First of all, then, and going back to the evidence already given as to
+the cure of the victims of morphia, we may say with truth that _there_
+we have seen as tremendous a moral _lift_--as sudden an elevation from
+utter baseness to at least normal living--as can be anywhere presented
+to us.
+
+Here, then, the question arises as to the possible range of such sudden
+reformations. Did we succeed with the morphinomaniac only because his
+was a _functional_, and not an _organic_, degradation?
+
+And may it not be a much harder task to create honesty, purity,
+unselfishness in a brain whose very conformation must keep the spirit
+that thinks through it nearly on the level of the brute? The question is
+of the highest psychological interest; the answer, though as yet
+rudimentary, is unexpectedly encouraging. The examples given in Appendix
+V. B show that if the subject is hypnotisable, and if hypnotic
+suggestion be applied with sufficient persistency and skill, no depth of
+previous baseness and foulness need prevent the man or woman whom we
+charge with "moral insanity," or stamp as a "criminal-born," from rising
+into a state where he or she can work steadily, and render services
+useful to the community.[90]
+
+I purposely limit my assertion to these words. We must still work within
+the bounds of natural capacity. Just as we cannot improvise a genius, we
+cannot improvise a saint. But what experience seems to show is that we
+can _select_ from the lowest and poorest range of feelings and faculties
+enough of sound feeling, enough of helpful faculty, to keep the man in a
+position of moral stability, and capable of falling in with the common
+labours of his kind.
+
+And here we approach a point of much interest. Hypnotic suggestion or
+self-suggestion is not an agency which stands wholly alone. It melts
+into the suasion of ordinary life. Ministers of religion as well as
+physicians have always wielded with authority the suasive power. From
+the crude animistic dances and ceremonies of the savage up to the
+"missions" and "revivals" in English and American churches and chapels,
+we find sudden and exciting impressions on mind and sense called into
+play for the purpose of producing religious and moral change.[91] Among
+the lower races especially these exciting reunions often involve both
+hysterical and hypnotic phenomena. There are sometimes convulsive
+accesses and there is sometimes the milder phenomenon of a deep
+restorative sleep. The influence exerted upon the convert is
+intermediate between hypnotic artifice, dependent on trance-states for
+access to subliminal plasticity, and ordinary moral suasion, addressed
+primarily to ordinary waking reason.
+
+Let us pause here to consider the point which we have already reached.
+We began by defining hypnotism as the empirical development of the
+sleeping phase of man's personality. In that sleeping phase the most
+conspicuous element--the most obvious function of the subliminal
+self--is the repair of wasted tissues, the physical, and therefore also
+largely the moral, refreshment and rejuvenation of the tired organism.
+
+But we found reason to believe that the subliminal self has other
+functions to fulfil during sleep. Those other functions are concerned in
+some unknown way with the spiritual world; and the indication of their
+exercise is given by the sporadic occurrence, in the sleeping phase, of
+supernormal phenomena. Such phenomena, as we shall presently see, occur
+also at various points in hypnotic practice. To them we must now turn,
+if our account of the phenomena of induced somnambulism is to be
+complete.
+
+Yet here, in order to give completeness to our intended review, we shall
+need a certain apparent extension of the scope of this chapter. We shall
+need to consider a group of cases which might have been introduced at
+various points in our scheme, but which are perhaps richest in their
+illustrations of the supernormal phenomena of hypnotism.
+
+_Spontaneous somnambulisms_,--those crude uprushes of incoherent
+subliminal faculty which sometimes break through the surface of
+sleep,--seem to occupy a kind of midway position among the various
+phenomena through which our inquiry has thus far carried us.
+
+The somnambulism often _starts_ as an exaggerated dream; it _develops_
+into a kind of secondary personality. The thoughts and impulses which
+the upheaval raises into manifestations--the psychical output--resemble
+sometimes the inspirations of genius, sometimes the follies of hysteria.
+And, finally, the spontaneous sleep-waking state itself is manifestly
+akin to hypnosis,--is sometimes actually interchangeable with the
+induced somnambulisms of the hypnotic trance. The _chain of memory_
+which repeated spontaneous somnambulisms gradually form,--while lying
+quite outside the primary or waking memory,--will often be found to form
+a part of the _hypnotic_ memory, which gradually accretes in similar
+fashion from repeated hypnosis.
+
+For one form of sleep-waking capacity we are already prepared by what
+has been said in Chapter IV. of the solution of problems in sleep. This
+is one of the ways in which we can watch the gradual merging of a vivid
+dream into a definite somnambulic act. The solution of a problem (as we
+have seen) may present itself merely as a sentence or a diagram,
+constructed in dream and remembered on waking. Or the sleeper (as in
+various cases familiar in text-books) may rise from bed and _write out_
+the chain of reasoning, or the sermon, or whatever it may be. Or again,
+in rarer cases the somnambulic output may take the form of oratory, and
+edifying discourses may be delivered by a preacher whom no amount of
+shaking or pinching will silence or, generally, even interrupt. This, so
+to speak, is genius with a vengeance; this is a too persistent uprush of
+subliminal zeal, co-operating even out of season with the hortatory
+instincts of the waking self.
+
+The group of sleep-waking cases which we may next discuss illustrates a
+natural evolution of the faculty of the sleeping phase of personality.
+The subliminal self, exercising in sleep a profounder _influence_ over
+the organism than the supraliminal can exert, may also be presumed to
+possess a profounder _knowledge_ of the organism--of its present, and
+therefore of its future--than the supraliminal self enjoys.
+
+There are cases[92] in which the somnambulic personality is discerned
+throughout as a wiser self--advising a treatment, or at least foreseeing
+future developments of the disease with great particularity. Of course,
+in such a case prediction is often simply a form of suggestion; the
+symptom occurs simply because it has been ordained beforehand. In the
+case of cures of long-standing disease the sagacity which foresees
+probably co-operates with the control which directs the changes in the
+organism.
+
+The next stage is a very important one. We come to the manifestation in
+spontaneous sleep-waking states of manifestly supernormal
+powers,--sometimes of telepathy, but more commonly of clairvoyance or
+telćsthesia. Unfortunately, these cases have been, as a rule, very
+insufficiently observed. Still, it appears that in spontaneous
+somnambulism there is frequently some indication of supernormal powers,
+though the observers--even if competent in other ways--have generally
+neglected to take account of the hyperćsthesia and heightening of memory
+and of general intelligence that often accompany the state.
+
+Before leaving this subject of spontaneous sleep-waking states I ought
+briefly to mention a form of trance with which we shall have to deal
+more at length in a later chapter. I speak of trance ascribed to
+_spirit-possession_. As will be seen, I myself fully adopt this
+explanation in a small number of the cases where it is put forward. Yet
+I do not think that spirit-agency is necessarily present in all the
+trances even of a true subject of possession. With all the leading
+sensitives--with D. D. Home, with Stainton Moses, with Mrs. Piper and
+with others--I think that the depth of the trance has varied greatly on
+different occasions, and that sometimes the subliminal self of the
+sensitive is vaguely simulating, probably in an unconscious dream-like
+way, an external intelligence. This hypothesis suggested itself to
+several observers in the case especially of D. D. Home, with whom the
+moments of strong characterisation of a departed personality, though far
+from rare, were yet scattered among tracts of dreamy improvisation which
+suggested only the utterance of Home's subliminal self. However we
+choose to interpret these trances, they should be mentioned in
+comparison with all the other sleep-waking states. They probably form
+the best transition between those shallow somnambulisms, on the one
+hand, which are little more than a vivid dream, and those profound
+trances, on the other hand, in which the native spirit quits, as nearly
+as may be, the sensitive's organism, and is for the time replaced, as
+nearly as may be, by an invading spirit from that unseen world.
+
+This brief review of non-hypnotic somnambulisms has not been without its
+lessons. It has shown us that the supernormal powers which we have
+traced in each of the preceding chapters in turn do also show
+themselves, in much the same fashion, in spontaneous sleep-waking states
+of various types. We must now inquire how far they occur in sleep-waking
+states experimentally induced.
+
+And here the very fact of _induction_ suggests to us a question
+specially applicable to the hypnotic state itself. Is hypnosis ever
+supernormally induced? Can any one, that is to say, be thrown into
+hypnotic trance by a telepathic impact? or, to phrase it more generally,
+by any influence, inexplicable by existing science, which may pass from
+man to man?
+
+In the first place one may say that of the anti-mesmeric schools of
+opinion, the "purely physiological" school has on the whole failed, the
+"purely suggestive" school has triumphantly succeeded. The school of
+Nancy, reinforced by hypnotists all over Europe, has abundantly proved
+that "pure suggestion" (whatever that be) is the determining cause of a
+very large proportion of hypnotic phenomena. That is beyond dispute; and
+the two other schools, the "pure physiologists" and the "mesmerists"
+alike, must now manage to prove as best they can that their favourite
+methods play any real part in the induction of any case of hypnosis. For
+to the pure suggestionist, monotonous stimulation and mesmeric passes
+are alike in themselves inert, are alike mere facilitations of
+suggestion, acting not directly on the patient's organism, but rather
+on his state of mental expectation.
+
+I reply that there is absolutely no need to go as far as this. In
+admitting suggestion as a _vera causa_ of hypnosis, we are recognising a
+cause which, if we really try to grasp it, resolves itself into
+_subliminal operation, brought about we know not how_. So far,
+therefore, from negativing and excluding any obscure and perhaps
+supernormal agency, the suggestion theory leaves the way for any such
+agency broadly open. Some unknown cause or other must determine whether
+each suggestion is to "take" or no; and that unknown cause must
+presumably act somehow upon the subliminal self. We should have
+something like a real explanation of suggestion, if we could show that a
+suggestion's success or failure was linked with some telepathic impact
+from the suggester's mind, or with some mesmeric effluence from his
+person.
+
+I know well that in many cases we can establish no link of this kind. In
+Bernheim's rapid hospital practice there seems no opportunity to bring
+the hypnotist's will, or the hypnotiser's organism, into any effective
+_rapport_ with the subject. Rather, the subject seems to do all that is
+wanted for himself almost instantaneously. He often falls into the
+suggested slumber almost before the word "_Dormez!_" has left the
+physician's mouth. But on the other hand, this is by no means the only
+type of hypnotic success. Just as in the mesmeric days, so also now
+there are continual instances where much more than the mere command has
+been needed for effective hypnotisation. Persistence, proximity,
+passes--all these prove needful still in the practice even of physicians
+who place no faith at all in the old mesmeric theory.
+
+The fact is, that since the days of those old controversies between
+mesmerists proper and hypnotists proper, the conditions of the
+controversy have greatly changed. The supposed mesmeric effluence was
+then treated as an entirely isolated, yet an entirely physiological
+phenomenon. There was supposed to be a kind of radiation or infection
+passing from one nervous system to another. It was of this that Cuvier
+(for instance) was convinced; it was this theory which Elliotson
+defended in the _Zoist_ with a wealth of illustration and argument to
+which little justice has even yet been done. Yet it was hard to prove
+_effluence_ as opposed to _suggestion_, because where there was
+proximity enough for effluence to be effective there was also proximity
+enough for suggestion to be possible. Only in some few
+circumstances,--such as Esdaile's mesmerisation of a blind man over a
+wall,[93]--was it possible to claim that the mesmeric trance had been
+induced without any suspicion whatever on the subject's part that the
+mesmerist was trying to entrance him.
+
+Since those days, however, the evidence for _telepathy_--for psychical
+influence from a distance--has grown to goodly proportions. A new form
+of experiment has been found possible, from which the influence of
+suggestion can be entirely excluded. It has now, as I shall presently
+try to show, been actually proved that the hypnotic trance can be
+induced from a distance so great, and with precautions so complete, that
+telepathy or some similar supernormal influence is the only efficient
+cause which can be conceived.
+
+I subjoin one of a series of experiments in this "telepathic hypnotism."
+(See Appendix V. C.) These experiments are not easy to manage, since it
+is essential at once to prevent the subject from suspecting that the
+experiment is being tried, and also to provide for his safety in the
+event of its success. In Dr. Gibert's experiment, for instance, it was a
+responsible matter to bring this elderly woman in her dream-like state
+through the streets of Havre. It was needful to provide her with an
+unnoticed escort; and, in fact, several persons had to devote themselves
+for some hours to a single experiment.
+
+I have cited first this experiment at a distance, without attempting to
+analyse the nature of the suggestion given or power employed by the
+hypnotist. Of course it is plain that if one can thus influence
+unexpectant persons from a distance there must be sometimes some kind of
+power actually exercised by the hypnotiser;--something beyond the mere
+tact and impressiveness of address, which is all that Bernheim and his
+followers admit or claim. Evidence of this has been afforded by the
+occasional production of organic and other effects in hypnotised
+subjects by the unuttered will of the operator when near them. The
+ingenious experiments of Gurney[94] in the production of local rigidity
+and anćsthesia were undertaken to test whether the agency employed were
+more in the nature of an effort of will or,--as the early mesmerists
+claimed,--of an emission of actual "mesmeric fluid" or physical
+effluence of some sort. Gurney was inclined to think that his results
+could not be explained solely by mental suggestion or telepathy, because
+the physical proximity of the operator's hand seemed necessary to
+produce them, and he thought it probable that they were due to a direct
+nervous influence, exercised through the hand of the operator, but not
+perceptible through the ordinary sensory channels. Mrs. Sidgwick's
+experiments[95] of the same kind, however, in which success was obtained
+when the operator was standing with folded arms several feet away from
+the subject, removed Gurney's main objection to the telepathic
+explanation. The fact that a thick sheet of glass over the subject's
+hands did not interfere with the results also afforded some presumption
+against the hypothesis of a physical influence; and Mrs. Sidgwick
+pointed out that the delicate discrimination involved in the specific
+limitations of the effects is much more easily attributable to mental
+suggestion, through the action of the operator's mind on that of the
+subject, than to any direct physical influence on the latter's nerves.
+
+It is, however, in my view, by no means improbable that effluences, as
+yet unknown to science, but perceptible by sensitive persons as the
+telepathic impulse is perceptible, should radiate from living human
+organisms. I see no reason to assume that the varied and concordant
+statements made by patients in the _Zoist_ and early mesmeric works
+merely reflect subjective fancies. I have myself performed and witnessed
+experiments on intelligent persons expressly designed to test whether or
+no the sensation following the hand was a mere fancy. It seems to me
+hardly likely that persons who have never experienced other purely
+subjective sensations, and who are expressly alive to the question here
+at issue, should nevertheless again and again feel the classical
+tingling, etc., along the track of the hypnotiser's passes without any
+real external cause. To assume that all which they feel is a mere result
+of suggestion, may be a premature attempt at simplifying modes of
+supernormal communication which, in fact, are probably not simpler but
+more complex than any idea which we have as yet formed of them.
+
+And here at last we arrive at what is in reality the most interesting
+group of inquiries connected with the hypnotic trance.
+
+We have just seen that the subliminal state of the hypnotised subject
+may be approached by ways subtler than mere verbal suggestion--by
+telepathic impacts and perhaps by some effluence of kindred supernormal
+type. We have now to trace the supernormal elements in the hypnotic
+_response_. Whether those elements are most readily excited by a
+directly subliminal appeal, or whether they depend mainly on the special
+powers innate in the hypnotised person, we can as yet but imperfectly
+guess. We can be pretty sure, at any rate, that they are not often
+evoked in answer to any rapid and, so to say, perfunctory hypnotic
+suggestion; they do not spring up in miscellaneous hospital practice;
+they need an education and a development which is hardly bestowed on
+one hypnotised subject in a hundred. The first stage of this response
+lies in a subliminal relation established between the subject and his
+hypnotiser, and manifesting itself in what is called _rapport_, or in
+_community of sensation_. The earlier stages of _rapport_--conditions
+when the subject apparently bears or feels the hypnotiser only, and so
+forth--arise probably from mere self-suggestion or from the suggestions
+of the operator, causing the conscious attention of the subject to be
+exclusively directed to him. Indications of the possible development of
+a real link between the two persons may rather be found in the cases
+where there is provable community of sensation,--the hypnotised subject
+tasting or feeling what the hypnotiser (unknown to the subject) does
+actually at that moment taste or feel.
+
+We have thus brought the hypnotised subject up to the point of knowing
+supernormally, at any rate, the superficial sensations of his
+hypnotiser. From that starting-point,--or, at any rate, from some
+supernormal perception of narrow range,--his cognition widens and
+deepens. He may seem to discern some picture of the past, and may
+retrace the history of some object which he holds in his hand, or he may
+seem to wander in spirit over the habitable globe, and to bring back
+knowledge of present facts discernible by no other means. Perhaps he
+seems to behold the future, predicting oftenest the organic history of
+some person near him; but sometimes discerning, as it were pictorially,
+scattered events to which we can guess at no attainable due. For all
+this there is already more of positive evidence than is generally
+realised; nor (I must repeat) is there any _negative_ evidence which
+might lead us to doubt that further care in developing hypnotic subjects
+may not at any moment be rewarded in the same way. We have here, in
+fact, a successful branch of investigation which has of late years been
+practically dropped from mere inattention to what has been done
+already,--mere diversion of effort to the easier and more practical
+triumphs of suggestive therapeutics.[96]
+
+The next group of cases to which I pass relate chiefly to knowledge of
+present facts. I may first refer to some experiments in
+thought-transference with hypnotised persons[97] analogous to the
+experiments with persons in a normal condition recorded in my next
+chapter. Here the subject seems simply to become aware telepathically
+of the thoughts of his hypnotiser, the hypnotic condition perhaps
+facilitating the transfer of the impression. Next come the cases of what
+used to be called "travelling clairvoyance" in the hypnotic state. These
+are more like the partially retrocognitive cases in that they cannot be
+traced with certainty to the contemporary thoughts of any particular
+person. In travelling clairvoyance we seem to have a development of
+"invasive dreams,"--of those visions of the night in which the sleeper
+seems to visit distant scenes and to bring back intelligence otherwise
+unattainable. These distant hypnotic visions seem to develop out of
+thought-transference; thus the subject may discern an imaginary picture
+as it is conceived in the hypnotiser's mind. Thence he may pass on and
+discern a true contemporaneous scene,[98] unknown to any one present,
+and in some few cases there is an element of apparent prevision in the
+impression.[99]
+
+Our survey of that important, though inchoate, appeal to the subliminal
+self which passes under the name of hypnotism is now nearly as
+complete--in its brief sketchy form--as the present state of knowledge
+permits.
+
+I have attempted to trace the inevitable _rise_ of hypnotism--its
+necessary development out of the spontaneous phenomena which preceded
+and which might so naturally have suggested it. I have shown,
+nevertheless, its almost accidental initiation, and then its rapid
+development in ways which no single experimenter has ever been able to
+correlate or to foresee. I am bound to say something further as to its
+prospect in the future. A systematic appeal to the deeper powers in
+man--conceived with the generality with which I have here conceived
+it--cannot remain a mere appanage of medical practice. It must be fitted
+on in some way to the whole serious life of man; it must present itself
+to him as a development of faiths and instincts which lie already deep
+in his heart. In other words, there must needs be some _scheme of
+self-suggestion_,--some general theory which can give the individual a
+basis for his appeal, whether he regards that appeal as directed to an
+intelligence outside himself or to his own inherent faculties and
+informing soul. These helps to the power of generalisation--to the
+feeling of confidence--we must consider now.
+
+The schemes of self-suggestion which have actually been found effective
+have covered, not unnaturally, a range as wide as all the superstition
+and all the religion of men. That is to say that each form of
+supernatural belief in turn has been utilised as a means of securing
+that urgently-needed temporal blessing--relief from physical pain. We
+see the same tendency running through fetichistic, polytheistic,
+monotheistic forms of belief. Beginning with fetichistic peoples, we
+observe that _charms_ of various kinds,--inert objects, arbitrary
+gestures, meaningless words,--have probably been actually the most
+general means which our race has employed for the cure of disease. We
+know how long some forms of primitive belief persisted in medicine,--as,
+for example, the doctrine of _likenesses_, or the cure of a disease by
+some object supposed to resemble its leading symptom. What is, however,
+even more remarkable is the efficacy which charms still continue in some
+cases to possess, even when they are worn merely as an experiment in
+self-suggestion by a person who is perfectly well aware of their
+intrinsic futility. Experiments on this subject seem to show that the
+mere continual contact of some small unfamiliar object will often act as
+a reminder to the subliminal self, and keep, at any rate, some nervous
+disturbances in check. Until one reads these modern examples, one can
+hardly realise how veritably potent for good may have been the savage
+amulet, the savage incantation.
+
+The transition from fetichistic to polytheistic conceptions of cure is,
+of course, a gradual one. It may be said to begin when curative
+properties are ascribed to objects not arbitrarily, nor on account of
+the _look_ of the objects themselves, but on account of their having
+been blessed or handled by some divine or semi-divine personage, or
+having formed part of his body or surroundings during some incarnation.
+Thus Lourdes water, bottled and exported, is still held to possess
+curative virtue on account of the Virgin's original blessing bestowed
+upon the Lourdes spring. But generally the influence of the divine or
+divinised being is more directly exercised, as in oracles, dreams,
+invisible touches, or actual _theophanies_, or appearances of the gods
+to the adoring patient. It will be seen as we proceed how amply the
+tradition of Lourdes has incorporated these ancient aids to faith.
+
+But at this point our modern experience suggests to us a remarkable
+interpolation in the antique chain of ideas. It is now alleged that
+departed persons need not exert influence through their dead bones
+alone, nor yet only by their supposed intermediacy with higher powers.
+There intervenes, in fact, the whole topic of _spirit-healing_,--which
+cannot, however, be treated fully here.
+
+Next in the ascending scale from polytheism to monotheism we come to the
+"Miracles of Lourdes," to which I have just alluded, where the supposed
+healer is the Virgin Mary, reverenced as semi-divine. This form of
+belief, however, retains (as has been said) some affinity with
+fetichism, since the actual _water_ from the Lourdes spring, supposed to
+have been blessed by the Virgin, is an important factor in the
+cures.[100]
+
+Much further removed from primitive belief is the appeal made by
+Christian scientists to the aid of Jesus Christ;--either as directly
+answering prayer, or as enabling the worshippers to comprehend the
+infinite love on which the universe is based, and in face of which pain
+and sickness become a vain imagination or even a sheer nonentity. To the
+readers of this chapter, however, there will be nothing surprising in my
+own inclination to include all these efforts at health under the general
+category of schemes of self-suggestion.
+
+In my view they are but crude attempts at a practical realisation of the
+essential truth that it is possible by a right disposition of our own
+minds to draw energy from an environing world of spiritual life.
+
+It seems, at least, that no real explanation of hypnotic vitalisation
+can, in fact, be given except upon the general theory supported in this
+work--the theory that a world of spiritual life exists, an environment
+profounder than those environments of matter and ether which in a sense
+we know. Let us look at this hypothesis a little more closely. When we
+say that an organism exists in a certain environment, we mean that its
+energy, or some part thereof, forms an element in a certain system of
+cosmic forces, which represents some special modification of the
+ultimate energy. The life of the organism consists in its power of
+interchanging energy with its environment,--of appropriating by its own
+action some fragment of that pre-existent and limitless Power. We human
+beings exist in the first place in a world of matter, whence we draw the
+obvious sustenance of our bodily functions.
+
+We exist also in a world of ether;--that is to say, we are constructed
+to respond to a system of laws,--ultimately continuous, no doubt, with
+the laws of matter, but affording a new, a generalised, a profounder
+conception of the Cosmos. So widely different, indeed, is this new
+aspect of things from the old, that it is common to speak of the ether
+as a newly-known environment. On this environment our organic existence
+depends as absolutely as on the material environment, although less
+obviously. In ways which we cannot fathom, the ether is at the
+foundation of our physical being. Perceiving heat, light, electricity,
+we do but recognise in certain conspicuous ways,--as in perceiving the
+"X rays" we recognise in a way less conspicuous,--the pervading
+influence of etherial vibrations which in range and variety far
+transcend our capacity of response.
+
+Within, beyond, the world of ether,--as a still profounder, still more
+generalised aspect of the Cosmos,--must lie, as I believe, the world of
+spiritual life. That the world of spiritual life does not depend upon
+the existence of the material world I hold as now proved by actual
+evidence. That it is in some way continuous with the world of ether I
+can well suppose. But for our minds there must needs be a "critical
+point" in any such imagined continuity; so that the world where life and
+thought are carried on apart from matter, must certainly rank again as a
+new, a _metetherial_ environment. In giving it this name I expressly
+imply only that from our human point of view it lies after or beyond the
+ether, as metaphysic lies after or beyond physics. I say only that what
+does not originate in matter or in ether originates _there_; but I well
+believe that beyond the ether there must be not one stage only, but
+countless stages in the infinity of things.
+
+On this hypothesis there will be an essential concordance between all
+views--spiritual or materialistic--which ascribe to any direction of
+attention or will any practical effect upon the human organism. "The
+prayer of faith shall save the sick," says St. James. "There is nothing
+in hypnotism but suggestion," says Bernheim. In my clumsier language
+these two statements (setting aside a possible telepathic element in St.
+James' words) will be expressible in identical terms. "There will be
+effective therapeutical or ethical self-suggestion whenever by any
+artifice subliminal attention to a bodily function or to a moral purpose
+is carried to some unknown pitch of intensity which draws energy from
+the metetherial world."
+
+A great practical question remains, to which St. James' words supply a
+direct, though perhaps an inadequate answer, while Bernheim's words
+supply no answer at all.
+
+What is this saving faith to be, and how is it to be attained? Can we
+find any sure way of touching the spring which moves us so potently, at
+once from without and from within? Can we propose any form of
+self-suggestion effective for all the human race? any controlling
+thought on which all alike can fix that long-sought mountain-moving
+faith?
+
+Assuredly no man can extemporise such a faith as this. Whatever form it
+may ultimately take, it must begin as the purification, the
+intensification, of the purest, the intensest beliefs to which human
+minds have yet attained. It must invoke the whole strength of all
+philosophies, of all religions;--not indeed the special arguments or
+evidence adduced for each, which lie outside my present theme, but all
+the spiritual energy by which in truth they live. And so far as this
+purpose goes, of drawing strength from the unseen, if one faith is true,
+all faiths are true; in so far at least as human mind can grasp or human
+prayer appropriate the unknown metetherial energy, the inscrutable Grace
+of God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SENSORY AUTOMATISM
+
+     [Greek: Blepomen gar arti di' esuptrou en ainigmati.]
+
+
+Each of the several lines of inquiry pursued in the foregoing chapters
+has brought indications of something transcending sensory experience in
+the reserves of human faculty; and we have come to a point where we need
+some further colligating generalisation--some conception under which
+these scattered phenomena may be gathered in their true kinship.
+
+Some steps at least towards such a generalisation the evidence to be
+presented in these next chapters may allow us to take. Considering
+together, under the heading of sensory and motor _automatism_, the whole
+range of that subliminal action of which we have as yet discussed
+fragments only, we shall gradually come to see that its distinctive
+faculty of telepathy or telćsthesia is in fact an introduction into a
+realm where the limitations of organic life can no longer be assumed to
+persist. Considering, again, the evidence which shows that that portion
+of the personality which exercises these powers during our earthly
+existence does actually continue to exercise them after our bodily
+decay, _we shall recognise a relation--obscure but indisputable--between
+the subliminal and the surviving self_.
+
+I begin, then, with my definition of _automatism_, as the widest term
+under which to include the range of subliminal emergences into ordinary
+life. The turbulent uprush and downdraught of hysteria; the helpful
+uprushes of genius, co-operating with supraliminal thought; the profound
+and recuperative changes which follow on hypnotic suggestion; these have
+been described under their separate headings. But the main mass of
+subliminal manifestations remains undescribed. I have dealt little with
+veridical hallucinations, not at all with automatic writing, nor with
+the utterances of spontaneous trance. The products of inner vision or
+inner audition externalised into quasi-percepts,--these form what I term
+_sensory automatisms_. The messages conveyed by movement of limbs or
+hand or tongue, initiated by an inner motor impulse beyond the
+conscious will--these are what I term _motor automatisms_. And I claim
+that when all these are surveyed together their essential analogy will
+be recognised beneath much diversity of form. They will be seen to be
+_messages_ from the subliminal to the supraliminal self;
+endeavours--conscious or unconscious--of submerged tracts of our
+personality to present to ordinary waking thought fragments of a
+knowledge which no ordinary waking thought could attain.
+
+I regard supraliminal life merely as a _privileged case_ of personality;
+a special phase of our personality, which is easiest for us to study,
+because it is simplified for us by our ready consciousness of what is
+going on in it; yet which is by no means necessarily either central or
+prepotent, could we see our whole being in comprehensive view.
+
+Now if we thus regard the whole supraliminal personality as a special
+case of something much more extensive, it follows that we must similarly
+regard all human faculty, and each sense severally, as mere special or
+privileged cases of some more general power.
+
+All human terrene faculty will be in this view simply a selection from
+faculty existing in the metetherial world; such part of that antecedent,
+even if not individualised, faculty as may be expressible through each
+several human organism.
+
+Each of our special senses, therefore, may be conceived as straining
+towards development of a wider kind than earthly experience has as yet
+allowed. And each special sense is both an internal and an external
+sense; involves a tract of the brain, of unknown capacity, as well as an
+end-organ, whose capacity is more nearly measurable. The relation of
+this internal, mental, mind's-eye vision to non-sensory psychological
+perception on the one hand, and to ocular vision on the other hand, is
+exactly one of the points on which some profounder observation will be
+seen to be necessary. One must at least speak of "mind's eye" perception
+in these sensory terms, if one is to discuss it at all.
+
+But ordinary experience at any rate assumes that the end-organ alone can
+acquire fresh information, and that the central tract can but combine
+this new information already sent in to it. This must plainly be the
+case, for instance, with optical or acoustic knowledge;--with such
+knowledge as is borne on waves of ether or of air, and is caught by a
+terminal apparatus, evolved for the purpose. But observe that it is by
+no means necessary that all seeing and all hearing should be through eye
+or ear.
+
+The vision of our dreams--to keep to vision alone for greater
+simplicity--is non-optical vision. It is usually generated in the
+central brain, not sent up thither from an excited retina. Optical laws
+can only by a stretch of terms be said to apply to it at all.
+
+Let us attempt some rough conspectus, which may show something of the
+relation in which central and peripheral vision stand to each other.
+
+We start from a region below the specialisation of visual faculty. The
+study of the successive dermal and nervous modifications which have led
+up to that faculty belongs to Biology, and all that our argument needs
+here is to point out that the very fact that this faculty has been
+developed in a germ, animated by metetherial life, indicates that some
+perceptivity from which sight could take its origin pre-existed in the
+originating, the unseen world. We know vaguely how vision differentiated
+itself peripherally, with the growing sensibility of the pigment-spot to
+light and shadow. But there must have been a cerebral differentiation
+also, and also a psychological differentiation, namely, a gradual
+shaping of a distinct feeling from obscure feelings, whose history we
+cannot recover.
+
+Yet I believe that we have still persistent in our brain-structure some
+dim vestige of the transition from that early undifferentiated
+continuous sensitivity to our existing specialisation of sense. Probably
+in all of us, though in some men much more distinctly than in others,
+there exist certain _synćsthesić_ or concomitances of sense-impression,
+which are at any rate not dependent on any recognisable link of
+association.[101] My present point is that such synćsthesić stand on the
+dividing line between percepts externally and internally originated.
+These irradiations of sensitivity, sometimes apparently congenital,
+cannot, on the one hand, be called a purely mental phenomenon. Nor again
+can they be definitely classed under external vision; since they do
+sometimes follow upon a mental process of association. It seems safer to
+term them _entencephalic_, on the analogy of _entoptic_, since they seem
+to be due to something in brain-structure, much as entoptic percepts are
+due to something in the structure of the eye.
+
+I will, then, start with the synćsthesić as the most generalised form of
+inward perception, and will pass on to other classes which approach more
+nearly to ordinary external vision.
+
+From these entencephalic photisms we seem to proceed by an easy
+transition to the most inward form of unmistakable entoptic
+vision--which is therefore the most inward form of all external
+vision--the flash of light consequent on electrisation of the optic
+nerve. Next on our outward road we may place the phosphenes caused by
+pressure on the optic nerve or irritation of the retina. Next Purkinje's
+figures, or shadows cast by the blood-vessels of the middle layer upon
+the bacillary layer of the retina. Then _muscć volitantes_, or shadows
+cast by motes in the vitreous humour upon the fibrous layer of the
+retina.
+
+Midway, again, between entoptic and ordinary external vision we may
+place _after-images_; which, although themselves perceptible with shut
+eyes, presuppose a previous retinal stimulation from without;--forming,
+in fact, the entoptic sequelć of ordinary external vision.
+
+Next comes our ordinary vision of the external world--and this, again,
+is pushed to its highest degree of externality by the employment of
+artificial aids to sight. He who gazes through a telescope at the stars
+has mechanically improved his end-organs to the furthest point now
+possible to man.
+
+And now, standing once more upon our watershed of entencephalic vision,
+let us trace the advancing capacities of internal vision. The forms of
+vision now to be considered are virtually independent of the eye; they
+can persist, that is to say, after the destruction of the eye, if only
+the eye has worked for a few years, so as to give visual education to
+the brain. We do not, in fact, fully know the limits of this
+independence, which can only be learnt by a fuller examination of
+intelligent blind persons than has yet been made. Nor can we say with
+certainty how far in a seeing person the eye is in its turn influenced
+by the brain. I shall avoid postulating any "retropulsive current" from
+brain to retina, just as I have avoided any expression more specific
+than "the brain" to indicate the primary seat of sight. The arrangement
+here presented, as already explained, is a psychological one, and can
+be set forth without trespassing on controverted physiological ground.
+
+We may take _memory-images_ as the simplest type of internal vision.
+These images, as commonly understood, introduce us to no fresh
+knowledge; they preserve the knowledge gained by conscious gaze upon the
+outer world. In their simplest spontaneous form they are the _cerebral_
+sequelć of external vision, just as after-images are its _entoptic_
+sequelć. These two classes of vision have been sometimes confounded,
+although the distinction is a marked one. Into the cerebral storage of
+impressions one element habitually enters which is totally absent from
+the mere retinal storage, namely, a psychical element--a rearrangement
+or generalisation of the impressions retinally received.
+
+Next we come to a common class of memory-images, in which the subliminal
+rearrangement is particularly marked. I speak of _dreams_--which lead us
+on in two directions from memory-images; in the direction of
+_imagination-images_, and in the direction of _hallucinations_. Certain
+individual dreams, indeed, of rare types point also in other directions
+which later on we shall have to follow. But dreams as a class consist of
+confused memory-images, reaching a kind of low hallucinatory intensity,
+a glow, so to say, sufficient to be perceptible in darkness.
+
+I will give the name of _imagination-images_ to those conscious
+recombinations of our store of visual imagery which we compose either
+for our mere enjoyment, as "waking dreams," or as artifices to help us
+to the better understanding of facts of nature confusedly discerned.
+Such, for instance, are imagined geometrical diagrams; and Watt, lying
+in bed in a dark room and conceiving the steam-engine, illustrates the
+utmost limit to which voluntary internal visualisation can go.
+
+Here at any rate the commonly admitted category of stages of inward
+vision will close. Thus far and no farther the brain's capacity for
+presenting visual images can be pushed on under the guidance of the
+conscious will of man. It is now my business to show, on the contrary,
+that we have here reached a mere intermediate point in the development
+of _internal_ vision. These imagination-images, valuable as they are,
+are merely attempts to control supraliminally a form of vision which--as
+spontaneous memory-images have already shown us--is predominantly
+subliminal. The memory-images welled up from a just-submerged stratum;
+we must now consider what other images also well upward from the same
+hidden source.
+
+To begin with, it is by no means certain that some of Watt's images of
+steam-engines did not well up from that source,--did not emerge
+ready-made into the supraliminal mind while it rested in that merely
+_expectant_ state which forms generally a great part of invention. We
+have seen in Chapter III. that there is reason to believe in such a
+conveyance in the much inferior mental processes of calculating boys,
+etc., and also in the mental processes of the painter. In short, without
+pretending to judge of the proportion of voluntary to involuntary
+imagery in each several creative mind, we must undoubtedly rank the
+spontaneously emergent visual images of genius as a further stage of
+internal vision.
+
+And now we have reached, by a triple road, the verge of a most important
+development of inward vision--namely, that vast range of phenomena which
+we call _hallucination_. Each of our last three classes had led up to
+hallucination in a different way. _Dreams_ actually _are_
+hallucinations; but they are usually hallucinations of low intensity;
+and are only rarely capable of maintaining themselves for a few seconds
+(as hypnopompic illusions) when the dreamer wakes to the stimuli of the
+material world. _Imagination-images_ may be carried to a hallucinatory
+pitch by good visualisers.[102] And the _inspirations of
+genius_--Raphael's San Sisto is the classical instance--may present
+themselves in hallucinatory vividness to the astonished artist.
+
+A hallucination, one may say boldly, is in fact a _hyperćsthesia_; and
+generally a _central_ hyperćsthesia. That is to say, the hallucination
+is in some cases due indirectly to peripheral stimulation; but often
+also it is the result of a stimulus to "mind's-eye vision," which sweeps
+the idea onwards into visual form, regardless of ordinary checks.
+
+Here, then, is a comprehensive and reasonable way of regarding these
+multifarious hallucinations or sensory automatisms. They are phenomena
+which must neither be feared nor ignored, but rather controlled and
+interpreted. Nor will that interpretation be an easy matter. The
+interpretation of the symbols by which the retina represents the
+external world has been, whether for the race or for the individual, no
+short or simple process. Yet ocular vision is in my view a simple, easy,
+privileged case of vision generally; and the symbols which represent our
+internal percepts of an immaterial world are likely to be far more
+complex than any impressions from the material world on the retina.
+
+All inward visions are like symbols abridged from a picture-alphabet. In
+order to understand any one class of hallucinations we ought to have all
+classes before us. At the lower limit of the series, indeed, the
+analysis of the physician should precede that of the psychologist. We
+already know to some extent, and may hope soon to know more accurately,
+what sensory disturbance corresponds to what nervous lesion. Yet these
+violent disturbances of inward perception--the snakes of the drunkard,
+the scarlet fire of the epileptic, the jeering voices of the
+paranoiac--these are perhaps of too gross a kind to afford more than a
+kind of neurological introduction to the subtler points which arise when
+hallucination is unaccompanied by any observable defect or malady.
+
+It is, indeed, obvious enough that the more idiognomonic the
+hallucination is, the more isolated from any other disturbance of
+normality, the greater will be its psychological interest. _An
+apparently spontaneous modification of central percepts_--what
+phenomenon could promise to take us deeper into the mystery of the mind?
+
+Yet until quite recently--until, in short, Edmund Gurney took up the
+inquiry in 1882--this wide, important subject was treated, even in
+serious text-books, in a superficial and perfunctory way. Few statistics
+were collected; hardly anything was really known; rather there was a
+facile assumption that all hallucinations or sensory automatisms _must_
+somehow be due to physical malady, even when there was no evidence
+whatever for such a connection. I must refer my readers to Gurney's
+résumé in his chapter on "Hallucinations" in _Phantasms of the Living_,
+if they would realise the gradual confused fashion in which men's minds
+had been prepared for the wider view soon to be opened, largely by
+Gurney's own statistical and analytical work. The wide collection of
+first-hand experiences of sensory automatisms of every kind which he
+initiated, and which the S.P.R. "Census of Hallucinations" continued
+after his death, has for the first time made it possible to treat these
+phenomena with some surety of hand.[103]
+
+The results of these inquiries show that a great number of sensory
+automatisms occur among sane and healthy persons, and that for many of
+these we can at present offer no explanation whatever. For some of them,
+however, we can offer a kind of explanation, or at least an indication
+of a probable determining cause, whose mode of working remains wholly
+obscure.
+
+Thus, in some few instances, although there is no disturbance of health,
+there seems to be a predisposition to the externalisation of figures or
+sounds. Since this in no way interferes with comfort, we must simply
+class it as an idiosyncratic central hyperćsthesia--much like the
+tendency to extremely vivid dreams, which by no means always implies a
+poor quality of sleep.
+
+In a few instances, again, we can trace moral predisposing
+causes--expectation, grief, anxiety.
+
+These causes, however, turn out to be much less often effective than
+might have been expected from the popular readiness to invoke them. In
+two ways especially the weakness of this predisposing cause is impressed
+upon us. In the first place, the bulk of our percipients experience
+their hallucinations at ordinary unexciting moments; traversing their
+more anxious crises without any such phenomenon. In the second place,
+those of our percipients whose hallucination is in fact more or less
+coincident with some distressing external event, seldom seem to have
+been predisposed to the hallucination by a knowledge of the event. For
+the event was generally unknown to them when the corresponding
+hallucination occurred.
+
+This last remark, it will be seen, introduces us to the most interesting
+and important group of percipients and of percepts; the percipients
+whose gift constitutes a fresh faculty rather than a degeneration; the
+percepts which are _veridical_--which are (as we shall see cause to
+infer) in some way generated by some event outside the percipient's
+mind, so that their correspondence with that event conveys some new
+fact, in however obscure a form. It is this group, of course, which
+gives high importance to the whole inquiry; which makes the study of
+inward vision no mere curiosity, but rather the opening of an inlet into
+forms of knowledge to which we can assign no bound.
+
+Now these telepathic hallucinations will introduce us to very varying
+forms of inward vision. It will be well to begin their study by
+recalling and somewhat expanding the thesis already advanced: that man's
+_ocular_ vision is but a special or privileged case of visual power, of
+which power his _inner_ vision affords a more extensive example.
+
+Ocular vision is the perception of material objects, in accordance with
+optical laws, from a definite point in space. Our review of
+hallucinations has already removed two of these limitations. If I see a
+hallucinatory figure--and figures seen in _dreams_ come under this
+category--I see something which is not a material object, and I see it
+in a manner not determined by optical laws. A dream-figure may indeed
+seem to _conform_ to optical laws; but that will be the result of
+self-suggestion, or of organised memories, and will vary according to
+the dreamer's visualising power. While a portrait-painter may see a face
+in dream which he can paint from memory when he wakes, the ordinary
+man's dream-percept will be vague, shifting, and unrememberable.
+
+Similarly, if I see a subjective hallucinatory figure "out in the room,"
+its aspect is not _determined_ by optical laws (it may even seem to
+stand _behind_ the observer, or otherwise _outside_ his visual field),
+but it will more or less _conform_--by my mere self-suggestion, if by
+nothing else--to optical laws; and, moreover, it will still seem to be
+seen from a fixed point in space, namely, from the stationary observer's
+eyes or brain.
+
+All this seems fairly plain, so long as we are admittedly dealing with
+hallucinatory figures whose origin must be in the percipient's own mind.
+But so soon as we come to quasi-percepts which we believe to exist or to
+originate somewhere outside the percipient's mind, our difficulties come
+thick and fast.
+
+If there be some external origin for our inward vision (which thereby
+becomes _veridical_) we must not any longer assume that all veridical
+inward vision starts or is exercised from the same point. If it gets
+hold of _facts_ (veridical impressions or pictures, not mere subjective
+fancies), we cannot be sure _a priori_ whether it somehow goes to find
+the facts, or the facts come to find it. Again, we cannot any longer
+take for granted that it will be cognisant only of phantasmal or
+immaterial percepts. If it can get at phantasmal percepts outside the
+organism, may it not get at _material_ percepts also? May it not see
+distant houses, as well as the images of distant souls?
+
+Hazardous as these speculations may seem, they nevertheless represent an
+attempt to get our notions of supersensory things as near down to our
+notions of sensory things as we fairly can. Whatever may be our ultimate
+conception of an ideal world, we must not for the present attempt to
+start from any standpoint too far removed from the temporal and spatial
+existence which alone we know.
+
+As telepathy is a conception intermediate between the apparent isolation
+of minds here communicating only as a rule through material organs, and
+the ultimate conception of the unity of all mind, so the conception
+which I am about to propose, of a recognition of space without our
+concomitant subjection to laws of matter, is strictly intermediate
+between man's incarnate condition and the condition which we may imagine
+him ultimately to attain. We cannot possibly infer _a priori_ that all
+recognition of space must needs disappear with the disappearance of the
+particular bodily sensations by means of which our conception of space
+has been developed. But we can imagine that a spirit should be
+essentially _independent_ of space, and yet capable of recognising it.
+
+Provisionally admitting this view, let us consider what range we are now
+led to assign to inner vision, when it is no longer merely subjective
+but veridical; bringing news to the percipient of actual fact outside
+his own organism.
+
+We infer that it may represent to us (1) material objects; or (2)
+symbols of immaterial things; (3) in ways not necessarily accordant with
+optical laws; and (4) from a point of view not necessarily located
+within the organism, by means of what I have called a _psychical
+excursion_. I will take an illustration from a case which is recorded in
+detail in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 41 [666 C].
+
+A Mrs. Wilmot has a vision of her husband in a cabin in a distant
+steamer. Besides her husband, she sees in the cabin a stranger (who was
+in fact present there), with certain material details. Now here I should
+say that Mrs. Wilmot's inner vision discerned material objects, from a
+point of view outside her own organism. But, on the other hand, although
+the perception came to her in visual terms, I do not suppose that it was
+really _optical_, that it came through the eye.
+
+Mrs. Wilmot might believe, say, that her husband's head concealed from
+her some part of the berth in which he lay; but this would not mean a
+real optical concealment, but only a special direction of her attention,
+guided by preconceived notions of what would be optically visible from a
+given point.
+
+As we proceed further we shall see, I think, in many ways how needful is
+this _excursive_ theory to explain _many_ telepathic and _all_
+telćsthetic experiences; _many_, I mean, of the cases where two minds
+are in communication, and _all_ the cases where the percipient learns
+material facts (as words in a closed book, etc.) with which no other
+known mind is concerned.
+
+Another most important corollary of this excursive theory must just be
+mentioned here. If there be spiritual excursion to a particular point of
+space, it is conceivable that this should involve not only the migrant
+spirit's perception _from_ that point, but also perception of that point
+by persons materially present near it. That point may become a
+_phantasmogenetic centre_, as well as a centre of outlook. In plain
+words, if A has spiritually invaded B's room, and there sees B, B on his
+part may see A symbolically standing there; and C and D if present may
+see A as well.
+
+This hint, here thrown out as an additional argument for the excursive
+theory, will fall to be developed later on. For the present we must
+confine our attention to our immediate subject: the range of man's inner
+vision, and the means which he must take to understand, to foster, and
+to control it.
+
+The first and simplest step in the control of inner vision is the
+repression by hypnotic suggestion of degenerative hallucinations. It is
+a noteworthy fact that such of these as are at all curable are much more
+often curable by hypnotism than in any other way.
+
+The next step is one to which, as the reader of my chapter on hypnotism
+already knows, I attribute an importance much greater than is generally
+accorded to it. I refer to the hypnotiser's power not only of
+controlling but of _inducing_ hallucinations in his subject.
+
+As I have already said, the evocation of hallucinations is commonly
+spoken of as a mere example of the subject's _obedience_ to the
+hypnotiser. "I tell my subject to raise his arm, and he raises it; I
+tell him to see a tiger in the room, and he sees one accordingly." But
+manifestly these two incidents are not on the same level, and only
+appear to be so through a certain laxity of language. The usage of
+speech allows me to say, "I will make my subject lift his arm," although
+I am of course unable to affect the motor centres in his brain which
+start that motion. But it is so easy for a man to lift his arm that my
+speech takes that familiar power for granted, and notes, only his
+readiness to lift it when I tell him--the hypnotic complaisance which
+prompts him to obey me if I suggest this trivial action. But when I say,
+"I will make him see a tiger," I take for granted a power on his part
+which is _not_ familiar, which I have no longer a right to assume. For
+under ordinary circumstances my subject simply _cannot_ see a tiger at
+will; nor can I affect the visual centres which might enable him to do
+so. All that I can ask him to do, therefore, is to choose this
+particular way of indicating that in his hypnotic condition he has
+become able to stimulate his central sensory tracts more powerfully than
+ever before.
+
+And not only this. His hallucinations are in most cases elaborate
+products--complex images which must have needed intelligence to fashion
+them--although the process of their fashioning is hidden from our view.
+In this respect they resemble the inspirations of genius. For here we
+find again just what we found in those inspirations--the uprush of a
+complex intellectual product, performed beneath the threshold, and
+projected ready-made into ordinary consciousness. The uprushing stream
+of intelligence, indeed, in the man of genius flowed habitually in
+conformity with the superficial stream. Only rarely does the great
+conception intrude itself upon him with such vigour and such
+untimeliness as to bring confusion and incoherence into his ordinary
+life. But in the case of these induced hallucinations the incongruity
+between the two streams of intelligence is much more marked. When a
+subject, for instance, is trying to keep down some post-hypnotic
+hallucinatory suggestion, one can watch the smooth surface of the
+supraliminal river disturbed by that suggestion as though by jets of
+steam from below, which sometimes merely break in bubbles, but sometimes
+force themselves up bodily through the superficial film.
+
+It is by considering hallucinations in this generalised manner and among
+these analogies, that we can best realise their absence of necessary
+connection with any bodily degeneration or disease. Often, of course,
+they accompany disease; but that is only to say that the central sensory
+tracts, like any other part of the organism, are capable of morbid as
+well as of healthful stimulus. Taken in itself, the mere fact of the
+quasi-externalisation of a centrally initiated image indicates strong
+central stimulation, and absolutely nothing more. There is no
+physiological law whatever which can tell us what degree of vividness
+our central pictures may assume consistently with health--short of the
+point where they get to be so indistinguishable from external
+preceptions that, as in madness, they interfere with the rational
+conduct of life. That point no well-attested case of veridical
+hallucinations, so far as my knowledge goes, has yet approached.
+
+It was, of course, natural that in the study of these phantasms, as
+elsewhere, the therapeutic interest should have preceded the
+psychological, but in the newer practical study of _eugenics_--the study
+which aims at improving the human organism, instead of merely conserving
+it--experimental psychology is indispensable, and one branch of this is
+the experimental study of mental visions.
+
+Let us consider whether, apart from such a rare and startling incident
+as an actual hallucination, there is any previous indication of a habit
+of receiving, or a power of summoning, pictures from a subliminal
+store-house? Any self-suggestion, conscious or unconscious, which places
+before the supraliminal intelligence visual images apparently matured
+elsewhere?
+
+Such indications have not been wanting. In the chapter on Genius, and in
+the chapter on Sleep, we have traced the existence of many classes of
+these pictures; all of them ready, as it would seem, to manifest
+themselves on slight inducement. _Dream-figures_ will rise in any
+momentary blur of consciousness; _inspirations_ will respond to the
+concentrated desire or the mere passing emotion of the man of genius;
+_after-images_ will recur, under unknown conditions, long after the
+original stimulus has been withdrawn; _memory-images_ will surge up into
+our minds with even unwished-for vividness; the brilliant exactness of
+_illusions hypnagogiques_ will astonish us in the revealing transition
+from waking to sleep.
+
+All is prepared, so to say, for some empirical short-cut to a fuller
+control of these subjacent pictures; just as before Mesmer and Puységur
+all was prepared for an empirical short-cut to trance, somnambulism,
+suggestibility.
+
+All that we want is to hit on some simple empirical way of bringing out
+the correlation between all these types of subjacent vision, just as
+mesmerism was a simple empirical way of bringing out the correlation
+between various trances and sleep-waking states.
+
+_Crystal-vision_, then, like hypnotic trance, might have been gradually
+evolved by a series of reasoned experiments, along an unexceptionable
+scientific road.
+
+In reality, of course, this prehistoric practice must have been reached
+in some quite different way. It does not fall within the scope of this
+book to trace the various streams of divination which converge into Dr.
+Dee's magic, and "the attracting of spirits into the ball." But it is
+really to the Elizabethan Dr. Dee--one of the leading _savants_ of his
+time--that the credit must be given of the first systematic attempt to
+describe, analyse, and utilise these externalised pictures.[104]
+
+I will describe briefly the general type of the experiment, and we shall
+see how near we can get to a psychological explanation.
+
+Let the observer gaze, steadily but not fatiguingly, into some speculum,
+or clear depth, so arranged as to return as little reflection as
+possible. A good example of what is meant will be a glass ball enveloped
+in a black shawl, or placed in the back part of a half-opened drawer; so
+arranged, in short, that the observer can gaze into it with as little
+distraction as may be from the reflection of his own face or of
+surrounding objects. After he has tried (say) three or four times, for
+ten minutes or so at a time--preferably in solitude, and in a state of
+mental passivity--he will perhaps begin to see the glass ball or crystal
+_clouding_, or to see some figure or picture apparently _in_ the ball.
+Perhaps one man or woman in twenty will have some slight occasional
+experience of this kind; and perhaps one in twenty of these seers (the
+percentages must as yet be mainly guess-work) will be able by practice
+to develop this faculty of inward vision up to a point where it will
+sometimes convey to him information not attainable by ordinary means.
+
+How comes it, in the first place, that he sees any figure in the crystal
+at all? Common hypnotic experiments supply two obvious answers, each of
+which no doubt explains some part of the phenomena.
+
+In the first place, we know that the hypnotic trance is often induced by
+gazing at some small bright object. This may or may not be a mere effect
+of suggestion; but it certainly sometimes occurs, and the "scryer"
+consequently may be partially hypnotised, and in a state which
+facilitates hallucinations.
+
+In the second place, a hypnotised subject--hypnotised but in a fully
+alert state--can often be caused by suggestion to see (say) a portrait
+upon a blank card; and will continue to see that portrait on that card,
+after the card has been shuffled with others; thus showing that he
+discerns with unusual acuteness such _points de repčre_, or little
+guiding marks, as may exist on the surface of even an apparently blank
+card.
+
+Correspondently with the _first_ of these observations, we find that
+crystal-vision is sometimes accompanied by a state of partial
+hypnotisation, perhaps merging into trance. This has been the case with
+various French hysterical subjects; and not only with them but with that
+exceptionally sound and vigorous observer, Mr. J. G. Keulemans. His
+evidence (in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 516-521) is just what
+one would have expected _a priori_ on such a matter.
+
+Correspondently with the _second_ of the above observations, we find
+that _points de repčre_ do occasionally seem to determine crystal
+visions.
+
+This, again, has been noticed among the French hysterical subjects; and
+not only with them, but with another among our best observers, Mrs.
+Verrall.
+
+These things being so--both these causes being apparently operative
+along the whole series of "scryers," or crystal-gazers, from the most
+unstable to the most scientific--one might be tempted to assume that
+these two clues, if we could follow them far enough, would explain the
+whole group of phenomena. Persons who have not _seen_ the phenomena,
+indeed, can hardly be persuaded to the contrary. But the real fact is,
+as even those who have seen much less of crystal-gazing than I have will
+very well know, that these explanations cannot be stretched to cover a
+quarter--perhaps not even a tenth--of the phenomena which actually
+occur.
+
+Judging both from the testimony of scryers themselves, and from the
+observations of Dr. Hodgson and others (myself included), who have had
+many opportunities of watching them, it is very seldom that the gaze
+into the glass ball induces any hypnotic symptoms whatever. It does not
+induce such symptoms with successful scryers any more than with
+unsuccessful. Furthermore, there is no proof that the gift of
+crystal-vision goes along with hypnotic sensibility. The most that one
+can say is that the gift often goes along with _telepathic_ sensibility;
+but although telepathic sensibility may sometimes be quickened by
+hypnotism, we have no proof that those two forms of sensitiveness
+habitually go together.
+
+The ordinary attitude of the scryer, I repeat, is one of complete
+detachment; an interested and often puzzled scrutiny and analysis of the
+figures which display themselves in swift or slow succession in the
+crystal ball.
+
+This last sentence applies to the theory of _points de repčre_ as well.
+As a general rule, the crystal vision, however meaningless and
+fantastic, is a thing which changes and develops somewhat as a dream
+does; following, it may be, some trivial chain of associations, but not
+maintaining, any more than a dream maintains, any continuous scheme of
+line or colour. At the most, the scraps of reflection in the crystal
+could only _start_ such a series of pictures as this. And the start, the
+initiation of one of these series, is often accompanied by an odd
+phenomenon mentioned above--a _milky clouding_ of the crystal, which
+obscures any fragments of reflected images, and from out of which the
+images of the vision gradually grow clear. I cannot explain this
+clouding. It occurs too often and too independently to be a mere effect
+of suggestion. It does not seem to depend on any optical condition--to
+be, for instance, a result of change of focus of the eye, or of
+prolonged gazing. It is a picture like other pictures; it may come when
+the eyes are quite fresh (nor ought they ever to be strained); and it
+may persist for some time, so that the scryer looks away and back again,
+and sees it still. It comes at the beginning of a first series of
+pictures, or as a kind of drop scene between one series of pictures and
+another. Its closest parallel, perhaps, is the mist or cloud out of
+which phantasmal figures, "out in the room," sometimes seem to form
+themselves.
+
+Moreover, the connection, if one can so call it, between the crystal and
+the vision is a very variable one. Sometimes the figures seem clearly
+defined within the crystal and limited thereby; sometimes all perception
+of the crystal or other speculum disappears, and the scryer seems
+clairvoyantly introduced into some group of life-sized figures. Nay,
+further, when the habit of gazing is fully acquired, some scryers can
+dispense with any speculum whatever, and can see pictures in mere
+blackness; thus approximating to the seers of "faces in the dark," or of
+_illusions hypnagogiques_.
+
+On the whole it seems safest to attempt at present no further
+explanation of crystal-gazing than to say that it is an empirical method
+of developing internal vision; of externalising pictures which are
+associated with changes in the sensorial tracts of the brain, due partly
+to internal stimuli, and partly to stimuli which may come from minds
+external to the scryer's own. The hallucinations thus induced appear to
+be absolutely harmless. I at least know of no kind of injury resulting
+from them; and I have probably heard of most of the experiments made in
+England, with any scientific aim or care, during the somewhat limited
+revival of crystal-gazing which has proceeded for the last few years.
+
+The crystal picture is what we must call (for want of knowledge of
+determining causes) a _random_ glimpse into inner vision, a reflection
+caught at some odd angle from the universe as it shines through the
+perturbing medium of that special soul. Normal and supernormal knowledge
+and imaginings are blended in strangely mingled rays. Memory, dream,
+telepathy, telćsthesia, retrocognition, precognition, all are there.
+Nay, there are indications of spiritual communications and of a kind of
+ecstasy.[105]
+
+We cannot pursue all these phenomena at once. In turning, as we must now
+turn, to the _spontaneous_ cases of sensory automatism--of every type of
+which the _induced_ visions of the crystal afford us a foretaste--we
+must needs single out first some fundamental phenomenon, illustrating
+some principle from which the rarer or more complex phenomena may be in
+part at least derived. Nor will there be difficulty in such a choice.
+Theory and actual experience point here in the same direction. If this
+inward vision, this inward audition, on whose importance I have been
+insisting, are to have any such importance--if they are to have any
+validity at all--if their contents are to represent anything more than
+dream or meditation--they must receive knowledge from other minds or
+from distant objects;--knowledge which is _not_ received by the external
+organs of sense. Communication must exist from the subliminal to the
+subliminal as well as from the supraliminal to the supraliminal parts of
+the being of different individual men. Telepathy, in short, must be the
+prerequisite of all these supernormal phenomena.
+
+Actual experience, as we shall presently see, confirms this view of the
+place of telepathy. For when we pass from the induced to the spontaneous
+phenomena we shall find that these illustrate before all else this
+transmission of thought and emotion directly from mind to mind.
+
+Now as to telepathy, there is in the first place this to be said, that
+such a faculty must absolutely exist somewhere in the universe, if the
+universe contains any unembodied intelligences at all. If there be any
+life less rooted in flesh than ours--any life more spiritual (as men
+have supposed that a higher life would be), then either it must not be
+_social_ life--there can be no exchange of thought in it at all--or else
+there must exist some method of exchanging thought which does not
+depend upon either tongue or brain.
+
+Thus much, one may say, has been evident since man first speculated on
+such subjects at all. But the advance of knowledge has added a new
+presumption--it can be no more than a presumption--to all such cosmic
+speculations. I mean the presumption of _continuity_. Learning how close
+a tie in reality unites man with inferior lives,--once treated as
+something wholly alien, impassably separated from the human race--we are
+led to conceive that a close tie may unite him also with superior
+lives,--that the series may be fundamentally unbroken, the essential
+qualities of life the same throughout. It used to be asked whether man
+was akin to the ape or to the angel. I reply that the very fact of his
+kinship with the ape is proof presumptive of his kinship with the angel.
+
+It is natural enough that man's instinctive feeling should have
+anticipated any argument of this speculative type. Men have in most ages
+believed, and do still widely believe, in the reality of prayer; that
+is, in the possibility of telepathic communication between our human
+minds and minds above our own, which are supposed not only to understand
+our wish or aspiration, but to impress or influence us inwardly in
+return.
+
+So widely spread has been this belief in prayer that it is somewhat
+strange that men should not have more commonly made what seems the
+natural deduction--namely, that if our spirits can communicate with
+higher spirits in a way transcending sense, they may also perhaps be
+able in like manner to communicate with each other. The idea, indeed,
+has been thrown out at intervals by leading thinkers--from Augustine to
+Bacon, from Bacon to Goethe, from Goethe to Tennyson.
+
+Isolated experiments from time to time indicated its practical truth.
+Yet it is only within the last few years that the vague and floating
+notion has been developed into definite theory by systematic experiment.
+
+To make such experiment possible has indeed been no easy matter. It has
+been needful to elicit and to isolate from the complex emotions and
+interactions of common life a certain psychical element of whose nature
+and working we have beforehand but a very obscure idea.
+
+If indeed we possessed any certain method of detecting the action of
+telepathy,--of distinguishing it from chance coincidence or from
+unconscious suggestion,--we should probably find that its action was
+widely diffused and mingled with other more commonplace causes in many
+incidents of life. We should find telepathy, perhaps, at the base of
+many sympathies and antipathies, of many wide communities of feeling;
+operating, it may be, in cases as different as the quasi-recognition of
+some friend in a stranger seen at a distance just before the friend
+himself unexpectedly appears, and the _Phęmę_ or Rumour which in
+Hindostan or in ancient Greece is said to have often spread far an
+inexplicable knowledge of victory or disaster.
+
+But we are obliged, for the sake of clearness of evidence, to set aside,
+when dealing with experimentation, all these mixed emotional cases, and
+to start from telepathic communications intentionally planned to be so
+trivial, so devoid of associations or emotions, that it shall be
+impossible to refer them to any common memory or sympathy; to anything
+save a direct transmission of idea, or impulse, or sensation, or image,
+from one to another mind.
+
+The reader who has studied the evidence originally set forth in Chapters
+II. and III. of _Phantasms of the Living_ will, I trust, carry away a
+pretty clear notion of what can at present actually be done in the way
+of experimental transferences of small definite ideas or pictures from
+one or more persons--the "agent" or "agents"--to one or more
+persons--the "percipient" or "percipients."[106] In these experiments
+actual _contact_ has been forbidden, to avoid the risk of unconscious
+indications by pressure. It is at present still doubtful how far close
+proximity really operates in aid of telepathy, or how far its advantage
+is a mere effect of self-suggestion--on the part either of agent or of
+percipient. Some few pairs of experimenters have obtained results of
+just the same type at distances of half a mile or more.[107] Similarly,
+in the case of induction of hypnotic trance, Dr. Gibert attained at the
+distance of nearly a mile results which are usually supposed to require
+close and actual presence. [See Appendix V. C.]
+
+We must clearly realise that in telepathic experiment we encounter just
+the same difficulty which makes our results in hypnotic therapeutics so
+unpredictable and irregular. We do not know how to get our suggestions
+to _take hold_ of the subliminal self. They are liable to fail for two
+main reasons. Either they somehow never _reach_ the subliminal centres
+which we wish to affect, or they find those centres preoccupied with
+some self-suggestion hostile to our behest. This source of uncertainty
+can only be removed by a far greater number of experiments than have yet
+been made--experiments repeated until we have oftener struck upon the
+happy veins which make up for an immense amount of sterile exploration.
+Meantime we must record, but can hardly interpret. Yet there is one
+provisional interpretation of telepathic experiment which must be
+noticed thus early in our discussion, because, if true, it may
+conceivably connect our groping work with more advanced departments of
+science, while, if seen to be inadequate, it may bid us turn our inquiry
+in some other direction. I refer to the suggestion that telepathy is
+propagated by "brain-waves"; or, as Sir W. Crookes has more exactly
+expressed it, by ether-waves of even smaller amplitude and greater
+frequency than those which carry the X rays. These waves are conceived
+as passing from one brain to another, and arousing in the _second_ brain
+an excitation or image similar to the excitation or image from which
+they start in the _first_. The hypothesis is an attractive one; because
+it fits an agency which certainly exists, but whose effect is unknown,
+to an effect which certainly exists, but whose agency is unknown.
+
+In this world of vibrations it may seem at first the simplest plan to
+invoke a vibration the more. It would be rash, indeed, to affirm that
+any phenomenon perceptible by men may not be expressible, in part at
+least, in terms of ethereal undulations. But in the case of telepathy
+the analogy which suggests this explanation, the obvious likeness
+between the picture emitted (so to say) by the agent and the picture
+received by the percipient--as when I fix my mind on the two of
+diamonds, and he sees a mental picture of that card--goes but a very
+short way. One has very soon to begin assuming that the percipient's
+mind _modifies_ the picture despatched from the agent: until the
+likeness between the two pictures becomes a quite symbolical affair. We
+have seen that there is a continuous transition from experimental to
+spontaneous telepathy; from our transferred pictures of cards to
+monitions of a friend's death at a distance. These monitions may indeed
+be pictures of the dying friend, but they are seldom such pictures as
+the decedent's brain seems likely to project in the form in which they
+reach the percipient. Mr. L.--to take a well-known case in our
+collection (_Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 210)--dies of heart
+disease when in the act of lying down undressed, in bed. At or about
+the same moment Mr. N. J. S. sees Mr. L. standing beside him with a
+cheerful air, dressed for walking and with a cane in his hand. One does
+not see how a system of undulations could have transmuted the physical
+facts in this way.
+
+A still greater difficulty for the vibration-theory is presented by
+_collective_ telepathic hallucinations. It is hard to understand how A
+can emit a pattern of vibrations which, radiating equally in all
+directions, shall affect not only his distant friend B, but also the
+strangers C and D, who happen to be standing near B;--and affect no
+other persons, so far as we know, in the world.
+
+The above points have been fair matter of argument almost since our
+research began. But as our evidence has developed, our conception of
+telepathy has needed to be more and more generalised in other and new
+directions,--still less compatible with the vibration theory. Three such
+directions may be briefly specified here--namely, the relation of
+telepathy (_a_) to telćsthesia or clairvoyance, (_b_) to time, and (_c_)
+to disembodied spirits. (_a_) It is increasingly hard to refer all the
+scenes of which percipients become aware to the action of any given mind
+which is perceiving those distant scenes. This is especially noticeable
+in crystal-gazing experiments. (_b_) And these crystal visions also show
+what, from the strict telepathic point of view, we should call a great
+laxity of time relations. The scryer chooses his own time to look in the
+ball;--and though sometimes he sees events which are taking place at the
+moment, he may also see past events,--and even, as it seems, future
+events. I at least cannot deny _precognition_, nor can I draw a definite
+line amid these complex visions which may separate precognition from
+telepathy (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 408-593). (_c_)
+Precognition itself may be explained, if you will, as telepathy from
+disembodied spirits;--and this would at any rate bring it under a class
+of phenomena which I think all students of our subject must before long
+admit. Admitting here, for argument's sake, that we do receive
+communications from the dead which we should term telepathic if we
+received them from the living, it is of course open to us to conjecture
+that these messages also are conveyed on ether-waves. But since those
+waves do not at any rate emanate from material brains, we shall by this
+time have got so far from the original brain-wave hypothesis that few
+will care still to defend it.
+
+I doubt, indeed, whether we can safely say of telepathy anything more
+definite than this: _Life has the power of manifesting itself to life._
+The laws of life, as we have thus far known them, have been only laws of
+life when already associated with matter. Thus limited, we have learnt
+little as to Life's true nature. We know not even whether Life be only
+a directive Force, or, on the other hand, an effective Energy. We know
+not in what way it operates on matter. We can in no way define the
+connection between our own consciousness and our organisms. Just here it
+is, I should say, that telepathic observations ought to supply us with
+some hint. From the mode in which some element of one individual
+life,--apart from material impact,--gets hold of another organism, we
+may in time learn something of the way in which our own life gets hold
+of our own organism,--and maintains, intermits, or abandons its organic
+sway.[108]
+
+The hypothesis which I suggested in _Phantasms of the Living_ itself, in
+my "Note on a possible mode of psychical interaction," seems to me to
+have been rendered increasingly plausible by evidence of many kinds
+since received; evidence of which the larger part falls outside the
+limits of this present work. I still believe--and more confidently than
+in 1886--that a "psychical invasion" does take place; that a
+"phantasmogenetic centre" is actually established in the percipient's
+surroundings; that some movement bearing some relation to space as we
+know it is actually accomplished; and some presence is transferred, and
+may or may not be discerned by the invaded person; some perception of
+the distant scene in itself is acquired, and may or may not be
+remembered by the invader.
+
+But the words which I am here beginning to use carry with them
+associations from which the scientific reader may well shrink. Fully
+realising the offence which such expressions may give, I see no better
+line of excuse than simply to recount the way in which the gradual
+accretion of evidence has obliged me, for the mere sake of covering all
+the phenomena, to use phrases and assumptions which go far beyond those
+which Edmund Gurney and I employed in our first papers on this inquiry
+in 1883.
+
+When in 1882 our small group began the collection of evidence bearing
+upon "veridical hallucinations"--or apparitions which coincided with
+other events in such a way as to suggest a causal connection--we found
+scattered among the cases from the first certain types which were with
+difficulty reducible under the conception of telepathy pure and
+simple--even if such a conception could be distinctly formed. Sometimes
+the apparition was seen by more than one percipient at once--a result
+which we could hardly have expected if all that had passed were the
+transference of an impression from the agent's mind to another mind,
+which then bodied forth that impression in externalised shape according
+to laws of its own structure. There were instances, too, where the
+percipient seemed to be the agent also--in so far that it was he who had
+an impression of having somehow visited and noted a distant scene, whose
+occupant was not necessarily conscious of any immediate relation with
+him. Or sometimes this "telepathic clairvoyance" developed into
+"reciprocity," and each of the two persons concerned was conscious of
+the other;--the _scene_ of their encounter being the same in the vision
+of each, or at least the experience being in some way common to both.
+These and cognate difficulties were present to my mind from the first;
+and in the above-mentioned "Note on a suggested mode of psychical
+interaction," included in vol. ii of _Phantasms of the Living_, I
+indicated briefly the extension of the telepathic theory to which they
+seemed to me to point.
+
+Meantime cases of certain other definite types continued to come
+steadily to hand, although in lesser numbers than the cases of
+apparition at death. To mention two important types only--there were
+apparitions of the so-called _dead_, and there were cases of
+_precognition_. With regard to each of these classes, it seemed
+reasonable to defer belief until time should have shown whether the
+influx of first-hand cases was likely to be permanent; whether
+independent witnesses continued to testify to incidents which could be
+better explained on these hypotheses than on any other. Before Edmund
+Gurney's death in 1888 our cases of apparitions and other manifestations
+of the dead had reached a degree of weight and consistency which, as his
+last paper showed, was beginning to convince him of their veridical
+character; and since that date these have been much further increased;
+and especially have drawn from Mrs. Piper's and other trance-phenomena
+an unexpected enlargement and corroboration. The evidence for
+communication from the departed is now in my personal estimate quite as
+strong as that for telepathic communication between the living; and it
+is moreover evidence which inevitably alters and widens our conception
+of telepathy between living men.
+
+The evidence for precognition, again, was from the first scantier, and
+has advanced at a slower rate. It has increased steadily enough to lead
+me to feel confident that it will have to be seriously reckoned with;
+but I cannot yet say--as I do say with reference to the evidence for
+messages from the departed--that almost every one who accepts our
+evidence for telepathy at all, must ultimately accept this evidence
+also. It must run on at any rate for some years longer before it shall
+have accreted a convincing weight.
+
+But at whatever point one or another inquirer may happen at present to
+stand, I urge that this is the reasonable course for conviction to
+follow. First analyse the miscellaneous stream of evidence into definite
+types; then observe the frequency with which these types recur, and let
+your sense of their importance gradually grow, if the evidence grows
+also.
+
+Now this mode of procedure evidently excludes all definite _a priori_
+views, and compels one's conceptions to be little more than the mere
+grouping to which the facts thus far known have to be subjected in order
+that they may be realised in their _ensemble_.
+
+"What definite reason do I know why this should _not_ be true?"--this is
+the question which needs to be pushed home again and again if one is to
+realise--and not in the ordinary paths of scientific speculation
+alone--how profound our ignorance of the Universe really is.
+
+My own ignorance, at any rate, I recognise to be such that my notions of
+the probable or improbable in the Universe are not of weight enough to
+lead me to set aside any facts which seem to me well attested, and which
+are not shown by experts actually to conflict with any
+better-established facts or generalisations. Wide though the range of
+established science may be, it represents, as its most far-sighted
+prophets are the first to admit, a narrow glance only into the unknown
+and infinite realm of law.
+
+The evidence, then, leading me thus unresisting along, has led me to
+this main difference from our early treatment of veridical phantasms.
+Instead of starting from a root-conception of a telepathic impulse
+merely passing from mind to mind, I now start from a root-conception of
+the dissociability of the self, of the possibility that different
+fractions of the personality can act so far independently of each other
+that the one is not conscious of the other's action.
+
+Naturally the two conceptions coincide over much of the ground. Where
+experimental thought-transference is concerned--even where the commoner
+types of coincidental phantasms are concerned--the second formula seems
+a needless and unprovable variation on the first. But as soon as we get
+among the difficult types--reciprocal cases, clairvoyant cases,
+collective cases, above all, manifestations of the dead--we find that
+the conception of a telepathic impulse as a message despatched and then
+left alone, as it were, to effect its purpose needs more and more of
+straining, of manipulation, to fit it to the evidence. On the other
+hand, it is just in those difficult regions that the analogies of other
+splits of personality recur, and that phantasmal or automatic behaviour
+recalls to us the behaviour of segments of personality detached from
+primary personality, but operating through the organism which is common
+to both.
+
+The innovation which we are here called upon to make is to suppose that
+segments of the personality can operate in apparent separation from the
+organism. Such a supposition, of course, could not have been started
+without proof of telepathy, and could with difficulty be sustained
+without proof of survival of death. But, given telepathy, we have _some_
+psychical agency connected with man operating apart from his organism.
+Given survival, we have an element of his personality--to say the least
+of it--operating when his organism is destroyed. There is therefore no
+very great additional burden in supposing that an element of his
+personality may operate apart from his organism, while that organism
+still exists.
+
+_Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coűte._ If we have once got a man's
+_thought_ operating apart from his body--if my fixation of attention on
+the two of diamonds does somehow so modify another man's brain a few
+yards off that he seems to see the two of diamonds floating before
+him--there is no obvious halting-place on _his_ side till we come to
+"possession" by a departed spirit, and there is no obvious halting-place
+on _my_ side till we come to "travelling clairvoyance," with a
+corresponding visibility of my own phantasm to other persons in the
+scenes which I spiritually visit. No obvious halting-place, I say; for
+the point which at first seems abruptly transitional has been already
+shown to be only the critical point of a continuous curve. I mean, of
+course, the point where consciousness is duplicated--where each segment
+of the personality begins to possess a separate and definite, but
+contemporaneous stream of memory and perception. That these can exist
+concurrently in the same organism our study of hypnotism has already
+shown, and our study of motor automatisms will still further prove to
+us.
+
+_Dissociation of personality, combined with activity in the metetherial
+environment_; such, in the phraseology used in this book, will be the
+formula which will most easily cover those actually observed facts of
+veridical apparition on which we must now enter at considerable length.
+And after this preliminary explanation I shall ask leave to use for
+clearness in my argument such words as are simplest and shortest,
+however vague or disputable their connotation may be. I must needs, for
+instance, use the word "spirit," when I speak of that unknown fraction
+of a man's personality--not the supraliminal fraction--which we discern
+as operating before or after death in the metetherial environment. For
+this conception I can find no other term, but by the word _spirit_ I
+wish to imply nothing more definite than this. Of the spirit's relation
+to space, or (which is a part of the same problem) to its own spatial
+manifestation in definite form, something has already been said, and
+there will be more to say hereafter. And similarly those terms,
+_invader_ or _invaded_, from whose strangeness and barbarity our
+immediate discussion began, will depend for their meaning upon
+conceptions which the evidence itself must gradually supply.
+
+That evidence, as it now lies before us, is perplexingly various both in
+content and quality. For some of the canons needed in its analysis I
+have already referred the reader to extracts from Edmund Gurney's
+writings. Certain points must still be mentioned here before the
+narrative begins.
+
+It must be remembered, in the first place, that all these veridical or
+coincidental cases stand out together as a single group from a
+background of hallucinations which involve no coincidence, which have no
+claim to veridicality. If purely subjective hallucinations of the senses
+affected insane or disordered brains alone,--as was pretty generally the
+assumption, even in scientific circles, when our inquiry began,--our
+task would have been much easier than it is. But while there can be no
+question as to the sound and healthy condition of the great majority of
+our percipients, Edmund Gurney's "Census of Hallucinations" of 1884,
+confirmed and extended by the wider inquiry of 1889-1892, showed a
+frequency, previously unsuspected, of scattered hallucinations among
+sane and healthy persons, the experience being often unique in a
+lifetime, and in no apparent connection with any other circumstance
+whatever.[109]
+
+Since casual hallucinations of the sane, then, are thus _frequent_, we
+can hardly venture to assume that they are all _veridical_. And the
+existence of all these perhaps merely subjective hallucinations greatly
+complicates our investigation of veridical hallucinations. It prevents
+the mere existence of the hallucinations, however strangely interposed
+in ordinary life, from having any evidential value, and throws us upon
+evidence afforded by external coincidence;--on the mere fact, to put
+such a coincidence in its simplest form, that I see a phantom of my
+friend Smith at the moment when Smith is unexpectedly dying at a
+distance. A coincidence of this general type, if it occurs, need not be
+difficult to substantiate, and we have in fact substantiated it with
+more or less completeness in several hundred cases.
+
+The _primâ facie_ conclusion will obviously be that there is a causal
+connection between the death and the apparition. To overcome this
+presumption it would be necessary either to impugn the accuracy of the
+informant's testimony, or to show that chance alone might have brought
+about the observed coincidences.
+
+On both of these questions there have been full and repeated discussions
+elsewhere. I need not re-argue them at length here, but will refer the
+reader to the "Report on the Census of Hallucinations," _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. x., where every source of error as yet discovered has been
+pretty fully considered.
+
+To that volume also I must refer him for a thorough discussion of the
+arguments for and against chance-coincidence. The conclusion to which
+the Committee unanimously came is expressed in the closing words:
+"Between deaths and apparitions of the dying person a connection exists
+which is not due to chance alone."
+
+We have a right, I think, to say that only by another census of
+hallucinations, equally careful, more extensive, and yielding absolutely
+different results, could this conclusion be overthrown.
+
+In forming this conclusion, apparitions at death are of course selected,
+because, death being an unique event in man's earthly existence, the
+coincidences between death and apparitions afford a favourable case for
+statistical treatment. But the coincidences between apparitions and
+crises other than death, although not susceptible of the same
+arithmetical precision of estimate, are, as will be seen, quite equally
+convincing. To this great mass of spontaneous cases we must now turn.
+
+The arrangement of these cases is not easy; nor are they capable of
+being presented in one logically consequent series.
+
+But the conception of _psychical invasion or excursion_ on which I have
+already dwelt has at any rate this advantage, that it is sufficiently
+fundamental to allow of our arrangement of all our recorded
+cases--perhaps of all possible cases of apparition--in accordance with
+its own lines.
+
+Our scheme will include all observable telepathic action, from the faint
+currents which we may imagine to be continually passing between man and
+man, up to the point--reserved for the following chapter--where one of
+the parties to the telepathic intercourse has definitely quitted the
+flesh. The _first_ term in our series must be conveniently vague: the
+_last_ must lead us to the threshold of the spiritual world.
+
+I must begin with cases where the action of the excursive fragment of
+the personality is of the weakest kind--the least capable of affecting
+other observers, or of being recalled into the agent's own waking
+memory.
+
+Such cases, naturally enough, will be hard to bring up to evidential
+level. It must depend on mere chance whether these weak and aimless
+psychical excursions are observed at all; or are observed in such a way
+as to lead us to attribute them to anything more than the subjective
+fancy of the observers.
+
+How can a casual vision--say, of a lady sitting in her
+drawing-room,--of a man returning home at six o'clock--be distinguished
+from memory-images on the one hand and from what I may term
+"expectation-images" on the other? The picture of the lady may be a
+slightly modified and externalised reminiscence; the picture of the man
+walking up to the door may be a mere projection of what the observer was
+hoping to see.
+
+I have assumed that these phantoms coincided with no marked event. The
+lady may have been thinking of going to her drawing-room; the man may
+have been in the act of walking home;--but these are trivial
+circumstances which might be repeated any day.
+
+Yet, however trivial, almost any set of human circumstances are
+sufficiently complex to leave room for coincidence. If the sitter in the
+drawing-room is wearing a distinctive article of dress, never seen by
+the percipient until it is seen in the hallucination;--if the phantasmal
+homeward traveller is carrying a parcel of unusual shape, which the real
+man does afterwards unexpectedly bring home with him;--there may be
+reason to think that there is a causal connection between the apparent
+agent's condition at the moment, and the apparition.
+
+In Appendix VI. A, I quote one of these "arrival-cases," so to term
+them, where the peculiarity of dress was such as to make the coincidence
+between vision and reality well worth attention. The case is interesting
+also as one of our earliest examples of a psychical incident carefully
+recorded at the time; so that after the lapse of nearly forty years it
+was possible to correct the percipient's surviving recollection by his
+contemporary written statement.
+
+In these _arrival_ cases, there is, I say, a certain likelihood that the
+man's mind may be fixed on his return home, so that his phantasm is seen
+in what might seem both to himself and to others the most probable
+place.[110] But there are other cases where a man's phantasm is seen, in
+a place where there is no special reason for his appearing, although
+these places seem always to lie within the beat and circuit of his
+habitual thought.
+
+In such cases there are still possible circumstances which may give
+reason to think that the apparition is causally connected with the
+apparent agent. The phantasm of a given person may be seen _repeatedly_
+by different percipients, or it may be seen _collectively_ by several
+persons at a time; or it may combine both these evidential
+characteristics, and may be seen several times and by several persons
+together.
+
+Now considering the rarity of phantasmal appearances, considering that
+not one person in (say) five thousand is ever phantasmally seen at all;
+the mere fact that a given person's phantasm is seen even _twice_, by
+different percipients (for we cannot count a second appearance to the
+_same_ percipient as of equal value), is in itself a remarkable fact;
+while if this happens _three or four times_ (as in the case of Mrs.
+Hawkins)[111] we can hardly ascribe such a sequence of rare occurrences
+to chance alone.
+
+Again, impressive as is the _repetition_ of the apparition in these
+cases, it is yet less so to my mind than the _collective_ character of
+some of the perceptions. In Mrs. Hawkins's first case there were two
+simultaneous percipients, and in Canon Bourne's first case (given in
+Appendix VI. B) there were three.
+
+And we now come to other cases, where the percipience has been
+collective, although it has not been repeated. There is a case[112]
+where two persons at one moment--a moment of no stress or excitement
+whatever--see the phantasm of a third; that third person being perhaps
+occupied with some supraliminal or subliminal thought of the scene in
+the midst of which she is phantasmally discerned. Both the percipients
+supposed at the moment that it was their actual sister whom they saw;
+and one can hardly fancy that a mere act of tranquil recognition of the
+figure by one percipient would communicate to the other percipient a
+telepathic shock such as would make _her_ see the same figure as well.
+
+The question of the true import of collectivity of percipience renews in
+another form that problem of _invasion_ to which our evidence so often
+brings us back. When two or three persons see what seems to be the same
+phantom in the same place and at the same time, does that mean that that
+special part of space is somehow modified? or does it mean that a mental
+impression, conveyed by the distant agent--the phantom-begetter--to one
+of the percipients is reflected telepathically from that percipient's
+mind to the minds of the other--as it were secondary--percipients? The
+reader already knows that I prefer the former of these views. And I
+observe--as telling against that other view, of psychical
+contagion--that in certain collective cases we discern no probable link
+between any one of the percipient minds and the distant agent.
+
+In some of that group of collective cases which we are at this moment
+considering, this absence of link is noticeable in a special way. There
+is nothing to show that any thought or emotion was passing from agent to
+percipients at the moment of the apparition. On the contrary, the
+indication is that there is no necessary connection whatever between the
+agent's condition of mind at the moment and the fact that such and such
+persons observed his phantasm. The projection of the phantasm, if I may
+so term it, seems a matter wholly automatic on the agent's part, as
+automatic and meaningless as a dream.
+
+Assuming, then, that this is so--that these _bilocations_ or
+self-projections to a point apparently remote from one's body do occur
+without any appreciable stimulus from without, and in moments of
+apparent calm and indifference--in what way will this fact tend to
+modify previous conceptions?
+
+It suggests that the continuous dream-life which we must suppose to run
+concurrently with our waking life is potent enough to effect from time
+to time enough of dissociation to enable some element of the personality
+to be perceived at a distance from the organism. How much of
+consciousness, if any, may be felt at the point where the excursive
+phantasm is seen, we cannot say. But the notion that a mere incoherent
+quasi-dream should thus become perceptible to others is fully in
+accordance with the theories suggested in this work. For I regard
+subliminal operation as _continuously_ going on, and I hold that the
+degree of dissociation which can generate a perceptible phantasm is not
+necessarily a profound change, since that perceptibility depends so
+largely upon idiosyncrasies of agent and percipient as yet wholly
+unexplained.
+
+That special idiosyncracy on the part of the agent which tends to make
+his phantasm easily visible has never yet, so far as I know, received a
+name, although for convenience' sake it certainly needs one. I propose
+to use the Greek word [Greek: psuchorragô], which means strictly "to let
+the soul break loose," and from which I form the words _psychorrhagy_
+and _psychorrhagic_, on obvious analogies. When I say that the agents in
+these cases were born with the _psychorrhagic diathesis_, I express what
+I believe to be an important fact, physiological as well as
+psychological, in terms which seem pedantic, but which are the only ones
+which mean exactly what the facts oblige me to say. That which "breaks
+loose" on my hypothesis is not (as in the Greek use of the word) the
+whole principle of life in the organism; rather it is some psychical
+element probably of very varying character, and definable mainly by its
+power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in
+some portion or other of space. I hold that this phantasmogenetic effect
+may be produced either on the mind, and consequently on the brain of
+another person--in which case he may discern the phantasm somewhere in
+his vicinity, according to his own mental habit or prepossession--or
+else directly on a portion of space, "out in the open," in which case
+several persons may simultaneously discern the phantasm in that actual
+spot.
+
+Let us apply this view to one of our most bizarre and puzzling
+cases--that of Canon Bourne (see Appendix VI. B). Here I conceive that
+Canon Bourne, while riding in the hunting-field, was also subliminally
+dreaming of himself (imagining himself with some part of his submerged
+consciousness) as having had a fall, and as beckoning to his
+daughters--an incoherent dream indeed, but of a quite ordinary type. I
+go on to suppose that, Canon Bourne being born with the psychorrhagic
+diathesis, a certain psychical element so far detached itself from his
+organism as to affect a certain portion of space--near the daughters of
+whom he was thinking--to effect it, I say, not materially nor even
+optically, but yet in such a manner that to a certain kind of immaterial
+and non-optical sensitivity a phantasm of himself and his horse became
+discernible. His horse was of course as purely a part of the phantasmal
+picture as his hat. The non-optical distinctness with which the words
+printed inside his hat were seen indicates that it was some inner
+non-retinal vision which received the impression from the
+phantasmogenetic centre. The other phantasmal appearance of Canon Bourne
+chanced to affect only one percipient, but was of precisely the same
+character; and of course adds, so far as it goes, to the plausibility of
+the above explanation.
+
+That explanation, indeed, suffers from the complexity and apparent
+absurdity inevitable in dealing with phenomena which greatly transcend
+known laws; but on the other hand it does in its way colligate Canon
+Bourne's case with a good many others of odd and varying types. Thus
+appearances such as Canon Bourne's are in my view exactly parallel to
+the _hauntings_ ascribed to departed spirits. There also we find a
+psychorrhagic diathesis--a habit or capacity on the part of certain
+spirits of detaching some psychical element in such a manner as to form
+a phantasmal picture, which represents the spirit as going through some
+dream-like action in a given place.
+
+The phantasmogenetic centre may thus, in my view, be equally well
+produced by an incarnate or by a discarnate spirit.
+
+Again, my hypothesis of a real modification of a part of space,
+transforming it into a phantasmogenetic centre, applies to a phantasmal
+voice just as well as to a phantasmal figure. The voice is not heard
+acoustically any more than the figure is seen optically. Yet a
+phantasmal voice may in a true sense "come from" a given spot.
+
+These psychorrhagic cases are, I think, important as showing us the
+earliest or feeblest stages of self-projection--where the dissociation
+belongs to the dream-stratum--implicating neither the supraliminal will
+nor the profounder subliminal strata.
+
+And now let us pass on from these, which hardly concern anybody beyond
+the phantom-begetter himself--and do not even add anything to his own
+knowledge--to cases where there is some sort of communication from one
+mind to another, or some knowledge gained by the excursive spirit.
+
+It is impossible to arrange these groups in one continuous logical
+series. But, roughly speaking, the degree in which the psychical
+collision is _recollected_ on either side may in some degree indicate
+its _intensity_, and may serve as a guide to our provisional
+arrangement.
+
+Following this scheme I shall begin with a group of cases which seem to
+promise but little information,--cases, namely, where A, the agent, in
+some way impresses or invades P, the percipient,--but nevertheless
+neither A nor P retains in supraliminal memory any knowledge of what has
+occurred.
+
+Now to begin with we shall have no difficulty in admitting that cases of
+this type are likely often to occur. The psychical _rapprochement_ of
+telepathy takes place, _ex hypothesi_, in a region which is subliminal
+for both agent and percipient, and from whence but few and scattered
+impressions rise for either of them above the conscious threshold.
+Telepathy will thus probably operate far more continuously than our
+scattered glimpses would in themselves suggest.
+
+But how can we outside inquirers know anything of telepathic incidents
+which the principals themselves fail altogether to remember?
+
+In ordinary life we may sometimes learn from bystanders incidents which
+we cannot learn from the principals themselves. Can there be bystanders
+who look on at a psychical invasion?
+
+The question is of much theoretical import. On my view that there is a
+real transference of something from the agent, involving an alteration
+of some kind in a particular part of space, there might theoretically be
+some bystander who might discern that alteration in space more clearly
+than the person for whose benefit, so to say, the alteration was made.
+If, on the other hand, what has happened is merely a transference of
+some impulse "from mind to mind";--then one can hardly understand how
+any mind except the mind aimed at could perceive the telepathic
+impression. Yet, in _collective_ cases, persons in whom the agent feels
+no interest, nay, of whose presence along with the intended percipient
+he is not aware, do in fact receive the impression in just the same way
+as that intended percipient himself. This was explained by Gurney as
+probably due to a fresh telepathic transmission,--this time from the
+due or original percipient's mind to the minds of his neighbours of the
+moment.
+
+Such a supposition, however, in itself a difficult one, becomes much
+more difficult when the telepathic impulse has never, so far as we know,
+penetrated into the due or intended percipient's mind at all. If in such
+a case a bystander perceives the invading figure, I must think that he
+perceives it merely as a bystander,--not as a person telepathically
+influenced by the intended percipient, who does not in fact perceive
+anything whatsoever. I quote in illustration a bizarre but well-attested
+case (see Appendix VI. C) which this explanation seems to fit better
+than any other.
+
+In a somewhat similar case[113] there is strong attestation that a
+sailor, watching by a dying comrade, saw figures around his hammock,
+apparently representing the dying man's family, in mourning garb. The
+family, although they had no ordinary knowledge of the sailor's illness,
+had been alarmed by noises, etc., which rightly or wrongly they took as
+indications of some danger to him. I conceive, then, that the wife paid
+a psychical visit to her husband; and I take the mourning garb and the
+accompanying children's figures to be symbolical accompaniments,
+representing her thought, "My children will be orphans." I think this
+more likely than that the sailor's children also should have possessed
+this rare peculiarity of becoming perceptible at a distant point in
+space. And secondary figures, as we shall see later on, are not uncommon
+in such telepathic presentations. One may picture oneself as though
+holding a child by the hand, or even driving in a carriage and pair, as
+vividly as though carrying an umbrella or walking across a room; and one
+may be thus pictured to others.
+
+And here I note a gradual transition to the next large class of cases on
+which I am about to enter. I am about to deal with _telćsthesia_;--with
+cases where an agent-percipient--for he is both in one--makes a
+clairvoyant excursion (of a more serious type than the mere
+psychorrhagies already described), and brings back some memory of the
+scene which he has psychically visited. Now, of course, it may happen
+that he fails to bring back any such memory, or that if he _does_ bring
+it back, he tells no one about it. In such cases, just as in the
+telepathic cases of which I have just spoken, the excursive phantom may
+possibly be observed by a bystander, and the circumstances may be such
+as to involve some coincidence which negatives the supposition of the
+bystander's mere subjective fancy. Such, I think, is the case which I
+give in Appendix VI. D.
+
+There is a similar case in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 541,
+where a girl, who is corporeally present in a certain drawing-room, is
+seen phantasmally in a neighbouring grove, whither she herself presently
+goes and hangs herself.
+
+Ponderings on projected suicide form perhaps the strongest instance of
+mental preoccupation with a particular spot. But of course, in our
+ignorance of the precise quality of thought or emotion needed to prompt
+a psychical excursion, we need not be surprised to find such an
+excursion observed on some occasions as trivial as the "arrival-case" of
+Col. Reed, with which I prefaced the mere psychorrhagic cases.
+
+Again, there is a strange case,[114] which comes to us on good
+authority, where we must suppose one man's subliminal impulse to have
+created a picture of himself, his wife, a carriage and a horse,
+persistent enough to have been watched for some seconds at least by
+three observers in one place, and by a fourth and independent observer
+at another point in the moving picture's career. The only alternative,
+if the narrative be accepted as substantially true, will be the
+hypothesis before alluded to of the flashing of an impending scene, as
+in crystal-vision, from some source external to any of the human minds
+concerned. I need hardly at this point repeat that in my view the wife
+and the horse will be as purely a part of the man's conception of his
+own aspect or environment as the coat on his back.
+
+And here, for purposes of comparison, I must refer to one of the most
+bizarre cases in our collection.[115] Four credible persons, to some
+extent independently, see a carriage and pair, with two men on the box
+and an inside occupant, under circumstances which make it impossible
+that the carriage was real. Now this vision cannot have been
+_precognitive_; nothing of the kind occurred for years after it, nor
+well _could_ occur; and I am forced to regard it as the externalisation
+of some dream, whether of an incarnate or of a discarnate mind. The
+parallel between this case and the one mentioned above tends therefore
+to show that the first, in spite of the paraphernalia of wife, horse,
+and dog-cart, may have been the outcome of a single waking dream;--of
+the phantasmogenetic dissociation of elements of one sole personality.
+
+In the cases which I have just been discussing there has been a
+psychical excursion, with its possibilities of clairvoyance; but the
+excursive element has not brought home any assignable knowledge to the
+supraliminal personality. I go on now to cases where such knowledge
+_has_ thus been garnered. But here there is need of some further pause,
+to consider a little in how many ways we can imagine that knowledge to
+be reached.
+
+Firstly, the distant knowledge may, it would seem, be reached through
+hyperćsthesia,--an extended power of the ordinary senses. Secondly, it
+sometimes seems to come through crystal-gazing or its correlative
+shell-hearing,--artifices which seem to utilise the ordinary senses in a
+new way. And besides these two avenues to distant knowledge there is a
+_third_, the telepathic avenue, which, as we have already surmised,
+sometimes shades off into the purely telćsthetic; when no distant
+_mind_, but only the distant _scene_, seems to be attracting the
+excursive spirit. And in the _fourth_ place we must remember that it is
+mainly in the form of _dream or vision_ that the most striking instances
+of telćsthesia which I have as yet recorded have come. Can we in any way
+harmonise these various modes of perception? Can we discover any
+condition of the percipient which is common to all?
+
+To a certain limited extent such co-ordination is possible. In each
+approach to telćsthesia in turn we find a tendency to something like a
+dream-excursion. Hyperćsthesia, in the first place, although it exists
+sometimes in persons wide awake, is characteristically an attribute of
+sleep-waking states.
+
+We have seen in discussing hypnotic experiments that it is sometimes
+possible to extend the subject's perceptive faculty by gradual
+suggestion, so far as to transform a hyperćsthesia which can still be
+referred to the action of the sense-organs into a telćsthesia which
+cannot be so referred. It is observable that percipients in such cases
+sometimes describe their sensation as that of receiving an impression,
+or seeing a picture placed before them; sometimes as that of
+_travelling_ and visiting the distant scene or person. Or the feeling
+may oscillate between these two sensations, just as the sense of
+_time-relation_ in the picture shown may oscillate between past,
+present, and future.
+
+To all these complex sensations the phenomena of crystal-gazing offer
+close analogies. I have already remarked on the curious fact that the
+simple artifice of gazing into a speculum should prove the avenue to
+phenomena of such various types. There may be very different origins
+even for pictures which in the crystal present very similar aspects; and
+certain sensations do also accompany these pictures; sensations not
+merely of _gazing_ but sometimes (though rarely) of partial _trance_;
+and oftener of _bilocation_;--of psychical _presence_ among the scenes
+which the crystal has indeed initiated, but no longer seems to limit or
+to contain.
+
+The idea of psychical excursion thus suggested must, however, be
+somehow reconciled with the frequently _symbolic_ character of these
+visions. The features of a crystal-vision seem often to be no mere
+transcription of material facts, but an abbreviated selection from such
+facts, or even a bold modification of such facts with a view of telling
+some story more quickly and clearly. We are familiar with the same kind
+of succession of symbolical scenes in dream, or in waking reverie. And
+of course if an intelligence outside the crystal-gazer's mind is
+endeavouring to impress him, this might well be the chosen way.
+
+And moreover through all telćsthetic vision some element of similar
+character is wont to run--some indication that _mind_ has been at work
+upon the picture--that the scene has not been presented, so to say, in
+crude objectivity, but that there has been some _choice_ as to the
+details discerned; and some _symbolism_ in the way in which they are
+presented.
+
+Let us consider how these characteristics affect different theories of
+the mechanism of clairvoyance. Let us suppose first that there is some
+kind of transition from hyperćsthesia to telćsthesia, so that when
+peripheral sensation is no longer possible, central perception may be
+still operating across obstacles otherwise insurmountable.
+
+If this be the case, it seems likely that central perception will shape
+itself on the types of perception to which the central tracts of the
+brain are accustomed; and that the _connaissance supérieure_, the
+telćsthetic knowledge, however it may really be acquired, will present
+itself mainly as clairvoyance or clairaudience--as some form of sight or
+sound. Yet these telćsthetic sights and sounds may be expected to show
+some trace of their unusual origin. They may, for instance, be
+_imperfectly co-ordinated_ with sights and sounds arriving through
+external channels; and, since they must in some way be a translation of
+supernormal impressions into sensory terms, they are likely to show
+something _symbolic_ in character.
+
+This tendency to subliminal symbolism, indeed, meets us at each point of
+our inquiry. As an instance of it in its simplest form, I may mention a
+case where a botanical student passing inattentively in front of the
+glass door of a restaurant thought that he had seen _Verbascum Thapsus_
+printed thereon. The real word was _Bouillon_; and that happens to be
+the trivial name in French for the plant Verbascum Thapsus. The actual
+optical perception had thus been subliminally transformed; the words
+Verbascum Thapsus were the report to the inattentive supraliminal self
+by a subliminal self more interested in botany than in dinner.
+
+Nay, we know that our own optical perception is in its own way highly
+symbolic. The scene which the baby sees instinctively,--which the
+impressionist painter manages to see by a sort of deliberate
+self-simplification,--is very different from the highly elaborate
+interpretation and selection of blotches of colour by which the ordinary
+adult figures to himself the visible world.
+
+Now we adults stand towards this subliminal symbolism in much the same
+attitude as the baby stands towards our educated optical symbolism. Just
+as the baby fails to grasp the third dimension, so may we still be
+failing to grasp a fourth;--or whatever be the law of that higher
+cognisance which begins to report fragmentarily to man that which his
+ordinary senses cannot discern.
+
+Assuredly then we must not take the fact that any knowledge comes to us
+symbolically as a proof that it comes to us from a mind outside our own.
+The symbolism may be the inevitable language in which one stratum of our
+personality makes its report to another. The symbolism, in short, may be
+either the easiest, or the only possible psychical record of actual
+objective fact; whether that fact be in the first instance discerned by
+our deeper selves, or be conveyed to us from other minds in this
+form;--elaborated for our mind's digestion, as animal food has been
+elaborated for our body's digestion, from a primitive crudity of things.
