“‘What is it,’ said Mr. A., ‘that now moves my pen?’ _Religion._
‘What is religion?’ _Worship._ Here arose a difficulty. Although
I did not expect either of these answers, yet, when the first few
letters had been written, I expected the remainder of the word. This
might vitiate the result. But now, as if the intelligent wished to
prove by the manner of answering, that the answer could be due to
_it_ alone, and in no part to mere expediency, my next question
received a singular reply. ‘Worship of what?’ _Wbwbwbwb._ ‘What is the
meaning of wb?’ _Win, buy._ ‘What?’ _Knowledge._ On the second day
the first question was—‘What is man?’ _Flise._ My pen was at first
very violently agitated, which had not been the case on the first
day. It was quite a minute before it wrote as above. On the analogy
of _wb_ I proceeded: ‘What does F stand for?’ _Fesi._ ‘L?’ ‘;_Le._’
‘I?’ ‘;_Ivy._’ ‘S?’ _Sir._ ‘E?’ _Eye._ ‘Is _Fesi le ivy, sir, eye_, an
anagram?’ _Yes._ ‘How many words in the answer?’ _Four._”
Mr. A. was unable to shift these letters into an intelligible sentence,
and began again on the third day with the same question:
“‘What is man?’ _Tefi, Hasl, Esble, Lies._ ‘Is this an anagram?’
_Yes._ ‘How many words in the answer?’ _Five._ ‘Must I interpret it
myself?’ _Try._ Presently I got out, _Life is the less able_. Next I
tried the previous anagram, and at last obtained _Every life is yes_.”
Other anagrams also were given, as _wfvs yoitet_ (Testify! vow!); _ieb;
iov ogf wle_ (I go, vow belief!); and in reply to the question, “How
shall I believe?” _neb 16 vbliy ev 86 e earf ee_ (Believe by fear even!
1866). How unlikely it is that all this was due to mere accident may
be seen by any one who will take letters (the vowels and consonants
roughly proportioned to the frequency of their actual use), and try to
make up a series of handfuls _completely_ into words possessing any
grammatical coherence or intelligible meaning. Now in Mr. A.’s case all
the _professed_ anagrams were _real_ anagrams (with one error of _i_
for _e_); some of the sentences were real answers to the questions; and
not even the absurdest sentences were wholly meaningless. In the two
first given, for instance, Mr. A. was inclined to trace a reference
to books lately read; the second sentence alluding to such doctrines
as that “Death solves mysteries which life cannot unlock;” the first
to Spinoza’s tenet that all existence is affirmation of the Deity. We
seem therefore to see the secondary self struggling to express abstract
thought with much the same kind of incoherence with which we have
elsewhere seen it struggle to express some concrete symbol. To revert
to our former parallel, we may say that “Every life is yes” bears
something the same relation to a thought of Spinoza’s which the letters
JICMNOS bear to the name James Simmonds.
Let us consider, then, how far we have got. Mr. A. (on the view here
taken) is communing with his second self, with another focus of
cerebral activity within his own brain. And I imagine this other focus
of personality to be capable of exhibiting about as much intelligence
as one exhibits in an ordinary dream. Mr. A. awake is addressing Mr.
A. asleep; and the first replies, _Religion_, _Worship_, &c., are
very much the kind of answer that one gets if one addresses a man who
is partially comatose, or muttering in broken slumber. Such a man
will make brief replies which show at least that the _words_ of the
question are caught, though perhaps not its meaning. In the next place,
the answer _wb_ must, I think, as Mr. A. suggests, be taken as an
attempt to prove independent action, a confused inchoate response to
the writer’s fear that his waking self might be suggesting the words
written. The same trick of language—abbreviation by initial letters,
occurs on the second day again; and this kind of _continuity of
character_, which automatic messages often exhibit, has been sometimes
taken to indicate the persisting presence of an extraneous mind. But
perhaps its true parallel may be found in the well-known cases of
intermittent memory, where a person repeatedly subjected to certain
abnormal states, as somnambulism or the hypnotic trance, carries on
from one access into another a chain of recollections of which his
ordinary self knows nothing.