+
+But again one must question, on general idealistic principles, whether
+there be in such cases any real distinction between symbolism and
+reality,--between subjective and objective as we commonly use those
+terms. The resisting matter which we see and touch has "solid" reality
+for minds so constituted as to have the same subjective feeling awakened
+by it. But to other minds, endowed with other forms of
+sensibility--minds possibly both higher and more numerous than our
+own--this solid matter may seem disputable and unreal, while thought and
+emotion, perceived in ways unknown to us, may be the only reality.
+
+This material world constitutes, in fact, a "privileged case"--a
+simplified example--among all discernible worlds, so far as the
+perception of incarnate spirits is concerned. For discarnate spirits it
+is no longer a privileged case; to _them_ it is apparently easier to
+discern thoughts and emotions by non-material signs.[116] But they need
+not therefore be wholly cut off from discerning material things, any
+more than incarnate spirits are wholly cut off from discerning
+immaterial things--thoughts and emotions symbolised in phantasmal form.
+"The ghost in man, the ghost that once was man," to use Tennyson's
+words, have each of them to overcome by empirical artifices certain
+difficulties which are of different type for each, but are not
+insurmountable by either.
+
+These reflections, applicable at various points in our argument, have
+seemed specially needed when we had first to attack the meaning of the
+so-called "travelling clairvoyance," of which instances were given in
+the chapter on hypnotism. It was needful to consider how far there was a
+continuous transition between these excursions and directer
+transferences between mind and mind,--between telćsthesia and telepathy.
+It now seems to me that such a continuous transition may well exist, and
+that there is no absolute gulf between the supernormal perception of
+ideas as existing in other minds, and the supernormal perception of what
+we know as matter. All matter may, for aught we know, exist as an idea
+in some cosmic mind, with which mind each individual spirit may be in
+relation, as fully as with individual minds. The difference perhaps lies
+rather in the fact that there may be generally a _summons_ from a
+cognate mind which starts the so-called agent's mind into action; his
+invasion may be in some way _invited_; while a spiritual excursion among
+inanimate objects only may often lack an impulse to start it. If this be
+so, it would explain the fact that such excursions have mainly succeeded
+under the influence of hypnotic suggestion.
+
+We see in travelling clairvoyance,[117] just as we see in
+crystal-visions, a kind of fusion of all our forms of supernormal
+faculty. There is telepathy, telćsthesia, retrocognition, precognition;
+and in the cases reported by Cahagnet, which will be referred to in
+Chapter IX., there is apparently something more besides. We see, in
+short, that any empirical inlet into the metetherial world is apt to
+show us those powers, which we try to distinguish, coexisting in some
+synthesis by us incomprehensible. Here, therefore, just as with the
+crystal-visions, we have artificially to separate out the special class
+of phenomena with which we wish first to deal.
+
+In these experiments, then, there seems to be an independent power of
+visiting almost any desired place, its position having been perhaps
+first explained by reference to some landmark already known. The
+clairvoyante (I use the female word, but in several cases a man or boy
+has shown this power) will frequently miss her way, and describe houses
+or scenes adjacent to those desired. Then if she--almost literally--gets
+on the scent,--if she finds some place which the man whom she is sent
+to seek has some time traversed,--she follows up his track with greater
+ease, apparently recognising past events in his life as well as present
+circumstances.
+
+In these prolonged experimental cases there is thus time enough to allow
+of the clairvoyante's traversing certain places, such as empty rooms,
+factories, and the like, whither no assignable link from any living
+person could draw her. The evidence to prove telćsthesia, unmixed with
+telepathy, has thus generally come _incidentally_ in the course of some
+experiment mainly telepathic in character.
+
+These long clairvoyant wanderings are more nearly paralleled by _dreams_
+than by waking hallucinations.
+
+In a case which I will here quote a physician is impressed, probably in
+dream, with a picture of a special place in a street, where something is
+happening, which, though in itself unemotional--merely that a man is
+standing and talking in the street--is of moment to the physician, who
+wants to get unobtrusively into the man's house.
+
+From _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 267. The case is there
+described as coming "from a Fellow of the College of Physicians, who
+fears professional injury if he were 'supposed to defend opinions at
+variance with general scientific belief,' and does not therefore allow
+his name to appear."
+
+
+_May 20th, 1884._
+
+     Twenty years ago [abroad] I had a patient, wife of a parson. She
+     had a peculiar kind of delirium which did not belong to her
+     disease, and perplexed me. The house in which she lived was closed
+     at midnight, that is--the outer door had no bell. One night I saw
+     her at nine. When I came home I said to my wife, "I don't
+     understand that case; I wish I could get into the house late." We
+     went to bed rather early. At about one o'clock I got up. She said,
+     "What are you about? are you not well?" I said, "Perfectly so."
+     "Then why get up?" "Because I can get into that house." "How, if it
+     is shut up?" "I see the proprietor standing under the lamp-post
+     this side of the bridge, with another man." "You have been
+     dreaming." "No, I have been wide awake; but dreaming or waking, I
+     mean to try." I started with the firm conviction that I should find
+     the individual in question. Sure enough there he was under the
+     lamp-post, talking to a friend. I asked him if he was going home.
+     (I knew him very well.) He said he was, so I told him I was going
+     to see a patient, and would accompany him. I was positively ashamed
+     to explain matters; it seemed so absurd that I knew he would not
+     believe me. On arriving at the house I said, "Now I am here, I will
+     drop in and see my patient." On entering the room I found the maid
+     giving her a tumbler of strong grog. The case was clear; it was as
+     I suspected--delirium from drink. The next day I delicately spoke
+     to the husband about it. He denied it, and in the afternoon I
+     received a note requesting me not to repeat the visits. Three weeks
+     ago I was recounting the story and mentioned the name. A lady
+     present said: "That is the name of the clergyman in my parish, at
+     B., and his wife is in a lunatic asylum from drink!"
+
+In conversation with Gurney, the narrator explained that the
+vision--though giving an impression of externality and seen, as he
+believes, with open eyes--was not definably located in space. He had
+never encountered the proprietor in the spot where he saw him, and it
+was not a likely thing that he should be standing talking in the streets
+at so late an hour.
+
+In this case we cannot consider either the drunken patient or the
+indifferent proprietor as in any sense the _agent_. Somehow or other the
+physician's own persistent wish to get some such opportunity induced a
+collaboration of his subliminal with his supraliminal self, akin to the
+inspirations of genius. Genius, however, operates within ordinary
+sensory limits; while in this physician's case the subliminal self
+exercised its farthest-reaching supernormal powers.
+
+With this again may be compared a case in _Phantasms of the Living_
+(vol. ii. p. 368), where a dreamer seems to himself to be present in the
+Thames Tunnel during a fatal accident, which did in fact occur during
+that night. Here again the drowned workman--who was quite unknown to the
+distant dreamer--can hardly be called an _agent_; yet it may have been
+the excitement surrounding his death which attracted the dreamer's
+spirit to that scene, as a conflagration might attract a waking
+night-wanderer.
+
+There are, on the other hand, a good many cases where a scene thus
+discerned in a flash is one of special interest to the percipient,
+although no one in the scene may have actually wished to transfer it to
+him.
+
+A case again of a somewhat different type is the sudden waking vision of
+Mr. Gottschalk,[118] who sees in a circle of light the chalked hands and
+ruffled wrists of Mr. Courtenay Thorpe--a well-known actor--who was
+opening a letter of Mr. Gottschalk's in that costume at the time.
+Trivial in itself, this incident illustrates an interesting class of
+cases, where a picture very much like a crystal-vision suddenly appears
+on a wall or even in the air with no apparent background.
+
+I know one or two persons who have had in their lives one single round
+or oval hallucinatory picture of this kind, of which no interpretation
+was apparent,--a curious indication of some subliminal predisposition
+towards this somewhat elaborate form of message.
+
+Somewhat like Mr. Gottschalk's projection of his picture upon a
+background of dark air is the experience of Mrs. Taunton.[119] In this
+case the phantasm was perfectly external; yet it certainly did not hold
+to the real objects around the same relation as a figure of flesh and
+blood would have held; it was in a peculiar way transparent. Gurney
+regards this transparency as indicating _imperfect externalisation_ of
+the hallucinatory image.
+
+My own phrase, "imperfect _co-ordination_ of inner with outward vision,"
+comes to much the same thing, and seems specially applicable to Mrs.
+Taunton's words: "The appearance was not transparent or filmy, but
+perfectly solid-looking; _and yet I could somehow see the orchestra, not
+through, but behind it_." There are a few cases where the percipient
+seems to see a hallucinatory figure _behind_ him, out of the range of
+optical vision.[120] There is of course no reason why this should not be
+so,--even if a part of space external to the percipient's brain should
+be actually affected.
+
+Mr. Searle's case also is very interesting.[121] Here Mrs. Searle faints
+when visiting a house a few miles from Mr. Searle's chambers in the
+Temple. At or about the same time, he sees as though in a looking-glass,
+upon a window opposite him, his wife's head and face, white and
+bloodless.
+
+Gurney suggests that this was a transference from Mrs. Searle's mind
+simply of "the _idea_ of fainting," which then worked itself out into
+perception in an appropriate fashion.
+
+Was it thus? Or did Mr. Searle in the Temple see with inner vision his
+wife's head as she lay back faint and pallid in Gloucester Gardens? Our
+nearest analogy here is plainly crystal-vision; and crystal-visions, as
+we have observed, point both ways. Sometimes the picture in the crystal
+is conspicuously symbolical; sometimes it seems a transcript of an
+actual distant scene.
+
+There are two further problems which occur as we deal with each class of
+cases in turn,--the problem of time-relations and the problem of
+spirit-agency. Can an incident be said to be seen clairvoyantly if it is
+seen some hours after it occurred? Ought we to say that a scene is
+clairvoyantly visited, or that it is spiritually shown, if it represents
+a still chamber of death,[122] where no emotion is any longer stirring;
+but to which the freed spirit might desire to attract the friend's
+attention and sympathy?
+
+Such problems cannot at present be solved; nor, as I have said, can any
+one class of these psychical interchanges be clearly demarcated from
+other classes. Recognising this, we must explain the central
+characteristics of each group in turn, and show at what points that
+group appears to merge into the next.
+
+And now we come to that class of cases where B invades A, and A
+perceives the invasion; but B retains no memory of it in supraliminal
+life. From one point of view, as will be seen, this is just the reverse
+of the class last discussed--where the invader remembered an invasion
+which the invaded person (when there was one) did not perceive.
+
+We have already discussed some cases of this sort which seemed to be
+_psychorrhagic_--to have occurred without will or purpose on the part of
+the invader. What we must now do is to collect cases where there may
+probably have been some real projection of will or desire on the
+invader's part, leading to the projection of his phantasm in a manner
+recognisable by the distant friend whom he thus invades--yet without
+subsequent memory of his own. These cases will be intermediate between
+the _psychorrhagic_ cases already described and the _experimental_ cases
+on which we shall presently enter.
+
+In the case of Canon Warburton--in Chapter IV.--the person undergoing
+the accident did recollect having had a vivid thought of his brother at
+the moment;--while his brother on the other hand was startled from a
+slight doze by the vision of the scene of danger as then taking
+place;--the steep stairs and the falling figure. This is an acute
+crisis, much resembling impending death by drowning, etc.; and the
+apparition may be construed either way--either as a scene clairvoyantly
+discerned by Canon Warburton, owing, as I say, to a spasmodic tightening
+of his psychical link with his brother, or as a sudden _invasion_ on
+that brother's part, whose very rapidity perhaps helped to prevent his
+remembering it.
+
+The case given in Appendix VI. E is interesting, both evidentially and
+from its intrinsic character. The narrative, printed in _Phantasms of
+the Living_, on the authority of one only of the witnesses concerned,
+led to the discovery of the _second_ witness--whom we had no other means
+of finding--and has been amply corroborated by her independent account.
+
+The case stands about midway between psychorrhagic cases and intentional
+self-projections, and is clearly of the nature of an _invasion_, since
+the phantasm was seen by a stranger as well as by the friend, and seemed
+to both to be moving about the room. The figure, that is to say, was
+adapted to the percipient's environment.
+
+Cases of this general character, both visual and auditory, occupy a
+great part of _Phantasms of the Living_, and others have been frequently
+quoted in the S.P.R. _Journal_ during recent years.[123]
+
+Of still greater interest is the class which comes next in order in my
+ascending scale of apparent _intensity_; the cases, namely, where there
+is recollection on both sides, so that the experience is
+_reciprocal_.[124] These deserve study, for it is by noting under what
+circumstances these spontaneously reciprocal cases occur that we have
+the best chance of learning how to produce them experimentally. It will
+be seen that there have been various degrees of tension of thought on
+the agent's part.
+
+And here comes in a small but important group--the group of what I may
+call death-compacts prematurely fulfilled. We shall see in the next
+chapter that the exchange of a solemn promise between two friends to
+appear to one another, if possible, after death is far from being a
+useless piece of sentiment. Such posthumous appearances, it is true, may
+be in most cases impossible, but nevertheless there is real ground to
+believe that the previous tension of the will in that direction makes it
+more likely that the longed-for meeting shall be accomplished. If so,
+this is a kind of _experiment_, and an experiment which all can make.
+
+Now we have two or three cases where this compact has been made, and
+where an apparition has followed--but before and not after the agent's
+death--at the moment, that is to say, of some dangerous accident, when
+the sufferer was perhaps all but drowned, or was stunned, or otherwise
+insensible.[125]
+
+Lastly, the lessons of these spontaneous apparitions have been confirmed
+and widened by actual experiment. It is plain that just as we are not
+confined to noting small spontaneous telepathic transferences when they
+occur, but can also endeavour to reproduce them by experiment, so also
+we can endeavour to reproduce experimentally these more advanced
+telepathic phenomena of the invasion of the presence of the percipient
+by the agent. It is to be hoped, indeed, that such experiment may become
+one of the most important features of our inquiry. The type of the
+experiment is somewhat as follows. The intending agent endeavours by an
+effort at self-concentration, made either in waking hours or just before
+sleep, to render himself perceptible to a given person at a distance,
+who, of course, must have no reason to expect a phantasmal visit at that
+hour. Independent records must be made on each side, of all attempts
+made, and of all phantoms seen. The evidential point is, of course, the
+coincidence between the _attempt_ and the _phantom_, whether or not the
+agent can afterwards remember his own success.[126]
+
+Now the _experimental_ element here is obviously very incomplete. It
+consists in little more than in a concentrated desire to produce an
+effect which one can never explain, and seldom fully remember. I have
+seen no evidence to show that any one can claim to be an adept in such
+matters--has learned a method of thus appearing at will.[127] We are
+acting in the dark. Yet nevertheless the mere fact that on some few
+occasions this strong desire has actually been followed by a result of
+this extremely interesting kind is one of the most encouraging phenomena
+in our whole research. The successes indeed have borne a higher
+proportion to the failures than I should have ventured to hope. But
+nowhere is there more need of persistent and careful
+experimentation;--nowhere, I may add, have emotions quite alien from
+Science--mere groundless fears of seeing anything unusual--interfered
+with more disastrous effect. Such fears, one hopes, will pass away, and
+the friend's visible image will be recognised as a welcome proof of the
+link that binds the two spirits together.
+
+The case which I quote in Appendix VI. F illustrates both the essential
+harmlessness--nay, naturalness--of such an experiment, and the causeless
+fear which it may engender even in rational and serious minds.
+
+In these experimental apparitions, which form, as it were, the _spolia
+opima_ of the collector, we naturally wish to know all that we can about
+each detail in the experience. Two important points are the _amount of
+effort_ made by the experimenter, and the degree of his _consciousness
+of success_. The amount of effort in Mr. S. H. B.'s case (for instance)
+seems to have been great; and this is encouraging, since what we want is
+to be assured that the tension of will has really some power. It seems
+to act in much the same way as a therapeutic suggestion from the
+conscious self; one can never make sure that any given self-suggestion
+will "take"; but, on the whole, the stronger the self-suggestions, the
+better the result. It is therefore quite in accordance with analogy that
+a suggestion from without, given to a hypnotised person, should be the
+most promising way of inducing these self-projections. It should be
+strongly impressed on hypnotised subjects that they can and must
+temporarily "leave the body," as they call it, and manifest themselves
+to distant persons--the consent, of course, of both parties to the
+experiment having been previously secured.
+
+Of this type were Dr. Backman's experiments with his subject
+"Alma,"[128] and although that series of efforts was prematurely broken
+off, it was full of promise. There were some slight indications that
+Alma's clairvoyant excursions were sometimes perceptible to persons in
+the scenes psychically invaded; and there was considerable and growing
+evidence to her own retention in subsequent memory of some details of
+those distant scenes.
+
+By all analogy, indeed, that subsequent memory should be an eminently
+_educable_ thing. The carrying over of recollections from one stratum of
+personality into another--as hypnotic experiment shows us--is largely a
+matter of patient suggestion. It would be very desirable to hypnotise
+the person who had succeeded in producing an experimental apparition, of
+Mr. S. H. B.'s type, and to see if he could then recall the psychical
+excursion. Hypnotic states should be far more carefully utilised in
+connection with all these forms of self-projection.
+
+In these self-projections we have before us, I do not say the most
+useful, but the most extraordinary achievement of the human will. What
+can lie further outside any known capacity than the power to cause a
+semblance of oneself to appear at a distance? What can be a more
+_central_ action--more manifestly the outcome of whatsoever is deepest
+and most unitary in man's whole being? Here, indeed, begins the
+justification of the conception expressed at the beginning of this
+chapter;--that we should now see the subliminal self no longer as a mere
+chain of eddies or backwaters, in some way secluded from the main stream
+of man's being, but rather as itself the central and potent current, the
+most truly identifiable with the man himself. Other achievements have
+their manifest limit; where is the limit here? The spirit has shown
+itself in part dissociated from the organism; to what point may its
+dissociation go? It has shown some independence, some intelligence, some
+permanence. To what degree of intelligence, independence, permanence,
+may it conceivably attain? Of all vital phenomena, I say, this is the
+most significant; this self-projection is the one definite act which it
+seems as though a man might perform equally well before and after bodily
+death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+PHANTASMS OF THE DEAD
+
+                             [Greek: ouketi prhosô
+    ebhatas ela kidnôu hyper Hrakleos perhas eumares
+    ... thume, tiua prhos dllodapas
+    xkras emos plsou paramelbeai];
+
+    --PINDAR
+
+
+The course of our argument has gradually conducted us to a point of
+capital importance. A profound and central question, approached in
+irregular fashion from time to time in previous chapters, must now be
+directly faced. From the actions and perceptions of spirits still in the
+flesh, and concerned with one another, we must pass on to inquire into
+the actions of spirits no longer in the flesh, and into the forms of
+perception with which men still in the flesh respond to that unfamiliar
+and mysterious agency.
+
+There need, I hope, be no real break here in my previous line of
+argument. The subliminal self, which we have already traced through
+various phases of growing sensitivity, growing independence of organic
+bonds, will now be studied as sensitive to yet remoter influences;--as
+maintaining an independent existence even when the organism is
+destroyed. Our subject will divide itself conveniently under three main
+heads. _First_, it will be well to discuss briefly the nature of the
+evidence to man's survival of death which may theoretically be
+obtainable, and its possible connections with evidence set forth in
+previous chapters. _Secondly_,--and this must form the bulk of the
+present chapter,--we need a classified exposition of the main evidence
+to survival thus far obtained;--so far, that is to say, as sensory
+automatism--audition or apparition--is concerned; for motor
+automatism--automatic writing and trance-utterance--must be left for
+later discussion. _Thirdly_, there will be need of some consideration of
+the meaning of this evidence as a whole, and of its implications alike
+for the scientific and for the ethical future of mankind. Much more,
+indeed, of discussion (as well as of evidence) than I can furnish will
+be needed before this great conception can be realised or argued from
+with the scientific thoroughness due to its position among fundamental
+cosmical laws. Considering how familiar the notion--the vague shadowy
+notion--of "immortality" has always been, it is strange indeed that so
+little should have been done in these modern days to grasp or to
+criticise it;--so little, one might almost say, since the _Phćdo_ of
+Plato.
+
+Beginning, then, with the inquiry as to what kind of evidence ought to
+be demanded for human survival, we are met first by the bluff statement
+which is still often uttered even by intelligent men, that _no_ evidence
+would convince them of such a fact; "neither would they be persuaded
+though one rose from the dead."
+
+Extravagant as such a profession sounds, it has a meaning which we shall
+do well to note. These resolute antagonists mean that no new evidence
+can carry conviction to them unless it be _continuous_ with old
+evidence; and that they cannot conceive that evidence to a world of
+spirit can possibly be continuous with evidence based upon our
+experience of a world of matter. I agree with this demand for
+continuity; and I agree also that the claims usually advanced for a
+spiritual world have not only made no attempt at continuity with known
+fact, but have even ostentatiously thrown such continuity to the winds.
+The popular mind has expressly desired something startling, something
+outside Law and above Nature. It has loved, if not a _Credo quia
+absurdum_, at least a _Credo quia non probatum_. But the inevitable
+retribution is a deep insecurity in the conviction thus attained.
+Unsupported by the general fabric of knowledge, the act of faith seems
+to shrink into the background as that great fabric stands and grows.
+
+I can hardly too often repeat that my object in these pages is of a
+quite opposite character. Believing that all cognisable Mind is as
+continuous as all cognisable Matter, my ideal would be to attempt for
+the realm of mind what the spectroscope and the law of gravitation have
+effected for the realm of matter, and to carry that known cosmic
+uniformity of substance and interaction upwards among the essences and
+operations of an unknown spiritual world. And in order to explore these
+unreachable altitudes I would not ask to stand with the theologian on
+the summit of a "cloud-capt tower," but rather on plain earth at the
+measured base of a trigonometrical survey.
+
+If we would measure such a base, the jungle must be cleared to begin
+with. Let us move for a while among first definitions; trying to make
+clear to ourselves what kind of thing it is that we are endeavouring to
+trace or discover. In popular parlance, we are looking out for _ghosts_.
+What connotation, then, are we to give to the word "ghost"--a word
+which has embodied so many unfounded theories and causeless fears? It
+would be more satisfactory, in the present state of our knowledge,
+simply to collect facts without offering speculative comment. But it
+seems safer to begin by briefly pointing out the manifest errors of the
+traditional view; since that tradition, if left unnoticed, would remain
+lodged in the background even of many minds which have never really
+accepted it.
+
+Briefly, then, the popular view regards a "ghost" as a _deceased person
+permitted by Providence to hold communication with survivors_. And this
+short definition contains, I think, at least three unwarrantable
+assumptions.
+
+In the first place, such words as _permission_ and _Providence_ are
+simply neither more nor less applicable to this phenomenon than to any
+other. We conceive that all phenomena alike take place in accordance
+with the laws of the universe, and consequently by permission of the
+Supreme Power in the universe. Undoubtedly the phenomena with which we
+are dealing are in this sense permitted to occur. But there is no _a
+priori_ reason whatever for assuming that they are permitted in any
+especial sense of their own, or that they form exceptions to law,
+instead of being exemplifications of law. Nor is there any _a
+posteriori_ reason for supposing any such inference to be deducible from
+a study of the phenomena themselves. If we attempt to find in these
+phenomena any poetical justice or manifest adaptation to human cravings,
+we shall be just as much disappointed as if we endeavoured to find a
+similar satisfaction in the ordinary course of terrene history.
+
+In the second place, we have no warrant for the assumption that the
+phantom seen, even though it be somehow _caused_ by a deceased person,
+_is_ that deceased person, in any ordinary sense of the word. Instead of
+appealing to the crude analogy of the living friend who, when he has
+walked into the room, _is_ in the room, we shall find for the ghost a
+much closer parallel in those hallucinatory figures or phantasms which
+living persons can sometimes project at a distance.
+
+But experience shows that when--as with these _post-mortem_
+phantoms--the deceased person has gone well out of sight or reach there
+is a tendency, so to say, to _anthropomorphose_ the apparition; to
+suppose that, as the deceased person is not provably anywhere else, he
+is probably here; and that the apparition is bound to behave
+accordingly. All such assumptions must be dismissed, and the phantom
+must be taken on its merits, as indicating merely a certain connection
+with the deceased, the precise nature of that connection being a part of
+the problem to be solved.
+
+And in the third place, just as we must cease to say that the phantom
+_is_ the deceased, so also must we cease to ascribe to the phantom the
+motives by which we imagine that the deceased might be swayed. We must
+therefore exclude from our definition of a ghost any words which assume
+its intention to communicate with the living. It may bear such a
+relation to the deceased that it can reflect or represent his presumed
+wish to communicate, or it may not. If, for instance, its relation to
+his _post-mortem_ life be like the relation of my dreams to my earthly
+life, it may represent little that is truly his, save such vague
+memories and instincts as give a dim individuality to each man's trivial
+dreams.
+
+Let us attempt, then, a truer definition. Instead of describing a
+"ghost" as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let
+us define it as _a manifestation of persistent personal energy_, or as
+an indication that some kind of force is being exercised after death
+which is in some way connected with a person previously known on earth.
+In this definition we have eliminated, as will be seen, a great mass of
+popular assumptions. Yet we must introduce a further proviso, lest our
+definition still seem to imply an assumption which we have no right to
+make. It is theoretically possible that this force or influence, which
+after a man's death creates a phantasmal impression of him, may indicate
+no continuing action on his part, but may be some residue of the force
+or energy which he generated while yet alive. There may be _veridical
+after-images_--such as Gurney hints at (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p.
+417) when in his comments on the recurring figure of an old woman--seen
+on the bed where she was murdered--he remarks that this figure suggests
+not so much "any continuing local interest on the part of the deceased
+person, as the survival of a mere image, impressed, we cannot guess how,
+on we cannot guess what, by that person's physical organism, and
+perceptible at times to those endowed with some cognate form of
+sensitiveness."
+
+Strange as this notion may seem, it is strongly suggested by many of the
+cases of _haunting_ which do not fall within the scope of the present
+chapter. We shall presently find that there is strong evidence for the
+recurrence of the same hallucinatory figures in the same localities, but
+weak evidence to indicate any purpose in most of these figures, or any
+connection with bygone individuals, or with such tragedies as are
+popularly supposed to start a ghost on its career. In some of these
+cases of frequent, meaningless recurrence of a figure in a given spot,
+we are driven to wonder whether it can be some deceased person's past
+frequentation of that spot, rather than any fresh action of his after
+death, which has generated what I have termed the veridical
+after-image--veridical in the sense that it communicates information,
+previously unknown to the percipient, as to a former inhabitant of the
+haunted locality.
+
+Such are some of the questions which our evidence suggests. And I may
+point out that the very fact that such bizarre problems should present
+themselves at every turn does in a certain sense tend to show that these
+apparitions are not purely subjective things,--do not originate merely
+in the percipient's imagination. For they are not like what any man
+would have imagined. What man's mind does tend to fancy on such topics
+may be seen in the endless crop of fictitious ghost stories, which
+furnish, indeed, a curious proof of the persistence of preconceived
+notions. For they go on being framed according to canons of their own,
+and deal with a set of imaginary phenomena quite different from those
+which actually occur. The actual phenomena, I may add, could scarcely be
+made romantic. One true "ghost story" is apt to be very like another,
+and most of them to be fragmentary and apparently meaningless. Their
+meaning, that is to say, lies in their conformity, not to the
+mythopoeic instinct of mankind, which fabricates and enjoys the
+fictitious tales, but to some unknown law, not based on human sentiment
+or convenience at all.
+
+And thus, absurdly enough, we sometimes hear men ridicule the phenomena
+which actually do happen, simply because those phenomena do not suit
+their preconceived notions of what ghostly phenomena ought to be;--not
+perceiving that this very divergence, this very unexpectedness, is in
+itself no slight indication of an origin _outside_ the minds which
+obviously were so far from anticipating anything of the kind.
+
+And in fact the very qualities which are most apt to raise derision are
+such as the evidence set forth in the earlier chapters of this work
+might reasonably lead us to expect. For I hold that now for the first
+time can we form a conception of ghostly communications which shall in
+any way consist or cohere with more established conceptions; which can
+be presented as in any way a development of facts which are already
+experimentally known. Two preliminary conceptions were
+needed--conceptions in one sense ancient enough; but yet the first of
+which has only in this generation found its place in science, while the
+second is as yet awaiting its brevet of orthodoxy. The first conception
+is that with which hypnotism and various automatisms have familiarised
+us,--the conception of multiplex personality, of the potential
+coexistence of many states and many memories in the same individual. The
+second is the conception of telepathy; of the action of mind on mind
+apart from the ordinary organs of sense; and especially of its action by
+means of hallucinations; by the generation of veridical phantasms which
+form, as it were, messages from men still in the flesh. And I believe
+that these two conceptions are in this way connected, that the
+telepathic message generally starts from, and generally impinges upon, a
+subconscious or submerged stratum in both agent and percipient.[129]
+Wherever there is hallucination, whether delusive or veridical, I hold
+that a message of some sort is forcing its way upwards from one stratum
+of personality to another,--a message which may be merely dreamlike and
+incoherent, or which may symbolise a fact otherwise unreachable by the
+percipient personality. And the mechanism seems much the same whether
+the message's path be continued within one individual or pass between
+two; whether A's own submerged self be signalling to his emergent self,
+or B be telepathically stimulating the hidden fountains of perception in
+A. If anything like this be true, it seems plainly needful that all that
+we know of abnormal or supernormal communications between minds, or
+states of the same mind, still embodied in flesh, should be searched for
+analogies which may throw light on this strangest mode of intercourse
+between embodied and disembodied minds.
+
+A communication (if such a thing exists) from a departed person to a
+person still on earth is, at any rate, a communication from a mind in
+one state of existence to a mind in a very different state of existence.
+And it is, moreover, a communication from one mind to another which
+passes through some channel other than the ordinary channels of sense,
+since on one side of the gulf no material sense-organs exist. It will
+apparently be an extreme instance of both these classes--of
+communications between state and state,[130] and of telepathic
+communications; and we ought, therefore, to approach it by considering
+the less advanced cases of both these types.
+
+On what occasions do we commonly find a mind conversing with another
+mind not on the same plane with itself?--with a mind inhabiting in some
+sense a different world, and viewing the environment with a difference
+of outlook greater than the mere difference of character of the two
+personages will account for?
+
+The first instance of this sort which will occur to us lies in
+spontaneous somnambulism, or colloquy between a person asleep and a
+person awake. And observe here how slight an accident allows us to
+enter into converse with a state which at first sight seems a type of
+incommunicable isolation. "Awake, we share our world," runs the old
+saying, "but each dreamer inhabits a world of his own." Yet the dreamer,
+apparently so self-enclosed, may be gently led, or will spontaneously
+enter, into converse with waking men.
+
+The somnambulist, or rather the somniloquist--for it is the talking
+rather than the walking which is the gist of the matter--is thus our
+first natural type of the _revenant_.
+
+And observing the habits of somnambulists, we note that the degree in
+which they can communicate with other minds varies greatly in different
+cases. One sleep-waker will go about his customary avocations without
+recognising the presence of any other person whatever; another will
+recognise certain persons only, or will answer when addressed, but only
+on certain subjects, his mind coming into contact with other minds only
+on a very few points. Rarely or never will a somnambulist spontaneously
+notice what other persons are doing, and adapt his own actions thereto.
+
+Next let us turn from natural to induced sleep-waking, from idiopathic
+somnambulism to the hypnotic trance. Here, too, throughout the different
+stages of the trance, we find a varying and partial (or elective) power
+of communication. Sometimes the entranced subject makes no sign
+whatever; sometimes he seems able to hear and answer one person, or
+certain persons, and not others; sometimes he will talk freely to all;
+but, however freely he may talk, he is not exactly his waking self, and
+as a rule he has no recollection, or a very imperfect recollection, in
+waking life of what he has said or done in his trance.
+
+Judging, then, from such analogy as communications from one living state
+to another can suggest to us, we shall expect that the communication of
+a disembodied or discarnate person with an incarnate, if such exist,
+will be subject to narrow limitations, and very possibly will not form a
+part of the main current of the supposed discarnate consciousness.
+
+These preliminary considerations are applicable to any kind of alleged
+communication from the departed--whether well or ill evidenced; whether
+conveyed in sensory or in motor form.
+
+Let us next consider what types of communication from the dead our
+existing evidence of communications among the living suggests to us as
+analogically possible. It appears to me that there is an important
+parallelism running through each class of our experiments in automatism
+and each class of our spontaneous phenomena. Roughly speaking, we may
+say that our experiment and observation up to this point have comprised
+five different stages of phenomena, viz., (I.) hypnotic suggestion;
+(II.) telepathic experiments; (III.) spontaneous telepathy during life;
+(IV.) phantasms at death; (V.) phantasms after death. And we find, I
+think, that the same types of communication meet us at each stage; so
+that this recurrent similarity of types raises a presumption that the
+underlying mechanism of manifestation at each stage may be in some way
+similar.
+
+Again using a mere rough form of division, we shall find three main
+forms of manifestation at each stage: (1) hallucinations of the senses;
+(2) emotional and motor impulses; (3) definite intellectual messages.
+
+(I.) And first let us start from a class of experiments into which
+telepathy does not enter, but which exhibit in its simplest form the
+mechanism of the automatic transfer of messages from one stratum to
+another of the same personality. I speak, of course, of post-hypnotic
+suggestions. Here the agent is a living man, operating in an ordinary
+way, by direct speech. The unusual feature lies in the condition of the
+percipient, who is hypnotised at the time, and is thus undergoing a kind
+of dislocation of personality, or temporary upheaval of a habitually
+subjacent stratum of the self. This hypnotic personality, being for the
+time at the surface, receives the agent's verbal suggestion, of which
+the percipient's waking self is unaware. Then afterwards, when the
+waking self has resumed its usual upper position, the hypnotic self
+carries out at the stated time the given suggestion,--an act whose
+origin the upper stratum of consciousness does not know, but which is in
+effect a message communicated to the upper stratum from the now
+submerged or subconscious stratum on which the suggestion was originally
+impressed.
+
+And this message may take any one of the three leading forms mentioned
+above;--say a hallucinatory image of the hypnotiser or of some other
+person; or an impulse to perform some action; or a definite word or
+sentence to be written automatically by the waking self, which thus
+learns what order has been laid upon the hypnotic self while the waking
+consciousness was in abeyance.
+
+(II.) Now turn to our experiments in thought-transference. Here again
+the agent is a living man; but he is no longer operating by ordinary
+means,--by spoken words or visible gestures. He is operating on the
+percipient's subconscious self by means of a telepathic impulse, which
+he desires, indeed, to project from himself, and which the percipient
+may desire to receive, but of whose _modus operandi_ the ordinary waking
+selves of agent and percipient alike are entirely unaware.
+
+Here again we may divide the messages sent into the same three main
+classes. First come the hallucinatory figures--always or almost always
+of himself--which the agent causes the percipient to see. Secondly come
+impulses to act, telepathically impressed; as when the hypnotiser
+desires his subject to come to him at an hour not previously notified.
+And thirdly, we have a parallel to the post-hypnotic writing of definite
+words or figures in our own experiments on the direct telepathic
+transmission of words, figures, cards, etc., from the agent, using no
+normal means of communication, to the percipient, either in the
+hypnotised or in the waking state.
+
+(III.) We come next to the spontaneous phantasms occurring during life.
+Here we find the same three broad classes of messages, with this
+difference, that the actual apparitions, which in our telepathic
+experimentation are thus far unfortunately rare, become now the most
+important class. I need not recall the instances given in Chapters IV.
+and VI., etc., where an agent undergoing some sudden crisis seems in
+some way to generate an apparition of himself seen by a distant
+percipient. Important also in this connection are those apparitions of
+the _double_, where some one agent is seen repeatedly in phantasmal form
+by different percipients at times when that agent is undergoing no
+special crisis.
+
+Again, among our telepathic impressions generated (spontaneously, not
+experimentally) by living agents, we have cases, which I need not here
+recapitulate, of pervading sensations of distress; or impulses to return
+home, which are parallel to the hypnotised subject's impulse to approach
+his distant hypnotiser, at a moment when that hypnotiser is willing him
+to do so.
+
+And thirdly, among these telepathic communications from the living to
+the living, we have definite sentences automatically written,
+communicating facts which the distant person knows, but is not
+consciously endeavouring to transmit.
+
+(IV.) Passing on to phantasms which cluster about the moment of death,
+we find our three main classes of cases still meeting us. Our readers
+are familiar with the _visual_ cases, where there is an actual
+apparition of the dying man, seen by one or more persons; and also with
+the _emotional and motor_ cases, where the impression, although
+powerful, is not definitely sensory in character. And various cases also
+have been published where the message has consisted of definite words,
+not always externalised as an auditory hallucination, but sometimes
+automatically _uttered_ or automatically _written_ by the percipient
+himself, as in the case communicated by Dr. Liébeault (see Appendix
+VIII. C), where a girl writes the message announcing her friend's death
+at the time when that friend is, in fact, dying in a distant city.
+
+(V.) And now I maintain that in these post-mortem cases also we find the
+same general classes persisting, and in somewhat the same proportion.
+Most conspicuous are the actual _apparitions_, with which, indeed, the
+following pages will mainly deal. It is very rare to find an apparition
+which seems to impart any verbal message; but a case of this kind has
+been given in Appendix IV. F. As a rule, however, the apparition is of
+the apparently automatic, purposeless character, already so fully
+described. We have also the _emotional and motor_ class of post-mortem
+cases;[131] and these may, perhaps, be more numerous in proportion than
+our collection would indicate; for it is obvious that impressions which
+are so much less definite than a visual hallucination (although they may
+be even more impressive to the percipient himself) can rarely be used as
+evidence of communication with the departed.
+
+But now I wish to point out that, besides these two classes of
+post-mortem manifestations, we have our _third_ class also still
+persisting; we have definite verbal messages which at least purport, and
+sometimes, I think, with strong probability, to come from the departed.
+
+I have, indeed, for the reader's convenience, postponed these motor
+cases to a subsequent chapter, so that the evidence here and now
+presented for survival will be very incomplete. Yet, at any rate, we are
+gradually getting before us a fairly definite task. We have in this
+chapter to record and analyse such sensory experiences of living men as
+seem referable to the action of some human individuality persisting
+after death. We have also obtained some preliminary notion as to the
+kind of phenomena for which we can hope, especially as to what their
+probable limitations must be, considering how great a gulf between
+psychical states any communication must overpass.
+
+Let us now press the actual evidential question somewhat closer. Let us
+consider, for it is by no means evident at first sight, what conditions
+a visual or auditory phantasm is bound to fulfil before it can be
+regarded as indicating _primâ facie_ the influence of a discarnate mind.
+The discussion may be best introduced by quoting the words in which
+Edmund Gurney opened it in 1888.[132] The main evidential lines as there
+laid down retain their validity, although the years which have since
+passed have greatly augmented the testimony, and in so doing have
+illustrated yet other tests of true post-mortem communication,--to which
+we shall presently come.
+
+     "It is evident that in alleged cases of apparitions of the dead,
+     the point which we have held to distinguish certain apparitions of
+     _living_ persons from purely subjective hallucinations is
+     necessarily lacking. That point is _coincidence_ between the
+     apparition and some critical or exceptional condition of the person
+     who seems to appear; but with regard to the dead, we have no
+     independent knowledge of their condition, and therefore never have
+     the opportunity of observing any such coincidences.
+
+     "There remain three, and I think only three, conditions which might
+     establish a presumption that an apparition or other immediate
+     manifestation of a dead person is something more than a mere
+     subjective hallucination of the percipient's senses. Either (1)
+     more persons than one might be independently affected by the
+     phenomenon; or (2) the phantasm might convey information,
+     afterwards discovered to be true, of something which the percipient
+     had never known; or (3) the appearance might be that of a person
+     whom the percipient himself had never seen, and of whose aspect he
+     was ignorant, and yet his description of it might be sufficiently
+     definite for identification. But though one or more of these
+     conditions would have to be fully satisfied before we could be
+     convinced that any particular apparition of the dead had some cause
+     external to the percipient's own mind, there is one more general
+     characteristic of the class which is sufficiently suggestive of
+     such a cause to be worth considering. I mean the disproportionate
+     number of cases which occur _shortly after_ the death of the person
+     represented. Such a time-relation, if frequently enough
+     encountered, might enable us to argue for the objective origin of
+     the phenomenon in a manner analogous to that which leads us to
+     conclude that many phantasms of the living have an objective (a
+     telepathic) origin. For, according to the doctrines of
+     probabilities, a hallucination representing a known person would
+     not _by chance_ present a definite time-relation to a special
+     cognate event--viz., the death of that person--in more than a
+     certain percentage of the whole number of similar hallucinations
+     that occur; and if that percentage is decidedly exceeded, there is
+     reason to surmise that some other cause than chance--in other
+     words, some objective origin for the phantasm--is present."
+
+But on the other hand, a phantasm representing a person whose death is
+recent is specially likely to arouse interest and, in cases where the
+death is previously known to the percipient, his emotional state may be
+considered a sufficient cause of the hallucination.
+
+     "If, then," Gurney continues, "we are to draw any probable
+     conclusion as to the objective nature of _post-mortem_ appearances
+     and communications (or of some of them) from the fact of their
+     special frequency soon after death, we must confine ourselves to
+     cases where the fact of death has been unknown to the percipient at
+     the time of his experience. Now, in these days of letters and
+     telegrams, people for the most part hear of the deaths of friends
+     and relatives within a very few days, sometimes within a very few
+     hours, after the death occurs; so that appearances of the sort
+     required would, as a rule, have to follow very closely indeed on
+     the death. Have we evidence of any considerable number of such
+     cases?
+
+     "Readers of _Phantasms of the Living_ will know that we have. In a
+     number of cases which were treated in that book as examples of
+     telepathic transference from a dying person, the person was
+     actually dead at the time that the percipient's experience
+     occurred; and the inclusion of such cases under the title of
+     _Phantasms of the Living_ naturally occasioned a certain amount of
+     adverse criticism. Their inclusion, it will be remembered, required
+     an assumption which cannot by any means be regarded as certain. We
+     had to suppose that the telepathic transfer took place just before,
+     or exactly at, the moment of death; but that the impression
+     remained latent in the percipient's mind, and only after an
+     interval emerged into his consciousness, whether as waking vision
+     or as dream or in some other form. Now, as a provisional
+     hypothesis, I think that this assumption was justified. For in the
+     first place, the moment of death is, in time, the central point of
+     a cluster of abnormal experiences occurring to percipients at a
+     distance, of which some _precede_, while others follow, the death;
+     it is natural, therefore, to surmise that the same explanation will
+     cover the whole group, and that the motive force in each of its
+     divisions lies in a state of the 'agent' prior to bodily death. In
+     the second place, some of the facts of experimental
+     thought-transference countenance the view that 'transferred
+     impressions' may be latent for a time before the recipient becomes
+     aware of them; and recent discoveries with respect to the whole
+     subject of automatism and 'secondary intelligence' make it seem far
+     less improbable than it would otherwise have seemed that telepathy
+     may take effect first on the 'unconscious' part of the mind.[133]
+     And in the third place, the period of supposed latency has in a
+     good many instances been a period when the person affected was in
+     activity, and when his mind and senses were being solicited by
+     other things; and in such cases it is specially easy to suppose
+     that the telepathic impression did not get the right conditions for
+     rising into consciousness until a season of silence and
+     _recueillement_ arrived.[134] But though the theory of latency has
+     thus a good deal to be said for it, my colleagues and I are most
+     anxious not to be supposed to be putting forward as a dogma what
+     must be regarded at present merely as a working hypothesis.
+     Psychical research is of all subjects the one where it is most
+     important to avoid this error, and to keep the mind open for new
+     interpretations of the facts. And in the present instance there are
+     certain definite objections which may fairly be made to the
+     hypothesis that a telepathic impression derived from a dying person
+     may emerge after hours of latency. The experimental cases to which
+     I have referred as analogous are few and uncertain, and, moreover,
+     in them the period of latency has been measured by seconds or
+     minutes, not by hours. And though, as I have said, some of the
+     instances of apparent delay among the death-cases might be
+     accounted for by the fact that the percipient's mind or senses
+     needed to be withdrawn from other occupations before the
+     manifestation could take place, there are other instances where
+     this is not so, and where no ground at all appears for connecting
+     the delay with the percipient's condition. On the whole, then, the
+     alternative hypothesis--that the condition of the phenomenon on the
+     'agent's' side (be it psychical or be it physical) is one which
+     only comes into existence at a distinct interval after death, and
+     that the percipient really is impressed at the moment, and not
+     before the moment, when he is conscious of the impression--is one
+     which must be steadily kept in view.
+
+     "So far I have been speaking of cases where the interval between
+     the death and the manifestation was so short as to make the theory
+     of latency possible. The rule adopted in _Phantasms of the Living_
+     was that this interval must not exceed twelve hours. But we have
+     records of a few cases where this interval has been greatly
+     exceeded, and yet where the fact of the death was still unknown to
+     the percipient at the time of his experience. The theory of latency
+     cannot reasonably be applied to cases where weeks or months divide
+     the vision (or whatever it may be) from the moment of death, which
+     is the latest at which an ordinary[135] telepathically transferred
+     idea could have obtained access to the percipient. And the
+     existence of such cases--so far as it tends to establish the
+     reality of objectively-caused apparitions of the dead--diminishes
+     the objection to conceiving that the appearances, etc., which have
+     very shortly _followed_ death have had a different causation from
+     those which have coincided with or very shortly _preceded_ it. For
+     we shall not be inventing a wholly new class for the former cases,
+     but only provisionally shifting them from one class to another--to
+     a much smaller and much less well-evidenced class, it is true, but
+     one nevertheless for which we have evidence enough to justify us in
+     expecting more."
+
+This, as I conceive, is a sound method of proceeding from ground made
+secure in _Phantasms of the Living_--and traversed in my own just
+previous chapter--to cases closely analogous, save for that little
+difference in _time-relations_, that occurrence in the hours which
+follow, instead of the hours which precede, bodily dissolution, which
+counts for so much in our insight into cosmic law.[136]
+
+The hypothesis of _latency_ which thus meets us _in limine_ in this
+inquiry will soon be found inadequate to cover the facts. Yet it will be
+well to dwell somewhat more fully upon its possible range.
+
+If we examine the proportionate number of apparitions observed at
+various periods before and after death, we find that they increase very
+rapidly for the few hours which precede death, and decrease gradually
+during the hours and days which follow, until after about a year's time
+they become merely sporadic.
+
+Yet one more point must be touched on, to avoid misconception of the
+phrase cited above, that "the moment of death is the centre of a cluster
+of abnormal experiences, of which some precede, while others follow, the
+death." Gurney, of course, did not mean to assume that the act of death
+itself was the cause of all these experiences. Those which occur before
+death may be caused or conditioned, not by the death itself, but by the
+abnormal state, as of coma, delirium, etc., which preceded the death.
+This we say because we have many instances where veridical phantasms
+have coincided with moments of _crisis_--carriage-accidents and the
+like--occurring to distant agents, but not followed by death.
+Accordingly we find that in almost all cases where a phantasm,
+apparently veridical, has _preceded_ the agent's death, that death was
+the result of disease and not of accident. To this rule there are very
+few exceptions. There is a case given in _Phantasms of the Living_ (vol.
+ii. p. 52), where the phantasm seems on the evidence to have preceded by
+about half an hour (longitude allowed for) a sudden death by drowning.
+In this case the percipient was in a Norfolk farmhouse, the drowning
+man--or agent--was in a storm off the island of Tristan d'Acunha; and we
+have suggested that an error of clocks or of observation may account for
+the discrepancy. In another case the death was in a sense a violent one,
+for it was a suicide; but the morbidly excited state of the girl a few
+hours before death--when her phantasm was seen--was in itself a state
+of crisis. But there are also a few recorded cases (none of which were
+cited in _Phantasms of the Living_) where a phantasm or double of some
+person has been observed some days previous to that person's accidental
+death. The evidence obtained in the Census of Hallucinations, however,
+tended to show that cases of this sort are too few to suggest even
+_primâ facie_ a causal connection between the death and the apparition
+(see _Proceedings_ S.P.R. vol. x. p. 331).
+
+I now proceed briefly to review some of the cases where the interval
+between death and phantasm has been measurable by minutes or hours.
+
+It is not easy to get definite cases where the interval has been
+measurable by _minutes_; for if the percipient is at a distance from the
+agent we can seldom be sure that the clocks at both places have been
+correct, and correctly observed; while if he is _present_ with the agent
+we can rarely be sure that the phantasm observed is more than a mere
+subjective hallucination. Thus we have several accounts of a rushing
+sound heard by the watcher of a dying man just after his apparent death,
+or of some kind of luminosity observed near his person; but this is just
+the moment when we may suppose some subjective hallucination likely to
+occur, and if one person's senses alone are affected we cannot allow
+much evidential weight to the occurrence.[137]
+
+There are some circumstances, however, in which, in spite of the fact
+that the death is already known, a hallucination occurring shortly
+afterwards may have some slight evidential value. Thus we have a case
+where a lady who knew that her sister had died a few hours previously,
+but who was not herself in any morbidly excited condition, seemed to see
+some one enter her own dining-room, opening and shutting the door. The
+percipient (who had never had any other hallucination) was much
+astonished when she found no one in the dining-room; but it did not till
+some time afterwards occur to her that the incident could be in any way
+connected with her recent loss. This reminds us of a case (ii. p.
+694[138]) where the Rev. R. M. Hill sees a tall figure rush into the
+room, which alarms and surprises him, then vanishes before he has time
+to recognise it. An uncle, a tall man, dies about that moment, and it is
+remarked that although Mr. Hill knew his uncle to be ill, the anxiety
+which he may have felt would hardly have given rise to an unrecognised
+and formidable apparition.
+
+There are cases also where a percipient who has had an apparition of a
+friend shortly after that friend's known death has had _veridical_
+hallucinations at other times, and has never had any hallucination of
+purely subjective origin. Such a percipient may naturally suppose that
+his apparition of the departed friend possessed the same veridical
+character which was common to the rest, although it was not _per se_
+evidential, since the fact of the death was already known.
+
+For the present, however, it will be better to return to the cases which
+are free from this important _primâ facie_ drawback--cases where the
+percipient was, at any rate, unaware that the death, which the phantasm
+seemed to indicate, had in fact taken place.
+
+In the first place, there are a few cases where a percipient is informed
+of a death by a veridical phantasm, and then some hours afterwards a
+similar phantasm differing perhaps in detail, recurs.
+
+Such was the case of Archdeacon Farler (i. p. 414), who _twice_ during
+one night saw the dripping figure of a friend who, as it turned out, had
+been drowned during the previous day. Even the first appearance was
+several hours after the death, but this we might explain by the latency
+of the impression till a season of quiet. The second appearance may have
+been a kind of recrudescence of the first; but if the theory of latency
+be discarded, so that the _first_ appearance (if more than a mere chance
+coincidence) is held to depend upon some energy excited by the deceased
+person after death, it would afford some ground for regarding the
+_second_ appearance as also veridical. The figure in this case was once
+more seen a fortnight later, and on this occasion, as Archdeacon Farler
+informs me, in ordinary garb, with no special trace of accident.
+
+A similar repetition occurs in seven other cases recorded in _Phantasms
+of the Living_.[139]
+
+Turning now to the cases where the phantasm is not repeated, but occurs
+some hours after death, let us take a few narratives where the interval
+of time is pretty certain, and consider how far the hypothesis of
+_latency_ looks probable in each instance.
+
+Where there is no actual hallucination, but only a feeling of unique
+_malaise_ or distress following at a few hours' interval on a friend's
+death at a distance, as in Archdeacon Wilson's case (i. p. 280), it is
+very hard to picture to ourselves what has taken place. Some injurious
+shock communicated to the percipient's brain at the moment of the
+agent's death may conceivably have slowly worked itself into
+consciousness. The delay may have been due, so to say, to physiological
+rather than to psychical causes.
+
+Next take a case like that of Mrs. Wheatcroft (i. p. 420), or of Mrs.
+Evens (ii. p. 690), or Sister Bertha (quoted below in Appendix VII. F),
+where a definite hallucination of sight or sound occurs some hours after
+the death, but in the middle of the night. It is in a case of this sort
+that we can most readily suppose that a "telepathic impact" received
+during the day has lain dormant until other excitations were hushed, and
+has externalised itself as a hallucination after the first sleep, just
+as when we wake from a first sleep some subject of interest or anxiety,
+which has been thrust out of our thoughts during the day, will often
+well upwards into consciousness with quite a new distinctness and force.
+But on the other hand, in the case (for instance) of Mrs. Teale (ii. p.
+693), there is a deferment of some eight hours, and then the
+hallucination occurs while the percipient is sitting wide awake in the
+middle of her family. And in one of the most remarkable dream-cases in
+our collection (given in Chapter IV.), Mrs. Storie's experience does not
+resemble the mere emergence of a latent impression. It is long and
+complex, and suggests some sort of clairvoyance; but if it be
+"telepathic clairvoyance," that is, a picture transferred from the
+decedent's mind, then it almost requires us to suppose that a
+_post-mortem_ picture was thus transferred, a view of the accident and
+its consequences _fuller_ than any which could have flashed through the
+dying man's mind during his moment of sudden and violent death from "the
+striking off of the top of the skull" by a railway train.
+
+If once we assume that the deceased person's mind could continue to act
+on living persons after his bodily death, then the confused horror of
+the series of pictures which were presented to Mrs. Storie's
+view--mixed, it should be said, with an element of _fresh departure_
+which there was nothing in the accident itself to suggest--would
+correspond well enough to what one can imagine a man's feelings a few
+hours after such a death to be. This is trespassing, no doubt, on
+hazardous ground; but if once we admit communication from the other side
+of death as a working hypothesis, we must allow ourselves to imagine
+something as to the attitude of the communicating mind, and the least
+violent supposition will be that that mind is still in part at least
+occupied with the same thoughts which last occupied it on earth. It is
+possible that there may be some interpretation of this kind for some of
+the cases where a funeral scene, or a dead body, is what the phantasm
+presents. There is a remarkable case (i. p. 265) [§ 664] where a lady
+sees the body of a well-known London physician--about ten hours after
+death--lying in a bare unfurnished room (a cottage hospital abroad).
+Here the description, as we have it, would certainly fit best with some
+kind of telepathic clairvoyance prolonged after death--some power on the
+deceased person's part to cause the percipient to share the picture
+which might at that moment be occupying his own mind.
+
+It will be seen that these phenomena are not of so simple a type as to
+admit of our considering them from the point of view of _time-relations_
+alone. Whatever else, indeed, a "ghost" may be, it is probably one of
+the most complex phenomena in nature. It is a function of two unknown
+variables--the incarnate spirit's sensitivity and the discarnate
+spirit's capacity of self-manifestation. Our attempt, therefore, to
+study such intercourse may begin at either end of the
+communication--with the percipient or with the agent. We shall have to
+ask, How does the incarnate mind receive the message? and we shall have
+to ask also, How does the discarnate mind originate and convey it?
+
+Now it is by pressing the _former_ of these two questions that we have,
+I think, the best chance at present of gaining fresh light. So long as
+we are considering the incarnate mind we are, to some extent at least,
+on known ground; and we may hope to discern analogies in some other
+among that mind's operations to that possibly most perplexing of all its
+operations, which consists in taking cognisance of messages from
+unembodied minds, and from an unseen world. I think, therefore, that
+"the surest way, though most about," as Bacon would say, to the
+comprehension of this sudden and startling phenomenon lies in the study
+of other rare mental phenomena which can be observed more at leisure,
+just as "the surest way, though most about," to the comprehension of
+some blazing inaccessible star has lain in the patient study of the
+spectra of the incandescence of terrestrial substances which lie about
+our feet. I am in hopes that by the study of various forms of subliminal
+consciousness, subliminal faculty, subliminal perception, we may
+ultimately obtain a conception of our own total being and operation
+which may show us the incarnate mind's perception of the discarnate
+mind's message as no isolated anomaly, but an orderly exercise of
+natural and innate powers, frequently observed in action in somewhat
+similar ways.
+
+It is, I say, from this human or terrene side that I should prefer, were
+it possible, to study in the first instance all our cases. Could we not
+only share but interpret the percipient's subjective feelings, could we
+compare those feelings with the feelings evoked by ordinary vision or
+telepathy among living men, we might get at a more intimate knowledge of
+what is happening than any observation from outside of the details of an
+apparition can supply. But this, of course, is not possible in any
+systematic way; occasional glimpses, inferences, comparisons, are all
+that we can attain to as yet. On the other hand, it is comparatively
+easy to arrange the whole group of our cases in some series depending on
+their observed external character and details. They can, indeed, be
+arranged in more than one series of this kind--the difficulty is in
+selecting the most instructive. That which I shall here select is in
+some points arbitrary, but it has the advantage of bringing out the wide
+range of variation in the clearness and content of these apparitional
+communications, here arranged mainly in a descending series, beginning
+with those cases where fullest knowledge or purpose is shown, and ending
+with those where the indication of intelligence becomes feeblest, dying
+away at last into vague sounds and sights without recognisable
+significance.
+
+But I shall begin by referring to a small group of cases,[140] which I
+admit to be anomalous and non-evidential--for we cannot prove that they
+were more than subjective experiences--yet which certainly should not be
+lost, filling as they do, in all their grotesqueness, a niche in our
+series otherwise as yet vacant. If man's spirit is separated at death
+from his organism, there must needs be cases where that separation,
+although apparently, is not really complete. There must be subjective
+sensations corresponding to the objective external facts of apparent
+death and subsequent resuscitation. Nor need it surprise those who may
+have followed my general argument, if those subjective sensations should
+prove to be dreamlike and fantastic. Here, as so often in our inquiries,
+the very oddity and unexpectedness of the details--the absence of that
+solemnity which one would think the dying man's own mind would have
+infused into the occasion--may point to the existence of some reality
+beneath the grotesque symbolism of the transitional dream.
+
+The transitional dream, I call it, for it seems to me not
+improbable--remote though such a view may be from current notions--that
+the passage from one state to another may sometimes be accompanied with
+some temporary lack of adjustment between experiences taking place in
+such different environments--between the systems of symbolism belonging
+to the one and to the other state. But the reason why I refer to the
+cases in this place is that here we have perhaps our nearest possible
+approach to the sensations of the spirit which is endeavouring to
+manifest itself;--an inside view of a would-be apparition. The
+narratives suggest, moreover, that spirits recently freed from the body
+may enjoy a fuller perception of earthly scenes than it is afterwards
+possible to retain, and that thus the predominance of apparitions of the
+_recently_ dead may be to some extent explained.
+
+We have, indeed, very few cases where actual apparitions give evidence
+of any _continuity_ in the knowledge possessed by a spirit of friends on
+earth. Such evidence is, naturally enough, more often furnished by
+automatic script or utterance. But there is one case (which I give in
+Appendix VII. A) where a spirit is recorded as appearing repeatedly--in
+guardian-angel fashion--and especially as foreseeing and sympathising
+with the survivor's future marriage.
+
+Among repeated apparitions this case at present stands almost alone; its
+parallels will be found when we come to deal with the persistent
+"controls," or alleged communicating spirits, which influence
+trance-utterance or automatic script. A case bearing some resemblance to
+it, however, is given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 233, the
+main difference being that the repeated communications are there made in
+_dream_, and in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 450, [714 A], is
+recorded another case, where the deceased person seems to make repeated
+efforts to impress on survivors a wish prompted by continued affection.
+
+Less uncommon are the cases where an apparition, occurring singly and
+not repeated, indicates a continued knowledge of the affairs of earth.
+That knowledge, indeed, runs mainly, as we shall presently see, in two
+directions. There is often knowledge of some circumstance connected with
+the deceased person's own death, as the appearance of his body after
+dissolution, or the place of its temporary deposit or final burial. And
+there is often knowledge of the impending or actual death of some friend
+of the deceased person's. On the view here taken of the gradual passage
+from the one environment into the other, both these kinds of knowledge
+seem probable enough. I think it likely that some part of the
+consciousness after death may for some time be dreamily occupied with
+the physical scene. And similarly, when some surviving friend is
+gradually verging towards the same dissolution, the fact may be readily
+perceptible in the spiritual world. When the friend has actually died,
+the knowledge which his predecessor may have of his transition is
+knowledge appertaining to events of the next world as much as of this.
+
+But apart from this information, acquired perhaps on the borderland
+between two states, apparitions do sometimes imply a perception of more
+definitely terrene events, such as the moral crises (as marriage, grave
+quarrels, or impending crimes) of friends left behind on earth. In
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 25 [716 A], is a case of impressive
+warning, in which the phantom was seen by two persons, one of whom had
+already had a less evidential experience.
+
+In another case of similar type,[141] the message, while felt by the
+percipient to be convincing and satisfactory, was held too private to be
+communicated in detail. It is plain that just in the cases where the
+message is most ultimately veracious, the greatest difficulty is likely
+to be felt as to making it known to strangers.
+
+I have already given a case (Appendix VII. A) where a departed spirit
+seems to show a sympathetic anticipation of a marriage some time before
+it is contemplated. In another case (_Journal_ S.P.R., vol v. p. 10),
+the percipient, Mrs. V., describes a vision of a mother's form
+suspended, as it were, in a church where her son is undergoing the rite
+of confirmation. That vision, indeed, might have been purely subjective,
+as Mrs. V. was familiar with the departed mother's aspect; though value
+is given to it by the fact that Mrs. V. has had other experiences which
+included evidential coincidences.
+
+From these instances of knowledge shown by the departed of events which
+seem wholly terrene, I pass to knowledge of events which seem in some
+sense more nearly concerned with the spirit-world. We have, as already
+hinted, a considerable group of cases where a spirit seems to be aware
+of the _impending death_ of a survivor.[142] In some few of those cases
+the foreknowledge is entirely inexplicable by any such foresight as we
+mortals can imagine, but in the case given in Appendix VII. B, though
+the family did not foresee the death, a physician might, for aught we
+know, have been able to anticipate it. However explained, the case is
+one of the best-attested, and in itself one of the most remarkable, that
+we possess.
+
+I place next by themselves a small group of cases which have the
+interest of uniting the group just recounted, where the spirit
+anticipates the friend's departure, with the group next to be
+considered, where the spirit welcomes the friend already departed from
+earth. This class forms at the same time a natural extension of the
+clairvoyance of the dying exemplified in some "reciprocal" cases (_e.g._
+in the case of Miss W., where a dying aunt has a vision of her little
+niece who sees an apparition of her at the same time; see _Phantasms of
+the Living_, vol. ii. p. 253). Just as the approaching severance of
+spirit from body there aided the spirit to project its observation among
+incarnate spirits at a distance upon this earth, so here does that same
+approaching severance enable the dying person to see spirits who are
+already in the next world. It is not very uncommon for dying persons to
+say, or to indicate when beyond speech, that they see spirit friends
+apparently near them. But, of course, such vision becomes evidential
+only when the dying person is unaware that the friend whose spirit he
+sees has actually departed, or is just about to depart, from earth. Such
+a conjuncture must plainly be rare; it is even rather surprising that
+these "Peak in Darien" cases, as Miss Cobbe has termed them in a small
+collection which she made some years ago, should be found at all. We can
+add to Miss Cobbe's cases two of fair attestation. (_Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 93, and vol. xiv. p. 288 [718 A and B]).
+
+From this last group, then, there is scarcely a noticeable transition to
+the group where departed spirits manifest their knowledge that some
+friend who survived them has now passed on into their world. That such
+recognition and welcome does in fact take place, later evidence, drawn
+especially from trance-utterances, will give good ground to believe.
+Only rarely, however, will such welcome--taking place as it does in the
+spiritual world--be reflected by apparitions in _this_. When so
+reflected, it may take different forms, from an actual utterance of
+sympathy, as from a known departed friend, down to a mere silent
+presence, perhaps inexplicable except to those who happen to have known
+some long predeceased friend of the decedent's.
+
+I quote in Appendix VII. C one of the most complete cases of this type,
+which was brought to us by the Census of Hallucinations.
+
+There are other cases more or less analogous to this. In one[143] the
+apparition of a dying mother brings the news of her own death and that
+her baby is living. In another[144] a mother sees a vision of her son
+being drowned and also an apparition of her own dead mother, who tells
+her of the drowning. In this case, the question may be raised as to
+whether the second figure seen may not have been, so to say,
+_substitutive_--a symbol in which the percipient's own mind clothed a
+telepathic impression of the actual decedent's passage from earth. Such
+a view might perhaps be supported by some anomalous cases where news of
+the death is brought by the apparition of a person still living, who,
+nevertheless, is not by any normal means aware of the death. (See the
+case of Mrs. T., already given in Appendix IV. E.)
+
+But such an explanation is not always possible. In the case of Mrs.
+Bacchus,[145] for instance, both the deceased person and the phantasmal
+figure were previously unknown to the percipient. This case--the last
+which Edmund Gurney published--comes from an excellent witness. The
+psychical incident which it seems to imply, while very remote from
+popular notions, would be quite in accordance with the rest of our
+present series. A lady dies; her husband in the spirit-world is moved by
+her arrival; and the direction thus given to his thought projects a
+picture of him, clothed as in the days when he lived with her, into
+visibility in the house where her body is lying. We have thus a
+dream-like recurrence to earthly memories, prompted by a revival of
+those memories which had taken place in the spiritual world. The case is
+midway between a case of _welcome_ and a case of _haunting_.
+
+I now come to a considerable group of cases where the departed spirit
+shows a definite knowledge of some fact connected with his own
+earth-life, his death, or subsequent events connected with that death.
+The knowledge of subsequent events, as of the spread of the news of his
+death, or as to the place of his burial, is, of course, a greater
+achievement (so to term it) than a mere recollection of facts known to
+him in life, and ought strictly, on the plan of this series, to be first
+illustrated. But it will be seen that all these stages of knowledge
+cohere together; and their connection can better be shown if I begin at
+the lower stage,--of mere earth-memory. Now here again, as so often
+already, we shall have to wait for automatic script and the like to
+illustrate the full extent of the deceased person's possible memory.
+Readers of the utterances, for instance, of "George Pelham" (see
+Chapter IX.) will know how full and accurate may be these recollections
+from beyond the grave. Mere apparitions, such as those with which we are
+now dealing, can rarely give more than one brief message, probably felt
+by the deceased to be of urgent importance.
+
+A well-attested case where the information communicated in a vision
+proved to be definite, accurate, and important to the survivors is given
+in Appendix VII. D. In the same Appendix another case in this group is
+also quoted. It illustrates the fact that the cases of deepest interest
+are often the hardest for the inquirer to get hold of.
+
+In this connection I may refer again to Mrs. Storie's dream of the death
+of her brother in a railway accident, given in Chapter IV. While I think
+that Gurney was right--in the state of the evidence at the time
+_Phantasms of the Living_ was written--in doing his best to bring this
+incident under the head of telepathic clairvoyance, I yet feel that the
+knowledge since gained makes it impossible for me to adhere to that
+view. I cannot regard the visionary scene as wholly reflected from the
+mind of the dying man. I cannot think, in the first place, that the
+vision of Mr. Johnstone--interpolated with seeming irrelevance among the
+details of the disaster--did only by accident coincide with the fact
+that that gentleman really _was_ in the train, and with the further fact
+that it was _he_ who communicated the fact of Mr. Hunter's death to Mr.
+and Mrs. Stone. I must suppose that the communicating intelligence was
+aware of Mr. Johnstone's presence, and at least guessed that upon him
+(as a clergyman) that task would naturally fall. Nor can I pass over as
+purely symbolic so important a part of the vision as the _second
+figure_, and the scrap of conversation, which seemed to be half heard. I
+therefore consider that the case falls among those where a friend
+recently departed appears in company of some other friend, dead some
+time before.
+
+We have thus seen the spirit occupied shortly after death with various
+duties or engagements, small or great, which it has incurred during life
+on earth. Such ties seem to prompt or aid its action upon its old
+surroundings. And here an important reflection occurs. Can we _prepare_
+such a tie for the departing spirit? Can we create for it some welcome
+and helpful train of association which may facilitate the
+self-manifestation which many souls appear to desire? I believe that we
+can to some extent do this. At an early stage of our collection, Edmund
+Gurney was struck by the unexpectedly large proportion of cases where
+the percipient informed us that there had been a _compact_ between
+himself and the deceased person that whichever passed away first should
+try to appear to the other. "Considering," he adds, "what an extremely
+small number of persons make such a compact, compared with those who do
+not, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that its existence has a
+certain efficacy."
+
+Let us now review the compact-cases given in _Phantasms of the Living_
+and consider how far they seem to indicate _ante-mortem_ or
+_post-mortem_ communication. The twelve cases there recorded are such as
+fell, or may have fallen, within twelve hours of the death. In three of
+these cases, the agent whose phantasm appeared was certainly still
+alive. In most of the other cases the exact time relation is obscure; in
+a few of them there is strong probability that the agent was already
+dead. The inference will be that the existence of a promise or compact
+may act effectively both on the subliminal self before death and also
+probably on the spirit after death.
+
+This conclusion is confirmed by several other cases, one of which is
+given in Appendix VII. E. This case suggests an important practical
+reflection. When a compact to appear, if possible, after death is made,
+it should be understood that the appearance need not be to the special
+partner in the compact, but to any one whom the agent can succeed in
+impressing. It is likely enough that many such attempts, which have
+faded on account of the surviving friend's lack of appropriate
+sensitivity, might have succeeded if the agent had tried to influence
+some one already known to be capable of receiving these
+impressions.[146] There is a case given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v.
+p. 440, in which a lady, having made a compact with her husband and also
+with a friend, her phantom is seen after her death by her husband and
+daughter and the latter's nurse, collectively; but not by the friend,
+who was living elsewhere.
+
+Again, we cannot tell how long the spirit may continue the effort, or,
+so to say, renew the experiment. In a case recorded in _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. x. p. 378, the compact is fulfilled after a space of five
+years. In another case,[147] there had been no formal compact; but there
+is an attempt to express gratitude on an anniversary of death; and this
+implies the same kind of mindful effort as the fulfilment of a definite
+promise.
+
+I have now traced certain _post-mortem_ manifestations which reveal a
+recollection of events known at death, and also a persistence of purpose
+in carrying out intentions formed before death. In this next group I
+shall trace the knowledge of the departed a little further, and shall
+discuss some cases where they appear cognisant of the aspect of their
+bodies after death, or of the scenes in which those bodies are
+temporarily deposited or finally laid. Such knowledge may appear
+trivial,--unworthy the attention of spirits transported into a higher
+world. But it is in accordance with the view of a gradual transference
+of interests and perceptions,--a period of intermediate confusion, such
+as may follow especially upon a death of a sudden or violent kind, or
+perhaps upon a death which interrupts very strong affections.
+
+Thus we have already (Appendix VII. B) encountered one striking case of
+this type,--the _scratch on the cheek_, perceived by the departed
+daughter, as we may conjecture, by reason of the close sympathy which
+united her to the mother who was caring for her remains.
+
+There are also two cases closely resembling each other, though from
+percipients in widely different parts of the world, where a clairvoyant
+vision seems to be presented of a tranquil death-chamber. In that of Mr.
+Hector of Valencia, South Australia (see _Phantasms of the Living_, vol.
+i. p. 353), the percipient sees in a dream his father dying in the room
+he usually occupied, with a candle burning on a chair by his bed; and
+the father is found dead in the morning, with a candle by his bedside in
+the position seen in the dream. There is not, however, in this case any
+sure indication that the dead or dying person was cognisant of his own
+body's aspect or surroundings. There may have been a clairvoyant
+excursion on the percipient's part, evoked by some impulse from the
+agent which did not itself develop into distinctness.[148]
+
+But in certain cases of violent death there seems to have been an
+intention on the deceased person's part to show the condition in which
+his body is left. Such was Mrs. Storie's dream, or rather series of
+visions referred to earlier in this chapter. Such are the cases given in
+_Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 365 [429 A], and _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. iii. (1885) p. 95 [§ 730]. Here, too, may be placed two
+cases--those of Dr. Bruce (in Appendix IV. D) and Miss Hall (_Journal_
+S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 173 [731 A])--where there are _successive_ pictures
+of a death and the subsequent arrangement of the body. The _milieux_ of
+the percipients, the nature of the deaths, are here again totally
+disparate; yet we seem to see the same unknown laws producing effects
+closely similar.
+
+In Dr. Bruce's case one might interpret the visions as coming to the
+percipient through the mind of his wife, who was present at the scene of
+the murder. But this explanation would be impossible in Miss Hall's
+case. Rather it seems as though some telepathic link, set up between the
+dying brother and the sister, had been maintained after death until all
+duties had been fulfilled to the departed. The case reminds one of the
+old Homeric notions of the restless appeal of unburied comrades.
+
+In the case of Mrs. Green (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 420 [429
+D]), we come across an interesting problem. Two women are drowned under
+very peculiar circumstances. A friend has apparently a clairvoyant
+vision of the scene, yet not at the moment when it occurred, but many
+hours afterwards, and about the time when another person, deeply
+interested, heard of the death. It is therefore possible to suppose that
+the apparently clairvoyant scene was in reality impressed telepathically
+on the percipient by another living mind. I think, however, that both
+the nature of the vision and certain analogies, which will appear later
+in our argument, point to a different view, involving an agency both of
+the dead and of the living. I conjecture that a current of influence may
+be started by a deceased person, which, however, only becomes strong
+enough to be perceptible to its object when reinforced by some vivid
+current of emotion arising in living minds. I do not say that this is
+yet provable; yet the hint may be of value when the far-reaching
+interdependencies of telepathy between the two worlds come to be better
+understood.
+
+Two singular cases in this group remain, where the departed spirit, long
+after death, seems preoccupied with the spot where his bones are laid.
+The first of these cases (_Journal_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 230 [733 A])
+approaches farce; the second (in which the skeleton of a man who had
+probably been murdered about forty years before was discovered by means
+of a dream; see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 35), stands alone
+among our narratives in the tragedy which follows on the communication.
+Mr. Podmore in an article in the same volume (p. 303) suggests other
+theories to account for this case without invoking the agency of the
+dead; but to me the least impossible explanation is still the notion
+that the murdered man's dreams harked back after all those years to his
+remote unconsecrated grave. I may refer further to another case (in
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 155, footnote) where feelings of
+horror and depression were constantly experienced in a room over which a
+baby's body was afterwards found. This case makes, perhaps, for another
+explanation--depending not so much on any _continued_ influence of the
+departed spirit as on some _persistent_ influence inhering in the bones
+themselves--deposited under circumstances of terror or anguish, and
+possibly in some way still radiating a malignant memory. Bizarre as this
+interpretation looks, we shall find some confirmation of such a
+possibility in our chapter on Possession. Yet another case belonging to
+the same group (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 418) supplies a variant
+on this view; suggesting, as Edward Gurney has remarked, the local
+imprintation of a tragic picture, by _whom_ and upon _what_ we cannot
+tell.
+
+I think it well to suggest even these wild conjectures; so long as they
+are understood to be conjectures and nothing more. I hold it probable
+that those communications, of which telepathy from one spirit to another
+forms the most easily traceable variety, are in reality infinitely
+varied and complex, and show themselves from time to time in forms which
+must for long remain quite beyond our comprehension.
+
+The next class of cases in this series well illustrates this
+unexpectedness. It has only been as the result of a gradual accumulation
+of concordant cases that I have come to believe there is some reality in
+the bizarre supposition that the departed spirit is sometimes specially
+aware of the tune at which news of his death is about to reach some
+given friend.[149] Proof of such knowledge on his part is rendered
+harder by the alternative possibility that the friend may by
+clairvoyance become aware of a letter in his own proximity. As was shown
+in _Phantasms of the Living_, there is some evidence for such
+clairvoyance even in cases where the letter seen is quite unimportant.
+
+Again, there are cases where the percipient states that a cloud of
+unreasonable depression fell upon him about the time of his friend's
+death at a distance, and continued until the actual news arrived; when,
+instead of becoming intensified, it lifted suddenly. In one or two such
+cases there was an actual presence or apparition, which seemed to hang
+about until the news arrived, and then disappeared. Or, on the other
+hand, there is sometimes a happy vision of the departed preluding the
+news, as though to prepare the percipient's mind for the shock
+(_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 90 [735 A]). The suggested inference
+is that in such cases the spirit's attention is more or less
+continuously directed to the survivor until the news reaches him. This
+does not, of course, explain how the spirit learns as to the arrival of
+the news; yet it makes that piece of knowledge seem a less isolated
+thing.
+
+Having thus referred to a number of cases where the apparition shows
+varying degrees of knowledge or memory, I pass on to the somewhat
+commoner type, where the apparition lacks the power or the impulse to
+communicate any message much more definite than that all-important
+one--of his own continued life and love. These cases, nevertheless,
+might be subdivided on many lines. Each apparition, even though it be
+momentary, is a phenomenon complex in more ways than our minds can
+follow. We must look for some broad line of demarcation, which may apply
+to a great many different incidents, while continuing to some extent
+the series which we have already been descending--from knowledge and
+purpose on the deceased person's part down to vagueness and apparent
+automatism.
+
+Such a division--gradual, indeed, but for that very reason the more
+instructive--exists between _personal_ and _local_ apparitions; between
+manifestations plainly intended to impress the minds of certain definite
+survivors and manifestations in accustomed haunts, some of which,
+indeed, may be destined to impress survivors, but which degenerate and
+disintegrate into sights and sounds too meaningless to prove either
+purpose or intelligence.
+
+Let us look, then, for these characteristics, not expecting, of course,
+that our series will be logically simple; for it must often happen that
+the personal and local impulses will be indistinguishable, as when the
+desired percipient is inhabiting the familiar home. But we may begin
+with some cases where the apparition has shown itself in some scene
+altogether strange to the deceased person.
+
+We have had, of course, some cases of this type already. Such was the
+case of the apparition with the _red scratch_ (Appendix VII. B); such
+too was the apparition in the Countess Kapnist's carriage (Appendix VII.
+E). Such cases, indeed, occur most frequently--and this fact is itself
+significant--among the higher and more developed forms of manifestation.
+Among the briefer, less-developed apparitions with which we have now to
+deal, invasions by the phantasm of quite unknown territory are
+relatively few. I will begin by referring to a curious case, where the
+impression given is that of a spiritual presence which seeks and finds
+the percipient, but is itself too confused for coherent communication
+(Mrs. Lightfoot's case, _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 453 [429
+B]). It will be seen that this narrative is thoroughly in accordance
+with previous indications of a state of posthumous _bewilderment_
+supervening before the spirit has adjusted its perceptions to the new
+environment.
+
+In cases like Mrs. Lightfoot's, where the percipient's surroundings are
+unknown to the deceased person, and especially in cases where the
+intimation of a death reaches the percipient when _at sea_, there is
+plainly nothing except the percipient's own personality to guide the
+spirit in his search. We have several narratives of this type. In one of
+these--Archdeacon Farler's, already referred to (p. 227), the apparition
+appears _twice_, the second appearance at least being subsequent to the
+death. It is plain that if in such a case the _second_ apparition
+conveys no fresh intelligence, we cannot prove that it is more than a
+subjective recrudescence of the _first_. Yet analogy is in favour of
+its veridical character, since we have cases where successive
+manifestations _do_ bring fresh knowledge, and seem to show a continued
+effort to communicate.[150]
+
+Then, again, there are _auditory_ cases where the phantasmal speech has
+occurred in places not known to the deceased person. (_Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 90, and vol. v. p. 455.)
+
+One specially impressive characteristic of apparitions (as has been
+already remarked) is their occasional _collectivity_--the fact that more
+percipients than one sometimes see or hear the phantasmal figure or
+voice simultaneously. When one is considering the gradual decline in
+definiteness and apparent purpose from one group of apparitions to
+another, it is natural to ask whether this characteristic--in my view so
+important--is found to accompany especially the higher, more intelligent
+manifestations.
+
+I cannot find that this is so. On the contrary, it is, I think, in cases
+of mere _haunting_ that we oftenest find that the figure is seen by
+several persons at once, or else (a cognate phenomenon) by several
+persons successively. I know not how to explain this apparent tendency.
+Could we admit the underlying assumptions, it would suit the view that
+the "haunting" spirits are "earthbound," and thus somehow nearer to
+matter than spirits more exalted. Yet instances of collectivity are
+scattered through all classes of apparitions; and the irregular
+appearance of a characteristic which seems to us so fundamental affords
+another lesson how great may be the variety of inward mechanism in cases
+which to us might seem constructed on much the same type.
+
+I pass on to a group of cases which are both personal and local;
+although the personal element in most of them--the desire to manifest to
+the friend--may seem more important than the local element--the impulse
+to revisit some accustomed haunt.
+
+In the case which I shall now cite the deceased person's image is seen
+simultaneously by several members of his own household, in his own
+house. Note the analogy to a collective crystal vision.[151]
+
+The account is taken from _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 213. It
+is given by Mr. Charles A. W. Lett, of the Military and Royal Naval
+Club, Albemarle Street, W.
+
+
+_December 3rd, 1885._
+
+     On the 5th April 1873 my wife's father, Captain Towns, died at his
+     residence, Cranbrook, Rose Bay, near Sidney, N. S. Wales. About six
+     weeks after his death my wife had occasion, one evening about nine
+     o'clock, to go to one of the bedrooms in the house. She was
+     accompanied by a young lady, Miss Berthon, and as they entered the
+     room--the gas was burning all the time--they were amazed to see,
+     reflected as it were on the polished surface of the wardrobe, the
+     image of Captain Towns. It was barely half figure, the head,
+     shoulders, and part of the arms only showing--in fact, it was like
+     an ordinary medallion portrait, but life-size. The face appeared
+     wan and pale, as it did before his death, and he wore a kind of
+     grey flannel jacket, in which he had been accustomed to sleep.
+     Surprised and half alarmed at what they saw, their first idea was
+     that a portrait had been hung in the room, and that what they saw
+     was its reflection; but there was no picture of the kind.
+
+     Whilst they were looking and wondering, my wife's sister, Miss
+     Towns, came into the room, and before either of the others had time
+     to speak she exclaimed, "Good gracious! Do you see papa?" One of
+     the housemaids happened to be passing downstairs at the moment, and
+     she was called in, and asked if she saw anything, and her reply
+     was, "Oh, miss! the master." Graham--Captain Towns' old body
+     servant--was then sent for, and he also immediately exclaimed, "Oh,
+     Lord save us! Mrs. Lett, it's the Captain!" The butler was called,
+     and then Mrs. Crane, my wife's nurse, and they both said what they
+     saw. Finally, Mrs. Towns was sent for, and, seeing the apparition,
+     she advanced towards it with her arm extended as if to touch it,
+     and as she passed her hand over the panel of the wardrobe the
+     figure gradually faded away, and never again appeared, though the
+     room was regularly occupied for a long time after.
+
+     These are the simple facts of the case, and they admit of no doubt;
+     no kind of intimation was given to any of the witnesses; the same
+     question was put to each one as they came into the room, and the
+     reply was given without hesitation by each. It was by the merest
+     accident that I did not see the apparition. I was in the house at
+     the time, but did not hear when I was called.
+
+C. A. W. LETT.
+
+     We, the undersigned, having read the above statement, certify that
+     it is strictly accurate, as we both were witnesses of the
+     apparition.
+
+SARA LETT.
+SIBBIE SMYTH (_nee_ TOWNS).
+
+Gurney writes:--
+
+     Mrs. Lett assures me that neither she nor her sister ever
+     experienced a hallucination of the senses on any other occasion.
+     She is positive that the recognition of the appearance on the part
+     of each of the later witnesses was _independent_, and not due to
+     any suggestion from the persons already in the room.
+
+There is another collective case which is noticeable from the fact that
+the departed spirit appears to influence two persons at a distance from
+each other in a concordant way, so that one of them becomes conscious of
+the appearance to the other.[152] Compare with this the incident given
+at the end of Appendix VII. G, when Miss Campbell has a vision of her
+friend seeing an apparition at a time when this is actually
+occurring.[153]
+
+The case given in Appendix VII. F--which comes from excellent
+informants--is one of those which correspond most nearly to what one
+would _desire_ in a posthumous message. I may refer also to General
+Campbell's case (in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 476) in which a
+long continued series of unaccountable noises and an apparition twice
+seen by a child in the house suggested to the narrator the agency of his
+dead wife. The case, which depends for its evidential force on a great
+mass of detail, is too long for me to quote; but it is worth study, as
+is any case where there seems evidence of persistent effort to manifest,
+meeting with one knows not what difficulty. It may be that in such a
+story there is nothing but strange coincidence, or it may be that from
+records of partially successful effort, renewed often and in ambiguous
+ways, we shall hereafter learn something of the nature of that curtain
+of obstruction which now seems so arbitrary in its sudden lifting, its
+sudden fall.
+
+I will conclude this group by referring the reader to three cases
+closely similar, all well attested, and all of them capable of
+explanation either on local or personal grounds. In the first
+(_Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 619 [744 A]) an apparition is
+seen by two persons in a house in Edinburgh, a few hours before the
+death of a lady who had lived there, and whose body was to be brought
+back to it. In the second (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 57 [744 B])
+the dead librarian haunts his library, but in the library are members of
+his old staff. In the third (_Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 212
+[§ 744]), the dead wife loiters round her husband's tomb, but near it
+passes a gardener who had been in her employ.
+
+In this last case the apparition was seen about seven and a half hours
+after the death. This, as Gurney remarked, makes it still more difficult
+to regard the case as a telepathic impression transmitted at the moment
+of death, and remaining latent in the mind of the percipient. The
+incident suggests rather that Bard, the gardener, had come upon Mrs. de
+Fréville's spirit, so to say, unawares. One cannot imagine that she
+specially wished him to see her, and to see her engaged in what seems so
+needless and undignified a retracing of currents of earthly thought.
+Rather this seems a rudimentary _haunting_--an incipient lapse into
+those aimless, perhaps unconscious, reappearances in familiar spots
+which may persist (as it would seem) for many years after death.
+
+A somewhat similar case is that of Colonel Crealock (in _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. v. p. 432) where a soldier who had been dead some hours was
+seen by his superior officer in camp at night rolling up and taking away
+his bed.
+
+It is, indeed, mainly by dwelling on these intermediate cases, between a
+message-bringing apparition and a purposeless haunt, that we have most
+hope of understanding the typical haunt which, while it has been in a
+sense the most popular of all our phenomena, is yet to the careful
+inquirer one of the least satisfactory. One main evidential difficulty
+generally lies in identifying the haunting figure, in finding anything
+to connect the history of the house with the vague and often various
+sights and sounds which perplex or terrify its flesh and blood
+inhabitants. We must, at any rate, rid ourselves of the notion that some
+great crime or catastrophe is always to be sought as the groundwork of a
+haunt of this kind. To that negative conclusion our cases concordantly
+point us.[154] The apparition is most often seen by a stranger, several
+months after the death, with no apparent reason for its appearance at
+that special time. This last point is of interest in considering the
+question whether the hallucinatory picture could have been projected
+from any still incarnate mind. In one case--the vision of the Bishop of
+St. Brieuc (given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 460), there _was_
+such a special reason--the Bishop's body, unknown to the percipient, was
+at that moment being buried at the distance of a few miles. Mr. Podmore
+suggests (_op. cit._, vol. vi. p. 301) that it was from the minds of the
+living mourners that the Bishop's phantasm was generated. That
+hypothesis may have its portion of truth; the surrounding emotion may
+have been one of the factors which made the apparition possible. But the
+assumption that it was the only admissible factor--that the departed
+Bishop's own possible agency must be set aside altogether--lands us, I
+think, in difficulties greater than those which we should thus escape.
+The reader who tries to apply it to the apparitions quoted in my earlier
+groups will find himself in a labyrinth of complexity. Still more will
+this be the case in dealing with the far fuller and more explicit
+_motor___ communications, by automatic writing or speech, which we shall
+have to discuss in the two next chapters. Unless the actual evidence be
+disallowed in a wholesale manner, we shall be forced, I think, to admit
+the continued action of the departed as a main element in these
+apparitions.
+
+I do not say as the _only_ element. I myself hold, as already implied,
+that the thought and emotion of living persons does largely intervene,
+as aiding or conditioning the independent action of the departed. I even
+believe that it is possible that, say, an intense fixation of my own
+mind on a departed spirit may aid that spirit to manifest at a special
+moment--and not even to me, but to a percipient more sensitive than
+myself. In the boundless ocean of mind innumerable currents and tides
+shift with the shifting emotion of each several soul.
+
+But now we are confronted by another possible element in these vaguer
+classes of apparitions, harder to evaluate even than the possible action
+of incarnate minds. I mean the possible _results_ of past mental action,
+which, for aught we know, may persist in some perceptible manner,
+without fresh reinforcement, just as the results of past bodily action
+persist. This question leads to the still wider question of
+_retrocognition_, and of the relation of psychical phenomena to _time_
+generally--a problem whose discussion cannot be attempted here.[155] Yet
+we must remember that such possibilities exist; they may explain certain
+phenomena into which little of fresh intelligence seems to enter, as,
+for instance, the alleged persistence, perhaps for years, of meaningless
+sounds in a particular room or house.
+
+And since we are coming now to cases into which this element of
+meaningless sound will enter largely, it seems right to begin their
+discussion with a small group of cases where there is evidence for the
+definite agency of some dying or deceased person in connection with
+inarticulate sounds, or I should rather say of the _connection_ of some
+deceased person with the sounds; since the best explanation may perhaps
+be that they are _sounds of welcome_--before or after actual
+death--corresponding to those _apparitions of welcome_ of which we have
+already had specimens. One of our cases (see _Phantasms of the Living_,
+vol. ii. p. 639 [§ 747]) is remarkable in that the auditory
+hallucination--a sound as of female voices gently singing--was heard by
+five persons, by four of them, as it seems, independently, and in two
+places, on different sides of the house. At the same time, one
+person--the Eton master whose mother had just died, and who was
+therefore presumably in a frame of mind more prone to hallucination than
+the physician, matron, friend, or servants who actually did hear the
+singing--himself heard nothing at all. In this case the physician felt
+no doubt that Mrs. L. was actually dead; and in fact it was during the
+laying out of the body that the sounds occurred.
+
+I have already discussed (Chapter VI.) the nature of these phantasmal
+sounds;--nor is it contrary to our analogies that the person most deeply
+concerned in the death should in this case fail to hear them. But the
+point on which I would here lay stress is that phantasmal sounds--even
+non-articulate sounds--may be as clear a manifestation of personality as
+phantasmal figures. Among non-articulate noises music is, of course, the
+most pleasing; but sounds, for instance, which imitate the work of a
+carpenter's shop, may be equally human and intelligent. In some of the
+cases of this class we see apparent attempts of various kinds to
+simulate sounds such as men and women--or manufactured, as opposed to
+natural, objects--are accustomed to produce. To claim this humanity, to
+indicate this intelligence, seems the only motive of sounds of this
+kind.[156]
+
+These sounds, in their rudimentary attempt at showing intelligence, are
+about on a level with the exploits of the "Poltergeist," where coals are
+thrown about, water spilt, and so forth. Poltergeist phenomena, however,
+seldom coincide with the ordinary phenomena of a haunt. We have one
+remarkable case (_Journal_ S.P.R., vol. ix. p. 280-84 [868 B]) where
+Poltergeist phenomena coincide with a death, and a few cases where they
+are supposed to follow on a death; but, as a rule, where figures appear
+there are no movements; and where there are movements no apparition is
+seen. If alleged Poltergeist phenomena are always fraudulent, there
+would be nothing to be surprised at here. If, as I suspect, they are
+sometimes genuine, their dissociation from visual hallucinations may
+sometimes afford us a hint of value.
+
+But after Poltergeists have been set aside,--after a severe line has
+been drawn excluding all those cases (in themselves singular enough)
+where the main phenomena observed consist of non-articulate
+sounds,--there remains a great mass of evidence to haunting,--that is,
+broadly speaking, to the fact that there are many houses in which more
+than one person has independently seen phantasmal figures, which
+usually, though not always, bear at least some resemblance to each
+other.[157] The facts thus baldly stated are beyond dispute. Their true
+interpretation is a very difficult matter. Mrs. Sidgwick gives four
+hypotheses, which I must quote at length as the first serious attempt
+ever made (so far as I know) to collect and face the difficulties of
+this problem, so often, but so loosely, discussed through all historical
+times. (From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iii. pp. 146-8.)
+
+"I will, therefore, proceed briefly to state and discuss the only four
+theories that have occurred to me.
+
+"The two which I will take first in order assume that the apparitions
+are due to the agency or presence of the spirits of deceased men.
+
+"There is first the popular view, that the apparition is something
+belonging to the external world--that, like ordinary matter, it occupies
+and moves through space, and would be in the room whether the percipient
+were there to see it or not. This hypothesis involves us in many
+difficulties, of which one serious one--that of accounting for the
+clothes of the ghost--has often been urged, and never, I think,
+satisfactorily answered. Nevertheless, I am bound to admit that there is
+some little evidence tending to suggest this theory. For instance, in
+the account,[158] of which I have given an abstract, of the weeping lady
+who has appeared so frequently in a certain house, the following passage
+occurs:--'They went after it (the figure) together into the
+drawing-room; it then came out, and went down the aforesaid passage
+(leading to the kitchen), but was the next minute seen by another Miss
+[M.] ... come up the outside steps from the kitchen. On this particular
+day, Captain [M.'s] married daughter happened to be at an upstairs
+window ... and independently saw the figure continue her course across
+the lawn and into the orchard.' A considerable amount of clear evidence
+to the appearance of ghosts to independent observers in successive
+points in space would certainly afford a strong argument for their
+having a definite relation to space; but in estimating evidence of this
+kind it would be necessary to know how far the observer's attention had
+been drawn to the point in question. If it had been a real woman whom
+the Miss [M.'s] were observing, we should have inferred, with perfect
+certainty, from our knowledge that she could not be in two places at
+once, that she had been successively, in a certain order, in the places
+where she was seen by the three observers. If they had noted the moments
+at which they saw her, and comparing notes afterwards, found that
+according to these notes they had all seen her at the same time, or in
+some other order to that inferred, we should still feel absolute
+confidence in our inference, and should conclude that there must be
+something wrong about the watches or the notes. From association of
+ideas, it would be perfectly natural to make the same inference in the
+case of a ghost which looks exactly like a woman. But in the case of the
+ghost the inference would not be legitimate, because, unless the
+particular theory of ghosts which we are discussing be true, there is no
+reason, so far as we know, why it should not appear in two or more
+places at once. Hence, in the case of the ghost, a well-founded
+assurance that the appearances were successive would require a careful
+observation of the times, which, so far as I know, has never been made.
+On the whole, therefore, I must dismiss the popular theory as not
+having, in my opinion, even a _primâ facie_ ground for serious
+consideration.
+
+"The theory that I will next examine seems to me decidedly more
+plausible, from its analogy to the conclusion to which I am brought by
+the examination of the evidence for phantasms of the living. This theory
+is that the apparition has no real relation to the external world, but
+is a hallucination caused in some way by some communication, without the
+intervention of the senses, between the disembodied spirit and the
+percipient, its form depending on the mind either of the spirit or of
+the percipient, or of both. In the case of haunted houses, however, a
+difficulty meets us that we do not encounter, or at least rarely
+encounter, in applying a similar hypothesis to explain phantasms of the
+living, or phantasms of the dead other than fixed local ghosts. In these
+cases we have generally to suppose a simple _rapport_ between mind and
+mind, but in a haunted house we have a _rapport_ complicated by its
+apparent dependence on locality. It seems necessary to make the
+improbable assumption, that the spirit is interested in an entirely
+special way in a particular house (though possibly this interest may be
+of a subconscious kind), and that his interest in it puts him into
+connection with another mind, occupied with it in the way that that of a
+living person actually there must consciously or unconsciously be, while
+he does not get into similar communication with the same, or with other
+persons elsewhere.
+
+"If, notwithstanding these difficulties, it be true that haunting is due
+in any way to the agency of deceased persons, and conveys a definite
+idea of them to the percipients through the resemblance to them of the
+apparition, then, by patiently continuing our investigations, we may
+expect, sooner or later, to obtain a sufficient amount of evidence to
+connect clearly the commencement of hauntings with the death of
+particular persons, and to establish clearly the likeness of the
+apparition to those persons. The fact that almost everybody is now
+photographed ought to be of material assistance in obtaining evidence of
+this latter kind.
+
+"My third theory dispenses with the agency of disembodied spirits, but
+involves us in other and perhaps equally great improbabilities. It is
+that the first appearance is a purely subjective hallucination, and that
+the subsequent similar appearances, both to the original percipient and
+to others, are the result of the first appearance; unconscious
+expectancy causing them in the case of the original percipient, and some
+sort of telepathic communication from the original percipient in the
+case of others. In fact, it assumes that a tendency to a particular
+hallucination is in a way infectious. If this theory be true, I should
+expect to find that the apparently independent appearances after the
+first depended on the percipient's having had some sort of intercourse
+with some one who had seen the ghost before, and that any decided
+discontinuity of occupancy would stop the haunting. I should also expect
+to find, as we do in one of the cases I have quoted, that sometimes the
+supposed ghost would follow the family from one abode to another,
+appearing to haunt them rather than any particular house.
+
+"The fourth theory that I shall mention is one which I can hardly expect
+to appear plausible, and which, therefore, I only introduce because I
+think that it corresponds best to a certain part of the evidence;--and,
+as I have already said, considering the altogether tentative way in
+which we are inevitably dealing with this obscure subject, it is as well
+to express definitely every hypothesis which an impartial consideration
+of the facts suggests. It is that there is something in the actual
+building itself--some subtle physical influence--which produces in the
+brain that effect which, in its turn, becomes the cause of a
+hallucination. It is certainly difficult on this hypothesis alone to
+suppose that the hallucinations of different people would be similar,
+but we might account for this by a combination of this hypothesis and
+the last. The idea is suggested by the case, of which I have given an
+abstract, where the haunting continued through more than one occupancy,
+but changed its character; and if there be any truth in the theory, I
+should expect in time to obtain a good deal more evidence of this kind,
+combined with evidence that the same persons do not as a rule encounter
+ghosts elsewhere. I should also expect evidence to be forthcoming
+supporting the popular idea that repairs and alterations of the building
+sometimes cause the haunting to cease."[159]
+
+These hypotheses--none of which, as Mrs. Sidgwick expressly states (_op.
+cit._, p. 145), seemed to herself satisfactory--did nevertheless, I
+think, comprise all the deductions which could reasonably be made from
+the evidence as it at that time stood. A few modifications, which the
+experience of subsequent years has led me to introduce, can hardly be
+said to afford further _explanation_, although they state the
+difficulties in what now seems to me a more hopeful way.
+
+In the first place then--as already explained in Chapter VI.--I in some
+sense fuse into one Mrs. Sidgwick's two first hypotheses by my own
+hypothesis of actual presence, actual spatial changes induced in the
+metetherial, but not in the material world. I hold that when the
+phantasm is discerned by more than one person at once (and on some
+other, but not all other occasions) it is actually effecting a change in
+that portion of space where it is perceived, although not, as a rule, in
+the matter which occupies that place. It is, therefore, not optically
+nor acoustically perceived; perhaps no rays of light are reflected nor
+waves of air set in motion; but an unknown form of supernormal
+perception, not necessarily acting through the sensory end-organs, comes
+into play. In the next place, I am inclined to lay stress on the
+parallel between these narratives of haunting and those phantasms of the
+living which I have already classed as _psychorrhagic_. In each case,
+as it seems to me, there is an involuntary detachment of some element of
+the spirit, probably with no knowledge thereof at the main centre of
+consciousness. Those "haunts by the living," as they may be called,
+where, for instance, a man is seen phantasmally standing before his own
+fireplace, seem to me to be repeated, perhaps more readily, after the
+spirit is freed from the flesh.
+
+Again, I think that the curious question as to the influence of certain
+_houses_ in generating apparitions may be included under the broader
+heading of Retrocognition. That is to say, we are not here dealing with
+a special condition of certain houses, but with a branch of the wide
+problem as to the relation of supernormal phenomena to _time_.
+Manifestations which occur in haunted houses depend, let us say, on
+something which has taken place a long time ago. In what way do they
+depend on that past event? Are they a sequel, or only a residue? Is
+there fresh operation going on, or only fresh perception of something
+already accomplished? Or can we in such a case draw any real distinction
+between a continued action and a continued perception of a past action?
+The closest parallel, as it seems to me, although not at first sight an
+obvious one, lies between these phenomena of haunting, these persistent
+sights and sounds, and certain phenomena of crystal-vision and of
+automatic script, which also seem to depend somehow upon long-past
+events,--to be their sequel or their residue. One specimen case I give
+in Appendix (VII. G), where the connection of the haunting apparition
+with a certain person long deceased may be maintained with more than
+usual plausibility. From that level the traceable connections get weaker
+and weaker, until we come to phantasmal scenes where there is no longer
+any even apparent claim to the contemporary agency of human spirits.
+Such a vision, for instance, as that of a line of spectral deer crossing
+a ford, may indeed, if seen in the same place by several independent
+observers, be held to be something more than a mere subjective fancy;
+but what in reality such a picture signifies is a question which brings
+us at once to theories of the permanence or simultaneity of all
+phenomena in a timeless Universal Soul.
+
+Such conceptions, however difficult, are among the highest to which our
+mind can reach. Could we approach them more nearly, they might deeply
+influence our view, even of our own remote individual destiny. So,
+perhaps, shall it some day be; at present we may be well satisfied if we
+can push our knowledge of that destiny one step further than of old,
+even just behind that veil which has so long hung impenetrably before
+the eyes of men.
+
+Here, then, is a natural place of pause in our inquiry.
+
+The discussion of the ethical aspect of these questions I have postponed
+to my concluding chapter. But one point already stands out from the
+evidence--at once so important and so manifest that it seems well to
+call attention to it at once--as a solvent more potent than any
+Lucretius could apply to human superstition and human fears.
+
+In this long string of narratives, complex and bizarre though their
+details may be, we yet observe that the character of the appearance
+varies in a definite manner with their distinctness and individuality.
+Haunting phantoms, incoherent and unintelligent, may seem restless and
+unhappy. But as they rise into definiteness, intelligence,
+individuality, the phantoms rise also into love and joy. I cannot recall
+one single case of a proved posthumous combination of intelligence with
+wickedness. Such evil as our evidence will show us--we have as yet
+hardly come across it in this book--is scarcely more than monkeyish
+mischief, childish folly. In dealing with automatic script, for
+instance, we shall have to wonder whence come the occasional vulgar
+jokes or silly mystifications. We shall discuss whether they are a kind
+of dream of the automatist's own, or whether they indicate the existence
+of unembodied intelligences on the level of the dog or the ape. But, on
+the other hand, all that world-old conception of Evil Spirits, of
+malevolent Powers, which has been the basis of so much of actual
+devil-worship and of so much more of vague supernatural fear;--all this
+insensibly melts from the mind as we study the evidence before us.
+
+    Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
+    Non radii solis, neque lucida tela diei
+    Discutiant sed, naturć species ratioque.
+
+Here surely is a fact of no little meaning. Our narratives have been
+collected from men and women of many types, holding all varieties of
+ordinary opinion. Yet the upshot of all these narratives is to emphasise
+a point which profoundly differentiates the scientific from the
+superstitious view of spiritual phenomena. The terror which shaped
+primitive theologies still tinges for the populace every hint of
+intercourse with disembodied souls. The transmutation of savage fear
+into scientific curiosity is of the essence of civilisation. Towards
+that transmutation each separate fragment of our evidence, with
+undesigned concordance, indisputably tends. In that faintly opening
+world of spirit I can find nothing worse than living men; I seem to
+discern not an intensification but a disintegration of selfishness,
+malevolence, pride. And is not this a natural result of any cosmic moral
+evolution? If the selfish man (as Marcus Antoninus has it) "is a kind of
+boil or imposthume upon the universe," must not his egoistic impulses
+suffer in that wider world a sure, even if a painful, decay; finding no
+support or sustenance among those permanent forces which maintain the
+stream of things?
+
+I have thus indicated one point of primary importance on which the
+undesignedly coincident testimony of hundreds of first-hand narratives
+supports a conclusion, not yet popularly accepted, but in harmony with
+the evolutionary conceptions which rule our modern thought. Nor does
+this point stand alone. I can find, indeed, no guarantee of absolute and
+idle bliss; no triumph in any exclusive salvation. But the student of
+these narratives will, I think, discover throughout them uncontradicted
+indications of the persistence of Love, the growth of Joy, the willing
+submission to Law.
+
+These indications, no doubt, may seem weak and scattered la comparison
+with the wholesale, thorough-going assertions of philosophical or
+religious creeds. Their advantage is that they occur incidentally in the
+course of our independent and cumulative demonstration of the
+profoundest cosmical thesis which we can at present conceive as
+susceptible of any kind of scientific proof. Cosmical questions, indeed,
+there may be which are in themselves of deeper import than our own
+survival of bodily death. The nature of the First Cause; the blind or
+the providential ordering of the sum of things;--these are problems
+vaster than any which affect only the destinies of men. But to whatever
+moral certainty we may attain on those mightiest questions, we can
+devise no way whatever of bringing them to scientific test. They deal
+with infinity; and our modes of investigation have grasp only on finite
+things.
+
+But the question of man's survival of death stands in a position
+uniquely intermediate between matters capable and matters incapable of
+proof. It is in itself a definite problem, admitting of conceivable
+proof which, even if not technically rigorous, might amply satisfy the
+scientific mind. And at the same time the conception which it involves
+is in itself a kind of avenue and inlet into infinity. Could a proof of
+our survival be obtained, it would carry us deeper into the true nature
+of the universe than we should be carried by an even perfect knowledge
+of the material scheme of things. It would carry us deeper both by
+achievement and by promise. The discovery that there was a life in man
+independent of blood and brain would be a cardinal, a dominating fact in
+all science and in all philosophy. And the prospect thus opened to human
+knowledge, in this or in other worlds, would be limitless indeed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MOTOR AUTOMATISM
+
+    [Greek: Męketi
+    monon sumpnein tô periechonti aeri, all' hędę kai sumphronoin
+    tô periechonti panta noerô.]
+
+    --MARCUS AURELIUS.
+
+
+At this point, one may broadly say, we reach the end of the phenomena
+whose existence is vaguely familiar to popular talk. And here, too, I
+might fairly claim, the evidence for my primary thesis,--namely, that
+the analysis of man's personality reveals him as a spirit, surviving
+death,--has attained an amplitude which would justify the reader in
+accepting that view as the provisional hypothesis which comes nearest to
+a comprehensive co-ordination of the actual facts. What we have already
+recounted seems, indeed, impossible to explain except by supposing that
+our inner vision has widened or deepened its purview so far as to attain
+some glimpses of a spiritual world in which the individualities of our
+departed friends still actually subsist.
+
+The reader, however, who has followed me thus far must be well aware
+that a large class of phenomena, of high importance, is still awaiting
+discussion. _Motor_ automatisms,--though less familiar to the general
+public than the phantasms which I have classed as _sensory_
+automatisms,--are in fact even commoner, and even more significant.
+
+Motor automatisms, as I define them, are phenomena of very wide range.
+We have encountered them already many times in this book. We met them in
+the first place in a highly developed form in connection with multiplex
+personality in Chapter II. Numerous instances were there given of motor
+effects, initiated by secondary selves without the knowledge of the
+primary selves, or sometimes in spite of their actual resistance. All
+motor action of a secondary self is an automatism in this sense, in
+relation to the primary self. And of course we might by analogy extend
+the use of the word still further, and might call not only
+post-epileptic acts, but also maniacal acts, automatic; since they are
+performed without the initiation of the presumedly sane primary
+personality. Those degenerative phenomena, indeed, are not to be
+discussed in this chapter. Yet it will be well to pause here long enough
+to make it clear to the reader just what motor automatisms I am about to
+discuss as _evolutive_ phenomena, and as therefore falling within the
+scope of this treatise;--and what kind of relation they bear to the
+dissolutive motor phenomena which occupy so much larger a place in
+popular knowledge.
+
+In order to meet this last question, I must here give more distinct
+formulation to a thesis which has already suggested itself more than
+once in dealing with special groups of our phenomena.
+
+_It may be expected that supernormal vital phenomena will manifest
+themselves as far as possible through the same channels as abnormal or
+morbid vital phenomena, when the same centres or the same synergies are
+involved._
+
+To illustrate the meaning of this theorem, I may refer to a remark long
+ago made by Edmund Gurney and myself in dealing with "Phantasms of the
+Living," or veridical hallucinations, generated (as we maintained), not
+by a morbid state of the percipient's brain, but by a telepathic impact
+from an agent at a distance. We observed that if a hallucination--a
+subjective image--is to be excited by this distant energy, it will
+probably be most readily excited in somewhat the same manner as the
+morbid hallucination which follows on a cerebral injury. We urged that
+this is _likely_ to be the case--we showed ground for supposing that it
+_is_ the case--both as regards the mode of evolution of the phantasm in
+the percipient's brain, and the mode in which it seems to present itself
+to his senses.
+
+And here I should wish to give a much wider generality to this
+principle, and to argue that if there be within us a secondary self
+aiming at manifestation by physiological means, it seems probable that
+its readiest _path of externalisation_--its readiest outlet of visible
+action--may often lie along some track which has already been shown to
+be a line of low resistance by the disintegrating processes of disease.
+Or, varying the metaphor, we may anticipate that the partition of the
+primary and the secondary self will lie along some plane of cleavage
+which the _morbid_ dissociations of our psychical synergies have already
+shown themselves disposed to follow. If epilepsy, madness, etc., tend to
+_split up_ our faculties in certain ways, automatism is likely to split
+them up in ways somewhat resembling these.
+
+But in what way then, it will be asked, do you distinguish the
+supernormal from the merely abnormal? Why assume that in these aberrant
+states there is anything besides hysteria, besides epilepsy, besides
+insanity?
+
+The answer to this question has virtually been given in previous
+chapters of this book. The reader is already accustomed to the point of
+view which regards all psychical as well as all physiological activities
+as necessarily either developmental or degenerative, tending to
+evolution or to dissolution. And now, whilst altogether waiving any
+teleological speculation, I will ask him hypothetically to suppose that
+an evolutionary _nisus_, something which we may represent as an effort
+towards self-development, self-adaptation, self-renewal, is discernible
+especially on the psychical side of at any rate the higher forms of
+life. Our question, Supernormal or abnormal?--may then be phrased,
+Evolutive or dissolutive? And in studying each psychical phenomenon in
+turn we shall have to inquire whether it indicates a mere degeneration
+of powers already acquired, or, on the other hand, the "promise and
+potency," if not the actual possession, of powers as yet unrecognised or
+unknown.
+
+Thus, for instance, Telepathy is surely a step in _evolution_.[160] To
+learn the thoughts of other minds without the mediation of the special
+senses, manifestly indicates the possibility of a vast extension of
+psychical powers. And any knowledge which we can amass as to the
+conditions under which telepathic action takes place will form a
+valuable starting-point for an inquiry as to the evolutive or
+dissolutive character of unfamiliar psychical states.[161]
+
+For example, we may learn from our knowledge of telepathy that the
+superficial aspect of certain stages of psychical evolution, like the
+superficial aspect of certain stages of physiological evolution, may
+resemble mere _inhibition_, or mere _perturbation_. But the inhibition
+may involve latent dynamogeny, and the perturbation may mask evolution.
+The hypnotised subject may pass through a lethargic stage before he
+wakes into a state in which he has gained _community of sensation_ with
+the operator; somewhat as the silkworm (to use the oldest and the most
+suggestive of all illustrations) passes through the apparent torpor of
+the cocoon-stage before evolving into the moth. Again, the automatist's
+hand (as we shall presently see) is apt to pass through a stage of
+inco-ordinated movements, which might almost be taken for choreic,
+before it acquires the power of ready and intelligent writing. Similarly
+the development, for instance, of a tooth may be preceded by a stage of
+indefinite aching, which might be ascribed to the formation of an
+abscess, did not the new tooth ultimately show itself. And still more
+striking cases of a _perturbation which masks evolution_ might be drawn
+from the history of the human organism as it develops into its own
+maturity, or prepares for the appearance of the fresh human organism
+which is to succeed it.
+
+Analogy, therefore, both physiological and psychical, warns us not to
+conclude that any given psychosis is merely degenerative until we have
+examined its results closely enough to satisfy ourselves whether they
+tend to bring about any enlargement of human powers, to open any new
+inlet to the reception of objective truth. If such there prove to be,
+then, with whatever morbid activities the psychosis may have been
+intertwined, it contains indications of an evolutionary _nisus_ as well.
+
+These remarks, I hope, may have sufficiently cleared the ground to admit
+of our starting afresh on the consideration of such motor automatisms as
+are at any rate not morbid in their effect on the organism, and which I
+now have to show to be _evolutive_ in character. I maintain that we have
+no valid ground for assuming that the movements which are _not_ due to
+our conscious will must be less important, and less significant, than
+those that _are_. We observe, of course, that in the organic region the
+movements which are _not_ due to conscious will are really the most
+important of all, though the voluntary movements by which a man seeks
+food and protects himself against enemies are also of great practical
+importance--he must first live and multiply if he is to learn and know.
+But we must guard against confusing importance for immediate practical
+life with importance for science--on which even practical life
+ultimately depends. As soon as the task of living and multiplying is no
+longer all-engrossing, we begin to change our relative estimate of
+values, and to find that it is not the broad and obvious phenomena, but
+the residual and elusive phenomena, which are oftenest likely to
+introduce us to new avenues of knowledge. I wish to persuade my readers
+that this is quite as truly the case in psychology as in physics.
+
+As a first step in our analysis, we may point out certain main
+characters which unite in a true class all the automatisms which we are
+here considering--greatly though these may differ among themselves in
+external form.
+
+In the first place, then, our automatisms are _independent_ phenomena;
+they are what the physician calls _idiognomonic_. That is to say, they
+are not merely symptomatic of some other affection, or incidental to
+some profounder change. The mere fact, for instance, that a man writes
+messages which he does not consciously originate will not, when taken
+alone, prove anything beyond this fact itself as to the writer's
+condition. He may be perfectly sane, in normal health, and with nothing
+unusual observable about him. This characteristic--provable by actual
+observation and experiment--distinguishes our automatisms from various
+seemingly kindred phenomena. Thus we may have to include in our class
+the occasional automatic utterance of words or sentences. But the
+continuous exhausting vociferation of acute mania does not fall within
+our province; for those shouts are merely _symptomatic_; nor, again,
+does the _cri hydrocéphalique_ (or spontaneous meaningless noise which
+sometimes accompanies water on the brain); for that, too, is no
+independent phenomenon, but the direct consequence of a definite lesion.
+Furthermore, we shall have to include in our class certain simple
+movements of the hands, co-ordinated into the act of writing. But here,
+also, our definition will lead us to exclude _choreic_ movements, which
+are merely symptomatic of nervous malnutrition; or which we may, if we
+choose, call _idiopathic_, as constituting an independent malady. But
+our automatisms are not _idiopathic_ but _idiognomonic_; they may indeed
+be associated with or facilitated by certain states of the organism, but
+they are neither a symptom of any other malady, nor are they a malady in
+themselves.
+
+Agreeing, then, that our peculiar class consists of automatisms which
+are idiognomonic,--whose existence does not necessarily imply the
+existence of some profounder affection already known as producing
+them,--we have still to look for some more positive bond of connection
+between them, some quality common to all of them, and which makes them
+worth our prolonged investigation.
+
+This we shall find in the fact that they are all of them
+_message-bearing_ or _nunciative_ automatisms. I do not, of course, mean
+that they all of them bring messages from sources external to the
+automatist's own mind. In some cases they probably do this; but as a
+rule the so-called messages seem more probably to originate within the
+automatist's own personality. Why, then, it may be asked, do I call them
+_messages_? We do not usually speak of a man as sending a message to
+himself. The answer to this question involves, as we shall presently
+see, the profoundest conception of these automatisms to which we can as
+yet attain. They present themselves to us as messages communicated from
+one stratum to another stratum of the same personality. Originating in
+some deeper zone of a man's being, they float up into superficial
+consciousness, as deeds, visions, words, ready-made and full-blown,
+without any accompanying perception of the elaborative process which has
+made them what they are.
+
+Can we then (we may next ask) in any way predict the possible _range_ of
+these motor automatisms? Have we any limit assignable _a priori_,
+outside which it would be useless to look for any externalisation of an
+impulse emanating from sub-conscious strata of our being?
+
+The answer to this must be that no such limit can be with any confidence
+suggested. We have not yet learnt with any distinctness even how far the
+wave from a _consciously_-perceived stimulus will spread, or what
+changes its motion will assume. Still less can we predict the
+limitations which the resistance of the organism will impose on the
+radiation of a stimulus originated within itself. We are learning to
+consider the human organism as a practically infinite complex of
+interacting vibrations; and each year adds many new facts to our
+knowledge of the various transformations which these vibrations may
+undergo, and of the unexpected artifices by which we may learn to
+cognise some stimulus which is not directly felt.
+
+A few concrete instances will make my meaning plainer. And my first
+example shall be taken from those experiments in _muscle-reading_--less
+correctly termed mind-reading--with which the readers of the
+_Proceedings_ of the S.P.R. are already familiar. Let us suppose that I
+am to hide a pin, and that some accomplished muscle-reader is to take my
+hand and find the pin by noting my muscular indications.[162] I first
+hide the pin in the hearth-rug; then I change my mind and hide it in the
+bookshelf. I fix my mind on the bookshelf, but resolve to make no
+guiding movement. The muscle-reader takes my hand, leads me first to the
+rug, then to the bookshelf, and finds the pin. Now, what has happened in
+this case? What movements have I made?
+
+Firstly, I have made no _voluntary_ movement; and secondly, I have made
+no _conscious involuntary_ movement. But, thirdly, I have made an
+_unconscious involuntary_ movement which directly depended on conscious
+ideation. I strongly thought of the bookshelf, and when the bookshelf
+was reached in our vague career about the room I made a movement--say
+rather a tremor occurred--in my hand, which, although beyond both my
+knowledge and my control, was enough to supply to the muscle-reader's
+delicate sensibility all the indication required. All this is now
+admitted, and, in a sense, understood; we formulate it by saying that my
+conscious ideation contained a motor element; and that this motor
+element, though inhibited from any conscious manifestation, did yet
+inevitably externalise itself in a peripheral tremor.
+
+But, fourthly, something more than this has clearly taken place. Before
+the muscle-reader stopped at the bookshelf he stopped at the rug. I was
+no longer consciously thinking of the rug; but the idea of the pin in
+the rug must still have been reverberating, so to say, in my
+sub-conscious region; and this unconscious memory, this unnoted
+reverberation, revealed itself in a peripheral tremor nearly as distinct
+as that which (when the bookshelf was reached) corresponded to the
+strain of conscious thought.
+
+This tremor, then, was in a certain sense a message-bearing automatism.
+It was the externalisation of an idea which, once conscious, had become
+unconscious, though in the slightest conceivable degree--namely, by a
+mere slight escape from the field of direct attention.
+
+Having, then, considered an instance where the automatic message passes
+only between two closely-adjacent strata of consciousness, externalising
+an impulse derived from an idea which has only recently sunk out of
+consciousness and which could easily be summoned back again;--let us
+find our next illustration in a case where the line of demarcation
+between the strata of consciousness through which the automatic message
+pierces is distinct and impassable by any effort of will.
+
+Let us take a case of _post-hypnotic suggestion_;--say, for instance, an
+experiment of Edmund Gurney's (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p.
+319). The subject had been trained to write with planchette, after he
+had been awakened, the statements which had been made to him when in the
+hypnotic trance. He wrote the desired words, or something like them, but
+while he wrote them his waking self was entirely unaware of what his
+hand was writing. Thus, having been told in the trance, "It has begun
+snowing again," he wrote, after waking, "It begun snowing," while he
+read aloud, with waking intelligence, from a book of stories, and was
+quite unconscious of what his hand (placed on a planchette behind a
+screen) was at the same time writing.
+
+Here we have an automatic message of traceable origin; a message
+implanted in the hypnotic stratum of the subject's self, and cropping
+up--like a fault--in the waking stratum,--externalised in automatic
+movements which the waking self could neither predict nor guide.
+
+Yet once more. In the discussion which will follow we shall have various
+instances of the transformation (as I shall regard it) of psychical
+shock into definite muscular energy of apparently a quite alien kind.
+Such transformations of so-called psychical into physical force--of will
+into motion--do of course perpetually occur within us.
+
+For example, I take a child to a circus; he sits by me holding my hand;
+there is a discharge of musketry and his grip tightens. Now in this case
+we should call the child's tightened grip automatic. But suppose that,
+instead of merely holding my hand, he is trying with all his might to
+squeeze the dynamometer, and that the sudden excitation enables him to
+squeeze it harder--are we then to describe that extra squeeze as
+automatic? or as voluntary?
+
+However phrased, it is the fact (as amply established by M. Féré and
+others[163]) that excitations of almost any kind--whether sudden and
+startling or agreeable and prolonged--do tend to increase the subject's
+dynamometrical power. In the first place, and this is in itself an
+important fact, the average of squeezing-power is found to be greater
+among educated students than among robust labouring men, thus showing
+that it is not so much developed muscle as active brain which renders
+possible a sudden concentration of muscular force. But more than this;
+M. Féré finds that with himself and his friends the mere listening to an
+interesting lecture, or the mere stress of thought in solitude, or still
+more the act of writing or of speech, produces a decided increase of
+strength in the grip, especially of the right hand. The same effect of
+dynamogeny is produced with hypnotic subjects, by musical sounds, by
+coloured light, especially red light, and even by a hallucinatory
+suggestion of red light. "All our sensations," says M. Féré in
+conclusion, "are accompanied by a development of potential energy, which
+passes into a kinetic state, and externalises itself in motor
+manifestations which even so rough a method as dynamometry is able to
+observe and record."
+
+I would beg the reader to keep these words in mind. We shall presently
+find that a method apparently even rougher than dynamographic tracings
+may be able to interpret, with far greater delicacy, the automatic
+tremors which are coursing to and fro within us. If once we can get a
+spy into the citadel of our own being, his rudest signalling will tell
+us more than our subtlest inferences from outside of what is being
+planned and done within.
+
+And now having to deal with what I define as messages conveyed by one
+stratum in man to another stratum, I must first consider in what general
+ways human messages can be conveyed. Writing and speech have become
+predominant in the intercourse of civilised men, and it is to writing
+and speech that we look with most interest among the communications of
+the subliminal self. But it does not follow that the subliminal self
+will always have such complex methods at its command. We have seen
+already that it often finds it hard to manage the delicate
+co-ordinations of muscular movement required for writing,--that the
+attempt at automatic script ends in a thump and a scrawl.
+
+The subliminal self like the telegraphist begins its effort with full
+knowledge, indeed, of the alphabet, but with only weak and rude command
+over our muscular adjustments. It is therefore _a priori_ likely that
+its easiest mode of communication will be through a repetition of simple
+movements, so arranged as to correspond to letters of the alphabet.
+
+And here, I think, we have attained to a conception of the mysterious
+and much-derided phenomenon of "table-tilting" which enables us to
+correlate it with known phenomena, and to start at least from an
+intelligible basis, and on a definite line of inquiry.
+
+A few words are needed to explain what are the verifiable phenomena, and
+the less verifiable hypotheses, connoted by such words as
+"table-turning," "spirit-rapping," and the like.
+
+If one or more persons of a special type--at present definable only by
+the question-begging and barbarous term "mediumistic"--remain quietly
+for some time with hands in contact with some easily movable object, and
+desiring its movement, that object will sometimes begin to move. If,
+further, they desire it to indicate letters of the alphabet by its
+movements,--as by tilting once for _a_, twice for _b_, etc., it will
+often do so, and answers unexpected by any one present will be obtained.
+
+Thus far, whatever our interpretation, we are in the region of easily
+reproducible facts, which many of my readers may confirm for themselves
+if they please.
+
+But beyond the simple movements--or table-turning--and the intelligible
+responses--or table-tilting--both of which are at least _primâ facie_
+physically explicable by the sitters' unconscious pressure, without
+postulating any unknown physical force at all,--it is alleged by many
+persons that further physical phenomena occur; namely, that the table
+moves in a direction, or with a violence, which no unconscious pressure
+can explain; and also that percussive sounds or "raps" occur, which no
+unconscious action, or indeed no agency known to us, could produce.
+These raps communicate messages like the tilts, and it is to them that
+the name of "spirit-rapping" is properly given. But spiritualists
+generally draw little distinction between these four phenomena--mere
+table-turning, responsive table-tilting, movements of inexplicable
+vehemence, and responsive raps--attributing all alike to the agency of
+departed spirits of men and women, or at any rate to disembodied
+intelligences of some kind or other.
+
+I am not at present discussing the physical phenomena of Spiritualism,
+and I shall therefore leave on one side all the alleged movements and
+noises of this kind for which unconscious pressure will not account. I
+do not prejudge the question as to their real occurrence; but assuming
+that such disturbances of the physical order do occur, there is at least
+no _primâ facie_ need to refer them to disembodied spirits. If a table
+moves when no one is touching it; this is not obviously more likely to
+have been effected by my deceased grandfather than by myself. We cannot
+tell how _I_ could move it; but then we cannot tell how _he_ could move
+it either. The question must be argued on its merits in each case; and
+our present argument is not therefore vitiated by our postponement of
+this further problem.
+
+M. Richet[164] was, I believe, the first writer, outside the
+Spiritualistic group, who so much as showed any practical knowledge of
+this phenomenon, still less endeavoured to explain it. Faraday's
+well-known explanation of table-turning as the result of the summation
+of many unconscious movements--obviously true as it is for some of the
+simplest cases of table-movement--does not touch this far more difficult
+question of the origination of these intelligent messages, conveyed by
+distinct and repeated movements of some object admitting of ready
+displacement. The ordinary explanation--I am speaking, of course, of
+cases where fraud is not in question--is that the sitter unconsciously
+sets going and stops the movements so as to shape the word in accordance
+with his expectation. Now that he unconsciously sets going and stops the
+movements is part of my own present contention, but that the word is
+thereby shaped in accordance with his expectation is often far indeed
+from being the case. To those indeed who are familiar with automatic
+_written_ messages, this question as to the unexpectedness of the
+_tilted_ messages will present itself in a new light. If the written
+messages originate in a source beyond the automatist's supraliminal
+self, so too may the tilted messages;--even though we admit that the
+tilts are caused by his hand's pressure of the table just as directly as
+the script by his hand's manipulation of the pen.
+
+One piece of evidence showing that _written_ messages are not always the
+mere echo of expectation is a case[165] where _anagrams_ were
+automatically written, which their writer was not at once able to
+decipher. Following this hint, I have occasionally succeeded in getting
+anagrams tilted out for myself by movements of a small table which I
+alone touched.
+
+This is a kind of experiment which might with advantage be oftener
+repeated; for the extreme incoherence and silliness of the responses
+thus obtained does not prevent the process itself from being in a high
+degree instructive. Here, again (as in automatic writing), a man may
+hold colloquy with his own dream--may note in actual juxtaposition two
+separate strata of his own intelligence.
+
+I shall not at present pursue the discussion of these tilted responses
+beyond this their very lowest and most rudimentary stage. They almost
+immediately suggest another problem, for which our discussion is hardly
+ripe, the participation, namely, of several minds in the production of
+the same automatic message. There is something of this difficulty even
+in the explanation of messages given when the hands of two persons are
+touching a planchette; but when the instrument of response is large, and
+the method of response simple, as with table-tilting, we find this
+question of the influence of more minds than one imperatively recurring.
+
+Our immediate object, however, is rather to correlate the different
+attainable modes of automatic response in some intelligible scheme than
+to pursue any one of them through all its phases. We regarded the
+table-tilting process as in one sense the simplest, the least
+differentiated form of motor response. It is a kind of _gesture_ merely,
+though a gesture implying knowledge of the alphabet. Let us see in what
+directions the movement of response becomes more specialised,--as
+gesture parts into pictorial art and articulate speech. We find, in
+fact, that a just similar divergence of impulses takes place in
+automatic response. On the one hand the motor impulse specialises itself
+into _drawing_; on the other hand it specialises itself into _speech_.
+Of automatic drawing I have already said something (Chapter III.).
+Automatic speech will receive detailed treatment in Chapter IX. At
+present I shall only briefly indicate the position of each form of
+movement among cognate automatisms.
+
+Some of my readers may have seen these so-called
+"spirit-drawings,"--designs, sometimes in colour, whose author asserts
+that he drew them without any plan, or even knowledge of what his hand
+was going to do. This assertion may be quite true, and the person making
+it may be perfectly sane.[166] The drawings so made will be found
+curiously accordant with what the view which I am explaining would lead
+us to expect. For they exhibit a fusion of arabesque with ideography;
+that is to say, they partly resemble the forms of ornamentation into
+which the artistic hand strays when, as it were, dreaming on the paper
+without definite plan; and partly they afford a parallel to the early
+attempts at symbolic self-expression of savages who have not yet learnt
+an alphabet. Like savage writing, they pass by insensible transitions
+from direct pictorial symbolism to an abbreviated ideography, mingled in
+its turn with writing of a fantastic or of an ordinary kind.
+
+And here, before we enter on the study of automatic writing, I must
+refer to two great historic cases of automatism, which may serve as a
+kind of prologue to what is to follow. One case, that of Socrates, is a
+case of monitory _inhibition_; the other, that of Jeanne d'Arc, of
+monitory _impulse_.
+
+The Founder of Science himself--the permanent type of sanity,
+shrewdness, physical robustness, and moral balance--was guided in all
+the affairs of life by a monitory Voice,--by "the Dćmon of Socrates."
+This is a case which can never lose its interest, a case which has been
+vouched for by the most practical, and discussed by the loftiest
+intellect of Greece,--both of them intimate friends of the illustrious
+subject;--a case, therefore, which one who endeavours to throw new light
+on hallucination and automatism is bound, even at this distance of time,
+to endeavour to explain.[167] And this is the more needful, since a
+treatise was actually written, a generation ago, as "a specimen of the
+application of the science of psychology to the science of history,"
+arguing from the records of the [Greek: daimónion] in Xenophon
+and Plato that Socrates was in fact insane.[168]
+
+I believe that it is now possible to give a truer explanation; to place
+these old records in juxtaposition with more instructive parallels; and
+to show that the messages which Socrates received were only advanced
+examples of a process which, if supernormal, is not abnormal, and which
+characterises that form of intelligence which we describe as _genius_.
+
+The story of Socrates I take as a signal example of _wise automatism_;
+of the possibility that the messages which are conveyed to the
+supraliminal mind from subliminal strata of the personality,--whether as
+sounds, as sights, or as movements,--may sometimes come from far beneath
+the realm of dream and confusion,--from some self whose monitions convey
+to us a wisdom profounder than we know.
+
+Similarly in the case of Joan of Arc, I believe that only now, with the
+comprehension which we are gradually gaining of the possibility of an
+impulse from the mind's deeper strata which is so far from madness that
+it is wiser than our sanity itself,--only now, I repeat, can we
+understand aright that familiar story.
+
+Joan's condemnation was based on her own admissions; and the Latin
+_procčs-verbal_ still exists, and was published from the MS. by M.
+Quicherat, 1841-9, for the French Historical Society.[169] Joan, like
+Socrates, was condemned mainly on the ground, or at least on the pretext
+of her monitory voices: and her Apology remarkably resembles his, in its
+resolute insistence on the truth of the very phenomena which were being
+used to destroy her. Her answers are clear and self-consistent, and seem
+to have been little, if at all, distorted by the recorder. Few pieces of
+history so remote as this can be so accurately known.
+
+Fortunately for our purpose, her inquisitors asked her many questions as
+to her voices and visions; and her answers enable us to give a pretty
+full analysis of the phenomena which concern us.
+
+I. The voices do not begin with the summons to fight for France. Joan
+heard them first at thirteen years of age,--as with Socrates also the
+voice began in childhood. The first command consisted of nothing more
+surprising than that "she was to be a good girl, and go often to
+church." After this the voice--as in the case of Socrates--intervened
+frequently, and on trivial occasions.
+
+II. The voice was accompanied at first by a light, and sometimes
+afterwards by figures of saints, who appeared to speak, and whom Joan
+appears to have both seen and felt as dearly as though they had been
+living persons. But here there is some obscurity; and Michelet thinks
+that on one occasion the Maid was tricked by the courtiers for political
+ends. For she asserted (apparently without contradiction) that several
+persons, including the Archbishop of Rheims, as well as herself, had
+seen an angel bringing to the King a material crown.[170]
+
+III. The voices came mainly when she was awake, but also sometimes
+roused her from sleep; a phenomenon often observed in our cases of
+"veridical hallucination." "Ipsa dormiebat, et vox excitabat eam."
+(Quicherat, i., p. 62.)
+
+IV. The voice was not always fully intelligible (especially if she was
+half awake);--in this respect again resembling some of our recorded
+cases, both visual and auditory, where, on the view taken in _Phantasms
+of the Living_, the externalisation has been incomplete. "Vox dixit
+aliqua, sed non omnia intellexit." (Quicherat, i., p. 62.)
+
+V. The predictions of the voice, so far as stated, were mainly
+fulfilled; viz., that the siege of Orleans would be raised; that Charles
+VII. would be crowned at Rheims; that she herself would be wounded; but
+the prediction that there would be a great victory over the English
+within seven years was not fulfilled in any exact way, although the
+English continued to lose ground. In short, about so much was fulfilled
+as an ardent self-devoted mind might have anticipated; much indeed that
+might have seemed irrational to ordinary observers, but nothing which
+actually needed a definite prophetic power. Here, again, we are reminded
+of the general character of the monitions of Socrates. And yet in Joan's
+case, more probably than in the case of Socrates, there may have been
+one singular exception to this general rule. She knew by monition that
+there was a sword "retro altare"--somewhere behind the altar--in the
+Church of St. Catherine of Fierbois. "Scivit ipsum ibi esse per
+voces":--she sent for it, nothing doubting, and it was found and given
+to her. This was a unique incident in her career. Her judges asked
+whether she had not once found a cup, and a missing priest, by help of
+similar monitions, but this she denied; and it is remarkable that no
+serious attempt was made either to show that she had claimed this
+clairvoyant power habitually, or, on the other hand, to invalidate the
+one instance of it which she did in effect claim. It would be absurd to
+cite the alleged discovery of the sword as in itself affording a proof
+of clairvoyance, any more than Socrates' alleged intimation of the
+approaching herd of swine.[171] But when we are considering monitions
+given in more recent times it will be well to remember that it is in
+this direction that some supernormal extension of knowledge seems
+possibly traceable.
+
+The cases of Socrates and of Joan of Arc, on which I have just dwelt,
+might with almost equal fitness have been introduced at certain other
+points of my discussion. At first sight, at any rate, they appear rather
+like sensory than like motor automatisms,--like hallucinations of
+hearing rather than like the motor impulses which we are now about to
+study. Each case, however, approaches motor automatism in a special way.
+
+In the case of Socrates the "sign" seems to have been not so much a
+definite voice as a sense of _inhibition_. In the case of Joan of Arc
+the voices were definite enough, but they were accompanied--as such
+voices sometimes are, but sometimes are _not_--with an overmastering
+impulse to _act_ in obedience to them. These are, I may say, palmary
+cases of inhibition and of impulse: and inhibition and impulse are at
+the very root of motor phenomena.
+
+They show moreover the furthest extent of the claim that can be made for
+the agency of the subliminal self, apart from any external
+influence,--apart from telepathy from the living, or possession by the
+departed. Each of those other hypotheses will claim its own group of
+cases; but we must not invoke them until the resources of subliminal
+wisdom are manifestly overtaxed.
+
+These two famous cases, then, have launched us on our subject in the
+stress of a twofold difficulty in logical arrangement. We cannot always
+answer these primary questions, Is the subliminal impulse sensory or
+motor? is it originated in the automatist's own mind, or in some mind
+external to him?
+
+In the first place, we must reflect that, if the subliminal self really
+possesses that profound power over the organism with which I have
+credited it, we may expect that its "messages" will sometimes express
+themselves in the form of deep organic modifications--of changes in the
+vaso-motor, the circulatory, the respiratory systems. Such phenomena are
+likely to be less noted or remembered as _coincidental_, from their very
+indefiniteness, as compared, for instance, with a phantasmal appearance;
+but we have, nevertheless, records of various telepathic cases of deep
+coenesthetic disturbance, of a profound _malaise_ which must, one
+would think, have involved some unusual condition of the viscera.[172]
+
+In cases, too, where the telepathic impression has ultimately assumed a
+definite sensory form, some organic or emotional phenomena have been
+noted, being perhaps the _first_ effects of the telepathic impact,
+whether from the living or from the dead.[173]
+
+And here I may mention an experience of Lady de Vesci's, who described
+to me in conversation a feeling of _malaise_, defining itself into the
+urgent need of definite action--namely, the despatch of a telegram to a
+friend who was in fact then dying at the other side of the world.[174]
+Such an impulse had one only parallel in her experience, which also was
+telepathic in a similar way.
+
+Similar sensory disturbances are sometimes reported in connection with
+an important form of motor automatism,--that of "dowsing" or discovering
+water by means of the movement of a rod held in the hands of the
+automatist,--already treated of in Appendix V. A.
+
+A small group of cases may naturally be mentioned here. From two
+different points of view they stand for the most part at the entrance of
+our subject. I speak of motor inhibitions, prompted at first by
+subliminal memory, or by subliminal hyperćsthesia, but merging into
+telćsthesia or telepathy. Inhibitions--sudden arrests or incapacities of
+action--(more or less of the Socratic type)--form a simple, almost
+rudimentary, type of motor automatisms. And an inhibition--a sudden
+check on action of this kind--will be a natural way in which a strong
+but obscure impression will work itself out. Such an impression, for
+instance, is that of _alarm_, suggested by some vague sound or odour
+which is only subliminally perceived. And thus in this series of motor
+automatisms, just as in our series of dreams, or in our series of
+sensory automatisms, we find ourselves beginning with cases where the
+subliminal self merely shows some slight extension of memory or of
+sensory perception,--and thence pass insensibly to cases where no
+"cryptomnesia" will explain the facts known in the past, and no
+hyperćsthesia will explain the facts discerned in the present.
+
+We may most of us have observed that if we perform any small action to
+which there are objections, which we have once known but which have
+altogether passed from our minds, we are apt to perform it in a
+hesitating, inefficient way.
+
+Similarly there are cases where some sudden muscular impulse or
+inhibition has probably depended on a subliminal perception or
+interpretation of a sound which had not reached the supraliminal
+attention. For instance, two friends walking together along a street in
+a storm just evade by sudden movements a falling mass of masonry. Each
+thinks that he has received some _monition_ of the fall; each asserting
+that he heard no noise whatever to warn him. Here is an instance where
+subliminal perception may have been slightly quicker and more delicate
+than supraliminal, and may have warned them just in time.
+
+In the case which I now quote (from _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p.
+416) there may have been some subliminal hyperćsthesia of hearing which
+dimly warned Mr. Wyman of the approach of the extra train.[175]
+
+Mr. Wm. H. Wyman writes to the Editor of the _Arena_ as follows:--
+
+
+DUNKIRK, N. Y., _June 26th, 1891_.
+
+     Some years ago my brother was employed and had charge as conductor
+     and engineer of a working train on the Lake Shore and Michigan
+     Southern Railway, running between Buffalo and Erie, which passes
+     through this city (Dunkirk, N. Y.). I often went with him to the
+     Grave Bank, where he had his headquarters, and returned on his
+     train with him. On one occasion I was with him, and after the train
+     of cars was loaded, we went together to the telegraph office to see
+     if there were any orders, and to find out if the trains were on
+     time, as he had to keep out of the way of all regular trains. After
+     looking over the train reports and finding them all on time, we
+     started for Buffalo. As we approached near Westfield Station,
+     running about 12 miles per hour, and when within about one mile of
+     a long curve in the line, my brother all of a sudden shut off the
+     steam, and quickly stepping over to the fireman's side of the
+     engine, he looked out of the cab window, and then to the rear of
+     his train to see if there was anything the matter with either. Not
+     discovering anything wrong, he stopped and put on steam, but almost
+     immediately again shut it off and gave the signal for breaks and
+     stopped. After inspecting the engine and train and finding nothing
+     wrong, he seemed very much excited, and for a short time he acted
+     as if he did not know where he was or what to do. I asked what was
+     the matter. He replied that he did not know, when, after looking at
+     his watch and orders, he said that he felt that there was some
+     trouble on the line of the road. I suggested that he had better run
+     his train to the station and find out. He then ordered his flagman
+     with his flag to go ahead around the curve, which was just ahead of
+     us, and he would follow with the train. The flagman started and had
+     just time to flag an extra express train, with the General
+     Superintendent and others on board, coming full 40 [forty] miles
+     per hour. The Superintendent inquired what he was doing there, and
+     if he did not receive orders to keep out of the way of the extra.
+     My brother told him that he had not received orders and did not
+     know of any extra train coming; that we had both examined the train
+     reports before leaving the station. The train then backed to the
+     station, where it was found that no orders had been given. The
+     train despatcher was at once discharged from the road, and from
+     that time to this both my brother and myself are unable to account
+     for his stopping the train as he did. I consider it quite a
+     mystery, and cannot give or find any intelligent reason for it. Can
+     you suggest any?
+
+     The above is true and correct in every particular.
+
+In other cases again some subliminal sense of smell may be
+conjectured.[176]
+
+_Tactile sensibility_, too, must be carefully allowed for. The sense of
+varying resistance in the air may reach in some seeing persons, as well
+as in the blind, a high degree of acuteness.[177]
+
+But there are cases of sudden motor inhibition where no warning can well
+have been received from hyperćsthetic sensation, where we come, as it
+seems, to telćsthesia or to spirit guardianship.
+
+(From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 459.)
+
+     Four years ago, I made arrangements with my nephew, John W.
+     Parsons, to go to my office after supper to investigate a case. We
+     walked along together, both fully determined to go up into the
+     office, but just as I stepped upon the door sill of the drug store,
+     in which my office was situated, some invisible influence stopped
+     me instantly. I was much surprised, felt like I was almost dazed,
+     the influence was so strong, almost like a blow, I felt like I
+     could not make another step. I said to my nephew, "John, I do not
+     feel like going into the office now; you go and read Flint and
+     Aitken on the subject." He went, lighted the lamp, took off his
+     hat, and just as he was reaching for a book the report of a large
+     pistol was heard. The ball entered the window near where he was
+     standing, passed near to and over his head, struck the wall and
+     fell to the floor. Had I been standing where he was, I would have
+     been killed, as I am much taller than he. The pistol was fired by a
+     man who had an old grudge against me, and had secreted himself in a
+     vacant house near by to assassinate me.
+
+     This impression was unlike any that I ever had before. All my
+     former impressions were slow in their development, grew stronger
+     and stronger, until the maximum was reached. I did not feel that I
+     was in any danger, and could not understand what the strong
+     impression meant. The fellow was drunk, had been drinking for two
+     weeks. If my system had been in a different condition--I had just
+     eaten supper--I think I would have received along with the
+     impression some knowledge of the character of the danger, and would
+     have prevented my nephew from going into the office.
+
+     I am fully satisfied that the invisible and unknown intelligence
+     did the best that could have been done, under the circumstances, to
+     save us from harm.
+
+D. J. PARSONS, M.D., Sweet Springs, Mo.
+
+     (The above account was received in a letter from Dr. D. J. Parsons,
+     dated _December 15th, 1891_.)
+
+     Statement of Dr. J. W. PARSONS.
+
+     About four years ago my uncle, Dr. D. J. Parsons, and I were going
+     to supper, when a man halted us and expressed a desire for medical
+     advice. My uncle requested him to call the next morning, and as we
+     walked along he said the case was a bad one and that we would come
+     back after supper and go to the office and examine the authorities
+     on the subject. After supper we returned, walked along together on
+     our way to the office, but just as we reached the door of the drug
+     store he very unexpectedly, to me, stopped suddenly, which caused
+     me to stop too; we stood there together a few seconds, and he
+     remarked to me that he did not feel like going into the office
+     then, or words to that effect, and told me to go and examine Flint
+     and Aitken. I went, lit the lamp, and just as I was getting a book,
+     a pistol was fired into the office, the ball passing close to my
+     head, struck the east wall, then the north, and fell to the floor.
+
+     This 5th day of July, 1891.
+
+JOHN W. PARSONS [Ladonia, Texas.]
+
+In the next group of cases, we reach a class of massive motor impulses
+which are almost entirely free from any sensory admixture.
+
+Take for instance the case of Mr. Garrison, who left a religious meeting
+in the evening, and walked eighteen miles under the strong impulse to
+see his mother, and found her dead. The account is given in the
+_Journal_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 125 [§ 825].
+
+In another case, that of Major Kobbé (given in _Phantasms of the
+Living_, vol. i. p. 288), the percipient was prompted to visit a distant
+cemetery, without any conscious reason, and there found his father, who
+had, in fact, for certain unexpected reasons, sent to his son, Major
+Kobbé, a request (accidentally _not received_) to meet him at that place
+and hour.
+
+In a third case, Mr. Skirving (see _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p.
+285 [825 A]) was irresistibly compelled to leave his work and go
+home--_why_, he knew not--at the moment when his wife was in fact
+calling for him in the distress of a serious accident. See also a case
+given in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 377, where a bricklayer
+has a sudden impulse to run home, and arrives just in time to save the
+life of his little boy, who had set himself on fire.
+
+This special sensibility to the _motor_ element in an impulse recalls to
+us the special susceptibilities to different forms of hallucination or
+suggestion shown by different hypnotic subjects. Some can be made to
+see, some to hear, some to act out the conception proposed to them. Dr.
+Bérillon[178] has even shown that certain subjects who seem at first
+quite refractory to hypnotisation are nevertheless at once obedient,
+even in the waking state, to a motor suggestion. This was the case both
+with a very strong man, with weak men and women, and with at least one
+subject actually suffering from locomotor ataxy. Thus the loss of
+supraliminal motor control over certain muscular combinations may
+actually lead to _motor suggestibility_ as regards those combinations;
+just as the loss of supraliminal sensation in some anćsthetic patch may
+lead to a special subliminal sensitiveness in the very directions where
+the superficial sensibility has sunk away. On the other hand, a
+specially well-developed motor control may predispose in a similar
+way;--as for instance, the subject who can sing already is more easily
+made to sing by suggestion. We must, then, await further observations
+before we can pretend to say beforehand with which automatist the
+messages will take a sensory, and with which a motor form.
+
+Still less can we explain the special predisposition of each
+experimenter to one or more of the common kinds of motor automatism--as
+automatic speech, automatic writing, table movements, raps, and so
+forth. These forms of messages may themselves be variously combined; and
+the contents of a message of any one of these kinds may be purely
+dream-like and fantastic, or may be veridical in various ways.
+
+Let us enumerate the modes of subliminal motor message as nearly as we
+can in order of their increasing specialisation.
+
+1. We may place first the massive motor impulses (like Mr. Garrison's)
+which mark a kind of transition between coenesthetic affections and
+motor impulses proper. There was here no impulse to special movement of
+any limb; but an impulse to reach a certain place by ordinary methods.
+
+2. Next, perhaps, in order of specialisation come the simple subliminal
+muscular impulses which give rise to table-tilting and similar
+phenomena.
+
+3. Musical execution, subliminally initiated, might theoretically be
+placed next; although definite evidence of this is hard to obtain, since
+the threshold of consciousness with musical performers is notoriously
+apt to be shifting and indefinite. ("When in doubt, play with your
+fingers, and not with your head.")
+
+4. Next we may place automatic drawing and painting. This curious group
+of messages has but seldom a telepathic content, and, as was suggested
+in Chapter III., is more akin to _genius_ and similar non-telepathic
+forms of subliminal faculty.[179]
+
+5. Next comes automatic writing, on which much remains to be said in
+this chapter.
+
+6. Automatic _speech_, which would not seem to be _per se_ a more
+developed form of motor message than automatic script, is often
+accompanied by profound changes of memory or of personality which raise
+the question of "inspiration" or "possession";--for the two words,
+however different their theological import, mean much the same thing
+from the standpoint of experimental psychology.
+
+7. I must conclude my list with a class of motor phenomena which I shall
+here merely record in passing, without attempting any explanation. I
+allude to raps, and to those telekinetic movements of objects whose real
+existence is still matter of controversy.
+
+Comparing this list of motor automatisms with the sensory automatisms
+enumerated in Chapter VI., we shall find a certain general tendency
+running through each alike. The sensory automatisms began with vague
+unspecialised sensations. They then passed through a phase of
+definition, of specialisation on the lines of the known senses. And
+finally they reached a stage beyond these habitual forms of
+specialisation: beyond them, as of wider reach, and including in an
+apparently unanalysable act of perception a completer truth than any of
+our specialised forms of perception could by itself convey. With motor
+messages, too, we begin with something of similar vagueness. They, too,
+develop from modifications of the percipient's general organic
+condition, or coenesthesia; and the first dim telepathic impulse
+apparently hesitates between several channels of expression. They then
+pass through various definitely specialised forms; and finally, as we
+shall see when automatic script is considered, they, too, merge into an
+unanalysable act of cognition in which the motor element of the message
+has disappeared. But these motor messages point also in another even
+more perplexing direction. They lead, as I have said above, towards the
+old idea of _possession_;--using the word simply as an expression for
+some form of temporary manifestation of some veritably distinct and
+alien personality through the physical organism of some man or woman, as
+is well exemplified in many cases of automatic writing. In Europe and
+America the phenomenon of automatic writing first came into notice as an
+element in so-called "modern spiritualism" about the middle of the
+nineteenth century; but the writings of W. Stainton Moses--about
+1870-80--were perhaps the first continuous series of such messages which
+could be regarded as worthy of serious attention. Mr. Moses--a man whose
+statements could not be lightly set aside--claimed for them that they
+were the direct utterances of departed persons, some of them lately
+dead, some dead long ago. However they were really to be explained, they
+strongly impressed Edmund Gurney and myself and added to our desire to
+work at the subject in as many ways as we could.
+
+It was plain that these writings could not be judged aright without a
+wide analysis of similar scripts,--without an experimental inquiry into
+what the human mind, in states of somnambulism or the like, could
+furnish of written messages, apart from the main stream of
+consciousness. By his experiments on writing obtained in different
+stages of hypnotic trance, Gurney acted as the pioneer of a long series
+of researches which, independently set on foot by Professor Pierre Janet
+in France, have become of high psychological, and even medical,
+importance. What is here of prime interest is the indubitable fact that
+fresh personalities can be artificially and temporarily created, which
+will write down matter quite alien from the first personality's
+character, and even matter which the first personality never knew. That
+matter may consist merely of reminiscences of previous periods when the
+second personality has been in control. But, nevertheless, if these
+writings are shown to the primary personality, he will absolutely
+repudiate their authorship--alleging not only that he has no
+recollection of writing them, but also that they contain allusions to
+facts which he never knew. Some of these messages, indeed, although
+their source is so perfectly well defined--although we know the very
+moment when the secondary personality which wrote them was called into
+existence--do certainly look more alien from the automatist in his
+normal state than many of the messages which claim to come from spirits
+of lofty type. It is noticeable, moreover, that these manufactured
+personalities sometimes cling obstinately to their fictitious names, and
+refuse to admit that they are in reality only aspects or portions of the
+automatist himself. This must be remembered when the persistent _claim_
+to some spiritual identity--say Napoleon--is urged as an argument for
+attributing a series of messages to that special person.
+
+What has now been said may suffice as regards the varieties of
+mechanism--the different forms of motor automatism--which the messages
+employ. I shall pass on to consider the _contents_ of the messages, and
+shall endeavour to classify them according to their apparent sources.
+
+_A._ In the first place, the message may come from the percipient's own
+mind; its contents being supplied from the resources of his ordinary
+memory, or of his more extensive subliminal memory; while the
+_dramatisation_ of the message--its assumption of some other mind as its
+source--will resemble the dramatisations of dream or of hypnotic trance.
+
+Of course the absence of facts unknown to the writer is not in itself a
+proof that the message does not come from some other mind. We cannot be
+sure that other minds, if they can communicate, will always be at the
+pains to fill their messages with evidential facts. But, equally of
+course, a message devoid of such facts must not, on the strength of its
+mere assertions, be claimed as the product of any but the writer's own
+mind.
+
+_B._ Next above the motor messages whose content the automatist's own
+mental resources might supply, we may place the messages whose content
+seems to be derived telepathically from the mind of some other person
+still living on earth; that person being either conscious or unconscious
+of transmitting the suggestion.
+
+_C._ Next comes the possibility that the message may emanate from some
+unembodied intelligence of unknown type--other, at any rate, than the
+intelligence of the alleged agent. Under this heading come the views
+which ascribe the messages on the one hand to "elementaries," or even
+devils, and on the other hand to "guides" or "guardians" of superhuman
+goodness and wisdom.
+
+_D._ Finally we have the possibility that the message may be derived, in
+a more or less direct manner, from the mind of the agent--the departed
+friend--from whom the communication does actually claim to come.
+
+My main effort has naturally been thus far directed to the proof that
+there are messages which do _not_ fall into the lowest class, _A_--in
+which class most psychologists would still place them all. And I
+myself--while reserving a certain small portion of the messages for my
+other classes--do not only admit but assert that the great majority of
+such communications represent the subliminal workings of the
+automatist's mind alone. It does not, however, follow that such messages
+have for us no interest or novelty. On the contrary, they form an
+instructive, an indispensable transition from psychological
+introspection of the old-fashioned kind to the bolder methods on whose
+validity I am anxious to insist. The mind's subliminal action, as thus
+revealed, differs from the supraliminal in ways which no one
+anticipated, and which no one can explain. There seem to be subliminal
+tendencies setting steadily in certain obscure directions, and bearing
+as little relation to the individual characteristics of the person to
+the deeps of whose being we have somehow penetrated as profound
+ocean-currents bear to waves and winds on the surface of the sea.[180]
+
+Another point also, of fundamental importance, connected with the powers
+of the subliminal self, will be better deferred until a later chapter. I
+have said that a message containing only facts normally known to the
+automatist must not, on the strength of its mere assertions, be regarded
+as proceeding from any mind but his own. This seems evident; but the
+converse proposition is not equally indisputable. We must not take for
+granted that a message which _does_ contain facts not normally known to
+the automatist must therefore come from some mind other than his own. If
+the subliminal self can acquire supernormal knowledge at all, it may
+obtain such knowledge by means other than telepathic impressions from
+other minds. It may assimilate its supernormal nutriment also by a
+directer process--it may devour it not only cooked but raw. Parallel
+with the possibilities of reception of such knowledge from the influence
+of other embodied or disembodied minds lies the possibility of its own
+clairvoyant perception, or active absorption of some kind, of facts
+lying indefinitely beyond its supraliminal purview.
+
+Now, as I have said, the great majority of the nunciative or
+message-bearing motor automatisms originate in the automatist's own
+mind, and do not involve the exercise of telepathy or telćsthesia, or
+any other supernormal faculty; but they illustrate in various ways the
+coexistence of the subliminal with the supraliminal self, its wider
+memory, and its independent intelligence.
+
+I need not here multiply instances of the simpler and commoner forms of
+this type, and I will merely quote in illustration one short case
+recounted by Mr. H. Arthur Smith (author of _The Principles of Equity_,
+and a member of the Council of the Society for Psychical Research) who
+has had the patience to analyse many communications through
+"Planchette."
+
+(From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. p. 233.)[181] Mr. Smith and his
+nephew placed their hands on the Planchette, and a purely fantastic
+name was given as that of the communicating agency.
+
+     Q. "Where did you live?" A. "Wem." This name was quite unknown to
+     any of us. I am sure it was to myself, and as sure of the word of
+     the others as of that of any one I know.
+
+     Q. "Is it decided who is to be Archbishop of Canterbury?" A. "Yes."
+
+     Q. "Who?" A. "Durham." As none of us remembered his name, we asked.
+
+     "What is his name?" A. "Lightfoot." Of course, how far the main
+     statement is correct, I don't know. The curiosity at the time
+     rested in the fact that the name was given which none of us could
+     recall, but was found, to be right.
+
+Now, this is just one of the cases which a less wary observer might have
+brought forward as evidence of spirit agency. An identity, it would be
+said, manifested itself, and gave an address which none present had ever
+heard. But I venture to say that there cannot be any real proof that an
+educated person has never heard of Wem. A permanent recorded fact, like
+the name of a town which is to be found (for instance) in Bradshaw's
+Guide, may at any moment have been presented to Mr. Smith's eye, and
+have found a lodgment in his subliminal memory.
+
+Similarly in the answers "Durham" and "Lightfoot" we are reminded of
+cases where in a dream we ask a question with vivid curiosity, and are
+astonished at the reply; which nevertheless proceeds from _ourselves_ as
+undoubtedly as does the inquiry. The prediction in this case was wrong.
+
+What we have been shown is an independent activity of the subliminal
+self holding colloquies with the supraliminal, and nothing more. Yet we
+shall find, if we go on accumulating instances of the same general type,
+that traces of telćsthesia and telepathy begin insensibly to show
+themselves; not at first with a distinctness or a persistence sufficient
+for actual proof, but just in the same gradual way in which indications
+of supernormal faculty stole in amid the disintegration of split
+personalities; or in which indications of some clairvoyant outlook stole
+in amid the incoherence of dream. Many of these faint indications,
+valueless, as I have said, for purely evidential purposes, are
+nevertheless of much theoretical interest, as showing how near is the
+subliminal self to that region of supernormal knowledge which for the
+supraliminal is so definitely closed.[182]
+
+Mr. Schiller's case (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. pp. 216-224)
+[832 A] is a good example of these obscure transitions between normal
+and supernormal, and introduces us to several phenomena which we shall
+afterwards find recurring again and again in independent quarters.
+Dramatisation of fictitious personalities, for instance, which forms so
+marked a feature in Professor Flournoy's celebrated case (to be
+discussed later), begins in this series of experiments, conducted
+throughout with a purely scientific aim, and with no sort of belief in
+the imaginary "Irktomar" and the rest. It seems as though this
+"objectivation of types" were part of a romance which some inscrutable
+but childish humorist was bent on making up. The "cryptomnesia" shown in
+this case through the reproduction of scraps of old French with which
+the automatist had no conscious acquaintance, reached a point at which
+(as again in Professor Flournoy's case) one is almost driven to suspect
+that it was aided by some slight clairvoyance on the part of the
+subliminal self.
+
+Indeed as the cases become increasingly complex, one wonders to what
+extent this strange manufacture of inward romances can be carried. There
+is, I may say, a great deal more of it in the world than is commonly
+suspected. I have myself received so many cases of these dramatised
+utterances--as though a number of different spirits were writing in turn
+through some automatist's hand--that I have come to recognise the
+operation of some law of dreams, so to call it, as yet but obscurely
+understood. The alleged personalities are for the most part not only
+unidentified, but purposely unidentifiable; they give themselves
+romantic or ludicrous names, and they are produced and disappear as
+lightly as puppets on a mimic stage. The main curiosity of such cases
+lies in their very persistence and complexity; it would be a waste of
+space to quote any of the longer ones in such a way as to do them
+justice. And, fortunately, there is no need for me to give any of my own
+cases; since a specially good case has been specially well observed and
+reported in a book with which many of my readers are probably already
+acquainted,--Professor Flournoy's _Des Indes ŕ la plančte Mars: Etude
+sur un cas de Somnambulisme avec Glossolalie_ (Paris and Geneva, 1900).
+I shall here make some comments on that striking record, which all
+students of these subjects ought to study in detail.
+
+It happens, no doubt, to any group which pursues for many years a
+somewhat unfamiliar line of inquiry, that those of their points which
+are first assailed get gradually admitted, so that as they become
+interested in new points they may scarcely observe what change has taken
+place in the reception of the old. The reader of early volumes of the
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R. will often observe this kind of progress of
+opinion. And now Professor Flournoy's book indicates in a remarkable way
+how things have moved in the psychology of the last twenty years. The
+book--a model of fairness throughout--is indeed, for the most part,
+critically _destructive_ in its treatment of the quasi-supernormal
+phenomena with which it deals. But what a mass of conceptions a
+competent psychologist now takes for granted in this realm, which the
+official science of twenty years ago would scarcely stomach our hinting
+at!
+
+One important point may be noticed at once as decisively corroborating a
+contention of my own made long ago, and at a time when it probably
+seemed fantastic to many readers. Arguing for the potential _continuity_
+of subliminal mentation (as against those who urged that there were only
+occasional flashes of submerged thought, like scattered dreams), I said
+that it would soon be found needful to press this notion of a continuous
+subliminal self to the utmost, if we were not prepared to admit a
+continuous spiritual guidance or possession. Now, in fact, with
+Professor Flournoy's subject the whole discussion turns on this very
+point. There is unquestionably a continuous and complex series of
+thoughts and feelings going on beneath the threshold of consciousness of
+Mlle. "Hélčne Smith." Is this submerged mentation due in any degree or
+in any manner to the operation of spirits other than Mlle. Smith's own?
+That is the broad question; but it is complicated here by a subsidiary
+question: whether, namely, any previous incarnations of Mlle.
+Smith's--other phases of her own spiritual history, now involving
+complex relationship with the past--have any part in the crowd of
+personalities which seem struggling to express themselves through her
+quite healthy organism.
+
+Mlle. Smith, I should at once say, is not,[183] and never has been, a
+paid medium. At the date of M. Flournoy's book, she occupied a leading
+post on the staff of a large _maison de commerce_ at Geneva, and gave
+séances to her friends simply because she enjoyed the exercise of her
+mediumistic faculties, and was herself interested in their explanation.
+
+Her organism, I repeat, is regarded, both by herself and by others, as a
+quite healthy one. Mlle. Smith, says Professor Flournoy, declares
+distinctly that she is perfectly sound in body and mind--in no way
+lacking in equilibrium--and indignantly repudiates the idea that there
+is any hurtful anomaly or the slightest danger in mediumship as she
+practises it.
+
+"It is far from being demonstrated," he continues, "that mediumship is a
+pathological phenomenon. It is abnormal, no doubt, in the sense of being
+_rare_, _exceptional_; but rarity is not morbidity. The few years during
+which these phenomena have been seriously and scientifically studied
+have not been enough to allow us to pronounce on their true nature. It
+is interesting to note that in the countries where these studies have
+been pushed the furthest, in England and America, the dominant view
+among the _savants_ who have gone deepest into the matter is not at all
+unfavourable to mediumship; and that, far from regarding it as a special
+case of hysteria, they see in it a faculty superior, advantageous,
+healthy, of which hysteria is a form of degenerescence, a pathological
+parody, a morbid caricature."
+
+The phenomena which this sensitive presents (Hélčne Smith is Professor
+Flournoy's pseudonym for her) cover a range which looks at first very
+wide, although a clearer analysis shows that these varieties are more
+apparent than real, and that self-suggestion will perhaps account for
+all of them.
+
+There is, to begin with, every kind of automatic irruption of subliminal
+into supraliminal life. As Professor Flournoy says (p. 45): "Phenomena
+of hypermnesia, divinations, mysterious findings of lost objects, happy
+inspirations, exact presentiments, just intuitions, teleological
+(purposive or helpful) automatisms, in short, of every kind; she
+possesses in a high degree this small change of genius--which
+constitutes a more than sufficient compensation for the inconvenience
+resulting from those distractions and moments of absence of mind which
+accompany her visions; and which, moreover, generally pass unobserved."
+
+At séances--where the deeper change has no inconveniences--Hélčne
+undergoes a sort of self-hypnotisation which produces various lethargic
+and somnambulistic states. And when she is alone and safe from
+interruption she has spontaneous visions, during which there may be some
+approach to ecstasy. At the séances she experiences positive
+hallucinations, and also negative hallucinations, or systematised
+anćsthesić, so that, for instance, she will cease to see some person
+present, especially one who is to be the recipient of messages in the
+course of the séance. "It seems as though a dream-like incoherence
+presided over this preliminary work of disaggregation, in which the
+normal perceptions are arbitrarily split up or absorbed by the
+subconscious personality--eager for materials with which to compose the
+hallucinations which it is preparing." Then, when the séance begins, the
+main actor is Hélčne's guide _Léopold_ (a pseudonym for Cagliostro) who
+speaks and writes through her, and is, in fact, either her leading
+spirit-control or (much more probably) her most developed form of
+secondary personality.
+
+"Leopold," says Professor Flournoy (p. 134), "certainly manifests a very
+honourable and amiable side of Mlle. Smith's character, and in taking
+him as her 'guide' she has followed inspirations which are doubtless
+among the highest in her nature."
+
+The high moral quality of these automatic communications, on which
+Professor Flournoy thus insists, is a phenomenon worth consideration.
+
+I do not mean that it is specially strange in the case of Mlle. Smith.
+But the almost universally high moral tone of genuinely automatic
+utterances has not, I think, been sufficiently noticed or adequately
+explained.
+
+In evidential messages--where there is real reason to believe that an
+identified spirit is communicating--there is a marked and independent
+consensus on such matters as these spirits profess themselves able to
+discuss.
+
+And again in non-evidential messages--in communications which probably
+proceed from the automatist's subliminal self--I hold that there is a
+remarkable and undesigned concordance in high moral tone, and also in
+avoidance of certain prevalent tenets, which many of the automatists do
+supraliminally hold as true. But I also insist that these subliminal
+messages, even when not incoherent, are generally dream-like, and often
+involve tenets which (though never in my experience base or immoral) are
+unsupported by evidence, and are probably to be referred to mere
+self-suggestion.
+
+Prominent among such tenets is one which forms a large part of Mlle.
+Smith's communications; namely, the doctrine of _reincarnation_, or of
+successive lives spent by each soul upon this planet.
+
+The simple fact that such was probably the opinion both of Plato and of
+Virgil shows that there is nothing here which is alien to the best
+reason or to the highest instincts of men. Nor, indeed, is it easy to
+realise any theory of the _direct creation_ of spirits at such different
+stages of advancement as those which enter upon the earth in the guise
+of mortal man. There _must_, one feels, be some kind of continuity--some
+form of spiritual Past. Yet for reincarnation there is at present no
+valid evidence; and it must be my duty to show how its assertion in any
+given instance--Mlle. Smith's included--constitutes in itself a strong
+argument in favour of self-suggestion rather than extraneous inspiration
+as the source of the messages in which it appears.
+
+Whenever civilised men have received what they have regarded as a
+revelation (which has generally been somewhat fragmentary in its first
+delivery) they have naturally endeavoured to complete and systematise it
+as well as they could. In so doing they have mostly aimed at three
+objects: (1) to _understand_ as much as possible of the secrets of the
+universe; (2) to _justify_ as far as possible Heaven's dealings with
+men; and (3) to _appropriate_ as far as possible the favour or benefit
+which the revelation may show as possibly accruing to believers. For all
+these purposes the doctrine of reincarnation has proved useful in many
+countries and times. But in no case could it seem more appropriate than
+in this last revelation (so to term it) through automatic messages and
+the like. And as a matter of history, a certain vigorous preacher of the
+new faith, known under the name of Allan Kardec, took up
+reincarnationist tenets, enforced them (as there is reason to believe)
+by strong suggestion upon the minds of various automatic writers, and
+set them forth in dogmatic works which have had much influence,
+especially among Latin nations, from their clarity, symmetry, and
+intrinsic reasonableness. Yet the data thus collected were absolutely
+insufficient, and the _Livre des Esprits_ must simply rank as the
+premature formulation of a new religion--the premature systematisation
+of a nascent science.
+
+I follow Professor Flournoy in believing that the teaching of that work
+must have directly or indirectly influenced the mind of Mlle. Smith, and
+is therefore responsible for her claim to these incarnations previous to
+that which she now undergoes or enjoys.
+
+On the general scheme here followed, each incarnation, if the last has
+been used aright, ought to represent some advance in the scale of being.
+If one earth-life has been misused, the next earth-life ought to afford
+opportunity for expiation--or for further practice in the special virtue
+which has been imperfectly acquired. Thus Mlle. Smith's present life in
+a humble position may be thought to atone for her overmuch pride in her
+last incarnation--as Marie Antoinette.
+
+But the mention of Marie Antoinette suggests the risk which this theory
+fosters--of assuming that one is the issue of a distinguished line of
+spiritual progenitors; insomuch that, with whatever temporary sets-back,
+one is sure in the end to find oneself in a leading position.
+
+Pythagoras, indeed, was content with the secondary hero Euphorbus as his
+bygone self. But in our days Dr. Anna Kingsford and Mr. Edward Maitland
+must needs have been the Virgin Mary and St. John the Divine. And Victor
+Hugo, who was naturally well to the front in these self-multiplications,
+took possession of most of the leading personages of antiquity whom he
+could manage to string together in chronological sequence. It is obvious
+that any number of re-born souls can play at this game; but where no one
+adduces any evidence it seems hardly worth while to go on. Even
+Pythagoras does not appear to have adduced any evidence beyond his _ipse
+dixit_ for his assertion that the alleged shield of Euphorbus had in
+reality been borne by that mythical hero. Meantime the question as to
+reincarnation has actually been put to a very few spirits who have given
+some real evidence of their identity. So far as I know, no one of these
+has claimed to know anything personally of such an incident; although
+all have united in saying that their knowledge was too limited to allow
+them to generalise on the matter.
+
+Hélčne's controls and previous incarnations--to return to our
+subject--do perhaps suffer from the general fault of aiming too high.
+She has to her credit a control from the planet Mars; one
+pre-incarnation as an Indian Princess; and a second (as I have said) as
+Marie Antoinette.
+
+In each case there are certain impressive features in the impersonation;
+but in each case also careful analysis negatives the idea that we can be
+dealing with a personality really revived from a former epoch, or from a
+distant planet;--and leaves us inclined to explain everything by
+"cryptomnesia" (as Professor Flournoy calls submerged memory), and that
+subliminal inventiveness of which we already know so much.
+
+The _Martian_ control was naturally the most striking at first sight.
+Its reality was supported by a Martian language, written in a Martian
+alphabet, spoken with fluency, and sufficiently interpreted into French
+to show that such part of it, at any rate, as could be committed to
+writing was actually a grammatical and coherent form of speech.
+
+And here I reach an appropriate point at which to remark that this book
+of Professor Flournoy's is not the first account which has been
+published of Mlle. Hélčne. Professor Lemaître, of Geneva, printed two
+papers about her in the _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_: first, a long
+article in the number for March-April, 1897--then a reply to M. Lefébure
+in the number for May-June, 1897. In these papers he distinctly claims
+supernormal powers for Mlle. Hélčne, implying a belief in her genuine
+possession by spirits, and even in her previous incarnations, and in the
+extra-terrene or ostensibly Martian language. I read these papers at the
+time, but put them aside as inconclusive, mainly because that very
+language, on which M. Lemaître seemed most to rely, appeared to me so
+obviously factitious as to throw doubt on all the evidence presented by
+an observer who could believe that denizens of another planet talked to
+each other in a language corresponding in every particular with simple
+French idioms, and including such words as _quisa_ for _quel_, _quisé_
+for _quelle_, _vétčche_ for _voir_, _včche_ for _vu_;--the fantastic
+locutions of the nursery. M. Lemaître remarks, as a proof of the
+consistency and reality of the extra-terrene tongue, "L'un des premiers
+mots que nous ayons eus, _métiche_, signifiant _monsieur_, se retrouve
+plus tard avec le sens de _homme_." That is to say, having
+transmogrified _monsieur_ into _métiche_, Hélčne further transmutes
+_les messieurs_ into _cée métiché_;--in naďve imitation of ordinary
+French usage. And this tongue is supposed to have sprung up
+independently of all the influences which have shaped terrene grammar in
+general or the French idiom in particular! And even after Professor
+Flournoy's analysis of this absurdity I see newspapers speaking of this
+Martian language as an impressive phenomenon! They seem willing to
+believe that the evolution of another planet, if it has culminated in
+conscious life at all, can have culminated in a conscious life into
+which we could all of us enter affably, with a suitable Ollendorff's
+phrase-book under our arms;--"_eni cée métiché oné qudé_,"--"ici les
+hommes (messieurs) sont bons,"--"here the men are good";--and the rest
+of it.
+
+To the student of automatisms, of course, all this irresistibly suggests
+the automatist's own subliminal handiwork. It is a case of "glossolaly,"
+or "speaking with tongues"; and we have no modern case--no case later
+than the half-mythical Miracles of the Cevennes--where such utterance
+has proved to be other than gibberish. I have had various automatic
+hieroglyphics shown to me, with the suggestion that they may be cursive
+Japanese, or perhaps an old dialect of Northern China; but I confess
+that I have grown tired of showing these fragments to the irresponsive
+expert, who suggests that they may also be vague reminiscences of the
+scrolls in an Oriental tea-tray.
+
+It seems indeed to be a most difficult thing to get telepathically into
+any brain even fragments of a language which it has not learnt. A few
+simple Italian, and even Hawaiian, words occur in Mrs. Piper's
+utterances, coming apparently from departed spirits (_Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 337 and 384 [960 A and § 961]), but these, with
+some Kaffir and Chinese words given through Miss Browne (_Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. ix. pp. 124-127 [871 A]), form, I think, almost the only
+instances which I know. And, speaking generally, whatever is elaborate,
+finished, pretentious, is likely to be of subliminal facture; while only
+things scrappy, perplexed, and tentative, have floated to us veritably
+from afar.
+
+I need not here go into the details of the Hindow preincarnation or of
+the more modern and accessible characterisation of Marie Antoinette, but
+will pass on to certain minor, but interesting phenomena, which
+Professor Flournoy calls _teleological automatisms_. These are small
+acts of helpfulness--_beneficent synergies_, as we might term them, in
+contrast with the _injurious synergies_, or combined groups of _hurtful_
+actions, with which hysteria has made us familiar.[184]
+
+"One day," says Professor Flournoy (p. 35), "Miss Smith, when desiring
+to lift down a large and heavy object which lay on a high shelf, was
+prevented from doing so because her raised arm remained for some seconds
+as though petrified in the air and incapable of movement. She took this
+as a warning, and gave up the attempt. At a subsequent séance Leopold
+stated that it was he who had thus fixed Hélčne's arm to prevent her
+from grasping this object, which was much too heavy for her and would
+have caused her some accident.
+
+"Another time, a shopman, who had been looking in vain for a certain
+pattern, asked Hélčne if by chance she knew what had become of it.
+Hélčne answered mechanically and without reflection--'Yes, it has been
+sent to Mr. J.' (a client of the house). At the same time she saw before
+her the number 18 in large black figures a few feet from the ground, and
+added instinctively, 'It was sent eighteen days ago.' [This was in the
+highest degree improbable, but was found to be absolutely correct.]
+Leopold had no recollection of this, and does not seem to have been the
+author of this cryptomnesic automatism."
+
+A similar phenomenon has also been noted (p. 87) when warning is
+conveyed by an actual phantasmal figure. Mlle. Smith has seen an
+_apparition_ of Leopold, barring a particular road, under circumstances
+which make it probable that Mlle. Smith would on that day have had cause
+to regret taking that route.
+
+This case of Professor Flournoy's, then--this classical case, as it may
+already be fairly termed--may serve here as our culminant example of the
+free scope and dominant activity of the unassisted subliminal self. The
+telepathic element in this case, if it exists, is relatively small; what
+we are watching in Mlle. Hélčne Smith resembles, as I have said, a kind
+of exaggeration of the submerged constructive faculty,--a hypertrophy of
+genius--without the innate originality of mind which made even the
+dreams of R. L. Stevenson a source of pleasure to thousands of readers.
+
+In reference to the main purpose of this work, such cases as these,
+however curious, can be only introductory to automatisms of deeper
+moment. In our attempt to trace an evolutive series of phenomena
+indicating ever higher human faculty, the smallest telepathic
+incident,--the most trivial proof, if proof it be, of communication
+received without sensory intermediation from either an incarnate or a
+discarnate mind outweighs in importance the most complex ramifications
+and burgeonings of the automatist's own submerged intelligence.
+
+I pass on, then, to evidence which points, through motor automatisms, to
+supernormal faculty; and I shall begin by referring the reader to
+certain experiments (due to Professor Richet) in the simplest of all
+forms of motor automatism, viz., table-tilting, with results which only
+telepathy can explain. (See Appendix VIII. A.)
+
+Trivial though they seem, such experiments may with a little care be
+made absolutely conclusive. Had Professor Richet's friends, for example,
+been willing to prolong this series, we might have had a standing
+demonstration of telepathy, reproducible at will.[185]
+
+And now I pass on to some experiments with Planchette, in which an
+element of telepathy was shown. The following account from Mrs. Alfred
+Moberly, Tynwald, Hythe, Kent, is corroborated, with some additional
+examples, by two other ladies present at the time.
+
+(From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. p. 235.)
+
+
+_May 9th, 1884._
+
+     The operators were placed out of sight of the rest of the company,
+     who selected--in silence--a photograph, one of an albumful, and
+     fixed their attention on it. We--the operators--were requested to
+     keep our minds a blank as far as possible and follow the first
+     involuntary motion of the Planchette. In three out of five cases it
+     wrote the name or initial or some word descriptive of the selected
+     portrait. We also obtained the signatures to letters selected in
+     the same manner. We both knew perfectly well that _we_ were
+     writing--not the spirits, as the rest of the company persist to
+     this day in believing--but had only the slightest idea what the
+     words might prove to be.
+
+     We have tried it since, and generally with some curious result. A
+     crucial test was offered by two gentlemen in the form of a question
+     to which we couldn't possibly guess the answer. "Where's Toosey?"
+     The answer came, "In Vauxhall Road." "Toosey," they explained, was
+     a pet terrier who had disappeared; suspicion attaching to a plumber
+     living in the road mentioned, who had been working at the house and
+     whose departure coincided with Toosey's.
+
+Of course, in the case of the inquiry after the lost dog, we may suppose
+that the answer given came from the questioner's own mind. Mrs. Moberly
+and her friends seem to have been quite aware of this; and were little
+likely to fall into the not uncommon error of asking Planchette, for
+instance, what horse will win the Derby, and staking, perhaps, some
+pecuniary consideration on the extremely illusory reply.[186]
+
+And now we come to the palmary case of the late Rev. P. H. Newnham,
+Vicar of Maker, Devonport, who was personally known to Edmund Gurney and
+myself, and was a man in all ways worthy of high respect. The long
+series of communications between Mr. Newnham and his wife, which date
+back to 1871, and whose contemporaneous written record is preserved in
+the archives of the S.P.R., must, I think, always retain their primacy
+as early and trustworthy examples of a telepathic transference where the
+percipient's automatic script answers questions penned by the agent in
+such a position that the percipient could not in any normal manner
+discern what those questions were. No part of our evidence seems to me
+more worthy of study than this.[187]
+
+It must be distinctly understood that Mrs. Newnham did not see or hear
+the questions which Mr. Newnham wrote down.[188] The fact, therefore,
+that her answers bore any relation to the questions shows that the sense
+of the questions was telepathically conveyed to her. This is the leading
+and important fact. The _substance_ of the replies written is also
+interesting, and Mr. Newnham has some good comments thereon. But even
+had the replies contained no facts which Mrs. Newnham could not have
+known, this would not detract from the main value of the evidence, which
+consists in the fact that _Mrs. Newnham's hand wrote replies clearly and
+repeatedly answering questions which she neither heard nor saw_.
+
+In this case we have the advantage of seeing before us the entire series
+of questions and answers, and thus of satisfying ourselves that the
+misses (which in that case are very few) are marked as well as the hits,
+and consequently that the coincidences between question and answer are
+at any rate not the result of chance. In several other cases which I
+have known, where the good faith of the informants has been equally
+above question, the possibility of an explanation by chance alone has
+been a more important element in the problem. All our evidence has
+tended to show that the telepathic power itself is a variable thing;
+that it shows itself in flashes, for the most part spontaneously, and
+seldom persists through a series of deliberate experiments. And if an
+automatist possessing power of this uncertain kind has exercised it at
+irregular moments and with no scientific aim;--and has kept, moreover,
+no steady record of success and failure;--then it becomes difficult to
+say that even some brilliant coincidences afford cogent proof of
+telepathic action.[189]
+
+I pass on to a small group of cases which form a curious transition from
+these communications _inter vivos_ to communications which I shall class
+as coming from the dead. These are cases where the message professes to
+come from a deceased person, but shows internal evidence of having come,
+telepathically, from the mind of some one present, or, indeed, from some
+living person at a distance. (See the case given in Appendix VIII. B.)
+
+But this, although a real risk, is by no means the only risk of
+deception which such messages involve. The communication may conceivably
+come from some unembodied spirit indeed, but not from the spirit who is
+claimed as its author.
+
+The reader who wishes to acquaint himself with this new range of
+problems cannot do better than study the record of the varied
+experiences of automatic writing which have been intermingled with Miss
+A.'s crystal-visions, etc.[190]
+
+There is no case that I have watched longer than Miss A.'s;--none where
+I have more absolute assurance of the scrupulous probity of the
+principal sensitive herself and of the group who share the
+experiments;--but none also which leaves me more often baffled as to the
+unseen source of the information given. There is a knowledge both of the
+past and of the future, which seems capriciously limited, and is mingled
+with mistakes, yet on the other hand is of a nature which it is
+difficult to refer to any individual human mind, incarnate or
+discarnate. We meet here some of the first indications of a possibility
+that discarnate spirits communicating with us have occasional access to
+certain sources of knowledge which even to themselves are inscrutably
+remote and obscure.
+
+The written diagnoses and prognoses given by the so-called "Semirus,"
+often without Miss A.'s even seeing the patient or hearing the nature of
+his malady, have become more and more remarkable. Miss A. and her
+friends do not wish these private matters to be printed, and I cannot
+therefore insist upon the phenomena here. Yet in view of the amount of
+telćsthesia which Miss A.'s various automatisms reveal, it should first
+be noted that human organisms seem especially pervious to such _vue ŕ
+distance_. "Semirus," "Gelalius," etc., are obvious pseudonyms; and
+neither Semirus' prescriptions nor Gelalius' cosmogony contain enough of
+indication to enable us to grasp their origin.[191]
+
+From the communications of these remote personages I go on to certain
+messages avowedly coming from persons more recently departed, and into
+which something more of definite personality seems to enter. One element
+of this kind is _handwriting_; there are many cases where resemblance of
+handwriting is one of the evidential points alleged. Now proof of
+identity from resemblance of handwriting may conceivably be very strong.
+But in estimating it we must bear two points in mind. The first is that
+(like the resemblances of so-called "spirit-photographs" to deceased
+friends) it is often very loosely asserted. One needs, if not an
+expert's opinion, at least a careful personal scrutiny of the three
+scripts--the automatist's voluntary and his automatic script, and the
+deceased person's script--before one can feel sure that the resemblance
+is in more than some general scrawliness. This refers to the cases where
+the automatist has provably never seen the deceased person's
+handwriting. Where he _has_ seen that handwriting, we have to remember
+(in the second place) that a hypnotised subject can frequently imitate
+any known handwriting far more closely than in his waking state; and
+that consequently we are bound to credit the subliminal self with a
+mimetic faculty which may come out in these messages without any
+supraliminal guidance whatever on the automatist's part. In
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 549-65 [864 A], is an account of a
+series of experiments by Professor Rossi-Pagnoni at Pesaro, into which
+the question of handwriting enters. The account illustrates automatic
+utterance as well as other forms of motor automatism, and possibly also
+telekinetic phenomena. The critical discussion of the evidence by Mr.
+H. Babington Smith, to whom we are indebted for the account, shows with
+what complex considerations we have to deal in the questions now before
+us.
+
+I now cite a few cases where the point of central interest is the
+announcement of a death unknown to the sitters.[192]
+
+In Appendix VIII. C is given a case which we received from Dr.
+Liébeault, of Nancy, and which was first published in _Phantasms of the
+Living_ (vol. i. p. 293), where it was regarded as an example of a
+spontaneous telepathic impulse proceeding directly from a dying person.
+I now regard it as more probably due to the action of the spirit after
+bodily death.
+
+I shall next give a _résumé_ of a case of curious complexity received
+from M. Aksakof;--an automatic message written by a Mdlle. Stramm,
+informing her of the death of a M. Duvanel. The principal incidents may
+here be disentangled as follows:--
+
+     Duvanel dies by his own hand on January 15th, 1887, in a Swiss
+     village, where he lives alone, having no relations except a brother
+     living at a distance, whom Mdlle. Stramm had never seen (as the
+     principal witness, M. Kaigorodoff, informs us in a letter of May
+     1890).
+
+     Mdlle. Stramm's father does not hear of Duvanel's death till two
+     days later, and sends her the news in a letter dated January 18th,
+     1887.
+
+     Five hours after Duvanel's death an automatic message announcing it
+     is written at the house of M. Kaigorodoff, at Wilna in Russia, by
+     Mdlle. Stramm, who had certainly at that time received no news of
+     the event.
+
+     From what mind are we to suppose that this information came?
+
+     (1) We may first attempt to account for Mdlle. Stramm's message on
+     the theory of _latency_. We may suppose that the telepathic message
+     came from the dying man, but did not rise into consciousness until
+     an opportunity was afforded by Mdlle. Stramm's sitting down to
+     write automatically.
+
+     But to this interpretation there is an objection of a very curious
+     kind. The message written by Mdlle. Stramm was not precisely
+     accurate. Instead of ascribing Duvanel's death to suicide, it
+     ascribed it to a stoppage of blood, "un engorgement de sang."
+
+     And when M. Stramm, three days after the death, wrote to his
+     daughter in Russia to tell her of it, he also used the same
+     expression, "un engorgement de sang," thus disguising the actual
+     truth in order to spare the feelings of his daughter, who had
+     formerly refused to marry Duvanel, and who (as her father feared)
+     might receive a painful shock if she learnt the tragic nature of
+     his end. There was, therefore, a singular coincidence between the
+     automatic and the normally-written message as to the death;--a
+     coincidence which looks as though the same mind had been at work
+     in each instance. But that mind cannot have been M. Stramm's
+     ordinary mind, as he was not supraliminally aware of Duvanel's
+     death at the time when the first message was written. It may,
+     however, be supposed that his subliminal self had received the
+     information of the death telepathically, had transmitted it in a
+     deliberately modified form to his daughter, while it remained
+     latent in himself, and had afterwards influenced his supraliminal
+     self to modify the information in the same way when writing to her.
+
+     (2) But we must also consider the explanation of the coincidence
+     given by the intelligence which controlled the automatic writing.
+     That intelligence asserted itself to be a brother of Mdlle.
+     Stramm's, who died some years before. And this "Louis" further
+     asserted that he had himself influenced M. Stramm to make use of
+     the same euphemistic phrase, with the object of avoiding a shock to
+     Mdlle. Stramm; for which purpose it was needful that the two
+     messages should agree in ascribing the death to the same form of
+     sudden illness.
+
+     Now if this be true, and the message did indeed come from the
+     deceased "Louis," we have an indication of continued existence, and
+     continued knowledge of earthly affairs, on the part of a person
+     long dead.
+
+     But if we consider that the case, as presented to us, contains no
+     proof of "Louis'" identity, so that "Louis" may be merely one of
+     those arbitrary names which the automatist's subliminal
+     intelligence seems so prone to assume; then we must suppose that
+     Duvanel was actually operative on two occasions after death, first
+     inspiring in Mdlle. Stramm the automatic message, and then
+     modifying in M. Stramm the message which the father might otherwise
+     have sent.
+
+I next quote a case in Appendix VIII. D which illustrates the continued
+terrene knowledge on the part of the dead of which other instances were
+given in the last chapter.
+
+And lastly, I give in Appendix VIII. E a case which in one respect
+stands alone. It narrates the success of a direct experiment,--a
+test-message planned before death, and communicated after death, by a
+man who held that the hope of an assurance of continued existence was
+worth at least a resolute effort, whatever its result might be. His
+tests, indeed, were two, and both were successful. One was the revealing
+of the place where, before death, he hid a piece of brick marked and
+broken for special recognition, and the other was the communication of
+the contents of a short letter which he wrote and sealed before death.
+We may say that the information was certainly not possessed
+supraliminally by any living person. There are two other cases
+(_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 353-355, and _op. cit._ vol viii.
+pp. 238-242 [876 A and B]) where information given through automatists
+may hypothetically be explicable by telepathy from the living, although,
+indeed, in my own view, it probably emanated from the deceased as
+alleged. In one of these cases the place where a missing will had been
+hidden was revealed to the automatist, but it is not clear whether the
+will was actually discovered or not before the automatic writing was
+obtained (although the automatist was unaware of its discovery), and in
+any case, apparently, its whereabouts was known to some living person
+who had hidden it, and may not have been known to the deceased before
+death.
+
+In the other case the whereabouts of a missing note of hand was revealed
+to the automatists, and even if this could be regarded as absolutely
+unknown supraliminally to any living person, it is not by any means
+certain that the fact was known before death to the deceased person from
+whom the message purported to come.
+
+These cases, therefore, are not such strong evidence for personal
+identity as the one to which I have referred above, and which I have
+given, as recording what purports to be the successful accomplishment of
+an experiment which every one may make;--which every one _ought_ to
+make;--for, small as may be the chances of success, a few score of
+distinct successes would establish a presumption of man's survival which
+the common sense of mankind would refuse to explain away.
+
+Here, then, let us pause and consider to what point the evidence
+contained in this chapter has gradually led us. We shall perceive that
+the motor phenomena have confirmed, and have also greatly extended, the
+results to which the cognate sensory phenomena had already pointed. We
+have already noted, in each of the two states of sleep and of waking,
+the variously expanding capacities of the subliminal self. We have
+watched a hyperćsthetic intensification of ordinary faculty,--leading up
+to telćsthesia, and to telepathy, from the living and from the departed.
+Along with these powers, which, on the hypothesis of the soul's
+independent existence, are at least within our range of analogical
+conception, we have noted also a precognitive capacity of a type which
+no fact as yet known to science will help us to explain.
+
+Proceeding to the study of motor automatisms, we have found a _third_
+group of cases which independently confirm in each of these lines in
+turn the results of our analysis of sensory automatisms both in sleep
+and in waking. Evidence thus convergent will already need no ordinary
+boldness of negative assumption if it is to be set aside. But motor
+automatisms have taught us much more than this. At once more energetic
+and more persistent than the sensory, they oblige us to face certain
+problems which the lightness and fugitiveness of sensory impressions
+allowed us in some measure to evade. Thus when we discussed the
+mechanism (so to call it) of visual and auditory phantasms, two
+competing conceptions presented themselves for our choice,--the
+conception of _telepathic impact_, and the conception of _psychical
+invasion_. Either (we said) there was an influence exerted by the agent
+on the percipient's mind, which so stimulated the sensory tracts of his
+brain that he externalised that impression as a quasi-percept, or else
+the agent in some way modified an actual portion of space where (say) an
+apparition was discerned, perhaps by several percipients at once.
+
+Phrased in this manner, the telepathic impact seemed the less startling,
+the less extreme hypothesis of the two,--mainly, perhaps, because the
+picture which it called up was left so vague and obscure. But now
+instead of a fleeting hallucination we have to deal with a strong and
+lasting impulse--such, for instance, as the girl's impulse to _write_,
+in Dr. Liébeault's case (Appendix VIII. C):--an impulse which seems to
+come from the depths of the being, and which (like a post-hypnotic
+suggestion) may override even strong disinclination, and keep the
+automatist uncomfortable until it has worked itself out. We may still
+call this a _telepathic impact_, if we will, but we shall find it hard
+to distinguish that term from a _psychical invasion_. This strong, yet
+apparently alien, motor innervation corresponds in fact as closely as
+possible to our idea of an _invasion_--an invasion no longer of the room
+only in which the percipient is sitting, but of his own body and his own
+powers. It is an invasion which, if sufficiently prolonged, would become
+a _possession_; and it both unites and intensifies those two earlier
+conjectures;--of telepathic impact on the percipient's mind, and of
+"phantasmogenetic presence" in the percipient's surroundings. What
+seemed at first a mere impact is tending to become a persistent control;
+what seemed an incursion merely into the percipient's environment has
+become an incursion into his organism itself.
+
+As has been usual in this inquiry, this slight forward step from
+vagueness to comparative clearness of conception introduces us at once
+to a whole series of novel problems. Yet, as we have also learnt to
+expect, some of our earlier phenomena may have to be called in with
+advantage to illustrate phenomena more advanced.
+
+In cases of split personality, to begin with, we have seen just the same
+phenomena occurring where certainly no personality was concerned save
+the percipient's own. We have seen a section of the subliminal self
+partially or temporarily dominating the organism; perhaps controlling
+permanently one arm alone;[193] or perhaps controlling intermittently
+the whole nervous system;--and all this with varying degrees of
+displacement of the primary personality.
+
+Similarly with post-hypnotic suggestion. We have seen the subliminal
+self ordered to write (say) "It has left off raining"--and thereupon
+writing the words without the conscious will of the automatist--and
+again with varying degrees of displacement of the waking self. The step
+hence to such a case as Mrs. Newnham's is thus not a very long one. Mrs.
+Newnham's subliminal self, exercising supernormal faculty, and by some
+effort of its own, acquires certain facts from Mr. Newnham's mind, and
+uses her hand to write them down automatically. The great problem here
+introduced is how the subliminal self acquires the facts, rather than
+how it succeeds in writing them down when it has once acquired them.
+
+But as we go further we can no longer limit the problem in this way,--to
+the activities of the automatist's subliminal self. We cannot always
+assume that some portion of the automatist's personality gets at the
+supernormal knowledge by some effort of its own. Our evidence, as we
+know, has pointed decisively to telepathic impacts or influences from
+without. What, then, is the mechanism here? Are we still to suppose that
+the automatist's subliminal self executes the movements--obeying somehow
+the bidding of the impulse from without? or does the external agent, who
+sends the telepathic message, himself execute the movements also,
+directly using the automatist's arm? And if telekinetic movements
+accompany the message (a subject thus far deferred, but of prime
+importance), are we to suppose that these also are effected by the
+percipient's subliminal self, under the guidance of some external
+spirit, incarnate or discarnate? or are they effected directly by that
+external spirit?
+
+We cannot really say which of these two is the easier hypothesis.
+
+From one point of view it may seem simpler to keep as long as we can to
+that acknowledged _vera causa_, the automatist's subliminal self; and to
+collect such observations as may indicate any power on its part of
+producing physical effects outside the organism. Such scattered
+observations occur at every stage, and even Mrs. Newnham (I may briefly
+observe in passing) thought that her pencil, when writing down the
+messages telepathically derived from her husband, was moved by something
+other than the ordinary muscular action of the fingers which held it. On
+the other hand, there seems something very forced in attributing to an
+external spirit's agency impulses and impressions which seem intimately
+the automatist's own, and at the same time refusing to ascribe to that
+external agency phenomena which take place outside the automatist's
+organism, and which present themselves to him as objective facts, as
+much outside his own being as the fall of the apple to the ground.
+
+Reflecting on such points--and once admitting this kind of interaction
+between the automatist's own spirit and an external spirit, incarnate or
+discarnate--we find the possible combinations presenting themselves in
+perplexing variety;--a variety both of agencies on the part of the
+invading spirit, and of effects on the part of the invaded spirit and
+organism.
+
+What is that which invades? and what is that which is displaced or
+superseded by this invasion? In what ways may two spirits co-operate in
+the possession and control of the same organism?
+
+These last words--control and possession--remind us of the great mass of
+vague tradition and belief to the effect that spirits of the departed
+may exercise such possession or control over the living. To those
+ancient and vague beliefs it will be our task in the next chapter to
+give a form as exact and stable as we can. And observe with how entirely
+novel a preparation of mind we now enter on that task. The examination
+of "possession" is no longer to us, as to the ordinary civilised
+inquirer, a merely antiquarian or anthropological research into forms of
+superstition lying wholly apart from any valid or systematic thought. On
+the contrary, it is an inquiry directly growing out of previous
+evidence; directly needed for the full comprehension of known facts as
+well as for the discovery of facts unknown. We need, (so to say), to
+analyse the spectrum of helium, as detected in the sun, in order to
+check and correct our spectrum of helium as detected in the Bath waters.
+We are obliged to seek for certain definite phenomena in the spiritual
+world in order to explain certain definite phenomena of the world of
+matter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TRANCE, POSSESSION, AND ECSTASY
+
+    Vicit iter durum pietas.
+
+    --VIRGIL.
+
+
+_Possession_, to define it for the moment in the narrowest way, is a
+more developed form of Motor Automatism. The difference broadly is, that
+in Possession the automatist's own personality does for the time
+altogether disappear, while there is a more or less complete
+_substitution_ of personality; writing or speech being given by a spirit
+through the entranced organism. The change which has come over this
+branch of evidence since the present work was first projected, in 1888,
+is most significant. There existed indeed, at that date, a good deal of
+evidence which pointed in this direction,[194] but for various reasons
+most of that evidence was still possibly explicable in other ways. Even
+the phenomena of Mr. W. S. Moses left it possible to argue that the main
+"controls" under which he wrote or spoke when entranced were
+self-suggestions of his own mind, or phases of his own deeper
+personality. I had not then had the opportunity, which the kindness of
+his executors after his death afforded to me, of studying the whole
+series of his original note-books, and forming at first-hand my present
+conviction that spiritual agency was an actual and important element in
+that long sequence of communications. On the whole, I did not then
+anticipate that the theory of possession could be presented as more than
+a plausible speculation, or as a supplement to other lines of proof of
+man's survival of death.
+
+The position of things, as the reader of the S.P.R. _Proceedings_ knows,
+has since that time undergone a complete change. The trance-phenomena of
+Mrs. Piper--so long and so carefully watched by Dr. Hodgson and
+others--formed, I think, by far the most remarkable mass of psychical
+evidence till then adduced in any quarter. And more recently other
+series of trance-phenomena with other "mediums"--though still
+incomplete--have added materially to the evidence obtained through Mrs.
+Piper. The result broadly is that these phenomena of possession are now
+the most amply attested, as well as intrinsically the most advanced, in
+our whole repertory.
+
+Nor, again, is the mere increment of direct evidence, important though
+that is, the sole factor in the changed situation. Not only has direct
+evidence grown, but indirect evidence, so to say, has moved to meet it.
+The notion of personality--of the control of organism by spirit--has
+gradually been so modified that Possession, which passed till the other
+day as a mere survival of savage thought, is now seen to be the
+consummation, the furthest development of many lines of experiment,
+observation, reflection, which the preceding chapters have opened to our
+view.
+
+Let us then at once consider what the notion of possession does actually
+claim. It will be better to face that claim in its full extent at once,
+as it will be seen that the evidence, while rising through various
+stages, does in the end insist on all that the ancient term implies. The
+leading modern cases, of which Stainton Moses and Mrs. Piper may be
+taken as types, are closely analogous, presenting many undesigned
+coincidences, some of which come out only on close examination.
+
+The claim, then, is that the automatist, in the first place, falls into
+a trance, during which his spirit partially "quits his body:" enters at
+any rate into a state in which the spiritual world is more or less open
+to its perception; and in which also--and this is the novelty--it so far
+ceases to occupy the organism as to leave room for an invading spirit to
+use it in somewhat the same fashion as its owner is accustomed to use
+it.
+
+The brain being thus left temporarily and partially uncontrolled, a
+disembodied spirit sometimes, but not always, succeeds in occupying it;
+and occupies it with varying degrees of control. In some cases (Mrs.
+Piper) two or more spirits may simultaneously control different portions
+of the same organism.
+
+The controlling spirit proves his identity mainly by reproducing, in
+speech or writing, facts which belong to his memory and not to the
+automatist's memory. He may also give evidence of supernormal perception
+of other kinds.
+
+His manifestations may differ very considerably from the automatist's
+normal personality. Yet in one sense it is a process of selection rather
+than of addition; the spirit selects what parts of the brain-machinery
+he will use, but he cannot get out of that machinery more than it is
+constructed to perform. The spirit can indeed produce facts and names
+unknown to the automatist; but they must be, as a rule, such facts and
+names as the automatist could easily have repeated, had they been known
+to him:--not, for instance, mathematical formulć or Chinese sentences,
+if the automatist is ignorant of mathematics or of Chinese.
+
+After a time the control gives way, and the automatist's spirit returns.
+The automatist, awaking, may or may not remember his experiences in the
+spiritual world during the trance. In some cases (Swedenborg) there is
+this memory of the spiritual world, but no possession of the organism by
+an external spirit. In others (Cahagnet's subject) there is utterance
+during the trance as to what is being discerned by the automatist, yet
+no memory thereof on waking. In others (Mrs. Piper) there is neither
+utterance as a rule, or at least no prolonged utterance, by the
+automatist's own spirit, nor subsequent memory; but there is writing or
+utterance during the trance by controlling spirits.
+
+Now this seems a strange doctrine to have reached after so much
+disputation. For it simply brings us back to the creeds of the Stone
+Age. We have come round again to the primitive practices of the shaman
+and the medicine-man;--to a doctrine of spiritual intercourse which was
+once oecumenical, but has now taken refuge in African swamps and
+Siberian tundras and the snow-clad wastes of the Red Indian and the
+Esquimaux. If, as is sometimes advised, we judge of the worth of ideas
+by tracing their _origins_, no conception could start from a lower level
+of humanity. It might be put out of court at once as unworthy of
+civilised men.
+
+Fortunately, however, our previous discussions have supplied us with a
+somewhat more searching criterion. Instead of asking in what age a
+doctrine originated--with the implied assumption that the more recent it
+is, the better--we can now ask how far it is in accord or in discord
+with a great mass of actual recent evidence which comes into contact, in
+one way or another, with nearly every belief as to an unseen world which
+has been held at least by western men. Submitted to this test, the
+theory of possession gives a remarkable result. It cannot be said to be
+inconsistent with any of our proved facts. We know absolutely nothing
+which negatives its possibility.
+
+Nay, more than this. The theory of possession actually supplies us with
+a powerful method of co-ordinating and explaining many earlier groups of
+phenomena, if only we will consent to explain them in a way which at
+first sight seemed extreme in its assumptions--seemed unduly prodigal of
+the marvellous. Yet as to that difficulty we have learnt by this time
+that no explanation of psychical phenomena is really simple, and that
+our best clue is to get hold of some group which seems to admit of one
+interpretation only, and then to use that group as a _point de repčre_
+from which to attack more complex problems.
+
+Now I think that the Moses-Piper group of trance-phenomena cannot be
+intelligently explained on any theory except that of possession. And I
+therefore think it important to consider in what way earlier phenomena
+have led up to possession, and in what way the facts of possession, in
+their turn, affect our view of these earlier phenomena.