In Mr. A.’s case, however, some persons might think that the proof of
an independent intelligence went much further than this; for his hand
wrote anagrams which his waking brain took an hour or more to unriddle.
And certainly there could hardly be a clearer proof that the answers
did not pass through the writer’s primary consciousness; that they
proceeded, if from himself at all, from a secondary self such as I
have been describing. But further than this we surely need not go. The
answers contain no unknown facts, no new materials, and there seems
no reason _à priori_ why the dream-self should not puzzle the waking
self; why its fantastic combinations of old elements of memory should
not need some pains to unravel. I may perhaps be permitted to quote
in illustration a recent dream of my own, to which I doubt not that
some of my readers can supply parallel instances. I dreamt that I saw
written in gold on a chapel wall some Greek hexameters, which, I was
told, were the work of an eminent living scholar. I gazed at them with
much respect, but dim comprehension, and succeeded in carrying back
into waking memory the bulk of one line:—ὁ μὲν κατὰ γᾶν θαλερὸν κύσε
δακνόμενον πῦρ. On waking, it needed some little thought to show me
that κατὰ γᾶν was a solecism for ὑπὸ γᾶν, revived from early boyhood,
and that the line meant: “He indeed beneath the earth embraced the
ever-burning, biting fire.” Further reflection reminded me that I
had lately been asked to apply to the Professor in question for an
inscription to be placed over the tomb of a common acquaintance. The
matter had dropped, and I had not thought of it again. But here, I
cannot doubt, was my inner self’s prevision of that unwritten epitaph;
although the drift of it certainly showed less tact and fine feeling
than my scholarly friend would have exhibited on such an occasion.
Now just in this same way, as it seems to me, Mr. A.’s inner self
retraced the familiar path of one of his childish amusements, and
mystified the waking man with the puzzles of the boy. It may be that
the unconscious self moves more readily than the conscious along these
old-established and stable mnemonic tracks, that we constantly retrace
our early memories without knowing it, and that when some recollection
seems to have _left_ us it has only passed into a storehouse from which
we can no longer summon it at will.
But we have not yet done with Mr. A.’s experiences. Yielding to the
suggestion that these anagrams were the work of some intelligence
without him, he placed himself in the mental attitude of colloquy with
some unknown being. Note the result:
“Who art thou? _Clelia._ Thou art a woman? _Yes._ Hast thou ever lived
upon the earth? _No._ Wilt thou? _Yes._ When? _Six years._ Wherefore
dost thou speak with me? _E if Clelia el._”
There is a disappointing ambiguity about this last very simple anagram,
which may mean “I Clelia feel,” or, “I Clelia flee.”
But mark what has happened. Mr. A. has created and is talking to a
personage in his own dream. In other words, his secondary self has
produced in his primary self the illusion that there is a separate
intelligence at work; and this illusion of the primary self reacts on
the secondary, as the words which we whisper back to the muttering
dreamer influence the course of a dream which we cannot follow. The
fact, therefore, of Clelia’s apparent personality and unexpected
rejoinders do not so much as suggest any need to look outside Mr.
A’s mind for her origin. The figures in our own ordinary dreams say
things which startle and even shock us; nay, these shadows sometimes
even defy our attempts at analyzing them away. On the rare occasions,
so brief and precious, when one dreams and knows it is a dream,
I always endeavor to get at my dream-personages and test their
independence of character by a few suitable inquiries. Unfortunately
they invariably vanish under my perhaps too hasty interrogation. But a
shrewd Northumbrian lately told me the following dream, unique in his
experience, and over which he had often pondered.
“I was walking in my dream,” he said, “in a Newcastle street, when
suddenly I knew so clearly that it was a dream, that I thought I would
find out what the folk in my dream thought of themselves. I saw three
foundrymen sitting at a yard door. I went up and said to all three:
‘Are you conscious of a real objective existence?’ Two of the men
stared and laughed at me. But the man in the middle stretched out his
two hands to his two mates and said, ‘Feel that,’ They said, ‘We do
feel you,’ Then he held out his hand to me, and I told him that I felt
it solid and warm; then he said: ‘Well, sir, my mates feel that I am a
real man of flesh and blood, and you feel it, and I feel it. What more
would you have?’ Now I had not formed any notion of what this man was
going to say. And I could not answer him, and I awoke.”