+
+If we analyse our observations of possession, we find two main
+factors--the central operation, which is the control by a spirit of the
+sensitive's organism; and the indispensable prerequisite, which is the
+partial and temporary desertion of that organism by the percipient's own
+spirit.
+
+Let us consider first how far this withdrawal of the living man's spirit
+from his organism has been rendered conceivable by evidence already
+obtained.
+
+First of all, the splits, and substitutions of phases of personality
+with which our second chapter made us familiar have great significance
+for _possession_ also.
+
+We have there seen some secondary personality, beginning with slight and
+isolated sensory and motor manifestations, yet going on gradually to
+complete predominance,--complete control of all supraliminal
+manifestation.
+
+The mere collection and description of such phenomena has up till now
+savoured of a certain boldness. The idea of tracing the possible
+mechanism involved in these transitions has scarcely arisen.
+
+Yet it is manifest that there must be a complex set of laws concerned
+with such alternating use of brain-centres;--developments, one may
+suppose, of those unknown physical laws underlying ordinary memory, of
+which no one has formed as yet even a first rough conception.
+
+An ordinary case of ecmnesia may present problems as insoluble in their
+way as those offered by spirit-possession itself. There may be in
+ecmnesia periods of life absolutely and permanently extruded from
+memory; and there may be also periods which are only temporarily thus
+extruded. Thus on Wednesday and Thursday I may be unaware of what I
+learnt and did on Monday and Tuesday; and then on Friday I may recover
+Monday's and Tuesday's knowledge, as well as retaining Wednesday's and
+Thursday's, so that my brain-cells have taken on, so to say, two
+separate lines of education since Sunday--that which began on Monday,
+and that which began on Wednesday. These intercurrent educations may
+have been naturally discordant, and may be fused in all kinds of ways in
+the ultimate synthesis.
+
+These processes are completely obscure; and all that can be said is that
+their mechanism probably belongs to the same unknown series of
+operations which ultimately lead to that completest break in the history
+of the brain-cells which consists in their intercalary occupation by an
+external spirit.
+
+Passing on to _genius_, which I discussed in my third chapter, it is
+noticeable that there also there is a certain degree of temporary
+substitution of one control for another over important brain-centres. We
+must here regard the subliminal self as an entity partially distinct
+from the supraliminal, and its occupation of these brain-centres
+habitually devoted to supraliminal work is a kind of possession, which
+illustrates in yet another way the rapid metastasis of psychical product
+(so to term it) of which these highest centres are capable. The highest
+genius would thus be the completest _self-possession_,--the occupation
+and dominance of the whole organism by those profoundest elements of the
+self which act from the fullest knowledge, and in the wisest way.
+
+The next main subject which fell under our description was _sleep_. And
+this state--the normal state which most resembles trance--has long ago
+suggested the question which first hints at the possibility of ecstasy,
+namely, What becomes of the soul during sleep? I think that our evidence
+has shown that sometimes during apparent ordinary sleep the spirit may
+travel away from the body, and may bring back a memory, more or less
+confused, of what it has seen in this clairvoyant excursion. This may
+indeed happen for brief flashes during waking moments also. But ordinary
+sleep seems to help the process; and deeper states of sleep--spontaneous
+or induced--seem still further to facilitate it. In the coma preceding
+death, or during that "suspended animation" which is sometimes taken for
+death, this travelling faculty has seemed to reach its highest point.
+
+I have spoken of deeper states of sleep, "spontaneous or induced," and
+here the reader will naturally recall much that has been said of
+ordinary somnambulism, much that has been said of hypnotic trance.
+Hypnotic trance has created for us, with perfect facility, situations
+externally indistinguishable from what I shall presently claim as true
+possession. A quasi-personality, arbitrarily created, may occupy the
+organism, responding to speech or sign in some characteristic fashion,
+although without producing any fresh verifiable facts as evidence to the
+alleged identity. Nay, sometimes, as in a few of the Pesaro experiments
+(see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 563-565), there may be
+indications that something of a new personality is there. And on the
+other hand, the sensitive's own spirit often claims to have been absent
+elsewhere,--much in the fashion in which it sometimes imagines itself to
+have been absent during ordinary sleep, but with greater persistence and
+lucidity.
+
+Our inquiry into the nature of what is thus alleged to be seen in sleep
+and cognate states has proved instructive. Sometimes known earthly
+scenes appear to be revisited--with only such alteration as may have
+taken place since the sleeper last visited them in waking hours. But
+sometimes also there is an admixture of an apparently _symbolical_
+element. The earthly scene includes some element of human action, which
+is presented in a selected or abbreviated fashion, as though some mind
+had been concerned to bring out a special significance from the complex
+story. Sometimes this element becomes quite dominant; phantasmal figures
+are seen; or there may be a prolonged symbolical representation of an
+entry into the spiritual world.
+
+Cases like these do of course apparently support that primitive doctrine
+of the spirit's actual wandering in space. On the other hand, this
+notion has become unwelcome to modern thought, which is less unwilling
+to believe in some telepathic intercourse between mind and mind in which
+space is not involved. For my own part, I have already explained that I
+think that the evidence to an at least apparent movement of some kind in
+space must outweigh any mere speculative presumption against it. And I
+hold that these new experiences of possession fall on this controversy
+with decisive force. It is so strongly claimed, in every instance of
+possession, that the sensitive's own spirit must in some sense _vacate_
+the organism, in order to allow another spirit to enter,--and the
+evidence for the reality of possession is at the same time so
+strong,--that I think that we must argue back from this spatial change
+as a relatively certain fact, and must place a corresponding
+interpretation on earlier phenomena. Such an interpretation, if once
+admitted, does certainly meet the phenomena in the way most accordant
+with the subjective impressions of the various percipients.
+
+As we have already repeatedly found, it is the bold evolutionary
+hypothesis which best fixes and colligates the scattered facts. We
+encounter in these studies phenomena of degeneration and phenomena of
+evolution. The degenerative phenomena are explicable singly and in
+detail as declensions in divergent directions from an existing level.
+The evolutive phenomena point, on the other hand, to new
+generalisations;--to powers previously unrecognised towards which our
+evidence _converges_ along constantly multiplying lines.
+
+This matter of psychical excursion from the organism ultimately involves
+the extremest claim to novel faculty which has ever been advanced for
+men. For it involves, as we shall see, the claim to _ecstasy_:--to a
+wandering vision which is not confined to this earth or this material
+world alone, but introduces the seer into the spiritual world and among
+communities higher than any which this planet knows. The discussion of
+this transportation, however, will be better deferred until after the
+evidence for possession has been laid before the reader at some length.
+
+Continuing, then, for the present our analysis of the idea of
+possession, we come now to its specific feature,--the occupation by a
+spiritual agency of the entranced and partially vacated organism. Here
+it is that our previous studies will do most to clear our conceptions.
+Instead of at once leaping to the question of what spirits in their
+essence are,--of what they can do and cannot do,--of the antecedent
+possibility of their re-entry into matter, and the like,--we must begin
+by simply carrying the idea of telepathy to its furthest point. We must
+imagine telepathy becoming as central and as intense as possible;--and
+we shall find that of two diverging types of telepathic intercourse
+which will thus present themselves, the one will gradually correspond to
+possession, and the other to ecstasy.
+
+But here let us pause, and consider what is the truest conception which
+we are by this time able to form of telepathy. The _word_ has been a
+convenient one; the _central notion_--of communication beyond this range
+of sense--can at any rate thus be expressed in simple terms. But
+nevertheless there has been nothing to assure us that our real
+comprehension of telepathic processes has got much deeper than that
+verbal definition. Our conception of telepathy, indeed, to say nothing
+of telćsthesia, has needed to be broadened with each fresh stage of our
+evidence. That evidence at first revealed to us certain transmissions of
+thoughts and images which suggested the passage of actual etherial
+vibrations from brain to brain. Nor indeed can any one say at any point
+of our evidence that etherial vibrations are demonstrably _not_
+concerned in the phenomena. We cannot tell how far from the material
+world (to use a crude phrase) some etherial agency may possibly extend.
+But telepathic phenomena are in fact soon seen to overpass any
+development which imaginative analogy can give to the conception of
+etherial radiation from one material point to another.
+
+For from the mere transmission of isolated ideas or pictures there is,
+as my readers know, a continuous progression to impressions and
+apparitions far more persistent and complex. We encounter an influence
+which suggests no mere impact of etherial waves, but an intelligent and
+responsive _presence_, resembling nothing so much as the ordinary human
+intercourse of persons in bodily nearness. Such visions or auditions,
+inward or externalised, are indeed sometimes felt to involve an even
+closer contact of spirits than the common intercourse of earth allows.
+One could hardly assign etherial undulations as their cause without
+assigning that same mechanism to all our emotions felt towards each
+other, or even to our control over our own organisms.
+
+Nay, more. There is--as I have striven to show--a further progression
+from these telepathic intercommunications between living men to
+intercommunications between living men and discarnate spirits. And this
+new thesis,--in every way of vital importance,--while practically
+solving one problem on which I have already dwelt, opens also a
+possibility of the determination of another problem, nowise accessible
+until now. In the first place, we may now rest assured that telepathic
+communication is not necessarily propagated by vibrations proceeding
+from an ordinary material _brain_. For the discarnate spirit at any rate
+has no such brain from which to start them.
+
+So much, in the first place, for the _agent's_ end of the communication.
+
+And in the second place, we now discern a possibility of getting at the
+_percipient's_ end; of determining whether the telepathic impact is
+received by the _brain_ or by the _spirit_ of the living man, or by both
+inseparably, or sometimes by one and sometimes by the other.
+
+On this problem, I say, the phenomena of automatic script, of
+trance-utterance, of spirit-possession, throw more of light than we
+could have ventured to hope.
+
+Stated broadly, our trance-phenomena show us to begin with that several
+currents of communication can pass at once from discarnate spirits to a
+living man;--and can pass in very varying ways. For clearness' sake I
+will put aside for the present all cases where the telepathic impact
+takes an externalised or sensory form, and will speak only of
+intellectual impressions and motor automatisms.
+
+Now these may pass through all grades of apparent _centrality_. If a
+man, awake and in other respects fully self-controlled, feels his hand
+impelled to scrawl words on a piece of paper, without consciousness of
+motor effort of _his own_, the impulse does not seem to him a _central_
+one, although some part of his brain is presumably involved. On the
+other hand, a much less conspicuous invasion of his personality may feel
+much more central;--as, for instance, a premonition of evil,--an inward
+heaviness which he can scarcely define. And so the motor automatism
+goes on until it reaches the point of _possession_;--that is to say,
+until the man's own consciousness is absolutely in abeyance, and every
+part of his body is utilised by the invading spirit or spirits. What
+happens in such conditions to the man's ruling principle--to his own
+spirit--we must consider presently. But so far as his organism is
+concerned, the invasion seems complete: and it indicates a power which
+is indeed telepathic in a true sense;--yet not quite in the sense which
+we originally attached to the word. We first thought of telepathy as of
+a communication between two minds, whereas what we have here looks more
+like a communication between a mind and a body,--an external mind, in
+place of the mind which is accustomed to rule that particular body.
+
+There is in such a case no apparent communication between the discarnate
+mind and the _mind_ of the automatist. Rather there is a kind of contact
+between the discarnate mind and the _brain_ of the automatist, in so far
+that the discarnate mind, pursuing its own ends, is helped up to a
+certain point by the accumulated capacities of the automatist's
+brain;--and similarly is hindered by its incapacities.
+
+Yet here the most characteristic element of telepathy, I repeat, seems
+to have dropped out altogether. There is no perceptible communion
+between the mind of the entranced person and any other mind whatever. He
+is _possessed_, but is kept in unconsciousness, and never regains memory
+of what his lips have uttered during his trance.
+
+But let us see whether we have thus grasped all the
+trance-phenomena;--whether something else may not be going on, which is
+more truly, more centrally telepathic.
+
+To go back to the earliest stage of telepathic experience, we can see
+well enough that the experimental process might quite possibly involve
+two different factors. The percipient's mind must somehow receive the
+telepathic impression;--and to this reception we can assign no definite
+physical correlative;--and also the percipient's motor or sensory
+centres must receive an excitation;--which excitation may be
+communicated, for aught we know, either by his own mind in the ordinary
+way, or by the agent's mind in some direct way,--which I may call
+_telergic_, thus giving a more precise sense to a word which I long ago
+suggested as a kind of correlative to _telepathic_. That is to say,
+there may even in these apparently simple cases be first a transmission
+from agent to percipient in the spiritual world, and then an action on
+the percipient's physical brain, of the same type as spirit-possession.
+This action on the physical brain may be due either to the percipient's
+own spirit, or subliminal self, or else directly to the agent's spirit.
+For I must repeat that the phenomena of possession seem to indicate
+that the extraneous spirit acts on a man's organism in very much the
+same way as the man's own spirit habitually acts on it. One must thus
+practically regard the body as an instrument upon which a spirit
+plays;--an ancient metaphor which now seems actually our nearest
+approximation to truth.
+
+Proceeding to the case of telepathic or veridical apparitions, we see
+the same hints of a double nature in the process;--traces of two
+elements mingling in various degrees. At the spiritual end there may be
+what we have called "clairvoyant visions,"--pictures manifestly
+symbolical, and not located by the observer in ordinary
+three-dimensional space. These seem analogous to the views of the
+spiritual world which the sensitive enjoys during entrancement. Then
+comes that larger class of veridical apparitions where the figure seems
+to be externalised from the percipient's mind, some stimulus having
+actually been applied,--whether by agent's or percipient's spirit,--to
+the appropriate brain-centre. These cases of "sensory automatism"
+resemble those experimental transferences of pictures of cards, etc. And
+beyond these again, on the physical or rather the ultra-physical side,
+come those _collective_ apparitions which in my view involve some
+unknown kind of modification of a certain portion of space not occupied
+by any organism,--as opposed to a modification of centres in one special
+brain. Here comes in, as I hold, the gradual transition from subjective
+to objective, as the portion of space in question is modified in a
+manner to affect a larger and larger number of percipient minds.
+
+Now when we proceed from these apparitions of the living to apparitions
+of the departed, we find very much the same types persisting still. We
+find symbolical _visions_ of departed persons, and of scenes among which
+they seem to dwell. We find externalised _apparitions_ or phantasms of
+departed persons,--indicating that some point in the percipient's brain
+has been stimulated by his own or by some other spirit. And finally, as
+has already been said, we find that in certain cases of possession these
+two kinds of influence are simultaneously carried to an extreme. The
+percipient automatist of earlier stages becomes no longer a percipient
+but an automatist pure and simple,--so far as his body is
+concerned,--for his whole brain--not one point alone--seems now to be
+stimulated and controlled by an extraneous spirit, and he is not himself
+aware of what his body writes or utters. And meantime his spirit,
+partially set free from the body, may be purely percipient;--may be
+enjoying that other spiritual form of communication more completely than
+in any type of vision which our description had hitherto reached.
+
+This point attained, another analogy, already mentioned, will be at once
+recalled. There is another class of phenomena, besides telepathy, of
+which this definition of possession at once reminds us. We have dealt
+much with _secondary personalities_,--with severances and alternations
+affecting a man's own spirit, in varying relation with his organism.
+Félida X.'s developed secondary personality, for instance (Appendix II.
+C), might be defined as another fragment--or another synthesis--of
+Félida's spirit acting upon her organism in much the same way as the
+original fragment--or the primary synthesis--of her spirit was wont to
+act upon it.
+
+Plainly, this analogy is close enough to be likely to lead to practical
+confusion. On what grounds can we base our distinctions? What justifies
+us in saying that Félida X.'s organism was controlled only by another
+modification of her own personality, but that Mrs. Piper's is controlled
+by George Pelham (see page 330 _et seq._)? May there not be any amount
+of self-suggestion, colouring with the fictitious hue of all kinds of
+identities what is in reality no more than an allotropic form of the
+entranced person himself? Is even the possession by the new personality
+of some fragments of fresh knowledge any proof of spirit-control? May
+not that knowledge be gained clairvoyantly or telepathically, with no
+intervention of any spirit other than of living men?
+
+Yes, indeed, we must reply, there _is_ here a danger of confusion, there
+_is_ a lack of any well-defined dividing line. While we must decide on
+general rules, we must also keep our minds open to possible exceptions.
+
+On the negative side, indeed, general rules will carry us a good way. We
+must _not_ allow ourselves to ascribe to spirit-control cases where no
+new knowledge is shown in the trance state. And this rule has at once an
+important consequence,--a consequence which profoundly modifies the
+antique idea of possession. I know of no evidence,--reaching in any way
+our habitual standard,--either for angelic, for diabolical, or for
+hostile possession.
+
+And here comes the question: What attitude are we to assume to savage
+cases of possession? Are we to accept as genuine the possession of the
+Esquimaux, the Chinaman,--nay, of the Hebrew of old days?
+
+Chinese possession is a good example, as described in Dr. Nevius' book
+(on _Demon Possession and Allied Themes_, an account of which by
+Professor Newbold is given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. p. 602
+[912 A]). I agree with Professor Newbold in holding that no proof has
+been shown that there is more in the Chinese cases than that hysterical
+duplication of personality with which we are so familiar in France and
+elsewhere.
+
+A devil is not a creature whose existence is independently known to
+science; and from the accounts the behaviour of the invading devils
+seems due to mere self-suggestion. With uncivilised races, even more
+than among our own friends, we are bound to insist on the rule that
+there must be some supernormal knowledge shown before we may assume an
+external influence. It may of course be replied that the character shown
+by the "devils" was fiendish and actually _hostile_ to the possessed
+person. Can we suppose that the tormentor was actually a fraction of the
+tormented?
+
+I reply that such a supposition, so far from being absurd, is supported
+by well-known phenomena both in insanity and in mere hysteria.
+
+Especially in the Middle Ages,--amid powerful self-suggestions of evil
+and terror,--did these quasi-possessions reach an intensity and violence
+which the calm and sceptical atmosphere of the modern hospital checks
+and discredits. The devils with terrifying names which possessed Soeur
+Angélique of Loudun[195] would at the Salpętričre under Charcot in our
+days have figured merely as stages of "clounisme" and "attitudes
+passionelles."
+
+And even now these splits of personality seem occasionally to destroy
+all sympathy between the normal individual and a divergent fraction. No
+great sympathy was felt by Léonie II. for Léonie I.[196] And Dr. Morton
+Prince's case[197] shows us the deepest and ablest of the personalities
+of his "Miss Beauchamp" positively spiteful in its relation to her main
+identity.
+
+Bizarre though a house thus divided against itself may seem, the moral
+dissidence is merely an exaggeration of the moral discontinuity
+observable in the typical case of Mrs. Newnham.[198] _There_ the
+secondary intelligence was merely tricky, not malevolent. But its
+trickiness was wholly alien from Mrs. Newnham's character,--was
+something, indeed, which she would have energetically repudiated.
+
+It seems, therefore,--and the analogy of dreams points in this direction
+also,--that our moral nature is as easily split up as our intellectual
+nature, and that we cannot be any more certain that the minor current of
+personality which is diverted into some new channel will retain _moral_
+than that it will retain _intellectual_ coherence.
+
+To return once more to the Chinese devil-possessions. Dr. Nevius
+asserts, though without adducing definite proof, that the possessing
+devils sometimes showed supernormal knowledge. This is a better argument
+for their separate existence than their fiendish temper is; but it is
+not in itself enough. The knowledge does not seem to have been specially
+appropriate to the supposed informing spirit. It seems as though it may
+have depended upon heightened memory, with possibly some slight
+telepathic or telćsthetic perception. Heightened memory is thoroughly
+characteristic of some hysterical phases; and even the possible traces
+of telepathy (although far the most important feature of the phenomena,
+if they really occurred) are, as we have seen, not unknown in trance
+states (like Léonie's) where there is no indication of an invading
+spirit.
+
+Temporary control of the organism by a widely divergent fragment of the
+personality, self-suggested in some dream-like manner into hostility to
+the main mass of the personality, and perhaps better able than that
+normal personality to reach and manipulate certain stored
+impressions,--or even certain supernormal influences,--such will be the
+formula to which we shall reduce the invading Chinese devil, as
+described by Dr. Nevius,--and _probably_ the great majority of supposed
+devil-possessions of similar type.
+
+The great majority, no doubt, but perhaps not _all_. It would indeed be
+matter for surprise if such trance-phenomena as those of Mrs. Piper and
+other modern cases had appeared in the world without previous parallel.
+Much more probable is it that similar phenomena have occurred
+sporadically from the earliest times,--although men have not had enough
+of training to analyse them.
+
+And, in fact, among the endless descriptions of trance-phenomena with
+which travellers furnish us, there are many which include points so
+concordant with our recent observations that we cannot but attach some
+weight to coincidences so wholly undesigned.[199] But although this may
+be admitted, I still maintain that the only invaders of the organism
+who have as yet made good their title have been human, and have been
+friendly; and with this clearance should, I think, vanish the somewhat
+grim associations which have gathered around the word _possession_.
+
+Assuming, then, as I think we at present may assume, that we have to
+deal only with spirits who have been men like ourselves, and who are
+still animated by much the same motives as those which influence us, we
+may briefly consider, on similar analogical grounds, what range of
+spirits are likely to be able to affect us, and what difficulties they
+are likely to find in doing so. Of course, actual experience alone can
+decide this; but nevertheless our expectations may be usefully modified
+if we reflect beforehand how far such changes of personality as we
+already know can suggest to us the limits of these profounder
+substitutions.
+
+What, to begin with, do we find to be the case as to addition of faculty
+in alternating states? How far do such changes bring with them
+unfamiliar powers?
+
+Reference to the recorded cases will show us that existing faculty may
+be greatly quickened and exalted. There may be an increase both in
+actual perception and in power of remembering or reproducing what has
+once been perceived. There may be increased control over muscular
+action,--as shown, for instance, in improved billiard-playing,--in the
+secondary state. But there is little evidence of the
+acquisition--telepathy apart--of any actual mass of fresh
+knowledge,--such as a new language, or a stage of mathematical knowledge
+unreached before. We shall not therefore be justified by analogy in
+expecting that an external spirit controlling an organism will be able
+easily to modify it in such a way as to produce speech in a language
+previously unknown. The brain is used as something between a typewriter
+and a calculating machine. German words, for instance, are not mere
+combinations of letters, but specific formulć; they can only seldom and
+with great difficulty be got out of a machine which has not been
+previously fashioned for their production.
+
+Consider, again, the analogies as to _memory_. In the case of
+alternations of personality, memory fails and changes in what seems a
+quite capricious way. The gaps which then occur recall (as I have said)
+the _ecmnesia_ or blank unrecollected spaces which follow upon accidents
+to the head, or upon crises of fever, when all memories that belong to a
+particular person or to a particular period of life are clean wiped out,
+other memories remaining intact. Compare, again, the memory of waking
+life which we retain in _dream_. This too is absolutely capricious;--I
+may forget my own name in a dream, and yet remember perfectly the kind
+of chairs in my dining-room. Or I may remember the chairs, but locate
+them in some one else's house. No one can predict the kind of confusion
+which may occur.
+
+We have also the parallel of _somnambulic utterance_. In talking with a
+somnambulist, be the somnambulism natural or induced, we find it hard to
+get into continuous colloquy on our own subjects. To begin with, he
+probably will not speak continuously for long together. He drops back
+into a state in which he cannot express himself at all. And when he does
+talk, he is apt to talk only on his own subjects;--to follow out his own
+train of ideas,--interrupted rather than influenced by what _we_ say to
+_him_. The difference of _state_ between waking and sleep is in many
+ways hard to bridge over.
+
+We have thus three parallelisms which may guide and limit our
+expectations. From the parallelism of possession with split
+personalities we may infer that a possessing spirit is not likely to be
+able to inspire into the recipient brain ideas or words of very
+unfamiliar type. From the parallelism of possession with dream we may
+infer that the memory of the possessing spirit may be subject to strange
+omissions and confusions. From the parallelism with somnambulism we may
+infer that colloquy between a human observer and the possessing spirit
+is not likely to be full or free, but rather to be hampered by
+difference of state, and abbreviated by the difficulty of maintaining
+psychical contact for long together.
+
+These remarks will, I hope, prepare the reader to consider the problems
+of possession with the same open-mindedness which has been needed for
+the study of previous problems attacked in the present work.
+
+But before we can proceed to the actual evidence there is another aspect
+of possession which must be explained. A group of phenomena are involved
+which have in various ways done much to confuse and even to retard our
+main inquiry, but which, when properly placed and understood, are seen
+to form an inevitable part of any scheme which strives to discover the
+influence of unseen agencies in the world we know.
+
+In our discussion of all telepathic and other supernormal influence I
+have thus far regarded it mainly from the psychological and not from the
+physical side. I have spoken as though the field of supernormal action
+has been always the metetherial world. Yet true as this dictum may be in
+its deepest sense, it cannot represent the _whole_ truth "for beings
+such as we are, in a world like the present." For us every psychological
+fact has (so far as we know) a physical side; and metetherial events, to
+be perceptible to us, must somehow affect the world of matter.
+
+In sensory and motor automatisms, then, we see effects, supernormally
+initiated, upon the world of matter.
+
+_Imprimis_, of course, and in ordinary life our own spirits (their
+existence once granted) affect our own bodies and are our standing
+examples of spirit affecting matter. Next, if a man receives a
+telepathic impact from another incarnate spirit which causes him to see
+a phantasmal figure, that man's brain has, we may suppose, been directly
+affected by his own spirit rather than by the spirit of the distant
+friend. But it may not always be true even in the case of sensory
+automatisms that the distant spirit has made a suggestion merely to the
+percipient's spirit which the percipient's own spirit carries out; and
+in motor automatisms, as they develop into _possession_, there are
+indications, as I have already pointed out, that the influence of the
+agent's spirit is _telergic_ rather than telepathic, and that we have
+extraneous spirits influencing the human brain or organism. That is to
+say, they are producing movements in matter;--even though that matter be
+organised matter and those movements molecular.
+
+So soon as this fact is grasped,--and it has not always been grasped by
+those who have striven to establish a fundamental difference between
+spiritual influence on our spirits and spiritual influence on the
+material world,--we shall naturally be prompted to inquire whether
+inorganic matter as well as organic ever shows the agency of extraneous
+spirits upon it. The reply which first suggests itself is, of course, in
+the negative. We are constantly dealing with inorganic matter, and no
+hypothesis of spiritual influence exerted on such matter is needed to
+explain our experiments. But this is a rough general statement, hardly
+likely to cover phenomena so rare and fugitive as many of those with
+which in this inquiry we deal. Let us begin, so to say, at the other
+end; not with the broad experience of life, but with the delicate and
+exceptional cases of _possession_ of which we have lately been speaking.
+
+Suppose that a discarnate spirit, in temporary possession of a living
+organism, is impelling it to motor automatisms. Can we say _a priori_
+what the limits of such automatic movements of that organism are likely
+to be, in the same way as we can say what the limits of any of its
+voluntary movements are likely to be? May not this extraneous spirit get
+more motor power out of the organism than the waking man himself can get
+out of it? It would not surprise us, for example, if the movements in
+trance showed increased _concentration_; if a dynamometer (for instance)
+was more forcibly squeezed by the spirit acting through the man than by
+the man himself. Is there any other way in which one would imagine that
+a spirit possessing me could use my vital force more skilfully than I
+could use it myself?
+
+I do not know how my will moves my arm; but I know by experience that my
+will generally moves only my arm and what my arm can touch;--whatever
+objects are actually in contact with the "protoplasmic skeleton" which
+represents the life of my organism. Yet I can sometimes move objects not
+in actual contact, as by melting them with the heat or (in the dry air
+of Colorado) kindling them with the electricity, which my fingers emit.
+I see no very definite limit to this power. I do not know all the forms
+of energy which my fingers might, under suitable training, emit.
+
+And now suppose that a possessing spirit can use my organism more
+skilfully than I can. May he not manage to emit from that organism some
+energy which can visibly move ponderable objects not actually in contact
+with my flesh? That would be a phenomenon of possession not very unlike
+its other phenomena;--and it would be _telekinesis_.
+
+By that word (due to M. Aksakoff) it is convenient to describe what have
+been called "the physical phenomena of spiritualism," as to whose
+existence as a reality, and not as a system of fraudulent pretences,
+fierce controversy has raged for half a century, and is still raging.
+
+The interest excited in the ordinary public by these phenomena has, as
+is well known, fostered much fraud, to expose and guard against which
+has been one of the main tasks of the S.P.R.[200]
+
+Indeed, the persistent simulation of telekinesis has, naturally enough,
+inspired persistent doubt as to its genuine occurrence even in cases
+where simulation has been carefully guarded against, or is antecedently
+improbable. And thus while believing absolutely in the occurrence of
+telekinetic phenomena, I yet hold that it would be premature to press
+them upon my readers' belief, or to introduce them as an integral part
+of my general expository scheme. From one point of view, their detailed
+establishment, as against the theory of fraud, demands an expert
+knowledge of conjuring and other arts which I cannot claim to possess.
+From another point of view, their right comprehension must depend upon a
+knowledge of the relations between matter and ether such as is now only
+dimly adumbrated by the most recent discoveries;--for instance,
+discoveries as to previously unsuspected forms of radiation.
+
+In a long Appendix, viz., "Scheme of Vital Faculty"[201]--originally
+written with reference to the manifestations through Mr. Stainton
+Moses--I have tried to prepare the way for future inquiries; to indicate
+in what directions a better equipped exploration may hereafter reap rich
+reward. Even that tentative sketch, perhaps, may have been too ambitious
+for my powers in the present state not only of my own, but of human
+knowledge; and in this chapter I shall allude to telekinetic phenomena
+only where unavoidable,--owing to their inmixture into phenomena more
+directly psychological,--and in the tone of the historian rather than of
+the scientific critic.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *[202]
+
+The way has now been so far cleared for our cases of Possession that at
+least the principal phenomena claimed have been (I hope) made
+intelligible, and shown to be concordant with other phenomena already
+described and attested. It will be best, however, to consider first some
+of the more rudimentary cases before going on to our own special
+instances of possession,--those of Mr. Stainton Moses or Mrs. Piper.
+
+We have already seen that there is no great gulf between the sudden
+incursions, the rapid messages of the dead, with which we are already
+familiar, and incursions so intimate, messages so prolonged, as to lay
+claim to a name more descriptive than that of motor automatisms.
+
+And similarly no line of absolute separation can be drawn between the
+brief psychical _excursions_ previously described, and those more
+prolonged excursions of the spirit which I would group under the name of
+ecstasy.
+
+In the earlier part of this book I have naturally dwelt rather on the
+evidence for supernormal acquisition of knowledge than on the methods of
+such acquisition, and my present discussion must needs be restricted to
+a certain extent in the same way. We must, however, attempt some
+provisional scheme of classification, though recognising that the
+difficulties of interpretation which I pointed out in Chapter IV., when
+endeavouring to distinguish between telepathy and telćsthesia, meet us
+again in dealing with possession and ecstasy. We may not, that is, be
+able to say, as regards a particular manifestation, whether it is an
+instance of incipient possession, or incipient ecstasy, or even whether
+the organism is being "controlled" directly by some extraneous spirit or
+by its own incarnate spirit. It is from the extreme cases that we form
+our categories. But now that we have reached some conception of what is
+involved in ecstasy and possession, we can interpret some earlier cases
+in this new light. Such experiences, for instance, as those of Mr.
+Mamtchitch (Appendix VII. A) and Miss Conley (Appendix VII. D), suggest
+a close kinship to the more developed cases of Mr. Moses and Mrs. Piper.
+
+In other cases it may be clear that no control of any discarnate spirit
+is involved, but there seems to be something like incipient possession
+by the subliminal self or incarnate spirit. From this point of view the
+first case given in Appendix IX. B is of undoubted psychological
+interest. If it is not a case of thought-transference from Miss C. to
+Mrs. Luther (possibly between their subliminal selves during sleep), we
+must assume that a very remarkable recrudescence of latent memory
+occurred to the latter independently, at the same time that a similar
+though less remarkable revival of memory occurred to the former. But I
+introduce the case here simply as suggestive of the momentary domination
+of the subliminal over the supraliminal self.
+
+In Professor Thoulet's case[203] we find a fuller control by the
+subliminal self, with a manifestation of knowledge suggesting some
+spiritual excursion; in Mr. Goodall's case there seems to be a
+telepathic conversation between his subliminal self controlling his
+utterance and some perhaps discarnate spirit; and finally, in Mr.
+Wilkie's case, there is the definite superposition, as it were, of a
+discarnate spirit's message upon the automatist in such a way that we
+are led to wonder whether it was the _mind_ or the _brain_ of the
+automatist that received the message. The first step apparently is the
+abeyance of the supraliminal self and the dominance of the subliminal
+self, which may lead in rare cases to a form of trance (or of what we
+have hitherto called secondary personality) where the whole body of the
+automatist is controlled by his own subliminal self, or incarnate
+spirit, but where there is no indication of any relation with discarnate
+spirits. The next form of trance is where the incarnate spirit, whether
+or not maintaining control of the whole body, makes excursions into or
+holds telepathic intercourse with the spiritual world. And, lastly,
+there is the trance of possession by another, a discarnate spirit. We
+cannot, of course, always distinguish between these three main types of
+trance--which, as we shall see later, themselves admit of different
+degrees and varieties.
+
+The most striking case known to me of the first form of
+trance--possession by the subliminal self--is that of the Rev. C. B.
+Sanders,[204] whose trance-personality has always called itself by the
+name of "X + Y = Z." The life of the normal Mr. Sanders has apparently
+been passed in the environment of a special form of Presbyterian
+doctrine, and there seems to have been a fear on the part of Mr. Sanders
+himself lest the trance manifestations of which he was the subject
+should conflict with the theological position which he held as a
+minister; and indeed for several years of his early suffering "he was
+inclined to regard his peculiar case of affliction as the result of
+Satanic agency." On the part of some of his friends also there seems to
+be a special desire to show that "X + Y = Z" was not heterodox. Under
+these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that we find so much
+reticence in "X + Y = Z" concerning his own relations to the normal Mr.
+Sanders, whom he calls "his casket." What little explanation is offered
+seems to be in singular harmony with one of the main tenets advanced in
+this book, since the claim made by "X + Y = Z" is obviously that he
+represents the incarnate spirit of Mr. Sanders exercising the higher
+faculties which naturally pertain to it, but which can be manifested to
+the full only when it is freed from its fleshly barriers. This
+frequently occurs, he says, in dying persons, who describe scenes in the
+spiritual world, and in his own experience when "his casket" is
+similarly affected, and the bodily obstructions to spiritual vision are
+removed.
+
+In this case, then, the subliminal self seems to take complete control
+of the organism, exercising its own powers of telepathy and telćsthesia,
+but showing no evidence of direct communication with discarnate spirits.
+We must now pass on to the most notable recent case where such
+communication has been claimed,--that of Swedenborg,--to whose
+exceptional trance-history and attempt to give some scientific system to
+his experiences of ecstasy I referred in Chapter I.
+
+The _evidential_ matter which Swedenborg has left behind him is
+singularly scanty in comparison with his pretensions to a communion of
+many years with so many spirits of the departed. But I think that the
+half-dozen "evidential cases" scattered through his memoirs are stamped
+with the impress of truth,--and I think, also, that without some true
+experience of the spiritual world Swedenborg could not have entered into
+that atmosphere of truth in which even his worst errors are held in
+solution. Swedenborg's writings on the world of spirits fall in the
+main into two classes,--albeit classes not easily divided. There are
+_experiential_ writings and there are _dogmatic_ writings. The first of
+these classes contains accounts of what he saw and felt in that world,
+and of such inferences with regard to its laws as his actual experience
+suggested. Now, speaking broadly, all this mass of matter, covering some
+hundreds of propositions, is in substantial accord with what has been
+given through the most trustworthy sensitives since Swedenborg's time.
+It is indeed usual to suppose that they have all been influenced by
+Swedenborg; and although I feel sure that this was not so in any direct
+manner in the case of the sensitives best known to myself, it is
+probable that Swedenborg's alleged experiences have affected modern
+thought more deeply than most modern thinkers know.
+
+On the other hand, the _second_ or purely _dogmatic_ class of
+Swedenborg's writings,--the records of instruction alleged to have been
+given to him by spirits on the inner meaning of the Scriptures,
+etc.,--these have more and more appeared to be mere arbitrary
+fancies;--mere projections and repercussions of his own preconceived
+ideas.
+
+On the whole, then,--with some stretching, yet no contravention, of
+conclusions independently reached,--I may say that Swedenborg's
+story,--one of the strangest lives yet lived by mortal men,--is
+corroborative rather than destructive of the slowly rising fabric of
+knowledge of which he was the uniquely gifted, but uniquely dangerous,
+precursor.
+
+It seemed desirable here to refer thus briefly to the doctrinal
+teachings of Swedenborg, but I shall deal later with the general
+question how much or how little of the statements of "sensitives" about
+the spiritual world--whether based on their own visions or on the
+allegations of their "controlling spirits"--are worthy of credence. In
+the case of Swedenborg there was at least some evidence, of the kind to
+which we can here appeal, of his actual communication with discarnate
+spirits;[205] but in most other cases of alleged ecstasy there is little
+or nothing to show that the supposed revelations are not purely
+subjective. (See, _e.g._, the revelations of Alphonse Cahagnet's
+sensitives, described in his _Arcanes de la vie future dévoilées_.)[206]
+At most, these visions must be regarded as a kind of symbolical
+representation of the unseen world.[207]
+
+Among Cahagnet's subjects, however, there was one young woman, Adčle
+Maginot, who not only saw heavenly visions of the usual
+post-Swedenborgian kind, but also obtained evidential
+communications--not unlike those of Mrs. Piper--purporting to come from
+discarnate spirits. Fortunately these were recorded with unusual care
+and thoroughness by Cahagnet, and the case thus becomes one of
+considerable importance for our inquiries. A general account of
+Cahagnet's work has recently been given in the _Proceedings_ S.P.R.
+(vol. xiv. p. 50) by Mr. Podmore, who, though finding it "almost
+impossible to doubt that Adčle's success was due to some kind of
+supernormal faculty," thinks it might be accounted for by telepathy from
+living persons. It appears that in all her trances Adčle--like Mr.
+Sanders--was controlled by her own subliminal self--that is to say, her
+supraliminal self became dormant, under "magnetism" by Cahagnet, while
+her subliminal self in trance-utterance manifested a knowledge which
+was, as I incline to think from its analogies with more developed cases,
+obtained from the spiritual world. That this knowledge should be mixed
+with much that was erroneous or unverifiable is not surprising.
+
+It is also interesting to note the occurrence in this case of
+circumstances which in their general character have become so habitual
+in trances of "mediumistic" type that they are not only found in genuine
+subjects, but are continually being simulated by the fraudulent. I refer
+to the so-called "taking on of the death conditions" of a communicating
+spirit, who, as Adčle stated, died of suffocation. "Adčle chokes as this
+man choked, and coughed as he did.... I was obliged to release her by
+passes; she suffered terribly."
+
+I need scarcely say that this suggests incipient possession. There were
+occasional analogous instances in the early trances of Mrs. Piper, when
+Phinuit was the controlling influence (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol.
+viii. p. 98, Professor Barrett Wendell's account; and vol. xiii. p.
+384). Other points of similarity between the accounts of the entranced
+Adčle and the utterances of Phinuit will be apparent to the student of
+the records.
+
+The next case to be considered, and so far one of the most important, is
+that of D. D. Home.
+
+The study of such records as are available of Home's psychical phenomena
+leaves me with the conviction that,--apart altogether from the
+telekinetic phenomena with which they were associated,--his
+trance-utterances belong to the same natural order as those, for
+instance, of Mr. Moses and Mrs. Piper. There are, however, important
+differences between these cases,--differences which should be of special
+instruction to us in endeavouring to comprehend the possession that
+completely excludes the subliminal self, and to appreciate the
+difficulty of obtaining this complete possession.
+
+Thus in Home's case the subliminal self seems, throughout the longest
+series of séances of which we have a record, to have been the spirit
+chiefly controlling him during the trance and acting as intermediary for
+other spirits, who occasionally, however, took complete possession.
+
+In Mrs. Piper's case, as we shall see, the subliminal self is very
+little in direct evidence; its manifestations form a fleeting interlude
+between her waking state and her possession by a discarnate spirit. In
+Mr. Moses' case, the subliminal self was rarely in direct evidence at
+all when he was entranced; but we infer from these other cases that it
+was probably dominant at some stage of his trance, even if at other
+times it was excluded or became completely dormant.
+
+And if, in Home's case, as there seems reason to suppose, the subliminal
+self may have participated with discarnate spirits in the production of
+telekinetic phenomena, as well as in the communication of tests of
+personal identity, it is not improbable that the subliminal self of Mr.
+Moses may also have been actively concerned in both these classes of
+phenomena.
+
+But, although I attribute much value to what evidence exists in the case
+of Home, it cannot but be deplored that the inestimable chance for
+experiment and record which this case afforded was almost entirely
+thrown away by the scientific world. Unfortunately the record is
+especially inadequate in reference to Home's trances and the evidence
+for the personal identity of the communicating spirits. His name is
+known to the world chiefly in connection with the telekinetic phenomena
+which are said to have occurred in his presence, and the best accounts
+of which we owe to Sir William Crookes. It is not my intention, as I
+have already explained, to deal with these, but it must be understood
+that they form an integral part of the manifestations in this case, as
+in the case of Stainton Moses. For detailed accounts of them the reader
+should consult the history of Home's life and experiences.[208]
+
+To the history of William Stainton Moses I now turn. Here the evidence
+for the telekinetic phenomena is comparatively slight, since they
+occurred almost exclusively in the presence of a small group of intimate
+personal friends, and were never scrutinised and examined by outside
+witnesses as were Home's manifestations. On the other hand, we have
+detailed records of Mr. Moses' whole series of experiences, while in the
+case of Home, as I have said, the record is very imperfect. As to the
+telekinetic phenomena, Mr. Moses himself regarded them as a mere means
+to an end, in accordance with the view urged on him by his
+"controls,"--that they were intended as proofs of the power and
+authority of these latter, while the real message lay in the religious
+teaching imparted to him.
+
+It was on May 9th, 1874, that Edmund Gurney and I met Stainton Moses for
+the first time, through the kindness of Mrs. Cowper-Temple (afterwards
+Lady Mount-Temple), who knew that we had become interested in
+"psychical" problems, and wished to introduce us to a man of honour who
+had recently experienced phenomena, due wholly to some gift of his own,
+which had profoundly changed his conception of life.
+
+Here was a man of University education, of manifest sanity and probity,
+who vouched to us for a series of phenomena,--occurring to himself, and
+with no doubtful or venal aid,--which seemed at least to prove, in
+confusedly intermingled form, three main theses unknown to Science.
+These were (1) the existence in the human spirit of hidden powers of
+insight and of communication; (2) the personal survival and near
+presence of the departed; and (3) interference, due to unknown agencies,
+with the ponderable world. He spoke frankly and fully; he showed his
+note-books; he referred us to his friends; he inspired a belief which
+was at once sufficient, and which is still sufficient, to prompt to
+action.
+
+The experiences which Stainton Moses had undergone had changed his
+views, but not his character. He was already set in the mould of the
+hard-working, conscientious, dogmatic clergyman, with a strong desire to
+do good, and a strong belief in preaching as the best way to do it. For
+himself the essential part of what I have called his "message" lay in
+the actual words automatically uttered or written,--not in the
+accompanying phenomena which really gave their uniqueness and importance
+to the automatic processes. In a book called _Spirit Teachings_ he
+collected what he regarded as the real fruits of those years of
+mysterious listening in the vestibule of a world unknown.
+
+My original impressions as regards Mr. Moses were strengthened by the
+opportunity which I had of examining his unpublished MSS. after his
+death on September 5th, 1892. These consist of thirty-one
+note-books--twenty-four of automatic script, four of records of physical
+phenomena, and three of retrospect and summary. In addition to these,
+the material available for a knowledge of Mr. Moses' experiences
+consists of his own printed works, and the written and printed
+statements of witnesses to his phenomena.
+
+Of this available material a detailed account will be found in
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. pp. 245-352, and vol. xi. pp. 24-113,
+together with a brief record of Mr. Moses' life.
+
+With the even tenor of this straightforward and reputable life was
+inwoven a chain of mysteries which, as I think, in what way soever they
+be explained, make it one of the most extraordinary which our century
+has seen. For its true history lies in that series of physical
+manifestations which began in 1872 and lasted for some eight years, and
+that series of automatic writings and trance-utterances which began in
+1873, received a record for some ten years, and did not, as is believed,
+cease altogether until the earthly end was near.
+
+These two series were intimately connected; the physical phenomena being
+avowedly designed to give authority to the speeches and writings which
+professed to emanate from the same source. There is no ground for
+separating the two groups, except the obvious one that the automatic
+phenomena are less difficult of credence than the physical; but, for
+reasons already stated, it has seemed to me desirable to exclude the
+latter from detailed treatment in this work. They included the apparent
+production of such phenomena as intelligent raps, movements of objects
+untouched, levitation, disappearance and reappearance of objects,
+passage of matter through matter, direct writing, sounds supernormally
+made on instruments, direct sounds, scents, lights, objects
+materialised, hands materialised (touched or seen). Mr. Moses was
+sometimes, but not always, entranced while these physical phenomena were
+occurring. Sometimes he was entranced and the trance-utterance purported
+to be that of a discarnate spirit. At other times, especially when
+alone, he wrote automatically, retaining his own ordinary consciousness
+meanwhile, and carrying on lengthy discussions with the "spirit
+influence" controlling his hand and answering his questions, etc. As a
+general rule the same alleged spirits both manifested themselves by
+raps, etc., at Mr. Moses' sittings with his friends, and also wrote
+through his hand when he was alone. In this, as in other respects, Mr.
+Moses' two series of writings--when alone and in company--were
+concordant, and, so to say, complementary;--explanations being given by
+the writing of what had happened at the séances. When "direct writing"
+was given at the séances the handwriting of each alleged spirit was the
+same as that which the same spirit was in the habit of employing in the
+automatic script. The claim to individuality was thus in all cases
+decisively made.
+
+Now the personages thus claiming to appear may be divided roughly into
+three classes:--
+
+A.--First and most important are a group of persons recently deceased,
+and sometimes manifesting themselves at the séances before their decease
+was known through any ordinary channel to any of the persons present.
+These spirits in many instances give tests of identity, mentioning facts
+connected with their earth-lives which are afterwards found to be
+correct.
+
+B.--Next comes a group of personages belonging to generations more
+remote, and generally of some distinction in their day. Grocyn, the
+friend of Erasmus, may be taken as a type of these. Many of these also
+contribute facts as a proof of identity, which facts are sometimes more
+correct than the conscious or admitted knowledge of any of the sitters
+could supply. In such cases, however, the difficulty of proving identity
+is increased by the fact that most of the correct statements are readily
+accessible in print, and may conceivably have either been read and
+forgotten by Mr. Moses, or have become known to him by some kind of
+clairvoyance.
+
+C.--A third group consists of spirits who give such names as Rector,
+Doctor, Theophilus, and, above all, Imperator. These from time to time
+reveal the names which they assert to have been theirs in earth-life.
+These concealed names are for the most part both more illustrious, and
+more remote, than the names in Class B,--and were withheld by Mr. Moses
+himself, who justly felt that the assumption of great names is likely
+to diminish rather than to increase the weight of the communication.
+
+I now pass on to consider briefly the nature of the evidence that the
+alleged spirits were what they purported to be, as described, in the
+first place, in Mr. Moses' books of automatic writing. The contents of
+these books consist partly of messages tending to prove the identity of
+communicating spirits; partly of discussions or explanations of the
+physical phenomena; and partly of religious and moral disquisitions.
+
+These automatic messages were almost wholly written by Mr. Moses' own
+hand, while he was in a normal waking state. The exceptions are of two
+kinds. (1) There is one long passage, alleged by Mr. Moses to have been
+written by himself while in a state of trance. (2) There are, here and
+there, a few words alleged to be in "direct writing";--written, that is
+to say, by invisible hands, but in Mr. Moses' presence; as several times
+described in the notes of séances where other persons were present.
+
+Putting these exceptional instances aside, we find that the writings
+generally take the form of a dialogue, Mr. Moses proposing a question in
+his ordinary thick, black handwriting. An answer is then generally,
+though not always, given; written also by Mr. Moses, and with the same
+pen, but in some one of various scripts which differ more or less widely
+from his own. Mr. Moses' own description of the process, as given in the
+preface to _Spirit Teachings_, may be studied with advantage.
+
+A prolonged study of the MS. books has revealed nothing inconsistent
+with this description. I have myself, of course, searched them carefully
+for any sign of confusion or alteration, but without finding any; and I
+have shown parts of them to various friends, who have seen no points of
+suspicion. It seems plain, moreover, that the various entries were made
+at or about the dates to which they are ascribed. They contain constant
+references to the séances which went on concurrently, and whose dates
+are independently known; and in the later books, records of some of
+these séances are interspersed in their due places amongst other matter.
+The MSS. contain also a number of allusions to other contemporaneous
+facts, many of which are independently known to myself.
+
+I think, moreover, that no one who had studied these entries throughout
+would doubt the originally private and intimate character of many of
+them. The tone of the spirits towards Mr. Moses himself is habitually
+courteous and respectful. But occasionally they have some criticism
+which pierces to the quick, and which goes far to explain to me Mr.
+Moses' unwillingness to have the books fully inspected during his
+lifetime. He did, no doubt, contemplate their being at least read by
+friends after his death; and there are indications that there may have
+been a still more private book, now doubtless destroyed, to which
+messages of an intimate character were sometimes consigned.
+
+Indeed, the questions at issue, as to these messages, refer not so much
+to their _genuineness_ as to their _authenticity_, in the proper sense
+of those words. That they were written down in good faith by Mr. Moses
+as proceeding from the personages whose names are signed to them, there
+can be little doubt. But as to whether they did really proceed from
+those personages or no there may in many cases be very great doubt;--a
+doubt which I, at least, shall be quite unable to remove. By the very
+conditions of the communication they cannot show commanding intellect,
+or teach entirely new truths, since their manifestations are _ex
+hypothesi_ limited by the capacity--not by the previous _knowledge_, but
+by the previous _capacity_--of the medium. And if they give facts not
+consciously known to the medium--facts however elaborate--it may, of
+course, be suggested that these facts have been _subliminally acquired_
+by the medium through some unconscious passage of the eye over a printed
+page, or else that they are _clairvoyantly learnt_, without the agency
+of any but the medium's own mind, though acting in a supernormal
+fashion.
+
+The case of Hélčne Smith has shown us how far-reaching may be the
+faculties of hyperćsthesia and hypermnesia in the subliminal self; but
+in view of the then general ignorance of the scientific world on this
+subject, it is not surprising that both Mr. Moses and his friends
+absolutely rejected this explanation of his phenomena, and that the
+evidence appeared to them more conclusive than it possibly can to us.
+Whether or not the alleged spirits were concerned,--as may sometimes, of
+course, have been the case,--we can hardly avoid thinking that the
+subliminal self of the medium played at least a considerable part in the
+communications.
+
+In two cases the announcement of a death was made to Mr. Moses, when the
+news was apparently not known to him by any normal means. One of these
+is the case of President Garfield (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p.
+100). The other (see my article in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 96
+_et seq._) is in some ways the most remarkable of all, from the series
+of chances which have been needful in order to establish its veracity.
+Specially noticeable in this case is the resemblance of the handwriting
+of the script to that of the alleged control, a lady whose writing was
+almost certainly unknown to Mr. Moses. Both to the lady's son and to
+myself the resemblance appeared incontestable, and our opinion was
+confirmed by Dr. Hodgson, who was an expert in such matters.
+
+And now we must briefly go through the points which make such messages
+as were received by Mr. Moses _primâ facie_ evidential, which indicate,
+that is to say, that they actually do come in some way from their
+alleged source. A brief recapitulation of the main stages of evidential
+quality in messages given by automatic writing or by trance-utterances
+is all that will be needed here.
+
+(1) Evidentially lowest comes the class of messages which is by far the
+most common; messages, namely, in which, although some special identity
+may be claimed, all the facts given have been consciously known to the
+automatist. Here we may well suppose that his own personality alone is
+concerned, and that the messages have a _subliminal_, but not an
+_external_ source.
+
+(2) Next above these come messages containing facts likely to be known
+to the alleged spirit, and not consciously known to the automatist; but
+which facts may nevertheless have some time been noted by the
+automatist, even unwittingly, and may have thus obtained lodgment in his
+subliminal memory.
+
+(3) Next come facts which can be proved,--with such varying degrees of
+certainty as such negative proof allows,--never to have been in any way
+known to the automatist; but which nevertheless are easily to be found
+in books; so that they may have been learnt clairvoyantly by the
+automatist himself, or learnt and communicated to him by some mind other
+than that of the alleged spirit.
+
+(4) Next come facts which can be proved, with similar varying degrees of
+certainty according to the circumstances, never to have been known to
+the automatist, or recorded in print; but which were known to the
+alleged spirit and can be verified by the memories of living persons.
+
+(5) Above this again would come that class of _experimental_ messages,
+or posthumous letters, of which we have as yet very few good examples,
+where the departed person has before death arranged some special
+test--some fact or sentence known only to himself, which he is to
+transmit after death, if possible, as a token of his return.
+
+(6) Thus much for the various kinds of verbal messages, which can be
+kept and analysed at leisure. We must now turn to evidence of a
+different and not precisely comparable kind. In point of fact it is not
+these inferences from written matter which have commonly been most
+efficacious in compelling the survivor's belief in the reality of the
+friend's return. Whether logically or no, it is not so much the written
+message that he trusts, but some phantom of face and voice that he knew
+so well. It is this familiar convincing presence,--[Greek: eikto de
+theskelon autô],--on which the percipient has always insisted, since
+Achilles strove in vain to embrace Patroclus' shade.
+
+How far such a phantasm is in fact a proof of any real action on the
+part of the spirit thus recognised is a problem which has been dealt
+with already in Chapter VII. The upshot of our evidence to my mind is
+that although the apparition of a departed person cannot _per se_ rank
+as evidence of his presence, yet this is not a shape which purely
+hallucinatory phantasms seem often to assume; and if there be any
+corroborative evidence, as, for instance, writing which claims to come
+from the same person, the chance that he is really operative is
+considerable. In Mr. Moses' case almost all the figures which he saw
+brought with them some corroboration by writing, trance-utterance,
+gesture-messages (as where a figure makes signs of assent or dissent),
+or raps.
+
+(7) And this brings us to a class largely represented in Mr. Moses'
+series, where writings professing to come from a certain spirit are
+supported by physical phenomena of which that spirit claims also to be
+the author. Whether such a line of proof can ever be made logically
+complete or no, one can imagine many cases where it would be practically
+convincing to almost all minds. Materialisations of hands, or direct
+writing in the script of the departed, have much of actual cogency; and
+these methods, with others like them, are employed by Mr. Moses'
+"controls" in their efforts to establish their own identities. Physical
+phenomena in themselves, however, carry no proof of an intelligence
+outside that of the sensitive himself, and, as I have said, may in many
+cases be a mere extension of his own ordinary muscular powers, and not
+due to any external agency at all.
+
+If we confine ourselves to the verbal messages, we find that the cases
+most fully represented in the records of Mr. Moses are limited to the
+first three classes mentioned above, and those which come under the
+fourth class--verifiable facts of which there is no printed record and
+which it is practically certain that the medium could never have
+known--are comparatively few. This may partly be accounted for by the
+small number of sitters with Mr. Moses and the fact that they were his
+personal friends. The records of Mrs. Piper, on the other hand, to which
+we now turn, are especially rich in incidents that fall under the fourth
+heading, and the evidential value of the verbal messages in this case
+is, therefore, much greater than in the case of Mr. Moses. Whereas for
+Mr. Moses the identity of many of his communicators rested largely upon
+their being guaranteed by Imperator and his group of helpers,--in the
+case of Mrs. Piper the spirits of some recently-departed friends who
+have given much evidence of their identity appear to maintain the
+independent reality and guiding control over Mrs. Piper of these same
+intelligences--Imperator, Rector, Doctor, and others--that Mr. Moses
+claimed as ruling in his own experience.
+
+The case of Mrs. Piper differs in two important respects from that of W.
+Stainton Moses or D. D. Home. In the first place no telekinetic
+phenomena have occurred in connection with her trance-manifestations;
+and in the second place her supraliminal self shows no traces of any
+supernormal faculty whatsoever. She presents an instance of automatism
+of the extreme type where the "possession" is not merely local or
+partial, but affects, so to say, the whole psychical area,--where the
+supraliminal self is for a time completely displaced, and the whole
+personality appears to suffer intermittent change. In other words, she
+passes into a trance, during which her organs of speech or writing are
+"controlled" by other personalities than the normal waking one.
+Occasionally, either just before or just after the trance, the
+subliminal self appears to take some control of the organism for a brief
+interval; but with this exception the personalities that speak or write
+during her trance claim to be discarnate spirits.
+
+Mrs. Piper's trances may be divided into three stages: (1) Where the
+dominant controlling personality was known as "Dr. Phinuit" and used the
+vocal organs almost exclusively, communicating by _trance-utterance_,
+1884-91.
+
+(2) Where the communications were made chiefly by automatic writing in
+the trance under the supervision more particularly of the control known
+as "George Pelham," or "G. P.," although "Dr. Phinuit" usually
+communicated also by speech during this period, 1892-96.
+
+(3) Where supervision is alleged to be exercised by Imperator, Doctor,
+Rector, and others already mentioned in connection with the experiences
+of Mr. Moses, and where the communications have been mainly by writing,
+but occasionally also by speech. This last stage, which began early in
+1897, still continues, and the final outcome remains to be seen.
+
+I proceed now to indicate in further detail the nature of the evidence
+and the character of the manifestations themselves, and begin by quoting
+from Dr. Hodgson (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 367-68) a brief
+statement of some of the historical facts of the case.
+
+     Mrs. Piper has been giving sittings for a period extending over
+     thirteen [now, 1901, seventeen] years. Very early in her trance
+     history she came under the attention of Professor James, who sent
+     many persons to her as strangers, in most cases making the
+     appointments himself, and in no case giving their names. She came
+     to some extent under my own supervision in 1887, and I also sent
+     many persons to her, in many cases accompanying them and recording
+     the statements made at their sittings, and taking all the care that
+     I could to prevent Mrs. Piper's obtaining any knowledge beforehand
+     of who the sitters were to be. In 1889-90 Mrs. Piper gave a series
+     of sittings in England under the supervision of Dr. Walter Leaf and
+     Mr. Myers and Professor Lodge, where also the most careful
+     precautions possible were taken to ensure that the sitters went as
+     strangers to Mrs. Piper. Further sittings were supervised by myself
+     in 1890-91 after Mrs. Piper's return to America. Many persons who
+     had sittings in the course of these earlier investigations were
+     convinced that they were actually receiving communications from
+     their "deceased" friends through Mrs. Piper's trance, but although
+     the special investigators were satisfied, from their study of the
+     trance-phenomena themselves and a careful analysis of the detailed
+     records of the sittings, that some supernormal power was involved,
+     there was no definite agreement as to their precise significance.
+     And to myself it seemed that any hypothesis that was offered
+     presented formidable difficulties in the way of its acceptance. In
+     the course of these earlier investigations the communications were
+     given almost entirely through the speech-utterance of the
+     trance-personality known as Phinuit, and even the best of them were
+     apt to include much matter that was irrelevant and unlike the
+     alleged communicators, while there were many indications that
+     Phinuit himself was far from being the kind of person in whom we
+     should be disposed to place implicit credence.
+
+     During the years 1892-96 inclusive, I exercised a yet closer
+     supervision of Mrs. Piper's trances than I had done in previous
+     years, continuing to take all the precautions that I could as
+     regards the introduction of persons as strangers. This period was
+     marked by a notable evolution in the quality of the trance results,
+     beginning early in 1892. The character of the manifestations
+     changed with the development of automatic writing in the trance,
+     and with what was alleged to be the continual rendering of active
+     assistance by the communicator whom I have called G. P. [George
+     Pelham]. As a result of this it appeared that communicators were
+     able to express their thoughts directly through the writing by Mrs.
+     Piper's hand, instead of conveying them more dimly and partially
+     through Phinuit as intermediary; and the advice and guidance which
+     they, apparently, received from G. P. enabled them to avoid much of
+     the confusion and irrelevancy so characteristic of the earlier
+     manifestations.
+
+I do not propose here to discuss the hypothesis of fraud in this case,
+since it has been fully discussed by Dr. Hodgson, Professor William
+James, Professor Newbold of Pennsylvania University, Dr. Walter Leaf,
+and Sir Oliver Lodge.[209] I merely quote, as a summary of the argument,
+a few words of Professor James, from _The Psychological Review_, July,
+1898, pp. 421-22:--
+
+     Dr. Hodgson considers that the hypothesis of fraud cannot be
+     seriously maintained. I agree with him absolutely. The medium has
+     been under observation, much of the time under close observation,
+     as to most of the conditions of her life, by a large number of
+     persons, eager, many of them, to pounce upon any suspicious
+     circumstance for [nearly] fifteen years. During that time, not only
+     has there not been one single suspicious circumstance remarked, but
+     not one suggestion has ever been made from any quarter which might
+     tend positively to explain how the medium, living the apparent life
+     she leads, could possibly collect information about so many sitters
+     by natural means. The scientist who is confident of "fraud" here,
+     must remember that in science as much as in common life a
+     hypothesis must receive some positive specification and
+     determination before it can be profitably discussed, and a fraud
+     which is no assigned kind of fraud, but simply "fraud" at large,
+     fraud _in abstracto_, can hardly be regarded as a specially
+     scientific explanation of concrete facts.
+
+Unfortunately we have no contemporary records of what occurred during
+Mrs. Piper's earliest trances; nor practically any information as to the
+first manifestations of the Phinuit personality. It seems clear at least
+that the _name_ Phinuit was the result of suggestion at these earliest
+trances (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 46-58), and many may
+think it most probable that the Phinuit "control" was nothing more than
+a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper. But, according to the statements
+(for which there is of course no evidence) made by "Imperator," Phinuit
+was an "earth-bound" or inferior spirit, who had become confused and
+bewildered in his first attempts at communication, and had, as we say,
+"lost his consciousness of personal identity." That such an occurrence
+is not uncommon in this life is plain from the cases to which I have
+drawn attention in Chapter II. of this book, and we cannot prove it to
+be impossible that profound memory disturbances should be produced in an
+inexperienced discarnate spirit when first attempting to communicate
+with us through a material organism. Be that as it may, the Phinuit
+personality has not manifested either directly or indirectly since
+January 1897, when "Imperator" claimed the supervision of Mrs. Piper's
+trances.
+
+There were various cases of alleged direct "control" by spirits other
+than Phinuit during the first stage of Mrs. Piper's trance history. But
+such cases were not usual, and on the whole, although there seemed to be
+abundant proof of some supernormal faculty which demanded at least the
+hypothesis of thought-transference from living persons both near and
+distant, and suggested occasionally some power of telćsthesia or
+perhaps even of premonition, yet the main question with which we are now
+concerned,--whether Mrs. Piper's organism was controlled, directly or
+indirectly, by discarnate spirits who could give satisfactory evidence
+of their identity,--remained undecided.
+
+More important, as regards this question of personal identity, is the
+series of sittings which formed the second stage of Mrs. Piper's trance
+history, in the years 1892-96, (of which a detailed account is given in
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 284-582, and vol. xiv. pp. 6-49),
+where the chief communicator or intermediary was G. P. This G. P., whose
+name (although, of course, well known to many persons) has been altered
+for publication into "George Pelham," was a young man of great ability,
+mainly occupied in literary pursuits. Although born an American citizen,
+he was a member of a noble English family. I never met him, but I have
+the good fortune to include a number of his friends among my own, and
+with several of these I have been privileged to hold intimate
+conversation on the nature of the communications which they received. I
+have thus heard of many significant utterances of G. P.'s, which are
+held too private for print; and I have myself been present at sittings
+where G. P. manifested. For the full discussion of the evidence tending
+to prove the identity of G. P., I refer my readers to the original
+report in the _Proceedings_ S.P.R. I quote here a general summary, given
+by Dr. Hodgson several years later, of the whole series of his
+manifestations. (From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 328-330.)
+
+     On the first appearance of the communicating G. P. to Mr. Hart in
+     March 1892, he gave not only his own name and that of the sitter,
+     but also the names of several of their most intimate common
+     friends, and referred specifically to the most important private
+     matters connected with them. At the same sitting reference was made
+     to other incidents unknown to the sitters, such as the account of
+     Mrs. Pelham's taking the studs from the body of G. P. and giving
+     them to Mr. Pelham to be sent to Mr. Hart, and the reproduction of
+     a notable remembrance of a conversation which G. P. living had with
+     Katharine, the daughter of his most intimate friends, the Howards.
+     These were primary examples of two kinds of knowledge concerning
+     matters unknown to the sitters, of which various other instances
+     were afterwards given; knowledge of events connected with G. P.
+     which had occurred since his death, and knowledge of special
+     memories pertaining to the G. P. personality before death. A week
+     later, at the sitting of Mr. Vance, he made an appropriate inquiry
+     after the sitter's son, and in reply to inquiries rightly specified
+     that the sitter's son had been at college with him, and further
+     correctly gave a correct description of the sitter's summer home as
+     the place of a special visit. This, again, was paralleled by many
+     later instances where appropriate inquiries were made and
+     remembrances recalled concerning other personal friends of G. P.
+     Nearly two weeks later came his most intimate friends, the Howards,
+     and to these, using the voice directly, he showed such a fulness of
+     private remembrance and specific knowledge and characteristic
+     intellectual and emotional quality pertaining to G. P. that, though
+     they had previously taken no interest in any branch of psychical
+     research, they were unable to resist the conviction that they were
+     actually conversing with their old friend G. P. And this conviction
+     was strengthened by their later experiences. Not least important,
+     at that time, was his anxiety about the disposal of a certain book
+     and about certain specified letters which concern matters too
+     private for publication. He was particularly desirous of convincing
+     his father, who lived in Washington, that it was indeed G. P. who
+     was communicating, and he soon afterwards stated that his father
+     had taken his photograph to be copied, as was the case, though Mr.
+     Pelham had not informed even his wife of this fact. Later on he
+     reproduced a series of incidents, unknown to the sitters, in which
+     Mrs. Howard had been engaged in her own home. Later still, at a
+     sitting with his father and mother in New York, a further intimate
+     knowledge was shown of private family circumstances, and at the
+     following sitting, at which his father and mother were not present,
+     he gave the details of certain private actions which they had done
+     in the interim. At their sitting, and at various sittings of the
+     Howards, appropriate comments were made concerning different
+     articles presented which had belonged to G. P. living, or had been
+     familiar to him; he inquired after other personal articles which
+     were not presented at the sittings, and showed intimate and
+     detailed recollections of incidents in connection with them. In
+     points connected with the recognition of articles with their
+     related associations of a personal sort, the G. P. communicating,
+     so far as I know, has never failed. Nor has he failed in the
+     recognition of personal friends. I may say generally that out of a
+     large number of sitters who went as strangers to Mrs. Piper, the
+     communicating G. P. has picked out the friends of G. P. living,
+     precisely as the G. P. living might have been expected to do
+     [thirty cases of recognition out of at least one hundred and fifty
+     persons who have had sittings with Mrs. Piper since the first
+     appearance of G. P., and no case of false recognition], and has
+     exhibited memories in connection with these and other friends which
+     are such as would naturally be associated as part of the G. P.
+     personality, which certainly do not suggest in themselves that they
+     originate otherwise, and which are accompanied by the emotional
+     relations which were connected with such friends in the mind of G.
+     P. living. At one of his early communications G. P. expressly
+     undertook the task of rendering all the assistance in his power
+     towards establishing the continued existence of himself and other
+     communicators, in pursuance of a promise of which he himself
+     reminded me, made some two years or more before his death, that if
+     he died before me and found himself "still existing," he would
+     devote himself to prove the fact; and in the persistence of his
+     endeavour to overcome the difficulties in communicating as far as
+     possible, in his constant readiness to act as amanuensis at the
+     sittings, in the effect which he has produced by his counsels,--to
+     myself as investigator, and to numerous other sitters and
+     communicators,--he has, in so far as I can form a judgment in a
+     problem so complex and still presenting so much obscurity,
+     displayed all the keenness and pertinacity which were eminently
+     characteristic of G. P. living.
+
+     Finally the manifestations of this G. P. communicating have not
+     been of a fitful and spasmodic nature, they have exhibited the
+     marks of a continuous living and persistent personality,
+     manifesting itself through a course of years, and showing the same
+     characteristics of an independent intelligence whether friends of
+     G. P. were present at the sittings or not. I learned of various
+     cases where in my absence active assistance was rendered by G. P.
+     to sitters who had never previously heard of him, and from time to
+     time he would make brief pertinent reference to matters with which
+     G. P. living was acquainted, though I was not, and sometimes in
+     ways which indicated that he could to some extent see what was
+     happening in our world to persons in whose welfare G. P. living
+     would have been specially interested.
+
+The sitter called Mr. Hart, to whom G. P. first manifested, died at
+Naples three years afterwards, and communicated, with the help of G. P.,
+on the second day after his death. An account of his communications is
+given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 353-57.
+
+There are numerous instances in the reports in the _Proceedings_ (see
+vol. vi. pp. 647-50; vol. viii. pp. 15-26; vol. xiii., _passim_; and
+vol. xvi. pp. 131-3), of the giving of information unknown to the
+sitters and afterwards verified. A striking illustration of this
+occurred in the case of the lady called "Elisa Mannors," whose near
+relatives and friends concerned in the communications were known to
+myself. On the morning after the death of her uncle, called F. in the
+report, she described an incident in connection with the appearance of
+herself to her uncle on his death-bed. I quote Dr. Hodgson's account of
+this (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. p. 378, footnote).
+
+     The notice of his [F.'s] death was in a Boston morning paper, and I
+     happened to see it on my way to the sitting. The first writing of
+     the sitting came from Madame Elisa, without my expecting it. She
+     wrote clearly and strongly, explaining that F. was there with her,
+     but unable to speak directly, that she wished to give me an account
+     of how she had helped F. to reach her. She said that she had been
+     present at his death-bed, and had spoken to him, and she repeated
+     what she had said, an unusual form of expression, and indicated
+     that he had heard and recognised her. This was confirmed in detail
+     in the only way possible at that time, by a very intimate friend of
+     Madame Elisa and myself, and also of the nearest surviving relative
+     of F. I showed my friend the account of the sitting, and to this
+     friend, a day or two later, the relative, who was present at the
+     death-bed, stated spontaneously that F. when dying said that he saw
+     Madame Elisa who was speaking to him, and he repeated what she was
+     saying. The expression so repeated, which the relative quoted to my
+     friend, was that which I had received from Madame Elisa through
+     Mrs. Piper's trance, when the death-bed incident was of course
+     entirely unknown to me.
+
+Rare are the "Peak in Darien" cases (see page 233), but cases like this
+are rarer still.
+
+With regard to the last of the three periods of Mrs. Piper's
+trance-history, the only detailed published accounts are contained in
+Professor Hyslop's report of his sittings in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol.
+xvi.[210] But neither his records nor the manuscript records which I
+have seen contain any proof of the personal identity of the alleged
+spirits called "Imperator," "Doctor," "Rector," etc., or any proof of
+the identity of these intelligences with those claimed by Mr. Moses.
+(See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii. pp. 408-9.) Whether any such proof
+will be forthcoming in the future remains to be seen,--or indeed,
+whether proof or disproof for us at present is even possible.
+
+We must now try to form some more definite idea--based not on
+preconceived theories but on our actual observation of trances--of the
+processes of possession.
+
+Let us try to realise what kind of feat it is which we are expecting the
+disembodied spirit to achieve. Such language, I know, again suggests the
+medicine-man's wigwam rather than the study of the white philosopher.
+Yet can we feel sure that the process in our own minds which has (as we
+think) refined and spiritualised man's early conceptions of an unseen
+world has been based upon any observed facts?
+
+In dealing with matters which lie outside human experience, our only
+clue is some attempt at _continuity_ with what we already know. We
+cannot, for instance, form independently a reliable conception of life
+in an unseen world. That conception has never yet been fairly faced from
+the standpoint of our modern ideas of continuity, conservation,
+evolution. The main notions that have been framed of such survival have
+been framed first by savages and then by _a priori_ philosophers.
+
+The savage made his own picture first. And he at any rate dimly felt
+after a principle of continuity; although he applied it in the crudest
+fashion. Yet the happy hunting-ground and the faithful dog were
+conceptions not more arbitrary and unscientific than that eternal and
+unimaginable worship _in vacuo_ which more accredited teachers have
+proclaimed. And, passing on to modern philosophic conceptions, one may
+say that where the savage assumed _too little_ difference between the
+material and the spiritual world the philosopher has assumed _too much_.
+He has regarded the gulf as too unbridgeable; he has taken for granted
+too clean a sweep of earthly modes of thought. Trying to shake off time,
+space, and definite form, he has attempted to transport himself too
+magically to what may be in reality an immensely distant goal.
+
+What, then, is to be our conception of identity prolonged beyond the
+tomb? In earth-life the actual body, in itself but a subordinate element
+in our thought of our friend, did yet by its physical continuity
+override as a symbol of identity all lapses of memory, all changes of
+the character within. Yet it was memory and character,--the stored
+impressions upon which he reacted, and his specific mode of
+reaction,--which made our veritable friend. How much of memory, how much
+of character, must he preserve for our recognition?
+
+Do we ask that either he or we should remember always, or should
+remember all? Do we ask that his memory should be expanded into
+omniscience and his character elevated into divinity? And, whatever
+heights he may attain, do we demand that he should reveal to us? Are the
+limitations of our material world no barrier to him?
+
+It is safest to fall back for the present upon the few points which
+these communications do seem to indicate. The spirit, then, is holding
+converse with a living man, located in a certain place at a certain
+moment, and animated by certain thoughts and emotions. The spirit (to
+which I must give a neuter pronoun for greater clearness) in some cases
+can find and follow the man as it pleases. It is therefore in some way
+cognizant of space, although not conditioned by space. Its mastery of
+space may perhaps bear somewhat the same relation to our eyesight as our
+eyesight bears to the gropings of the blind. Similarly, the spirit
+appears to be partly cognizant of our _time_, although not wholly
+conditioned thereby. It is apt to see as _present_ both certain things
+which appear to us as past and certain things which appear to us as
+future.
+
+Once more, the spirit is at least partly conscious of the thought and
+emotions of its earthly friend, so far as directed towards itself; and
+this not only when the friend is in the presence of the sensitive, but
+also (as G. P. has repeatedly shown) when the friend is at home and
+living his ordinary life.
+
+Lastly, it seems as though the spirit had some occasional glimpses of
+material fact upon the earth (as the contents of drawers and the like),
+not manifestly proceeding through any living mind. I do not, however,
+recall any clear evidence of a spirit's perception of material facts
+which provably have never been known to any incarnate mind whatever.
+
+Accepting this, then, for argument's sake, as the normal condition of a
+spirit in reference to human things, what process must it attempt if it
+wishes to communicate with living men? That it _will_ wish to
+communicate seems probable enough, if it retains not only memory of the
+loves of earth, but actual fresh consciousness of loving emotion
+directed towards it after death.
+
+Seeking then for some open avenue, it discerns something which
+corresponds (in G. P.'s phrase) to a _light_--a glimmer of translucency
+in the confused darkness of our material world. This "light" indicates a
+_sensitive_--a human organism so constituted that a spirit can
+temporarily _inform_ or _control_ it, not necessarily interrupting the
+stream of the sensitive's ordinary consciousness; perhaps using a hand
+only, or perhaps, as in Mrs. Piper's case, using voice as well as hand,
+and occupying all the sensitive's channels of self-manifestation. The
+difficulties which must be inherent in such an act of control are thus
+described by Dr. Hodgson:--
+
+"If, indeed, each one of us is a 'spirit' that survives the death of the
+fleshly organism, there are certain suppositions that I think we may not
+unreasonably make concerning the ability of the discarnate 'spirit' to
+communicate with those yet incarnate. Even under the best of conditions
+for communication--which I am supposing for the nonce to be possible--it
+may well be that the aptitude for communicating clearly may be as rare
+as the gifts that make a great artist, or a great mathematician, or a
+great philosopher. Again, it may well be that, owing to the change
+connected with death itself, the 'spirit' may at first be much confused,
+and such confusion may last for a long time; and even after the 'spirit'
+has become accustomed to its new environment, it is not an unreasonable
+supposition that if it came into some such relation to another living
+human organism as it once maintained with its own former organism, it
+would find itself confused by that relation. The state might be like
+that of awaking from a prolonged period of unconsciousness into strange
+surroundings. If my own ordinary body could be preserved in its present
+state, and I could absent myself from it for days or months or years,
+and continue my existence under another set of conditions altogether,
+and if I could then return to my own body, it might well be that I
+should be very confused and incoherent at first in my manifestations by
+means of it. How much more would this be the case were I to return to
+_another_ human body. I might be troubled with various forms of aphasia
+and agraphia, might be particularly liable to failures of inhibition,
+might find the conditions oppressive and exhausting, and my state of
+mind would probably be of an automatic and dreamlike character. Now, the
+communicators through Mrs. Piper's trance exhibit precisely the kind of
+confusion and incoherence which it seems to me we have some reason _a
+priori_ to expect if they are actually what they claim to be."
+
+At the outset of this chapter I compared the phenomena of possession
+with those of alternating personalities, of dreams, and of somnambulism.
+Now it seems probable that the thesis of multiplex personality--namely,
+that no known current of man's consciousness exhausts his whole
+consciousness, and no known self-manifestation expresses man's whole
+potential being--may hold good both for embodied and for unembodied men,
+and this would lead us to expect that the manifestations of the
+departed,--through the sensory automatisms dealt with in Chapter VII.,
+and the motor automatisms considered in Chapter VIII., up to the
+completer form of possession illustrated in the present chapter,--would
+resemble those fugitive and unstable communications between widely
+different strata of personality of which embodied minds offer us
+examples. G. P. himself appears to be well aware of the dreamlike
+character of the communications, which, indeed, his own style often
+exemplifies. Thus he wrote on February 15th, 1894:--
+
+"Remember we share and always shall have our friends in the dream-life,
+_i.e._ your life so to speak, which will attract us for ever and ever,
+and so long as we have any friends _sleeping_ in the material world; you
+to us are more like as we understand sleep, you look shut up as one in
+prison, and in order for us to get into communication with you, we have
+to enter into your sphere, as one like yourself, asleep. This is just
+why we make mistakes, as you call them, or get confused and muddled."
+
+Yet even this very difficulty and fragmentariness of communication ought
+in the end to be for us full of an instruction of its own. We are here
+actually witnessing the central mystery of human life, unrolling itself
+under novel conditions, and open to closer observation than ever before.
+We are seeing a mind use a brain. The human brain is in its last
+analysis an arrangement of matter expressly adapted to being acted upon
+by a spirit; but so long as the accustomed spirit acts upon it the
+working is generally too smooth to allow us a glimpse of the mechanism.
+_Now_, however, we can watch an unaccustomed spirit, new to the
+instrument, installing itself and feeling its way. The lessons thus
+learnt are likely to be more penetrating than any which mere morbid
+interruptions of the accustomed spirit's work can teach us. In aphasia,
+for instance, we can watch with instruction special difficulties of
+utterance, supervening on special injuries to the brain. But in
+_possession_ we perceive the controlling spirit actually engaged in
+overcoming somewhat similar difficulties--writing or uttering the wrong
+word, and then getting hold of the right one--and sometimes even finding
+power to explain to us something of the minute verbal mechanism (so to
+term it) through whose blocking or dislocation the mistake has arisen.
+
+And we may hope, indeed, that as our investigations proceed, and as we
+on this side of the fateful gulf, and the discarnate spirits on the
+other, learn more of the conditions necessary for perfect control of the
+brain and nervous system of intermediaries,--the communications will
+grow fuller and more coherent, and reach a higher level of unitary
+consciousness.
+
+Among the cases of trance discussed in this chapter, we have found
+intimately interwoven with the phenomena of possession many instances of
+its correlative,--ecstasy. Mrs. Piper's fragmentary utterances and
+visions during her passage from trance to waking life,--utterances and
+visions that fade away and leave no remembrance in her waking self;
+Stainton Moses' occasional visions, his journeys in the "spirit world"
+which he recorded on returning to his ordinary consciousness; Home's
+entrancement and converse with the various controls whose messages he
+gave;--all these suggest actual excursions of the incarnate spirit from
+its organism. The theoretical importance of these spiritual excursions
+is, of course, very great. It is, indeed, so great that most men will
+hesitate to accept a thesis which carries us straight into the inmost
+sanctuary of mysticism; which preaches "a precursory entrance into the
+most holy place, as by divine transportation."
+
+Yet I think that this belief, although extreme, is not, at the point to
+which our evidence has carried us, in any real way improbable. To put
+the matter briefly, if a spirit from outside can enter the organism, the
+spirit from inside can go out, can change its centre of perception and
+action, in a way less complete and irrevocable than the change of death.
+Ecstasy would thus be simply the complementary or correlative aspect of
+spirit-control. Such a change need not be a _spatial_ change, any more
+than there need be any _spatial_ change for the spirit which invades the
+deserted organism. Nay, further: if the incarnate spirit can in this
+manner change its centre of perception in response (so to say) to a
+discarnate spirit's invasion of the organism, there is no obvious reason
+why it should not do so on other occasions as well. We are already
+familiar with "travelling clairvoyance," a spirit's change of centre of
+perception among the scenes of the material world. May there not be an
+extension of travelling clairvoyance to the spiritual world? a
+spontaneous transfer of the centre of perception into that region from
+whence discarnate spirits seem now to be able, on their side, to
+communicate with growing freedom?
+
+The conception of _ecstasy_--at once in its most literal and in its most
+lofty sense--has thus developed itself, almost insensibly, from several
+concurrent lines of actual modern evidence. It must still, of course, be
+long before we can at all adequately separate,--I can hardly say the
+objective from the subjective element in the experience, for we have got
+beyond the region where the meaning of those words is clear,--but the
+element in the experience which is recognised and responded to by
+spirits other than the ecstatic's, from the element which belongs to his
+own spirit alone.
+
+In the meantime, however, the fact that this kind of communion of
+ecstasy has been, in preliminary fashion, rendered probable is of the
+highest importance for our whole inquiry. We thus come directly into
+relation with the highest form which the various religions known to men
+have assumed in the past.
+
+It is hardly a paradox to say that the evidence for ecstasy is stronger
+than the evidence for any other religious belief. Of all the subjective
+experiences of religion, ecstasy is that which has been most urgently,
+perhaps to the psychologist most convincingly, asserted; and it is not
+confined to any one religion. From a psychological point of view, one
+main indication of the importance of a subjective phenomenon found in
+religious experience will be the fact that it is common to all
+religions. I doubt whether there is any phenomenon, except ecstasy, of
+which this can be said. From the medicine-man of the lowest savages up
+to St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul, with Buddha, Mahomet and Swedenborg on
+the way, we find records which, though morally and intellectually much
+differing, are in psychological essence the same.
+
+At all stages alike we find that the spirit is conceived as quitting the
+body; or, if not quitting it, at least as greatly expanding its range of
+perception in some state resembling trance. Observe, moreover, that on
+this view all genuine recorded forms of ecstasy are akin, and all of
+them represent a real fact.
+
+To our embodied souls the matter round us seems real and self-existent;
+to souls emancipated it is but the sign of the degree which we have
+reached, and thus the highest task of science must be to link and
+co-ordinate the symbols appropriate to our terrene state with the
+symbols appropriate to the state immediately above us. Nay, one might
+push this truth to paradox, and maintain that of all earth's inspired
+spirits it has been the least divinised, the least lovable, who has
+opened the surest path for men. Religions have risen and die again;
+philosophy, poetry, heroism, answer only indirectly the prime need of
+men. Plotinus, "the eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato," is lost to
+sight in the heavens. Conquering and to conquer, the Maid rides on
+through other worlds than ours. Virgil himself, "light among the
+vanished ages, star that gildest yet this earthly shore," sustains our
+spirit, as I have said, but indirectly, by filling still our fountain of
+purest intellectual joy. But the prosaic Swede,--his stiff mind prickly
+with dogma,--the opaque cell-walls of his intelligence flooded cloudily
+by the irradiant day,--this man as by the very limitations of his
+faculty, by the practical humility of a spirit trained to acquire but
+not to generate truth,--has awkwardly laid the corner-stone, grotesquely
+sketched the elevation of a temple which our remotest posterity will be
+upbuilding and adorning still. For he dimly felt that man's true passage
+and intuition from state to state depends not upon individual ecstasy,
+but upon comprehensive law; while yet all law is in fact but symbol;
+adaptation of truth timeless and infinite to intelligences of lower or
+higher range.
+
+Beyond us still is mystery; but it is mystery lit and mellowed with an
+infinite hope. We ride in darkness at the haven's mouth; but sometimes
+through rifted clouds we see the desires and needs of many generations
+floating and melting upwards into a distant glow, "up through the light
+of the seas by the moon's long-silvering ray."
+
+The high possibilities that lie before us should be grasped once for
+all, in order that the dignity of the quest may help to carry the
+inquirer through many disappointments, deceptions, delays. But he must
+remember that this inquiry must be extended over many generations; nor
+must he allow himself to be persuaded that there are byways to mastery.
+I will not say that there cannot possibly be any such thing as occult
+wisdom, or dominion over the secrets of nature ascetically or magically
+acquired. But I will say that every claim of this kind which my
+colleagues or I have been able to examine has proved deserving of
+complete mistrust; and that we have no confidence here any more than
+elsewhere in any methods except the open, candid, straightforward
+methods which the spirit of modern science demands.
+
+All omens point towards the steady continuance of just such labour as
+has already taught us all we know. Perhaps, indeed, in this complex of
+interpenetrating spirits our own effort is no individual, no transitory
+thing. That which lies at the root of each of us lies at the root of the
+Cosmos too. Our struggle is the struggle of the Universe itself; and the
+very Godhead finds fulfilment through our upward-striving souls.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+[Greek: Edokei tis moi gynę proselthousa kale kai eueidęs, leuka imatia
+echousa, kalesei me kai eipein, Hô Sôkrates, hęmati ken tretatô Phthięn
+erivôlon ikoio.--Platônos Kritôn.]
+
+
+The task which I proposed to myself at the beginning of this work is
+now, after a fashion, accomplished. Following the successive steps of my
+programme, I have presented,--not indeed all the evidence which I
+possess, and which I would willingly present,--but enough at least to
+illustrate a continuous exposition, and as much as can be compressed
+into two volumes, with any hope that these volumes will be read at
+all.[211] I have indicated also the principal inferences which that
+evidence immediately suggests. Such wider generalisations as I may now
+add must needs be dangerously speculative; they must run the risk of
+alienating still further from this research many of the scientific minds
+which I am most anxious to influence.
+
+This risk, nevertheless, I feel bound to face. For two reasons,--or, I
+should perhaps say, for one main reason seen under two aspects,--I
+cannot leave this obscure and unfamiliar mass of observation and
+experiment without some words of wider generalisation, some epilogue
+which may place these new discoveries in clearer relation to the
+existing schemes of civilised thought and belief.
+
+In the first place, I feel that some such attempt at synthesis is
+needful for the practical purpose of enlisting help in our long inquiry.
+As has been hinted more than once, the real drag upon its progress has
+been not opposition but indifference. Or if indifference be too strong a
+word, at any rate the interest evoked has not been such as to inspire to
+steady independent work anything like the number of coadjutors who would
+have responded to a new departure in one of the sciences which all men
+have learnt to respect. The inquiry falls between the two stools of
+religion and science; it cannot claim support either from the "religious
+world" or from the Royal Society. Yet even apart from the instinct of
+pure scientific curiosity (which surely has seldom seen such a field
+opening before it), the mighty issues depending on these phenomena
+ought, I think, to constitute in themselves a strong, an exceptional
+appeal. I desire in this book to emphasise that appeal;--not only to
+produce conviction, but also to attract co-operation. And actual
+converse with many persons has led me to believe that in order to
+attract such help, even from scientific men, some general view of the
+moral upshot of all the phenomena is needed;--speculative and uncertain
+though such a general view must be.
+
+Again,--and here the practical reason already given expands into a wider
+scope,--it would be unfair to the evidence itself were I to close this
+work without touching more directly than hitherto on some of the deepest
+faiths of men. The influence of the evidence set forth in this book
+should not be limited to the conclusions, however weighty, which that
+evidence may be thought to establish. Rather these discoveries should
+prompt, as nothing else could have prompted, towards the ultimate
+achievement of that programme of scientific dominance which the
+_Instauratio Magna_ proclaimed for mankind. Bacon foresaw the gradual
+victory of observation and experiment--the triumph of actual analysed
+fact--in every department of human study;--in every department save one.
+The realm of "Divine things" he left to Authority and Faith. I here urge
+that that great exemption need be no longer made. I claim that there now
+exists an incipient method of getting at this Divine knowledge also,
+with the same certainty, the same calm assurance, with which we make our
+steady progress in the knowledge of terrene things. The authority of
+creeds and Churches will thus be replaced by the authority of
+observation and experiment. The impulse of faith will resolve itself
+into a reasoned and resolute imagination, bent upon raising even higher
+than now the highest ideals of man.
+
+Most readers of the preceding pages will have been prepared for the
+point of view thus frankly avowed. Yet to few readers can that point of
+view at first present itself otherwise than as alien and repellent.
+Philosophy and orthodoxy will alike resent it as presumptuous; nor will
+science readily accept the unauthorised transfer to herself of regions
+of which she has long been wont either to deny the existence, or at any
+rate to disclaim the rule. Nevertheless, I think that it will appear on
+reflection that some such change of standpoint as this was urgently
+needed,--nay, was ultimately inevitable.
+
+I need not here describe at length the deep disquiet of our time. Never,
+perhaps, did man's spiritual satisfaction bear a smaller proportion to
+his needs. The old-world sustenance, however earnestly administered, is
+too unsubstantial for the modern cravings. And thus through our
+civilised societies two conflicting currents run. On the one hand
+health, intelligence, morality,--all such boons as the steady progress
+of planetary evolution can win for man,--are being achieved in
+increasing measure. On the other hand this very sanity, this very
+prosperity, do but bring out in stronger relief the underlying
+_Welt-Schmers_, the decline of any real belief in the dignity, the
+meaning, the endlessness of life.
+
+There are many, of course, who readily accept this limitation of view;
+who are willing to let earthly activities and pleasures gradually
+dissipate and obscure the larger hope. But others cannot thus be easily
+satisfied. They rather resemble children who are growing too old for
+their games;--whose amusement sinks into an indifference and discontent
+for which the fitting remedy is an initiation into the serious work of
+men.
+
+A similar crisis has passed over Europe once before. There came a time
+when the joyful naďveté, the unquestioning impulse of the early world
+had passed away; when the worship of Greeks no more was beauty, nor the
+religion of Romans Rome. Alexandrian decadence, Byzantine despair, found
+utterance in many an epigram which might have been written to-day. Then
+came a great uprush or incursion from the spiritual world, and with new
+races and new ideals Europe regained its youth.
+
+The unique effect of that great Christian impulse begins, perhaps, to
+wear away. But more grace may yet be attainable from the region whence
+that grace came. Our age's restlessness, as I believe, is the
+restlessness not of senility but of adolescence; it resembles the
+approach of puberty rather than the approach of death.
+
+What the age needs is not an abandonment of effort, but an increase; the
+time is ripe for a study of unseen things as strenuous and sincere as
+that which Science has made familiar for the problems of earth. For now
+the scientific instinct,--so newly developed in mankind,--seems likely
+to spread until it becomes as dominant as was in time past the
+religious; and if there be even the narrowest chink through which man
+can look forth from his planetary cage, our descendants will not leave
+that chink neglected or unwidened. The scheme of knowledge which can
+commend itself to such seekers must be a scheme which, while it
+_transcends_ our present knowledge, steadily _continues_ it;--a scheme
+not catastrophic, but evolutionary; not promulgated and closed in a
+moment, but gradually unfolding itself to progressive inquiry.
+
+Must there not also be a continuous change, an unending advance in the
+human ideal itself? so that Faith must shift her standpoint from the
+brief Past to the endless Future, not so much caring to supply the
+lacunć of tradition as to intensify the conviction that there is still a
+higher life to work for, a holiness which may be some day reached by
+grace and effort as yet unknown.
+
+It may be that for some generations to come the truest faith will lie in
+the patient attempt to unravel from confused phenomena some trace of the
+supernal world;--to find thus at last "the substance of things hoped
+for, the evidence of things not seen." I confess, indeed, that I have
+often felt as though this present age were even unduly favoured;--as
+though no future revelation and calm could equal the joy of this great
+struggle from doubt into certainty;--from the materialism or agnosticism
+which accompany the first advance of Science into the deeper scientific
+conviction that there is a deathless soul in man. I can imagine no other
+crisis of such deep delight. But after all this is but like the starving
+child's inability to imagine anything sweeter than his first bite at the
+crust. Give him but _that_, and he can hardly care for the moment
+whether he is fated to be Prime Minister or ploughboy.
+
+Equally transitory, equally dependent on our special place in the story
+of man's upward effort, is another shade of feeling which many men have
+known. They have felt that uncertainty gave scope to faith and courage
+in a way which scientific assurance could never do. There has been a
+stern delight in the choice of virtue,--even though virtue might bring
+no reward. This joy, like the joy of Columbus sailing westward from
+Hierro, can hardly recur in precisely the same form. But neither (to
+descend to a humbler comparison) can we grown men again give ourselves
+up to learning in the same spirit of pure faith, without prefigurement
+of result, as when we learnt the alphabet at our mother's knees. Have we
+therefore relaxed since then our intellectual effort? Have we felt that
+there was no longer need to struggle against idleness when once we knew
+that knowledge brought a sure reward?
+
+Endless are the varieties of lofty joy. In the age of Thales, Greece
+knew the delight of the first dim notion of cosmic unity and law. In the
+age of Christ, Europe felt the first high authentic message from a world
+beyond our own. In our own age we reach the perception that such
+messages may become continuous and progressive;--that between seen and
+unseen there is a channel and fairway which future generations may learn
+to widen and to clarify. Our own age may seem the best to us; so will
+their mightier ages seem to them.
+
+    "'Talia saecla' suis dixerunt 'currite' fusis
+      Concordes stabili Fatorum numine Parcae."
+
+_Spiritual evolution_:--that, then, is our destiny, in this and other
+worlds;--an evolution gradual with many gradations, and rising to no
+assignable close. And the passion for Life is no selfish weakness, it is
+a factor in the universal energy. It should keep its strength unbroken
+even when our weariness longs to fold the hands in endless slumber; it
+should outlast and annihilate the "pangs that conquer trust." If to the
+Greeks it seemed a [Greek: lipotaxía]--a desertion of one's
+post in battle--to quit by suicide the life of earth, how much more
+craven were the desire to desert the Cosmos,--the despair, not of this
+planet only, but of the Sum of Things!
+
+Nay, in the infinite Universe man may now feel, for the first time, at
+home. The worst fear is over; the true security is won. The worst fear
+was the fear of spiritual extinction or spiritual solitude; the true
+security is in the telepathic law.
+
+Let me draw out my meaning at somewhat greater length.
+
+As we have dwelt successively on various aspects of telepathy, we have
+gradually felt the conception enlarge and deepen under our study. It
+began as a quasi-mechanical transference of ideas and images from one to
+another brain. Presently we found it assuming a more varied and potent
+form, as though it were the veritable ingruence or invasion of a distant
+mind. Again, its action was traced across a gulf greater than any space
+of earth or ocean, and it bridged the interval between spirits incarnate
+and discarnate, between the visible and the invisible world. There
+seemed no limit to the distance of its operation, or to the intimacy of
+its appeal.
+
+    [Greek: hen thhęrsin hen brotohisin hen theohis hanô.]
+
+This Love, then, which (as Sophocles has it) rules "beasts and men and
+gods" with equal sway, is no matter of carnal impulse or of emotional
+caprice. Rather it is now possible to define Love (as we have already
+defined Genius) in terms which convey for us some new meaning in
+connection with phenomena described in this work. Genius, as has been
+already said, is a kind of exalted but undeveloped clairvoyance. The
+subliminal uprush which inspires the poet or the musician presents to
+him a deep, but vague perception of that world unseen, through which the
+seer or the sensitive projects a narrower but an exacter gaze. Somewhat
+similarly, Love is a kind of exalted but unspecialised telepathy;--the
+simplest and most universal expression of that mutual gravitation or
+kinship of spirits which is the foundation of the telepathic law.
+
+This is the answer to the ancient fear; the fear lest man's fellowships
+be the outward and his solitude the inward thing; the fear lest all
+close linking with our fellows be the mere product of the struggle for
+existence,--of the tribal need of strength and cohesion;--the fear that
+if love and virtue thus arose, love and virtue may thus likewise perish.
+It is an answer to the dread that separate centres of conscious life
+must be always strangers, and often foes; their leagues and fellowships
+interested and illusory; their love the truce of a moment amid infinite
+inevitable war.
+
+Such fears, I say, vanish when we learn that it is the soul in man which
+links him with other souls; the body which dissevers even while it seems
+to unite; so that "no man liveth to himself nor dieth to himself," but
+in a sense which goes deeper than metaphor, "We are every one members
+one of another." Like atoms, like suns, like galaxies, our spirits are
+systems of forces which vibrate continually to each other's attractive
+power.
+
+All this as yet is dimly adumbrated; it is a first hint of a scheme of
+thought which it may well take centuries to develop. But can we suppose
+that, when once this conception of the bond between all souls has taken
+root, men will turn back from it to the old exclusiveness, the old
+controversy? Will they not see that this world-widening knowledge is
+both old and new, that _die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen_? that
+always have such revelations been given, but develop now into a mightier
+meaning,--with the growth of wisdom in those who send them, and in us
+who receive?
+
+Surely we have here a conception, at once wider and exacter than ever
+before, of that "religious education of the world" on which theologians
+have been fain to dwell. We need assume no "supernatural interference"
+no "plan of redemption." We need suppose only that the same process
+which we observe to-day has been operating for ages between this world
+and the next.
+
+Let us suppose that whilst incarnate men have risen from savagery into
+intelligence, discarnate men have made on their part a like advance. Let
+us suppose that they have become more eager and more able to use, for
+communication with earth, the standing laws of relation between the
+spiritual and the material Universe.
+
+At first, on such a hypothesis, certain automatic phenomena will occur,
+but will not be purposely modified by spirit power. Already and always
+there must have been points of contact where unseen things impinged upon
+the seen. Always there would be "clairvoyant wanderings," where the
+spirit of _shaman_ or of medicine-man discerned things distant upon
+earth by the spirit's excursive power. Always there would be apparitions
+at death,--conscious or unconscious effects of the shock which separated
+soul from body; and always "hauntings,"--where the spirit, already
+discarnate, revisited, as in a dream perceptible by others, the scenes
+which once he knew.
+
+From this groundwork of phenomena developed (to take civilised Europe
+alone) the oracular religion first, the Christian later. The golden
+gifts of Croesus to Delphi attested the clairvoyance of the Pythia as
+strongly, perhaps, as can be expected of any tradition which comes to us
+from the morning of history.
+
+And furthermore, do we not better understand at once the uniqueness and
+the reality of the Christian revelation itself, when we regard it as a
+culmination rather than an exception,--as destined not to destroy the
+cosmic law, but to fulfil it? Then first in human history came from the
+unseen a message such as the whole heart desired;--a message adequate in
+its response to fundamental emotional needs not in that age only, but in
+all ages that should follow. _Intellectually_ adequate for all coming
+ages that revelation could not be;--given the laws of mind, incarnate
+alike and discarnate,--the evolution, on either side of the gulf of
+death, of knowledge and power.
+
+No one at the date of that revelation suspected that uniformity, that
+continuity of the Universe which long experience has now made for us
+almost axiomatic. No one foresaw the day when the demand for miracle
+would be merged in the demand for higher law.
+
+This newer scientific temper is not confined, as I believe, to the
+denizens of this earth alone. The spiritual world meets it, as I think
+our evidence has shown, with eager and strenuous response. But that
+response is made, and must be made, along the lines of our normal
+evolution. It must rest upon the education, the disentanglement, of
+_that_ within us mortals which exists in the Invisible, a partaker of
+the undying world. And on our side and on theirs alike, the process must
+be steady and continuous. We have no longer to deal with some isolated
+series of events in the past,--interpretable this way or that, but in no
+way renewable,--but rather with a world-wide and actual condition of
+things, recognisable every year in greater clearness, and changing in
+directions which we can better and better foresee. This new aspect of
+things needs something of new generalisation, of new forecast,--it
+points to a provisional synthesis of religious belief which may fitly
+conclude the present work.
+
+    PROVISIONAL SKETCH OF A RELIGIOUS SYNTHESIS
+
+    [Greek: holbios hostis idôn ekeina koilan
+    eisin upd chędna oiden men bion keinos teleutdn,
+    oiden de dibodoton drchdn.]
+
+    --PINDAR.
+
+I see ground for hoping that we are within sight of a religious
+synthesis, which, although as yet provisional and rudimentary, may in
+the end meet more adequately than any previous synthesis the reasonable
+needs of men. Such a synthesis cannot, I think, be reached by a mere
+predominance of any one existing creed, nor by any eclectic or syncretic
+process. Its prerequisite is the actual acquisition of new knowledge
+whether by discovery or by revelation--knowledge discerned from without
+the veil or from within--yet so realised that the main forms of
+religious thought, by harmonious expansion and development, shall find
+place severally as elements in a more comprehensive whole. And enough of
+such knowledge has, I think, been now attained to make it desirable to
+submit to my readers the religious results which seem likely to follow.
+
+With such a purpose, our conception of religion should be both profound
+and comprehensive. I will use here the definition already adopted of
+religion as the sane and normal response of the human spirit to all that
+we know of cosmic law; that is, to the known phenomena of the universe,
+regarded as an intelligible whole. For on the one hand I cannot confine
+the term to any single definite view or tradition of things unseen. On
+the other hand, I am not content to define religion as "morality tinged
+with emotion," lest morality _per se_ should seem to hang in air, so
+that we should be merely gilding the tortoise which supports the earth.
+Yet my definition needs some further guarding if it is to correspond
+with our habitual use of language. Most men's subjective response to
+their environment falls below the level of true religious thought. It is
+scattered into cravings, or embittered by resentment, or distorted by
+superstitious fear. But of such men I do not speak; rather of men in
+whom the great pageant has inspired at least some vague out-reaching
+toward the Source of All; men for whom knowledge has ripened into
+meditation, and has prompted high desire. I would have Science first
+sublimed into Philosophy, and then kindled by Religion into a burning
+flame. For, from my point of view, man cannot be too religious. I desire
+that the environing, the interpenetrating universe,--its energy, its
+life, its love,--should illume in us, in our low degree, that which we
+ascribe to the World-Soul, saying, "God is Love," "God is Light." The
+World-Soul's infinite energy of omniscient benevolence should become in
+us an enthusiasm of adoring co-operation,--an eager obedience to
+whatsoever with our best pains we can discern as the justly ruling
+principle--[Greek: to hęgemonikon]--without us and within.
+
+Yet if we form so high an ideal of religion,--raising it so far above
+any blind obedience or self-seeking fear that its submission is wholly
+willing, and its demand is for spiritual response alone,--we are bound
+to ask ourselves whether it is right and reasonable to be religious, to
+regard with this full devotion a universe apparently imperfect and
+irresponsive, and a Ruling Principle which so many men have doubted or
+ignored.
+
+The pessimist holds the view that sentient existence has been a
+deplorable blunder in the scheme of things. The egotist at least _acts_
+upon the view that the universe has no moral coherence, and that "each
+for himself" is the only indisputable law. I am sanguine enough to think
+that the answer to the pessimist and the egotist has by our new
+knowledge been made complete. There remains, indeed, a difficulty of
+subtler type, but instinctive in generous souls. "The world," such an
+one may say, "is a mixed place, and I am plainly bound to do my best to
+improve it. But am I bound to feel--can any bribe of personal happiness
+justify me in feeling--_religious enthusiasm_ for a universe in which
+even one being may have been summoned into a sentiency destined to
+inescapable pain?"
+
+The answer to this ethical scruple must be a matter largely of faith. If
+indeed we knew that this earthly life was all, or (far worse) that it
+was followed for any one soul by endless pain, we could not without some
+moral jugglery ascribe perfection of both power and goodness to a
+personal or impersonal First Cause of such a doom. But if we believe
+that endless life exists for all, with infinite possibilities of human
+redress and of divine justification, then it seems right to assume that
+the universe is either already (in some inscrutable fashion) wholly
+good, or is at least in course of becoming so; since it may be becoming
+so in part through the very ardour of our own faith and hope.
+
+I do but mention these initial difficulties; I shall not dwell on them
+here. I speak to men who have determined, whether at the bidding of
+instinct or of reason, that it is well to be religious; well to approach
+in self-devoted reverence an infinite Power and Love. Our desire is
+simply to find the least unworthy way of thinking of matters which
+inevitably transcend and baffle our finite thought.
+
+And here, for the broad purpose of our present survey, we may divide
+the best religious emotion of the world in triple fashion; tracing three
+main streams of thought,--streams which on the whole run parallel, and
+which all rise, as I believe, from some source in the reality of things.
+
+First, then, I place that obscure consensus of independent thinkers in
+many ages and countries which, to avoid any disputable title, I will
+here call simply the Religion of the Ancient Sage. Under that title
+(though Lao Tz[)u] is hardly more than a name) it has been set forth to
+us in brief summary by the great sage and poet of our own time; and such
+words as Natural Religion, Pantheism, Platonism, Mysticism, do but
+express or intensify varying aspects of its main underlying conception.
+That conception is the coexistence and interpenetration of a real or
+spiritual with this material or phenomenal world; a belief driven home
+to many minds by experiences both more weighty and more concordant than
+the percipients themselves have always known. More weighty, I say, for
+they have implied the veritable nascency and operation of a "last and
+largest sense"; a faculty for apprehending, not God, indeed (for what
+finite faculty can apprehend the Infinite?), but at least some dim and
+scattered tokens and prefigurements of a true world of Life and Love.
+More _concordant_ also; and this for a reason which till recently would
+have seemed a paradox. For the mutual corroboration of these signs and
+messages lies not only in their fundamental agreement up to a certain
+point, but in their inevitable divergence beyond it;--as they pass from
+things felt into things imagined; from actual experience into dogmatic
+creed.
+
+The Religion of the Ancient Sage is of unknown antiquity. Of unknown
+antiquity also are various Oriental types of religion, culminating in
+historical times in the Religion of Buddha. For Buddhism all
+interpenetrating universes make the steps upon man's upward way; until
+deliverance from illusion leaves the spirit merged ineffably in the
+impersonal All. But the teaching of Buddha has lost touch with reality;
+it rests on no basis of observed or of reproducible fact.
+
+On a basis of observed facts, on the other hand, Christianity, the
+youngest of the great types of religion, does assuredly rest. Assuredly
+those facts, so far as tradition has made them known to us, do tend to
+prove the superhuman character of its Founder, and His triumph over
+death; and thus the existence and influence of a spiritual world, where
+men's true citizenship lies. These ideas, by common consent, lay at the
+origin of the Faith. Since those first days, however, Christianity has
+been elaborated into codes of ethic and ritual adapted to Western
+civilisation;--has gained (some think) as a rule of life what it has
+lost as a simplicity of spirit.
+
+From the unfettered standpoint of the Ancient Sage the deep concordance
+of these and other schemes of religious thought may well outweigh their
+formal oppositions. And yet I repeat that it is not from any mere
+welding of these schemes together, nor from any choice of the best
+points in existing syntheses, that the new synthesis for which I hope
+must be born. It must be born from new-dawning knowledge; and in that
+new knowledge I believe that each great form of religious thought will
+find its indispensable--I may almost say its predicted--development. Our
+race from its very infancy has stumbled along a guarded way; and now the
+first lessons of its early childhood reveal the root in reality of much
+that it has instinctively believed.
+
+What I think I know, therefore, I am bound to tell; I must give the
+religious upshot of observation and experiment in such brief
+announcement as an audience like this[212] has a right to hear, even
+before our discoveries can be laid in full before the courts of science
+for definite approval.
+
+The _religious upshot_, I repeat:--for I cannot here reproduce the mass
+of evidence which has been published in full elsewhere. Its general
+character is by this time widely known. Observation, experiment,
+inference, have led many inquirers, of whom I am one, to a belief in
+direct or telepathic intercommunication, not only between the minds of
+men still on earth, but between minds or spirits still on earth and
+spirits departed. Such a _discovery_ opens the door also to
+_revelation_. By discovery and by revelation--by observation from
+without the veil, and by utterance from within--certain theses have been
+provisionally established with regard to such departed souls as we have
+been able to encounter. First and chiefly, I at least see ground to
+believe that their state is one of endless evolution in wisdom and in
+love. Their loves of earth persist; and most of all those highest loves
+which seek their outlet in adoration and worship. We do not find,
+indeed, that support is given by souls in bliss to any special scheme of
+terrene theology. Thereon they know less than we mortal men have often
+fancied that we knew. Yet from their step of vantage-ground in the
+Universe, at least, they see that it is good. I do not mean that they
+know either of an end or of an explanation of evil. Yet evil to them
+seems less a terrible than a slavish thing. It is embodied in no mighty
+Potentate; rather it forms an isolating madness from which higher
+spirits strive to free the distorted soul. There needs no chastisement
+of fire; self-knowledge is man's punishment and his reward;
+self-knowledge, and the nearness or the aloofness of companion souls.
+For in that world love is actually self-preservation; the Communion of
+Saints not only adorns but constitutes the Life Everlasting. Nay, from
+the law of telepathy it follows that that communion is valid for us here
+and now. Even now the love of souls departed makes answer to our
+invocations. Even now our loving memory--love is itself a
+prayer--supports and strengthens those delivered spirits upon their
+upward way. No wonder; since we are to them but as fellow-travellers
+shrouded in a mist; "neither death, nor life, nor height, nor depth, nor
+any other creature," can bar us from the hearth-fire of the universe, or
+hide for more than a moment the inconceivable oneness of souls.
+
+And is not this a fresh instalment, or a precursory adumbration, of that
+Truth into which the Paraclete should lead? Has any world-scheme yet
+been suggested so profoundly corroborative of the very core of the
+Christian revelation? Jesus Christ "brought life and immortality to
+light." By His appearance after bodily death He proved the deathlessness
+of the spirit. By His character and His teaching He testified to the
+Fatherhood of God. So far, then, as His unique message admitted of
+evidential support, it is here supported. So far as He promised things
+unprovable, that promise is here renewed.
+
+I venture now on a bold saying; for I predict that, in consequence of
+the new evidence, all reasonable men, a century hence, will believe the
+Resurrection of Christ, whereas, in default of the new evidence, no
+reasonable men, a century hence, would have believed it. The ground of
+this forecast is plain enough. Our ever-growing recognition of the
+continuity, the uniformity of cosmic law has gradually made of the
+alleged _uniqueness_ of any incident its almost inevitable refutation.
+Ever more clearly must our age of science realise that any relation
+between a material and a spiritual world cannot be an ethical or
+emotional relation alone; that it must needs be a great structural fact
+of the Universe, involving laws at least as persistent, as identical
+from age to age, as our known laws of Energy or of Motion. And
+especially as to that central claim, of the soul's life manifested after
+the body's death, it is plain that this can less and less be supported
+by remote tradition alone; that it must more and more be tested by
+modern experience and inquiry. Suppose, for instance, that we collect
+many such histories, recorded on first-hand evidence in our critical
+age; and suppose that all these narratives break down on analysis; that
+they can all be traced to hallucination, misdescription, and other
+persistent sources of error;--can we then expect reasonable men to
+believe that this marvellous phenomenon, always vanishing into
+nothingness when closely scrutinised in a modern English scene, must yet
+compel adoring credence when alleged to have occurred in an Oriental
+country, and in a remote and superstitious age? Had the results (in
+short) of "psychical research" been purely negative, would not Christian
+evidence--I do not say Christian _emotion_, but Christian
+_evidence_--have received an overwhelming blow?
+
+As a matter of fact,--or, if you prefer the phrase, in my own personal
+opinion,--our research has led us to results of a quite different type.
+They have not been negative only, but largely positive. We have shown
+that amid much deception and self-deception, fraud and illusion,
+veritable manifestations do reach us from beyond the grave. The central
+claim of Christianity is thus confirmed, as never before. If our own
+friends, men like ourselves, can sometimes return to tell us of love and
+hope, a mightier Spirit may well have used the eternal laws with a more
+commanding power. There is nothing to hinder the reverent faith that,
+though we be all "the Children of the Most Highest," He came nearer than
+we, by some space by us immeasurable, to That which is infinitely far.
+There is nothing to hinder the devout conviction that He of His own act
+"took upon Him the form of a servant," and was made flesh for our
+salvation, foreseeing the earthly travail and the eternal crown. "Surely
+before this descent into generation," says Plotinus,[213] "we existed in
+the intelligible world; being other men than now we are, and some of us
+Gods; clear souls, and minds unmixed with all existence; parts of the
+Intelligible, nor severed thence; nor are we severed even now."
+
+It is not thus to less of reverence that man is summoned, but to more.
+Let him keep hold of early sanctities; but let him remember also that
+once again "a great sheet has been let down out of heaven"; and lo!
+neither Buddha nor Plato is found common or unclean.
+
+Nay, as to our own soul's future, when that first shock of death is
+past, it is in Buddhism that we find the more inspiring, the truer view.
+That Western conception of an instant and unchangeable bliss or woe--a
+bliss or woe determined largely by a man's beliefs, in this earthly
+ignorance, on matters which "the angels desire to look into"--is the
+bequest of a pre-Copernican era of speculative thought. In its Mahomedan
+travesty, we see the same scheme with outlines coarsened into
+grotesqueness;--we see it degrade the cosmic march and profluence into a
+manner of children's play.
+
+Meantime the immemorial musings of unnumbered men have dreamt of a
+consummation so far removed that he who gazed has scarcely known whether
+it were Nothingness or Deity. With profoundest fantasy, the East has
+pondered on the vastness of the world that now is, of the worlds that
+are to be. What rest or pasture for the mind in the seven days of
+Creation, the four rivers of Paradise, the stars "made also"? The
+farther East has reached blindly forth towards astronomical epochs,
+sidereal spaces, galactic congregations of inconceivable Being. Pressed
+by the incumbency of ancestral gods (as the Chinese legend tells us), it
+has "created by one sweep of the imagination a thousand Universes, to be
+the Buddha's realm."
+
+The sacred tale of Buddha, developed from its earlier simplicity by the
+shaping stress of many generations, opens to us the whole range and
+majesty of human fate. "The destined Buddha has desired to be a Buddha
+through an almost unimaginable series of worlds." No soul need ever be
+without that hope. "The spirit-worlds are even now announcing the advent
+of future Buddhas, in epochs too remote for the computation of men." No
+obstacles without us can arrest our way. "The rocks that were thrown at
+Buddha were changed into flowers." Not our own worst misdoings need
+beget despair. "Buddha, too, had often been to hell for his sins." The
+vast complexity of the Sum of Things need not appal us. "Beneath the
+bottomless whirlpool of existences, behind the illusion of Form and
+Name," we, too, like Buddha, may discover and reveal "the perfection of
+the Eternal Law." Us, too, like Buddha, the cosmic welcome may await; as
+when "Earth itself and the laws of all worlds" trembled with joy "as
+Buddha attained the Supreme Intelligence, and entered into the Endless
+Calm."
+
+I believe that some of those who once were near to us are already
+mounting swiftly upon this heavenly way. And when from that cloud
+encompassing of unforgetful souls some voice is heard,--as long
+ago,--there needs no heroism, no sanctity, to inspire the apostle's
+[Greek: epithumia eis to analuoai], the desire to lift our anchor, and
+to sail out beyond the bar. What fitter summons for man than the wish to
+live in the memory of the highest soul that he has known, now risen
+higher;--to lift into an immortal security the yearning passion of his
+love? "As the soul hasteneth," says Plotinus,[214] "to the things that
+are above, she will ever forget the more; unless all her life on earth
+leave a memory of things done well. For even here may man do well, if he
+stand clear of the cares of earth. And he must stand clear of their
+memories too; so that one may rightly speak of a noble soul as
+forgetting those things that are behind. And the shade of Hęraklęs,
+indeed, may talk of his own valour to the shades, but the true Hęraklęs
+in the true world will deem all that of little worth; being transported
+into a more sacred place, and strenuously engaging, even above his
+strength, in those battles in which the wise engage." Can we men now on
+earth claim more of sustainment than lies in the incipient communion
+with those enfranchised souls? What day of hope, of exaltation, has
+dawned like this, since the message of Pentecost?
+
+Yet a durable religious synthesis should do more than satisfy man's
+immediate aspiration. It should be in itself progressive and
+evolutionary; it should bear a promise of ever deeper holiness, to
+answer to the long ages of heightening wisdom during which our race may
+be destined to inhabit the earth. This condition has never yet been met.
+No scheme, indeed, could meet it which was not based upon recurrent and
+developing facts. To such facts we now appeal. We look, not backward to
+fading tradition, but onward to dawning experience. We hope that the
+intercourse, now at last consciously begun--although as through the
+mouth of babes and sucklings, and in confused and stammering
+speech--between discarnate and incarnate souls, may through long effort
+clarify into a director communion, so that they shall teach us all they
+will.
+
+Science, then, need be no longer fettered by the limitations of this
+planetary standpoint; nor ethics by the narrow experience of a single
+life. Evolution will no longer appear as a truncated process, an
+ever-arrested movement upon an unknown goal. Rather we may gain a
+glimpse of an ultimate incandescence where science and religion fuse in
+one; a cosmic evolution of Energy into Life, and of Life into Love,
+which is Joy. Love, which is Joy at once and Wisdom;--we can do no more
+than ring the changes on terms like these, whether we imagine the
+transfigurement and apotheosis of conquering souls, or the lower, but
+still sacred, destiny which may be some day possible for souls still
+tarrying here. We picture the perfected soul as the Buddha, the Saviour,
+the _aurai simplicis ignem_, dwelling on one or other aspect of that
+trinal conception of Wisdom, Love, and Joy. For souls not yet perfected
+but still held on earth I have foretold a growth in _holiness_. By this
+I mean no unreal opposition or forced divorcement of sacred and secular,
+of flesh and spirit. Rather I define holiness as the joy too high as yet
+for our enjoyment; the wisdom just beyond our learning; the rapture of
+love which we still strive to attain. Inevitably, as our link with other
+spirits strengthens, as the life of the organism pours more fully
+through the individual cell, we shall feel love more ardent, wider
+wisdom, higher joy; perceiving that this organic unity of Soul, which
+forms the inward aspect of the telepathic law, is in itself the Order of
+the Cosmos, the Summation of Things. And such devotion may find its
+flower in no vain self-martyrdom, no cloistered resignation, but rather
+in such pervading ecstasy as already the elect have known; the Vision
+which dissolves for a moment the corporeal prison-house; "the flight of
+the One to the One."
+
+"So let the soul that is not unworthy of that vision contemplate the
+Great Soul; freed from deceit and every witchery, and collected into
+calm. Calmed be the body for her in that hour, and the tumult of the
+flesh; ay, all that is about her, calm; calm be the earth, the sea, the
+air, and let Heaven itself be still. Then let her feel how into that
+silent heaven the Great Soul floweth in.... And so may man's soul be
+sure of Vision, when suddenly she is filled with light; for this light
+is from Him and is He; and then surely shall one know His presence when,
+like a god of old time, He entered into the house of one that calleth
+Him, and maketh it full of light." "And how," concludes Plotinus, "may
+this thing be for us? Let all else go."[215]
+
+These heights, I confess, are above the stature of my spirit. Yet for
+each of us is a fit ingress into the Unseen; and for some lesser man the
+memory of one vanished soul may be beatific as of old for Plotinus the
+flooding immensity of Heaven. And albeit no historical religion can
+persist as a logical halting-place upon the endless mounting way--that
+way which leads unbroken from the first germ of love in the heart to an
+inconceivable union with the Divine--yet many a creed in turn may well
+be close inwrought and inwoven with our eternal hope. What wonder, if in
+the soul's long battle, some Captain of our Salvation shall sometimes
+seem to tower unrivalled and alone?--[Greek: oios gar erueto Ilion
+Hektôr]. And yet in no single act or passion can that salvation stand;
+far hence, beyond Orion and Andromeda, the cosmic process works and
+shall work for ever through unbegotten souls. And even as it was not in
+truth the great ghost of Hector only, but the whole nascent race of
+Rome, which bore from the Trojan altar the hallowing fire, so is it not
+one Saviour only, but the whole nascent race of man--nay, all the
+immeasurable progeny and population of the heavens--which issues
+continually from behind the veil of Being, and forth from the Sanctuary
+of the Universe carries the ever-burning flame: _A eternumque adytis
+effert penetralibus ignem_.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+TO
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+II. A. It is well known that a great variety of slight causes--hunger,
+fatigue, slight poisoning by impure air, a small degree of fever,
+etc.--are sometimes enough to produce a transient perturbation of
+personality of the most violent kind. I give as an instance the
+following account of a feverish experience, sent to me by the late
+Robert Louis Stevenson, from Samoa, in 1892 (and published in
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. p. 9). In Stevenson's paper on his own
+dreams, alluded to in Chapter III, we have one of the most striking
+examples known to me of that helpful and productive subliminal uprush
+which I have characterised as the mechanism of genius. It is therefore,
+interesting to observe how, under morbid conditions, this temperament of
+genius--this ready permeability of the psychical diaphragm--transforms
+what might in others be a mere vague and massive discomfort into a vivid
+though incoherent message from the subliminal storm and fire. The result
+is a kind of supraliminal duality, the perception at the same time of
+two personalities--the one rational and moral, the other belonging to
+the stratum of dreams and nightmare.
+
+
+VAILIMA PLANTATION, UPOHO, SAMOAN ISLANDS,
+_July 14th, 1892_.
+
+     DEAR MR. MYERS,--I am tempted to communicate to you some
+     experiences of mine which seem to me (ignorant as I am) of a high
+     psychological interest.
+
+     I had infamous bad health when I was a child and suffered much from
+     night fears; but from the age of about thirteen until I was past
+     thirty I did not know what it was to have a high fever or to wander
+     in my mind. So that these experiences, when they were renewed, came
+     upon me with entire freshness; and either I am a peculiar subject,
+     or I was thus enabled to observe them with unusual closeness.
+
+     Experience A. During an illness at Nice I lay awake a whole night
+     in extreme pain. From the beginning of the evening _one part of my
+     mind_ became possessed of a notion so grotesque and shapeless that
+     it may best be described as a form of words. I thought the pain
+     was, or was connected with, a wisp or coil of some sort; I knew
+     not of what it consisted nor yet where it was, and cared not; only
+     I thought, if the two ends were brought together, the pain would
+     cease. Now all the time, with _another part of my mind_, which I
+     venture to think was _myself_, I was fully alive to the absurdity
+     of this idea, knew it to be a mark of impaired sanity, and was
+     engaged with _my other self_ in a perpetual conflict. _Myself_ had
+     nothing more at heart than to keep from my wife, who was nursing
+     me, any hint of this ridiculous hallucination; the _other_ was
+     bound that she should be told of it and ordered to effect the cure.
+     I believe it must have been well on in the morning before the fever
+     (or _the other fellow_) triumphed, and I called my wife to my
+     bedside, seized her savagely by the wrist, and looking on her with
+     a face of fury, cried: "Why do you not put the two ends together
+     and put me out of pain?"
+
+     Experience B. The other day in Sydney I was seized on a Saturday
+     with a high fever. Early in the afternoon I began to repeat
+     mechanically the sound usually written "mhn," caught myself in the
+     act, instantly stopped it, and explained to my mother, who was in
+     the room, my reasons for so doing. "That is the beginning of the
+     mind to wander," I said, "and has to be resisted at the outset." I
+     fell asleep and woke, and for the rest of the night repeated to
+     myself mentally a nonsense word which I could not recall next
+     morning. I had been reading the day before the life of Swift, and
+     all night long one part of my mind (_the other fellow_) kept
+     informing me that I was not repeating the word myself, but was only
+     reading in a book that Swift had so repeated it in his last
+     sickness. The temptation to communicate this nonsense was again
+     strongly felt by _myself_, but was on this occasion triumphantly
+     resisted, and my watcher heard from me all night nothing of Dean
+     Swift or the word, nothing but what was rational and to the point.
+     So much for the two consciousnesses when I can disentangle them;
+     but there is a part of my thoughts that I have more difficulty in
+     attributing. One part of my mind continually bid me remark the
+     transrational felicity of the word, examined all the syllables,
+     showed me that not one was in itself significant, and yet the whole
+     expressed to a nicety the voluminous distress of one in a high
+     fever and his annoyance at and recoil from the attentions of his
+     nurses. It was probably the same part (and for a guess _the other
+     fellow_) who bid me compare it with the nonsense words of Lewis
+     Carroll as the invention of a lunatic with those of a sane man. But
+     surely it was _myself_ (and myself in a perfectly clear-headed
+     state) that kept me trying all night to get the word by heart, on
+     the ground that it would afterwards be useful in literature if I
+     wanted to deal with mad folk. It must have been myself, I say,
+     because _the other fellow_ believed (or pretended to believe) he
+     was reading the passage in a book where it could always be found
+     again when wanted.
+
+     Experience C. The next night _the other fellow_ had an explanation
+     ready for my sufferings, of which I can only say that it had
+     something to do with the navy, that it was sheer undiluted
+     nonsense, had neither end nor beginning, and was insusceptible of
+     being expressed in words. _Myself_ knew this; yet I gave way, and
+     my watcher was favoured with some references to the navy. Nor only
+     that; _the other fellow_ was annoyed--or _I_ was annoyed--on two
+     inconsistent accounts: first, because he had failed to make his
+     meaning comprehensible; and second, because the nurse displayed no
+     interest. _The other fellow_ would have liked to explain further;
+     but _myself_ was much hurt at having been got into this false
+     position, and would be led no further.
+
+     In cases A and C the illusion was amorphous. I knew it to be so,
+     and yet succumbed to the temptation of trying to communicate it. In
+     case B the idea was coherent, and I managed to hold my peace. Both
+     consciousnesses, in other words, were less affected in case B, and
+     both more affected in cases A and C. It is perhaps not always so:
+     the illusion might be coherent, even practical, and the rational
+     authority of the mind quite in abeyance. Would not that be lunacy?
+
+     In case A I had an absolute knowledge that I was out of my mind,
+     and that there was no meaning in my words; these were the very
+     facts that I was anxious to conceal; and yet when I succumbed to
+     the temptation of speaking my face was convulsed with anger, and I
+     wrung my watcher's wrist with cruelty. Here is action, unnatural
+     and uncharacteristic action, flowing from an idea in which I had no
+     belief, and which I had been concealing for hours as a plain mark
+     of aberration. Is it not so with lunatics?
+
+     I have called the one person _myself_, and the other _the other
+     fellow_. It was myself who spoke and acted; the other fellow seemed
+     to have no control of the body or the tongue; he could only act
+     through myself, on whom he brought to bear a heavy strain, resisted
+     in one case, triumphant in the two others. Yet I am tempted to
+     think that I know the other fellow; I am tempted to think he is the
+     dreamer described in my Chapter on Dreams to which you refer. Here
+     at least is a dream belonging to the same period, but this time a
+     pure dream, an illusion, I mean, that disappeared with the return
+     of the sense of sight, not one that persevered during waking
+     moments, and while I was able to speak and take my medicine. It
+     occurred the day after case B and before case C.
+
+     Case D. In the afternoon there sprang up a storm of wind with
+     monstrous clouds of dust; my room looked on a steep hill of trees
+     whose boughs were all blowing in the same direction; the world
+     seemed to pass by my windows like a mill-race. By this turmoil and
+     movement I was confused, but not distressed, and surprised not to
+     be distressed; for even in good health a high wind has often a
+     painful influence on my nerves. In the midst of this I dozed off
+     asleep. I had just been reading Scott's "Life of Dryden," and been
+     struck with the fact that Dryden had translated some of the Latin
+     hymns, and had wondered that I had never remarked them in his
+     works. As soon as I was asleep I dreamed a reason why the sound of
+     the wind and the sight of the flying dust had not distressed me.
+     There was no wind, it seemed, no dust; it was only Dryden singing
+     his translated hymns in _one direction_, and all those who had
+     blamed and attacked him after the Revolution singing them in
+     _another_. This point of the two directions is very singular and
+     insane. In part it meant that Dryden was continuously flying past
+     yet never passing my window in the direction of the wind and dust,
+     and all his detractors similarly flying past yet not passing
+     towards the other side. But it applied, besides this, both to the
+     words and to the music in a manner wholly insusceptible of
+     expression.
+
+     That was a dream; and yet how exactly it reproduces the method of
+     _my other fellow_ while I was awake. Here is an explanation for a
+     state of mind or body sought, and found, in a tissue of rabid,
+     complicated, and inexpressible folly.--Yours very sincerely.
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
+
+
+
+II. B. A good example of the application of true scientific method to
+problems which doctors of the old school did not think worth their
+science is Dr. Janet's treatment of a singular problem which the
+mistakes of brutal ignorance turned in old times into a veritable
+scourge of our race. I speak of _demoniacal possession_, in which
+affliction Dr. Janet has shown himself a better than ecclesiastical
+exorcist.
+
+I give here a typical case of pseudo-possession from _Névroses et Idées
+fixes_ (vol. i. pp. 377-389): Achille, as Professor Janet calls him, was
+a timid and rather morbid young man, but he was married to a good wife,
+and nothing went specially wrong with him until his return from a
+business journey in 1890. He then became sombre and taciturn--sometimes
+even seemed unable to speak--then took to his bed and lay murmuring
+incomprehensible words, and at last said farewell to his wife and
+children, and stretched himself out motionless for a couple of days,
+while his family waited for his last breath.
+
+"Suddenly one morning, after two days of apparent death, Achille sat up
+in bed with his eyes wide open, and burst into a terrible laugh. It was
+a convulsive laugh which shook all his limbs; an exaggerated laugh which
+twisted his mouth; a lugubrious, satanic laugh which went on for more
+than two hours.
+
+"From this moment everything was changed. Achille leapt from his bed and
+refused all attentions. To every question he answered, 'There's nothing
+to be done! let's have some champagne; it's the end of the world!' Then
+he uttered piercing cries, 'They are burning me--they are cutting me to
+pieces!'"
+
+After an agitated sleep, Achille woke up with the conviction that he was
+possessed with a devil. And in fact his mouth now uttered blasphemies,
+his limbs were contorted, and he repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts at
+suicide. Ultimately he was taken to the Salpętričre, and placed under
+Professor Janet, who recognised at once the classic signs of possession.
+The poor man kept protesting against the odious outrages on religion,
+which he attributed to a devil inside him, moving his tongue against
+his will. "Achille could say, like a celebrated victim of possession,
+Pčre Surin, 'It is as though I had two souls; one of which has been
+dispossessed of its body and the use of its organs, and is frantic at
+the sight of the other soul which has crept in.'"
+
+It was by no means easy to get either at Achille or at his possessing
+devil. Attempts to hypnotise him failed, and any remonstrance was met
+with insult. But the wily psychologist was accustomed to such
+difficulties, and had resort to a plan too insidious for a common devil
+to suspect. He gently moved the hand of Achille in such a way as to
+suggest the act of writing, and having thus succeeded in starting
+automatic script, he got the devil thus to answer questions quietly put
+while the raving was going on as usual. "I will not believe in your
+power," said Professor Janet to the malignant intruder, "unless you give
+me a proof." "What proof?" "Raise the poor man's left arm without his
+knowing it." This was done--to the astonishment of poor Achille--and a
+series of suggestions followed, all of which the demon triumphantly and
+unsuspectingly carried out, to show his power. Then came the suggestion
+to which Professor Janet had been leading up. It was like getting the
+djinn into the bottle. "You cannot put Achille soundly to sleep in that
+arm-chair!" "Yes, I can!" No sooner said than done, and no sooner done
+than Achille was delivered from his tormentor--from his own tormenting
+self.
+
+For there in that hypnotic sleep he was gently led on to tell all his
+story; and such stories, when told to a skilled and kindly auditor, are
+apt to come to an end in the very act of being told.
+
+Achille had been living in a day-dream; it was a day-dream which had
+swollen to these nightmare proportions, and had, as it were, ousted his
+rational being; and in the deeper self-knowledge which the somnambulic
+state brings with it the dream and the interpretation thereof became
+present to his bewildered mind.
+
+The fact was that on that fateful journey when Achille's troubles began
+he had committed an act of unfaithfulness to his wife. A gloomy anxiety
+to conceal this action prompted him to an increasing taciturnity, and
+morbid fancies as to his health grew on him until at last his day-dream
+led him to imagine himself as actually dead. "His two days' lethargy was
+but an episode, a chapter in the long dream."
+
+What then was the natural next stage of the dream's development? "He
+dreamt that, now that he was dead indeed, the devil rose from the abyss
+and came to take him. The poor man, as in his somnambulic state he
+retraced the series of his dreams, remembered the precise instant when
+this lamentable event took place. It was about 11 A.M.: a dog barked in
+the court at the moment, incommoded, no doubt, by the smell of
+brimstone; flames filled the room; numbers of little fiends scourged the
+unhappy man, or drove nails into his eyes, and through the wounds in his
+body Satan entered in to take possession of head and heart."
+
+From this point the pseudo-possession may be said to have begun. The
+fixed idea developed itself into sensory and motor automatisms--visions
+of devils, uncontrollable utterances, automatic script--ascribed by the
+automatist to the possessing devil within.
+
+And now came the moment when the veracity, the utility, of this new type
+of psychological analysis was to be submitted to yet another test. From
+the point of view of the ordinary physician Achille's condition was
+almost hopeless. Physical treatment had failed, and death from
+exhaustion and misery seemed near at hand. Nor could any appeal have
+been effective which did not go to the hidden root of the evil, which
+did not lighten the load of morbid remorse from which the whole series
+of troubles had developed. Fortunately for Achille, he was in the hands
+of an unsurpassed minister to minds thus diseased. Professor Janet
+adopted his usual tactics--what he terms the _dissociation_ and the
+gradual _substitution_ of ideas. The incidents of the miserable memory
+were modified, were explained away, were slowly dissolved from the
+brooding brain, and the hallucinatory image of the offended wife was
+presented to the sufferer at what novelists call the psychological
+moment, with pardon in her eyes. "Such stuff as dreams are made
+of!"--but even by such means was Achille restored to physical and moral
+health; he leads now the life of normal man; he no longer "walketh in a
+vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain."
+
+
+II. C. I give here the case of Dr. Azam's often quoted patient, Félida
+X.[216] In this case the somnambulic life finally became the normal
+life; as the "second state," which appeared at first only in short,
+dreamlike accesses, gradually replaced the "first state," which finally
+recurred but for a few hours at long intervals. But the point on which I
+wish to dwell is this: that Félida's second state was altogether
+_superior_ to the first--physically superior, since the nervous pains
+which had troubled her from childhood disappeared: and mentally
+superior, inasmuch as her morose, self-centred disposition was exchanged
+for a cheerful activity which enabled her to attend to her children and
+her shop much more effectively than when she was in the "état bęte," as
+she called what was once the only personality that she knew. In this
+case, then, which at the time Dr. Azam wrote--1887--was of nearly thirty
+years' standing, the spontaneous readjustment of nervous activities--the
+second state, no memory of which remained in the first state--resulted
+in an improvement profounder than could have been anticipated from any
+moral or medical treatment that we know. The case shows us how often the
+word "normal" means nothing more than "what happens to exist." For
+Félida's _normal_ state was in fact her _morbid_ state: and the new
+condition, which seemed at first a mere hysterical abnormality, brought
+her at last to a life of bodily and mental sanity which made her fully
+the equal of average women of her class.
+
+A very complete account of the case, reproducing in full almost the
+whole of Dr. Azam's report, is given in Dr. A. Binet's _Altérations de
+la Personnalité_ (pp. 6-20), and I briefly summarise this here:--
+
+     Félida was born at Bordeaux, in 1843, of healthy parents. Towards
+     the age of thirteen years she began to exhibit symptoms of
+     hysteria. When about fourteen and a half she used suddenly to feel
+     a pain in her forehead, and then to fall into a profound sleep for
+     some ten minutes, after which she woke spontaneously in her
+     secondary condition. This lasted an hour or two; then the sleep
+     came on again, and she awoke in her normal state. The change at
+     first occurred every five or six days. As the hysterical symptoms
+     increased, Dr. Azam was called in to attend her in 1858.
+
+     His report of that time states that in the primary state she
+     appears very intelligent and fairly well educated; of a melancholy
+     disposition, talking little, very industrious; constantly thinking
+     of her maladies and suffering acute pains in various parts of the
+     body, especially the head--the _clou hystérique_ being very marked;
+     all her actions, ideas, and words perfectly rational. Almost every
+     day what she calls her _crise_ comes on spontaneously--often while
+     she is sitting at her needlework--preceded by a brief interval of
+     the profound sleep, from which no external stimulus can rouse her.
+     On waking into the secondary state, she appears like an entirely
+     different person, smiling and gay; she continues her work
+     cheerfully or walks about briskly, no longer feeling all the pains
+     she has just before been complaining of. She looks after her
+     ordinary domestic duties, goes out, walks about the town, and pays
+     calls; behaves in every way like an ordinary healthy girl.
+
+     In this condition she remembers perfectly all that has happened on
+     previous occasions when she was in the same state, and also all the
+     events of her normal life; whereas during her normal life she
+     forgets absolutely the occurrences of the secondary state. She
+     declares constantly that whatever state she is in at the moment is
+     the normal one--her _raison_--while the other one is always her
+     _crise_.
+
+     The change of character in the secondary state is strongly marked;
+     she becomes gay and vivacious--almost noisy; instead of being
+     indifferent to everything, her sensibilities--both imaginative and
+     emotional--become excessive. All her faculties appear more
+     developed and more complete. The condition, in fact, is much
+     superior to her ordinary one, as shown by the disappearance of her
+     physical pains, and especially by the state of her memory.
+
+     She married early, and her _crises_ became more frequent, though
+     there were occasionally long intervals when they never came at all.
+     But the secondary state, which in 1858 and 1859 only occupied about
+     a tenth part of her life, gradually encroached more and more on the
+     primary state, till the latter began to appear only at intervals
+     and for a brief space of time.
+
+     In 1875 Dr. Azam, having for long lost sight of her, found her a
+     mother of a family, keeping a shop. Now and then, but more and more
+     rarely, occurred what she called her _crises_--really relapses into
+     her _primary_ condition. These were excessively inconvenient, since
+     she forgot in them all the events of what was now her ordinary
+     life, all the arrangements of her business, etc.; for instance, in
+     going to a funeral, she had a _crise_, and consequently found it
+     impossible to remember who the deceased person was. She had a great
+     dread of these occurrences, though, by long practice, she had
+     become very skilful at concealing them from every one but her
+     husband; and the transition periods in passing from one state to
+     another, during which she was completely unconscious, were now so
+     short as to escape general notice. A peculiar feeling of pressure
+     in the head warned her that the _crise_ was coming, and she would
+     then, for fear of making mistakes in her business, hastily write
+     down whatever facts she most needed to keep in mind.
+
+     While the primary state lasted, she relapsed into the extreme
+     melancholy and depression that characterised her early life, these
+     being, in fact, now aggravated by her troublesome amnesia. She also
+     lost her affection for her husband and children, and suffered from
+     many hysterical pains and other symptoms which were much less acute
+     in the secondary state. By 1887, however, the primary state only
+     occurred every month or two, lasting only for a few hours at a
+     time.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+TO
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+IV. A. From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 389; related by Mr.
+Herbert J. Lewis, 19 Park Place, Cardiff.
+
+     In September 1880, I lost the landing order of a large steamer
+     containing a cargo of iron ore, which had arrived in the port of
+     Cardiff. She had to commence discharging at six o'clock the next
+     morning. I received the landing order at four o'clock in the
+     afternoon, and when I arrived at the office at six I found that I
+     had lost it. During all the evening I was doing my utmost to find
+     the officials of the Custom House to get a permit, as the loss was
+     of the greatest importance, preventing the ship from discharging. I
+     came home in a great degree of trouble about the matter, as I
+     feared that I should lose my situation in consequence.
+
+     That night I dreamed that I saw the lost landing order lying in a
+     crack in the wall under a desk in the Long Room of the Custom
+     House.
+
+     At five the next morning I went down to the Custom House and got
+     the keeper to get up and open it. I went to the spot of which I had
+     dreamed, and found the paper in the very place. The ship was not
+     ready to discharge at her proper time, and I went on board at seven
+     and delivered the landing order, saving her from all delay.
+
+HERBERT J. LEWIS.
+
+     I can certify to the truth of the above statement.
+
+THOMAS LEWIS
+
+(Herbert Lewis's father),
+
+H. WALLIS.
+
+  _July 14th, 1884_.
+
+[Mr. E. J. Newell, of the George and Abbotsford Hotel, Melrose, adds the
+following corroborative note:--]
+
+
+_August 14th, 1884._
+
+     I made some inquiries about Mr. Herbert Lewis's dream before I left
+     Cardiff. He had been searching throughout the room in which the
+     order was found. His theory as to how the order got in the place in
+     which it was found, is that it was probably put there by some one
+     (perhaps with malicious intent), as he does not see how it could
+     have fallen so.
+
+     The fact that Mr. H. Lewis is exceedingly short-sighted adds to the
+     probability of the thing which you suggest, that the dream was
+     simply an unconscious act of memory in sleep. On the other hand he
+     does not believe it was there when he searched.
+
+E. J. NEWELL.
+
+Can there have been a momentary unnoticed spasm of the ciliary muscle,
+with the result of extending the range of vision? It may suffice here to
+quote--that my suggestion may not seem too fantastic--a few lines from a
+personal observation of a somnambule by Dr. Dufay.[217]
+
+"It is eight o'clock: several workwomen are busy around a table, on
+which a lamp is placed. Mdlle. R. L. directs and shares in the work,
+chatting cheerfully meantime. Suddenly a noise is heard; it is her head
+which has fallen sharply on the edge of the table. This is the beginning
+of the access. She picks herself up in a few seconds, pulls off her
+spectacles with disgust, and continues the work which she had
+begun;--having no further need of the concave glasses which a pronounced
+myopia renders needful to her in ordinary life;--and even placing
+herself so that her work is less exposed to the light of the lamp."
+Similarly, and yet differently, Miss Goodrich-Freer has had an
+experience where the title of a book quite unknown to her, which she had
+vainly endeavoured to read where it lay at some distance from her,
+presented itself in the crystal. In such a case we can hardly suppose
+any such spasmodic alteration in ocular conditions as may perhaps occur
+in trance.
+
+
+IV. B. This case was recorded by Professor W. Romaine Newbold of the
+University of Pennsylvania, in a paper entitled "Subconscious
+Reasoning," in the _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xii. pp. 11-20.
+
+     I give the following extracts:--
+
+     For [these] cases I am indebted to another friend and colleague,
+     Dr. Herman V. Hilprecht, Professor of Assyrian in the University of
+     Pennsylvania. Both occurred in his own experience, and I write the
+     account of the first from notes made by me upon his narrative.
+
+     During the winter, 1882-1883, he was working with Professor
+     Friedrich Delitzsch, and was preparing to publish, as his
+     dissertation, a text, transliteration, and translation of a stone
+     of Nebuchadnezzar I. with notes. He accepted at that time the
+     explanation given by Professor Delitzsch of the name
+     Nebuchadnezzar--"_Nabű-kudűrru-usur_," "Nebo protect my mason's
+     pad, or mortar board," _i.e._, "my work as a builder." One night,
+     after working late, he went to bed about two o'clock in the
+     morning. After a somewhat restless sleep, he awoke with his mind
+     full of the thought that the name should be translated "Nebo
+     protect my boundary." He had a dim consciousness of having been
+     working at his table in a dream, but could never recall the details
+     of the process by which he arrived at this conclusion. Reflecting
+     upon it when awake, however, he at once saw that _kudűrru_,
+     "boundary," could be derived from the verb _kadâru_, to enclose.
+     Shortly afterwards he published this translation in his
+     dissertation, and it has since been universally adopted.
+
+     I quote this experience, in itself of a familiar type, on account
+     of its interest when viewed in connection with the more curious
+     dream next to be related. I was told of the latter shortly after it
+     happened, and here translate an account written in German by
+     Professor Hilprecht, August 8th, 1893, before the more complete
+     confirmation was received.
+
+     "One Saturday evening, about the middle of March, 1893, I had been
+     wearying myself, as I had done so often in the weeks preceding, in
+     the vain attempt to decipher two small fragments of agate which
+     were supposed to belong to the finger-rings of some Babylonian. The
+     labour was much increased by the fact that the fragments presented
+     remnants only of characters and lines, that dozens of similar small
+     fragments had been found in the ruins of the temple of Bel at
+     Nippur with which nothing could be done, that in this case
+     furthermore I had never had the originals before me, but only a
+     hasty sketch made by one of the members of the expedition sent by
+     the University of Pennsylvania to Babylonia. I could not say more
+     than that the fragments, taking into consideration the place in
+     which they were found and the peculiar characteristics of the
+     cuneiform characters preserved upon them, sprang from the Cassite
+     period of Babylonian history (_circa_ 1700-1140 B.C.); moreover, as
+     the first character of the third line of the first fragment seemed
+     to be KU, I ascribed this fragment, with an interrogation point, to
+     King Kurigalzu, while I placed the other fragment, as
+     unclassifiable, with other Cassite fragments upon a page of my book
+     where I published the unclassifiable fragments. The proofs already
+     lay before me, but I was far from satisfied. The whole problem
+     passed yet again through my mind that March evening before I placed
+     my mark of approval under the last correction in the book. Even
+     then I had come to no conclusion. About midnight, weary and
+     exhausted, I went to bed and was soon in deep sleep. Then I dreamed
+     the following remarkable dream. A tall, thin priest of the old
+     pre-Christian Nippur, about forty years of age and clad in a simple
+     abba, led me to the treasure chamber of the temple, on its
+     south-east side. He went with me into a small, low-ceiled room
+     without windows, in which there was a large wooden chest, while
+     scraps of agate and lapis-lazuli lay scattered on the floor. Here
+     he addressed me as follows: 'The two fragments which you have
+     published separately upon pages 22 and 26, belong together, are not
+     finger-rings, and their history is as follows. King Kurigalzu
+     (_circa_ 1300 B.C.) once sent to the temple of Bel, among other
+     articles of agate and lapis lazuli, an inscribed votive cylinder of
+     agate. Then we priests suddenly received the command to make for
+     the statue of the god Ninib a pair of earrings of agate. We were in
+     great dismay, since there was no agate as raw material at hand. In
+     order to execute the command there was nothing for us to do but cut
+     the votive cylinder into three parts, thus making three rings, each
+     of which contained a portion of the original inscription. The first
+     two rings served as earrings for the statue of the god; the two
+     fragments which have given you so much trouble are portions of
+     them. If you will put the two together you will have confirmation
+     of my words. But the third ring you have not yet found in the
+     course of your excavations, and you never will find it.' With this,
+     the priest disappeared. I awoke at once and immediately told my
+     wife the dream that I might not forget it. Next morning--Sunday--I
+     examined the fragments once more in the light of these disclosures,
+     and to my astonishment found all the details of the dream precisely
+     verified in so far as the means of verification were in my hands.
+     The original inscription on the votive cylinder read: 'To the god
+     Ninib, son of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel,
+     presented this.'
+
+     "The problem was thus at last solved. I stated in the preface that
+     I had unfortunately discovered too late that the two fragments
+     belonged together, made the corresponding changes in the Table of
+     Contents, pp. 50 and 52, and, it being not possible to transpose
+     the fragments, as the plates were already made, I put in each plate
+     a brief reference to the other. (Cf. Hilprecht, 'The Babylonian
+     Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania,' Series A, Cuneiform
+     Texts, Vol. I., Part I, 'Old Babylonian Inscriptions, chiefly from
+     Nippur.')
+
+"H. V. HILPRECHT."
+
+Upon the priest's statement that the fragments were those of a votive
+cylinder, Professor Hilprecht makes the following comment:--
+
+"There are not many of these votive cylinders. I had seen, all told, up
+to that evening, not more than two. They very much resemble the
+so-called seal cylinders, but usually have no pictorial representations
+upon them, and the inscription is not reversed, not being intended for
+use in sealing, but is written as it is read."
+
+The following transliteration of the inscription, in the Sumerian
+language, will serve to give those of us who are unlearned in cuneiform
+languages an idea of the material which suggested the dream. The
+straight vertical lines represent the cuts by which the stone-cutter
+divided the original cylinder into three sections. The bracketed words
+are entirely lost, and have been supplied by analogy from the many
+similar inscriptions.
+
+    Line 1.    Dingir N    inib du    (mu)      To the god Ninib, child
+     "   2.    dingir      En-        (lil)     of the god Bel
+     "   3.    luga        l-a-ni     (ir)      his lord
+     "   4.    Ku-r        (i- galzu)           Kurigalzu
+     "   5.    pa-         (tesi dingir Enlil)  pontifex of the god Bel
+     "   6.    (in- na-    ba)                  has presented it.
+
+I translate also the following statement which Mrs. Hilprecht kindly
+made at my request.
+
+"I was awakened from sleep by a sigh, immediately thereafter heard a
+spring from the bed, and at the same moment saw Professor Hilprecht
+hurrying into his study. Thence came the cry, 'It is so, it is so.'
+Grasping the situation, I followed him and satisfied myself in the
+midnight hour as to the outcome of his most interesting dream.[218]
+
+"J. C. HILPRECHT."
+
+
+
+At the time Professor Hilprecht told me of this curious dream, which was
+a few weeks after its occurrence, there remained a serious difficulty
+which he was not able to explain. According to the memoranda in our
+possession, the fragments were of different colours, and therefore could
+have scarcely belonged to the same object. The original fragments were
+in Constantinople, and it was with no little interest that I awaited
+Professor Hilprecht's return from the trip which he made thither in the
+summer of 1893. I translate again his own account of what he then
+ascertained.
+
+
+"_November 10th_, 1895.
+
+     "In August 1893, I was sent by the Committee on the Babylonian
+     Expedition to Constantinople, to catalogue and study the objects
+     got from Nippur and preserved there in the Imperial Museum. It was
+     to me a matter of the greatest interest to see for myself the
+     objects which, according to my dream, belonged together, in order
+     to satisfy myself that they had both originally been parts of the
+     same votive cylinder. Halil Bey, the director of the museum, to
+     whom I told my dream, and of whom I asked permission to see the
+     objects, was so interested in the matter, that he at once opened
+     all the cases of the Babylonian section, and requested me to
+     search. Father Scheil, an Assyriologist from Paris, who had
+     examined and arranged the articles excavated by us before me, had
+     not recognised the fact that these fragments belonged together, and
+     consequently I found one fragment in one case, and the other in a
+     case far away from it. As soon as I found the fragments and put
+     them together, the truth of the dream was demonstrated _ad
+     oculos_--they had, in fact, once belonged to one and the same
+     votive cylinder. As it had been originally of finely veined agate,
+     the stone-cutter's saw had accidentally divided the object in such
+     a way that the whitish vein of the stone appeared only upon the one
+     fragment and the larger grey surface upon the other. Thus I was
+     able to explain Dr. Peters's discordant description of the two
+     fragments."
+
+Professor Hilprecht is unable to say what language the old priest used
+in addressing him. He is quite certain that it was not Assyrian, and
+thinks it was either English or German.
+
+There are two especial points of interest in this case, the character of
+the information conveyed, and the dramatic form in which it was put. The
+apparently novel points of information given were:--
+
+    1. That the fragments belonged together.
+    2. That they were fragments of a votive cylinder.
+    3. That the cylinder was presented by King Kurigalzu.
+    4. That it was dedicated to Ninib.
+    5. That it had been made into a pair of earrings.
+
+6. That the "treasure chamber" was located upon the south-east side of
+the temple.
+
+A careful analysis reveals the fact that not one of these items was
+beyond the reach of the processes of associative reasoning which
+Professor Hilprecht daily employs. Among the possible associative
+consequents of the writing upon the one fragment, some of the
+associative consequents of the writing on the other were sub-consciously
+involved; the attraction of these identical elements brings the separate
+pieces into mental juxtaposition, precisely as the pieces of a
+"dissected map" find one another in thought. In waking life the
+dissimilarity of colour inhibited any tendency on the part of the
+associative processes to bring them together, but in sleep this
+difference of colour seems to have been forgotten--there being no
+mention made of it--and the assimilation took place. The second point is
+more curious, but is not inexplicable. For as soon as the fragments were
+brought into juxtaposition mentally, enough of the inscription became
+legible to suggest the original character of the object. This is true
+also of the third and fourth points. The source of the fifth is not so
+clear. Upon examining the originals, Professor Hilprecht felt convinced
+from the size of the hole still to be seen through the fragments that
+they could not have been used as finger-rings, and that they had been
+used as earrings, but the written description which he had before him at
+the time of his dream did not bring these points to view. Still, such
+earrings are by no means uncommon objects. Such a supposition might well
+have occurred to Professor Hilprecht in his waking state and, in view of
+the lack of positive confirmation, it would be rash to ascribe it to any
+supernormal power. The last point is most interesting. When he told me
+this story, Professor Hilprecht remembered that he had heard from Dr.
+John P. Peters, before he had the dream, of the discovery of a room in
+which were remnants of a wooden box, while the floor was strewn with
+fragments of agate and lapis-lazuli. The walls, of course, and ceiling
+have long since perished. The location, however, of the room he did not
+know, and suggested I should write to Dr. Peters and find out whether it
+was correctly given in his dream, and whether Dr. Peters had told him of
+it. Dr. Peters replied that the location given was correct, but, he
+adds, he told Professor Hilprecht all these facts as long ago as 1891,
+and thinks he provided him with a drawing of the room's relation to the
+temple. Of this Professor Hilprecht has no recollection. He thinks it
+probable that Dr. Peters told him orally of the location of the room,
+but feels sure that if any such plan was given him it would now be found
+among his papers. This is a point of no importance, however. We
+certainly cannot regard the location as ascertained by supernormal
+means.
+
+
+IV. C. From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 505.
+
+From Mr. Alfred Cooper, of 9 Henrietta Street, Cavendish Square, W.
+
+[This account was orally confirmed by him to Mr. E. Gurney, June 6th,
+1888. It is written by Mr. Cooper, but attested also by the Duchess of
+Hamilton.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A fortnight before the death of the late Earl of L----, in 1882, I
+called upon the Duke of Hamilton, in Hill Street, to see him
+professionally. After I had finished seeing him we went into the
+drawing-room, where the Duchess was, and the Duke said to me, "Oh,
+Cooper; how is the Earl?"
+
+The Duchess said, "What Earl?" and on my answering, "Lord L----," she
+replied, "That is very odd. I have had a most extraordinary vision. I
+went to bed, but after being in bed a short time, I was not exactly
+asleep, but thought I saw a scene as if from a play before me. The
+actors in it were Lord L----, in a chair, as if in a fit, with a man
+standing over him with a red beard. He was by the side of a bath, over
+which bath a red lamp was distinctly shown."
+
+I then said, "I am attending Lord L---- at present; there is very little
+the matter with him; he is not going to die; he will be all right very
+soon."
+
+Well, he got better for a week and was nearly well, but at the end of
+six or seven days after this I was called to see him suddenly. He had
+inflammation of both lungs.
+
+I called in Sir William Jenner, but in six days he was a dead man. There
+were two male nurses attending on him; one had been taken ill. But when
+I saw the other the dream of the Duchess was exactly represented. He was
+standing near a bath over the Earl and, strange to say, his beard was
+red. There was the bath with the red lamp over it. It is rather rare to
+find a bath with a red lamp over it, and this brought the story to my
+mind.
+
+The vision seen by the Duchess was told two weeks before the death of
+Lord L----. It is a most remarkable thing.
+
+This account, written in 1888, has been revised by the [late] Duke of
+Manchester, father of the Duchess of Hamilton, who heard the vision from
+his daughter on the morning after she had seen it.
+
+(Signed)     MARY HAMILTON.
+             ALFRED COOPER.
+
+     Her Grace had been reading and had just blown out the candle. Her
+     Grace has had many dreams which have come true years after.
+
+ALFRED COOPER.
+
+[The Duchess only knew Lord L---- by sight, and had not heard that he
+was ill. She knew she was not asleep, for she opened her eyes to get rid
+of the vision and, shutting them, saw the same thing again.]
+
+An independent and concordant account has been given to me (F. W. H. M.)
+orally by a gentleman to whom the Duchess related the dream on the
+morning after its occurrence.
+
+
+IV. D. From _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 383. The following
+account, which first appeared in a letter in the _Religio-Philosophical
+Journal_, is from Dr. Bruce, of Micanopy, Fla., U.S.A. The case might be
+called "collective," but for the fact that one of the dreams, though
+vivid and alarming, was probably not so distinctive as was afterwards
+imagined, and, moreover, was possibly dreamt on the night _preceding_
+that on which the tragic event took place.
+
+
+_February 17th, 1884._
+
+     On Thursday, the 27th of December last, I returned from Gainesville
+     (twelve miles from here) to my orange grove, near Micanopy. I have
+     only a small plank house of three rooms at my grove, where I spend
+     most of my time when the grove is being cultivated. There was no
+     one in the house but myself at the time, and being somewhat
+     fatigued with my ride, I retired to my bed very early, probably 6
+     o'clock; and, as I am frequently in the habit of doing, I lit my
+     lamp on a stand by the bed for the purpose of reading. After
+     reading a short time, I began to feel a little drowsy, put out the
+     light, and soon fell asleep. Quite early in the night I was
+     awakened. I could not have been asleep very long, I am sure. I felt
+     as if I had been aroused intentionally, and at first thought some
+     one was breaking into the house. I looked from where I lay into the
+     other two rooms (the doors of both being open), and at once
+     recognised where I was, and that there was no ground for the
+     burglar theory; there being nothing in the house to make it worth a
+     burglar's time to come after.
+
+     I then turned on my side to go to sleep again, and immediately felt
+     a consciousness of a presence in the room, and, singular to state,
+     it was not the consciousness of a live person, but of a spiritual
+     presence. This may provoke a smile, but I can only tell you the
+     facts as they occurred to me. I do not know how to better describe
+     my sensations than by simply stating that I felt a consciousness of
+     a spiritual presence. This may have been a part of the dream, for I
+     felt as if I were dozing off again to sleep; but it was unlike any
+     dream I ever had. I felt also at the same time a strong feeling of
+     superstitious dread, as if something strange and fearful were about
+     to happen. I was soon asleep again, or unconscious, at any rate, to
+     my surroundings. Then I saw two men engaged in a slight scuffle:
+     one fell fatally wounded--the other immediately disappeared. I did
+     not see the gash in the wounded man's throat, but knew that his
+     throat was cut. I did not recognise him, either, as my
+     brother-in-law. I saw him lying with his hands under him, his head
+     turned slightly to the left, his feet close together. I could, from
+     the position in which I stood, see but a small portion of his face;
+     his coat, collar, hair, or something partly obscured it. I looked
+     at him the second time a little closer to see it I could make out
+     who it was. I was aware it was some one I knew, but still could not
+     recognise him. I turned, and then saw my wife sitting not far from
+     him. She told me she could not leave until he was attended to. (I
+     had got a letter a few days previously from my wife, telling me she
+     would leave in a day or two, and was expecting every day a letter
+     or telegram telling me when to meet her at the depôt.) My attention
+     was struck by the surroundings of the dead man. He appeared to be
+     lying on an elevated platform of some kind, surrounded by chairs,
+     benches, and desks, reminding me somewhat of a schoolroom. Outside
+     of the room in which he was lying was a crowd of people, mostly
+     females, some of whom I thought I knew. Here my dream terminated. I
+     awoke again about midnight; got up and went to the door to see if
+     there were any prospect of rain; returned to my bed again, and lay
+     there until nearly daylight before falling asleep again. I thought
+     of my dream, and was strongly impressed by it. All strange,
+     superstitious feelings had passed off.
+
+     It was not until a week or ten days after this that I got a letter
+     from my wife, giving me an account of her brother's death. Her
+     letter, which was written the day after his death, was mis-sent.
+     The account she gave me of his death tallies most remarkably with
+     my dream. Her brother was with a wedding party at the depôt at
+     Markham station, Fauquier Co., Va. He went into a store near by to
+     see a young man who kept a bar-room near the depôt, and with whom
+     he had some words. He turned and left the man, and walked out of
+     the store. The bar-room keeper followed him out, and without
+     further words deliberately cut his throat. It was a most brutal and
+     unprovoked murder. My brother-in-law had on his overcoat, with the
+     collar turned up. The knife went through the collar and clear to
+     the bone. He was carried into the store and laid on the counter,
+     near a desk and show case. He swooned from loss of blood soon after
+     being cut. The cutting occurred early Thursday night, December
+     27th. He did not die, however, until almost daylight, Saturday
+     morning.
+
+     I have not had a complete account of my sister-in-law's dream. She
+     was visiting a young lady, a cousin, in Kentucky. They slept
+     together Friday night, I think, the night of her brother's death.
+     She dreamed of seeing a man with his throat cut, and awoke very
+     much alarmed. She awoke her cousin, and they got up and lighted the
+     lamp and sat up until daylight. That day she received a telegram
+     announcing her brother's death.
+
+     I cannot give you any certain explanation of these dreams. I do not
+     believe that they are due to ordinary causes, but to causes of
+     which science does not at present take cognisance.
+
+WALTER BRUCE.
+
+In reply to inquiries, Dr. Bruce says:--
+
+
+_July 9th, 1884._
+
+     I have never had another dream similar to the one related in the
+     letter. I have at times had dreams that were vivid, or from some
+     cause impressed themselves upon my mind for a time, such as any one
+     would be likely to have. I cannot call to mind, though, any of
+     special importance, or with any bearing upon the dream in question.
+
+     I did not mention the dream to any one before receiving the letter
+     confirming it. I live in rather a retired place in the country, and
+     if I saw any one during that time to whom I would care to relate
+     the dream, it did not occur to me to do so.
+
+     You ask me how my wife knew of the circumstances of her brother's
+     death. She was visiting her relatives in Va. at the time, and was
+     present when her brother died.
+
+The following account is from Dr. Bruce's sister-in-law, Mrs.
+Stubbing:--
+
+
+_March 28th, 1885._
+
+     Whilst in Kentucky on a visit in the year 1883, I had a dream, in
+     which I saw two persons--one with his throat cut. I could not tell
+     who it was, though I knew it was somebody that I knew, and as soon
+     as I heard of my brother's death, I said at once that I knew it was
+     he that I had seen murdered in my dream; and though I did not hear
+     how my brother died, I told my cousin, whom I was staying with,
+     that I knew he had been murdered. This dream took place on Thursday
+     or Friday night, I do not remember which. I saw the exact spot
+     where he was murdered, and just as it happened.
+
+ANNIE S. STUBBING.
+
+     The Thursday and Friday night mentioned in this account are
+     December 26th and 27th [27th and 28th], 1883. It was upon the
+     Thursday night my dream occurred.
+
+WALTER BRUCE.
+
+In reply to questions, Mrs. Stubbing says:--
+
+     Yes, I saw one man cut the other. The wound was told to me to be
+     just like what I had seen in my dream. I received a telegram
+     announcing the death of my brother on Saturday morning. No, I never
+     had any such dream as that before.
+
+IV. E. I quote the following case from _Phantasms of the Living_, vol.
+i. p. 425. The account was written by Mrs. T---- in 1883.
+
+     On November 18th, 1863, I was living near Adelaide, and not long
+     recovered from a severe illness at the birth of an infant, who was
+     then five months old. My husband had also suffered from neuralgia,
+     and had gone to stay with friends at the seaside for the benefit of
+     bathing. One night during his absence the child woke me about
+     midnight; having hushed him off to sleep, I said, "Now, sir, I hope
+     you will let me rest!" I lay down, and instantly became conscious
+     of two figures standing at the door of my room. One, M. N. (these
+     are not the real initials), whom I recognised at once, was that of
+     a former lover, whose misconduct and neglect had compelled me to
+     renounce him. Of this I am sure, that if ever I saw him in my life,
+     it was then. I was not in the least frightened; but said to myself,
+     as it were, "You never used to wear that kind of waistcoat." The
+     door close to which he stood was in a deep recess close to the
+     fireplace, for there was no grate; we burnt logs only. In that
+     recess stood a man in a tweed suit. I saw the whole figure
+     distinctly, but not the face, and for this reason: on the edge of
+     the mantelshelf always stood a morocco leather medicine chest,
+     which concealed the face from me. (On this being stated to our
+     friends, the Singletons, they asked to go into the room and judge
+     for themselves. They expressed themselves satisfied that would be
+     the case to any one on the bed where I was.) I had an impression
+     that this other was a cousin of M. N.'s, who had been the means of
+     leading him astray while in the North of England. I never saw him
+     in my life; he died in India.
+
+     M. N. was in deep mourning; he had a look of unutterable sorrow
+     upon his face, and was deadly pale. He never opened his lips, but I
+     read his heart as if it were an open book, and it said, "My father
+     is dead, and I have come into his property." I answered, "How much
+     you have grown like your father!" Then in a moment, _without
+     appearing to walk_, he stood at the foot of the child's cot, and I
+     saw _distinctly_ the blueness of his eyes as he gazed on my boy,
+     and then raised them to Heaven as if in prayer.
+
+     All vanished. I looked round and remarked a trivial circumstance,
+     viz., that the brass handles of my chest of drawers had been rubbed
+     very bright. Not till then was I conscious of having seen a spirit,
+     but a feeling of awe (not fear) came over me, and I prayed to be
+     kept from harm, although there was no reason to dread it. I slept
+     tranquilly, and in the morning I went across to the parsonage and
+     told the clergyman's wife what I had seen. She, of course, thought
+     it was merely a dream. But no--if it were a dream should I not have
+     seen him _as I had known him_, a young man of twenty-two, without
+     beard or whiskers? But there was all the difference that sixteen
+     years would make in a man's aspect.
+
+     On Saturday my husband returned, and my brother having ridden out
+     to see us on Sunday afternoon, I told them both my vision as we sat
+     together on the verandah. They treated it so lightly that I
+     determined to write it down in my diary and see if the news were
+     verified. And from that diary I am now quoting. Also I mentioned it
+     to at least twelve or fourteen other people, and bid them await the
+     result.
+
+     And surely enough, at the end of several weeks, my sister-in-law
+     wrote that M. N.'s father died at C---- Common on November 18th,
+     1863, which exactly tallied with the date of the vision. He left
+     Ł45,000 to be divided between his son and daughter, but the son has
+     never been found.
+
+     Many people in Adelaide heard the story before the confirmation
+     came, and I wrote and told M. N.'s mother. She was much distressed
+     about it, fearing he was unhappy. She is now dead. My husband was
+     profoundly struck when he saw my diary corresponding _exactly_ to
+     the news in the letter I had that moment received in his presence.
+
+Gurney adds the following note:--
+
+     Mr. T. has confirmed to us the accuracy of this narrative, and Mrs.
+     T. has shown to one of us a memorandum of the appearance of two
+     figures, under date November 18th, in her diary of the year 1863,
+     and a newspaper obituary confirms this as the date of the death. We
+     learn from a gentleman who is a near relative of M. N.'s, that M.
+     N., though long lost sight of, was afterwards heard of, and
+     outlived his father.
+
+I should not now take it for granted (as we did at the time when
+_Phantasms of the Living_ was compiled) that the agent here "can
+apparently only have been the dying man." I think it possible, in the
+light of our now somewhat fuller knowledge, that M. N.'s spirit was
+aware of his father's death,--even though possibly M. N.'s supraliminal
+self may not have heard of it;--so that the invading presence in this
+case may have been the discarded lover himself,--dreaming on his own
+account at a distance from Mrs. T. The second figure I regard as having
+been an object in M. N.'s dream;--symbolical of his own alienation from
+Mrs. T. All this sounds fanciful; but I may remark here (as often
+elsewhere), that I think that we gain little by attempting to enforce
+our own ideas of simplicity upon narratives of this bizarre type.
+
+
+IV. F. From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 341.
+
+Communicated by Fräulein Schneller, sister-in-law of the percipient, and
+known to F. W. H. M., January 1890.
+
+
+DOBER UND PAUSE, SCHLESIEN, _December 12th, 1889_.
+
+     About a year ago there died in a neighbouring village a brewer
+     called Wünscher, with whom I stood in friendly relations. His death
+     ensued after a short illness, and as I seldom had an opportunity of
+     visiting him, I knew nothing of his illness nor of his death. On
+     the day of his death I went to bed at nine o'clock, tired with the
+     labours which my calling as a farmer demands of me. Here I must
+     observe that my diet is of a frugal kind; beer and wine are rare
+     things in my house, and water, as usual, had been my drink that
+     night. Being of a very healthy constitution, I fell asleep as soon
+     as I lay down. In my dream I heard the deceased call out with a
+     loud voice, "Boy, make haste and give me my boots." This awoke me,
+     and I noticed that, for the sake of our child, my wife had left the
+     light burning. I pondered with pleasure over my dream, thinking in
+     my mind how Wünscher, who was a good-natured, humorous man, would
+     laugh when I told him of this dream. Still thinking on it, I hear
+     Wünscher's voice scolding outside, just under my window. I sit up
+     in my bed at once and listen, but cannot understand his words. What
+     can the brewer want? I thought, and I know for certain that I was
+     much vexed with him, that he should make a disturbance in the
+     night, as I felt convinced that his affairs might surely have
+     waited till the morrow. Suddenly he comes into the room from behind
+     the linen press, steps with long strides past the bed of my wife
+     and the child's bed; wildly gesticulating with his arms all the
+     time, as his habit was, he called out, "What do you say to this,
+     Herr Oberamtmann? This afternoon at five o'clock I have died."
+     Startled by this information, I exclaim, "Oh, that is not true!" He
+     replied: "Truly, as I tell you; and, what do you think? They want
+     to bury me already on Tuesday afternoon at two o'clock,"
+     accentuating his assertions all the while by his gesticulations.
+     During this long speech of my visitor I examined myself as to
+     whether I was really awake and not dreaming.
+
+     I asked myself: Is this a hallucination? Is my mind in full
+     possession of its faculties? Yes, there is the light, there the
+     jug, this is the mirror, and this the brewer; and I came to the
+     conclusion: I am awake. Then the thought occurred to me, What will
+     my wife think if she awakes and sees the brewer in our bedroom? In
+     this fear of her waking up I turn round to my wife, and to my great
+     relief I see from her face, which is turned towards me, that she is
+     still asleep; but she looks very pale. I say to the brewer, "Herr
+     Wünscher, we will speak softly, so that my wife may not wake up, it
+     would be very disagreeable to her to find you here." To which
+     Wünscher answered in a lower and calmer tone: "Don't be afraid, I
+     will do no harm to your wife." Things do happen indeed for which we
+     find no explanation--I thought to myself, and said to Wünscher: "If
+     this be true, that you have died, I am sincerely sorry for it; I
+     will look after your children." Wünscher stepped towards me,
+     stretched out his arms and moved his lips as though he would
+     embrace me; therefore I said in a threatening tone, and looking
+     steadfastly at him with a frowning brow: "Don't come so near, it is
+     disagreeable to me," and lifted my right arm to ward him off, but
+     before my arm reached him the apparition had vanished. My first
+     look was to my wife to see if she were still asleep. She was. I got
+     up and looked at my watch, it was seven minutes past twelve. My
+     wife woke up and asked me: "To whom did you speak so loud just
+     now?" "Have you understood anything?" I said. "No," she answered,
+     and went to sleep again.
+
+     I impart this experience to the Society for Psychical Research, in
+     the belief that it may serve as a new proof for the real existence
+     of telepathy. I must further remark that the brewer _had_ died that
+     afternoon at five o'clock, and was buried on the following Tuesday
+     at two.--With great respect,
+
+KARL DIGNOWTTY
+(Landed Proprietor).
+
+The usual time for burial in Germany, adds Fräulein Schneller, is three
+days after death. This time may be prolonged, however, on application.
+There are no special _hours_ fixed.
+
+In conversation Fräulein S. described her brother-in-law as a man of
+strong practical sense and of extremely active habits.
+
+We have received the "Sterbeurkunde" from the "Standesbeamte"
+Siegismund, Kreis Sagan, certifying that Karl Wünscher died Saturday,
+September 15th, 1888, at 4.30 P.M., and was buried Tuesday, September
+18th, 1888, at 2 P.M.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Herr Dignowity writes again, January 18th, 1890:--
+
+     Frau Wünscher told me that the time of the burial was settled in
+     the death-room immediately after Wünscher's death, because
+     relations at a distance had to be summoned by telegram. Wünscher
+     had suffered from inflammation of the lungs, which ended in spasm
+     of the heart. During his illness his thoughts had been much
+     occupied with me, and he often wondered what I should say if I knew
+     how ill he was.
+
+Finally, Frau Dignowity (born Schneller) writes from Pause, January
+18th, 1890:--
+
+     I confirm that my husband told me on the morning of September 16th,
+     1888, that the brewer Wünscher had given him intimation of his
+     death.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+TO
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+V.A.[219] The principal inorganic objects alleged to have elicited novel
+sensations are running water, metals, crystals and magnets;--including
+under this last heading the magnetism of the earth, as claimed to be
+felt differently by sleepers according as they lie in the north-south or
+in the east-west positions.
+
+(1) The faculty of finding _running water_ has the interest of being the
+first subliminal faculty which has been so habitually utilised for
+public ends as to form for its possessors a recognised and lucrative
+occupation.
+
+An exhaustive and impartial survey of the existing evidence for the
+faculty of "dowsing" is given in Professor W. F. Barrett's two articles
+"On the so-called Divining Rod" in the _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiii.
+pp. 2-282, and vol. xv. pp. 130-383.
+
+From this it seems clear that this power of discovery is genuine, and is
+not dependent on the dowser's conscious knowledge or observation. It
+forms a subliminal uprush; but whether it is akin to _genius_, as being
+a subconscious manipulation of facts accessible through normal sensory
+channels, or to _heterćsthesia_ (as resting on a specific sensibility to
+the proximity of running water), is a question which will be variously
+decided in each special case. The dowser, I should add, is not
+hypnotised before he finds the water. But (as Professor Barrett has
+shown) he is often thrown, presumably by self-suggestion, into a state
+much resembling light hypnotic trance. The perceptivity (we may say) of
+central organs, in an unfamiliar direction, is stimulated by
+concentrated attention, involving a certain disturbance or abeyance of
+perceptivity in other directions.
+
+(2) I next take the case of metallćsthesia,--that alleged reaction to
+special metals which has often been asserted both in hypnotic and in
+hysterical cases. As a definite instance I will take the statement made
+by certain physicians attending Louis Vivé,[220] that while they
+supported him during a hysterical attack a gold ring on the finger of
+one of them touched him for some time and left a red mark, as of a burn,
+of whose origin the patient knew nothing. It is further alleged--and
+this is a quite separate point, although often confused with the
+first--that gold is distinguished by some subjects under conditions
+where no degree of sensitiveness to weight or temperature could have
+shown them that gold was near.
+
+Now, as to the first point, _e.g._ the Louis Vivé incident, I can
+readily believe that the touch of gold, unknown to the subject's
+supraliminal consciousness, may produce a redness, subsequent pain, etc.
+All that is needed for this is a capricious self-suggestion, like any
+other hysterical idea. This self-suggestion might remain completely
+unknown to the waking self, which might be puzzled as to the cause of
+the redness and pain. The second claim, however, involves much more than
+this. If gold is recognised through a covering, for instance, or heated
+to the same point as other metals, so that no sensation of weight or
+temperature can help observation, this might possibly be by virtue of
+some sensibility more resembling the attraction of low organisms to
+specific substances whose chemical action on them we cannot determine,
+or to particular rays in the spectrum. I am not convinced that this has
+yet been proved; but I should not regard it as _a priori_ impossible.
+
+Medicamentous substances have also been claimed by many different
+hypnotists as exerting from a little distance, or when in sealed tubes,
+specific influences on patients. The phenomenon is of the same nature as
+the alleged specific influences of metals,--all being very possibly
+explicable as the mere freak of self-suggestion.
+
+(3) Considering in the next place the alleged sensibility of certain
+persons to crystals and magnets,--known to be absolutely inert in
+relation to ordinary men,--we should note the alleged connection between
+the perception of magnets and that of running water.
+
+Some experiments intended to test the reality of the "magnetic sense,"
+and especially of the so-called "magnetic light"--luminous appearances
+described by Baron Reichenbach as being seen by his sensitives in the
+neighbourhood of magnets--were carried out by a Committee of the S.P.R.,
+in 1883. After careful and repeated trials with forty-five "subjects" of
+both sexes and of ages between sixteen and sixty, only three of these
+professed to see luminous appearances.
+
+The value of these experiments as evidence of a magnetic sense of
+course depends primarily on whether the subjects had any means, direct
+or indirect, of knowing when the current was made or broken. The
+precautions taken to avoid this and the other conditions of the
+experiments are described in detail in the report of them in the
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. i. pp. 230-37. See also a further note by the
+Chairman of the Committee, Professor W. F. Barrett, vol. ii. pp. 56-60.
+
+(4) And next as to the heterćsthesić alleged to be evoked by dead
+organic substances, or by living organisms. We may begin by observing
+that some of our senses, at any rate, form the subjective expression of
+certain chemical reactions. But many kinds of chemical reactions go on
+in us besides those which, for example, form the basis of our sense of
+taste. And some persons are much more affected than others by certain
+special reactions, which from a purely chemical point of view may or may
+not be precisely the same for all. Some persons have a specific
+sensibility to certain foods, or to certain drugs;--the presence of
+which their stomach detects, and to which it responds with extraordinary
+delicacy. Now, if it were an important object to discover the presence
+of a certain drug, such a sensibility would be regarded as a precious
+gift, and the discovery might be quite as valuable when made by the
+stomach as it would have been if made by the nose. These are nascent
+heterćsthesić, which, however, are not fostered either by natural
+selection or by human care.
+
+Of similar type are the specific sensibilities to the presence of
+certain plants or animals,--familiar in certain cases of "rose-asthma,"
+"horse-asthma," and discomfort felt if a cat is in the room. These
+feelings have many causes. At one end there is ordinary mechanical
+irritation by solid particles. At the other end of the scale there is,
+of course, mere self-suggestion. But between the two there seems to be a
+kind of sensibility which is not purely self-suggestive, and not exactly
+olfactory, but resembles rather the instincts by which insects or other
+animals discern each other's neighbourhood.
+
+(5) It is perhaps through some such power of discrimination that effects
+are produced on sensitive subjects by "mesmerised objects,"--assuming,
+of course, that sufficient care has been taken to avoid their
+discovering by ordinary means that the objects have been specially
+manipulated in any way. See some experiments recorded in the
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. i. pp. 260-262, and a description of
+Esdaile's experiments with mesmerised water in vol. iii. p. 409; also
+cases in the _Zoist_, _e.g._ vol. v. p. 129, and vol. v. p. 99.
+
+(6) And now I pass on to medical clairvoyance, or the power of
+diagnosing the present or past state of a living organism either from
+actual contact or even in the absence of the invalid, and from contact
+with some object which he has himself touched.
+
+The early mesmerists, _e.g._ Puységur, Pététin, Despine, and Teste, all
+had the utmost faith in the faculty of their subjects to see their own
+disease and prescribe the right remedy. The same attitude of mind can be
+traced all through the _Zoist_. Fahnestock was perhaps the first to
+point out the ambiguity of this alleged introvision. "It is well known
+to me," he says, "that when a resolution is taken, a belief cherished,
+or a determination formed by persons while in the somnambulic state,
+that, when they awake, although they may know nothing about it or
+relative to it, they always do what has been so resolved or determined
+upon at the time appointed or specified" (_Statuvolism_, p. 203), and he
+quotes experiments to prove his point. With the knowledge we now possess
+of the extraordinary power of self-suggestion in producing all kinds of
+bodily symptoms, it is obvious that these cases cannot be adduced as
+evidence of anything more. A typical instance of one of these early
+observations is to be found in the _Zoist_, vol. x. p. 347. See also
+Puységur, _Recherches sur l'Homme dans le Somnambulisme_ (Paris, 1811),
+pp. 140 _et seq._ and 214 _et seq._; Pététin, _Electricité Animale_
+(Paris, 1808); Despine, _Observations de Médecine Pratique_
+(1838)--"Estelle nous a indiqué tous les soirs, dans sa crise, ce qu'il
+y avait ŕ faire pour le lendemain, tant pour le régime alimentaire que
+pour les moyens médicamentaires" (p. 38).
+
+
+V. B. Some of the most striking cases of moral reforms produced by
+hypnotic suggestion are those recorded by Dr. Auguste Voisin. For
+instance:--
+
+     In the summer of 1884, there was at the Salpętričre a young woman
+     of a deplorable type.[221] Jeanne Sch---- was a criminal lunatic,
+     filthy in habits, violent in demeanour, and with a lifelong
+     history, of impurity and theft. M. Voisin, who was one of the
+     physicians on the staff, undertook to hypnotise her on May 31st, at
+     a time when she could only be kept quiet by the strait jacket and
+     _bonnet d'irrigation_, or perpetual cold douche to the head. She
+     would not--indeed, she could not--look steadily at the operator,
+     but raved and spat at him. M. Voisin kept his face close to hers,
+     and followed her eyes wherever she moved them. In about ten minutes
+     a stertorous sleep ensued, and in five minutes more she passed into
+     a sleep-waking state, and began to talk incoherently. The process
+     was repeated on many days, and gradually she became sane when in
+     the trance, though she still raved when awake. Gradually, too, she
+     became able to obey in waking hours commands impressed on her in
+     the trance--first trivial orders (to sweep the room and so forth),
+     then orders involving a marked change of behaviour. Nay more; in
+     the hypnotic state she voluntarily expressed repentance for her
+     past life, made a confession which involved more evil than the
+     police were cognisant of (though it agreed with facts otherwise
+     known), and finally of her own impulse made good resolves for the
+     future. Two years later, M. Voisin wrote to me (July 31st, 1886)
+     that she was then a nurse in a Paris hospital, and that her conduct
+     was irreproachable. It appeared, then, that this poor woman, whose
+     history since the age of thirteen had been one of reckless folly
+     and vice, had become capable of the steady, self-controlled work of
+     a nurse at a hospital, the reformed character having first
+     manifested itself in the hypnotic state, partly in obedience to
+     suggestion, and partly as the natural result of the
+     tranquillisation of morbid passions.
+
+     M. Dufour, the medical head of another asylum,[222] has adopted
+     hypnotic suggestion as a regular element in his treatment. "Dčs ŕ
+     présent," he says, "notre opinion est faite: sans crainte de nous
+     tromper, nous affirmons que l'hypnotisme peut rendre service dans
+     le traitement des maladies mentales." As was to be expected, he
+     finds that only a small proportion of lunatics are hypnotisable;
+     but the effect produced on these, whether by entrancement or
+     suggestion, is uniformly good. His best subject is a depraved young
+     man, who after many convictions for crimes (including attempted
+     murder) has become a violent lunatic. "T.," says Dr. Dufour, "a été
+     un assez mauvais sujet. Nous n'avons plus ŕ parler au présent,
+     tellement ses sentiments moraux ont été améliorés par
+     l'hypnotisme." This change and amelioration of character (over and
+     above the simple recovery of sanity) has been a marked feature in
+     some of Dr. Voisin's cases as well.
+
+See also a case given by Dr. Voisin in the _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, vol.
+iii., 1889, p. 130.
+
+
+V. C. The subject of these experiments in telepathic hypnotisation was
+Professor Pierre Janet's well-known subject, Madame B. The experiments
+were carried out with her at Havre, by Professer Janet and Dr. Gibert, a
+leading physician there, and described in the _Bulletins de la Société
+de Psychologie Physiologique_, Tome I., p. 24, and in the _Revue
+Philosophique_, August 1886.
+
+I give the following extract from my own notes of experiments, April
+20th to 24th, 1886, taken at the time in conjunction with Dr. A. T.
+Myers, and forming the bulk of a paper presented to the Société de
+Psychologie Physiologique on May 24th (also published in _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. iv. pp. 131-37.)
+
+     In the evening (22nd) we all dined at M. Gibert's, and in the
+     evening M. Gibert made another attempt to put her to sleep at a
+     distance from his house in the Rue Séry--she being at the Pavillon,
+     Rue de la Ferme--and to bring her to his house by an effort of
+     will. At 8.55 he retired to his study, and MM. Ochorowicz,
+     Marillier, Janet, and A. T. Myers went to the Pavilion, and waited
+     outside in the street, out of sight of the house. At 9.22 Dr. Myers
+     observed Madame B. coming half-way out of the garden-gate, and
+     again retreating. Those who saw her more closely observed that she
+     was plainly in the somnambulic state, and was wandering about and
+     muttering. At 9.25 she came out (with eyes persistently closed, so
+     far as could be seen), walked quickly past MM. Janet and Marillier,
+     without noticing them, and made for M. Gibert's house, though not
+     by the usual or shortest route. (It appeared afterwards that the
+     bonne had seen her go into the _salon_ at 8.45, and issue thence
+     asleep at 9.15; had not looked in between those times.[223]) She
+     avoided lamp-posts, vehicles, etc., but crossed and recrossed the
+     street repeatedly. No one went in front of her or spoke to her.
+     After eight or ten minutes she grew much more uncertain in gait,
+     and paused as though she would fall. Dr. Myers noted the moment in
+     the Rue Faure; it was 9.35. At about 9.40 she grew bolder, and at
+     9.45 reached the street in front of M. Gibert's house. There she
+     met him, but did not notice him, and walked into his house, where
+     she rushed hurriedly from room to room on the ground-floor. M.
+     Gibert had to take her hand before she recognised him. She then
+     grew calm.
+
+     M. Gibert said that from 8.55 to 9.20 he thought intently about
+     her, from 9.20 to 9.35 he thought more feebly; at 9.35 he gave the
+     experiment up, and began to play billiards; but in a few minutes
+     began to will her again. It appeared that his visit to the
+     billiard-room had coincided with her hesitation and stumbling in
+     the street. But this coincidence may of course have been
+     accidental....
+
+Out of a series of twenty-five similar experiments nineteen were
+successful. The experiments were made at different times in the day and
+at varying intervals, in order to avoid the effects of expectancy in the
+subject.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+TO
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+VI. A. This case is taken from _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p.
+94, having been contributed by Colonel Bigge, of 2 Morpeth Terrace,
+S.W., who took the account out of a sealed envelope, in Gurney's
+presence, for the first time since it was written on the day of the
+occurrence.
+
+     An account of a circumstance which occurred to me when quartered at
+     Templemore, Co. Tipperary, on 20th February 1847.
+
+     This afternoon, about 3 o'clock P.M., I was walking from my
+     quarters towards the mess-room to put some letters into the
+     letter-box, when I distinctly saw Lieut.-Colonel Reed, 70th
+     Regiment, walking from the corner of the range of buildings
+     occupied by the officers towards the mess-room door; and I saw him
+     go into the passage. He was dressed in a brown shooting-jacket,
+     with grey summer regulation tweed trousers, and had a fishing-rod
+     and a landing-net in his hand. Although at the time I saw him he
+     was about 15 or 20 yards from me, and although anxious to speak to
+     him at the moment, I did not do so, but followed him into the
+     passage and turned into the ante-room on the left-hand side, where
+     I expected to find him. On opening the door, to my great surprise,
+     he was not there; the only person in the room was Quartermaster
+     Nolan, 70th Regiment, and I immediately asked him if he had seen
+     the colonel, and he replied he had not; upon which I said, "I
+     suppose he has gone upstairs," and I immediately left the room.
+     Thinking he might have gone upstairs to one of the officers' rooms,
+     I listened at the bottom of the stairs and then went up to the
+     first landing-place; but not hearing anything I went downstairs
+     again and tried to open the bedroom door, which is opposite to the
+     ante-room, thinking he might have gone there; but I found the door
+     locked, as it usually is in the middle of the day. I was very much
+     surprised at not finding the colonel, and I walked into the
+     barrack-yard and joined Lieutenant Caulfield, 66th Regiment, who
+     was walking there; and I told the story to him, and particularly
+     described the dress in which I had seen the colonel. We walked up
+     and down the barrack-yard talking about it for about ten minutes,
+     when, to my great surprise, never having kept my eye from the door
+     leading to the mess-room (there is only one outlet from it), I saw
+     the colonel walk into the barracks through the gate--which is in
+     the opposite direction--accompanied by Ensign Willington, 70th
+     Regiment, in precisely the same dress in which I had seen him, and
+     with a fishing-rod and a landing-net in his hand. Lieutenant
+     Caulfield and I immediately walked to them, and we were joined by
+     Lieut.-Colonel Goldie, 66th Regiment, and Captain Hartford, and I
+     asked Colonel Reed if he had not gone into the mess-room about ten
+     minutes before. He replied that he certainly had not, for that he
+     had been out fishing for more than two hours at some ponds about a
+     mile from the barracks, and that he had not been near the mess-room
+     at all since the morning.
+
+     At the time I saw Colonel Reed going into the mess-room I was not
+     aware that he had gone out fishing--a very unusual thing to do at
+     this time of the year; neither had I seen him before in the dress I
+     have described during that day. I had seen him in uniform in the
+     morning at parade, but not afterwards at all until 3
+     o'clock--having been engaged in my room writing letters, and upon
+     other business. My eyesight being very good, and the colonel's
+     figure and general appearance somewhat remarkable, it is morally
+     impossible that I could have mistaken any other person in the world
+     for him. That I _did_ see him I shall continue to believe until the
+     last day of my existence.
+
+WILLIAM MATTHEW BIGGE,
+Major, 70th Regiment.
+
+     [On July 17th, 1885, after Colonel Bigge had described the
+     occurrence but before the account was taken from the envelope and
+     read, he dictated the following remarks to Gurney:--]
+
+     When Colonel R. got off the car about a couple of hours afterwards,
+     Colonel Goldie and other officers said to me, "Why, that's the very
+     dress you described." They had not known where he was or how he was
+     engaged. The month, February, was a most unlikely one to be fishing
+     in. Colonel Reed was much alarmed when told what I had seen.
+
+     The quartermaster, sitting at the window, would have been bound to
+     see a real figure; he denied having seen anything.
+
+     I have never had the slightest hallucination of the senses on any
+     other occasion.
+
+     [It will be seen that these recent remarks exhibit two slips of
+     memory. It is quite unimportant whether Colonel Reed was seen
+     walking in at the gate or getting off a car. But in making the
+     interval between the vision and the return two hours instead of ten
+     minutes, the later account unduly diminishes the force of the case.
+     If there is any justification at all for the provisional hypothesis
+     that the sense of impending arrival is a condition favourable for
+     the emission of a telepathic influence, it is of importance that,
+     at the time when the phantasmal form was seen, Colonel Reed was not
+     busy with his fishing, but was rapidly approaching his destination;
+     for thus the incident, at any rate, gets the benefit of analogy
+     with other cases.]
+
+
+VI. B. From the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 129. The case is recorded
+by the Misses H. M. and L. Bourne.
+
+Additional evidence of the hallucinatory character of the figure seen is
+afforded by the details having been more clearly discernible than those
+of a real figure at the same distance would have been, and also by the
+second appearance, where the percipient had the impression of being
+transported to a different scene.
+
+Miss L. Bourne writes:--
+
+     On February 5th, 1887, my father, sister, and I went out hunting.
+     About the middle of the day my sister and I decided to return home
+     with the coachman, while my father went on. Somebody came and spoke
+     to us, and delayed us for a few moments. As we were turning to go
+     home, we distinctly saw my father, waving his hat to us and signing
+     us to follow him. He was on the side of a small hill, and there was
+     a dip between him and us. My sister, the coachman, and myself all
+     recognised my father, and also the horse. The horse looked so dirty
+     and shaken that the coachman remarked he thought there had been a
+     nasty accident. As my father waved his hat I clearly saw the
+     Lincoln and Bennett mark inside, though from the distance we were
+     apart it ought to have been utterly impossible for me to have seen
+     it. At the time I mentioned seeing the mark in the hat, though the
+     strangeness of seeing it did not strike me till afterwards.
+
+     Fearing an accident, we hurried down the hill. From the nature of
+     the ground we had to lose sight of my father, but it took us very
+     few seconds to reach the place where we had seen him. When we got
+     there, there was no sign of him anywhere, nor could we see anyone
+     in sight at all. We rode about for some time looking for him, but
+     could not see or hear anything of him. We all reached home within a
+     quarter of an hour of each other. My father then told us he had
+     never been in the field, nor near the field, in which we thought we
+     saw him, the whole of that day. He had never waved to us, and had
+     met with no accident.
+
+     My father was riding the only white horse that was out that day.
+
+LOUISA BOURNE.
+H. M. Bourne.
+
+The second signature was added later, with the words: "This was written
+by my sister and me together."
+
+Miss H. M. Bourne enclosed the above in the following letter to Mrs.
+Dent, to whom we are indebted for the case:--
+
+
+WESTON SUBEDGE, BROADWAY, WORCESTERSHIRE, _May 21st, 1891_.
+
+     MY DEAR MRS. DENT,--Louisa has asked me send you the enclosed
+     account of the impression she, the coachman, and I had of seeing
+     papa on Paddy in the hunting-field. It was on the 5th February 1887
+     it happened, and in March the same year, when I was out walking
+     alone, I thought I saw papa and Paddy stop at a little plantation
+     of his close to, and look at the wall, which had fallen in [in] one
+     part. He then appeared to ride a few yards towards me, but
+     afterwards turned round and went back past the plantation and out
+     of sight. When I went in I asked him if he had not seen me, and why
+     he turned back, when it transpired he had not been past that
+     plantation all day, but had ridden home another way. He said it
+     must have been some one else on a white horse, and asked where I
+     was when I saw him, and then, not before, it dawned on me that it
+     was utterly impossible to see either plantation or wall from where
+     I was. Since then I have often been along the same road, and stood,
+     and looked, and wondered how it was I so distinctly saw the broken
+     wall and papa on the white horse; a turn in the road makes my
+     having really done so quite impossible. I am sorry I cannot give
+     you the exact date of this: I know it was in March 1887, but cannot
+     remember the day, except that it was _not_ on the 5th. The other
+     "experience" is, I always think, far more interesting, as having
+     been seen by three, and also from the fact that Paddy was the only
+     white or grey horse in the hunting-field that day; so that
+     unbelievers could not say it was some one else on a white horse
+     that we had mistaken....
+
+NINA M. BOURNE.
+
+Mrs. Sidgwick writes:--
+
+
+_February 25th, 1892._
+
+     I saw Miss H. Bourne and her father this afternoon. Miss Bourne
+     told me the stories of her seeing her father, first with her
+     sister, and later by herself, and signed the account which she and
+     her sister had, she says, made out together about it. The groom who
+     saw the figure at the same time has since been dismissed, and
+     cannot be asked for his evidence. Canon Bourne remembers hearing of
+     the matter the day it happened. The groom rode up to the ladies as
+     they were looking, and said: "The Canon is beckoning, Miss, and I
+     think you had better go to him; his horse looks as if he had had a
+     fall" (that is, muddy). The figure was beckoning to them with their
+     father's usual (and peculiar) gesture. He is a heavy man, and his
+     white horse, adapted to carry weight, was quite unlike any other
+     horse in the neighbourhood. Every one agrees as to the
+     impossibility of mistaking the horse. The horses of the
+     neighbourhood were well known to the neighbourhood in general and
+     to the Miss Bournes in particular, as they were at that time
+     constantly out with the hounds. The incident seems quite
+     unaccountable.
+
+
+VI. C. From _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 214. We received the
+first account of this case--the percipient's evidence--through the
+kindness of Mrs. Martin, of Ham Court, Upton-on-Severn, Worcester.
+
+
+ANTONY, TORPOINT, _December 14th, 1882_.
+
+     Helen Alexander (maid to Lady Waldegrave) was lying here very ill
+     with typhoid fever, and was attended by me. I was standing at the
+     table by her bedside, pouring out her medicine, at about 4 o'clock
+     in the morning of the 4th October 1880. I heard the call-bell ring
+     (this had been heard twice before during the night in that same
+     week), and was attracted by the door of the room opening, and by
+     seeing a person entering the room whom I instantly felt to be the
+     mother of the sick woman. She had a brass candlestick in her hand,
+     a red shawl over her shoulders, and a flannel petticoat on which
+     had a hole in the front. I looked at her as much as to say, "I am
+     glad you have come," but the woman looked at me sternly, as much as
+     to say, "Why wasn't I sent for before?" I gave the medicine to
+     Helen Alexander, and then turned round to speak to the vision, but
+     no one was there. She had gone. She was a short, dark person, and
+     very stout. At about 6 o'clock that morning Helen Alexander died.
+     Two days after her parents and a sister came to Antony, and arrived
+     between 1 and 2 o'clock in the morning; I and another maid let them
+     in, and it gave me a great turn when I saw the living likeness of
+     the vision I had seen two nights before. I told the sister about
+     the vision, and she said that the description of the dress exactly
+     answered to her mother's, and that they had brass candlesticks at
+     home exactly like the one described. There was not the slightest
+     resemblance between the mother and daughter.
+
+FRANCES REDDELL.
+
+This at first sight might be taken for a mere delusion of an excitable
+or over-tired servant, modified and exaggerated by the subsequent sight
+of the real mother. If such a case is to have evidential force, we must
+ascertain beyond doubt that the description of the experience was given
+in detail before any knowledge of the reality can have affected the
+percipient's memory or imagination. This necessary corroboration has
+been kindly supplied by Mrs. Pole-Carew, of Antony, Torpoint, Devonport.
+
+
+_December 31st, 1883._
+
+     In October, 1880, Lord and Lady Waldegrave came with their Scotch
+     maid, Helen Alexander, to stay with us. [The account then describes
+     how Helen was discovered to have caught typhoid fever.] She did not
+     seem to be very ill in spite of it, and as there seemed no fear of
+     danger, and Lord and Lady Waldegrave had to go a long journey the
+     following day (Thursday), they decided to leave her, as they were
+     advised to do, under their friend's care.
+
+     The illness ran its usual course, and she seemed to be going on
+     perfectly well till the Sunday week following, when the doctor told
+     me that the fever had left her, but the state of weakness which had
+     supervened was such as to make him extremely anxious. I immediately
+     engaged a regular nurse, greatly against the wish of Reddell, my
+     maid, who had been her chief nurse all through the illness, and who
+     was quite devoted to her. However, as the nurse could not
+     conveniently come till the following day, I allowed Reddell to sit
+     up with Helen again that night, to give her the medicine and food,
+     which were to be taken constantly.
+
+     At about 4.30 that night, or rather Monday morning, Reddell looked
+     at her watch, poured out the medicine, and was bending over the bed
+     to give it to Helen, when the call-bell in the passage rang. She
+     said to herself, "There's that tiresome bell with the wire caught
+     again." (It seems it did occasionally ring of itself in this
+     manner.) At that moment, however, she heard the door open and,
+     looking round, saw a very stout old woman walk in. She was dressed
+     in a night-gown and red flannel petticoat, and carried an
+     old-fashioned brass candlestick in her hand. The petticoat had a
+     hole rubbed in it. She walked into the room, and appeared to be
+     going towards the dressing-table to put her candle down. She was a
+     perfect stranger to Reddell, who, however, merely thought, "This is
+     her mother come to see after her," and she felt quite glad it was
+     so, accepting the idea without reasoning upon it, as one would in a
+     dream. She thought the mother looked annoyed, possibly at not
+     having been sent for before. She then gave Helen the medicine, and
+     turning round, found that the apparition had disappeared, and that
+     the door was shut. A great change, meanwhile, had taken place in
+     Helen, and Reddell fetched me, who sent off for the doctor, and
+     meanwhile applied hot poultices, etc., but Helen died a little
+     before the doctor came. She was quite conscious up to about half an
+     hour before she died, when she seemed to be going to sleep.
+
+     During the early days of her illness, Helen had written to a
+     sister, mentioning her being unwell, but making nothing of it, and
+     as she never mentioned any one but this sister, it was supposed by
+     the household, to whom she was a perfect stranger, that she had no
+     other relation alive. Reddell was always offering to write for her,
+     but she always declined, saying there was no need, she would write
+     herself in a day or two. No one at home, therefore, knew anything
+     of her being so ill, and it is, therefore, remarkable, that her
+     mother, a far from nervous person, should have said that evening
+     going up to bed, "I am sure Helen is very ill."
+
+     Reddell told me and my daughter of the apparition, about an hour
+     after Helen's death, prefacing with, "I am not superstitious, or
+     nervous, and I wasn't the least frightened, but her mother came
+     last night," and she then told the story, giving a careful
+     description of the figure she had seen. The relations were asked to
+     come to the funeral, and the father, mother, and sister came, and
+     in the mother Reddell recognised the apparition, as I did also, for
+     Reddell's description had been most accurate, even to the
+     expression, which she had ascribed to annoyance, but which was due
+     to deafness. It was judged best not to speak about it to the
+     mother, but Reddell told the sister, who said the description of
+     the figure corresponded exactly with the probable appearance of her
+     mother if roused in the night; that they had exactly such a
+     candlestick at home, and that there was a hole in her mother's
+     petticoat produced by the way she always wore it. It seems curious
+     that neither Helen nor her mother appeared to be aware of the
+     visit. Neither of them, at any rate, ever spoke of having seen the
+     other, nor even of having dreamt of having done so.
+
+F. A. POLE-CAREW.
+
+     [Frances Reddell states that she has never had any hallucination,
+     or any odd experience of any kind, except on this one occasion. The
+     Hon. Mrs. Lyttelton, formerly of Selwyn College, Cambridge, who
+     knows her, tells us that "she appears to be a most matter-of-fact
+     person, and was apparently most impressed by the fact that she saw
+     a hole in the mother's flannel petticoat, made by the busk of her
+     stays, reproduced in the apparition."]
+
+Now what I imagine to have happened here is this. The mother, anxious
+about her daughter, paid her a psychical visit during the sleep of both.