Now I take this self-assertive dream-foundry-man to be the exact
analogue of Clelia. Let us now see whether anything of Clelia survived
the excited hour which begat her.
“On the fourth day,” says Mr. A., “I began my questioning in the
same exalted mood, but to my surprise did not get the same answer.
‘Wherefore,’ I asked, ‘dost thou speak with me?’ (The answer was a
wavy line, denoting repetition, and meaning.—‘Wherefore dost _thou_
speak with _me_?’) ‘Do I answer myself?’ _Yes._ ‘Is Clelia here?’
_No._ ‘Who is it, then, now here?’ _Nobody._ ‘Does Clelia exist?’
_No._ ‘With whom did I speak yesterday?’ _No one._ ‘Do souls exist in
another world?’ _Mb._ ‘What does _mb_ mean? ’_May be._”
And this was all the revelation which our inquirer got. Some further
anagrams were given, but Clelia came no more. Such indeed, on the view
here set forth, was the natural conclusion. The dream passed through
its stages, and faded at last away.
I have heard of a piece of French statuary entitled “Jeune homme
caressant sa Chimère.” Clelia, could the sculptor have caught her,
might have been his fittest model; what else could he have found at
once so intimate and so fugitive, discerned so elusively without us,
and yet with such a root within?
I might mention many other strange varieties of graphic automatism;
as _reversed script_, so written as to be read in a mirror;[32]
alternating styles of handwriting, symbolic arabesque, and the like.
But I must hasten on to the object towards which I am mainly tending,
which is to show, not so much the influence exercised by a man’s
own mind on itself as the influence exercised by one man’s mind on
another’s. We have been watching, so to say, the psychic wave as it
washed up deep-sea products on the open shore. But the interest will
be keener still if we find that wave washing up the products of some
far-off clime; if we discover that there has been a profound current
with no surface trace—a current propagated by an unimagined impulse,
and obeying laws as yet unknown.
The psychical phenomenon here alluded to is that for which I have
suggested the name Telepathy; the transference of ideas or sensations
from one conscious or unconscious mind to another, without the agency
of any of the recognized organs of sense.
Our first task in the investigation of this influence has naturally
been to assure ourselves of the transmission of thought between two
persons, both of them in normal condition; the _agent_, conscious of
the thought which he wishes to transmit, the _percipient_, conscious of
the thought as he receives it.
The “Proceedings” of the Society for Psychical Research must for a long
time be largely occupied with experiments of this definite kind. But,
of course, if such an influence truly exists, its manifestations are
not likely to be confined to the transference of a name or a cypher, a
card or a diagram, from one man’s field of mental vision to another’s,
by deliberate effort and as a preconcerted experiment. If Telepathy
be anything at all, it involves one of the profoundest laws of mind,
and, like other important laws, may be expected to operate in many
unlooked for ways, and to be at the root of many scattered phenomena,
inexplicable before. Especially must we watch for traces of it wherever
unconscious mental action is concerned. For the telepathic impact, we
may fairly conjecture, may often be a stimulus so gentle as to need
some concentration or exaltation in the percipient’s mind, or at least
some inhibition of competing stimuli, in order to enable him to realize
it in consciousness at all. And in fact (as we have shown or are
prepared to show), almost every abnormal mental condition (consistent
with sanity) as yet investigated yields some indication of telepathic
action.
Telepathy, I venture to maintain, is an occasional phenomenon in
somnambulism and in the hypnotic state; it is one of the obscure causes
which generate hallucinations; it enters into dream and into delirium;
and it often rises to its maximum of vividness in the swoon that ends
in death.
In accordance with analogy, therefore, we may expect to find that
automatic writing—this new glimpse into our deep-sea world—will afford
us some fresh proof of currents which set obscurely towards us from
the depths of minds other than our own. And we find, I believe, that
this is so. Had space permitted it, I should have liked to detail some
transitional cases, to have shown by what gradual steps we discover
that it is not always one man’s intelligence _alone_ which is concerned
in the message given, that an infusion of facts known to some spectator
only may mingle in the general tenor which the writer’s mind supplies.