+In so doing she actually modified a certain portion of space, not
+materially nor optically, but in such a manner that persons perceptive
+in a certain fashion would discern in that part of space an image
+approximately corresponding to the conception of her own aspect latent
+in the invading mother's mind. A person thus susceptible happened to be
+in the room, and thus, as a bystander, witnessed a psychical invasion
+whose memory the invader apparently did not retain, while the invaded
+person--the due percipient--may or may not have perceived it in a dream,
+but died and left no sign of having done so.
+
+
+VI. D. From the "Report on the Census of Hallucinations," _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. x. p. 332. The account is given by Mrs. McAlpine.
+
+
+GARSCADDEN, BEARDSDEN, GLASGOW, _April 20th, 1892_.
+
+     I remember in the June of 1889, I drove to Castleblaney, a little
+     town in the county Monaghan, to meet my sister, who was coming by
+     train from Longford. I expected her at three o'clock, but as she
+     did not come with that train, I got the horse put up, and went for
+     a walk in the demesne. The day was very warm and bright, and I
+     wandered on under the shade of the trees to the side of a lake,
+     which is in the demesne. Being at length tired, I sat down to rest
+     upon a rock, at the edge of the water. My attention was quite taken
+     up with the extreme beauty of the scene before me. There was not a
+     sound or movement, except the soft ripple of the water on the sand
+     at my feet. Presently I felt a cold chill creep through me, and a
+     curious stiffness of my limbs, as if I _could_ not move, though
+     wishing to do so. I felt frightened, yet chained to the spot, and
+     as if impelled to stare at the water straight in front of me.
+     Gradually a black cloud seemed to rise, and in the midst of it I
+     saw a tall man, in a suit of tweed, jump into the water and sink.
+
+     In a moment the darkness was gone, and I again became sensible of
+     the heat and sunshine, but I was awed and felt "eerie"--it was then
+     about four o'clock or so--I cannot remember either the exact time
+     or date. On my sister's arrival I told her of the occurrence; she
+     was surprised, but inclined to laugh at it. When we got home I told
+     my brother; he treated the subject much in the same manner.
+     However, about a week afterwards, Mr. Espie, a bank clerk (unknown
+     to me), committed suicide by drowning in that very spot. He left a
+     letter for his wife, indicating that he had for some time
+     contemplated his death. My sister's memory of the event is the only
+     evidence I can give. I did not see the account of the inquest at
+     the time, and did not mention my strange experience to any one,
+     saving my sister and brother.
+
+F. C. MCALPINE.
+
+Mrs. McAlpine's sister writes:--
+
+
+ROXBORO', _February 15th, 1892_.
+
+     I remember perfectly you meeting me in Castleblaney, on my way home
+     from Longford, and telling me of the strange thing which happened
+     in the demesne. You know you were always hearing or seeing
+     something and I paid little attention; but I remember it
+     distinctly--your troubled expression more than the story. You said
+     a tall gentleman, dressed in tweed, walked past you, and went into
+     a little inlet or creek. I think, but am not sure, that you said he
+     had a beard. You were troubled about it, or looked so; and I talked
+     of other things. You told me while we were driving home. I think,
+     but I am not sure, that it was about the 25th or 27th of June 1889
+     that I left Longford. I am sure of that being the day, but cannot
+     remember the date. _It was in June_, and on the 3rd of July, 1889,
+     a Mr. Espie, a bank clerk, drowned himself in the lake in the
+     demesne in 'Blaney. I have no doubt that the day I came home you
+     saw Mr. Espie's "fetch."
+
+The following account is taken from a local paper, the _Northern
+Standard_, Saturday, July 6th, 1889:--
+
+     _Sad Case of Suicide._--The town of Castleblaney was put into a
+     fearful state of excitement when it became known on Wednesday last
+     that Mr. Espy had committed suicide by drowning himself in the lake
+     in the demesne. Latterly, he was noticed to be rather dull and low
+     in spirits, but no serious notice was taken of his conduct, nor had
+     any one the most remote idea that he contemplated suicide. On
+     Wednesday morning he seemed in his usual health, and, as was
+     customary with him, walked down to get his newspaper on the arrival
+     of the 9.45 train from Dublin. He met Mr. Fox (in whose office he
+     has been for years) at the station, and having procured his paper
+     walked up to the office, wrote a note in which he stated what he
+     was going to do, and indicating where his body would be found. This
+     seemed to concern him a good deal, for he seemed very anxious that
+     his body should be recovered without any delay. He had
+     fishing-tackle in his pocket, and having tied one end of a
+     pike-line to a tree, and the other end round one of his legs, he
+     threw himself into about three feet deep of water, where he was
+     found shortly afterwards quite dead, and before the note that he
+     had left in the office had been opened.
+
+It would be possible, no doubt, to explain this appearance as simply
+precognitive--as a picture from the future impressed in some unknown way
+upon the percipient's inner vision. There are certain cases which
+strongly suggest this extreme hypothesis. But it seems here simpler to
+assume that the unhappy man was already imagining his plunge into the
+lake when Mrs. McAlpine visited the shore, and that his intense thought
+effected a self-projection, conscious or unconscious, of some element of
+his being.
+
+
+VI. E. From _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 239. Mrs. Elgee, of
+18 Woburn Road, Bedford, gave the following account:--
+
+
+_March 1st, 1885._
+
+     In the month of November 1864, being detained in Cairo, on my way
+     out to India, the following curious circumstance occurred to me:--
+
+     Owing to an unusual influx of travellers, I, with the young lady
+     under my charge (whom we will call D.) and some other passengers of
+     the outward-bound mail to India, had to take up our abode in a
+     somewhat unfrequented hotel. The room shared by Miss D. and myself
+     was large, lofty, and gloomy; the furniture of the scantiest,
+     consisting of two small beds, placed nearly in the middle of the
+     room and not touching the walls at all, two or three rush-bottomed
+     chairs, a very small washing stand, and a large old-fashioned sofa
+     of the settee sort, which was placed against one half of the large
+     folding doors which gave entrance to the room. This settee was far
+     too heavy to be removed, unless by two or three people. The other
+     half of the door was used for entrance, and faced the two beds.
+     Feeling rather desolate and strange, and Miss D. being a nervous
+     person, I locked the door, and, taking out the key, put it under my
+     pillow; but on Miss D. remarking that there might be a duplicate
+     which could open the door from outside, I put a chair against the
+     door, with my travelling bag on it, so arranged that, on any
+     pressure outside, one or both must fall on the bare floor, and make
+     noise enough to rouse me. We then proceeded to retire to bed, the
+     one I had chosen being near the only window in the room, which
+     opened with two glazed doors, almost to the floor. These doors, on
+     account of the heat, I left open, first assuring myself that no
+     communication from the outside could be obtained. The window led on
+     to a small balcony, which was isolated, and was three stories above
+     the ground.
+
+     I suddenly woke from a sound sleep with the impression that
+     somebody had called me, and, sitting up in bed, to my unbounded
+     astonishment, by the clear light of early dawn coming in through
+     the large window before mentioned, I beheld the figure of an old
+     and very valued friend whom I knew to be in England. He appeared as
+     if most eager to speak to me, and I addressed him with, "Good
+     gracious! how did you come here?" So clear was the figure, that I
+     noted every detail of his dress, even to three onyx shirt-studs
+     which he always wore. He seemed to come a step nearer to me, when
+     he suddenly pointed across the room, and on my looking round, I saw
+     Miss D. sitting up in her bed, gazing at the figure with every
+     expression of terror. On looking back, my friend seemed to shake
+     his head, and retreated step by step, slowly, till he seemed to
+     sink through that portion of the door where the settee stood. I
+     never knew what happened to me after this; but my next remembrance
+     is of bright sunshine pouring through the window. Gradually the
+     remembrance of what had happened came back to me, and the question
+     arose in my mind, had I been dreaming, or had I seen a visitant
+     from another world?--the bodily presence of my friend being utterly
+     impossible. Remembering that Miss D. had seemed aware of the figure
+     as well as myself, I determined to allow the test of my dream or
+     vision to be whatever she said to me upon the subject, I intending
+     to say nothing to her unless she spoke to me. As she seemed still
+     asleep, I got out of bed, examined the door carefully, and found
+     the chair and my bag untouched, and the key under my pillow; the
+     settee had not been touched nor had that portion of the door
+     against which it was placed any appearance of being opened for
+     years.
+
+     Presently, on Miss D. waking up, she looked about the room, and,
+     noticing the chair and bag, made some remark as to their not having
+     been much use. I said, "What do you mean?" and then she said, "Why,
+     that man who was in the room this morning must have got in
+     somehow." She then proceeded to describe to me exactly what I
+     myself had seen. Without giving any satisfactory answer as to what
+     I had seen, I made her rather angry by affecting to treat the
+     matter as a fancy on her part, and showed her the key still under
+     my pillow, and the chair and bag untouched. I then asked her, if
+     she was so sure that she had seen somebody in the room, did not she
+     know who it was? "No," said she, "I have never seen him before, nor
+     any one like him." I said, "Have you ever seen a photograph of
+     him?" She said, "No." This lady never was told what I saw, and yet
+     described exactly to a third person what we both had seen.
+
+     Of course, I was under the impression my friend was dead. Such,
+     however, was not the case; and I met him some four years later,
+     when, without telling him anything of my experience in Cairo, I
+     asked him, in a joking way, could he remember what he was doing on
+     a certain night in November 1864. "Well," he said, "you require me
+     to have a good memory;" but after a little reflection he replied,
+     "Why, that was the time I was so harassed with trying to decide for
+     or against the appointment which was offered me, and I so much
+     wished you could have been with me to talk the matter over. I sat
+     over the fire quite late, trying to think what you would have
+     advised me to do." A little cross-questioning and comparing of
+     dates brought out the curious fact that, allowing for the
+     difference of time between England and Cairo, his meditations over
+     the fire and my experience were simultaneous. Having told him the
+     circumstances above narrated, I asked him had he been aware of any
+     peculiar or unusual sensation. He said none, only that he had
+     wanted to see me very much.
+
+E. H. ELGEE.
+
+In answer to inquiries, Mrs. Elgee says:--
+
+     I fear it is quite impossible to get any information from Miss D.
+     She married soon after we reached India, and I never met her since,
+     nor do I know where she is, if alive. I quite understand the value
+     of her corroboration; and at the time she told the whole
+     circumstance to a fellow-traveller, who repeated it to me, and her
+     story and mine agreed in every particular, save that to her the
+     visitant was a complete stranger; and her tale was quite unbiassed
+     by mine, as I always treated hers as a fancy, and _never_
+     acknowledged I had been aware of anything unusual having taken
+     place in our room at Cairo. I never have seen, or fancied I saw,
+     any one before or since.
+
+     My visitant, also, is dead, or he would, I know, have added his
+     testimony, small as it was, to mine. He was a very calm, quiet,
+     clever, scientific man, not given to vain fancies on any subject,
+     and certainly was not aware of any desire of appearing to me.
+
+The publication of _Phantasms of the Living_ led fortunately to our
+obtaining the testimony of the second percipient, now Mrs. Ramsay, of
+Clevelands, Bassett, Southampton, whose account follows:--
+
+
+_July 1891._
+
+     I have been asked by a leading member of the Psychical Society to
+     write down what I can remember of a strange experience that
+     occurred no less than twenty-seven years ago. I now do so as simply
+     as I can, and to the best of my recollection.
+
+     In October 1864, I was travelling to India, going to rejoin my
+     parents, from whom I had been separated twelve years, a kind
+     friend--a Mrs. E.--having undertaken to chaperon me as far as
+     Calcutta. She was going out to join her husband, Major E., of the
+     23rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers. We started by a P. & O steamer--the
+     _Ceylon_--from Southampton, and travelled by the overland route,
+     _via_ Alexandria and Cairo, to Suez.
+
+     We landed at Alexandria, and went by rail across the desert to
+     Cairo. There all passengers had to sleep the night before
+     proceeding on to Suez. Shepherd's Hotel was the best hotel then,
+     and there was consequently a great rush to try and get rooms in it;
+     but Mrs. E. and I, finding we could get no corner, decided, with
+     two or three other passengers, to get accommodation in the Hôtel de
+     l'Europe. We felt somewhat nervous at the swarthy visages of the
+     Arabs all round us, and for this reason selected our quarters on
+     the very highest storey, thinking we should be more out of reach of
+     robbers and thieves than if we were on the ground floor. This is an
+     important point to remember, as no one could have effected an
+     entrance into our room from outside. It was a bright moonlight
+     night when we went to bed, and I can recollect as if it were
+     yesterday this fact, that the shadow of a "pepul" tree was
+     reflected on the wall opposite our beds--the leaves of the tree
+     were trembling and shaking, as the leaves of a "pepul" always do,
+     making the shadows dance about the wall.
+
+     Before we finally retired to rest we made the grandest arrangements
+     for personal security! The window looking out on to the street
+     below was much too high up to be at all unsafe. So we left that
+     open (I think) but we closed our door very firmly indeed! It was a
+     large folding door, and opened _inwards_. We locked it carefully,
+     leaving the key in the lock; pushed an arm-chair against the middle
+     of the door; and, to crown all, we balanced a hand-bag on one of
+     the arms, with a bunch of keys in the lock thereof! so that if any
+     intruder should venture to open that door, we should _know_ of it
+     at any rate!! (But no one did venture, and we found everything in
+     the morning exactly as we had left it.) I remember that Mrs. E. was
+     very careful about tucking her mosquito curtains all round, but I
+     disliked the feeling of suffocation they gave, and put mine up; not
+     realising, of course, in my inexperience, what the consequences
+     would be for myself; for these small plagues of Egypt (!) soon
+     descended upon me, nearly eating me up, and absolutely prevented
+     sleep. This is another important fact to remember, for had I slept
+     I might have dreamed, but, as it happened, I was wide awake. I was
+     looking at the shadows of the tree shaking on the wall when
+     gradually they seemed to merge into a form, which form took the
+     shape of a man, not of an Arab, but of an English gentleman. Then
+     this form glided into the room, advancing towards my chaperon,
+     stretching out his hands as if in blessing, turned round, looked at
+     me, sadly and sorrowfully (so I thought), and then vanished again
+     into the shadows as it came. I do not remember feeling terrified,
+     only awed--the face was so kind and human, only the moonlight made
+     it look very white. I did not wake Mrs. E., as she appeared to me
+     to be asleep. I felt sure I had seen a vision, and something that
+     had to do with her.
+
+     The next morning, while we were dressing, she remarked how odd I
+     looked, and quite apart from the mosquito bites, I know I did. We
+     had a good laugh over my comical appearance, for I had not scrupled
+     to scratch the bites, until my forehead and face resembled a plum
+     bun! I believe I then told her it was not strange that I should
+     look odd, for I "had seen a ghost." She started violently, and
+     asked me to tell her what I saw. I described it as best I could,
+     and _she said she had seen "it" too_, and that she knew it to be
+     the form and face of a valued friend. She was much disturbed about
+     it--as, indeed, so was I, for I had never indulged in
+     "hallucinations" and was not given to seeing visions.
+
+     We proceeded next day to join our ship at Suez, and when on board,
+     it was a great relief to us to be able to tell it to a kind
+     fellow-passenger. He was an absolute sceptic in all matters
+     relating to the invisible world, but he was obliged to admit that
+     it was the most extraordinary thing he had ever heard.... I should
+     like to add that I have never, before or since, had any kind of
+     vision.
+
+     Our experience at Cairo had this sequel, that Mrs. E.'s
+     spirit-friend happened to be, at that very time, in great
+     perplexity of mind--most anxious about some very important event in
+     his life. He was sitting in his room one night in the month of
+     October 1864, and a most intense yearning came over him for her
+     advice and assistance--so great was it, that he felt as if an
+     invisible power had drawn him into some spirit-state, in which he
+     could and did see her.[224]
+
+For a somewhat similar case, that of the apparition of General Frémont
+(too lengthy to quote here), I may refer the reader to the _Journal_
+S.P.R., vol. v. p. 54. The crisis there is the removal of long and
+wearing anxiety; the self-projection into the home-scene which now at
+last the General felt assured of being able to reach alive.
+
+
+VI. F. From _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. pp. 104-109. The
+following case was especially remarkable in that there were two
+percipients. The narrative was copied by Gurney from a MS. book of Mr.
+S. H. B.'s, to which he transferred it from an almanac diary, since
+lost.
+
+     On a certain Sunday evening in November 1881, having been reading
+     of the great power which the human will is capable of exercising, I
+     determined with the whole force of my being, that I would be
+     present in spirit in the front bed-room on the second floor of a
+     house situated at 22 Hogarth Road, Kensington, in which room slept
+     two ladies of my acquaintance, viz., Miss L. S. V. and Miss E. C.
+     V., aged respectively 25 and 11 years. I was living at this time at
+     23 Kildare Gardens, a distance of about three miles from Hogarth
+     Road, and I had not mentioned in any way my intention of trying
+     this experiment to either of the above ladies, for the simple
+     reason that it was only on retiring to rest upon this Sunday night
+     that I made up my mind to do so. The time at which I determined I
+     would be there was 1 o'clock in the morning, and I also had a
+     strong intention of making my presence perceptible.
+
+     On the following Thursday I went to see the ladies in question, and
+     in the course of conversation (without any allusion to the subject
+     on my part) the elder one told me, that on the previous Sunday
+     night she had been much terrified by perceiving me standing by her
+     bedside, and that she screamed when the apparition advanced towards
+     her, and awoke her little sister, who saw me also.
+
+     I asked her if she was awake at the time, and she replied most
+     decidedly in the affirmative, and upon my inquiring the time of the
+     occurrence, she replied, about 1 o'clock in the morning.
+
+     This lady, at my request, wrote down a statement of the event and
+     signed it.
+
+     This was the first occasion upon which I tried an experiment of
+     this kind, and its complete success startled me very much.
+
+     Besides exercising my power of volition very strongly, I put forth
+     an effort which I cannot find words to describe. I was conscious of
+     a mysterious influence of some sort permeating in my body, and had
+     a distinct impression that I was exercising some force with which I
+     had been hitherto unacquainted, but which I can now at certain
+     times set in motion at will.
+
+S. H. B.
+
+Of the original entry in the almanac diary, Mr. B. says: "I recollect
+having made it within a week or so of the occurrence of the experiment,
+and whilst it was perfectly fresh in my memory."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Verity's account is as follows:--
+
+
+_January 18th, 1883._
+
+     On a certain Sunday evening, about twelve months since, at our
+     house in Hogarth Road, Kensington, I distinctly saw Mr. B. in my
+     room, about 1 o'clock. I was perfectly awake and was much
+     terrified. I awoke my sister by screaming, and she saw the
+     apparition herself. Three days after, when I saw Mr. B., I told him
+     what had happened, but it was some time before I could recover from
+     the shock I had received; and the remembrance is too vivid to be
+     ever erased from my memory.
+
+L. S. VERITY.
+
+In answer to inquiries, Miss Verity adds: "I had never had any
+hallucination of the senses of any sort whatever."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss E. C. Verity says:--
+
+     I remember the occurrence of the event described by my sister in
+     the annexed paragraph, and her description is quite correct. I saw
+     the apparition which she saw, at the same time and under the same
+     circumstances.
+
+E. C. VERITY.
+
+Miss A. S. Verity says:--
+
+     I remember quite clearly the evening my eldest sister awoke me by
+     calling to me from an adjoining room; and upon my going to her
+     bedside, where she slept with my youngest sister, they both told me
+     they had seen S. H. B. standing in the room. The time was about 1
+     o'clock. S. H. B. was in evening dress, they told me.
+
+A. S. VERITY.
+
+Mr. B. does not remember how he was dressed on the night of the
+occurrence.
+
+Miss E. C. Verity was asleep when her sister caught sight of the figure,
+and was awoke by her sister's exclaiming, "There is S." The name had
+therefore met her ear before she herself saw the figure; and the
+hallucination on her part might thus be attributed to suggestion. But it
+is against this view that she has never had any other hallucination, and
+cannot therefore be considered as predisposed to such experiences. The
+sisters are both equally certain that the figure was in evening dress,
+and that it stood in one particular spot in the room. The gas was
+burning low, and the phantasmal figure was seen with far more clearness
+than a real figure would have been.
+
+"The witnesses" (says Gurney) "have been very carefully cross-examined
+by the present writer. There is not the slightest doubt that their
+mention of the occurrence to S. H. B. was spontaneous. They had not at
+first intended to mention it; but when they saw him, their sense of its
+oddness overcame their resolution. Miss Verity is a perfectly
+sober-minded and sensible witness, with no love of marvels, and with a
+considerable dread and dislike of this particular form of marvel."
+
+[I omit here for want of space the next case, in which Mr. S. H. B.
+attempted to appear in Miss Verity's house at two different hours on the
+same evening, and was seen there, at both the times fixed, by a married
+sister who was visiting in the house.]
+
+Gurney requested Mr. B. to send him a note on the night that he intended
+to make his next experiment of the kind, and received the following note
+by the first post on Monday, March 24th, 1884.
+
+
+_March 22nd, 1884._
+
+     DEAR MR. GURNEY,--I am going to try the experiment to-night of
+     making my presence perceptible at 44 Norland Square, at 12 P.M. I
+     will let you know the result in a few days.--Yours very sincerely,
+
+S. H. B.
+
+The next letter was received in the course of the following week:--
+
+
+_April 3rd, 1884._
+
+     DEAR MR. GURNEY,--I have a strange statement to show you,
+     respecting my experiment, which was tried at your suggestion, and
+     under the test conditions which you imposed.
+
+     Having quite forgotten which night it was on which I attempted the
+     projection, I cannot say whether the result is a brilliant success,
+     or only a slight one, until I see the letter which I posted you on
+     the evening of the experiment.
+
+     Having sent you that letter, I did not deem it necessary to make a
+     note in my diary, and consequently have let the exact date slip my
+     memory.
+
+     If the dates correspond, the success is complete in every detail,
+     and I have an account signed and witnessed to show you.
+
+     I saw the lady (who was the subject) for the first time last night,
+     since the experiment, and she made a voluntary statement to me,
+     which I wrote down at her dictation, and to which she has attached
+     her signature. The date and time of the apparition are specified in
+     this statement, and it will be for you to decide whether they are
+     identical with those given in my letter to you. I have completely
+     forgotten, but yet I fancy that they are the same.
+
+S. H. B.
+
+This is the statement:--
+
+
+44 NORLAND SQUARE, W.
+
+     On Saturday night, March 22nd, 1884, at about midnight, I had a
+     distinct impression that Mr. S. H. B. was present in my room, and I
+     distinctly saw him whilst I was quite widely awake. He came towards
+     me, and stroked my hair. I _voluntarily_ gave him this information,
+     when he called to see me on Wednesday, April 2nd, telling him the
+     time and the circumstances of the apparition, without any
+     suggestion on his part. The appearance in my room was most vivid,
+     and quite unmistakable.
+
+L. S. VERITY.
+
+Miss A. S. Verity corroborates as follows:--
+
+     I remember my sister telling me that she had seen S. H. B., and
+     that he had touched her hair, _before_ he came to see us on April
+     2nd.
+
+A. S. V.
+
+Mr. B.'s own account is as follows:--
+
+     On Saturday, March 22nd, I determined to make my presence
+     perceptible to Miss V., at 44 Norland Square, Notting Hill, at 12
+     midnight, and as I had previously arranged with Mr. Gurney that I
+     should post him a letter on the evening on which I tried my next
+     experiment (stating the time and other particulars), I sent a note
+     to acquaint him with the above facts.
+
+     About ten days afterwards I called upon Miss V., and she
+     voluntarily told me, that on March 22nd, at 12 o'clock midnight,
+     she had seen me so vividly in her room (whilst widely awake) that
+     her nerves had been much shaken, and she had been obliged to send
+     for a doctor in the morning.
+
+S. H. B.
+
+Unfortunately Mr. B.'s intention to produce the impression of touching
+the percipient's hair is not included in his written account. On August
+21st, 1885, he wrote to Gurney, "I remember that I had this intention";
+and Gurney remembered that, very soon after the occurrence, he mentioned
+this as one of the points which made the success "complete in every
+detail"; and that he recommended him in any future trial to endeavour
+instead to produce the impression of some spoken phrase.
+
+On this case, Gurney observes:--
+
+     It will be observed that in all these instances the conditions were
+     the same--the agent concentrating his thoughts on the object in
+     view before going to sleep. Mr. B. has never succeeded in producing
+     a similar effect when he has been awake. And this restriction as to
+     time has made it difficult to devise a plan by which the phenomenon
+     could be tested by independent observers, one of whom might arrange
+     to be in the company of the agent at a given time, and the other in
+     that of the percipient. Nor is it easy to press for repetitions of
+     the experiment, which is not an agreeable one to the percipient,
+     and is followed by a considerable amount of nervous prostration.
+     Moreover, if trials were frequently made with the same percipient,
+     the value of success would diminish; for any latent expectation on
+     the percipient's part might be argued to be itself productive of
+     the delusion, and the coincidence with the agent's resolve might be
+     explained as accidental. We have, of course, requested Mr. B. to
+     try to produce the effect on ourselves; but though he has more than
+     once made the attempt, it has not succeeded.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+TO
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+VII. A. The account of this case, given by Mr. E. Mamtchitch, is taken
+from the "Report on the Census of Hallucinations" in the _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. x. pp. 387-91.
+
+
+ST. PETERSBURG, _April 29th, 1891_.
+
+     Comme il s'agira des apparitions de Palladia, je dois dire
+     auparavant quelques mots sur sa personne. Elle était la fille d'un
+     riche propriétaire russe, mort un mois avant sa naissance. Sa mčre,
+     dans son désespoir, voua son enfant futur au couvent. De lŕ son
+     nom, usité parmi les religieuses. Deux ans aprčs, sa mčre mourut,
+     et l'orpheline, jusqu'ŕ l'âge de 14 ans, fut élevée dans un couvent
+     de Moscou par sa tante, qui en était la supérieure.
+
+     En 1870, étant encore étudiant ŕ l'université de Moscou, je fis la
+     connaissance du frčre de Palladia, étudiant comme moi, et il fut
+     souvent question entre nous de rendre ŕ la société la nonne malgré
+     soi; mais ce plan ne fut réalisé qu'en 1872. J'étais venu en été ŕ
+     Moscou, pour voir l'exposition, et j'y rencontrai par hasard le
+     frčre de Palladia. J'appris qu'il était en train de l'envoyer en
+     Crimée pour cause de santé, et je le secondai de mon mieux. C'est
+     alors que je vis Palladia pour la premičre fois; elle avait 14 ans;
+     quoique haute de taille, elle était fort chétive et déjŕ
+     poitrinaire. A la pričre de son frčre, j'accompagnai Palladia et sa
+     soeur, Mme. P. S., en Crimée, oů elles restčrent pour passer
+     l'hiver et moi, deux semaines aprčs, je revins ŕ Kieff.
+
+     En été 1873 je rencontrai par hasard Palladia et sa soeur ŕ
+     Odessa, oů elles étaient venues pour consulter les médecins,
+     quoique Palladia avait l'air de se porter assez bien. Le 27 Aoűt,
+     pendant que je faisais la lecture aux deux dames, Palladia mourut
+     subitement d'un anévrisme, ŕ l'âge de 15 ans.
+
+     Deux ans aprčs la mort de Palladia, en 1875, me trouvant ŕ Kieff,
+     il m'arriva, par une soirée du mois de Décembre, d'assister pour la
+     premičre fois ŕ une séance spiritique; j'entendis des coups dans la
+     table; cela ne m'étonna nullement, car j'était sűr que c'était une
+     plaisanterie. De retour chez moi, je voulus voir si les męmes coups
+     se produiraient chez moi; je me mis dans la męme pose, les mains
+     sur la table. Bientôt des coups se firent entendre. Imitant le
+     procédé dont j'avais été le témoin, je commençai ŕ réciter
+     l'alphabet; le nom de Palladia me fut indiqué. Je fus étonné,
+     presque effrayé; ne pouvant me tranquilliser, je me mis de nouveau
+     ŕ la table, et je demandai ŕ Palladia, qu'avait-elle ŕ me dire? La
+     réponse fut: "_Replacer l'ange, il tombe._" Je ne compris pas de
+     suite de quoi il s'agissait. Le fait est qu'elle est enterrée ŕ
+     Kieff, et j'avais entendu dire qu'on voulait mettre un monument sur
+     sa tombe, mais je n'y avais jamais été, et je ne savais pas de quel
+     genre était le monument. Aprčs cette réponse, je ne me couchai
+     plus, et dčs que le jour parut je me rendis au cimetičre. Non sans
+     peine, avec l'aide du gardien, je découvris enfin la tombe enfouie
+     sous la neige. Je m'arrętai stupéfié: la statue en marbre de l'ange
+     avec une croix était tout ŕ fait de côté.
+
+     Depuis ce moment, il me fut prouvé ŕ l'évidence qu'il y a un autre
+     monde avec lequel, je ne sais comment, nous pouvons entrer en
+     rapport, et dont les habitants peuvent nous donner de telles
+     preuves de leur existence qu'elles désarment le scepticisme le plus
+     tenace.
+
+     En Octobre, 1876, je me trouvais ŕ Kieff, et j'étais en train de
+     m'installer dans un nouveau logement (rue Prorésnaya) avec mon
+     camarade de service au Ministčre de la Justice, M. Potolof. On
+     venait de m'apporter un pianino. Il fut placé dans la salle, et je
+     me mis ŕ jouer; il était ŕ peu prčs 8 h. du soir; la salle oů je
+     jouais était éclairée par une lampe pendue au mur. A côté se
+     trouvait mon cabinet de travail, éclairé aussi par une lampe. Je me
+     rappelle trčs bien que j'étais de fort bonne humeur. Mon camarade,
+     M. Potolof, était occupé ŕ sa table, ŕ l'autre bout du logis.
+     Toutes les portes étaient ouvertes, et de sa place il pouvait voir
+     trčs bien le cabinet et la salle oů je jouais.[225] Jetant un
+     regard vers la porte de mon cabinet de travail, je vis tout ŕ coup
+     Palladia. Elle se tenait au milieu de la porte, un peu de côté,
+     avec le visage tourné vers moi. Elle me regardait tranquillement.
+     Elle avait la męme robe foncée qu'elle portait lorsqu'elle mourut
+     en ma présence. Sa main droite pendait librement. Je voyais
+     distinctement ses épaules et sa taille, mais ne me rappelle pas du
+     bas de son habit, et avais-je vu les pieds?--peut-ętre, parce que
+     tout le temps je lui regardais dans les yeux. En la voyant, j'avais
+     tout ŕ fait oublié que je voyais devant moi non une personne
+     vivante, mais morte, tellement je la voyais distinctement; elle
+     était éclairée de deux côtés; et d'autant plus j'ai la vue trčs
+     bonne. Ma premičre sensation fut un frisson dans le dos. Je fus
+     comme pétrifié et ma respiration fut suspendue; mais ce n'était pas
+     un effet causé par le frayeur ou l'excitation,--c'était quelque
+     chose d'autre. Je puis comparer cela ŕ la sensation que j'éprouve
+     quand je regarde en bas d'une grande hauteur; je sens alors une
+     terrible anxiété et en męme temps je ne puis me retenir de
+     regarder, quelque chose m'attire invinciblement. Combien de temps
+     Palladia resta devant moi, je ne saurais le dire, mais je me
+     rappelle qu'elle fit un mouvement ŕ droite et disparut derričre la
+     porte du cabinet du travail. Je me précipitai vers elle, mais dans
+     la porte je m'arrętai, car alors seulement je me rappelai qu'elle
+     était déjŕ morte, et je craignai d'entrer, étant sűr de la revoir.
+     Dans ce moment mon camarade vint ŕ moi et me demanda qu'est-ce que
+     j'avais? Je lui dis ce qui venait de se passer; alors nous entrâmes
+     au cabinet oů nous ne trouvâmes personne. Mon camarade, ayant
+     entendu la brusque interruption de mon jeu, avait levé la tęte et,
+     tant que je me rappelle, disait avoir vu aussi quelqu'un passer
+     devant la porte de mon cabinet; mais, voyant mon excitation, il me
+     dit, pour me tranquilliser, que probablement c'était Nikita, mon
+     domestique, qui était venu arranger la lampe. Nous allâmes
+     immédiatement dans sa chambre, il n'y était pas; il était en bas,
+     dans la cuisine, oú il préparait le samovar. Voilŕ comment je vis
+     Palladia pour la premičre fois, trois ans aprčs sa mort.
+
+     Aprčs la premičre apparition de Palladia, en Octobre, 1876, et
+     jusqu'ŕ présent, je la vois souvent. Il arrive que je la vois trois
+     fois par semaine, ou deux fois le męme jour, ou bien un mois se
+     passe sans la voir. En résumé, voilŕ les traits principaux de ces
+     apparitions.
+
+     (1) Palladia apparait toujours d'une façon inattendue, me prenant
+     comme par surprise, juste au moment quand j'y pense le moins.
+
+     (2) Quand je veux la voir moi-męme, j'ai beau y penser ou le
+     vouloir--elle n'apparait pas.
+
+     (3) A de rares exceptions, son apparition n'a aucun rapport avec le
+     courant de ma vie, comme présage ou avertissement de
+     quelqu'événement insolite.
+
+     (4) Jamais je ne la vois en songe.
+
+     (5) Je la vois également quand je suis seul, ou en grande
+     compagnie.
+
+     (6) Elle m'apparait toujours avec la męme expression sereine des
+     yeux; quelque fois avec un faible sourire. Elle ne m'a jamais
+     parlé, ŕ l'exception de deux fois, que je vais raconter plus loin.
+
+     (7) Je la vois toujours dans la robe foncée qu'elle portait
+     lorsqu'elle mourut sous mes yeux. Je vois distinctement son visage,
+     sa tęte, les épaules et les bras, mais je ne vois pas ses pieds, ou
+     plutôt je n'ai pas le temps de les examiner.
+
+     (8) Chaque fois, en voyant Palladia inopinément, je perds la
+     parole, je sens du froid dans le dos, je pâlis, je m'écrie
+     faiblement, et ma respiration s'arręte (c'est ce que me disent ceux
+     qui par hasard m'ont observé pendant ce moment).
+
+     (9) L'apparition de Palladia se prolonge une, deux, trois minutes,
+     puis graduellement elle s'efface et se dissout dans l'espace.
+
+     A présent je vais décrire trois cas d'apparitions de Palladia dont
+     je me souviens bien.
+
+     (1) En 1879, ŕ la fin de Novembre, ŕ Kieff, j'étais assis ŕ mon
+     bureau ŕ écrire un acte d'accusation; il était 8-1/4 du soir, la
+     montre était devant moi sur la table. Je me hâtais de finir mon
+     travail, car ŕ 9 h. je devais me rendre ŕ une soirée. Tout ŕ coup,
+     en face de moi, assise sur un fauteuil, je vis Palladia; elle avait
+     le coude du bras droit sur la table et la tęte appuyée sur la main.
+     M'étant remis de mon saisissement, je regardai la montre et je
+     suivis le mouvement de l'aiguille ŕ seconde, puis je relevai les
+     yeux sur Palladia; je vis qu'elle n'avait pas changé de pose et son
+     coude se dessinait clairement sur la table. Ses yeux me regardaient
+     avec joie et sérénité; alors pour la premičre fois je me décidai de
+     lui parler: "Que sentez-vous ŕ présent?" lui demandai-je. Son
+     visage resta impassible, ses lčvres, tant que je me rappelle,
+     restčrent immobiles, mais j'entendis distinctement sa voix
+     prononcer le mot "Quiétude." "Je comprends," lui répondis-je, et
+     effectivement, en ce moment, je comprenais toute la signification
+     qu'elle avait mise dans ce mot. Encore une fois, pour ętre sűr que
+     je ne ręvai pas, je regardai de nouveau la montre et je suivis les
+     mouvements de l'aiguille ŕ seconde; je voyais clairement comme elle
+     se mouvait. Ayant rapporté mon regard sur Palladia, je remarquai
+     qu'elle commençait déjŕ ŕ s'effacer et disparaître. Si je m'étais
+     avisé de noter immédiatement la signification du mot "Quiétude," ma
+     mémoire aurait retenu tout ce qu'il y avait de nouveau et
+     d'étrange. Mais ŕ peine avais-je quitté la table pour monter en
+     haut, chez mon camarade Apouktine, avec lequel nous devions aller
+     ensemble, que je ne pus lui dire autre chose que ce que je viens
+     d'écrire.
+
+     (2) En 1885, je demeurais chez mes parents, ŕ une campagne du
+     gouvernement de Poltava. Une dame de notre connaissance était venue
+     passer chez nous quelques jours avec ses deux demoiselles. Quelque
+     temps aprčs leur arrivée, m'étant réveillé ŕ l'aube du jour, je vis
+     Palladia (je dormais dans une aile séparée oů j'étais tout seul).
+     Elle se tenait devant moi, ŕ cinq pas ŕ peu prčs, et me regardait
+     avec un sourire joyeux. S'étant approchée de moi, elle me dit deux
+     mots: "J'ai été, j'ai vu," et tout en souriant disparut. Que
+     voulaient dire ces mots, je ne pus le comprendre. Dans ma chambre
+     dormait avec moi mon setter. Dčs que j'aperçus Palladia, le chien
+     hérissa le poil et avec glapissement sauta sur mon lit; se pressant
+     vers moi, il regardait dans la direction oů je voyais Palladia. Le
+     chien n'aboyait pas, tandis que, ordinairement, il ne laissait
+     personne entrer dans la chambre sans aboyer et grogner. Et toutes
+     les fois, quand mon chien voyait Palladia, il se pressait auprčs de
+     moi, comme cherchant un refuge. Quand Palladia disparut et je vins
+     dans la maison, je ne dis rien ŕ personne de cette incident. Le
+     soir de męme jour, la fille aînée de la dame qui se trouvait chez
+     nous me raconta qu'une chose étrange lui était arrivée ce matin:
+     "M'étant réveillée de grand matin," me dit-elle, "j'ai senti comme
+     si quelqu'un se tenait au chevet de mon lit, et j'entendis
+     distinctement une voix me disant: 'Ne me crains pas, je suis bonne
+     et aimante.' Je tournai la tęte, mais je ne vis rien; ma mčre et ma
+     soeur dormaient tranquillement; cela m'a fort étonnée, car jamais
+     rien de pareil ne m'est arrivé." Sur quoi je répondis que bien des
+     choses inexplicables nous arrivent; mais je ne lui dit rien de ce
+     que j'avais vu le matin. Seulement un an plus tard, quand j'étais
+     déjŕ son fiancé, je lui fis part de l'apparition et des paroles de
+     Palladia le męme jour. N'était-ce pas elle qui était venue la voir
+     aussi? Je dois ajouter que j'avais vu alors cette demoiselle pour
+     la premičre fois et que je ne pensais pas du tout que j'allais
+     l'épouser.
+
+     (3) En Octobre, 1890, je me trouvais avec ma femme et mon fils, âgé
+     de deux ans, chez mes anciens amis, les Strijewsky, ŕ leur
+     campagne du gouvernement de Worončje. Un jour, vers les 7 h. du
+     soir, rentrant de la chasse, je passai dans l'aile que nous
+     habitons pour changer de toilette; j'étais assis dans une chambre
+     éclairée par une grande lampe. La porte s'ouvrit et mon fils Olég
+     accourut; il se tenait auprčs de mon fauteuil, quand Palladia
+     apparut tout ŕ coup devant moi. Jetant sur lui un coup d'oeil, je
+     remarquai qu'il ne détachait pas les yeux de Palladia; se tournant
+     vers moi et montrant Palladia du doigt, il prononça: "La tante." Je
+     le pris sur les genoux et jetai un regard sur Palladia, mais elle
+     n'était plus. Le visage d'Olég était tout ŕ fait tranquil et
+     joyeux; il commençait seulement ŕ parler, ce qui explique la
+     dénomination qu'il donna ŕ Palladia.
+
+EUGČNE MAMTCHITCH.
+
+Mrs. Mamtchitch writes:--
+
+
+_5 Mai, 1891._
+
+     Je me rappelle trčs bien que le 10 Juillet 1885, lorsque nous
+     étions en visite chez les parents de M. E. Mamtchitch, je m'étais
+     réveillée ŕ l'aube du jour, car il avait été convenu entre moi et
+     ma soeur que nous irions faire une promenade matinale. M'étant
+     soulevée sur le lit, je vis que maman et ma soeur dormaient, et
+     en ce moment je sentis comme si quelqu'un se tenait ŕ mon chevet.
+     M'étant tournée ŕ demi--car je craignais de bien regarder--je ne
+     vis personne; m'étant recouchée, j'entendis immédiatement, derričre
+     et au dessus de ma tęte, une voix de femme me disant doucement,
+     mais distinctement: "Ne me crains pas, je suis bonne et aimante,"
+     et encore toute une phrase que j'oubliai ŕ l'instant męme.
+     Immédiatement aprčs je m'habillai et j'allai me promener. C'est
+     étrange que ces paroles ne m'effrayčrent pas du tout. De retour, je
+     n'en dis rien ni ŕ ma mčre, ni ŕ ma soeur, car elles n'aimaient
+     pas de telles choses et n'y croyaient pas; mais le soir du męme
+     jour, comme la conversation tourna sur le spiritisme, je racontai ŕ
+     M. M. ce qui venait de m'arriver le matin; il ne me répondit rien
+     de particulier.
+
+     Je n'ai jamais eu aucune hallucination, ni avant, ni aprčs cet
+     incident, ŕ l'exception d'un cas tout récent, quand je me suis vue
+     moi-męme, de quoi je parlerai une autre fois.
+
+SOPHIE MAMTCHITCH.
+
+Mr. Potolof writes to Mr. Aksakoff, through whom the case was sent:--
+
+
+RUE SCHPALERNAYA, 26. S. PÉTERSBOURG, _le 10 Mai, 1891_.
+
+     MONSIEUR,--En réponse ŕ votre lettre du 8 Mai et les questions que
+     vous me posez relativement ŕ l'incident avec M. E. Mamtchitch,
+     lorsque dans les années 1876-77 nous habitions ensemble Kieff, rue
+     Proresnaya, maison Barsky, je puis vous communiquer ce qui suit.
+     Effectivement, je fus alors témoin comme M. M., pendant qu'il
+     jouait un soir du piano quelque air mélancolique, s'interrompait
+     brusquement (comme si aprčs avoir fortement attaqué le clavier, ses
+     mains s'étaient subitement affaissées), et lorsque je vins lui
+     demander ce qui lui était arrivé, il me répondit qu'il venait de
+     voir apparaître le fantôme de Palladia, se tenant derričre la
+     draperie de la porte de la chambre contigue ŕ celle oů se trouvait
+     le piano. Je dois ajouter que notre appartement commun formait une
+     enfilade de trois chambres, sans compter celle de l'entrée, qui
+     occupait le milieu; je travaillais dans ma chambre, qui était ŕ
+     droite de celle de l'entrée, et je pouvais voir toute l'enfilade
+     bien éclairée. Ce qui me regarde personnellement, je ne vis en ce
+     moment aucune figure humaine passer par les chambres de M. M., mais
+     je ne nie pas que pour le tranquilliser j'essayai d'expliquer cet
+     incident par l'entrée de notre domestique Nikita; il se peut aussi
+     que, ne l'ayant pas trouvé dans nos appartements, nous allâmes le
+     chercher en bas, dans la cuisine. Voilŕ tout ce que je puis vous
+     dire relativement ŕ cet incident.
+
+W. POTOLOF.
+
+Note by Mr. Aksakoff:--
+
+
+S. PÉTERSBOURG, _Le 16|28 Mai, 1891_.
+
+     Traduit des manuscrits russes de M. et Madame Mamtchitch, et de M.
+     Potolof. La premičre partie du manuscrit de M. Mamtchitch, jusqu'ŕ
+     la premičre apparition de Palladia, est abrégé.
+
+     J'avais rencontré M. Mamtchitch plusieurs fois, mais je n'avais
+     aucune idée de ces apparitions constantes de Palladia. M.
+     Mamtchitch a vu aussi d'autres figures que celle de Palladia, mais
+     je n'ai pas eu le temps d'en faire un mémorandum circonstantiel.
+
+A. AKSAKOFF.
+
+
+VII. B. The account, which I quote from _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi.
+p. 17, was sent in 1887 to the American Society for Psychical Research
+by Mr. F. G., of Boston. Professor Royce and Dr. Hodgson vouch for the
+high character and good position of the informants; and it will be seen
+that, besides the percipient himself, his father and brother are
+first-hand witnesses as regards the most important point,--the effect
+produced by a certain symbolic item in the phantom's aspect. Mr. G.
+writes:--
+
+
+_January 11th, 1888._
+
+     SIR,--Replying to the recently published request of your Society
+     for actual occurrences of psychical phenomena, I respectfully
+     submit the following remarkable occurrence to the consideration of
+     your distinguished Society, with the assurance that the event made
+     a more powerful impression on my mind than the combined incidents
+     of my whole life. I have never mentioned it outside of my family
+     and a few intimate friends, knowing well that few would believe it,
+     or else ascribe it to some disordered state of my mind at the time;
+     but I well know I never was in better health or possessed a clearer
+     head and mind than at the time it occurred.
+
+     In 1867 my only sister, a young lady of eighteen years, died
+     suddenly of cholera in St. Louis, Mo. My attachment for her was
+     very strong, and the blow a severe one to me. A year or so after
+     her death the writer became a commercial traveller, and it was in
+     1876, while on one of my Western trips, that the event occurred.
+
+     I had "drummed" the city of St. Joseph, Mo., and had gone to my
+     room at the Pacific House to send in my orders, which were
+     unusually large ones, so that I was in a very happy frame of mind
+     indeed. My thoughts, of course, were about these orders, knowing
+     how pleased my house would be at my success. I had not been
+     thinking of my late sister, or in any manner reflecting on the
+     past. The hour was high noon, and the sun was shining cheerfully
+     into my room. While busily smoking a cigar and writing out my
+     orders, I suddenly became conscious that some one was sitting on my
+     left, with one arm resting on the table. Quick as a flash I turned
+     and distinctly saw the form of my dead sister, and for a brief
+     second or so looked her squarely in the face; and so sure was I
+     that it was she, that I sprang forward in delight, calling her by
+     name, and, as I did so, the apparition instantly vanished.
+     Naturally I was startled and dumbfounded, almost doubting my
+     senses; but the cigar in my mouth, and pen in hand, with the ink
+     still moist on my letter, I satisfied myself I had not been
+     dreaming and was wide awake. I was near enough to touch her, had it
+     been a physical possibility, and noted her features, expression,
+     and details of dress, etc. She appeared as if alive. Her eyes
+     looked kindly and perfectly natural into mine. Her skin was so
+     life-like that I could see the glow or moisture on its surface,
+     and, on the whole, there was no change in her appearance, otherwise
+     than when alive.
+
+     Now comes the most remarkable _confirmation_ of my statement, which
+     cannot be doubted by those who know what I state actually occurred.
+     This visitation, or whatever you may call it, so impressed me that
+     I took the next train home, and in the presence of my parents and
+     others I related what had occurred. My father, a man of rare good
+     sense and very practical, was inclined to ridicule me, as he saw
+     how earnestly I believed what I stated; but he, too, was amazed
+     when later on I told them of a bright red line or _scratch_ on the
+     right-hand side of my sister's face, which I distinctly had seen.
+     When I mentioned this my mother rose trembling to her feet and
+     nearly fainted away, and as soon as she sufficiently recovered her
+     self-possession, with tears streaming down her face, she exclaimed
+     that I had indeed seen my sister, as no living mortal but herself
+     was aware of that scratch, which she had accidentally made while
+     doing some little act of kindness after my sister's death. She said
+     she well remembered how pained she was to think she should have,
+     unintentionally, marred the features of her dead daughter, and
+     that, unknown to all, how she had carefully obliterated all traces
+     of the slight scratch with the aid of powder, etc., and that she
+     had never mentioned it to a human being from that day to this. In
+     proof, neither my father nor any of our family had detected it, and
+     positively were unaware of the incident, yet _I saw the scratch as
+     bright as if just made_. So strangely impressed was my mother, that
+     even after she had retired to rest she got up and dressed, came to
+     me and told me _she knew_ at least that I had seen my sister. A few
+     weeks later my mother died, happy in her belief she would rejoin
+     her favourite daughter in a better world.
+
+In a further letter Mr. F. G. adds:--
+
+     There was nothing of a spiritual or ghostly nature in either the
+     form or dress of my sister, she appearing perfectly natural, and
+     dressed in clothing that she usually wore in life, and which was
+     familiar to me. From her position at the table, I could only see
+     her _from the waist up_, and her appearance and everything she wore
+     is indelibly photographed in my mind. I even had time to notice the
+     collar and little breastpin she wore, as well as the comb in her
+     hair, after the style then worn by young ladies. The dress had no
+     particular association for me or my mother, no more so than others
+     she was in the habit of wearing; but _to-day, while I have
+     forgotten all her other dresses, pins, and combs_, I could go to
+     her trunk (which we have just as she left it) and pick out the very
+     dress and ornaments she wore when she appeared to me, so well do I
+     remember it.
+
+     You are correct in understanding that I returned home earlier than
+     I had intended, as it had such an effect on me that I could hardly
+     think of any other matter; in fact, I abandoned a trip that I had
+     barely commenced, and, ordinarily, would have remained on the road
+     a month longer.
+
+Mr. F. G. again writes to Dr. Hodgson, January 23rd, 1888:--
+
+     As per your request, I enclose a letter from my father which is
+     indorsed by my brother, confirming the statement I made to them of
+     the apparition I had seen. I will add that my father is one of the
+     oldest and most respected citizens of St. Louis, Mo., a retired
+     merchant, whose winter residence is at----, Ills., a few miles out
+     by rail. He is now seventy years of age, but a remarkably
+     well-preserved gentleman in body and mind, and a very learned man
+     as well. As I informed you, he is slow to believe things that
+     reason cannot explain. My brother, who indorses the statement, has
+     resided in Boston for twelve years, doing business on---- Street,
+     as per letter-head above, and the last man in the world to take
+     stock in statements without good proof. The others who were present
+     (including my mother) are now dead, or were then so young as to now
+     have but a dim remembrance of the matter.
+
+     You will note that my father refers to the "scratch," and it was
+     this that puzzled all, even himself, and which we have never been
+     able to account for, further than that in some mysterious way I had
+     actually seen my sister _nine years after death_, and had
+     particularly noticed and described to my parents and family this
+     bright red scratch, and which, beyond all doubt in our minds, was
+     unknown to a soul save my mother, who had accidentally caused it.
+
+     When I made my statement, all, of course, listened and were
+     interested; but the matter would probably have passed with comments
+     that it was a freak of memory had not I asked about the scratch,
+     and the instant I mentioned it my mother was aroused as if she had
+     received an electric shock, as she had kept it secret from all, and
+     _she alone_ was able to explain it. My mother was a sincere
+     Christian lady, who was for twenty-five years superintendent of a
+     large infant class in her church, the Southern Methodist, and a
+     directress in many charitable institutions, and was highly
+     educated. No lady at the time stood higher in the city of St.
+     Louis, and she was, besides, a woman of rare good sense.
+
+     I mention these points to give you an insight into the character
+     and standing of those whose testimony, in such a case, is
+     necessary.
+
+(Signed)      F. G.
+
+From Mr. H. G.:--
+
+
+-----, ILLS., _January 20th, 1888_.
+
+     DEAR F.,--Yours of 16th inst. is received. In reply to your
+     questions relating to your having seen our Annie, while at St.
+     Joseph, Mo., I will state that I well remember the statement you
+     made to family on your return home. I remember your stating how she
+     looked in ordinary home dress, and particularly about the scratch
+     (or red spot) on her face, which you could not account for, but
+     which was fully explained by your mother. The spot was made while
+     adjusting something about her head while in the casket, and covered
+     with powder. All who heard you relate the phenomenal sight thought
+     it was true. You well know how sceptical I am about things which
+     reason cannot explain.
+
+(Signed)      H. G. (father).
+
+     I was present at the time and indorse the above.
+
+(Signed)      K. G. (brother).
+
+The apparent _redness_ of the scratch on the face of the apparition goes
+naturally enough with the look of life in the face. The phantom did not
+appear as a corpse, but as a blooming girl, and the scratch showed as it
+would have shown if made during life.
+
+Dr. Hodgson visited Mr. F. G. later, and sent us the following notes of
+his interview:--
+
+
+ST. LOUIS, MO., _April 16th, 1890_.
+
+     In conversation with Mr. F. G., now forty-three years of age, he
+     says that there was a very special sympathy between his mother,
+     sister, and himself.
+
+     When he saw the apparition he was seated at a small table, about
+     two feet in diameter, and had his left elbow on the table. The
+     scratch which he saw was on the right side of his sister's nose,
+     about three fourths of an inch long, and was a somewhat ragged
+     mark. His home at the time of the incident was in St. Louis. His
+     mother died within two weeks after the incident. His sister's face
+     was hardly a foot away from his own. The sun was shining upon it
+     through the open window. The figure disappeared like an
+     instantaneous evaporation.
+
+     Mr. G. has had another experience, but of a somewhat different
+     character. Last fall the impression persisted for some time of a
+     lady friend of his, and he could not rid himself for some time of
+     thoughts of her. He found afterwards that she died at the time of
+     the curious persistence of his impression.
+
+     Mr. G. appears to be a first-class witness.
+
+R. HODGSON.
+
+I have ranked this case _primâ facie_ as a perception by the spirit of
+her mother's approaching death. That coincidence is too marked to be
+explained away: the son is brought home in time to see his mother once
+more by perhaps the only means which would have succeeded; and the
+mother herself is sustained by the knowledge that her daughter loves and
+awaits her. Mr. Podmore[226] has suggested, on the other hand, that the
+daughter's figure was a mere projection from the mother's mind: a
+conception which has scarcely any analogy to support it; for the one
+ancient case of Wesermann's projection of a female figure to a distance
+(_Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 217) remains, I think, the sole instance
+where an agent has generated a hallucinatory figure or group of figures
+which did not, at any rate, _include_ his own. I mean that he may
+spontaneously project a picture of himself as he is or dreams himself to
+be situated, perhaps with other figures round him, but not, so far as
+our evidence goes, the single figure of some one other than himself.
+Whilst not assuming that this rule can have no exceptions, I see no
+reason for supposing that it has been transgressed in the present case.
+Nay, I think that the very fact that the figure was not that of the
+corpse with the dull mark on which the mother's regretful thoughts might
+dwell, but was that of the girl in health and happiness, with the
+symbolic _red_ mark worn simply as a test of identity, goes far to show
+that it was not the _mother's_ mind from whence that image came. As to
+the spirit's own knowledge of the fate of the body after death, there
+are other cases which show, I think, that this specific form of
+_post-mortem_ perception is not unusual.
+
+
+VII. C. From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. pp. 380-82.
+
+From Miss L. Dodson:--
+
+
+_September 14th, 1891._
+
+     On June 5th, 1887, a Sunday evening,[227] between eleven and twelve
+     at night, being awake, my name was called three times. I answered
+     twice, thinking it was my uncle, "Come in, Uncle George, I am
+     awake," but the third time I recognised the voice as that of my
+     mother, who had been dead sixteen years. I said, "Mamma!" She then
+     came round a screen near my bedside with two children in her arms,
+     and placed them in my arms and put the bedclothes over them and
+     said, "Lucy, promise me to take care of them, for their mother is
+     just dead." I said, "Yes, mamma." She repeated, "_Promise_ me to
+     take care of them." I replied, "Yes, I promise you"; and I added,
+     "Oh, mamma, stay and speak to me, I am so wretched." She replied,
+     "Not yet, my child," then she seemed to go round the screen again,
+     and I remained, feeling the children to be still in my arms, and
+     fell asleep. When I awoke there was nothing. Tuesday morning, June
+     7th, I received the news of my sister-in-law's death. She had given
+     birth to a child three weeks before, which I did not know till
+     after her death.
+
+     I was in bed, but not asleep, and the room was lighted by a
+     gaslight in the street outside. I was out of health, and in anxiety
+     about family troubles. My age was forty-two. I was quite alone. I
+     mentioned the circumstance to my uncle the next morning. He thought
+     I was sickening for brain fever. [I have had other experiences,
+     but] only to the extent of having felt a hand laid on my head, and
+     sometimes on my hands, at times of great trouble.
+
+LUCY DODSON.
+
+Mr. C. H. Cope, who sent the case, wrote in answer to our questions:--
+
+
+BRUSSELS, _October 17th, 1891_.
+
+     I have received replies from Miss Dodson to your inquiries.
+
+     (1) "Yes [I was] perfectly awake [at the time]."
+
+     (2) "Was she in anxiety about her sister-in-law?" "None whatever; I
+     did not know a second baby had been born; in fact, had not the
+     remotest idea of my sister-in-law's illness."
+
+     (3) "Did she think at the time that the words about the children's
+     mother having just died referred to her sister-in-law? Had she two
+     children?" "No, I was at a total loss to imagine whose children
+     they were."
+
+     (4) "I was living in Albany Street, Regent's Park, at the time. My
+     sister-in-law, as I heard afterwards, was confined at St. André
+     (near Bruges), and removed to Bruges three days prior to her death.
+     (_N.B._--She had two children including the new-born baby.)"
+
+     (5) "My late uncle only saw business connections, and having no
+     relations or personal friends in London, save myself, would not
+     have been likely to mention the occurrence to any one."
+
+Mr. Cope also sent us a copy of the printed announcement of the death,
+which Miss Dodson had received. It was dated, "Bruges, June 7th, 1887,"
+and gave the date of death as June 5th. He quotes from Miss Dodson's
+letter to him, enclosing it, as follows: "[My friend], Mrs. Grange,
+tells me she saw [my sister-in-law] a couple of hours prior to her
+death, which took place about nine o'clock on the evening of June 5th,
+and it was between eleven and twelve o'clock the same night my mother
+brought me the two little children."
+
+Professor Sidgwick writes:--
+
+
+_November 23rd, 1892._
+
+     I have just had an interesting conversation with Miss Dodson and
+     her friend, Mrs. Grange.
+
+     Miss Dodson told me that she was not thinking of her brother or his
+     wife at this time, as her mind was absorbed by certain other
+     matters. But the brother was an object of special concern to her,
+     as her mother on her deathbed, in 1871, had specially charged
+     her--and she had promised--to take care of the other children,
+     especially this brother, who was then five years old. He had
+     married in April, 1885, and she had not seen him since, though she
+     had heard of the birth of his first child, a little girl, in
+     January, 1886; and she had never seen his wife nor heard of the
+     birth of the second child.
+
+     She is as sure as she can be that she was awake at the time of the
+     experience. She knew the time by a clock in the room and also a
+     clock outside. She heard this latter strike twelve afterwards, and
+     the apparition must have occurred after eleven, because lights were
+     out in front of the public-house. The children seemed to be with
+     her a long time; indeed, they seemed to be still with her when the
+     clock struck twelve. The room was usually light enough to see
+     things in--_e.g._ to get a glass of water, etc.--owing to the lamp
+     in the street, but the distinctness with which the vision was seen
+     is not explicable by the real light. The children were of ages
+     corresponding to those of her sister-in-law's children, _i.e._ they
+     seemed to be a little girl and a baby newly born; the sex was not
+     distinguished. She was not at all alarmed.
+
+     She heard from Mrs. Grange by letter, and afterwards orally from
+     her brother, that her sister-in-law died between eight and nine the
+     same night.
+
+     She never had any experience of the kind, or any hallucination at
+     all before: but _since_ she has occasionally felt a hand on her
+     head in trouble.
+
+     Mrs. Grange told me that she was with the sister-in-law about an
+     hour and a half before her death. She left her about seven o'clock,
+     without any particular alarm about her; though she was suffering
+     from inflammation after childbirth, and Mrs. Grange did not quite
+     like her look; still her state was not considered alarming by those
+     who were attending on her. Then about 8.30 news came to Mrs. Grange
+     in her own house that something had happened at the
+     sister-in-law's. As it was only in the next street, Mrs. Grange put
+     on her bonnet and went round to the house, and found she was dead.
+     She then wrote and told Miss Dodson.
+
+
+VII. D. From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 200-205.[228]
+
+The first report of the case appeared in _The Herald_ (Dubuque, Iowa),
+February 11th, 1891, as follows:--
+
+     It will be remembered that on February 2nd, Michael Conley, a
+     farmer living near Ionia, Chickasaw County, was found dead in an
+     outhouse at the Jefferson house. He was carried to Coroner
+     Hoffmann's morgue, where, after the inquest, his body was prepared
+     for shipment to his late home. The old clothes which he wore were
+     covered with filth from the place where he was found, and they were
+     thrown outside the morgue on the ground.
+
+     His son came from Ionia, and took the corpse home. When he reached
+     there, and one of the daughters was told that her father was dead,
+     she fell into a swoon, in which she remained for several hours.
+     When at last she was brought from the swoon, she said, "Where are
+     father's old clothes? He has just appeared to me dressed in a white
+     shirt, black clothes, and felt [mis-reported for _satin_]
+     slippers, and told me that after leaving home he sewed a large roll
+     of bills inside his grey shirt with a piece of my red dress, and
+     the money is still there." In a short time she fell into another
+     swoon, and when out of it demanded that somebody go to Dubuque and
+     get the clothes. She was deathly sick, and is so yet.
+
+     The entire family considered it only a hallucination, but the
+     physician advised them to get the clothes, as it might set her mind
+     at rest. The son telephoned Coroner Hoffmann, asking if the clothes
+     were still in his possession. He looked and found them in the
+     backyard, although he had supposed they were thrown in the vault,
+     as he had intended. He answered that he still had them, and on
+     being told that the son would come to get them, they were wrapped
+     in a bundle.
+
+     The young man arrived last Monday afternoon, and told Coroner
+     Hoffmann what his sister had said. Mr. Hoffmann admitted that the
+     lady had described the identical burial garb in which her father
+     was clad, even to the slippers, although she never saw him after
+     death, and none of the family had seen more than his face through
+     the coffin lid. Curiosity being fully aroused, they took the grey
+     shirt from the bundle, and within the bosom found a large roll of
+     bills sewed with a piece of red cloth. The young man said his
+     sister had a red dress exactly like it. The stitches were large and
+     irregular, and looked to be those of a man. The son wrapped up the
+     garments and took them home with him yesterday morning, filled with
+     wonder at the supernatural revelation made to his sister, who is at
+     present lingering between life and death.
+
+Dr. Hodgson communicated with the proprietors of _The Herald_, and both
+they and their reporter who had written the account stated that it was
+strictly accurate. The coroner, Mr. Hoffmann, wrote to Dr. Hodgson on
+March 18th, 1891, as follows:--
+
+     In regard to the statements in the Dubuque _Herald_, about February
+     19th, about the Conley matter is more than true by my
+     investigation. I laughed and did not believe in the matter when I
+     first heard of it, until I satisfied myself by investigating and
+     seeing what I did.
+
+M. M. HOFFMANN, _County Coroner_.
+
+Further evidence was obtained through Mr. Amos Crum, pastor of a church
+at Dubuque. The following statement was made by Mr. Brown, whom Mr. Crum
+described as "an intelligent and reliable farmer, residing about one
+mile from the Conleys."
+
+
+IONIA, _July 20th, 1891_.
+
+     Elizabeth Conley, the subject of so much comment in the various
+     papers, was born in Chickasaw township, Chickasaw County, Iowa, in
+     March, 1863. Her mother died the same year. Is of Irish parentage;
+     brought up, and is, a Roman Catholic; has been keeping house for
+     her father for ten years.
+
+     On the 1st day of February, 1891, her father went to Dubuque, Iowa,
+     for medical treatment, and died on the 3rd of the same month very
+     suddenly. His son was notified by telegraph the same day, and he
+     and I started the next morning after the remains, which we found in
+     charge of Coroner Hoffmann.
+
+     He had 9 dollars 75 cents, which he had taken from his pocket-book.
+     I think it was about two days after our return she had the dream or
+     vision. She claimed her father had appeared to her, and told her
+     there was a sum of money in an inside pocket of his undershirt. Her
+     brother started for Dubuque a few days afterwards, and found the
+     clothes as we had left them, and in the pocket referred to found 30
+     dollars in currency. These are the facts of the matter as near as I
+     can give them.
+
+GEORGE BROWN.
+
+Mr. Crum wrote later:--
+
+
+DUBUQUE, IOWA, _August 15th, 1891_.
+
+     DEAR MR. HODGSON,--I send you in another cover a detailed account
+     of interview with the Conleys. I could not get the doctor.
+
+     I have had a long talk with Mr. Hoffmann about the Conley incident,
+     and think you have all the facts--and they are _facts_.
+
+     The girl Lizzie Conley swooned. She saw her dead father; she heard
+     from him of the money left in his old shirt; she returned to bodily
+     consciousness; she described her father's burial dress, robe,
+     shirt, and slippers exactly, though she had never seen them. She
+     described the pocket in the shirt that had been left for days in
+     the shed at the undertaker's. It was a ragged-edged piece of red
+     cloth clumsily sewn, and in this pocket was found a roll of
+     bill--35 dollars in amount--as taken out by Mr. Hoffmann in
+     presence of Pat Conley, son of the deceased, and brother of the
+     Lizzie Conley whose remarkable dream or vision is the subject of
+     inquiry.
+
+AMOS CRUM, _Past. Univ. Ch._
+
+...I herewith transcribe my questions addressed to Miss Elizabeth
+     Conley, and her replies to the same concerning her alleged dream or
+     vision....
+
+     On July 17th, about noon, I called at the Conley home near Ionia,
+     Chickasaw County, Iowa, and inquired for Elizabeth Conley. She was
+     present, and engaged in her domestic labours. When I stated the
+     object of my call, she seemed quite reluctant for a moment to
+     engage in conversation. Then she directed a lad who was present to
+     leave the room. She said she would converse with me upon the matter
+     pertaining to her father.
+
+     Q. What is your age? A. Twenty-eight.
+
+     Q. What is the state of your health? A. Not good since my father's
+     death.
+
+     Q. What was the state of your health previous to his death? A. It
+     was good. I was a healthy girl.
+
+     Q. Did you have dreams, visions, or swoons previous to your
+     father's death? A. Why, I had _dreams_. Everybody has dreams.
+
+     Q. Have you ever made discoveries or received other information
+     during your dreams or visions previous to your father's death? A.
+     No.
+
+     Q. Had there been anything unusual in your dreams or visions
+     previous to your father's death? A. No, not that I know of.
+
+     Q. Was your father in the habit of carrying considerable sums of
+     money about his person? A. Not that I knew of.
+
+     Q. Did you know _before his death_ of the pocket in the breast of
+     the shirt worn by him to Dubuque? A. No.
+
+     Q. Did you wash or prepare that shirt for him to wear on his trip
+     to Dubuque? A. No. It was a heavy woollen undershirt, and the
+     pocket was stitched inside of the breast of it.
+
+     Q. Will you recite the circumstances connected with the recovery of
+     money from clothing worn by your father at the time of his death?
+     A. (after some hesitation) When they told me that father was dead I
+     felt very sick and bad; I did not know anything. Then father came
+     to me. He had on a white shirt and black clothes and slippers. When
+     I came to, I told Pat [her brother] I had seen father. I asked him
+     (Pat) if he had brought back father's old clothes. He said, "No,"
+     and asked me why I wanted them. I told him father said to me he had
+     sewed a roll of bills inside of his grey shirt, in a pocket made of
+     a piece of my old red dress. I went to sleep, and father came to me
+     again. When I awoke I told Pat he must go and get the clothes.
+
+     Q. While in these swoons did you hear the ordinary conversations or
+     noises in the house about you? A. No.
+
+     Q. Did you see your father's body after it was placed in its
+     coffin? A. No; I did not see him after he left the house to go to
+     Dubuque.
+
+     Q. Have you an education? A. No.
+
+     Q. Can you read and write? A. Oh yes, I can read and write; but
+     I've not been to school much.
+
+     Q. Are you willing to write out what you have told me of this
+     strange affair? A. Why, I've told you all I know about it.
+
+     She was averse to writing or to signing a written statement. During
+     the conversation she was quite emotional, and manifested much
+     effort to suppress her feelings. She is a little more than medium
+     size, of Irish parentage, of Catholic faith, and shows by her
+     conversation that her education is limited.
+
+     Her brother, Pat Conley, corroborates all that she has recited. He
+     is a sincere and substantial man, and has no theory upon which to
+     account for the strange facts that have come to his knowledge. In
+     his presence Coroner Hoffmann, in Dubuque, found the shirt with its
+     pocket of red cloth stitched on the inside with long, straggling,
+     and awkward stitches, just as a dim-sighted old man or an awkward
+     boy might sew it there. The pocket was about 7 [seven] inches deep,
+     and in the pocket of that dirty old shirt that had lain in
+     Hoffmann's back room was a roll of bills amounting to 35 dollars.
+     When the shirt was found with the pocket, as described by his
+     sister after her swoon, and the money as told her by the old man
+     _after his death_, Pat Conley seemed dazed and overcome by the
+     mystery. Hoffmann says the girl, after her swoon, described
+     exactly the burial suit, shirt, coat or robe, and satin slippers
+     in which the body was prepared for burial. She even described
+     minutely the slippers, which were of a new pattern that had not
+     been in the market here, and which the girl could never have seen a
+     sample of; and she had not seen, and never saw, the body of her
+     father after it was placed in the coffin, and if she had seen it
+     she could not have seen his feet "in the nice black satin slippers"
+     which she described....
+
+AMOS CRUM, _Pastor Univ. Church_.
+
+If we may accept the details of this narrative, which seems to have been
+carefully and promptly investigated, we find that the phantasm
+communicates two sets of facts: one of them known only to strangers (the
+dress in which he was buried), and one of them known only to himself
+(the existence of the inside pocket and the money therein). In
+discussing from what mind these images originate it is, of course,
+important to note whether any living minds, known or unknown to the
+percipient, were aware of the facts thus conveyed.
+
+There are few cases where the communication between the percipient and
+the deceased seems to have been more direct than here. The hard, prosaic
+reality of the details of the message need not, of course, surprise us.
+On the contrary, the father's sudden death in the midst of earthly
+business would at once retain his attention on money matters and
+facilitate his impressing them on the daughter's mind. One wishes that
+more could be learned of the daughter's condition when receiving the
+message. It seems to have resembled trance rather than dream.[229]
+
+One other case in this group I must quote at length. It illustrates the
+fact that the cases of deepest interest are often the hardest for the
+inquirer to get hold of.
+
+From the _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. pp. 385-86.
+
+The account of the percipient, Baron B. von Driesen, was written in
+November, 1890, and has been translated from the Russian by Mr. M.
+Petrovo-Solovovo, who sent us the case.
+
+     [Baron von Driesen begins by saying that he has never believed and
+     does not believe in the supernatural, and that he is more inclined
+     to attribute the apparition he saw to his "excited fancy" than to
+     anything else. After these preliminary remarks he proceeds as
+     follows:--]
+
+     I must tell you that my father-in-law, M. N. J. Ponomareff, died in
+     the country. This did not happen at once, but after a long and
+     painful illness, whose sharp phases had obliged my wife and myself
+     to join him long before his death. I had not been on good terms
+     with M. Ponomareff. Different circumstances, which are out of place
+     in this narrative, had estranged us from each other, and these
+     relations did not change until his death. He died very quietly,
+     after having given his blessing to all his family, including
+     myself. A liturgy for the rest of his soul was to be celebrated on
+     the ninth day. I remember very well how I went to bed between one
+     and two o'clock on the eve of that day, and how I read the Gospel
+     before falling asleep. My wife was sleeping in the same room. It
+     was perfectly quiet. I had just put out the candle when footsteps
+     were heard in the adjacent room--a sound of slippers shuffling, I
+     might say--which ceased before the door of our bedroom. I called
+     out, "Who is there?" No answer. I struck one match, then another,
+     and when after the stifling smell of the sulphur the fire had
+     lighted up the room, I saw M. Ponomareff standing before the closed
+     door. Yes, it was he, in his blue dressing-gown, lined with
+     squirrel furs and only half-buttoned, so that I could see his white
+     waistcoat and his black trousers. It was he undoubtedly. I was not
+     frightened. They say that, as a rule, one is _not_ frightened when
+     seeing a ghost, as ghosts possess the quality of paralysing fear.
+
+     "What do you want?" I asked my father-in-law. M. Ponomareff made
+     two steps forward, stopped before my bed, and said, "Basil
+     Feodorovitch, I have acted wrongly towards you. Forgive me! Without
+     this I do not feel at rest there." He was pointing to the ceiling
+     with his left hand, whilst holding out his right to me. I seized
+     this hand, which was long and cold, shook it, and answered,
+     "Nicholas Ivanovitch, God is my witness that I have never had
+     anything against you."
+
+     [The ghost of] my father-in-law bowed [or bent down], moved away,
+     and went through the opposite door into the billiard-room, where he
+     disappeared. I looked after him for a moment, crossed myself, put
+     out the candle, and fell asleep with the sense of joy which a man
+     who has done his duty must feel. The morning came. My wife's
+     brothers, as well as our neighbours and the peasants, assembled,
+     and the liturgy was celebrated by our confessor, the Rev. Father
+     Basil. But when all was over, the same Father Basil led me aside,
+     and said to me mysteriously, "Basil Feodorovitch, I have got
+     something to say to you in private." My wife having come near us at
+     this moment, the clergyman repeated his wish. I answered, "Father
+     Basil, I have no secrets from my wife; please tell us what you
+     wished to tell me alone."
+
+     Then Father Basil, who is living till now in the Koi parish of the
+     district of Kashin [Gov. of Tver], said to me in a rather solemn
+     voice, "This night at three o'clock Nicholas Ivanovitch
+     [Ponomareff] appeared to me and begged of me to reconcile him to
+     you."
+
+(Signed)      BARON BASIL DRIESEN.
+
+Mr. Solovovo adds:--
+
+     The Baroness von Driesen is now dead, so that her evidence cannot
+     be obtained....
+
+     I also saw Baron Basil von Driesen himself, and spoke with him
+     about M. Ponomareff's ghost. He stated to me that if he were going
+     to die to-morrow, he should still be ready to swear to the fact of
+     his having seen the apparition, or something to this effect. I
+     asked him to obtain for me the clergyman's account, to whom I had
+     already written before seeing Baron von Driesen (though not knowing
+     him), but without receiving an answer--which is but natural, after
+     all. Baron von Driesen kindly promised to procure for me the
+     account in question, as it was then his intention to visit
+     different estates in Central Russia, including the one that had
+     belonged to M. Ponomareff.
+
+     Baron Nicholas von Driesen--Baron Basil's son--called on me a few
+     days ago. He stated, with regard to the case in question, that it
+     was necessary to see the clergyman in order to induce him to write
+     an account of what had happened to him.
+
+Baron N. von Driesen afterwards sent a note to Mr. Solovovo, stating
+that his grandfather (M. Ponomareff) died on November 21st, 1860; and
+the testimony of the priest was obtained later. Mr. Solovovo, who had
+already ascertained independently that the Rev. Basil Bajenoff had been
+a priest at Koi in the year 1861, and was there still, writes:--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following is the translation of the Rev. Basil Bajenoff's
+statement:--
+
+
+"KOI, _July 23rd [August 4th], 1891_.
+
+     "To the account I heard from Baron B. F. Driesen in the presence of
+     his wife's brothers, MM. N. N., A. N., and I. N. Ponomareff, as to
+     how M. Nicholas I. Ponomareff appeared to him in the night of
+     November 29-30th, 1860, having died nine days before, and begged of
+     the Baron to be reconciled to him, I may add that to me also did he
+     appear _at the same time_ and with the same request, which fact,
+     before hearing the Baron's narrative, I communicated to all those
+     present at the liturgy for the rest of the soul of the late M. N.
+     I. Ponomareff.
+
+"(Signed)      BASIL BAJENOFF,
+"Priest of Trinity Church, at Koi, District of Kashin,
+Government of Tver."
+
+
+VII. E. The following is quoted from the "Report on the Census of
+Hallucinations" in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. p. 284.
+
+From Countess Eugénie Kapnist:--
+
+
+_June 24th, 1891._
+
+     A Talta, en Février, 1889, nous fîmes la connaissance de M. P. et
+     de sa femme, passant la soirée chez des amis communs qui avaient
+     tenu ŕ nous réunir. A cette époque, M. P. souffrait déjŕ d'une
+     phthisie assez avancée; il venait de perdre, ŕ Pétersbourg, son
+     frčre, atteint de la męme maladie. On pria ma soeur de faire un
+     peu de musique, et elle choisit au hasard le Prélude de
+     Mendelssohn. A mon étonnement je vis M. P. que nous ne connaissions
+     que de ce soir, aller, trčs émotionné, prendre place auprčs du
+     piano, et suivre avec une espčce d'anxiété le jeu de ma soeur.
+     Lorsqu'elle eut fini, il dit que pour quelques instants elle venait
+     de faire ressusciter son frčre, exécutant absolument de la męme
+     maničre ce morceau, qu'il jouait fréquemment. Depuis, en voyant ma
+     soeur, il aimait particuličrement ŕ causer avec elle. Je puis
+     certifier ainsi qu'elle une conversation que nous eűmes ŕ une
+     soirée, au mois de Mars. Nous parlions de la mort, chose fréquente
+     ŕ Talta, toujours peuplée de malades:--"Savez-vous," disait-il ŕ ma
+     soeur, "il me semble toujours que mon esprit est trčs proche du
+     vôtre; j'ai la certitude de vous avoir déjŕ connue; nous avons dans
+     la réalité une preuve que ce n'est pas en ce monde--ce sera que je
+     vous aurais vue durant quelqu'autre vie précédente" (il était un
+     peu spirite). "Ainsi donc, si je meurs avant vous, ce qui est bien
+     probable, vu ma maladie, je reviendrai vers vous, si cela m'est
+     possible, et je vous apparaîtrai de façon ŕ ne pas vous effrayer
+     désagréablement." Ma soeur lui répondit, prenant la chose trčs au
+     sérieux, qu'elle lui rendrait la pareille si elle mourait la
+     premičre, et j'étais témoin de cette promesse mutuelle.
+
+     Néanmoins nous fîmes ŕ peine connaissance de maison; nous nous
+     rencontrions parfois chez des amis communs, et nous le voyions
+     souvent se promener sur le quai dans un paletot couleur noisette
+     qui excitait notre hilarité et qui nous resta dans la mémoire je ne
+     sais plus pourquoi. Au mois de Mai, nous partions de Talta, et
+     depuis nous eűmes tant d'impressions diverses, nous vîmes tant de
+     monde, que jusqu'ŕ l'hiver suivant nous oubliâmes complétement M.
+     P. et sa femme, qui représentaient pour nous des connaissances
+     comme on en a par centaines dans la vie.
+
+     Nous étions ŕ Pétersbourg. Le 11 Mars, c'était un lundi de Caręme
+     en 1890, nous allâmes au théâtre voir une représentation de la
+     troupe des Meiningner. Je crois qu'on donnait _Le Marchand de
+     Venise_. Mlle. B. était avec nous, venue de Tsarskoé ŕ cette
+     occasion. La pičce terminée, nous n'eűmes que le temps de rentrer ŕ
+     la maison changer de toilette, aprčs quoi nous accompagnâmes Mlle.
+     B. ŕ la gare. Elle partait avec le dernier train, qui quitte pour
+     Tsarskoé Sélo ŕ 1 heure de la nuit. Nous l'installâmes en wagon, et
+     ne l'y laissâmes qu'aprčs la seconde cloche de départ.
+
+     Notre domestique allait bien en avant de nous, afin de retrouver
+     notre voiture, de maničre que, gagnant le perron, nous la trouvâmes
+     avancée qui nous attendait. Ma soeur s'assit la premičre; moi je
+     la fis attendre, descendant plus doucement les marches de
+     l'escalier; le domestique tenait la portičre du landau ouverte. Je
+     montai ŕ demi, sur le marchepied, et soudain je m'arrętai dans
+     cette pose, tellement surprise que je ne compris plus ce qui
+     m'arrivait. Il faisait sombre dans la voiture, et pourtant en face
+     de ma soeur, la regardant, je vis dans un petit jour gris qu'on
+     eűt dit factice, s'éclaircissant vers le point qui attachait le
+     plus mes yeux, une figure ŕ la silhouette émoussée, diaphane,
+     plutôt qu'indécise. Cette vision dura un instant, pendant lequel,
+     pourtant, mes yeux prirent connaissance des moindres détails de ce
+     visage, qui me sembla connu: des traits assez pointus, une raie un
+     peu de côté, un nez prononcé, un menton trčs maigre ŕ barbe rare et
+     d'un blond foncé. Ce qui me frappe, lorsque j'y pense ŕ présent,
+     c'est d'avoir vu les différentes couleurs, malgré que la lueur
+     grisâtre, qui éclairait ŕ peine l'inconnu, eűt été insuffisante
+     pour les distinguer dans un cas normal. Il était sans chapeau, et
+     en męme temps dans un paletot comme on en porte au sud--de couleur
+     plutôt claire--noisette. Toute sa personne avait un cachet de
+     grande fatigue et de maigreur.
+
+     Le domestique, trčs étonné de ne pas me voir monter, arrętée ainsi
+     sur le marchepied, crut que j'avais marché dans ma robe et m'aida ŕ
+     m'asseoir, pendant que je demandais ŕ ma soeur, en prenant place
+     ŕ côté d'elle, si c'était bien notre voiture? A tel point j'avais
+     perdu la tęte, ayant senti un vrai engourdissement de cerveau en
+     voyant cet étranger installé en face d'elle, je ne m'étais pas
+     rendu compte que, dans le cas d'une présence réelle d'un semblable
+     vis-ŕ-vis, ni ma soeur, ni le valet de pied ne resteraient si
+     calmement ŕ l'envisager. Lorsque je fus assise, je ne vis plus
+     rien, et je demandais ŕ ma soeur:--"N'as-tu rien vu en face de
+     toi?" "Rien du tout, et quelle idée as-tu eue de demander, en
+     entrant dans la voiture, si c'était bien la nôtre?" répondit-elle
+     en riant. Alors, je lui racontais tout ce qui précéde, décrivant
+     minutieusement ma vision. "Quelle figure connue," disait-elle, "et
+     ŕ paletot noisette, cette raie de côté, oů donc l'avons nous vue?
+     Pourtant nul ne ressemble ici ŕ ta description"; et nous nous
+     creusions la tęte sans rien trouver. Rentrées ŕ la maison, nous
+     racontâmes ce fait ŕ notre mčre; ma description la fit aussi
+     souvenir vaguement d'un visage analogue. Le lendemain soir (12
+     Mars) un jeune homme de notre connaissance, M. M. S., vint nous
+     voir. Je lui répétais aussi l'incident qui nous était arrivé. Nous
+     en parlâmes beaucoup, mais inutilement; je ne pouvais toujours pas
+     appliquer le nom voulu ŕ la personnalité de ma vision, tout en me
+     souvenant fort bien avoir vu un visage tout pareil parmi mes
+     nombreuses connaissances; mais oů et ŕ quelle époque? Je ne me
+     souvenais de rien, avec ma mauvaise mémoire qui me fait souvent
+     défaut, ŕ ce sujet. Quelques jours plus tard, nous étions chez la
+     grandmčre de M. M. S.:--"Savez-vous," nous dit-elle, "quelle triste
+     nouvelle je viens de recevoir de Talta? M. P. vient de mourir, mais
+     on ne me donne pas de détails." Ma soeur et moi, nous nous
+     regardâmes. A ce nom, la figure pointue et le paletot noisette
+     retrouvčrent leur possesseur. Ma soeur reconnut en męme temps que
+     moi, grâce ŕ ma description précise. Lorsque M. M. S. entra, je le
+     priai de chercher dans les vieux journaux la date exacte de cette
+     mort. Le décčs était marqué au 14 du mois de Mars, donc, deux jours
+     _aprčs_ la vision que j'avais eue. J'écrivis ŕ Talta pour avoir des
+     renseignements. On me répondit qu'il gardait le lit depuis le 24
+     Novembre et qu'il avait été depuis dans un état de faiblesse
+     extręme, mais le sommeil ne l'avait point quitté; il dormait si
+     longtemps et si profondément, męme durant les derničres nuits de
+     son existence, que cela faisait espérer une amélioration. Nous nous
+     étonnions de ce que j'aie vu M. P., malgré sa promesse de se
+     montrer ŕ ma soeur. Mais je dois ajouter ici qu'avant le fait
+     décrit ci-dessus, j'avais été voyante un certain nombre de fois,
+     mais cette vision est bien celle que j'ai distinguée le plus
+     nettement, avec des détails minutieux, et avec les teintes diverses
+     du visage humain, et męme du vętement.
+
+COMTESSE EUGÉNIE KAPNIST.
+COMTESSE INA KAPNIST.
+
+The second signature is that of the sister who was present at the time.
+
+Mr. Michael Petrovo-Solovovo, who sent us the case, writes:--
+
+     I have much pleasure in certifying that the fact of Countess
+     Kapnist's vision was mentioned, among others, to myself before the
+     news of Mr. P.'s death came to Petersburg. I well remember seeing
+     an announcement of his demise in the papers.
+
+
+VII. F. From _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 522, footnote. The
+account was written down, a few months after the occurrence, from the
+dictation of the percipient--Sister Bertha, Superior of the House of
+Mercy at Bovey Tracy, Newton Abbot--who read it through on December
+29th, 1885, pronounced it correct, and signed it.
+
+     On the night of the 10th of November, 1861 (I do not know the exact
+     hour), I was up in my bed watching, because there was a person not
+     quite well in the next room. I heard a voice, which I recognised at
+     once as familiar to me, and at first thought of my sister. It said,
+     in the brightest and most cheerful tone, "I am here with you." I
+     answered, looking and seeing nothing, "Who are you?" The voice
+     said, "You mustn't know yet." I heard nothing more, and saw
+     nothing, and am certain that the door was not opened or shut. I was
+     not in the least frightened, and felt convinced that it was Lucy's
+     [Miss Lucy Gambier Parry's] voice. I have never doubted it from
+     that moment. I had not heard of her being worse; the last account
+     had been good, and I was expecting to hear that she was at Torquay.
+     In the course of the next day (the 11th), mother told me that she
+     had died on the morning of the 10th, rather more than twelve hours
+     before I heard her voice.
+
+The narrator informs us that she has never in her life experienced any
+other hallucination of the senses. Mrs. Gambier Parry, of Highnam Court,
+Gloucester, step-mother and cousin of the "Lucy" of the narrative,
+writes:--
+
+     Sister Bertha (her name is Bertha Foertsch) had been living for
+     many years as German governess to Lucy Anna Gambier Parry, and was
+     her dearest friend. She came to us at once on hearing of Lucy's
+     death, and told me of the mysterious occurrence of the night
+     before.
+
+
+VII. G. The following case is in some respects one of the most
+remarkable and best authenticated instances of "haunting" on record,
+although, as will be seen, the evidence for the identity of the
+apparition is inconclusive. The case was fully described in a paper
+entitled "Record of a Haunted House," by Miss R. C. Morton, in
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 311-332. Besides the account of the
+principal percipient, Miss R. C. Morton, the paper contains independent
+first-hand statements from six other witnesses,--a friend, Miss
+Campbell, a sister and brother of Miss Morton's who lived in the house,
+a married sister who visited there, and two former servants; also plans
+of the whole house. For the full details I must refer the reader to the
+original paper; I have space here only for abbreviated extracts from
+Miss Morton's account.
+
+An account of the case first came into my hands in December, 1884, and
+this with Miss Morton's letters to her friend, Miss Campbell, are the
+earliest written records. On May 1st, 1886, I called upon Captain Morton
+at the "haunted house," and afterwards visited him at intervals, and
+took notes of what he told me. I also saw Miss Morton and Miss E.
+Morton, and the two former servants whose accounts are given in Miss
+Morton's paper. The phenomena as seen or heard by all the witnesses were
+very uniform in character, even in the numerous instances where there
+had been no previous communication between the percipients. Miss Morton
+is a lady of scientific training, and was at the time her account was
+written (in April, 1892) preparing to be a physician. The name "Morton"
+is substituted for the real family name. With that exception the names
+and initials are the true ones.
+
+After describing the house and garden, Miss Morton proceeds:--
+
+     It was built about the year 1860; the first occupant was Mr. S., an
+     Anglo-Indian, who lived in it for about sixteen years. During this
+     time, in the month of August, year uncertain, he lost his wife, to
+     whom he was passionately attached, and to drown his grief took to
+     drinking. About two years later, Mr. S. married again. His second
+     wife, a Miss I. H., was in hopes of curing him of his intemperate
+     habits, but instead she also took to drinking, and their married
+     life was embittered by constant quarrels, frequently resulting in
+     violent scenes. The chief subjects of dispute were the management
+     of the children (two girls, and either one or two boys, all quite
+     young) of the first Mrs. S., and the possession of her jewellery,
+     to preserve which for her children, Mr. S. had some of the boards
+     in the small front sitting-room taken up by a local carpenter and
+     the jewels inserted in the receptacle so formed. Finally, a few
+     months before Mr. S.'s death, on July 14th, 1876, his wife
+     separated from him and went to live in Clifton. She was not present
+     at the time of his death, nor, as far as is known, was she ever at
+     the house afterwards. She died on September 23rd, 1878.
+
+     After Mr. S.'s death the house was bought by Mr. L., an elderly
+     gentleman, who died rather suddenly within six months of going into
+     it. The house then remained empty for some years--probably four.
+
+     During this time there is no direct evidence of haunting, but when
+     inquiry was made later on much hearsay evidence was brought
+     forward. In April 1882, the house was let by the representatives of
+     the late Mr. L. to Captain Morton, and it is during his tenancy
+     (not yet terminated) that the appearances recorded have taken
+     place.
+
+     The family consists of Captain M. himself; his wife, who is a great
+     invalid; neither of whom saw anything; a married daughter, Mrs. K.,
+     then about twenty-six, who was only a visitor from time to time,
+     sometimes with, but more often without, her husband; four unmarried
+     daughters, myself, then aged nineteen, who was the chief percipient
+     and now give the chief account of the apparition; E. Morton, then
+     aged eighteen; L. and M. Morton, then fifteen and thirteen; two
+     sons, one of sixteen, who was absent during the greater part of the
+     time when the apparition was seen; the other, then six years old.
+
+     My father took the house in March 1882, none of us having then
+     heard of anything unusual about the house. We moved in towards the
+     end of April, and it was not until the following June that I first
+     saw the apparition.
+
+     I had gone up to my room, but was not yet in bed, when I heard some
+     one at the door, and went to it, thinking it might be my mother. On
+     opening the door, I saw no one; but on going a few steps along the
+     passage, I saw the figure of a tall lady, dressed in black,
+     standing at the head of the stairs. After a few moments she
+     descended the stairs, and I followed for a short distance, feeling
+     curious what it could be. I had only a small piece of candle, and
+     it suddenly burnt itself out; and being unable to see more, I went
+     back to my room.
+
+     The figure was that of a tall lady, dressed in black of a soft
+     woollen material, judging from the slight sound in moving. The face
+     was hidden in a handkerchief held in the right hand. This is all I
+     noticed then; but on further occasions, when I was able to observe
+     her more closely, I saw the upper part of the left side of the
+     forehead, and a little of the hair above. Her left hand was nearly
+     hidden by her sleeve and a fold of her dress. As she held it down a
+     portion of a widow's cuff was visible on both wrists, so that the
+     whole impression was that of a lady in widow's weeds. There was no
+     cap on the head but a general effect of blackness suggests a
+     bonnet, with a long veil or a hood.
+
+     During the next two years--from 1882 to 1884--I saw the figure
+     about half-a-dozen times; at first at long intervals, and
+     afterwards at shorter, but I only mentioned these appearances to
+     one friend, who did not speak of them to any one. During this
+     period, as far as we know, there were only three appearances to any
+     one else.
+
+     1. In the summer of 1882 to my sister, Mrs. K., when the figure was
+     thought to be that of a Sister of Mercy who had called at the
+     house, and no further curiosity was aroused. She was coming down
+     the stairs rather late for dinner at 6.30, it being then quite
+     light, when she saw the figure cross the hall in front of her, and
+     pass into the drawing-room. She then asked the rest of us, already
+     seated at dinner, "Who was that Sister of Mercy whom I have just
+     seen going into the drawing-room?" She was told there was no such
+     person, and a servant was sent to look; but the drawing-room was
+     empty, and she was sure no one had come in. Mrs. K. persisted that
+     she had seen a tall figure in black, with some white about it; but
+     nothing further was thought of the matter.
+
+     2. In the autumn of 1883 it was seen by the housemaid about 10
+     P.M., she declaring that some one had got into the house, her
+     description agreeing fairly with what I had seen; but as on
+     searching no one was found, her story received no credit.
+
+     3. On or about December 18th, 1883, it was seen in the drawing-room
+     by my brother and another little boy. They were playing outside on
+     the terrace when they saw the figure in the drawing-room close to
+     the window, and ran in to see who it could be that was crying so
+     bitterly. They found no one in the drawing-room, and the
+     parlour-maid told them that no one had come into the house.
+
+     After the first time, I followed the figure several times
+     downstairs into the drawing-room, where she remained a variable
+     time, generally standing to the right hand side of the bow window.
+     From the drawing-room she went along the passage towards the garden
+     door, where she always disappeared.
+
+     The first time I spoke to her was on January 29th, 1884. "I opened
+     the drawing-room door softly and went in, standing just by it. She
+     came in past me and walked to the sofa and stood still there, so I
+     went up to her and asked her if I could help her. She moved, and I
+     thought she was going to speak, but she only gave a slight gasp and
+     moved towards the door. Just by the door I spoke to her again, but
+     she seemed as if she were quite unable to speak. She walked into
+     the hall, then by the side door she seemed to disappear as before."
+     (Quoted from a letter written on January 31st.) In May and June,
+     1884, I tried some experiments, fastening strings with marine glue
+     across the stairs at different heights from the ground--of which I
+     give a more detailed account later on.
+
+     I also attempted to touch her, but she always eluded me. It was not
+     that there was nothing there to touch, but that she always seemed
+     to be _beyond_ me, and if followed into a corner, simply
+     disappeared.
+
+     During these two years the only _noises_ I heard were those of
+     slight pushes against my bedroom door, accompanied by footsteps;
+     and if I looked out on hearing these sounds, I invariably saw the
+     figure. "Her footstep is very light, you can hardly hear it, except
+     on the linoleum, and then only like a person walking softly with
+     thin boots on." (Letter on January 31st, 1884.) The appearances
+     during the next two months--July and August, 1884--became much more
+     frequent; indeed they were then at their maximum, from which time
+     they seem gradually to have decreased, until now they seem to have
+     ceased.
+
+     Of these two months I have a short record in a set of journal
+     letters written at the time to a friend. On July 21st I find the
+     following account. "I went into the drawing-room, where my father
+     and sisters were sitting about nine in the evening, and sat down on
+     a couch close to the bow window. A few minutes after, as I sat
+     reading, I saw the figure come in at the open door, cross the room
+     and take up a position close behind the couch where I was. I was
+     astonished that no one else in the room saw her, as she was so very
+     distinct to me. My youngest brother, who had before seen her, was
+     not in the room. She stood behind the couch for about half-an-hour,
+     and then as usual walked to the door. I went after her, on the
+     excuse of getting a book, and saw her pass along the hall, until
+     she came to the garden door, where she disappeared. I spoke to her
+     as she passed the foot of the stairs, but she did not answer,
+     although as before she stopped and seemed as though _about_ to
+     speak." On July 31st, some time after I had gone up to bed, my
+     second sister E., who had remained downstairs talking in another
+     sister's room, came to me saying that some one had passed her on
+     the stairs. I tried then to persuade her that it was one of the
+     servants, but next morning found it could not have been so, as none
+     of them had been out of their rooms at that hour, and E.'s more
+     detailed description tallied with what I had already seen.
+
+     On the night of August 1st, I again saw the figure. I heard the
+     footsteps outside on the landing about 2 A.M. I got up at once, and
+     went outside. She was then at the end of the landing at the top of
+     the stairs, with her side view towards me. She stood there some
+     minutes, then went downstairs, stopping again when she reached the
+     hall below. I opened the drawing-room door and she went in, walked
+     across the room to the couch in the bow window, stayed there a
+     little, then came out of the room, went along the passage, and
+     disappeared by the garden door. I spoke to her again, but she did
+     not answer.
+
+     On the night of August 2nd the footsteps were heard by my three
+     sisters and by the cook, all of whom slept on the top landing--also
+     by my married sister, Mrs. K., who was sleeping on the floor below.
+     They all said the next morning that they had heard them very
+     plainly pass and repass their doors. The cook was a middle-aged and
+     very sensible person; on my asking her the following morning if any
+     of the servants had been out of their rooms the night before, after
+     coming up to bed, she told me that she had heard these footsteps
+     before, and that she had seen the figure on the stairs one night
+     when going down to the kitchen to fetch hot water after the
+     servants had come up to bed. She described it as a lady in widow's
+     dress, tall and slight, with her face hidden in a handkerchief held
+     in her right hand. Unfortunately we have since lost sight of this
+     servant; she left us about a year afterwards on her mother's death,
+     and we cannot now trace her. She also saw the figure outside the
+     kitchen windows on the terrace-walk, she herself being in the
+     kitchen; it was then about eleven in the morning, but having no
+     note of the occurrence, I cannot now remember whether this
+     appearance was subsequent to the one above mentioned.
+
+     These footsteps are very characteristic, and are not at all like
+     those of any of the people in the house; they are soft and rather
+     slow, though decided and even. My sisters would not go out on the
+     landing after hearing them pass, nor would the servants, but each
+     time when I have gone out after hearing them, I have seen the
+     figure there.
+
+     On August 5th I told my father about her and what we had seen and
+     heard. He was much astonished, not having seen or heard anything
+     himself at that time--neither then had my mother, but she is
+     slightly deaf, and is an invalid. He made inquiries of the landlord
+     (who then lived close by) as to whether he knew of anything unusual
+     about the house, as he had himself lived in it for a short time,
+     but he replied that he had only been there for three months, and
+     had never seen anything unusual....
+
+     On the evening of August 11th we were sitting in the drawing-room
+     with the gas lit but the shutters not shut, the light outside
+     getting dusk, my brothers and a friend having just given up tennis,
+     finding it too dark; my eldest sister, Mrs. K., and myself both saw
+     the figure on the balcony outside, looking in at the window. She
+     stood there some minutes, then walked to the end and back again,
+     after which she seemed to disappear. She soon after came into the
+     drawing-room, when I saw her, but my sister did not. The same
+     evening my sister E. saw her on the stairs as she came out of a
+     room on the upper landing.
+
+     The following evening, August 12th, while coming up the garden, I
+     walked towards the orchard, when I saw the figure cross the
+     orchard, go along the carriage drive in front of the house, and in
+     at the open side door, across the hall and into the drawing-room, I
+     following. She crossed the drawing-room and took up her usual
+     position behind the couch in the bow window. My father came in soon
+     after, and I told him she was there. He could not see the figure,
+     but went up to where I showed him she was. She then went swiftly
+     round behind him, across the room, out of the door, and along the
+     hall, disappearing as usual near the garden door, we both following
+     her. We looked out into the garden, having first to unlock the
+     garden door, which my father had locked as he came through, but saw
+     nothing of her.
+
+     On August 12th, about 8 P.M., and still quite light, my sister E.
+     was singing in the back drawing-room. I heard her stop abruptly,
+     come out into the hall, and call me. She said she had seen the
+     figure in the drawing-room close behind her as she sat at the
+     piano. I went back into the room with her and saw the figure in the
+     bow window in her usual place. I spoke to her several times, but
+     had no answer. She stood there for about ten minutes or a quarter
+     of an hour; then went across the room to the door, and along the
+     passage, disappearing in the same place by the garden door.
+
+     My sister M. then came in from the garden, saying she had seen her
+     coming up the kitchen steps outside. We all three then went out
+     into the garden, when Mrs. K. called out from a window on the first
+     storey that she had just seen her pass across the lawn in front and
+     along the carriage drive towards the orchard. This evening, then,
+     altogether four people saw her. My father was then away, and my
+     youngest brother was out.
+
+     On the morning of August 14th the parlour-maid saw her in the
+     dining-room, about 8.30 A.M., having gone into the room to open the
+     shutters. The room is very sunny, and even with all the shutters
+     closed it is quite light, the shutters not fitting well, and
+     letting sunlight through the cracks. She had opened one shutter,
+     when, on turning round, she saw the figure cross the room. We were
+     all on the look-out for her that evening, but saw nothing; in fact,
+     whenever we had made arrangements to watch, and were especially
+     expecting her, we never saw anything. This servant, who afterwards
+     married, was interviewed by Mr Myers at her own house....
+
+     On August 19th we all went to the seaside, and were away a month,
+     leaving three servants in the house.
+
+     When we came back they said that they had heard footsteps and
+     noises frequently, but as the stair-carpets were up part of the
+     time and the house was empty, many of these noises were doubtless
+     due to natural causes, though by them attributed to the figure.
+
+     The cook also spoke of seeing the figure in the garden, standing by
+     a stone vase on the lawn behind the house.
+
+     During the rest of that year and the following, 1885, the
+     apparition was frequently seen through each year, especially during
+     July, August, and September. In these months the three deaths took
+     place, viz.:--Mr. S., on July 14th, 1876; the first Mrs. S. in
+     August, and the second Mrs. S. on September 23rd.
+
+     The apparitions were of exactly the same type, seen in the same
+     places and by the same people, at varying intervals.
+
+     The footsteps continued, and were heard by several visitors and new
+     servants who had taken the places of those who had left, as well as
+     by myself, four sisters and brother; in all by about twenty people,
+     many of them not having previously heard of the apparitions or
+     sounds.
+
+     Other sounds were also heard in addition which seemed gradually to
+     increase in intensity. They consisted of walking up and down on the
+     second-floor landing, of bumps against the doors of the bedrooms,
+     and of the handles of the doors turning....
+
+     During this year, at Mr. Myers's suggestion, I kept a photographic
+     camera constantly ready to try to photograph the figure, but on the
+     few occasions I was able to do so, I got no result; at night,
+     usually only by candle-light, a long exposure would be necessary
+     for so dark a figure, and this I could not obtain. I also tried to
+     communicate with the figure, constantly speaking to it and asking
+     it to make signs, if not able to speak, but with no result. I also
+     tried especially to _touch_ her, but did not succeed. On cornering
+     her, as I did once or twice, she disappeared.
+
+     Some time in the summer of this year (1886), Mrs. Twining, our
+     regular charwoman, saw the figure, while waiting in the hall at the
+     door leading to the kitchen stairs, for her payment. Until it
+     suddenly vanished from her sight, as no real figure could have
+     done, she thought it was a lady visitor who had mistaken her way.
+     Mr. Myers interviewed her on December 29th, 1889, and has her
+     separate account.
+
+     On one night in July 1886 (my father and I being away from home),
+     my mother and her maid heard a loud noise in an unoccupied room
+     over their heads. They went up, but seeing nothing and the noise
+     ceasing, they went back to my mother's room on the first storey.
+     They then heard loud noises from the morning-room on the ground
+     floor. They then went half-way downstairs, when they saw a bright
+     light in the hall beneath. Being alarmed, they went up to my sister
+     E., who then came down, and they all three examined the doors,
+     windows, etc., and found them all fastened as usual. My mother and
+     her maid then went to bed. My sister E. went up to her room on the
+     second storey, but as she passed the room where my two sisters L.
+     and M. were sleeping, they opened their door to say that they had
+     heard noises, and also seen what they described as the _flame_ of a
+     candle, without candle or hand visible, cross the room diagonally
+     from corner to door. Two of the maids opened the doors of their two
+     bedrooms, and said that they had also heard noises; they all five
+     stood at their doors with their lighted candles for some little
+     time. They all heard steps walking up and down the landing between
+     them; as they passed they felt a sensation which they described as
+     "a cold wind," though their candles were not blown about. They
+     _saw_ nothing. The steps then descended the stairs, re-ascended,
+     again descended, and did not return.
+
+     In the course of the following autumn we heard traditions of
+     earlier haunting, though, unfortunately, in no case were we able to
+     get a first-hand account....
+
+     We also now heard from a carpenter who had done jobs in the house
+     in Mrs. S.'s time, that Mrs. S. had wished to possess herself of
+     the first Mrs. S.'s jewels. Her husband had called him in to make a
+     receptacle under the boards in the morning-room on the
+     ground-floor, in which receptacle he placed the jewels, and then
+     had it nailed down and the carpet replaced. The carpenter showed us
+     the place. My father made him take up the boards; the receptacle
+     was there, but empty....
+
+     During the next two years, 1887 to 1889, the figure was very seldom
+     seen, though footsteps were heard; the louder noises had gradually
+     ceased. From 1889 to the present, 1892, so far as I know, the
+     figure has not been seen at all; the lighter footsteps lasted a
+     little longer, but even they have now ceased. The figure became
+     much less substantial on its later appearances. Up to about 1886 it
+     was so solid and life-like that it was often mistaken for a real
+     person. It gradually became less distinct. At all times it
+     intercepted the light; we have not been able to ascertain if it
+     cast a shadow.
+
+    _Proofs of Immateriality._
+
+     1. I have several times fastened fine strings across the stairs at
+     various heights before going to bed, but after all others have gone
+     up to their rooms. These were fastened in the following way: I made
+     small pellets of marine glue, into which I inserted the ends of the
+     cord, then stuck one pellet lightly against the wall and the other
+     to the banister, the string being thus stretched across the stairs.
+     They were knocked down by a very slight touch, and yet would not be
+     felt by any one passing up or down the stairs, and by candle-light
+     could not be seen from below. They were put at various heights from
+     the ground from six inches to the height of the banisters, about
+     three feet. I have twice at least seen the figure pass through the
+     cords, leaving them intact.
+
+     2. The sudden and complete disappearance of the figure, while still
+     in full view.
+
+     3. The impossibility of touching the figure. I have repeatedly
+     followed it into a corner, when it disappeared, and have tried to
+     suddenly pounce upon it, but have never succeeded in touching it or
+     getting my hand up to it, the figure eluding my touch.
+
+     4. It has appeared in a room with the doors shut.
+
+     On the other hand, the figure was not called up by a desire to see
+     it, for on every occasion when we had made special arrangements to
+     watch for it, we never saw it. On several occasions we have sat up
+     at night hoping to see it, but in vain,--my father, with my
+     brother-in-law, myself with a friend three or four times, an aunt
+     and myself twice, and my sisters with friends more than once; but
+     on none of these occasions was anything seen. Nor have the
+     appearances been seen after we have been talking or thinking much
+     of the figure.
+
+     The figure has been connected with the second Mrs. S.; the grounds
+     for which are:--
+
+     1. The complete history of the house is known, and if we are to
+     connect the figure with any of the previous occupants, she is the
+     only person who in any way resembled the figure.
+
+     2. The widow's garb excludes the first Mrs. S.
+
+     3. Although none of us had ever seen the second Mrs. S., several
+     people who _had_ known her identified her from our description. On
+     being shown a photo-album containing a number of portraits, I
+     picked out one of her sister as being most like that of the figure,
+     and was afterwards told that the sisters were much alike.
+
+     4. Her step-daughter and others told us that she especially used
+     the front drawing-room in which she continually appeared, and that
+     her habitual seat was on a couch placed in similar position to
+     ours.
+
+     5. The figure is undoubtedly connected with the house, none of the
+     percipients having seen it anywhere else, nor had any other
+     hallucination.
+
+     In writing the above account, my memory of the occurrences has been
+     largely assisted by reference to a set of journal letters written
+     [to Miss Campbell] at the time, and by notes of interviews held by
+     Mr. Myers with my father and various members of our family.
+
+R. C. MORTON.
+
+Of the accounts given by the other witnesses, I quote only part of Miss
+Campbell's statement, as follows:--
+
+
+77 CHESTERTON ROAD, NORTH KENSINGTON, W., _March 31st, 1892_.
+
+...On the night on which Miss Morton first spoke to the figure, as
+     stated in her account, I myself saw her telepathically. I was in my
+     room (I was then residing in the North of England, quite one
+     hundred miles away from Miss Morton's home), preparing for bed,
+     between twelve and half-past, when I seemed suddenly to be standing
+     close by the door of the housemaid's cupboard, so facing the short
+     flight of stairs leading to the top landing. Coming down these
+     stairs, I saw the figure, exactly as described, and about two steps
+     behind Miss Morton herself, with a dressing-gown thrown loosely
+     round her, and carrying a candle in her hand. A loud noise in the
+     room overhead recalled me to my surroundings, and although I tried
+     for some time I could not resume the impression. The black dress,
+     dark head-gear, widow's cuffs and handkerchief were plainly
+     visible, though the details of them were not given me by Miss
+     Morton till afterwards, when I asked her whether she had not seen
+     the apparition on that night.
+
+(Signed)      CATHERINE M. CAMPBELL.
+
+To this account Miss Morton adds:--
+
+     Miss Campbell was the friend to whom I first spoke of the
+     apparition. She suggested to me that when next I saw her I should
+     speak; but of course she had no idea when this would be. She wrote
+     an account to me the next day of what she had seen, and asked me if
+     I had not seen the figure that night; but naturally did not know
+     that I _had_ done so, until she received my reply. Miss Campbell
+     asks me to say that this is the only vision she has had, veridical
+     or otherwise.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+TO
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+VIII. A. Some early experiments in thought-transference through
+table-tilting were published by Professor Richet in the _Revue
+Philosophique_ for December 1884. A critical discussion of these by
+Gurney appeared in the _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. pp. 239-64, and a
+briefer report in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. pp. 72-81. I quote
+from the latter a description of the method used:--
+
+     The place of a planchette was taken by a table, and M. Richet
+     prefaces his account by a succinct statement of the orthodox view
+     as to "table-turning." Rejecting altogether the three theories
+     which attribute the phenomena to wholesale fraud, to spirits, and
+     to an unknown force, he regards the gyrations and oscillations of
+     séance-tables as due wholly to the unconscious muscular
+     contractions of the sitters. It thus occurred to him to employ a
+     table as an indicator of the movements that might be produced by
+     "mental suggestion." The plan of the experiments was as follows.
+     Three persons (C, D, and E) took their seats in a semi-circle, at a
+     little table on which their hands rested. One of these three was
+     always a "medium"--a term used by M. Richet to denote a person
+     liable to exhibit intelligent movements in which consciousness and
+     will apparently take no part. Attached to the table was a simple
+     electrical apparatus, the effect of which was to ring a bell
+     whenever the current was broken by the tilting of the table. Behind
+     the backs of the sitters at the table was another table, on which
+     was a large alphabet, completely screened from the view of C, D,
+     and E, even had they turned round and endeavoured to see it. In
+     front of this alphabet sat A, whose duty was to follow the letters
+     slowly and steadily with a pen, returning at once to the beginning
+     as soon as he arrived at the end. At A's side sat B, with a
+     note-book; his duty was to write down the letter at which A's pen
+     happened to be pointing whenever the bell rang. This happened
+     whenever one of the sitters at the table made the simple movement
+     necessary to tilt it. Under these conditions, A and B are
+     apparently mere automata. C, D, and E are little more, being
+     unconscious of tilting the table, which appears to them to tilt
+     itself; but even if they tilted it consciously, and with a
+     conscious desire to dictate words, they have no means of
+     ascertaining at what letter A's pen is pointing at any particular
+     moment; and they might tilt for ever without producing more than
+     an endless series of incoherent letters. Things being arranged
+     thus, a sixth operator, F, stationed himself apart both from the
+     tilting table and from the alphabet, and concentrated his thought
+     on some word of his own choosing, which he had not communicated to
+     the others. The three sitters at the first table engaged in
+     conversation, sang, or told stories; but at intervals the table
+     tilted, the bell rang, and B wrote down the letter which A's pen
+     was opposite to at that moment. Now, to the astonishment of all
+     concerned, these letters, when arranged in a series, turned out to
+     produce a more or less close approximation to the word of which F
+     was thinking.
+
+
+VIII. B. The correspondent, Mr. G. E. Long, was known to Dr. Hodgson.
+
+From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. p. 65.
+
+
+JERSEY CITY, N. J., _October 22nd, 1888_.
+
+...I think I wrote you once that about two years ago I had received
+     what was said to be a most convincing test of spirit-return,
+     convincing to all except myself. A young lady, a Spiritualist and
+     medium, though not a professional, nor one that ever received one
+     cent in pay, by means of a lettered board and toy chair, she
+     holding one leg of the chair and I another, while a third leg of
+     the chair served as a pointer, gave the following by means of the
+     chair:--
+
+     First the chair spelt out my name and showed a disposition to get
+     in my lap; then it spelled out "CARY," and when I asked for the
+     name of the "spirit" it spelt out "George (my name), you ought to
+     know me as I am Jim." But I didn't, and said so. Then, without my
+     looking at the board, it spelt out "Long Island, Jim Rowe," and
+     "Don't you remember I used to carry you when you were a little
+     fellow," or words to that effect. I had to acknowledge the truth of
+     it and also to say that as he was an ignorant man he possibly
+     intended "Cary" for carry. I must own I was puzzled for the moment.
+     To make sure of his power I asked that he count the pickets in the
+     fence outside of the house and I would go out and confirm his
+     statement. Somehow he couldn't agree to this, and even the medium
+     objected. As a last resort I asked how long he had been in the
+     spirit land and the answer came, between thirteen and fourteen
+     years.
+
+     Now to the sequel. First it occurred to me a day or two after, that
+     while all the incidents given were correct, the name should have
+     been given as ROE instead of ROWE. Second, I was upon Long Island
+     this summer, and the matter coming to my mind I inquired how long
+     Jim Roe had been dead, and was informed he died last winter; so
+     when I received this test so convincing to the believers _the man
+     was not dead_.
+
+     Yours truly,
+
+GEO. E. LONG.
+
+On October 26th, 1888, Mr. Long adds:--
+
+     I do not think that the medium was fraudulent. Her family consists
+     of Mr. S. and three daughters, she being the youngest. I have found
+     all to be hypnotic subjects, with the exception of the eldest
+     daughter. They are all believers in Spiritualism, the youngest
+     having been the medium. They do not sit now, as it is claimed that
+     the sittings, while rich in spiritualistic satisfaction, were
+     productive of a state of poor health in the medium.
+
+     As I myself have obtained information supposed to have been
+     impossible for me to have reached, I cannot say for certainty that
+     she had not obtained information about Jim, but I don't believe she
+     had. As the name Rowe was being spelled I sat with my eyes turned
+     from the board and had in mind the name Scudder, and mentally
+     followed the taps of the chair to S C U D--when the medium said,
+     "The name Rowe is given," etc. This would seem to leave out any
+     involuntary muscular action. Why Rowe should have been given
+     instead of Roe is still another phase. I wonder whether, if any
+     question of the Roe family had arisen, I would have had in mind the
+     name of Rowe? If so, then she produced that which I had long while
+     before been conscious of, but was at the time unconscious of, and
+     had it coupled with an error in spelling that I might have been
+     guilty of had I myself been called upon at that moment to spell it.
+     Had she been fraudulent the probability is she would have spelt it
+     correctly.
+
+     It seems to me that the basis of Spiritualism rests mainly upon
+     this phenomenon which men and women in a supernormal condition
+     produce, without understanding it, and credit it to spiritual
+     agencies.
+
+     [A general corroboration of Mr. Long's memory of the incident is
+     added from a lady present at the time, who does not now recall the
+     details.]
+
+
+VIII. C. The following case, received from Dr. Liébeault, is quoted from
+_Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 293:--
+
+
+NANCY, _September 4th, 1885_.
+
+     I hasten to write to you as to that case of thought-transference of
+     which I spoke to you when you were present at my hypnotic séances
+     at Nancy. The incident occurred in a French family from New
+     Orleans, who had come to stay for some time at Nancy for business
+     reasons. I had become acquainted with this family from the fact
+     that M. G., its head, had brought to me his niece, Mlle. B., to be
+     treated by hypnotism. She suffered from slight anćmia and from a
+     nervous cough, contracted at Coblentz, in a High School where she
+     was a teacher. I easily induced somnambulism, and she was cured in
+     two sittings. The production of this hypnotic state suggested to
+     the G. family (Mrs. G. was a spirit medium) and to Mlle. B. herself
+     that she might easily become a medium. She set herself to the
+     evocation of spirits (in which she firmly believed) by the aid of
+     her pen, and at the end of two months she had become a remarkable
+     writing medium. I have myself seen her rapidly writing page after
+     page of what she called "messages,"--all in well-chosen language
+     and with no erasures,--while at the same time she maintained
+     conversation with the people near her. An odd thing was that she
+     had no knowledge whatever of what she was writing. "It must be a
+     spirit," she would say, "which guides my hand; it is certainly not
+     I."
+
+     One day,--it was, I think, February 7th, 1868, about 8 A.M., when
+     just about to seat herself at table for breakfast, she felt a kind
+     of need, an impulse which prompted her to write;--it was what she
+     called a _trance_,--and she rushed off at once to her large
+     note-book, where she wrote in pencil, with feverish haste, certain
+     undecipherable words. She wrote the same words again and again on
+     the pages which followed, and at last, as her agitation diminished,
+     it was possible to read that a person called Marguérite was thus
+     announcing her death. The family at once assumed that a young lady
+     of that name, a friend of Mlle. B.'s and her companion and
+     colleague in the Coblentz High School, must have just expired. They
+     all came immediately to me, Mlle. B. among them, and we decided to
+     verify the announcement of death that very day. Mlle. B. wrote to a
+     young English lady who was also a teacher in that same school. She
+     gave some other reason for writing;--taking care not to reveal the
+     true motive of the letter. By return of post we received an answer
+     in English, of which they copied for me the essential part. I found
+     this answer in a portfolio hardly a fortnight ago, and have mislaid
+     it again. It expressed the surprise of the English lady at the
+     receipt of Mlle. B.'s unexpected and apparently motiveless letter.
+     But at the same time the English correspondent made haste to
+     announce to Mlle. B. that their common friend, Marguérite, had died
+     on February 7th, at about 8 A.M. Moreover, the letter contained a
+     little square piece of printed paper;--the announcement of death
+     sent round to friends.
+
+     I need not say that I examined the envelope, and that the letter
+     appeared to me to have veritably come from Coblentz. Yet I have
+     since felt a certain regret. In the interests of science I ought to
+     have asked the G. family to allow me to go with them to the
+     telegraph office to inquire whether they had received a telegram
+     early on February 7th. Science should feel no shame; truth does not
+     dread exposure. My proof of the fact is ultimately a moral one: the
+     honour of the G. family,--which has always appeared to me to be
+     absolutely above suspicion.
+
+A. A. LIÉBEAULT.
+
+Upon these last sentences Gurney remarks that, apart from the
+improbability that the whole family would join in a conspiracy to
+deceive their friend, the nature of the answer received from Coblentz
+shows that the writer of it cannot have been aware that any telegraphic
+announcement had been sent. And it is in itself unlikely that the
+authorities of the school would have felt it necessary instantly to
+communicate the news to Mdlle. B.
+
+
+VIII. D. From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 349-53. The narrative
+is a translation from an article in _Psychische Studien_, December 1889,
+pp. 572-77, by the Editor, the Hon. Alexander Aksakoff.
+
+     The case belongs not to the category of _facts which are known only
+     to the deceased_, but to the category of those which _could only be
+     imparted by the deceased_, for it relates to a political secret
+     concerning a living person, which was revealed by an intimate
+     friend of that living person for the purpose of saving him. I
+     shall set forth this case in all possible detail, because I
+     consider it a most convincing one in support of the Spiritualistic
+     hypothesis. I will even express myself still more strongly. I
+     consider that it affords as absolute a proof of identity as it is
+     possible for evidence of this kind to present.
+
+     My readers are already acquainted with my sister-in-law, Mrs. A.
+     von Wiesler, from the part she took in the family séances held with
+     me in the years 1880-1883, after the decease of my wife. She has an
+     only daughter, Sophie, who at the time of those séances was
+     completing her studies. She had taken no part, either at our
+     séances or at any others, and she had not read anything about
+     Spiritualism. Her mother also had not joined in any séances except
+     our own. One evening in October 1884, during the visit of a distant
+     relative, the conversation turned upon Spiritualism, and in order
+     to please him a trial with the table was arranged. This séance,
+     however, gave no satisfactory result. It only showed that the two
+     ladies were able to get something. On Tuesday evening, January 1st,
+     1885, Mrs. von Wiesler being alone with her daughter, in order to
+     divert her mind from some matters which made her anxious, proposed
+     to hold a little séance. An alphabet was written out on a sheet of
+     paper, a saucer with a black line as pointer served as a
+     planchette, and, behold, the name Andreas was indicated. This was
+     quite natural, for Andreas was the name of Sophie's father, the
+     deceased husband of Mrs. von Wiesler. The communication presented
+     nothing remarkable, but it was nevertheless resolved to continue
+     the séances once a week, on every Tuesday. For three weeks the
+     character of the communications remained unchanged. The name
+     Andreas was continually repeated.
+
+     But on the fourth Tuesday--January 22nd--in place of the customary
+     name, Andreas, the name "Schura" was spelt out, to the great
+     astonishment of both sitters. Then, by quick and precise movements
+     of the pointer, these words were added:--
+
+     "It is given to thee to save Nikolaus."
+
+     "What does this mean?" asked the astonished ladies.
+
+     "He is compromised as Michael was, and will like him go to ruin. A
+     band of good-for-nothing fellows are leading him astray."
+
+     "What can be done to counteract it?"
+
+     "Thou must go to the Technological Institute before three o'clock,
+     let Nikolaus be called out, and make an appointment with him at his
+     house."
+
+     This being all addressed to the young lady, Sophie, she replied
+     that it would be difficult for her to carry out these directions on
+     account of the slight acquaintanceship which existed between her
+     and Nikolaus's family.
+
+     "Absurd ideas of propriety!" was "Schura's" indignant reply.
+
+     "But in what way shall I be able to influence him?" asked Sophie.
+
+     "Thou wilt speak to him in my name."
+
+     "Then your convictions no longer remain the same?"
+
+     "Revolting error!" was the reply.
+
+     I must now explain the meaning of this mysterious communication.
+     "Schura" is the Russian pet name for Alexandrine. Nikolaus and
+     Michael were her cousins. Michael, quite a young man, had
+     unfortunately allowed himself to become entangled by the
+     revolutionary ideas of our Anarchists or Socialists. He was
+     arrested, tried, and condemned to imprisonment at a distance from
+     St. Petersburg, where he lost his life in an attempt to escape.
+     "Schura" loved him dearly, and fully sympathised with his political
+     convictions, making no secret of it. After his death, which
+     occurred in September 1884, she was discouraged in her
+     revolutionary aspirations, and ended her life by poison, at the age
+     of seventeen, on the 15th of January 1885, just one week before the
+     séance above described. Nikolaus, Michael's brother, was then a
+     student at the Technological Institute.
+
+     Mrs. von Wiesler and her daughter were aware of these
+     circumstances, for they had long been acquainted with "Schura's"
+     parents, and with those of her cousins, who belong to the best
+     society of St. Petersburg. It will be obvious that I cannot publish
+     the names of these families. I have also changed those of the young
+     people. The acquaintanceship was, however, far from being ultimate.
+     They saw each other occasionally, but nothing more. Later I will
+     give further details. We will now continue our narrative.
+
+     Naturally, neither Mrs. von Wiesler nor her daughter knew anything
+     as to the views or secret conduct of Nikolaus. The communication
+     was just as unexpected as it was important. It involved a great
+     responsibility. Sophie's position was a very difficult one. The
+     literal carrying out of "Schura's" demands was, for a young lady,
+     simply impossible, merely from considerations of social propriety.
+     What right could she have, on the ground of simple
+     acquaintanceship, to interfere in family affairs of so delicate a
+     character? Besides, it might not be true; or, quite simply and most
+     probably, Nikolaus might deny it. What position would she then find
+     herself in? Mrs. von Wiesler knew only too well, from the séances
+     she had taken part in with me, how little dependence can be placed
+     on Spiritualistic communications. She counselled her daughter, in
+     the first place, to convince herself of "Schura's" identity. This
+     advice was followed without any hesitation as one way out of the
+     difficulty.
+
+     On the following Tuesday "Schura" manifested at once, and Sophie
+     asked for a proof of her identity, to which "Schura" forthwith
+     replied:--
+
+     "Invite Nikolaus, arrange a séance, and I will come."
+
+     It will be seen from this reply that "Schura," who during her life
+     had learnt to despise the conventionalities of society, as is the
+     custom among the Socialists, remained true to her character, and
+     again demanded what was an impossibility. Nikolaus had never been
+     in Mrs. von Wiesler's house. Sophie then asked for another proof of
+     her identity, without Nikolaus being brought in at all, and
+     requested that it might be a convincing one.
+
+     "I will appear to thee," was the reply.
+
+     "How?"
+
+     "Thou wilt see."
+
+     A few days later Sophie was returning home from a soirée; it was
+     nearly 4 A.M. She was just retiring, and was at the door between
+     her bedroom and the dining-room, there being no lights in the
+     latter, when she saw on the wall of the dining-room, in sight of
+     the door at which she stood, a luminous round spot, with, as it
+     were, shoulders. This lasted for two or three seconds, and
+     disappeared, ascending towards the ceiling. Sophie immediately
+     assured herself that it was not the reflection of any light coming
+     from the street.
+
+     At the séance on the following Tuesday, an explanation of this
+     appearance being asked for, "Schura" replied:--
+
+     "It was the outline of a head with shoulders. I cannot appear more
+     distinctly. I am still weak."
+
+     Many other details, which I have passed over, tended to convince
+     Sophie of the reality of "Schura's" identity, yet she could not
+     bring herself to carry out that which "Schura" desired her to do.
+     She therefore proposed as a suitable compromise that she should
+     acquaint Nikolaus's parents with what had occurred.
+
+     This proposal aroused "Schura's" strongest displeasure, expressed
+     by violent movements of the saucer, and by the sentence:--
+
+     "That will lead to nothing";--after which disparaging epithets
+     followed, impossible to repeat here, especially applicable to
+     persons of weak and irresolute character, with whom the energetic
+     and decisive "Schura" had no patience--epithets which are not found
+     in dictionaries, but which were expressions used by "Schura" in her
+     lifetime, and characteristic of her. This was confirmed in the
+     sequel.
+
+     Nevertheless Sophie continued to hesitate, and at each successive
+     séance "Schura" insisted more and more imperatively that Sophie
+     must act at once. This is very important to notice, as we shall see
+     later. This want of resolution on the part of Sophie was ascribed
+     by "Schura" to the influence of Mrs. von Wiesler. From the
+     beginning "Schura" had seemed to bear a grudge against Mrs. von
+     Wiesler. From the first séance she addressed Sophie only. She never
+     permitted Mrs. von Wiesler to ask a question. Whenever she
+     attempted to do so, she met with a--"Be silent--be silent!" Whereas
+     in addressing Sophie she overwhelmed her with the tenderest
+     expressions.
+
+     How great was the astonishment and consternation of the ladies,
+     when at the séance on the 26th of February the first words were:--
+
+     "It is too late. Thou wilt repent it bitterly. The pangs of remorse
+     will follow thee. Expect his arrest!"
+
+     These were "Schura's" last words. From this time she was silent. A
+     séance was attempted on the following Tuesday, but there was no
+     result. The séances of Mrs. von Wiesler and her daughter were from
+     that time entirely given up.
+
+     While these séances were being held, Mrs. von Wiesler naturally
+     kept me informed of what transpired, and consulted with me as to
+     what was to be done in view of the extraordinary character of
+     "Schura's" requests. Some time after they had ceased, Mrs. von
+     Wiesler, to satisfy her own conscience and to comfort her daughter,
+     resolved to communicate the whole episode to the parents of
+     Nikolaus. They paid no attention to it. Nothing was elicited that
+     any fault could be found with. The family were quite satisfied in
+     regard to Nikolaus's conduct. But it is important to bear in mind
+     the fact that these Spiritualistic communications were made known
+     to the parents before the final issue. When during the remainder of
+     the year everything went on happily, Sophie became fully convinced
+     that all the communications were only lies, and formed a resolution
+     that she would never again occupy herself with Spiritualistic
+     séances.
+
+     Another year passed without any special event. But on the 9th of
+     March, 1887, the secret police suddenly searched Nikolaus's rooms.
+     He was arrested in his own house, and within twenty-four hours was
+     exiled from St. Petersburg. It came out later that his crime was
+     taking part in anarchical assemblies--assemblies which were held in
+     the months of January and February 1885, exactly corresponding with
+     the time when "Schura" was insisting that steps should _then_ be
+     taken to dissuade Nikolaus from taking part in such meetings. Only
+     now were the communications of "Schura" estimated at their true
+     value. The notes which Mrs. von Wiesler had made were read again
+     and again by the families both of "Schura" and of Nikolaus.
+     "Schura's" identity in all those manifestations was recognised as
+     incontestably demonstrated, in the first place, by the main fact in
+     relation to Nikolaus, by other intimate particulars, and also by
+     the totality of the features which characterised her personality.
+     This mournful occurrence fell like a fresh thunderclap on
+     Nikolaus's family, and they had only to thank God that the errors
+     of the young man were not followed by more fatal results.
+
+     In order to estimate this incident aright, it is of great
+     importance to establish the relations which existed between the two
+     young ladies. I have requested Madame and Mdlle. von Wiesler to
+     give me on this, as on the previous points, a written memorandum in
+     full detail; and from that memorandum I extract what follows
+     [somewhat abridged here]:--
+
+     In December 1880 Madame von Wiesler and her daughter paid a
+     Christmas visit to "Schura's" grandfather, Senator N., where Sophie
+     saw "Schura" for the first time. Sophie was then about thirteen
+     years old, and "Schura" even younger. Sophie was astonished to see
+     "Schura's" writing-table covered with books [and had a talk with
+     her about favourite authors]. The two girls often saw each other at
+     a distance in the recreation-room of their school during the
+     winter, but "Schura" was soon transferred to another school. [They
+     met once at a country-house without exchanging a word, and saw each
+     other once across a theatre. Sophie, in fact, had had one childish
+     talk with "Schura"; Madame von Wiesler had never had any real talk
+     with her.] Hence it is clear that the relations of these ladies
+     with "Schura" were of the most distant kind, and that they could
+     not know anything of her political secrets.
+
+
+VIII. E. From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 248-51.[230]
+
+The following letters were received from the principal witness, Mrs.
+Finney:--
+
+
+ROCKLAND, MASS., _April 19th, 1891_.
+
+     MR. HODGSON,--DEAR SIR,--Some weeks ago I received from you a few
+     lines asking me to give you an account of the communication
+     received from Cousin Benja in spirit-life, some twenty-five years
+     ago.
+
+     For weeks and months before my brother left the form we conversed
+     freely on the subject of spirit communion and such matters, and one
+     morning he requested me to bring him a small piece of brick, also
+     pen and ink; he then made two marks on one side, and one on the
+     other with the ink, then breaking the brick in two, gave me one
+     piece, telling me at the time to take care of it, and some day he
+     would hide the other piece away where no one but himself would
+     know, and after leaving the form, if possible, would return in some
+     way and tell me where it was. I could then compare them together,
+     and it would be a test that he could return and communicate, and
+     _my mind_ could not have any influence over it, as I did not know
+     where he put it.
+
+     After he left the form our anxiety was _very great_ to hear and
+     learn all we could of communicating with spirits, and for months we
+     got nothing satisfactory.
+
+     We then commenced sitting at the table at home (mother and myself),
+     which we did for some little time; at last it commenced tipping,
+     and by calling the alphabet spelled out where we could find the
+     piece of brick that he put away,--that was the way we got the test.
+     To us that was truth that spirits can and do communicate with us,
+     and nothing but the influence and power of Benja could tell us that
+     test.--Truly yours,
+
+MRS. WM. A. FINNEY.
+
+ROCKLAND, _May 3rd, 1891_.
+
+     MR. R. HODGSON,--DEAR SIR,--Yours of April 21st received, and I
+     will add a few more lines as to statement of brother Benja's
+     communication.
+
+     By calling the alphabet we spelled out:--
+
+     "You will find that piece of brick in the cabinet under the
+     tomahawk.--BENJA."
+
+     I went to that room and took the key, unlocked the cabinet, which
+     had not been touched by any one after he locked it and put away the
+     key. There I found that piece of brick just as it had spelled out,
+     and it corresponded with the piece I had retained, fitting on
+     exactly where he broke it off the piece I had. It was wrapped in a
+     bit of paper and tucked into a shell, and placed in the bottom of
+     the cabinet _exactly under_ the tomahawk, as was spelled out by the
+     alphabet.
+
+     This is truth, and no power but Benja's could tell that.
+
+     Mother is not living; I am the only one of the family that is
+     living.--Yours respectfully,
+
+MRS. WM. A. FINNEY.
+
+ROCKLAND, _May 11th, 1891_.
+
+     MR. R. HODGSON,--DEAR SIR,--Yours of 6th received. I will continue
+     to say, in answer to your questions, that the piece of brick was
+     entirely concealed in the shell, so that it could not be seen from
+     outside of cabinet. It was wrapped in a piece of paper stuck
+     together with mucilage and tucked into the end of the shell, then a
+     piece of paper gummed over that, so that nothing was visible from
+     the shell. The shell was on the lower shelf of the cabinet, and
+     only the top of the shell was visible outside the cabinet.
+
+     One more little incident I will mention, for to me it is as
+     valuable as the other. He wrote me a letter (about the time he gave
+     me the piece of brick) and sealed it, saying at the time it was not
+     to be answered, but the contents of the letter to be told. I got
+     that in the same way I did the other, by calling the alphabet and
+     the table tipping. It was these words:--
+
+     "Julia! do right and be happy.--BENJA."
+
+     That was correct. Just the contents of my letter. I have no
+     particular objection as to giving my name, for I have stated
+     nothing but the truth.
+
+     At my home in Kingston I have that little shell with the piece of
+     brick, and if you would like them I will send them to you. Will
+     place the brick into the shell as it was when I found it. Of
+     course, the paper that was around it then is worn out years ago.
+     The cabinet is disposed of.
+
+JULIA A. FINNEY.
+
+Mrs. Finney further writes:--
+
+
+ROCKLAND, _June 26th, 1891_.
+
+     I send you by express a box containing the letter and shell with
+     the piece of brick. I have placed one piece in the shell just as it
+     was when I found it, so you can see how nicely it was concealed in
+     the shell. The papers that were around it then are worn out. You
+     can retain them if you like, as I do not care for them now.
+
+     To me it is a positive truth that he did communicate to us, and our
+     minds could have nothing to do with it.
+
+J. A. FINNEY.
+
+ROCKLAND, _July 19th, 1891_.
+
+...The shell was placed on the same shelf with the tomahawk, and no
+     other shells on that shelf. It was placed with the open side down,
+     and the tomahawk stood directly over it. I cannot say why he did
+     not tell us to look inside of the shell. We started to look as soon
+     as he told us. It was in the cabinet under the tomahawk. We did not
+     wait for any more to be said.
+
+     I am not intimately acquainted with many public people. As to my
+     integrity, will refer you to Rev. C. Y. de Normandie, of Kingston.
+
+J. A. FINNEY.
+
+Dr. Hodgson writes:--
+
+     The shell is a large Triton, about ten inches long. The piece of
+     brick was wrapped in folds of soft paper and tucked deeply into the
+     recess. Another piece of paper was then gummed around the sides of
+     the shell in the interior, so as absolutely to prevent the piece of
+     brick from falling out. When I received the shell from Mrs. Finney
+     and looked into the interior and shook the shell violently, there
+     was nothing to indicate that the shell contained anything but the
+     piece of gummed paper.
+
+     The piece of brick in the shell weighs one and a half ounces, and
+     the piece of brick retained by Mrs. Finney weighs about two and a
+     quarter ounces. The shell with the piece of brick and paper
+     wrapping weighs about eleven and a half ounces.
+
+     Mrs. Finney also forwarded me the letter written by her brother.
+     The shell and the pieces of brick and the letter are now all in my
+     possession.
+
+R. HODGSON.
+
+     We have a letter (in original) from the Rev. C. Y. de Normandie, of
+     Kingston, Canada, to Mrs. Finney. "I expressed then," he says,
+     speaking of a former note to Dr. Hodgson, which accidentally went
+     astray, "that to the best knowledge I had of you and to my firm
+     belief your word could be implicitly relied on. I felt confident
+     that you would state a matter as you understood it, as you regarded
+     it, without reference to the consequences; and that you would not
+     be any more likely to be misled and deceived about a matter of that
+     kind than others similarly situated."
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+TO
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SCHEME OF VITAL FACULTY.
+
+
+IX. A. The following scheme[231] is not put forth as expressing
+deliberate convictions, supported by adequate evidence. Its speculative
+character has, in fact, excluded it from my text, yet I hope that it may
+not be without its use. For many men the difficulty of belief is not so
+much in defect of trustworthy evidence as in the unintelligibility, the
+_incoherence_ of the phenomena described, which prevents them from being
+retained in the mind or assimilated with previous knowledge.
+
+I have felt myself the full force of this objection, and I believe that
+some effort to meet it has become absolutely needful. Undoubtedly a
+record of facts without theories is the first essential. But the facts
+individually are like "stones that fall down from Jupiter,"--isolated
+marvels, each of which seems incredible until we have made shift to
+colligate them all.
+
+Let us begin, then, by taking the most generalised view possible of all
+these phenomena. They appear, at any rate, to depend upon the presence
+of living human beings; and they are therefore in some sense phenomena
+of _life_. If, then, they are phenomena of life, they must be in some
+way derived from, or must bear some analogy to, the vital phenomena, the
+faculties and functions with which we are familiar in the experience of
+every day. Yet to say this brings us little nearer to our aim. Spirits
+may have ruled Mr. Moses' mind and body just as truly as our own
+conscious will rules our mind and body.[232] But the results which they
+produced were so different from any results which we can produce that it
+is hard to know where to begin the comparison. Is there not some middle
+term, some intermediate series, with which both these extreme series may
+have points of resemblance?
+
+It is here that we ought to feel the advantage of previous discussions
+on man's own supernormal faculties,--on the powers of the Self below the
+threshold of ordinary consciousness. We have traced these powers in
+detail; we have noted the extension of the normal spectrum of
+consciousness beyond both red and violet ends, in response to subliminal
+control. Perhaps the profounder conception of the Self thus gained may
+help us to bridge over that gulf between the performances of the
+ordinary man and those of the so-called medium which heretofore has
+involved so difficult a leap. We may find that the spirit's power over
+the organism which it controls or "possesses,"--while possibly going
+much further than any subliminal power in the organism itself, as known
+to us,--may yet advance along similar lines, and receive explanation
+from hypnotic or telepathic phenomena. I will endeavour, then, to set
+side by side, in tabular form, the main heads of vital process or
+faculty as exercised (1) under normal or supraliminal control; (2) under
+subliminal and telepathic control; (3) under what is claimed as
+disembodied or spiritual control.
+
+In arranging this scheme my first object is to bring all such phenomena
+as we actually have before us into intelligible connection; introducing
+by the way a few of the explanations given to Mr. Moses by his guides.
+Those explanations, however, are for the most part slight and vague, and
+our experimental knowledge of the phenomena is, of course, merely
+nascent and fragmentary. My scheme, therefore, cannot aim at complete
+logical arrangement. It must involve both repetitions and lacunć; nor
+can it be such as the physiologist would care to sanction. But it will,
+at least, be a first attempt at a connected schedule or rational index
+of phenomena apparently so disparate that the very possibility of their
+interdependence b even now constantly denied.
+
+
+SYNOPSIS OF VITAL FACULTY
+
+I.
+
+FIRST SERIES:--PHENOMENA SUPRALIMINALLY CONTROLLED, OR OCCURRING IN
+ORDINARY LIFE.
+
+     1. Supraliminal or empirical consciousness; aware only of the
+     material world through sensory impressions.
+
+     2. Physical nutrition, including respiration.
+
+     (_a_) Physiological and pathological processes and products.
+
+     3. Physical expenditure; action on material and etherial
+     environment.
+
+     (_a_) Mechanical work done at the expense of food assimilated.
+
+     (_b_) Production of heat, odour, sound, chemical changes, as the
+     result of protoplasmic metabolism.
+
+     (_c_) Production of etherial disturbances; as emission of light and
+     generation of electrical energy.
+
+     4. Action on the incarnation of life on the planet.
+
+     (_a_) Reproduction, as physiological division.
+
+     5. Mental nutrition; sensory receptivity.
+
+     (_a_) Ordinary sense-perception.
+
+     (_b_) Memory.
+
+     6. Mental expenditure; response to stimuli.
+
+     (_a_) Intra-cerebral response; ideation.
+
+     (_b_) Emotion; will; voluntary innervation.
+
+     7. Modifications of supraliminal personality.
+
+     (_a_) Birth; as physiological individuation.
+
+     (_b_) Sleep; with dreams, as oscillations of the conscious
+     threshold.
+
+     (_c_) Metamorphoses; as of insects and amphibians; and
+     polymorphism, as of hydrozoa; multiplex personality.
+
+     (_d_) Death; as physiological dissolution.
+
+
+II.
+
+SECOND SERIES:--PHENOMENA SUBLIMINALLY CONTROLLED.
+
+     1. Subliminal consciousness; obscurely aware of the transcendental
+     world, through telepathic and telćsthetic impressions.
+
+     2. Physical nutrition modified by subliminal control.
+
+     (_a_) Suggestion, self-suggestion, psycho-therapeutics.
+
+     (_b_) Stigmatisation.
+
+     3. Physical expenditure modified by subliminal control.
+
+     (_a_) Mechanical work modified by psychical integration or
+     disintegration; hysteria.
+
+     (_b_) Production of heat, and other specific effects upon matter,
+     subliminally modified.
+
+     (_c_) Emission of light, and generation of electrical energy
+     modified.
+
+     4. Action on the incarnation of life on the planet.
+
+     (_a_) Prenatal suggestion through intermediate organism of parent.
+
+     5. Mental nutrition (sensory and supersensory receptivity)
+     subliminally controlled.
+
+     (_a_) Hyperćsthesia; anćsthesia; analgesia.
+
+     (_b_) Hypermnesia, manifested in dreams or automatisms.
+
+     (_c_) Telepathy; veridical hallucinations; sensory automatism.
+
+     (_d_) Telćsthesia or clairvoyance; perception of distant scenes;
+     retrocognition; precognition.
+
+     6. Mental expenditure; response to stimuli modified by subliminal
+     control.
+
+     (_a_) Subliminal ideation; the inspirations of genius.
+
+     (_b_) Motor automatism; concurrent consciousness; hyperboulia.
+
+     (_c_) Extradition of will-power beyond the organism; telergy;
+     self-projection.
+
+     7. Modifications of subliminal personality.
+
+     (_a_) Birth; as spiritual individuation.
+
+     (_b_) Sleep and trance; self-suggested or telepathically suggested;
+     with clairvoyant visions.
+
+     (_c_) Ecstasy.
+
+     (_d_) Death; as irrevocable self-projection of the spirit.
+
+
+III.
+
+THIRD SERIES:--PHENOMENA CLAIMED AS SPIRITUALLY CONTROLLED.
+
+     1. Subliminal consciousness, discerning and influenced by
+     disembodied spirits in a spiritual world, who co-operate in
+     producing objective phenomena.
+
+     2. Physical nutrition modified by spirit-control.
+
+     (_a_) Spirit-suggestion; psycho-therapeutics.
+
+     (_b_) Stigmatisation.
+
+     (_c_) Novel and purposive metastasis of secretion.
+
+     3. Physical expenditure modified by spirit-control.
+
+     (_a_) Mechanical efficiency increased and fulcrum displaced.
+
+     (_b_) Control over individual material molecules; resulting in
+     abrogation of ordinary thermal laws, and in aggregation and
+     disaggregation of matter.
+
+     (_c_) Control over etherial manifestations; with possible effects
+     in the domains of light, electricity, gravitation, and cohesion.
+
+     4. Action on the incarnation of life on the planet.
+
+     (_a_) Pre-conceptual suggestion or self-suggestion.
+
+     (_b_) Ectoplasy or Materialisation; temporary extradition or
+     concentration of vital energy.
+
+     5. Mental nutrition modified by spirit-control.
+
+     (_a_) Ordinary sensory perception spiritually controlled.
+
+     (_b_) Memory controlled; retrocognition spiritually given.
+
+     (_c_) Sensory automatism spiritually controlled; phantasms of the
+     dead, etc.
+
+     (_d_) Telćsthesia developed into perception of spiritual
+     environment; precognition.
+
+     6. Response to stimuli spiritually controlled.
+
+     (_a_) Ideation inspired by spirits.
+
+     (_b_) Motor automatism spiritually controlled; possession.
+
+     (_c_) Extension of will-power into the spiritual world; prayer.
+
+     7. Modifications of personality from spiritual standpoint.
+
+     (_a_) Birth; as descent into generation.
+
+     (_b_) Sleep and trance induced, and visions inspired, by spirits.
+
+     (_c_) Precursory emergence into completer personality; ecstasy with
+     perception of spiritual world.
+
+     (_d_) Death; as birth into completer personality.
+
+     (_e_) Vital faculty fully exercised in spiritual world.
+
+IX. B. (1) The following case is quoted from the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol.
+v. p. 253. Professor Luther writes:--
+
+
+HARTFORD, CONN., _March 2nd, 1892_.
+
+...Miss C. is often in my study and consults my books freely, so
+     that her dream was not remarkable. The dream of Mrs. L. (my wife)
+     was also ordinary in character. The coincidence in time of the
+     dreams may have been merely a coincidence. But that after these
+     occurrences Mrs. L. should suddenly, without the least
+     premeditation and without hesitation, take the right book and open
+     it at the right page with the certainty of a somnambulist, seems to
+     me strange....
+
+     These events took place yesterday, last night, and this morning.
+
+F. S. LUTHER
+(Prof. Math., Trinity College).
+
+Mrs. L. and Miss C. live at the same hotel and meet daily. Miss C. is
+engaged in writing an essay upon Emerson, and expresses to Mrs. L. her
+wish to obtain some particulars as to Emerson's private life. Mrs. L.
+regrets that she has no book treating of the subject. During the night
+following this conversation Mrs. L. dreams of handing Miss C. a book
+containing an article such as is desired, and Miss C. dreams of telling
+Mrs. L. that she had procured just the information which she had been
+looking for. Each lady relates to the other her dream when they meet at
+breakfast the next morning. Mrs. L. returns to her room, and, while
+certainly not consciously thinking of Emerson, suddenly finds in her
+mind the thought, "There is the book which Miss C. needs." She goes
+directly to a bookcase, takes down vol. xvii. of the _Century Magazine_,
+and opens _immediately_ at the article, "The Homes and Haunts of
+Emerson." Mrs. L. had undoubtedly read this article in 1879, but she had
+never studied Emerson or his works, nor had she made any special effort
+to assist Miss C. in her search, though feeling a friend's interest in
+the proposed essay.
+
+     After receiving the book and hearing how it was selected, Miss C.
+     relates her dream more fully, it appearing that she had seemed to
+     be standing in front of Mrs. L.'s shelves with a large, illustrated
+     book in her hands, and that in the book was something about
+     Emerson.
+
+     Still later it is found that Miss C. had actually noticed the
+     article in question while actually in the position reproduced in
+     her dream. This, however, had happened about a month previous to
+     the events just narrated, and before she had thought of looking up
+     authorities as to Emerson, so that she had entirely forgotten the
+     occurrence and the article. Neither did she, at that time, call
+     Mrs. L.'s attention to the article, or mention Emerson.
+
+     According to the best information attainable, Miss C. was not
+     thinking of her essay at the time when Mrs. L. felt the sudden
+     impulse to take down a certain book. And perhaps it should be added
+     that the volume is one of a complete set of the _Century_ variously
+     disposed upon Mrs. L.'s shelves.
+
+     [This account is signed by Professor Luther, Mrs. L., and Miss C.]
+
+Of special interest are a few cases where the actual mechanism of some
+brief communication from the spiritual world seems to suggest and lead
+up to the mechanism which we shall afterwards describe either as ecstasy
+or as possession.
+
+(2) I give here a case which suggests such knowledge as may be learnt in
+ecstasy;--as though a message had been communicated to a sleeper during
+some brief excursion into the spiritual world,--which message was
+remembered for a few moments, in symbolic form, and then rapidly
+forgotten, as the sleeper returned fully into the normal waking state.
+What is to be noted is that the personality of sleep, to which I
+attribute the spiritual excursion, seems at first to have been
+"controlling" the awakened organism. In other words, Professor Thoulet
+was partially entranced or _possessed_ by his own spirit or subliminal
+self.
+
+I quote from _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 503-5, a translation of
+the original account of the case in the _Annales des Sciences
+Psychiques_ (September-October, 1891).
+
+Professor Thoulet writes to Professor Richet as follows:--
+
+
+_April 17th, 1891._
+
+...During the summer of 1867, I was officially the assistant, but
+     in reality the friend, in spite of difference in age, of M. F., a
+     former officer in the navy, who had gone into business. We were
+     trying to set on foot again the exploitation of an old sulphur mine
+     at Rivanazzaro, near Voghera, in Piedmont, which had been long
+     abandoned on account of a falling in.
+
+     We occupied the same rooms, and our relations were those of father
+     and son, or of elder and younger brother....
+
+     I knew that Madame F., who lived at Toulon, and with whom I was
+     slightly acquainted, would soon be confined. I cannot say I was
+     indifferent about this fact, for it concerned M. F.; but it
+     certainly caused me no profound emotion; it was a second child, all
+     was going well, and M. F. was not anxious. I myself was well and
+     calm. It is true that a few days before, in Burgundy, my mother had
+     fallen out of a carriage; but the fall had no bad consequences, and
+     the letter which informed me of it also told me there was no harm
+     done.
+
+     M. F. and I slept in adjoining rooms, and as it was hot we left the
+     door between them open. One morning I sprang suddenly out of bed,
+     crossed my room, entered that of M. F., and awakened him by crying
+     out, "You have just got a little girl; the telegram says ..." Upon
+     this I began to read the telegram. M. F. sat up and listened; but
+     all at once I understood that I had been asleep, and that
+     consequently my telegram was only a dream, not to be believed; and
+     then, at the same time, this telegram, which was somehow in my hand
+     and of which I had read about three lines aloud, word for word,
+     seemed to withdraw from my eyes as if some one were carrying it off
+     open; the words disappeared, though their image still remained;
+     those which I had _pronounced_ remained in my memory, while the
+     rest of the telegram was only a _form_.
+
+     I stammered something; M. F. got up and led me into the
+     dining-room, and made me write down the words I had pronounced;
+     when I came to the lines which, though they had disappeared from my
+     memory, still remained pictured in my eye, I replaced them by dots,
+     making a sort of drawing of them. Remark that the telegram was not
+     written in common terms; there were about six lines of it, and I
+     had read more than two of them. Then, becoming aware of our rather
+     incorrect costume, M. F. and I began to laugh, and went back to our
+     beds.
+
+     Two or three days after I left for Torée; I tried in vain to
+     remember the rest of the telegram; I went on to Turin, and eight or
+     ten days after my dream I received the following telegram from M.
+     F., "Come directly, you were right."
+
+     I returned to Rivanazzaro and M. F. showed me a telegram which he
+     had received the evening before; I recognised it as the one I had
+     seen in my dream; the beginning was exactly what I had written, and
+     the end, which was exactly like my drawing, enabled me to read
+     _again_ the words which I saw _again_. Please remark that the
+     confinement had taken place the evening before, and therefore the
+     fact was not that I, being in Italy, had seen a telegram which
+     already existed in France--this I might with some difficulty have
+     understood--but that I had seen it ten days before it existed or
+     could have existed; since the event it announced had not yet taken
+     place. I have turned this phenomenon over in my memory and reasoned
+     about it many times, trying to explain it, to connect it with
+     something, with a previous conversation, with some mental tension,
+     with an analogy, a wish,--and all in vain. M. F. is dead, and the
+     paper I wrote has disappeared. If I were called before a court of
+     justice about it, I could not furnish the shadow of a material
+     proof, and again the two personalities which exist in me, the
+     animal and the _savant_, have disputed on this subject so often
+     that sometimes I doubt it myself. However, the animal, obstinate
+     as an animal usually is, repeats incessantly that I have seen, and
+     I have read, and it is useless for me to tell myself that if any
+     one else told me such a story I should not believe it. I am obliged
+     to admit that it happened.
+
+J. THOULET,
+_Professor at the Faculté des Sciences at Nancy_.
+
+Professor Richet adds:--
+
+     M. Thoulet has lately confirmed all the details contained in his
+     letter. He has no longer any written trace of this old story, but
+     the recollection of it is perfectly clear. He assured me that he
+     had _seen_ and _read_ the telegram like a real object....
+
+(3) And now I quote a case where a kind of conversation is indicated
+between the sleeper and some communicating spirit;--recalling the scraps
+of conversation sometimes overheard (as it were) between Mrs. Piper and
+some "control" when she is in the act of awaking from trance. These
+moments "between two worlds" are often, as will be seen, of high
+significance. In the case here cited we seem to see Mr. Goodall at first
+misapprehending a message, and himself automatically uttering the
+misapprehension, and then receiving the needed correction from his
+invisible interlocutor.
+
+From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 453-5. The following narrative
+was communicated by Mr. Edward A. Goodall, of the Royal Society of
+Painters in Water Colours, London:--
+
+
+_May 1888._
+
+     At Midsummer, 1869, I left London for Naples. The heat being
+     excessive, people were leaving for Ischia, and I thought it best to
+     go there myself.
+
+     Crossing by steamer, I slept one night at Casamicciola, on the
+     coast, and walked next morning into the town of Ischia.
+
+     Liking the hotel there better than my quarters of the previous
+     night, I fetched my small amount of luggage by help of a man, who
+     returned with me on foot beside an animal which I rode--one of the
+     fine, sure-footed, big donkeys of the country. Arrived at the
+     hotel, and while sitting perfectly still in my saddle talking to
+     the landlady, the donkey went down upon his knees as if he had been
+     shot or struck by lightning, throwing me over his head upon the
+     lava pavement. In endeavouring to save myself my right hand was
+     badly injured. It soon became much swollen and very painful. A
+     Neapolitan doctor on the spot said no bones were broken, but
+     perfect rest would be needful, with my arm in a sling. Sketching,
+     of course, was impossible, and with neither books, newspapers, nor
+     letters I felt my inactivity keenly.
+
+     It must have been on my third or fourth night, and about the middle
+     of it, when I awoke, as it seemed at the sound of my own voice,
+     saying, "I know I have lost my dearest little May." Another voice,
+     which I in no way recognised, answered, "_No_, not May, but your
+     _youngest boy_."
+
+     The distinctness and solemnity of the voice made such a distressing
+     impression upon me that I slept no more. I got up at daybreak, and
+     went out, noticing for the first time telegraph-poles and wires.
+
+     Without delay I communicated with the postmaster at Naples, and by
+     next boat received two letters from home. I opened them according
+     to dates outside. The first told me that my youngest boy was taken
+     suddenly ill; the second, that he was dead.
+
+     Neither on his account nor on that of any of my family had I any
+     cause for uneasiness. All were quite well on my taking leave of
+     them so lately. My impression ever since has been that the time of
+     the death coincided as nearly as we could judge with the time of my
+     accident.[233]
+
+     In writing to Mrs. Goodall, I called the incident of the voice a
+     dream, as less likely perhaps to disturb her than the details which
+     I gave on reaching home, and which I have now repeated.
+
+     My letters happen to have been preserved.
+
+     I have never had any hallucination of any kind, nor am I in the
+     habit of talking in my sleep. I do remember once waking with some
+     words of mere nonsense upon my lips, but the experience of the
+     voice speaking to me was absolutely unique.
+
+EDWARD A. GOODALL.
+
+Extracts from letters to Mrs. E. A. Goodall from Ischia:--
+
+
+_Wednesday, August 11th, 1869._
+
+     The postman brought me two letters containing sad news indeed. Poor
+     little Percy. I dreamt some nights since the poor little fellow was
+     taken from us....
+
+_August 14th._
+
+     I did not tell you, dear, the particulars of my dream about poor
+     little Percy.
+
+     I had been for several days very fidgety and wretched at getting no
+     letters from home, and had gone to bed in worse spirits than usual,
+     and in my dream I fancied I said: "I have lost my dearest little
+     May." A strange voice seemed to say: "No, _not_ May but your
+     youngest boy," not mentioning his name....
+
+Mr. Goodall gave me verbally a concordant account of the affair, and
+several members of his family, who were present at our interview,
+recollected the strong impression made on him and them at the time.
+
+(4) The next case is precisely a miniature case of possession.
+
+From the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 278-280.
+
+"The following account" (writes Dr. Hodgson) "was sent to me by Mr. John
+E. Wilkie at the suggestion of one of our American members who is well
+known to me, and who speaks in the highest terms of Mr. Wilkie as a
+witness:"--
+
+
+WASHINGTON, D. C., _April 11th, 1898_.
+
+     In October 1895, while living in London, England, I was attacked by
+     bronchitis in rather a severe form, and on the advice of my
+     physician, Dr. Oscar C. De Wolf, went to his residence in 6
+     Grenville Place, Cromwell Road, where I could be under his
+     immediate care. For two days I was confined to my bed, and about
+     five o'clock in the afternoon of the third day, feeling somewhat
+     better, I partially dressed myself, slipped on a heavy bath robe,
+     and went down to the sitting-room on the main floor, where my
+     friend, the doctor, usually spent a part of the afternoon in
+     reading. A steamer chair was placed before the fire by one of the
+     servants, and I was made comfortable with pillows. The doctor was
+     present, and sat immediately behind me reading. I dropped off into
+     a light doze, and slept for perhaps thirty minutes. Suddenly I
+     became conscious of the fact that I was about to awaken; I was in a
+     condition where I was neither awake nor asleep. I realised fully
+     that I had been asleep, and I was equally conscious of the fact
+     that I was not wide awake. While in this peculiar mental condition
+     I suddenly said to myself: "Wait a minute. Here is a message for
+     the doctor." At the moment I fancied that I had upon my lap a pad
+     of paper, and I thought I wrote upon this pad with a pencil the
+     following words:--
+
+     "DEAR DOCTOR,--Do you remember Katy McGuire, who used to live with
+     you in Chester? She died in 1872. She hopes you are having a good
+     time in London."
+
+     Instantly thereafter I found myself wide awake, felt no surprise at
+     not finding the pad of paper on my knees, bcause I then realised
+     that that was but the hallucination of a dream, but impressed with
+     that feature of my thought which related to the message, I partly
+     turned my head, and, speaking over my shoulder to the doctor, said:
+     "Doctor, I have a message for you."
+
+     The doctor looked up from the _British Medical Journal_ which he
+     was reading, and said: "What's that?"
+
+     "I have a message for you," I repeated. "It is this: 'Dear Doctor:
+     Do you remember Katy McGuire, who used to live with you in Chester?
+     She died in 1872. She hopes you are having a good time in London.'"
+
+     The doctor looked at me with amazement written all over his face,
+     and said: "Why,---- what the devil do you mean?"
+
+     "I don't know anything about it except that just before I woke up I
+     was impelled to receive this message which I have just delivered to
+     you."
+
+     "Did you ever hear of Katy McGuire?" asked the doctor.
+
+     "Never in my life."
+
+     "Well," said the doctor, "that's one of the most remarkable things
+     I ever heard of. My father for a great many years lived at Chester,
+     Mass. There was a neighbouring family named McGuire, and Katy
+     McGuire, a daughter of this neighbour, frequently came over to our
+     house, as the younger people in a country village will visit their
+     neighbours, and used to assist my mother in the lighter duties
+     about the house. I was absent from Chester from about 1869 to about
+     1873. I had known Katy, however, as a daughter of our neighbour and
+     knew that she used to visit the house. She died some time during
+     the absence I speak of, but as to the exact date of her death I am
+     not informed."
+
+     That closed the incident, and although the doctor told me that he
+     would write to his old home to ascertain the exact date of Katy's
+     death, I have never heard from him further in the matter. I
+     questioned him at the time as to whether he had recently thought of
+     Katy McGuire, and he told me that her name had not occurred to him
+     for twenty years, and that he might never have recalled it had it
+     not been for the rather curious incident which had occurred. In my
+     own mind I could only explain the occurrence as a rather unusual
+     coincidence. I was personally aware of the fact that the doctor's
+     old home had been Chester, Mass., and had frequently talked with
+     him of his earlier experiences in life when he began practice in
+     that city, but never at any time during these conversations had the
+     name of this neighbour's daughter been mentioned, nor had the name
+     of the neighbour been mentioned, our conversation relating entirely
+     to the immediate members of the family, particularly the doctor's
+     father, who was a noted practitioner in that district.
+
+JOHN E. WILKIE.
+
+Dr. De Wolf, in reply to Dr. Hodgson's first inquiry, wrote:--
+
+
+6 GRENVILLE PLACE, CROMWELL ROAD, S.W., _April 29th, 1898_.
+
+     DEAR SIR,--In reply to your letter of the 27th inst., I regret that
+     I cannot recall with any definite recollection the incident to
+     which Mr. Wilkie refers.
+
+     I _do_ remember that he told me one morning he had had a remarkable
+     dream--or conference with some one who knew me when a young
+     lad.--Very truly yours,
+
+OSCAR C. DE WOLF.
+
+Dr. Hodgson then sent Mr. Wilkie's account to Dr. De Wolf, with further
+inquiries, to which Dr. De Wolf replied as follows:--
+
+
+6 GRENVILLE PLACE, CROMWELL ROAD, S.W., _May 4th, 1898_.
+
+     DEAR SIR,--Mr. Wilkie's statement is correct except as to
+     unimportant detail. My father practised his profession of medicine,
+     in Chester, Mass., for sixty years--dying in 1890. I was born in
+     Chester and lived there until 1857, when I was in Paris studying
+     medicine for four years. In 1861 I returned to America and
+     immediately entered the army as surgeon and served until the close
+     of the war in 1865. In 1866 I located in Northampton, Mass., where
+     I practised my profession until 1873, when I removed to Chicago.
+
+     Chester is a hill town in Western Mass., and Northampton is
+     seventeen miles distant. While in Northampton I was often at my
+     father's house--probably every week--and during some of the years
+     from 1866 to 1873 I knew Katy McGuire as a servant assisting my
+     mother.
+
+     She was an obliging and pleasant girl and always glad to see me.
+     She had no family in Chester (as Mr. Wilkie says) and I do not know
+     where she came from. Neither do I know where or when she died--but
+     I know she is dead. There is nothing left of my family in Chester.
+     The old homestead still remains with me, and I visit it every year.
+
+     The strange feature (to me) of this incident is the fact that I had
+     not thought of this girl for many years, and Mr. Wilkie was never
+     within 500 miles of Chester.
+
+     We had been warm friends since soon after my location in Chicago,
+     where he was connected with a department of the Chicago _Tribune_.
+     I came to London in 1892 and Mr. Wilkie followed the next year as
+     the manager of Low's _American Exchange_, 3 Northumberland Avenue.
+     His family did not join him until 1895, which explains his being in
+     my house when ill.
+
+     Mr. Wilkie is a very straightforward man and not given to illusions
+     of any kind. He is now the chief of the Secret Service Department
+     of the U.S. Government, Washington, D. C.
+
+     Neither of us were believers in spiritual manifestations of this
+     character, and this event so impressed us that we did not like to
+     talk about it, and it has been very seldom referred to when we
+     met.--Very truly yours,
+
+OSCAR C. DE WOLF.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+A., Miss, automatic writing, and crystal visions of, 276 _note_, 289-290.
+
+Abnormal and supernormal vital phenomena, 255-257.
+
+Accidents, apparitions at time of, 106-107, 208.
+
+Achille, case of, 359-361.
+
+_Across the Plains_, _cited_, 97.
+
+After-images--
+  Ghosts described as, 215.
+  Veridical, 215.
+
+Agassiz, dream intelligence exercised by, case of, 103.
+
+_Ages of Faith_, _cited_, 277 _note_.
+
+Agoraphobia, 34;
+  cured by hypnotism, 136.
+
+Aidé, Mr. Hamilton, _cited_, 320 _note_.
+
+Aksakof, Hon. Alexander, case reported by, 291-292, 405;
+  _cited_, 313;
+  _quoted_, 433-437.
+
+Alcohol in relation to hypnotism, 123, 135.
+
+Alexander, Helen, case of, 388-390.
+
+"Alma," case of, 211.
+
+Alternating Personalities--
+  Addition of faculty in, 310.
+  Memory in, 131, 310-311.
+  "Possession" compared with, 308-309, 336.
+  X., Félida, case of, 361-363.
+
+_Alterations de la Personalité_, _cited_, 362.
+
+Ambidexterity, relation of, to subliminal mentation, 68.
+
+_American Journal of Psychology_, _cited_, 33 _and note_, 64 _note_,
+   170 _note_, 265 _note_, 270 _note_.
+
+American Society for Psychical Research, _see under_ Society
+   for Psychical Research.
+
+Amnesia, case of, 47.
+
+Ampčre, case of, 66, 68.
+
+Anćsthesia--
+  Hypnotic, 138-141.
+  Hysterical, unconsciousness of patient in, 36-37;
+    injury not resulting from, 37-39;
+    patches of, 37, 124.
+  Witches, patches on, 124.
+
+Anagrams automatically written, 264.
+
+Analgesia induced by hypnotism, 138-141.
+
+_Anatomy of Sleep_, _cited_, 416 _note_.
+
+Angélique, Soeur, 308.
+
+Animals--
+  Apparition possibly seen by, 456, 457 _note_.
+  Hypnotisability and suggestibility of, 123-124.
+  Proximity of, sensibility to, 380.
+  Shock, effects of, on, 123.
+  Telepathy between, 188 _note_.
+
+_Annales des Sciences Psychiques_, _cited_, 284, 446.
+
+_Annales Médico-Psychologiques_, _cited_, 47 _note_{1}, 49 _note_{1},
+   379 _note_, 381 _note_, 382 _note_.
+
+_Année Psychologique, L'_, _cited_, 83 _and note_.
+
+Apparitions, _see_ Hallucinations.
+
+_Apparitions and Thought-transference_, _cited_, 185 _note_{2}.
+
+Arago, _quoted_, 71.
+
+_Arcanes de la vie future dévoilées_, _cited_, 317.
+
+_Archives de Médecine_, _cited_, 98 _note_{3}.
+
+_Archives de Nevrologie_, _cited_, 49 _note_{1}.
+
+Arithmetical calculations done under hypnotism, 152.
+
+---- prodigies, 64-67.
+
+Art, symbolism of, 79-80.
+
+Attention, hypnotic influence on, 153.
+
+Audition--
+  Coloured, 170 _note_.
+  Defects of, removed by hypnotism, 143.
+  Hyperćsthesia of, 270.
+  Shell-hearing, 201.
+
+Automatic writing, _see under_ Motor Automatism.
+
+Automatism--
+  Definition of, 168.
+  Motor, _see_ Motor Automatism.
+  Sensory, _see_ Sensory Automatism.
+
+_Automatisme Psychologique, L'_, _cited_, 48, 146 _note_, 308 _note_{2};
+  _quoted_, 85-86.
+
+Ayre, Captain, case of, _cited_, 228 _note_.
+
+Azam, Dr., case of patient of, _quoted_, 361-363.
+
+
+B., Madame, telepathic hypnotisation of, 382-383.
+
+--, S. H., apparition of, 210-211, 396-399.
+
+Babylonian inscriptions deciphered in dream, 366-369.
+
+Bacchus, Mrs., case of, 234.
+
+Backman, Dr., case of patient of, 211.
+
+Bacon, Francis, _cited_, 184, 341.
+
+Baillarger, _cited_, 96.
+
+Bajenoff, Rev. Basil, case attested by, 417.
+
+Barnes, Mary, case of, 49 _note_{3}.
+
+Barrett, Prof. W. F., _cited_, 320 _note_, 378, 380;
+  S.P.R. promoted by, 9 _note_{1}.
+
+Barrows, Dr. Ira, _cited_, 295.
+
+Beauchamp, Sally, case of, 49, 308.
+
+Beaumis, Prof., _cited_, 147 _note_.
+
+Beecher, Sir Arthur, case of, _cited_, 244 _note_.
+
+Bérillon, Dr. Edgar, _cited_, 133 _note_, 135 _note_{1}, 139 _note_,
+   153, 155 _note_, 272.
+
+Berjon, Dr., _cited_, 49 _note_{1}, 379 _note_.
+
+Bernheim, Professor, hypnotic cures by, 117;
+  work of, 121-122;
+  _cited_, 133 _note_, 134 _note_, 135 _note_{2}, 155 _note_, 159, 160, 166.
+
+Bertha, Sister (Bertha Foertsch), apparition seen by, 228, 420.
+
+Bertrand, Dr., work of, 119.
+
+----, Rev. L. J., trance of, 400.
+
+_Bibliothčque Diabolique_, _cited_, 277 _note_, 308 _note_{1}.
+
+Bidder, Mr., case of, 66, 68.
+
+Bigge, Wm. Matthew, case of, 384-385.
+
+Biggs, Dr., _cited_, 146 _note_, 151 and _note_.
+
+Binet, Professor, _cited_, 64 _note_, 83, 362.
+
+Binns, Dr., _cited_, 416 _note_.
+
+Blake, William, work of, 58.
+
+Blindness, tactile hyperćsthesia with, 271.
+
+Blyth, Mr., case of, 68.
+
+Boeteau, M., case of patient of, 47.
+
+Bouffé, _cited_, 133 _note_.
+
+Bourdon, Dr., _cited_, 133 _note_, 134 _note_, 137 _note_{1}.
+
+Bourne, Ansel, case of, 45-46.
+
+----, Canon, apparition of, 195, 197.
+
+----, the Misses, apparition seen by, 386-387.
+
+Bourru, Dr., _cited_, 49 _note_{1}, 146 _note_.
+
+Boyle, Mr., case of, _cited_, 107 _note_.
+
+Braid, work of, 120 _and note_{2}-121;
+  squint of, 125-126.
+
+Brain--
+  Possession, functions in, 190, 201.
+  Recovery of, from injury, 81-82.
+  Spirit's action on, 305.
+  Telepathic communications in relation to, 304-305.
+
+_Brain_, _cited_, 49 _note_{3}, 98 _note_{1}, 153 _note_{2}.
+
+Bramwell, Dr. J. Milne, _cited_, 49 _note_{3}, 120 _note_{2},
+   123, 124 _note_, 126 _note_, 129 _note_, 135 _note_{2},
+    137, 152, 153, 154;
+  _quoted_, 41.
+
+Breuer, Dr., _cited_, 40-41 _and note_.
+
+_British Medical Journal_, _cited_, 137 _note_{3}, 139 _note_.
+
+Brown, George, evidence given by, 413.
+
+Browne, Miss, 285.
+
+Bruce, Dr., case of, 107-108, 237;
+  _quoted_, 371-373.
+
+Buddhism, 349, 352-353.
+
+_Bulletins de la Société de Psychologie Physiologique_, _cited_, 382.
+
+Burot, Dr., _cited_, 49 _note_{1}, 146 _note_.
+
+Buxton, case of, 66, 67.
+
+
+C., Miss, dream of, 315, 445-446.
+
+Cćdmon's poem, _cited_, 104 _note_.
+
+Cahagnet, Alphonse, cases of subjects of, 299, 317-318;
+  _cited_, 204.
+
+Calculating boys, 64-67.
+
+Calculations under hypnotism, 152.
+
+Campbell, General, case of, _cited_, 243.
+
+----, Miss Catherine M., apparition seen by, 243, 429.
+
+Camuset, Dr., _cited_, 49 _note_{1}.
+
+Cataplexy produced by shock, 123.
+
+Cevennes, miracles of the, 285.
+
+Chabaneix, Paul, _cited_, 71 and _note_.
+
+Chaddock, Dr. C. G., _cited_, 98 _note_{4}.
+
+Character, hypnotic influence on, 133-135 _and notes_, 155, 381-382.
+
+Charcot, Prof.--
+  _Cited_, 52 _note_, 103 _and note_[3], 132 _note_.
+  Hypnotic school of, 121.
+  Stages in hypnotism, theory as to, 130.
+
+Charms, potency of, 164.
+
+Childhood, 92.
+
+Children--
+  Education and training of, value of hypnotism in, 133 _and
+   note_--134 _and note_.
+  Phantasms of, 456, 457 _note_.
+  Terrors of, 33-34.
+
+Chinese devil-possession, 307-309.
+
+Chloroform, influence of, on suggestibility, 122-123.
+
+Christian Science, 128, 165.
+
+Christianity, 3-4, 342, 346, 349-352.
+
+Clairvoyance--
+  Automatic messages due to, 325.
+  Definition of term, 6 _note_{1};
+    inadequacy of term, 105.
+  Dying, of the, 233.
+  Genius a kind of, 344.
+  Joan of Arc, case of, 267.
+  Medical, 380-381.
+  Telepathy, relation to, 187.
+  Travelling--
+    Cases of, 205-206, 400.
+    Dreams, likeness to, 205.
+    Ecstasy and extension of, 337-338.
+    Hypnotic, 163.
+    Nature of, 204-205.
+    Savages, among, 345.
+    Sleep, during, 301.
+
+Claustrophobia cured by hypnotism, 136.
+
+"Clelia" case, _cited_, 277 _note_.
+
+Cobbe, Miss, cases of, _cited_, 233.
+
+Colburn, case of, 66, 67.
+
+Coleridge, Hartley considered as a genius, 60.
+
+----, S. T.--inspiration of _Kubla Khan_, 104.
+
+Colonial animals, analogy from, 30.
+
+_Comptes Rendus de la Société de Biologie_, _cited_, 146 _note_.
+
+Condillac, _cited_, 71.
+
+Conley, Elizabeth, vision seen by, 315, 412-415.
+
+Consciousness--
+  Central, in relation to minor consciousness, 30.
+  Complexity and memory the test of, 28-30.
+  Dogs, of, 29.
+  Double, _see_ Secondary Personality.
+  Ethical and legal view of, 29.
+  Mind, relation to, 29.
+  Spectrum of, solar spectrum analogous to, 18-19.
+  Subliminal, 14-16.
+  Unreliability of, 14.
+
+Continuity--
+  Doctrine of, 346.
+  Evidence, in, demand for, 213.
+  Life, of, presumptive proof of, 184.
+  Subliminal mentation, of, 280.
+
+_Contribution ŕ l'étude de l'hypnotisme_, _cited_, 382 _note_.
+
+Coomes, Dr. M. F., _cited_, 146 _note_.
+
+Cooper, Alfred, _quoted_, 370.
+
+Cope, C. H., case collected by, 410-411.
+
+Cosmic and Planetary--
+  Evolution, 342, 354.
+  Phases of personality developed simultaneously, 114-115, 165-166.
+
+Cosmic Law--
+  Christianity the fulfilment of, 346.
+  Continuity of, 351.
+
+_Courier-Journal_, _cited_, 146 _note_.
+
+Cox, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 228 _note_.
+
+Crawford and Balcarres, Earl of, _cited_, 320 _note_.
+
+Crealock, Colonel, apparition seen by, 244.
+
+Crimes committed under hypnotism, no evidence for, 37, 154.
+
+Crookes, Sir W., _cited_, 24, 186, 319, 320 _note_;
+  work of, 7.
+
+Crowe, Mrs., _cited_, 317 _note_{2}.
+
+Crum, Amos, evidence obtained by, 413-415.
+
+Crystal Visions--
+  Collective, analogy of, with collective apparitions, 241.
+  Distant knowledge acquired by, 201.
+  Goodrich-Freer, Miss, experience of, 365.
+  Hypnotisation accompanying, 181.
+  Method and nature of, 180, 182-183.
+  Supraliminally unapprehended facts, of, 103.
+  Symbolic character of, 202.
+  Telćsthesia in, 201-202.
+  Telepathic sensibility accompanying gift of, 181-182, 187.
+
+Crystals, sensibility to, 379.
+
+Cryptomnesia, 279, 284, 286.
+
+Cuvier, _cited_, 159.
+
+
+D., Mrs., case of, _cited_, 228 _note_.
+
+_D. D. Home; His Life and Mission_, _cited_, 319 _note_, 320 _note_.
+
+Dase, case of, 66, 67, 68, 91.
+
+De Fréville, Mrs., apparition of, 243-244.
+
+_De Genio Socratis_, _cited_, 267 _note_{2}.
+
+De Gourmont Rémy, _quoted_, 71.
+
+D'Indy, M. Vincent, _cited_, 71.
+
+De Jong, _cited_, 134 _note_, 135 _note_{1}.
+
+_De l'Intelligence_, _cited_, 98 _note_{2}.
+
+_De la Suggestion et de ses Applications ŕ la pédagogie_, _cited_, 133
+  _note_, 134 _note_, 153 _note_.
+
+De Musset, _quoted_, 71.
+
+De Normandie, Rev. C. Y., _quoted_, 440.
+
+De Puységur, Marquis, work of, 119 _and note_;
+  _cited_, 157 _note_, 381.
+
+De Vesci, Lady, case of, 269.
+
+De Wolf, O. C., _quoted_, 451-452.
+
+Dead, the, _see_ Discarnate Spirits.
+
+Deafness removed by hypnotic suggestion, 143.
+
+Dean, Sidney, _cited_, 276 note.
+
+Death--
+  Apparitions at or near time of, 9, 193, 225-226;
+    causes conditioning, 225;
+    time relations in, 224 _note_{2}, 225;
+    three main types of, 220.
+  Clairvoyance at time of, 233.
+  Conditions of, taken on, in mediumistic trance, 318.
+  Dream of, 228 _note_.
+  Premonitory vision of, 370.
+  Prevision of, by discarnate spirits, 232.
+  Transitional stage immediately following, 230-232, 237, 240.
+
+Dee, Dr., magic of, 180.
+
+Delboeuf, _cited_, 139 _note_{1}, 141, 152.
+
+Delirium tremens, suggestibility developed during recovery from, 123.
+
+Delitzsch, Prof. Friedrich, 365.
+
+Demoniacal possession, 307-309.
+
+Dent, Mrs., 386.
+
+_Des Indes ŕ la plančte Mars_, _cited_, 265 _note_, 279.
+
+Despine, Dr. Prosper, 150 _and note_, 157 _note_, 381.
+
+Dessoir, Herr Max, _cited_, 185.
+
+Devils, possession by, 307-309.
+
+Diamanti, case of, 64 _note_.
+
+Dickens, Charles, _cited_, 82-83.
+
+Dignowity, Karl, dream and vision of, 375-377.
+
+Discarnate spirits--
+  Apparitions of--
+    Animals, possibly seen by, 456, 457 _note_.
+    Automatic character of, 215, 221.
+    Cases of, 226-229, 231-236, 366, 371-373, 375-376, 406-409,
+      410-411, 416-417, 420-429.
+    Collective, 241-243.
+    Compacts, in answer to, 235-236.
+    Dying, seen by the, 233.
+    Evidence for, Gurney _quoted_ on, 222.
+    Evidence of presence, not always to be considered as, 326.
+    Ghosts, popular theories as to, 214-216.
+    Nature of, 305-306.
+    News of death, bringing, 234-235;
+      coincident with, 239.
+    Personal and local, 240-243 _and note_[2].
+    Premonitory, 406-411.
+    Projected from incarnate minds, 234, 244-245, 249, 250 _note_.
+    Repeated, 227, 231, 240-241, 401-404.
+    Results of past mental action as a factor in, 245.
+    Retrocognition in relation to, 245, 251.
+    Spatial phenomena in relation to, 250.
+    Twofold nature of, 306.
+    Veridical after-images, 215-216.
+  Attitude of, probable, towards earthly things, 229.
+  Bewilderment of, immediately after death, 237, 240, 335.
+  Communications from, 189, 217;
+    difficulties of spirits in establishing, 335-337;
+    case of Swedenborg, 317;
+    types of, 218-219, 221.
+  Corpse, knowledge regarding, indicated by, 236-238, 406-409.
+  Death conditions of, reproduced in mediumistic trance, 318.
+  Evolution amongst, theory as to, 345, 346.
+  Ghosts, definitions of, 214-215.
+  Identity, conception of, 334.
+  Knowledge of, sources of, 289-290.
+  Material perception of, 203.
+  Physical intervention of, question as to, 24.
+  Spacial relations of, 334.
+  State of, 252-253, 350-351.
+  Study of problems as to, method of, 229-230.
+  Surviving friends, thought for, indicated by, 239.
+  Telekinesis by, 312-314.
+  Telepathy from, 16, 187, 238, 304.
+  Terrene affairs--
+    Knowledge of present and future, evidence as to, 231-233, 292-293, 334.
+    Memory of, evidence as to, 234-235, 412-415.
+  Theology, knowledge of, 350.
+  Time, relation to, 334.
+  Welcome of friends into spirit world by, 233.
+
+_Dissociation of a Personality_, _cited_, 49 _note_{2}.
+
+Dissociation of ideas, 361.
+
+Dissolution and evolution contrasted, 254-257.
+
+Divining rod, 269, 378.
+
+Distant knowledge, avenues to, 201.
+
+Dodson, Miss L., apparition seen by, 410-411.
+
+Dorez, Dr. A., _cited_, 137 _note_{1}.
+
+Dowsing, 269, 378.
+
+Drawing, automatic, 273 _and note_.
+
+Dreams--
+  Acuteness of senses in, 97.
+  Babylonian inscriptions deciphered in, 366-369.
+  Death, of, 228 _note_.
+  Hallucinations, defined as, 173.
+  Hypermnesic, 102.
+  Hypnotic memory of, 30.
+  Inferences drawn in, 102.
+  Life of, concurrent with waking life, 196.
+  Lost objects, of, 364.
+  Memory in--
+    Capricious nature of, 310-311.
+    Ecmnesic periods of, 101.
+    Hypnotic memory, relation to, 99-101.
+    Pain, of, after operations under chloroform, 140.
+    Scope of, as compared with that of waking memory, 102-104, 113.
+    Supraliminally known but forgotten facts, of, 102.
+    Supraliminally unapprehended facts, of, 102-103.
+  Nature of, 43-44, 53.
+  Permanent effect of certain, 97-98.
+  Precognitive, 107-112, 371-373.
+  Questions asked and replied to in, 278.
+  Reasoning intelligence of, 103-104, 113-114, 365-366.
+  Self-suggestion in, 98-99.
+  Stevenson, R. L., of, 72-73.
+  Storie, Mrs., case of, _see_ Storie.
+  Supernormal faculties exercised in, 104-112, 114, 366-375.
+  Transitional, 231.
+  Vision in, 172, 175-176.
+  Visualisation in, 179.
+
+_Dreams of a Spirit Seer_, _cited_, 317 _note_{1}.
+
+Drewry, Dr., _cited_, 48.
+
+Driesen, Baron Basil, apparition seen by, 416-417.
+
+Drugs--
+  Hypnotic cure of impulse to, 135.
+  Suggestibility, relation to, 122-123.
+
+_Du Magnetisme Animal_, _cited_, 119 _note_.
+
+Du Prel, _cited_, 43 _note_.
+
+Dual existence in cosmic and planetary worlds, 114-115, 165-166.
+
+Dufay, Dr., _cited_, 152; _quoted_, 365.
+
+Dufour, M., hypnotic treatment by, 382 _and note_.
+
+Dunraven, Lord, _cited_, 320 _note_.
+
+Durand, _cited_, 139 _note_, 150 _note_.
+
+Dyce, Dr., case of patient of, _cited_, 45 _note_.
+
+Dynamometrical power and brain energy, 261.
+
+
+E., Mlle. A., case of, _cited_, 147 _note_.
+
+Ecmnesia--
+  Nature of, 310.
+  Temporary and permanent, 300-301.
+  Vivé, Louis, case of, 49.
+
+Ecstasy--
+  Cases of, 337.
+  Definition of, 303.
+  Evidence for, 338.
+  Possession merging into, 314-315.
+  Revelations of, probably subjective, 317.
+  Sleep, relation with, 116.
+
+Education and training, value of hypnotism in, 133-134 _and notes_, 153.
+
+Eeden, Van, _cited_, 133 _note_, 134 _note_, 135 _note_{2}, 139 _note_.
+
+Egotistical view of life, 348.
+
+_Einige therapeutische Versuche mit dem Hypnotismus bei Geisteskranken_,
+   _cited_, 135 _note_.
+
+_Electricité Animale_, _cited_, 381.
+
+Elgee, Mrs., apparition seen by, 392-395.
+
+Elliotson, Dr., _cited_, 159 _note_;
+  mesmeric hospital of, 117-118, 120.
+
+Ellis, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 228 _note_.
+
+_Encyclopćdia Britannica_, _cited_, 125 _note_.
+
+End-organs--
+  Evolution of, 144.
+  Knowledge acquired without aid of, 169-170.
+
+Energy, ghost defined as persistent personal, 214-215.
+
+Enthusiasts, self-suggestion in relation to, 42.
+
+Environment, man's evolution a perception of, 74-76.
+
+Epilepsy--
+  Hypnotism applied to, 46.
+  Nerve-centres functioning in, 57.
+  _Post-epileptic_ states, 45-46.
+
+_Erfolge des therapeutischen Hypnotismus in der Landpraxis_,
+   _cited_, 135 _note_{2}.
+
+Esdaile, hypnotic hospital of, at Calcutta, 52, 120; _cited_,
+   52, 139 _note_, 159-160, 380.
+
+_Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man_, _quoted_, 11.
+
+_État Mental des Hystériques, L'_, _quoted_, 36.
+
+Ether, matter in relation to, 313.
+
+_Étude Scientifique sur Somnambulisme_, _cited_, 150 _note_.
+
+Eugenics, study of, 179.
+
+Evens, Mr., case of, _cited_, 228.
+
+Evil, view of discarnate spirits as to, 350-351.
+
+Evolution--
+  _By-products_ of, so-called, 75-76.
+  Cosmic, 354.
+  Dissolutive phenomena contrasted with that of, 254-257.
+  Environment, a perception of, 74-76.
+  Path of, 76.
+  Perturbation masking, 257.
+  Spiritual, 340-346.
+  Subliminal faculties, problem of origin of, 90-91.
+
+_Experiences in Spiritualism with Mr. D. D. Home_, _cited_, 320 _note_.
+
+_Experimental Study in Hypnotism, An_, _cited_, 98 _note_{4}, 146 _note_.
+
+
+Fahnestock, Dr., _cited_, 163 _note_; _quoted_, 381;
+  work of, 121.
+
+Fairman, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 228 _note_.
+
+Faith--
+  Aims of, 342-343.
+  Impulse given to, by spiritualistic knowledge, 341.
+  Need for, 348.
+  Self-suggestion in relation to, 166-167.
+  Uncertainty as an aid to, 343.
+
+_Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subject_, _quoted_, 69.
+
+Fancher, Mollie, case of, 51 _and note_[1].
+
+Faraday, _cited_, 263.
+
+Farez, Paul, _cited_, 134 _note_.
+
+Farler, Archdeacon, case of, 227; _cited_, 240.
+
+Faure, Dr., _cited_, 98 _and note_[3].
+
+Féré, Dr., _cited_, 98 _note_{1}, 261 _and note_.
+
+Fetichism, cures in relation to, 164-165.
+
+Finney, Mrs. W. A., _quoted_, 438-440.
+
+Flournoy, Prof., _cited_, 170, 265 _note_{1};
+  case of patient of, discussed, 279-286.
+
+Foissac, _cited_, 150 _note_.
+
+Fontan, Prof., _cited_, 150 _note_.
+
+Forel, Dr. Auguste, _cited_, 135 _note_{2};
+  cases of, _cited_, 153.
+
+_Forum_, _cited_, 210 _note_.
+
+Fraud in connection with spiritualism, 313, 329.
+
+Frémont, General, apparition of, 395.
+
+Freud, Dr., _cited_, 40-41 _and note_.
+
+Fryer, Mr., _cited_, 155 _note_.
+
+Fuller, case of, 66.
+
+
+G., Mr. F., apparition seen by, 406-409.
+
+--, H., _quoted_, 408.
+
+--, K., _quoted_, 408.
+
+Galton, Mr., _cited_, 65, 96.
+
+Garrison, Mr., case of, 272.
+
+Gauss, case of, 66, 68.
+
+Genius--
+  Aberrant manifestation, considered as, 56.
+  Definition of, 20, 56, 60-61.
+  Growth, analogy with, 82.
+  Hallucinations resembling inspirations of, 178.
+  Hypnotism and automatism in relation to, 72, 80-81.
+  Hysteria in relation to, 41, 53.
+  Inspirations of, 63-73, 80, 173, 179.
+  Internal vision of, 173.
+  Irregularities of, 76-77.
+  Lombroso's theories as to, 56, 74.
+  Nature of, 20, 63-64.
+  Normal, the best type of, 57, 61-63.
+  Origin of, 89-90.
+  Potential in all men, 63.
+  Scope of term, 56-57.
+  Sensitive's faculties, relation to, 83-84.
+  Sleep and, analogy between, 104.
+  Socrates, case of, 83-34, 266.
+  Stevenson, R. L., case of, 356.
+  Subjective rather than objective effects the real test of, 60-61.
+  Subliminal perceptions, the co-ordinated effect of, 58, 63-73, 80.
+  Substitution of control in, 301.
+  Telepathy and telćsthesia, relation to, 84-85.
+  Visual images of, 179.
+
+Geometrical patterns and subliminal mentation, 69-70.
+
+Germany, work on hypnotism in, 120.
+
+Ghosts, _see_ Discarnate Spirits.
+
+Gibert, Dr., experiments by, 160, 185, 382-383.
+
+_Gift of D. D. Home_, The, _cited_, 319 _note_, 320 _note_.
+
+Glanvil, Richard, _cited_, 7 _note_{1}.
+
+Goerwitz, E. F., _cited_, 317 _note_{1}.
+
+Goethe, _cited_, 184.
+
+Goodall, Edward A., case of, 315, 448-449.
+
+Goodhart, S. P., _cited_, 47 _note_{2}.
+
+Goodrich-Freer, Miss, _cited_, 180 _note_;
+  crystal-gazing experiments of, 103, 365.
+
+Gottschalk, Mr., case of, 206.
+
+_Grande Hysterie chez l'Homme, La_, _cited_, 49 _note_{1}, 379 _note_.
+
+Grant, Mr. Cameron, case of, _cited_, 221 _note_{1}, 273 _note_.
+
+Green, Mrs., case of, 238.
+
+Griesinger, _cited_, 96.
+
+Gurney, Edmund--
+  Cases investigated by, 108, 320, 369.
+  _Cited_, 5, 9 _and note_[1], 107 _note_, 111, 112, 125, 130-131,
+   137, 147 _note_, 152, 160-161, 174, 188, 189, 192, 198, 206,
+   207, 215, 225, 235, 238, 242, 243, 255, 260, 274-275, 396, 433.
+  _Quoted_, 222-224, 397, 398, 399, 430.
+
+Guthrie, Malcolm, _cited_, 185 _note_{1}.
+
+
+Hall, Miss, case of, _cited_, 237.
+
+----, Prof. Stanley, _cited_, 33 _and note_.
+
+Hallucinations--
+  Accidents, at time of, 106-107, 208.
+  Arrival cases, 194, 384-385.
+  Auditory, 245-246.
+  Bystander the percipient of, 387-390.
+  Collective cases, 187, 194-196, 198-199, 200, 306.
+  Crises other than death, connected with, 193, 208, 390-391.
+  Death, at or near time of, _see_ Death--Apparitions.
+  Death-compacts prematurely fulfilled, 209.
+  Discarnate spirits, of, _see_ Discarnate Spirits--Apparitions.
+  Experimental production of, 209-211.
+  Genius, resembling inspirations of, 178.
+  Healthy subjects, of, 192 _and note_.
+  Hyperćsthesić, defined as, 173.
+  Hypnotism in relation to, 148, 178.
+  Living, of the--
+    Cases of, 390-399.
+    Continuous series from, to those of the dead, 9-10.
+  Morbid, 179.
+  Optical laws not followed in, case of, 386-387.
+  Premonitory dream, 106-109, 371-373.
+  Projection of figures by agent, 409.
+  Promises, in fulfilment of, 418-420.
+  Psychorrhagic cases, 193-198.
+  Repetition of, 194-195.
+  Report of Census of, _cited_, 174 _and note_, 192, 193, 226, 233;
+    _quoted_, 390-391, 400-405, 418-420.
+  Spirit excursion in relation to, 177-178.
+  Threefold classification of, 220.
+  Veridical--
+    Nature of, 175-177, 216-217;
+      two-fold nature of, 306.
+    Types of, apparently outside scope of telepathy, 188-189.
+  Waking, 206-207.
+
+Hamilton, Duchess of, vision of, 370.
+
+Handwriting, automatic, _see_ Motor Automatism--Writing.
+
+Hanna, Rev. Thos. C., case of, 47-48.
+
+Harriss, Miss, case of, _cited_, 228 _note_.
+
+Hart, Mr., communication from, after death, 332.
+
+Hartmann, Dr. Von, _cited_, 70-71.
+
+Haunting--
+  Cases of, 244, 421-429.
+  Earth-bound spirits, by, 241.
+  Theories as to, 215-216, 247-251.
+  Unconscious, possibility of, 244.
+  Veridical after-images, 215-216.
+
+Hawkins, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 195 _and note_[1].
+
+Haydon, genius of, 60.
+
+Hearing, _see_ Audition.
+
+Hector, Mr., case of, 237.
+
+_Herald, The_ (Dubuque, Iowa), case reported in, 412.
+
+Hernaman, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 227 _note_{2}.
+
+Herschel, Sir John, _quoted_, 69.
+
+Heterćsthesić--
+  Hypnotism, produced by, 142, 144-145.
+  Organic substances, evoked by, 378, 380.
+
+Highest-level nerve-centres, function of, 57.
+
+Hill, Dr., _cited_, 137 _note_{2}.
+
+----, Rev. R. M., case of, 227.
+
+Hilprecht, Dr. Herman V., cases of, 103, 365-369.
+
+----, J. C., _quoted_, 367.
+
+_History of Rationalism_, _cited_, 4.
+
+Hodgson, Dr. Richard--
+  Cases: attested by, 405-409;
+    investigated by, 438-440, 449-451.
+  _Cited_, 181, 297, 324, 328.
+  _Quoted_, 327-328, 332-333, 335-336, 409.
+
+Hoffmann, M. M., case attested by, 421.
+
+Holiness, definition of, 354.
+
+Home. D. D.--
+  Case of, 24, 158, 318-319, 327, 337.
+  Literature concerning, 319 _note_--320.
+
+----, Madame Dunglas, _cited_, 319 _note_, 320 _note_.
+
+Homer, _cited_, 96 _and note_.
+
+Horse-asthma, 380.
+
+Hugo, Victor, 283.
+
+Hydrozoon, analogy from, 30.
+
+Hyperćsthesia--
+  Auditory, 270.
+  Cases of, 270, 324.
+  Hypnotism, produced by, 142-145.
+  Tactile, 271.
+  Telćsthesia in relation to, 201, 202.
+
+Hypermnesia, 324.
+
+Hypnagogic visions, 96, 97.
+
+Hypnogenous zones, hypnotic trance induced by pressure on, 124.
+
+Hypnopompic visions, 96-97.
+
+Hypnosis--
+  External stimuli, place of, in producing, 120, 122-125.
+  Highest level centres active in, 37-38, 151, 154.
+  Middle level centres: active in, 148-149:
+    under control of higher centres if necessary, 154.
+  Mono-ideism a misleading term for, 137.
+  Narcosis contrasted with, 123.
+  Nature of, 116-117.
+  Normal state of organism the effect of, 39.
+  Prolonged, effects of, 93-94.
+  Sleep, relation to, 122.
+
+Hypnotism--
+  Agoraphobia cured by, 136.
+  Anćsthetic agent, as, 138-141.
+  Analgesia induced by, 138-141.
+  Animals, sensibility of, to, 123-124.
+  Attention, influence on, 137-142, 153.
+  Charcot's school of, 121.
+  Children susceptible to, 133-134 _and notes_.
+  Claustrophobia cured by, 136.
+  Community of sensation between hypnotiser and subject, 162.
+  Consciousness under, 131-132 _and note_.
+  Crimes not committed under, 37, 154.
+  Crystal-visions, as a factor in seeing of, 181.
+  Cures effected by, 122;
+    classes of cases treated by, 133 _note_--134 _and note_.
+  Definition of term, 53-54, 156.
+  Delirium tremens, suggestibility developed during recovery from, 123, 135.
+  Development of, 5.
+  Distance no bar to, 160, 185.
+  Dreams remembered under, 30.
+  Dynamogenic effects of--
+    Attention and character, on, 151-155.
+    Imagination, on, 147.
+    Perceptive faculties, on, 142-145.
+    Vaso-motor system, on, 145-146.
+  Education, value in, 133-134 _and notes_, 153.
+  Effluence theory, 127, 159, 160-161.
+  Empirical development of sleep, considered as, 20.
+  Epilepsy, applied to, 46.
+  Faith cures in relation to, 166-167.
+  Future of, 163.
+  Genius and automatism in relation to, 80-81.
+  ---- ---- sleep in relation to, 72.
+  Hallucinations in relation to, 148, 178.
+  Heterćsthesić produced by, 142, 144-145.
+  Hyperćsthesić produced by, 142-145.
+  Hysterical hypnogenous zones, trance induced by pressure on, 124.
+  _Idées fixes_, cured by, 34, 138.
+  Inhibition by--
+    Choice in exercise of faculty made possible by, 141-142.
+    Education and training of children, value in, 133 _and
+      note_--134 _and note_.
+    Memory, as applied to, 137.
+    Moral results of, 133-136.
+    Pain, effect on, 139-141.
+  Intellectual work done under, 152.
+  Jealousy, influence on, 136-137.
+  Kleptomania cured by, 134-135.
+  Maladies cured by aid of, 120.
+  Maniacs, in cases of, 125.
+  Memory in--
+    Alternations in, 131.
+    Exactness of, 152.
+    Post-epileptic state of, 46.
+    Purgation of, 137.
+    Relation to dream memory, 99-101.
+    Secondary restored, 47.
+    Somnambulistic memory a part of, 156.
+    Wider scope of, than of waking memory, 130-131.
+  Monotonous stimulation, by, 125-126.
+  Moral training and reform by, 133-135 _and notes_, 155, 381-382.
+  Morphia habit cured by, 135-136 _and note_[1].
+  Music and, 261.
+  Mysophobia cured by, 136.
+  Nancy school of, 158.
+  Narcotic drugs in relation to, 122-123.
+  Operations performed under, 120.
+  Pain treated by, 138-141.
+  Passes, procured by means of, 119-120, 126, 158-159.
+  "Phobies" cured by, 136.
+  Pioneer work in study of, 117-122.
+  Possession externally indistinguishable from, 301.
+  Post-hypnotic suggestions, three main types of, 219.
+  _Rapport_ in, 162.
+  Red light in relation to, 261.
+  Salpętričre school of, 121, 123, 132 _note_, 147 _note_, 308, 381.
+  Self-suggestion in--
+    Braid's discovery of, 120.
+    Fahnestock's results in, 121.
+    Nature of, 129.
+    Neuro-muscular changes produced by, 128-129.
+    Schemes of, 127-128, 163-165.
+    Stimuli, external, merely signals for action of, 125.
+    Subliminal self, defined as appeal to, 129.
+  Sexual disorders cured by, 135.
+  Sleep in relation to, 72, 121-122, 123.
+  Somatic signs of, 121.
+  Somnambulic state contrasted with, 137.
+  Squint, convergent, produced by, 120, 125-126.
+  Stages of--
+    Charcot's three stages, 130;
+    depth of, 131;
+    Gurney's two stages, 130-131.
+  Stigmatisation due to self-suggestion, 146 _and notes_.
+  Subliminal operation in, 129-130, 132, 143, 147-149.
+  Suggestion in--
+    Braid's discovery, 120.
+    Nature of, 126-127.
+    Mode of action unknown, 159.
+    Responsiveness to, requisite, 122-123.
+  Telćsthesia in relation to, 149-150.
+  Telepathic, 158-163, 382-383.
+  Telepathic _v._ physical influence, 160-161.
+  Travelling clairvoyance under, 163.
+  Will-power, effect on, 153-154.
+
+_Hypnotism_ (Dr. Bramwell), _cited_, 120 _note_{2}, 126 _note_, 129 _note_.
+
+_Hypnotisme, Double Conscience, etc._, _cited_, 361 _note_.
+
+_Hypnotisme et l'Orthopédie morale, L'_, _cited_, 134 _note_.
+
+_Hypnotismus und seine Anwendung in der praktischen Medicin, Der_,
+   _cited_, 135 _note_{2}.
+
+Hyslop, Prof., _cited_, 333 _and note_.
+
+Hysteria--
+  Anćsthesia in--
+    Accidents avoided in, 37, 38.
+    Fanciful areas of, 37, 38.
+    Organic disease unnoticed in, 39.
+    Patches of (witch marks), 124.
+    Sensibilities, separation of, 52.
+    Unconscious, 36-39.
+  Aphasia in, 52.
+  Genius in relation to, 41, 53.
+  Hyperćsthesia in, 52-53.
+  Nature, of 40.
+  Predisposition to, causes of, 40-42.
+  Types of, 35.
+  Visual area reduced in, 38-39.
+  Witches, of, 5.
+
+
+_Idées fixes_--
+  Disaggregation, first symptom of, 33.
+  Enthusiasts of, 41-42.
+  Hypnotic cure of, 34, 138.
+  Nature of, 33-34.
+
+Identity of discarnate spirits, cases offering proofs of, 433-439.
+
+_Illusions hypnagogiques_, 96, 179, 182.
+
+Imagination, effect of hypnotism on, 147.
+
+Improvisation, 81, 82.
+
+Inaudi, Jacques, case of, 64 _note_.
+
+_Incidents in my Life_ (D. D. Home), _cited_, 319 _note_.
+
+Inhibition--
+  Hypnotic, _see under_ Hypnotism.
+  Socrates, case of, 268.
+
+Inorganic matter, spiritual influence exerted on, 312-314.
+
+_Inquiry into Human Faculty_, _cited_, 96.
+
+Insane, drawings of the, 265 _note_{1}.
+
+Inspiration the effect of subliminal uprush, 56, 65.
+
+_Instauratio magna_, _cited_, 341.
+
+_Introduction of Mesmerism with sanction of Government
+   into the Public Hospitals of India, The_, _cited_, 139 _note_.
+
+
+Jackson, Dr. Hughlings, _cited_, 57.
+
+James, Prof. W., _cited_, 46, 48 _note_, 69
+   _note_{3}, 295 _note_, 327, 328 _and note_;
+  _quoted_, 276 _note_, 329.
+
+Janet, Dr. Jules, cases of patients of, 36-37;
+  experiment by, 130.
+
+----, Dr. Pierre, cases of patients of, 359-361, 382;
+  _cited_, 36-37, 34 _and note_[1], 38-39, 48, 101
+   _note_{3}, 123, 146 _note_, 147 _note_, 275, 308 _note_{2};
+  _quoted_, 36, 85-86.
+
+Jealousy cured by hypnotism, 136-137.
+
+Jeanne des Anges, Soeur, _cited_, 277 _note_.
+
+Jesus Christ, resurrection and teachings of, 351.
+
+Joan of Arc, case of, 266-268.
+
+Johnson, Miss A., _cited_, 174 _note_.
+
+----, Samuel, 7 _note_{1}.
+
+Johnstone, Rev. J. C., _quoted_, 110-111.
+
+Jones, Mr. F. J., case of, _cited_, 228 _note_.
+
+Jowett, Prof., _cited_, 86 _note_.
+
+
+Kant, Immanuel, _cited_, 6, 317 _note_{1}.
+
+Kapnist, Countess Eugénie, apparition seen by, 240, 418-420.
+
+Kardec, Allan, _cited_, 283.
+
+Keulemans, Mr., case of, _cited_, 181, 227 _note_{2}.
+
+Kingsford, Dr. Anna, 283.
+
+Kleptomania cured by hypnotism, 134-135.
+
+Kobbé, Major, case of, 272.
+
+Krafft, Ebing, Dr. R. von, case of patient of, 98-99;
+  _cited_, 146 _note_.
+
+Kubla Khan, inspiration of, 104.
+
+
+L., Mr., case of, 186-187.
+
+--, Mrs., dream of, 445-446.
+
+Ladame, _cited_, 134 _note_, 135 _note_{2}.
+
+Ladd, Prof., _cited_, 70 _and note_.
+
+Lamartine, _quoted_, 71.
+
+Lang, Andrew, _cited_, 180 _note_, 232 _note_{2}, 266 _note_, 267 _note_{1}.
+
+Language, inadequacy of, in expressing needs of the psychical being, 77-78.
+
+Lao Tzu, religion of, 349.
+
+Lateau, Louise, case of, _cited_, 146 _note_.
+
+Leaf, Dr. Walter, _cited_, 328 _and note_.
+
+Lecky, Mr., _cited_, 4.
+
+Lefébure, M., _cited_, 284.
+
+Lemaître, Prof., _cited_, 284.
+
+Léonie, case of, 308, 309.
+
+Lett, Charles A. W., case reported by, 241-242.
+
+----, Sara, apparition seen by, 242.
+
+Lewis, Mr., dream of, _cited_, 106.
+
+----, H. J., _quoted_, 364.
+
+Liébeault, Dr. A. A.--
+  Cases of patients of, 220, 291, 294.
+  _Cited_, 123 _note_, 130, 133 _note_, 134
+   _note_, 135 _note_{2}, 142 _note_, 143 _and note_[1], 155 _note_.
+  Hypnotic school originated by, 121.
+  _Quoted_, 432-433.
+
+Life--
+  Continuity of, presumptive proof of, 184.
+  Dual existence in material and spiritual world, 114-116.
+  Etherial world, a product of, 76.
+  Nature of, human ignorance of, 187-188.
+  Passion for, a factor in universal energy, 344.
+  Planetary origin of, an unproven theory, 74.
+
+Light--
+  Magnetic, 379.
+  Red, dynamometrical power increased by, 261.
+
+Lightfoot, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 240.
+
+_Livre des Esprits_, _cited_, 283.
+
+Lodge, Sir Oliver, _cited_, 185 _note_{1}, 328 _and note_.
+
+Lombroso, Prof., _cited_, 56.
+
+Long, Geo. E., _quoted_, 431-432.
+
+Lourdes, miracles of, 128, 164-165.
+
+Love--
+  Definition of, 85, 344-345.
+  Earth-loves, persistence of, in spirit world, 350-351.
+  Planetary conception of, 85-86.
+  Platonic conception of, 85-89.
+  Underlying Power of the Universe, as, 347-349.
+
+Lowest level nerve-centres, function of, 57.
+
+Lucidité, _see_ Clairvoyance _and_ Telćsthesia.
+
+Luther, Prof., _quoted_, 445-446.
+
+----, Mrs. case of, 315.
+
+Lyttelton, Hon. Mrs., 389.
+
+
+M., Mrs., case of, _cited_, 244 _note_.
+
+--, Marie, case of, 47.
+
+--, S., _quoted_, 71.
+
+Mabille, Dr., _cited_, 146 _note_.
+
+Mabire, M. Etienne, _cited_, 185 _note_{1}.
+
+McAlpine, Mrs., apparition seen by, 390-391.
+
+M'Kendrick, Prof., _cited_, 125.
+
+_Macmillan's Magazine_, _cited_, 146 _note_.
+
+Maginot, Adčle, case of, 318.
+
+Magnetic sense, 379.
+
+Magnetism of the earth, 378.
+
+Magnets, sensibility to, 379.
+
+Mahomedanism, 352.
+
+Maitland, Edward, 283.
+
+_Making of Religion_, _cited_, 180 _note_.
+
+_Maladies de la Personnalité, Les_, _quoted_, 11-12.
+
+Mamtchitch, Eugčne, apparition seen by, 315, 400-405.
+
+----, Sophie, apparition seen by, 404-405.
+
+Mangiamele, case of, 66, 67.
+
+Maniacs, hypnotisation of, 125.
+
+Manning, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 112 _note_.
+
+Mannors, Elisa, automatic writings by, 332-333.
+
+Marot, Dr., _cited_, 136 _note_.
+
+Martian control of Hélčne Smith, 284-285.
+
+Martin, Mrs., case contributed by, 387-388.
+
+Mason, Dr. R. Osgood, case of patient of, 50-51.
+
+Massive motor impulses, 272-273.
+
+Maury, M. Alfred, _cited_, 96.
+
+_Mauvaise honte_ cured by hypnotism, 137.
+
+Medical clairvoyance, _see under_ Clairvoyance.
+
+_Medico-Legal Journal_, _cited_, 48.
+
+Mediumship--a healthy faculty, 280-281;
+  communications possibly affected by character of medium, 324.
+
+_Melbourne Argus_, _cited_, 111.
+
+_Mémoires pour servir ŕ l'Histoire et ŕ l'Etablissement du
+   magnetism Animal_, _cited_, 119 _note_.
+
+Memory--
+  Alternating personalities, in, 131, 310-311.
+  Crystal-vision, subliminal memory reproduced by, 103.
+  Dream--
+    Capricious nature of, 310-311.
+    Relation to waking and hypnotic memories, 99-100.
+  Ecmnesia, _see that title_.
+  Hypnotism, in, _see under_ Hypnotism.
+  Hysteria, heightened in, 309.
+  Multiple personality, in, 51.
+  Possession, memory of controlling spirit evident in, 298-299.
+  Post-epileptic, 46, 47.
+  Secondary personality, of, 46-48.
+  Somnambulistic, 156.
+  Subliminal continuous, 15.
+  Trance memory of spiritual world, 299.
+
+Mesmer, work of, 5, 117, 118, 119.
+
+Mesmerism--
+  Nervous effluence theory of, 119.
+  Sensibility to objects treated by, 380.
+
+_Mesmerism in India_, _cited_, 139 _note_.
+
+Mesnet, Dr., case of, _cited_, 45 _note_.
+
+Metetherial environment, 9 _and note_{2}, 166.
+
+"Methectic," 217 _note_{2}.
+
+Mettalćsthesia, 378-379.
+
+Middle-level nerve centres--
+  Function of, 57.
+  Unchecked rule of, in post-epileptic states, 45.
+
+Mill, John Stuart, _cited_, 72.
+
+Mind-reading, _see_ Muscle-reading.
+
+_Mind_, _cited_, 143 _note_{2}.
+
+_Mind-cure, Faith-cure, and the Miracles of Lourdes_, _cited_, 165 _note_.
+
+Mitchell, Rev. G. W., _cited_, 316 _note_.
+
+Moberly, Mrs. Alfred, planchette experiments by, 287.
+
+_Modern spiritualism; a History and a criticism_, _cited_, 313 _note_{1}.
+
+Moncrieff, Major, case of, _cited_, 227 _note_{2}.
+
+Mondeux, case of, 66, 67.
+
+Mono-ideism, 137, 147.
+
+Moral nature, splits in, 308.
+
+Moral training and reform, hypnotism in, 133-135.
+
+Morphia habit cured by hypnotism, 135-136 _and note_.
+
+Morton, Miss R. C., apparition seen by, 421-429.
+
+Moses, W. Stainton--
+  Case of, 24, 158, 274, 297, 298, 300, 314, 315, 319-327 337, 441-445.
+  _Spirit Teachings_ by, 321, 323.
+
+Motor automatism--
+  Anagrams automatically written, 264.
+  Definition of term, 168-169.
+  Dissolutive and evolutive, 254-255.
+  Dowsing, 269.
+
+  Drawing, 264-265 _and note_[1].
+  Genius and hypnotism, relation to, 80-81.
+  Idiognomonic, 258.
+  Inhibitions, 269-272.
+  Modes of, 273-274.
+  Nunciative character of, 258-268.
+  Possession, _see that title_.
+  Range of, 259.
+  Scope of, 21.
+  Sensibility to motor impulses, 272-273.
+  Sensory automatism: connected with, 268;
+    compared with, 274.
+  Speech, 274.
+  Spirit drawings, 78-79.
+  Spirit rapping, 262-264.
+  Table-tilting, 262-264, 400-401.
+  Teleological, 285-286.
+  Writing (hand-)--
+    Cases of, 291-292, 360.
+    Moses, W. S., case of, _see_ Moses.
+    Spirit control, considered as proof of, 290.
+  Writing (planchette-), cases of, 287-289, 433-437.
+  Writing (hand- and planchette-),--
+    Contents of messages, classification of, 275-276.
+    Early investigations of, 274-275.
+    Knowledge evidenced in, sources of, 291-296.
+    Literary style of, 78.
+    Secondary personality, by, 275.
+    Sources of, 275-276.
+    Subliminal centres regulating, 58-59.
+    Subliminal self, messages from, 276-278.
+
+Mount-Temple, Lady, 320.
+
+Multiple Personality, cases of, 49-51;
+  memory in, 51.
+
+_Multiple Personality_, _cited_, 47 _note_{2}.
+
+_Murray's Magazine_, _cited_, 395 _note_.
+
+Muscle-reading, 259-260.
+
+Muscular resistance, sense of, in relation to subliminal mentation, 69.
+
+Music, symbolism of, 79.
+
+Musical execution, subliminally initiated, 273.
+
+Musset, De, _quoted_, 71.
+
+Myers, Dr. A. T., _cited_, 165 _note_, 174 _note_, 382.
+
+----, F. W. H., 328; _cited_, 165 _note_.
+
+Mysophobia cured by hypnotism, 136.
+
+_Myth, Ritual and Religion_, _cited_, 232 _note_.
+
+
+Nagel, _cited_, 144 _note_.
+
+Nancy School of Hypnotism, 121, 158.
+
+Narcosis, hypnosis contrasted with, 123.
+
+Narcotics, _see_ Drugs.
+
+Nasse, _cited_, 120 _note_{1}.
+
+_Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance_, _cited_, 139 _note_, 160 _note_{1}.
+
+Neilson, _cited_, 135 _note_{2}.
+
+Nerve cells, controlled by subliminal self, 34.
+
+Nervous development, modern, rapidity of, 73-74.
+
+Nevius, Dr., _cited_, 307, 309.
+
+_Nevroses et Idées Fixes_, _cited_, 45 _note_{1}, 101 _note_{3};
+  case _quoted_ from, 359-361.
+
+Newbold, Prof. W. Romaine, case recorded by, 365;
+  _cited_, 307, 328 _and note_;
+  _quoted_, 103.
+
+Newell, E. J., _quoted_, 364-365.
+
+Newnham, Mr., case of, _cited_, 112 _note_.
+
+----, Mrs., case of, 287-288, 295-296, 308.
+
+----, Rev. P. H., case of, 287-989, 295-296.
+
+_Nineteenth Century_, _cited_, 320 _note_.
+
+Nordau, Dr. Max, _cited_, 56.
+
+Normal--
+  Genius the best type of, 20, 57, 61-63.
+  Misuse of word, 61.
+
+Normandie, Rev. C. Y., de, _quoted_, 440.
+
+_Northern Standard_, _quoted_, 391.
+
+_Notes of Séances with D. D. Home_, _cited_, 320 _note_.
+
+
+_Observations de Médecine Pratique_, _cited_, 150 _note_, 157 _note_, 381.
+
+Occult Wisdom, 339.
+
+_On the so-called Divining Rod_, _cited_, 378.
+
+
+Pain--
+  Dream memory of, 140.
+  Hypnotic suppression of, 138-141.
+  Memory of, 140-141.
+  Psychological entity, treated as, 140.
+  Sense of, distinguished from temperature sense in hysteria, 52.
+  Suggestion in removing, 140.
+
+Painting, automatic, 273.
+
+Palladia, apparitions of, 400-405.
+
+Parsons, Dr. D. J., case of, _quoted_, 271.
+
+----, Dr. J. W., _quoted_, 272.
+
+Parry, Mrs. Gambier, _quoted_, 421.
+
+"Peak in Darien" cases, 233.
+
+Pelham, George, control of, 235.
+
+Pennée, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 244 _note_.
+
+Percipient, definition of term, 9 _note_{3}.
+
+Perception--
+  Distant, 201.
+  Power of, 149-150.
+
+Personality--
+  Common-sense view of, 11, 13.
+  Co-ordination theory, 11-13, 26-27, 31.
+  Cosmic and planetary, simultaneous development of, 114-115, 165-166.
+  Dissociation of, 190-191, 196-197.
+  Dual, 356-359.
+  Hypnotic stratum of, 35, 37.
+  Knowledge, new, not evidenced in changes of, 310, 311.
+  Multiplex, 216.
+  Psychological view of, 11-12.
+  Secondary, _see_ Secondary personality.
+  Supraliminal life regarded as privileged case of, 169.
+  Upbuilding of, notion of, 32.
+
+Perturbation masking evolution, 357.
+
+Pesaro, experiments of, 301.
+
+Pessimistic views of life, 348.
+
+Pététin, _cited_, 150 _note_, 381.
+
+Petrovo-Solovovo, Mr. M., case collected by, 416-417.
+
+_Phćdo_, _cited_, 213.
+
+Phantasmogenetic centres, 177, 188, 196, 197.
+
+Phantasms--
+  Discarnate spirits, of, _see_ Discarnate Spirits--Apparitions.
+  Living, of the, 193-198, 205-207, 209-210.
+
+_Phantasms of the Dead from another point of view_, _cited_, 409 _note_.
+
+_Phantasms of the Living_, _cited_, 5, 9, 96, 108, 112 _and note_, 113
+    _note_{1}, 160 _note_{1}, 174, 185 _and note_[1], 188, 195 _notes_, 199
+    _and note_, 200 _notes_, 206, 207 _notes_, 208, 209 _and notes_, 210
+    _note_{1}, 217 _note_{1}, 223 _and note_[2], 224 _and note_, 225, 226,
+    227 _and note_[1], 233, 234 _note_{2}, 236 _and note_, 237, 240, 241,
+    243, 272, 291;
+  _quoted_, 106-107, 205-206, 370-374, 384-385, 387-388, 392-396, 420, 430.
+
+_Phęme_, _cited_, 185.
+
+_Philosophy of Mysticism_, _cited_, 43 _note_.
+
+_Philosophy of the Unconscious_, _cited_, 71.
+
+Pierce, A. H., _cited_, 14 _note_.
+
+Piper, Mrs.--
+  Case of, 158, 189, 285, 297-300, 307, 309, 314,
+   315, 318, 319, 326-333, 337, 448.
+  "George Pelham" control of, _quoted_, 336.
+
+Pitres, Dr., 124.
+
+Planchette, _see_ Motor Automatism--Writing.
+
+Plants, sensibility to presence of certain, 380.
+
+Plato--
+  _Cited_, 137, 213, 217, _note_{2}, 282.
+  Love, conception of, 85, 86-89.
+  Pre-terrene training, theory as to, 91.
+
+Plotinus, _quoted_, 352-355.
+
+Plutarch, _cited_, 267 _note_{2}.
+
+Podmore, Frank, _cited_, 9, 14 _note_, 174
+   _note_, 185 _note_{2}, 238, 244, 313 _note_{1}, 318, 409.
+
+_Points de repčre_, 181, 182.
+
+Pole, W., _quoted_, 66.
+
+Pole-Carew, Mrs., case attested by, 388-389.
+
+Poltergeist phenomena, 246.
+
+Possession--
+  Analogies for, 300-302, 307, 310-311.
+  Angelic, diabolical or hostile, no evidence for, 307-310.
+  Brain function in, 305.
+  Cases of, 446-451.
+  Chinese, 307, 309.
+  Definition of term, 274, 298, 300.
+  Demoniacal, 307-310, 359.
+  Ecstasy, merging into, 314-315.
+  Evidence for, 297-298.
+  Home, D. D., case of, 318-319.
+  Janet's treatment of, 361.
+  Memory in, 298-299.
+  Moses case, _see_ Moses.
+  Motor automatism contrasted with, 297.
+  Nature of, 300-303, 311.
+  Piper, Mrs., case of, _see_ Piper.
+  Place of, in psychical phenomena, 299-300.
+  Pseudo-, 51, 359-361.
+  Simulation of, in somnambulistic state, 157-158.
+  Spirit possession--
+    Difficulties of controlling spirit in, 335-337.
+    Home, D. D., case of, 319.
+    Piper, Mrs., case of, discussed, 330-333.
+  Subliminal self, as the domination of, 315-316, 318, 324, 325.
+  Two or more spirits, by, 298.
+
+Potolof, W., case attested by, 405.
+
+Prayer, relation of, to telepathy, 184.
+
+Precognition--
+  Death, of, 232, 370.
+  Dreams, in, 107-112.
+  Telepathy from discarnate spirits, defined as, 187.
+
+Prince, Dr. Morton, case of patient of, 49 _and note_[2], 308.
+
+_Principles of Psychology_, _cited_, 48 _note_, 69 _note_{3}.
+
+Prolongeau, case of, 66, 67.
+
+Proust, Dr., case of patient of, 46-47.
+
+Proximity of plants and animals, sensibility to, 380.
+
+Prudhomme, M. Sully, _quoted_, 71.
+
+Psychical invasion--
+  Cases of, 193-198, 337;
+    where agent has no memory of circumstance, 208;
+    where agent and percipient retain memory of, 199-200, 209;
+    where neither agent nor percipient retain memory of, 198-199.
+  Dreams, in, 105, 112.
+  Dying, by, 113.
+  Ecstasy in relation to, 314.
+  Evidence for, 302, 337-338.
+  Living persons, of, 112-113.
+  Telepathy almost indistinguishable from, 294.
+
+Psychical Research, Christian evidence supported by, 352.
+
+_Psychische Studien_, _cited_, 433.
+
+_Psychological Review, The_, _quoted_, 329.
+
+Psychology, advance in, during last twenty years, 279-280.
+
+_Psychology of Suggestion_, _cited_, 47 _note_{2}.
+
+Psychorrhagic diathesis, 196-197.
+
+_Psycho-Thérapie_, _cited_, 133 _note_, 134 _note_, 135 _note_{2}, 139 _note_.
+
+Psycho-therapeutics, development of, 5.
+
+Pythagoras, 283.
+
+
+_Quarterly Journal of Science_, _cited_, 320 _note_.
+
+Quicherat, M., _cited_, 266, 267.
+
+
+R., Mr. Van, of Utica, case of, 66, 67.
+
+Ramsay, Mrs., apparition seen by, 394-395.
+
+Raphael's San Sisto, inspiration of, 173.
+
+Rarey, _cited_, 123.
+
+Rawson, Henry G., _cited_, 185 _note_{1}.
+
+_Recent Experiments in Crystal Vision_, _cited_, 180 _note_.
+
+_Recherches Physiologiques sur l'Homme_, _cited_, 119 _note_.
+
+_Recherches sur l'Homme dans le Somnambulisme_, _cited_, 157 _note_, 381.
+
+_Record of a Haunted House_, _cited_, 421.
+
+Red Light in hypnotism, 261.
+
+Reddell, Frances, apparition seen by, 387-388.
+
+Reed, Colonel, case of, _cited_, 200.
+
+----, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 228 _note_.
+
+Regis, _cited_, 135 _note_{1}.
+
+Reichenbach, Baron, 379.
+
+Reid, _quoted_, 11.
+
+Reincarnation, doctrine of, 282-285.
+
+_Religio-Philosophical Journal_, _cited_, 51 _note_{3}, 370-371, 437 _note_.
+
+Religion--
+  Ancient Sage, of, 349-50.
+  Buddha, of, 349, 352-353.
+  Christianity, 342, 346, 349-350.
+  Definition of, 85, 89, 347.
+  Ideals of, 347-348.
+  Natural, 349-350.
+  Old-world beliefs not adapted to modern needs, 342.
+  Oracular, development of, 346.
+  Science, complementary to, 25, 354;
+    scientific methods applied to truths of, 341.
+  Synthesis of, provisional sketch for, 347-355.
+
+Renterghem, Dr. van, hypnotic cures by, 117;
+  _cited_, 133 _note_, 134 _note_, 135 _note_{2}, 139 _note_.
+
+_Report of the International Congress of Experimental
+   Psychology_, _cited_, 170 note.
+
+_Report on Spiritualism of the Committee of the London
+   Dialectical Society_, _cited_, 319 _note_.
+
+_Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism_, _cited_, 320 _note_.
+
+_Retrocognition and Precognition_, _cited_, 245 _note_.
+
+Retté, M., _cited_, 71.
+
+Revelation, telepathy a means for continuous, 350.
+
+_Ręves, Les_, _cited_, 98, 101 _note_{2}.
+
+_Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, _cited_, 46 _note_, 52 _note_, 101 _note_{1},
+   133 _note_, 134 _note_, 135 _notes_[1] _and_ [2], 136 _note,_ 137
+   _note_{1}, 139, 140 _note_{1}, 142 _note_, 146 _note_, 147 _note_, 153
+   _note_{1}, 155 _note_, 170 _note_, 272 _note_, 382.
+
+_Revue de Médecine_, _cited_, 101 _note_{3}.
+
+_Revue Philosophique_, _cited_, 64 _note_, 139 _note_{1}, 143 _note_{2},
+   150 _note_, 152 _note_{2}, 308 _note_{2}, 382, 430.
+
+_Revue Scientifique_, _quoted_, 365 _and note_.
+
+Reynolds, Mary, case of, 48-49.
+
+Ribot, Mr., _quoted_, 11-12, 71-72.
+
+Richet, Prof., work of, 121;
+  table-tilting experiments of, 430;
+  _cited_, 185 _note_{1}, 263, 287, 446;
+  _quoted_, 448.
+
+Ringier, Georg, _cited_, 133 _note_, 135 _note_{2}.
+
+_Riverine Herald_, _cited_, 111.
+
+Romances, inward, 279.
+
+Rose-asthma, 380.
+
+Rossi-Pagnoni, Prof., experiments by, 290.
+
+Royce, Prof., _cited_, 69 _and note_[1];
+  case attested by, 405-406.
+
+Rybalkin, Dr. J., _cited_, 146 _note_.
+
+
+Safford, Prof., case of, 66-67.
+
+S. Augustine, _cited_, 184.
+
+S. Brieux, Bishop of, vision of, 244-245.
+
+S. Ilma, case of, _cited_, 146 _note_.
+
+Saint-Saens, _cited_, 71.
+
+S. Theresa, 5-6.
+
+Salpętričre School of Hypnotism, 121, 123, 132 _note_, 147 _note_, 308, 381.
+
+Sand, George, method of work of, 82.
+
+Sanders, Rev. C. B. (X + Y = Z), case of, 316 _and note_.
+
+"Scheme of Vital Faculty," 313-314.
+
+Schiller, Mr., case of, 278-279.
+
+Schmoll, Herr Anton, _cited_, 185 _note_{1}.
+
+Schneller, Fräulein, case communicated by, 375-376.
+
+Schrenck-Notzing, _cited_, 133 _note_, 185 _note_{1}.
+
+Science--
+  Methods of, applied to psychology, 1-3.
+  Religion, complementary to, 25, 354.
+
+Scripture, Dr., _cited_, 64 _note_, 65;
+  _quoted_, 67.
+
+Searle, Mr., case of, 207.
+
+Secondary personality--
+  Defective integration of psychical being, cases due to, 45-48.
+  Diabolical possession a phase of, 308.
+  Emotionally selected, 44.
+  Fictitious, 48.
+  Improvement on primary, 48-49, 51.
+  Memory of, lost to primary, 46, 47;
+    recovered under hypnotism, 46-48.
+  Motor automatisms by, 295.
+  Possession, possible confusion with, 307.
+  _Post-epileptic states_, 45-46.
+  Primary superseded by, 48-49, 51.
+  Somnambulic, 45, 156-157.
+  Stevenson, R. L., case of, 356-359.
+  X., Félida, case of, 361-363.
+
+"Seeress of Prevorst," _cited_, 317 _note_{2}.
+
+Self-projection, 210-211.
+
+Self-suggestion--
+  Automatisms, range of, increased by, 152.
+  Charms as means to, efficacy of, 164.
+  Pain suppressed by, 140.
+  Schemes of, 127-128.
+  Stigmatisation due to, 146 _and notes_.
+  Subliminal self, defined as appeal to, 129.
+  Witchcraft explained as, 5.
+
+_Sensation et Mouvement_, _cited_, 261 _note_.
+
+Sense Organs--
+  Perceptive power independent of, 149-150.
+  Specialised, 169-171.
+  Transposition of faculties of, 149-150.
+
+Sensibility--
+  Drugs, to, 122-123.
+  Magnets, to, 379.
+
+  Synćsthesić of, 170 _and notes_, 171.
+  Transition from undifferentiated, to specialisation of sense, 170-171.
+
+Sensitives, spirit perception of, 335.
+
+Sensory automatism--
+  Causes predisposing to, in healthy persons, 174-175.
+  Genius and hypnotism, relation to, 80-81.
+  Hallucinations, _see that title_.
+  Motor automatism: connected with, 268;
+    compared with, 274.
+  Nature of, 20-21.
+  Scope of term, 168.
+  Telepathy the prerequisite for, 183.
+
+Sewall, Frank, _cited_, 317 _note_{1}.
+
+Shell-hearing, 201.
+
+Shock, effects of, on human beings and animals, 123.
+
+Sidgwick, Mrs., experiments of, 131;
+  case attested by, 387;
+  _cited_, 161, 162 _note_{2}, 174 _note_, 185 _note_{1}, 246 _note_;
+  _quoted_, 111, 247 _and note_-250 _and note_.
+
+Sidgwick, Professor, case of, _cited_, 277 _note_;
+  case investigated by, 411;
+  _cited_, 9 _note_{1}, 108, 162 _note_{2}, 174 _note_, 185 _note_{1};
+  _quoted_, 111.
+
+Sidis, Dr. Boris, 47 _and note_[2].
+
+Skae, Dr. David, case of patient of, 48.
+
+Skirving, Mr., case of, 272.
+
+Sleep--
+  Characteristics of, 93-94, 113-114.
+  Clairvoyant excursions during, 301.
+  Cosmic personality developed during, 114-115.
+  Definition of, 20.
+  Ecstasy, connection with, 116.
+  Faculties of, analogy between those of Genius and, 104.
+  Hyperćsthesia of, 97.
+  Hypnotism in relation to, 72, 121-122, 131.
+  Imagination, intense, during, 97.
+  Psychical excursion during, 302.
+  Recuperative powers of, 94-95, 97, 113.
+  Rocking, induced by, 126.
+  Somnambulism, relation to, 95.
+  Spiritual functions of subliminal self during, 156.
+  Subliminal self directing, 116.
+  Submerged faculty, indicating existence of, 53.
+  Telepathy and telćsthesia in, 105, 114, 116.
+
+Smell, subliminal sense of, 271.
+
+Smith, G. M., _cited_, 287 _and note_[1].
+
+----, H. Babington, _cited_, 291.
+
+----, H. Arthur, cases of, 277 _and note_--278.
+
+----, Mlle. Hélčne--
+  Case of, discussed, 280-286; _cited_, 324.
+  Martian landscapes of, 265 _note_{1}
+
+----, J. W., _cited_, 185 _note_{1}.
+
+Smyth, Sibbie (née Towns), apparition seen by, 242.
+
+Snow, Herman, _cited_, 437 _note_.
+
+_Société de Psychologie Physiologique_, paper presented to, _cited_, 382.
+
+Society for Psychical Research--
+  Address of Secretary, 293 _note_.
+  American, _Proceedings of_, case from, 226 _note_, _cited_, 51
+   _note_{2}, 69 _note_{1}, 102 _note_, 243 _note_{1}, 244 _note_,
+    246 _note_, 295 _note_, 405.
+  Census of Hallucinations undertaken by, 174 _and note_;
+    Report of, _see under_ Hallucinations.
+  Founding of, 9 _note_{1}.
+  Journal of--
+    Cases _quoted_ from, 385-386, 445, 449-451.
+    _Cited_, 51 _note_{3}, 102 _note_, 106 _note_, 107 _note_, 112
+   _note_, 113 _note_{2} 140 _note_{2}, 146 _note_, 151 _note_, 157
+   _note_, 185 _note_{2}, 188 _note_, 207 _note_{2}, 209 _and note_[1],
+    210 _note_{1}, 237, 238, 241 _notes_, 272, 285 _note_, 287 _note_{1}, 290
+   _note_, 320 _note_, 395, 409, 416 _note_.
+  Object of, 313.
+  _Proceedings of_, _cited_, 35 _and note_, 45 _note_{3}, 49 _notes_[2]
+   _and_[3], 51 _note_{1}, 69 _note_{2}, 103 _note_, 106 _note_, 112
+   _note_, 120 _note_{2}, 124 _note_, 126 _note_, 128, 139 _note_, 141
+   _note_{2}, 142 _note_, 147 _note_, 148 _and note_, 152 _note_{1}, 155
+   _note_, 160 _note_{2}, 162 _notes_, 163 _note_{1}, 165 _note_, 173
+   _note_, 180 _note_, 181, 185 _note_{1}, 187, 192 _note_, 193, 195
+   _note_{2}, 209 _note_{2}, 210 _note_{1}, 215, 221 _notes_[1] _and_[2],
+   226, 231, 232 _and_ _note_{1}, 233, 234 _notes_[1] _and_[2], 236 _and
+   note_, 237, 238, 239 _and note_, 241, 243 _and note_[2], 244, 245
+   _note_, 247 _and note_[1], 259 _and note_, 260, 263 _note_, 266
+   _note_{1}, 271 _notes_, 277 _and note_, 278 _and note_, 279, 285 _and
+   note_, 287 _note_{2}, 288 _note_{1}, 289 _notes_, 290 _and note_, 292,
+   297, 301, 317 _note_{3}, 318, 320 _note_, 321, 324, 328 _note_, 329,
+   330, 332, 333 _and note_, 356, 378, 380, 382, 400, 409 _note_, 430;
+   _quoted_, 177, 270, 271, 287, 327-328, 330-333, 364-366, 369-370,
+   375-376, 390-391, 405, 410, 412, 416, 418-420, 421, 433-437, 446-449.
+  Test letters to be sent to, suggestions regarding, 293 _note_.
+
+Socrates--
+  Dćmon of, 265-268.
+  Science originated by, 6.
+
+Solon, _quoted_, 117 _note_.
+
+Solovovo, Michael Petrovo, _quoted_, 420.
+
+Somnambulism--
+  Analogy from, for ghostly communications, 217-218.
+  Characteristics of state of, 44.
+  Hypnosis in relation to, 137, 156.
+  Intellectual work done in state of, 156-157.
+  Possession, parallelism with, 311.
+  Secondary personality starting from, 44, 45.
+  Sleep, relation to, 95.
+  Spontaneous, 156.
+  Supernormal powers evidenced in, 157
+
+Space--
+  Phantasmogenetic centre, modification of part into, 195, 197.
+  Spirit attitude towards, 176.
+  Spiritual phenomena in relation to, 22.
+  Telepathy, relation to, 22.
+
+Speech, phantasmal, 241.
+
+Speer, Dr., _cited_, 24.
+
+Spirit--
+  Conception of, 59.
+  Existence of, postulated, 27, 91-92.
+
+Spirit drawings, 78-79.
+
+_Spirit Drawings_, _cited_, 79 _note_, 265 _note_{1}.
+
+Spirit guardianship, case of, 271-272.
+
+Spirit healing, 164.
+
+Spirit intervention, telepathy explained by theory of, 16-17.
+
+Spirit possession, _see_ Possession.
+
+Spirit rapping, 262-264.
+
+_Spirit Teachings_, _cited_, 321, 323.
+
+Spiritual environment, 165-166.
+
+---- evolution, 340-346.
+
+Spiritualism--
+  Fraud in connection with, 313, 329.
+  Home, D. D., case of, _see_ Home.
+  Methods of, 8.
+  Moses, W. S., case of, _see_ Moses.
+  Physical phenomena of, 313-314.
+  Pioneer work in, 4 _et seq._
+  Piper, Mrs., case of, _see_ Piper.
+  Support of, by subliminal-self theory, 16-17.
+
+Stage-fright cured by hypnotism, 152.
+
+_Statuvolism, or Artificial Somnambulism_, _cited_, 121, 163 _note_{1};
+  _quoted_, 381.
+
+Stevenson, R. L.--
+  Dreams of, 72-73, 82-83, 97.
+  Dual personality experiences of, 356-359.
+  Genius of, 356.
+
+Stigmatisation, 146 _and notes_.
+
+Stone Age, 104, 299.
+
+Storie, Mrs., case of, 108-112, 228-229, 235, 237.
+
+Stramm, Mdlle., automatic message written by, 291-292.
+
+Stubbing, Mrs. Annie S., _quoted_, 373.
+
+_Studien über Hysterie_, _cited_, 41 _and note_[1].
+
+_Study of Fears_, _cited_, 33 _and note_.
+
+Sturgis, Dr. Russell, _cited_, 33 _note_.
+
+_Subconscient chez les Artistes, les Savantes et les
+   Ecrivains, Les_, _cited_, 71 _and note_.
+
+Subliminal, definition of term, 15.
+
+Subliminal power--
+  Functioning of, referred to control centres, 57-60.
+  Potential, in every organism, 63.
+
+Subliminal self--
+  Control of organism by, 151, 157.
+  Cognisance of fragment of, 15.
+  Definition of term, 15.
+  Dominance of, over supraliminal self, 315.
+  Functions of, 37.
+  Imaginative faculty of, 147-149.
+  Methods of communication with supraliminal self, 20-21.
+  Nerve cells controlled by, 34.
+  Powers of, compared with supraliminal, 277-278.
+  Suggestion in relation to, 129.
+  Surviving self, related to, 168.
+  Telepathy explained by theory of, 16, 17.
+
+_Subliminal Self or Unconscious Cerebration_, _cited_, 14 _note_.
+
+Substitution of ideas, 361.
+
+Suggestion--
+  Attention, effect on, 153.
+  Character, influence on, 154-155.
+  Cures effected by, 34.
+  Delirium tremens, suggestibility developed during recovery from, 123, 135.
+  Dynamogenic effect of, on attention and character, 151-155.
+  Post-hypnotic, 260-261.
+  Responsiveness to, requisite, 122-123.
+  Subliminal self, defined as appeal to, 129.
+  Will-power, influence on, 153-154.
+
+_Suggestion Mentale, La_, _cited_, 263 _note_.
+
+_Suggestions-Therapie bei krankhaften Erscheinungen des
+   Geschlechissinnes, Die_, _cited_, 133 _note_.
+
+Suicide--
+  Greek view of, 344.
+  Phantasms in connection with, 200.
+
+Supernormal, definition of term, 6 _note_{1}.
+
+Survival--
+  Continuity, theory as to, 333-334.
+  Evidence for, 9-10; nature of, 213.
+  Scientific method not applied to problem of, 3.
+  Telepathy the security of, 344.
+  Tests of, 292-293 _and note_.
+
+Swedenborg, Emmanuel--
+  Case of, 299.
+  Debt of posterity to, 339.
+  Evidential cases of, 316.
+  Experiential and dogmatic writings of, 317.
+  Psychical science originated by, 6-7, 9.
+  Teachings of, corroborative of recent investigations, 317.
+
+Symbolism, subliminal tendency to, 202-203.
+
+Synćsthesia, 170 _and notes_--171.
+
+Synthetic Society, papers read before, 350 _note_.
+
+Syringomyelitis, anćsthesia of, 37.
+
+
+T., case of, 382.
+
+--, Mrs., case of, 373-375. _cited_, 234.
+
+--, Mr. and Mrs., case of, _cited_, 112-113.
+
+Table-tilting, 262-264, 400-401, 430-433, 438.
+
+Tactile sensibility, hyperćsthesia of, 271.
+
+Taine, M., _cited_, 98 _and note_[2].
+
+Taunton, Mrs., case of, 207 _and note_[1].
+
+Teale Mrs., case of, _cited_, 228.
+
+Telćsthesia--
+  Cases of, 289-290.
+  Crystal gazing or shell hearing, in, 201.
+  Definition of term, 6 _note_{1}, 90, 105.
+  Dreams in, 104-112, 114, 366-375.
+  Genius, relation to, 84-85.
+  Hyperćsthesia in relation to, 201, 202.
+  Hypotheses explaining, 16.
+  Parsons, Dr. D. J., case of, 271-272.
+  Psychical invasion in relation to, 177, 199-205.
+  Telepathy, relation to, 187.
+
+Telekinesis, 313-314. 326;
+  case of W. S. Moses, 320-322.
+
+Telepathy--
+  Animals, between, 188 _note_.
+  Brain vibrations in, theory of, 304.
+  Collective cases, 187, 198-199.
+  Conception of, 303-306.
+  Crystal-vision, gift of, accompanied by sensibility to, 181-182.
+  Definition of, 90, 105.
+  Discarnate spirits, relation to, 187, 350.
+  Distance, from, 160, 185.
+  Evidence for, 183-189, 191.
+  Evolutive nature of, 256 _and notes_.
+  Experiments to prove, 185 _and notes_-186.
+  Genius, relation to, 84-85.
+  Ghostly communications in relation to, 216-217.
+  Hypnosis induced by, 160, 162 _and note_[2], 382-383.
+  Hypotheses explaining, 16-17.
+  Inadequacy of term, 105.
+  Language difficulties in, 285.
+  Latency of impacts, 223-224, 228, 291.
+  Law, fundamental, of spiritual world, as, 31.
+  Newnham, Rev. P. H., case of, 287-289.
+  Prayer in relation to, 184.
+  Precognitive, 187, 189.
+  Prerequisite for supernormal phenomena, as the, 183.
+  Psychical invasion indistinguishable from, in motor automatism, 294.
+  Savages, among, 256 _note_{1}.
+  Sleep, relation to, 116.
+  Spiritual excursion in relation to, 177.
+  Split personality in relation to, 190-191.
+  Subliminal selves, between, during sleep, 315.
+  Survival, the security for, 9, 344.
+  Table-tilting, by, 430-433, 438.
+  Telćsthesia in relation to, 187.
+  Three main types of communications in, 219-220.
+  Time relations in, 187.
+  Vibration theory of, 186-187.
+
+Temperature sense distinguished from pain sense, 52.
+
+Tennyson, _cited_, 184.
+
+Teste, _cited_, 381.
+
+Thaw, Dr. A. Blair, _cited_, 185 _note_{1}.
+
+Theology, reason for avoiding, 10.
+
+_Thérapeutique Suggestive_, _cited_, 123 _note_, 142 _note_, 143 _note_{1}.
+
+Thorpe, Mr. Courtenay, 206.
+
+Thought-transference, _see_ Telepathy.
+
+Thoulet, Professor, case of, 315, 446-448.
+
+Time--
+  Spiritual phenomena, in relation to, 22-23, 251.
+  Subliminal mentation, in relation to, 68-69.
+  Telepathy, in relation to, 187.
+
+Tissié, Dr., _cited_, 98;
+  case of patient of, 101.
+
+Trance (_see also_ Home--Moses--Piper)--
+  Messages, generic similarity of, in different individuals, 276 _note_.
+  Three main types of, 315.
+
+Transposition of senses, 149.
+
+Tuckey, Lloyd, _cited_, 135 _note_.
+
+Twins, telepathic communications between, 108-109.
+
+
+Unity, central, in multicellular organisms, 30-31.
+
+_Use of Hypnotism in the First Degree_, _cited_, 33 _note_.
+
+
+V., Mrs., vision of, 232.
+
+Vaso-motor system, dynamogenic hypnotic effects on, 145-146.
+
+Vennum, Miss Mary Lurancy, case of, 51.
+
+Verity, A. S., case attested by, 397, 398.
+
+----, L. S. and E. C., apparition appearing to, 396-399.
+
+Verrall, Mrs., 181.
+
+Virgil, _cited_, 96 _and note_, 282.
+
+Vision--
+  After-images, 171, 179.
+  Defects of, removed by suggestion, 142-143.
+  Entoptic, 171.
+  Evolution of, 169-173.
+  Imagination images, 172-173.
+  Inward, 171-174;
+    control of, 178;
+    veridical, 175-177.
+  Memory-images, 172, 179.
+  Non-optical, in dreams, 169-170.
+  Ocular, a privileged case of general vision, 173, 175.
+  Subliminal mentation in relation to, 69 _and note_-70.
+
+Vital faculty, scheme of, 441 _et seq._
+
+Vivé, Louis, case of, 49 _and note_[1], 146 _note_, 379.
+
+Vlavianos, Dr., _cited_, 134 _note_, 135 _note_{2}.
+
+Voisin, Dr. Auguste, _cited_, 49 _note_{1}, 101 _and note_,
+   133 _note_, 134 _note_, 135 _notes_[1] _and_ [2], 136 _note_, 155 _note_;
+  _quoted_, 381-382.
+
+Voltaire, genius of, 60.
+
+
+W., Miss, case of, _cited_, 233.
+
+Wallace, Alfred Russel, _cited_, 7 _and note_, 16.
+
+Warburton, Canon, dream of, 106-107, 208.
+
+Water--
+  Mesmerised, experiments with, 380.
+  Running, finding of, 378.
+
+Wendell, Prof. Barrett, _cited_, 318.
+
+Wesermann, experiments of, 409.
+
+Wesley, John, 7 _note_{1}.
+
+Wetterstrand, Otto, _cited_, 93, 135 _note_{2}, 136 _note_.
+
+Whately, Archbishop, case of, 66-67.
+
+Wheatcroft, Mrs., case of, _cited_, 228.
+
+Wilkie, J. E., dream of, 315, 450-451.
+
+Wilkinson, W. M., _cited_, 79 _note_, 265 _note_{1}.
+
+Will power--
+  Hypnotic influence on, 153-154.
+  Self-projection by means of, 210-211, 396-399.
+
+Wilmot, Mrs., case of, 177.
+
+Wilson, Archdeacon, case of, 228.
+
+----, Dr. Albert, case of patient of, 49 _note_{3}.
+
+Wingfield, Dr. Hugh, _quoted_, 128.
+
+Winsor, Miss Anna, case of, 51 _and note_[2], 295 _note_.
+
+Witchcraft, 4-5.
+
+Witches, anćsthetic patches on, 124.
+
+Wittman, 130.
+
+Wordsworth, _cited_, 81, 84 _note_, 92.
+
+World-soul, 355 _note_.
+
+Wyman, W. H., case of, _quoted_, 270.
+
+
+X., Emile, case of, 46-47.
+
+--, Félida, case of, 44, 48, 50-51, 307, 361-363.
+
+"X + Y = Z," case of, 316 _and note_.
+
+_X + Y = Z_ or _The Sleeping Preacher of North Alabama_, _cited_, 316 _note_.
+
+
+Z., Alma, case of, 50-51.
+
+_Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus_, _passim_, _cited_, 120 _note_{1}.
+
+_Zoist, the_, _cited_, 123 _note_, 139 _note_{1}, 159,
+   161, 162 _note_, 163 _note_{2}, 177 _note_, 380, 381.
+
+Zones, anćsthetic, occurrence of, in witchcraft, 124.
+
+_Zones analgésique_ in witches, 5.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following typographical errors were corrected by the etext
+transcriber:
+
+and of communciation with=>and of communication with
+
+His field of consciousness is so far=> His field of typo consciousness
+is so far
+
+physiolgical explanations=>physiological explanations
+
+choreic or fidgetty shiftings of motor impulse=>choreic or fidgety
+shiftings of motor impulse
+
+these types of subacent vision=>these types of subjacent vision
+
+will sometimes express themseves=>will sometimes express themselves
+
+Bibliotčque Diabolique=>Bibliothčque Diabolique
+
+omniscent benevolence=>omniscient benevolence
+
+childhood dissappeared=>childhood disappeared
+
+ot January and February 1885=>of January and February 1885
+
+committed siucide by drowning himself in the lake=>committed suicide by
+drowning himself in the lake
+
+temps aprés leur arrivée=>temps aprčs leur arrivée
+
+soon as he told ns.=>soon as he told us.
+
+not finding the pad of paper on my kneee=>not finding the pad of paper
+on my knees
+
+Telepathy almost intistinguishable=>Telepathy almost indistinguishable
+
+ou il préparait le samovar=>oů il préparait le samovar
+
+cabinet ou nous ne trouvâmes personne=>cabinet oů nous ne trouvâmes
+personne
+
+séparée ou j'étais tout seul=>séparée oů j'étais tout seul
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] See glossary.
+
+[2] I have ventured to coin the word "supernormal" to be applied to
+phenomena which are _beyond what usually happens_--_beyond_, that is, in
+the sense of suggesting unknown psychical laws. It is thus formed on the
+analogy of _abnormal_. When we speak of an abnormal phenomenon we do not
+mean one which _contravenes_ natural laws, but one which exhibits them
+in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly by a supernormal
+phenomenon I mean, not one which _overrides_ natural laws, for I believe
+no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the action of laws
+higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in everyday
+life. By _higher_ (either in a psychical or physiological sense) I mean
+"apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution."
+
+[3] Other _savants_ of eminence--the great name of Alfred Russel Wallace
+will occur to all--had also satisfied themselves of the reality of these
+strange phenomena; but they had not tested or demonstrated that reality
+with equal care. I am not able in this brief sketch to allude to
+distinguished men of earlier date--Richard Glanvil, John Wesley, Samuel
+Johnson, etc., who discerned the importance of phenomena which they had
+no adequate means of investigating.
+
+[4] The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, Professor W.
+F. Barrett taking a leading part in its promotion. Henry Sidgwick was
+its first President, and Edmund Gurney was its first Honorary
+Secretary--he and I being joint Honorary Secretaries of its Literary
+Committee, whose business was the collection of evidence.
+
+[5] See, for instance, _Proceedings_ of the Society for Psychical
+Research (henceforth in this book referred to as the S.P.R.), vol. iv.
+p. 256, Jan. 1887.
+
+[6] See, however, an article in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 317
+to 325, entitled "Subliminal Self or Unconscious Cerebration," by Mr. A.
+H. Pierce, of Harvard University, with a reply by Mr. F. Podmore.
+
+[7] The difficulty of conceiving any cellular focus, either fixed or
+shifting, has actually led some psychologists to demand a unifying
+principle which is not cellular, and yet is not a soul.
+
+[8] Stanley Hall's "Study of Fears," _American Journal of Psychology_,
+vol. viii., No. 2, January, 1897. See also "The Use of Hypnotism in the
+First Degree," by Dr. Russell Sturgis (Boston, 1894).
+
+[9] For instances of such cures see Drs. Raymond and Janet's _Névroses
+et Idées fixes_.
+
+[10] See vol. vii. p. 309.
+
+[11] See "Studien über Hysterie" (Leipsic, 1895), by Drs. Breuer and
+Freud. An account of two of these cases is given in the original
+edition. Vol. i. pp. 51-6.
+
+[12] On this subject see Du Prel, _Philosophy of Mysticism_, Eng.
+trans., vol. i., passim.
+
+[13] An old case of Dr. Dyce's (see _The Zoist_, vol. iv. p. 158) forms
+a simple example of this type. Dr. Mesnet's case (_De l'Automatisme de
+la Mémoire_, _etc._ Par le Dr. Ernest Mesnet, Paris, 1874, p. 18, seq.)
+should also be referred to here. In these instances the secondary state
+is manifestly a degeneration of the primary state, even when certain
+traces of supernormal faculty are discernible in the narrowed psychical
+field.
+
+[14] See _The Zoist_, vol. iv. pp. 172-79, for a case showing the
+inevitable accomplishment of a post-epileptic crime in such a way as to
+bring out its analogy with the inevitable working out of a post-hypnotic
+suggestion.
+
+[15] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vii. pp. 221-258 [225 A].
+
+[16] See _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, March 1890, p. 267 [226 A].
+
+[17] See the _Annales Médico-Psychologiques_ for January 1892 [226 B].
+
+[18] For full details of this, see Dr. Boris Sidis's work, _The
+Psychology of Suggestion: a Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man
+and Society_ (New York, 1898), and _Multiple Personality_ by Drs. Boris
+Sidis and S. P. Goodhart. London, 1905.
+
+[19] Zoist vol. iv. p. 185 [229 A].
+
+[20] See Professor W. James's _Principles of Psychology_, vol. I. pp.
+381-84 [232 A].
+
+[21] For Dr. Camuset's account see _Annales Médico-Psychologiques_,
+1882, p. 75; for Dr. Voisin's, _Archives de Neurologie_, September 1885.
+The observations at Rochefort have been carefully recorded by Dr.
+Berjon, _La Grande Hystérie chez l'Homme_, Paris, 1886, and by Drs.
+Bourru and Burot in a treatise, _De la suggestion mentale_, &c. (_Bibl.
+scientifique contemporaine_), Paris, 1887 [233 A].
+
+[22] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xv. pp. 466-483 [234 A] and the more
+complete account given in Dr. Morton Prince's _Dissociation of a
+Personality_. New York and London, 1906.
+
+[23] Besides the cases mentioned above see a remarkable recent case
+recorded by Dr. Bramwell in _Brain_, Summer Number, 1900, on the
+authority of Dr. Albert Wilson, of Leytonstone. Dr. Wilson has given a
+detailed account of his patient, Mary Barnes, in _Proceedings_ S.P.R.,
+vol. xviii. pp. 352-416, where a full discussion of the case will also
+be found. Mary Barnes developed sixteen different personalities with
+distinct memories and different characteristics.
+
+[24] _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiv. 396-398 [236 A].
+
+[25] _Proceedings of American_ S.P.R., vol. i. p. 552 [237 A].
+
+[26] For a detailed record of this case see the _Religio-Philosophical
+Journal_ for 1879. An abridgment is given in [238 A]. See also _Journal_
+S.P.R., vol. x. p. 99.
+
+[27] _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, July 1889.
+
+[28] Professor Scripture in the _American Journal of Psychology_, vol.
+iv., No. 1, April 1891; Professor Binet in the _Revue Philosophique_,
+1895. Professor Binet's article deals largely with Jacques Inaudi, the
+most recent prodigy, who appears to differ from the rest in that his
+gift is auditile rather than visual. His gift was first observed in
+childhood. His general intelligence is below the average. Another recent
+prodigy, Diamanti, seems, on the other hand, to be in other ways
+quick-witted.
+
+[29] Scripture, _op. cit._, p. 54.
+
+[30] _Proceedings_ of American S.P.R., vol. i. No. 4, p. 360.
+
+[31] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 337 [§ 311].
+
+[32] On this point see Professor James's _Principles of Psychology_,
+vol. ii. p. 84, note. Goethe's well-known phantasmal flower was clearly
+no mere representation of retinal structure. A near analogy to these
+patterns lies in the so-called "spirit-drawings," or automatic
+arabesques, discussed elsewhere in this chapter.
+
+[33] See Professor Ladd's paper on this subject in _Mind_, April 1892.
+
+[34] "Le Subconscient chez les Artistes, les Savantes, et les
+Ecrivains," par le Dr. Paul Chabaneix, Paris, 1897.
+
+[35] Instances of this form of automatism are described in a book called
+_Spirit Drawings: a Personal Narrative_, by W. M. Wilkinson, some
+account of which is given in Appendix 811 A (Vol. II.) of the unabridged
+edition.
+
+[36] _L'Année Psychologique_, i. 1894, p. 124, F. de Curel, par A. Binet
+[§ 330].
+
+[37] In Wordsworth's _Prelude_ we find introspective passages of extreme
+psychological interest as being deliberate attempts to tell the truth
+about exactly those emotions and intuitions which differentiate the poet
+from common men.
+
+[38] In the passage which follows some use has been made of Jowett's
+translation. It is noticeable that this utterance, unsurpassed among the
+utterances of antiquity, has been placed by Plato in the mouth of a
+woman--the prophetess Diotima--with the express intention, as I think,
+of generalising it, and of raising it above the region of sexual
+passion. There is nothing else in antiquity resembling the position thus
+ascribed to Diotima in reference to Socrates,--the woman being
+represented as capable of raising the highest and of illumining the
+wisest soul.
+
+[39] _Iliad_, xxii. 199; _Ćneid_, xii. 908.
+
+[40] See Dr. Féré in _Brain_ for January 1887.
+
+[41] _De l'Intelligence_, vol. i. p. 119.
+
+[42] _Archives de Médecine_, vol. i. 1876, p. 554.
+
+[43] _An Experimental Study in Hypnotism_, by Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,
+translated by Dr. C. G. Chaddock, p. 91.
+
+[44] _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, June 1891, p. 302.
+
+[45] _Les Ręves_, p. 135. This remarkable patient afforded examples of
+many forms of communication of memory between different states of
+personality. See pp. 192-200 for a conspectus of these complex
+recollections.
+
+[46] _Revue de Médecine_, February 1892. A full account and discussion
+of the same case is contained in Dr. P. Janet's _Névroses et Idées
+fixes_, vol. i. pp. 116 _et seq._ [§413].
+
+[47] See also _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 142 (October 1889), and
+_Proceedings_ of the American S.P.R., vol. i. No. 4, p. 363 [415 A and
+B].
+
+[48] _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 507.
+
+[49] Cćdmon's poem was traditionally said to have come to him in like
+fashion.
+
+[50] The reader will find many similar cases in the _Journal_ and
+_Proceedings_ of the S.P.R. Several are quoted in Appendices to Section
+421 in the unabridged edition.
+
+[51] The case of Mr. Boyle, investigated by Edmund Gurney and printed in
+S.P.R. _Journal_, vol. iii. pp. 265, 266 [§423], is interesting in this
+connection. In this case the vision, which recurred twice, was of a
+simple kind, and might be interpreted as an impression transferred from
+the mind of one waking to the mind of one asleep.
+
+Again, the single dream which a man has noted down in all his life
+stands evidentially in almost as good a position as a single waking
+hallucination. For cases of this kind see _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iii. p.
+267 [§424]; _ibid._ vol. v. p. 61 [424 A]; _ibid._ vol. v. p. 252 [424
+C]; and _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 443 [424 B].
+
+[52] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 105 [428 A].
+
+[53] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 154 [428 D].
+
+The cases of Mrs. Manning (_Journal_ S.P.R., vol. xii. p. 100 [428 B])
+and Mr. Newnham (_Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 225 [428 C]) are
+somewhat similar. See also _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 444 [428 E]
+and _Journal_ S.P.R., vol viii. p. 128 [428 F].
+
+[54] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 365; _ibid._, p. 453 [429 A
+and B].
+
+[55] See, for example, _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 123 [429 F].
+
+[56] Long ago Solon had said, apparently of mesmeric cure--
+
+        [Greek: Ton de kakais nousoisi kykômenon argaleais te
+        aphamenos cheiroin aipha tithęs hygię.]
+
+
+[57] _Recherches Physiologiques sur l'Homme_ (Paris, 1811); _Mémoires
+pour servir ŕ l'Histoire et ŕ l'Establissement du Magnétisme Animal_;
+_Du Magnétisme Animal considéré dans ses Rapports avec diverses branches
+de la Physique Générale_; etc.
+
+[58] See Nasse's _Zeitschrift für Hypnoitsmus_, _passim_.
+
+[59] This later work of Braid's has been generally overlooked, and his
+theories were stated again as new discoveries by recent observers who
+ignored what he had already accomplished. See Dr. Bramwell's paper on
+"James Braid, his Work and Writings," in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xii.
+pp. 127-166. This contains a complete list of Braid's writings, and
+references to his work by other writers. See also the references to
+Braid's work and theories in Dr. Bramwell's _Hypnotism_.
+
+[60] See also the _Zoist_ (Vol. viii. pp. 156, 297-299) for cases of
+mesmerisation of animals. In his _Thérapeutique Suggestive_, 1891 (pp.
+246-68), Dr. Liébeault gives an account of his experiments with infants
+[513 B and C].
+
+[61] See Dr. Bramwell's discussion of the subject. (_Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. xii. p. 213) [513 A].
+
+[62] This view unfortunately dominates Professor M'Kendrick's article on
+"Hypnotism" in the _Encyclopćdia Britannica_.
+
+[63] See Dr. Bramwell's discussion of the inadequacy of this explanation
+in his article "What is Hypnotism?" in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xii.
+p. 224, also in his book on _Hypnotism_ pp. 337-8.
+
+[64] See Dr. Bramwell's _Hypnotism_, p. 274.
+
+[65] I am inclined to think that this is always the case. For a long
+time the lethargic state was supposed at the Salpętričre to preclude all
+knowledge of what was going on; and I have heard Charcot speak before a
+deeply-entranced subject as if there were no danger of her gathering
+hints as to what he expected her to do. I believe that his patients did
+subliminally receive such hints, and work them out in their own hypnotic
+behaviour. On the other hand, I have heard the late Dr. Auguste Voisin,
+one of the most persistent and successful of hypnotisers, make
+suggestion after suggestion to a subject apparently almost
+comatose,--which suggestions, nevertheless, she obeyed as soon as she
+awoke.
+
+[66] According to Dr. Edgar Bérillon, who was the first systematically
+to apply the hypnotic method to the education of children (see his
+paper, "De la Suggestion envisagée au point de vue pédagogique" in the
+_Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, vol. i. (1887), p. 84), the percentage of those
+who can be hypnotised is more than 80, and he asserts that
+suggestibility varies directly as the intellectual development of the
+subject. He classes under four heads the affections which can be
+successfully treated by hypnotic suggestion. (See the _Revue de
+l'Hypnotisme_, July 1895.)
+
+(1) Psychical derangements caused by acute diseases; in particular,
+insomnia, restlessness, nocturnal delirium, incontrollable vomiting,
+incontinence of urine and of fćces.
+
+(2) Functional affections connected with nervous disease: chorea, tics,
+convulsions, anćsthesić, contractures and hysterical paresis, hysterical
+hiccough, blepharospasm.
+
+(3) Psychical derangements, such as habit of biting nails, precocious
+impulsive tendencies, nocturnal terrors, speaking in sleep, kleptomania,
+nervousness, shyness.
+
+(4) Chorea, hysteria, epilepsy, or mental derangements considered as
+resulting from the combination of several nervous diseases.
+
+Scattered about in the _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_ the reader will find
+numerous illustrative cases. Specially characteristic are those recorded
+in the number for July 1893, p. 11, and April 1895, p. 306.
+
+For reports of hypnotic cure of onychophagy, see Bérillon, the articles
+already quoted; Bourdon, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, November 1895, p. 134;
+Bouffé, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, September 1898, p. 76.
+
+For reports of hypnotic cure of even graver habits, see Van Renterghem
+and Van Eeden, _Psycho-Thérapie_, p. 250; Bernheim, _Revue de
+l'Hypnotisme_, December 1891, a case in which the habit had become quite
+automatic and irresistible, and where every other method of treatment
+had failed; also _De la Suggestion_; Schrenck-Notzing, _Die
+Suggestions-Therapie bei krankhaften Erscheinungen des
+Geschlechtssinnes_; Bérillon, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, July 1893, pp.
+12, 14, 15; Bourdon, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, November 1895, pp. 136,
+139, 140; Auguste Voisin, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, November 1887, p.
+151.
+
+For cures of _enuresis nocturna_, see Liébeault, _Revue de
+l'Hypnotisme_, September 1886, p. 71; Bérillon, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_,
+June 1894, p. 359; Van Renterghem and Van Eeden, _Psycho-thérapie_; Paul
+Farez, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, August 1899, p. 53. This author
+recommends the method of suggestion in normal sleep.
+
+Liébeault, in the _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_ for January 1889, gives
+twenty-two cases in which hypnotic suggestion was used in the moral
+education of children from the age of fourteen months upwards, with the
+aim of curing, _e.g._ the habit of lying, excessive developments of
+emotions, such as fear and anger, and precocious or depraved appetites;
+and of improving the normal faculties of attention and memory. He
+reports ten cures, eight improvements, and four failures.
+
+For other cases of moral education, see Bérillon, _De la suggestion et
+de ses applications ŕ la pédagogie_ (1887); _L'Hypnotisme et
+l'Orthopédie morale_ (1898); _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, December 1887, pp.
+169-180, and December 1897, p. 162; Bernheim, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_,
+November 1886, p. 129; Ladame, the same, June and July 1887; Voisin, the
+same, November 1888; De Jong, the same, September 1891; Bourdon, the
+same, August 1896; Van Renterghem and Van Eeden, _Psycho-thérapie_, p.
+215. Nervous troubles in adults have often been cured by the same means.
+Thus, in the _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, September 1899, p. 73, Dr.
+Vlavianos records a case of _tic convulsif_ cured by hypnotic
+suggestion. Wetterstrand has used the same method with success (_loc.
+cit._, p. 76). See also Janet, _Névroses et Idées Fixes_, vol. ii., part
+ii., chapter iii., "Les. Tics."
+
+[67] See Bérillon, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, September 1890, p. 75, and
+February 1896, p. 237; Regis, the same, May 1896; De Jong, the same,
+September 1891, p. 82; and Auguste Voisin, the same, November 1888, p.
+130.
+
+[68] See Otto Wetterstrand, _Der Hypnotismus und seine Anwendung in der
+praktischen Medicin_; Georg Ringier, _Erfolge des therapeutischen
+Hypnotismus in der Landpraxis_; Van Renterghem and Van Eeden,
+_Psycho-thérapie_; Auguste Forel, _Einige therapeutische Versuche mit
+dem Hypnotismus bei Geisteskranken_; Lloyd Tuckey, _Revue de
+l'Hypnotisme_, January 1897, p. 207; Ladame, Revue de l'Hypnotisme,
+November 1887, p. 131, and December 1887, p. 165; A. Voisin, _Revue de
+l'Hypnotisme_, vol. ii. (1888), p. 69, and vol. iii. (1889), p. 353;
+Vlavianos, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, June 1899, p. 361; Neilson, _Revue
+de l'Hypnotisme_, vol. vi. (1892), p. 17. Bérillon, _Le traitement
+psychologique de L'Alcoolisme_. Paris 1906. See also the works of
+Liébeault, Bernheim, and Milne Bramwell.
+
+[69] There are many instances of the cure of morphinomania. See
+especially the case recorded by Dr. Marot in the _Revue de
+l'Hypnotisme_, February 1893, on account of the psychological interest
+of the patient's own remarks.
+
+Wetterstrand, out of fourteen cases, records eleven cures of
+morphinomania. In a paper in the _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, November 1890,
+he discusses the benefit of prolonged hypnosis--causing the patient to
+sleep for a week or more at a time--which he tried in one case. See also
+Voisin, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, December 1886, p. 163.
+
+[70] See Dr. A. Dorez, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, May 1899, p. 345; and
+Dr. Bourdon, the same, November 1893, p. 141 [557 A].
+
+[71] Dr. Hill, _British Medical Journal_, July 4th, 1891.
+
+[72] In some articles in the _Revue Philosophique_, published in 1886
+and 1887, Delboeuf describes some experiments which suggest that in
+many of the remarkable hypnotic cures recorded in the _Zoist_ (as well
+as in modern cases) the removal of pain was probably an important
+element in the cure; see _e.g._ cures of inflammation (_Zoist_, vol. x.
+p. 347); of neuralgia and chronic rheumatism (vol. ix. pp. 76-79); of
+abdominal pains (vol. ix. p. 155); of tic douloureux (vol. viii. p.
+186); of severe headaches (vol. x. p. 369); of eczema impetiginodes
+(vol. x. p. 96).
+
+The general subject of hypnotic analgesia is strikingly illustrated by
+Esdaile's well-known work in the Indian hospitals; see his books,
+_Mesmerism in India_ (London, 1846); _The Introduction of Mesmerism with
+Sanction of Government into the Public Hospitals of India_ (2nd edit.
+London, 1856); _Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance_ (London, 1852); and
+constant references to him in the _Zoist_.
+
+For later cases see _British Medical Journal_, April 5th, 1890, p. 801;
+the same, February 28th, 1891, pp. 460-468.
+
+See also Van Renterghem and Van Eeden's _Psycho-thérapie_, pp. 262-280.
+
+See also the _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xii. p. 21, and the _Revue de
+l'Hypnotisme_, November 1891, p. 132; the same, 1895, p. 300; and for
+the discussion of a very interesting recent case of the cure of _sycosis
+menti_, see Bérillon, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, January 1896, p. 195;
+Delboeuf, _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, February 1896, p. 225; Durand (de
+Gros), _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, 1896, p. 37. It was also quoted in the
+_British Medical Journal_ for November 16th, 1895.
+
+[73] See the _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, August 1887.
+
+[74] See the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 209 [535 A].
+
+[75] See the _Revue Philosophique_, 1886.
+
+[76] See the _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xii. p. 193 [535 B].
+
+[77] For cases bearing on this subject see Dr. Liébeault's
+_Thérapeutique Suggestive_, pp. 64 _et seq._; the _Revue de
+l'Hypnotisme_, January 1893; and _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xii. p. 177
+[538 A and B].
+
+[78] _Thérapeutique Suggestive_, pp. 64 _et seq._
+
+[79] See the _Revue Philosophique_, November 1886. The same case is
+discussed in _Mind_ for January 1887 [539 A].
+
+[80] Nagel suggests that there may have been at a certain stage _mixed
+sense-organs_, by means of which two or three sensations were perceived
+simultaneously.
+
+[81] For a circumstantial English account of the well-known case of
+Louise Lateau, see _Macmillan's Magazine_, vol. xxiii. p. 488 _et seq._
+
+Three cases of the production of cruciform marks reported by Dr. Biggs,
+of Lima, appeared in the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 100.
+
+Another remarkable American case of stigmatisation was reported in the
+_Courier-Journal_, Louisville, Ky., December 7th, 1891, on the authority
+of Dr. M. F. Coomes and several other physicians.
+
+See also the case of Ilma S. recorded in Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing's
+_Experimental Study in Hypnotism_.
+
+Dr. P. Janet describes somewhat similar experiments in _L'Automatisme
+Psychologique_ (see p. 166 _et seq._).
+
+Again, somewhat similar is a case recorded by Dr. J. Rybalkin in the
+_Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, June 1890 (p. 361), in which a post-hypnotic
+suggestion to the subject to burn his arm at a stove--really
+unlighted--produced blisters as of a burn.
+
+Hćmorrhage and bleeding stigmata were several times produced in the
+famous subject, Louis Vivé, by verbal suggestion alone. (Drs. Bourru and
+Burot, _Comptes Rendus de la Société de Biologie_, July 12th, 1885; and
+Dr. Mabille, _Progrčs Médical_, August 29th, 1885.)
+
+Professor Beaunis (_Recherches Expérimentales_, etc., Paris, 1886, p.
+29) produced redness and cutaneous congestion in his subject, Mlle. A.
+E., by suggestion, and the experiment was repeated on the same subject
+by the present writer and Edmund Gurney in September 1885 (see
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 167).
+
+It appears that there is at present at the Salpętričre a _stigmatisée_,
+the development of whose stigmata has been watched by Dr. Janet under
+copper shields with glass windows inserted in them (_Revue de
+l'Hypnotisme_, December 1900, p. 190).
+
+Other cases are recorded in the _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, June 1890, p.
+353; the same February 1892, p. 251 [543 A to H].
+
+[82] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. pp. 268-323 [551 A].
+
+[83] Professor Fontan's experiments described in the _Revue
+Philosophique_, August 1887, cannot lightly be set aside. An account of
+his experiments is given in _Proceedings_ S. P. R. vol. ii. p. 263-268.
+[549 D]. See also the works of Pététin, Durand, Foissac, and Despine,
+especially _Observations de Médecine Pratique_, pp. 45, 62, and _Étude
+Scientifique sur Somnambulisme_, p. 167.
+
+[84] See _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 100 [543 B].
+
+[85] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xii. pp. 176-203 [551 C].
+
+[86] _Revue Philosophique_, September 1888 [552 A].
+
+[87] _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, vol. vi. p. 357 [553 A].
+
+[88] For illustrative instances see _Brain_, Summer Number 1900, p. 207,
+_Revue de l' Hypnotisme_, January 1889, and Bérillon, _De la suggestion
+et de ses applications ŕ la pédagogie_ (1887) [553 B]. See also
+Bérillon, _La Psychologie du Courage et l'Éducation du Caractčre_. Paris
+1905.
+
+[89] _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xii. pp. 204-58 [555 B]. See also his
+book on _Hypnotism_, pp. 425-32.
+
+[90] See also the _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, January 1889, September 1890,
+November 1886, November 1888, for cases reported by Liébeault, Bérillon,
+Bernheim, and Voisin.
+
+[91] See Mr. Fryer's paper on "The Welsh Revival of 1904-5," in
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xix. p. 80.
+
+[92] See Puységur, _Recherches sur l'Homme dans le Somnambulisme_
+(Paris, 1811); Pététin, _Electricité Animale_ (Paris, 1808); Despine,
+_Observations de Médecine Pratique_ (1838), and _Journal_ S.P.R., vol.
+ix. p. 333.
+
+[93] _Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance_, pp. 227-28; quoted in
+_Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 88.
+
+[94] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. (1888), pp. 14-17. [569 A.]
+
+[95] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 536-596. [569 B.]
+
+[96] Beginning with cases partly retrocognitive, the leader is referred
+to _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vii. pp. 30-99; _Zoist_, vol. vii. pp.
+95-101 [572 A and B].
+
+[97] The longest and most important series of experiments in
+thought-transference with hypnotised subjects, carried out by members of
+the S.P.R., are those of Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick. _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 128-70; and vol. viii. pp. 536-96 [573 A].
+
+[98] _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vii. pp. 199-220; Dr. Fahnestock's
+_Statuvolism_, pp. 117-35, 221-32 [573 B, C and D].
+
+[99] _Zoist_, vol. xii. pp. 249-52 [573 F].
+
+[100] See "Mind-Cure, Faith-Cure, and the Miracles of Lourdes," by A. T.
+Myers, M.D., F.R.C.P., and F. W. H. Myers, _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol.
+ix. pp. 160-210.
+
+[101] For a true synćsthetic or "sound-seer,"--to take the commonest
+form of these central repercussions of sensory shock,--there is a
+connection between sight and sound which is instinctive, complex, and
+yet for our intelligence altogether arbitrary.
+
+But sound-seeing is only a conspicuous example of synćsthesić which
+exist in as yet unexplored variety. When we find that there are
+gradated, peremptory, inexplicable associations connecting sensations of
+light and colour with sensations of temperature, smell, taste, muscular
+resistance, etc., we are led to conclude that we are dealing, not with
+the casual associations of childish experience, but with some reflection
+or irradiation of specialised sensations which must depend upon the
+connate structure of the brain itself.
+
+This view is consistent with the results of an _Enquęte sur l'audition
+colorée_ recently conducted by Professor Flournoy, from which it appears
+that of 213 persons presenting these associations only 48 could assign
+the date of their origin; and is supported by a case described in the
+_Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, December 1892, p. 185, where a man who had long
+exhibited a limited form of _audition colorée_ developed _gustation
+colorée_ in addition when in a low state of health.
+
+See also the "Report of the International Congress of Experimental
+Psychology, Second Session, London, 1892," pp. 10-20 (Williams &
+Norgate, London, 1892), and the _American Journal of Psychology_ for
+April 1900 (vol. xi. pp. 377-404).
+
+[102] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 480 [610 A].
+
+[103] The "Census of Hallucinations" was undertaken in 1889, by a
+Committee of the S.P.R., under the direction of Professor Sidgwick, and
+consisting of himself and Mrs. Sidgwick, Dr. A. T. Myers, Mr. F.
+Podmore, Miss A. Johnson, and the present writer. The full report of the
+committee was published in 1894. (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. pp.
+25-422.) A summary of the report is given in the original edition. [612
+A.]
+
+[104] For prehistoric and historic crystal-gazing see Mr. Andrew Lang's
+_Making of Religion_, and Miss Goodrich-Freer's "Recent Experiments in
+Crystal-Vision," _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 486 [620 A].
+
+[105] It is right also to state, although I cannot here discuss the
+problems involved, that I believe these visions to be sometimes seen by
+more than one person, simultaneously or successively.
+
+[106] See also _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. i. pp. 263-283; vol. ii. pp.
+1-5, 24-42, 189-200; vol. iii. pp. 424-452, where a full record will be
+found of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie's experiments [630 B]. Also _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 2-17 [630 C], for Mr. Henry G. Rawson's
+experiments. Others are recorded in the _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. i.
+pp. 161-167 and 174-215. See also those of Herr Max Dessoir
+(_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 111, and vol. v. p. 355); Herr Anton
+Schmoll and M. Etienne Mabire (_ibid._ vol. iv. p. 324 and vol. v. p.
+169); Mr. J. W. Smith (_ibid._ vol. ii. p. 207); Sir Oliver Lodge
+(_ibid._ vol. vii. p. 374); Dr. A. Blair Thaw (_ibid._ vol. viii. p.
+422); Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing (_ibid._ vol. vii. p. 3); Professor
+Richet (_ibid._ vol. v. p. 18). See also _Phantasms of the Living_, vol.
+i. pp. 32-34, and vol. ii. pp. 653-654. Also the experiments of
+Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick (_Proceedings_, vol. vi. and vol. viii.)
+already referred to in Chapter V.
+
+[107] See Mr. F. Podmore's _Apparitions and Thought-transference_,
+Chapter V. [630 D, etc.]; also _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 455
+[630 F]; and _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. vii. pp. 325-329 [630 E]: _ibid._
+pp. 234-237, pp. 299-306 and pp. 311-319; and vol. xii. p. 223 (March
+1906).
+
+[108] It is plain that on this view there is no theoretical reason for
+limiting telepathy to human beings. For aught we can say, the impulse
+may pass between man and the lower animals, or between the lower animals
+themselves. See _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 278-290 and pp. 323-4;
+the same, vol. xii. pp. 21-3; the same, vol. iv. p. 289; and
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xiv. p. 285.
+
+[109] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. pp. 25-422.
+
+[110] See also _Phantasms of the Living_ vol. ii. p. 96 [§ 653], and for
+an auditory case, _ibid._ p. 100 [§ 655].
+
+[111] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 78 [§ 645]. See also _op.
+cit._, p. 82 _et seq._
+
+[112] _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. p. 306 [§ 646]. See also the case in
+_Phantasms of the Living_ (vol. ii. p. 217) [§ 647], where an apparition
+was seen _by its original_ and by others _at the same time_.
+
+[113] See _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 144 [651 A] and _ibid._
+p. 61 [§ 651].
+
+[114] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 97 [654 A].
+
+[115] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 194 [654 B].
+
+[116] See Chapter IX., _passim_.
+
+[117] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vii. pp. 30-99 [572 A and 573 B];
+_op. cit._, 199-220 [573 C]; _Zoist_, vol. vii. pp. 95-101, vol. ix. p.
+234, vol. xii. pp. 249-52; and Dr. Fahnestock's _Statuvolism_,
+especially pp. 127-35 and 221-32.
+
+[118] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 31 [662 B].
+
+[119] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 37 [662 D].
+
+[120] See _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 25 [665 A].
+
+[121] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 35 [662 C].
+
+[122] See _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 265 [§ 664].
+
+[123] For examples of various types see _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. vii. p.
+25; vol. v. p. 68, and _op. cit._, p. 147 [665 A, B and C].
+
+[124] See _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 162; _op. cit._, p.
+164; _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 41 [666 A, B and C].
+
+[125] See _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 527, for example [667
+A].
+
+[126] For cases see the second edition of _Phantasms of the Living_,
+vol. i. p. lxxxi; _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. pp. 270, 273, and 418;
+_Forum_, March 1900; _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 217; vol. vii. p. 99
+[668 A to G]. See also _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 103 and
+vol. ii. p. 675; and the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 307.
+
+[127] Some such power as this is frequently claimed in oriental books as
+attainable by mystic practices. We have not thus far been fortunate
+enough to discover any performances corresponding to these promises.
+
+[128] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vii. pp. 199-220 [573 C].
+
+[129] See _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 231.
+
+[130] Some word is much needed to express communications between one
+state and another, _e.g._ between the somnambulic and the waking state,
+or, in hypnotism, the cataleptic and the somnambulic, etc. The word
+"methectic" ([Greek: methektikhos]) seems to me the most
+suitable, especially since [Greek: methexis] happens to be the
+word used by Plato (Parm. 132 D.) for participation between ideas and
+concrete objects. Or the word "inter-state" might be pressed into this
+new duty.
+
+[131] See for example Mr. Cameron Grant's case. (_Proceedings_ S.P.R.,
+vol. viii. p. 202.)
+
+[132] _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 404-408.
+
+[133] In some experimental cases, it will be remembered, the impression
+takes effect through the _motor_, not the _sensory_, system of the
+recipient, as by automatic writing, so that he is never directly aware
+of it at all.
+
+[134] See, for instance, case 500, _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii.
+p. 462.
+
+[135] I mean by "ordinary" the classes which are recognised and treated
+of in _Phantasms of the Living_. But if the departed survive, the
+possibility of thought-transference between them and those who remain is
+of course a perfectly tenable hypothesis. "As our telepathic theory is a
+psychical one, and makes no physical assumptions, it would be perfectly
+applicable (though the _name_ perhaps would be inappropriate) to the
+conditions of disembodied existence."--_Phantasms_, vol. i. p. 512.
+
+[136] Certain statistics as to these time-relations are given by Edmund
+Gurney as follows (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 408): "The
+statistics drawn from the first-hand records in _Phantasms of the
+Living_ as to the time-relation of appearances, etc., occurring in close
+proximity to deaths, are as follows:--In 134 cases the coincidence is
+represented as having been exact, or, when times are specifically
+stated, close to within an hour. In 104 cases it is not known whether
+the percipient's experience preceded or followed the death; such cases
+cannot be taken account of for our present purpose. There remain 78
+cases where it appears that there was an interval of more than an hour;
+and of these 38 preceded and 40 followed the death. Of the 38 cases
+where the percipient's experience preceded the death (all of which, of
+course, took place during a time when the "agent" was seriously ill), 19
+fell within twenty-four hours of the death. Of the 40 cases where the
+percipient's experience followed the death, all followed within an
+interval of twenty-four hours, and in only one (included by mistake) was
+the twelve hours' interval certainly exceeded, though there are one or
+two others where it is possible that it was slightly exceeded."
+
+[137] The _Proceedings_ of the American Society for Psychical Research
+(vol. i. p. 405) contain a case where a physician and his wife, sleeping
+in separate but adjoining rooms, are both of them awakened by a bright
+light. The physician sees a figure standing in the light; his wife, who
+gets up to see what the light in her husband's room may be, does not
+reach that room till the figure has disappeared. The figure is not
+clearly identified, but has some resemblance to a patient of the
+physician's, who has died suddenly (from hemorrhage) about three hours
+before, calling for her doctor, who did not anticipate this sudden end.
+Even this resemblance did not strike the percipient until after he knew
+of the death, and the defect in _recognition_ weakens the case
+evidentially.
+
+[138] The references in this and the two following pages are to
+_Phantasms of the Living_.
+
+[139] See the cases of Major Moncrieff (i. p. 415); of Mr. Keulemans (i.
+p. 444), where the second phantasm was held by the percipient to convey
+a fresh veridical picture; of Mr. Hernaman (i. p. 561), where, however,
+the agent was alive, though dying, at the time of the appearance; see
+also the cases of Mrs. Ellis (ii. p. 59); of Mrs. D. (ii. p. 467); of
+Mrs. Fairman (ii. p. 482), and of Mr. F. J. Jones (ii. p. 500), where
+the death was again due to drowning, and the act of dying cannot,
+therefore, have been very prolonged. We may note also Mrs. Reed's case
+(ii. p. 237), Captain Ayre's (ii. p. 256) and Mrs. Cox's (ii. p. 235).
+In the case of Miss Harriss (ii. p. 117) a hallucinatory _voice_, about
+the time of the death, but not suggesting the decedent, is followed by a
+dream the next night, which presents the dead person as in the act of
+dying. One or two other cases might be added to this list, and it is
+plain that the matter is one towards which observation should be
+specially directed.
+
+[140] See _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 305; _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 180; _ibid._ p. 194.
+
+[141] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii p. 236 [716 B].
+
+[142] See for instance _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 20; the same,
+vol. xi p. 429 and _Phantasms of the Living_, vol ii. p. 208 [717 A, B
+and C].
+
+[143] _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. p. 214 [719 A].
+
+[144] _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 449 [719 B].
+
+[145] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 422-26 [§ 720].
+
+[146] The cases recorded in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 216,
+and _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. p. 263 [727 A and B] may be regarded
+as deflected fulfilments.
+
+[147] _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x. p. 383. See also _ibid._ p. 371 and
+vol. viii. p. 214 [728 A and B and § 726].
+
+[148] For the other case see _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 265.
+
+[149] For cases illustrating this, see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p.
+409 [§ 734]; also _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 220; _ibid._ p.
+218; _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 690; and _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. x. p. 373 [§ 736 and 736 A, B and C].
+
+[150] See for instance _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 173.
+
+[151] This analogy suggests itself still more forcibly in the remarkable
+case recorded in _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. xii. p. 17. Here the visions,
+seen in a mirror, were perceived simultaneously, though not quite in the
+same way, by four witnesses, and lasted for an appreciable length of
+time.
+
+[152] See the _Proceedings_ of the American Society for Psychical
+Research, vol. i. p. 446 [741 A].
+
+[153] In the case recorded in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 173 [§
+742], the decedent would appear to be satisfying both a local and a
+personal attraction. See also the cases given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R.,
+vol. iii. p. 93, and vol. v. p. 437 [742 A], which are somewhat similar.
+
+[154] See, however, Sir Arthur Beecher's case (_Proceedings_ S.P.R.,
+vol. iii. p. 110) where there was at least a rumour of some crime. In
+Mrs. M.'s case, too (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 178) and Mrs.
+Pennée's (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 60) there is some indication
+of past troubles in which the percipients, of course, were in no way
+concerned. But in no other cases has there been anything, as far as we
+know, which could trouble the departed spirit with importunate memories
+of his earthly home.
+
+[155] For a discussion of this problem, illustrated by a large number of
+cases, see my article on "Retrocognition and Precognition" in the
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 334-593.
+
+[156] See, however, Mrs. Sidgwick's remarks (_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol.
+iii. pp. 79-80), as to the rarity of any indication of intelligence in
+such sounds, and the possibility of reading more intelligence into them
+than they really possess. There is now, of course, more evidence as to
+these sounds than there was at the date of Mrs. Sidgwick's paper (1885).
+
+[157] Thus Mrs. Sidgwick, even as far back as 1885 (_Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 142), writes: "I can only say that having made
+every effort--as my paper will, I hope, have shown--to exercise a
+reasonable scepticism, I yet do not feel equal to the degree of unbelief
+in human testimony necessary to avoid accepting, at least provisionally,
+the conclusion that there are, in a certain sense, haunted houses, i.e.,
+that there are houses in which similar quasi-human apparitions have
+occurred at different times to different inhabitants, under
+circumstances which exclude the hypothesis of suggestion or
+expectation."
+
+[158] This case is given in Appendix VII. G.
+
+[159] In an earlier part of this paper, I mentioned cases of haunted
+houses where the apparitions are various, and might therefore all of
+them be merely subjective hallucinations, sometimes, perhaps, caused by
+expectancy. It is, of course, also possible to explain these cases by
+the hypothesis we are now discussing. Another class of cases is,
+perhaps, worth mentioning in this connection. We have in the collection
+two cases of what was believed by the narrators to be a quite peculiar
+feeling of discomfort, in houses where concealed and long since
+decomposed bodies were subsequently found. Such feelings are seldom
+dearly defined enough to have much evidential value, for others, at any
+rate, than the percipient; even though mentioned beforehand, and
+definitely connected with the place where the skeleton was. But if there
+be really any connection between the skeleton and the feeling, it may
+possibly be a subtle physical influence such as I am suggesting.--E. M.
+S.
+
+[160] To avoid misconception, I may point out that this view in no way
+negatives the possibility that telepathy (or its correlative telergy)
+may be in some of its aspects commoner, or more powerful, among savages
+than among ourselves. Evolutionary processes are not necessarily
+_continuous_. The acquirement by our lowly-organised ancestors of the
+sense of _smell_ (for instance) was a step in evolution. But the sense
+of smell probably reached its highest energy in races earlier than man;
+and it has perceptibly declined even in the short space which separates
+civilised man from existing savages. Yet if, with some change in our
+environment, the sense of smell again became useful, and we reacquired
+it, this would be none the less an evolutionary process because the
+evolution had been interrupted.
+
+[161] I do not wish to assert that _all_ unfamiliar psychical states are
+necessarily evolutive or dissolutive in any assignable manner. I should
+prefer to suppose that there are states which may better be styled
+_allotropic_;--modifications of the arrangements of nervous elements on
+which our conscious identity depends, but with no more conspicuous
+_superiority_ of the one state over the other than (for instance)
+charcoal possesses over graphite or graphite over charcoal. But there
+may also be states in which the (metaphorical) carbon becomes
+_diamond_;--with so much at least of _advance_ on previous states as is
+involved in the substitution of the crystalline for the amorphous
+structure.
+
+[162] See, for instance, _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. i. p. 291.
+
+[163] _Sensation et Mouvement_, par Ch. Féré. Paris: Alcan, 1887.
+
+[164] _La Suggestion Mentale_ (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. pp.
+239 _sqq._).
+
+[165] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. pp. 226-31 [830 A].
+
+[166] See Mr. Wilkinson's book _Spirit Drawings: a Personal Narrative_.
+But, of course, like other automatic impulses, this impulse to
+decorative or symbolical drawing is sometimes seen at its maximum in
+insane patients. Some drawings of an insane patient, reproduced in the
+_American Journal of Psychology_, June 1888, show a noticeable analogy
+(in my view a _predictable_ analogy) with some of the "spirit-drawings"
+above discussed. See also the Martian landscapes of Hélčne Smith, in
+Professor Flournoy's _Des Indes ŕ la plančte Mars_.
+
+[167] An account of recorded instances of Socratic monitions and some
+discussion of them is given in the original edition [§ 813, 814].
+
+[168] _Du Démon de Socrate_, etc., by L. F. Lélut, Membre de l'Institut.
+Nouvelle édition, 1856.
+
+[169] For other authorities see Mr. Andrew Lang's paper in _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 198-212.
+
+[170] On this point, see Mr. Lang's paper referred to above.
+
+[171] See Plutarch's _De genio Socratis_.
+
+[172] See _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i., Chapter VII, _passim_.
+
+[173] See _Proceedings_ of the American S.P.R., vol. i. p. 397;
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. pp. 33 and 35 [817 A, B, and C].
+
+[174] The case is recorded in _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 136 [817 D].
+
+[175] For a somewhat similar case, possibly due to hyperćsthesia of
+hearing, see _American Journal of Psychology_, vol. iii. p. 435
+(September 1890).
+
+[176] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 419 and 421 [821 A].
+
+[177] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 422 and 423 [§§ 822 and
+823]; also a case given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 345,
+where a lady hurrying up to the door of a lift, is stopped by seeing a
+figure of a man standing in front of it, and then finds that the door is
+open, leaving the well exposed, so that she would probably have fallen
+down it, if she had not been checked by the apparition.
+
+[178] _Revue de l'Hypnotisme_, March 1893, p. 268.
+
+[179] When the automatic drawings have any telepathic or other
+supernormal content, they are usually associated with automatic writing.
+Compare the case of Mr. Cameron Grant (_Phantasms of the Living_, vol.
+ii. p. 690).
+
+[180] See James's _Psychology_, vol. i. p. 394: "One curious thing about
+trance utterances is their generic similarity in different
+individuals.... It seems exactly as if one author composed more than
+half of the trance messages, no matter by whom they are uttered. Whether
+all sub-conscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum
+of the _Zeitgeist_, and get their inspiration from it, I know not." See
+the account of automatic and impressional script, by Mr. Sidney Dean,
+which Professor James goes on to quote, and which is closely parallel to
+(for instance) Miss A.'s case, to be referred to below, although the one
+series of messages comes from the hand of a late member of Congress,
+"all his life a robust and active journalist, author, and man of
+affairs," and the other from a young lady with so different a history
+and _entourage_.
+
+[181] Some other cases of Mr. Smith's will be found in this volume. See
+also _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 25 [§ 831] for a case of Prof.
+Sidgwick's, and _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. pp. 226-231 for the
+complex "Clelia" case. Other cases of imaginary personalities are to be
+found in the accounts of possession which have come down to us from the
+"Ages of Faith." See for example the autobiography of Soeur Jeanne des
+Anges (_Bibliothčque Diabolique_ [collection Bourneville] Paris, 1886).
+
+[182] For the description of a curious case combining various motor
+automatisms in a very unusual way, see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. p.
+182 [§ 833].
+
+[183] For Mlle. Smith's later history, see Professor Flournoy's
+_Nouvelles Observations sur un cas de Somnambulisme_, Geneva, 1902.
+
+[184] We have already printed several incidents of this type in our
+_Proceedings_ and _Journal_. (See, for instance, _Proceedings_ S.P.R.,
+vol. viii. p. 344 [818 A].)
+
+[185] A somewhat similar but less complex set of experiments by Mr. G.
+M. Smith is given in the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. v. pp. 318-320 [843 B].
+
+[186] For further cases see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iii. pp. 2 and 5
+[§§ 845 and 847].
+
+[187] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iii. pp. 8-23 [849 A]. For a series
+of experiments on a smaller scale but analogous to these see
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. (1893), pp. 61-64.
+
+[188] Mr. Newnham procured for me two autograph letters from
+eye-witnesses of some of the experiments, who do not, however, wish
+their names to be published. One writer says: "You wrote the question on
+a slip of paper and put it under one of the ornaments of the
+chimney-piece--no one seeing what you had written. Mrs. Newnham sat
+apart at a small table. I recollect you kept a book of the questions
+asked and answers given, as you thought some new power might be
+discovered, and you read me from it some of the results. I remember
+particularly questions and answers relating to the selection of a curate
+for B. My wife and her sister saw experiments conducted in this manner.
+Mrs. Newnham and you were sitting at different tables." Another
+eye-witness writes: "I and my sister were staying at----, and were
+present at many of the Planchette experiments of Mr. and Mrs. Newnham.
+Mr. and Mrs. Newnham sat at different tables some distance apart, and in
+such a position that it was quite impossible Mrs. Newnham could see what
+question was written down. The subject of the questions was never
+mentioned even in a whisper. Mr. Newnham wrote them down in pencil and
+sometimes passed them to me and my sister to see, but not often. Mrs.
+Newnham immediately answered the questions. Though not always correct,
+they (the answers) always referred to the questions. Mr. Newnham copied
+out the pencil questions and answers verbatim each day into a diary."
+
+[189] For further cases see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. p. 44 [851
+A]; _ibid._ p. 48 [§ 852]; _ibid._ p. 64 [§ 853]; _ibid._ p. 65 [§ 854].
+Also _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ii. p. 236; vol. vi. pp. 112-115 [§ 855
+and 856]; vol. xi. pp. 477-481 [852 B]; vol. ix. pp. 67-70 [857 A and
+858 A].
+
+[190] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. (1893) pp. 73-92 [839 A and 625
+C].
+
+[191] For another series of messages which afford an interesting field
+for the discussion of the rival hypotheses of "cryptomnesia" and
+spirit-control, see _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 319; _op. cit._ p.
+174; and _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. ix. p. 92 [§§ 860, 861 and 862 A].
+
+[192] For further examples see the cases given in _Proceedings_ S.P.R.,
+vol. vi. pp. 355-57; vol. viii. pp. 242-48; _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iii.
+pp. 216-19; vol. ix. pp. 65-8; vol. ix. pp. 280-84 [868 A and B, 869 A
+and B, § 873].
+
+[193] See the "Report of Dr. Ira Barrows on the case of Miss Anna
+Winsor." An account of Professor James' inquiry into the case will be
+found in _Proceedings_ of the American S.P.R., vol. i. p. 552 [237 A].
+
+[194] The cases of Swedenborg, Cahagnet's subject, D. D. Home, and
+Stainton Moses will be discussed in the course of this chapter.
+
+[195] _Bibliothčque Diabolique_ (Collection Bourneville). Paris: Aux
+Bureaux du Progrčs Medical, 1886 [832 B].
+
+[196] See Professor Janet's paper in the _Revue Philosophique_, March,
+1888. The case is also constantly referred to in his _L'Automatisme
+Psychologique_.
+
+[197] See page 49.
+
+[198] See page 288.
+
+[199] One important point of similarity is the concurrence in some
+savage ceremonies of utterance through an invading spirit and travelling
+clairvoyance exercised meantime by the man whose organism is thus
+invaded. The uncouth spirit shouts and bellows, presumably with the
+lungs of the medicine-man, hidden from view in profound slumber. Then
+the medicine-man awakes,--and tells the listening tribe the news which
+his sleep-wanderings, among gods or men, have won.
+
+If this indeed be thus, it fits in strangely with the experience of our
+modern seers,--with the spiritual interchange which takes place when a
+discarnate intelligence occupies the organism and meantime the incarnate
+intelligence, temporarily freed, awakes to wider percipience,--in this
+or in another world.
+
+[200] See _Modern Spiritualism; a History and a Criticism_, by Frank
+Podmore (Methuen and Co., London, 1902).
+
+[201] In this edition the Synopsis alone is given. See Appendix IX. A.
+
+[202] The asterisks indicate the end of the part of this chapter which
+was consecutively composed by the author. The rest of the chapter
+consists chiefly of fragments written by him at different times.
+
+[203] This as well as the next two cases mentioned are given in Appendix
+IX. B.
+
+[204] See _X + Y = Z; or, The Sleeping Preacher of North Alabama.
+Containing an account of most wonderful mysterious mental phenomena,
+fully authenticated by living witnesses._ By the Rev. G. W. Mitchell.
+(New York: W. C. Smith, 67 John Street, 1876) [934 A].
+
+[205] For Kant's evidence in regard to the supernormal powers of
+Swedenborg, see "Dreams of a Spirit Seer," by Immanuel Kant, translated
+by E. F. Goerwitz; edited by Frank Sewall (London: Swan Sonnenschein &
+Co.; New York: The Macmillan Co., 1900) [936 A].
+
+[206] See also an account of the "Seeress of Prevorst," translated from
+the German by Mrs. Crowe, and published in London in 1845 [936 B].
+
+[207] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 560 [936 C].
+
+[208] The chief sources of information as to D. D. Home's life and
+experiences are the following works:--
+
+_Incidents in my Life_, by D. D. Home (1st edition, London, 1863; 2nd
+edition, 1864; second series, 1872).
+
+_D. D. Home: His Life and Mission_, by Madame Dunglas Home (London,
+1888).
+
+_The Gift of D. D. Home_, by Madame Dunglas Home (London, 1890).
+
+_Report on Spiritualism of the Committee of the London Dialectical
+Society_ (London, 1871). This contains the evidence of the Master of
+Lindsay,--now Earl of Crawford and Balcarres,--and others.
+
+_Experiences in Spiritualism with Mr. D. D. Home_, by Viscount Adare
+(now Lord Dunraven; privately printed).
+
+_Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism_, by William Crookes,
+F.R.S. Reprinted from the _Quarterly Journal of Science_ (London, 1874).
+
+_Notes of Séances with D. D. Home_, by William Crookes, F.R.S.
+(_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 98.)
+
+See also a review by Professor Barrett and the present writer of Madame
+Home's first book, _D. D. Home: His Life and Mission_, in the _Journal_
+S.P.R., vol. iv. pp. 101-136; a briefer review of her second book, _The
+Gift of D. D. Home_, in the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 249; and a
+note on "The Character of D. D. Home" in the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. vi.
+p. 176; also an article by Mr. Hamilton Aidé, "Was I hypnotised?" in the
+_Nineteenth Century_ for April 1890.
+
+[209] See _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 436-659; vol. viii. pp.
+1-167; vol. xiii. pp. 284-582; vol. xiv. pp. 6-78; vol. xv. pp. 16-52;
+vol. xvi. pp. 1-649.
+
+[210] For a discussion of Professor Hyslop's report see _Proceedings_
+S.P.R., vol. xvii. pp. 331-388.
+
+[211] The original unabridged edition was published in two volumes.
+
+[212] The Synthetic Society, before which these pages were first read as
+a paper in March 1899.
+
+[213] _Enn._ vi. 4, 14.
+
+[214] _Enn._ iv. 3, 27.
+
+[215] _Enn._ v. 2-3. The World-Soul is _supra grammaticam_; and Plotinus
+sometimes uses a personal, sometimes an impersonal, locution to express
+what is infinitely beyond the conception of personality, as it is
+infinitely beyond any human conception whatsoever.
+
+[216] For the fullest account of Félida, see _Hypnotisme_, _Double
+Conscience_, etc., par le Dr. Azam. Paris, 1887.
+
+[217] _Revue Scientifique_, 3e série, xxxii. p. 167.
+
+[218] An apparent discrepancy between Professor Hilprecht's account and
+that of Mrs. Hilprecht calls for explanation. Professor Hilprecht states
+that he verified his dream on Sunday morning at the University; Mrs.
+Hilprecht that he verified it immediately upon awaking, in his library.
+Both statements are correct. He had a working copy in his library which
+he examined at once, but hurried to the University next morning to
+verify it by comparison with the authorised copy made from the
+originals.--W. R. N.
+
+[219] This appendix has been greatly abridged.
+
+[220] See _Annales Médico-Psychologiques_, 1882, p. 75, and Dr. Berjon,
+_La grande Hystéric chez l'Homme_, Paris, 1886.
+
+[221] _Annales Médico-Psychologiques_, 1884, vol. ii. p. 289 _seqq._
+
+[222] Dr. E. Dufour, médecin en chef de l'asile Saint-Robert (Isčre).
+See _Annales Médico-Psychologiques_, September 1886, p. 238, and
+_Contribution ŕ l'étude de l'hypnotisme_, par le Dr. Dufour, Grenoble,
+1887.
+
+[223] It was not unusual for her to sit in the _salon_ in the evening,
+after the day's occupations were over.
+
+[224] I noted on this narrative at the time I received it: "This account
+is entirely concordant with the account written by Mrs. Ramsay before
+reading Mrs. Elgee's account in 1888, and abstracted by me for an
+article in _Murray's Magazine_. There was this discrepancy between Mrs.
+Elgee and Mrs. Ramsay,--that Mrs. Ramsay thought that the figure wore a
+beard, whereas Mrs. Elgee saw him as she knew him--with whiskers only.
+He certainly had no beard at the time."
+
+[225] A plan enclosed shows a suite of four rooms, M. Potolof's study,
+the ante-room, the drawing-room, and M. Mamtchitch's study, all opening
+into one another, the three doors between them being in one straight
+line.
+
+[226] See "Phantasms of the Dead from another point of view,"
+_Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 291.
+
+[227] We have ascertained that this date was a Sunday.
+
+[228] Some of the correspondence about the case given in the
+_Proceedings_ is omitted here for want of space.
+
+[229] A dream in which a message of somewhat the same kind is given is
+recorded in the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 188. See also the old
+case of Dr. Binns, given in his _Anatomy of Sleep_, p. 462.
+
+[230] An account of this case appeared in an article by Herman Snow in
+the _Religio-Philosophical Journal_ for January 31st, 1891, and Mr. Snow
+also sent us an earlier article on the subject which he had written in
+1881, and of which his second account was a mere repetition. The facts
+were related to him by the Unitarian minister of the place where Mrs.
+Finney lived; and this third-hand account recorded by Mr. Snow fifteen
+years after the event closely coincides with Mrs. Finney's first-hand
+one, recorded twenty-five years after the event.
+
+[231] In this edition the synopsis of the scheme alone is given.
+
+[232] This appendix was written originally with a special view to the
+phenomena alleged to occur in the case of Mr. W. Stainton Moses.
+
+[233] Mr. Goodall thinks that the mule's sudden fall, otherwise
+unexplainable, may have been due to terror at some apparition of the
+dying child.
+
+
+
+ou il préparait le samovar
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Human Personality and its Survival of
+Bodily Death, by Frederick W. H. Myers
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