Especially I should have wished to describe some attempts at this kind
of thought-transference attended with only slight or partial success.
For the mind justly hesitates to give credence to a palmary group of
experiments unless it has been prepared for them by following some
series of gradual suggestions and approximate endeavor.
But the case which I am about to relate, although a _culminant_, is
not an _isolated_ one in the life-history of the persons concerned.
The Rev. P. H. Newnham, Rector of Maker, Devonport, experienced an
even more striking instance of thought-transference with Mrs. Newnham,
some forty years ago, before their marriage; and during subsequent
years there has been frequent and unmistakable transmission of thought
from husband to wife of an _involuntary_ kind, although it was only in
the year 1871 that they succeeded in getting the ideas transferred by
intentional effort.
Mr. Newnham’s communication consists of a copy of entries in a
note-book made during eight months in 1871, at the actual moments
of experiment. Mrs. Newnham independently corroborates the account.
The entries had previously been shown to a few personal friends, but
had never been used, and were not meant to be used, for any literary
purpose. Mr. Newnham has kindly placed them at my disposal, from a
belief that they may serve to elucidate important truth.
“Being desirous,” says the first entry in Mr. Newnham’s note-book, “of
investigating accurately the phenomena of ‘planchette,’ myself and my
wife have agreed to carry out a series of systematic experiments, in
order to ascertain the conditions under which the instrument is able
to work. To this end the following rules are strictly observed:
“1. The question to be asked is written down before the planchette is
set in motion. This question, as a rule, is not known to the operator.
[The few cases were the question _was_ known to Mrs. Newnham are
specially marked in the note-book, and are none of them cited here.]
“2. Whenever an evasive, or other, answer is returned, necessitating
one or more new questions to be put before a clear answer can be
obtained, the operator is not to be made aware of any of these
questions, or even of the general subject to which they allude, until
the final answer has been obtained.
“My wife,” adds Mr. Newnham, “always sat at a small low table, in a
low chair, leaning backwards. I sat about eight feet distant, at a
rather high table, and with my back towards her while writing down
the questions. It was absolutely impossible that any gesture or play
of feature on my part could have been visible or intelligible to her.
As a rule she kept her eyes shut; but never became in the slightest
degree hypnotic, or even naturally drowsy.
“Under these conditions we carried on experiments for about eight
months, and I have 309 questions and answers recorded in my note-book,
spread over this time. But the experiments were found very exhaustive
of nerve power, and as my wife’s health was delicate, and the fact of
thought-transmission had been abundantly proved, we thought it best to
abandon the pursuit.
“The planchette began to move instantly with my wife. The answer was
often half written before I had completed the question.
“On finding that it would write easily, I asked three simple
questions, which were known to the operator, then three others
unknown to her, relating to my own private concerns. All six having
been instantly answered in a manner to show complete intelligence, I
proceeded to ask:
“(7) Write down the lowest temperature here this week. Answer: 8. Now,
this reply at once arrested my interest. The actual lowest temperature
had been 7·6°, so that 8 was the nearest whole degree; but my wife
said at once that, if she had been asked the question, she would have
written 7, and not 8; as she had forgotten the decimal, but remembered
my having said that the temperature had been down to 7 _something_,
“I simply quote this as a good instance, at the very outset, of
perfect transmission of thought, coupled with a perfectly independent
reply; the answer being correct in itself, but different from the
impression on the conscious intelligence of both parties.
“Naturally, our first desire was to see if we could obtain any
information concerning the nature of the intelligence which was
operating through the planchette, and of the method by which it
produced the written results. We repeated questions on this subject
again and again, and I will copy down the principal questions and
answers in this connection.
“(13) Is it the operator’s brain or some external force that moves the
planchette? Answer ‘brain’ or ‘force.’ _Will._
“(14) Is it the will of a living person, or of an immaterial spirit
distinct from that person? Answer ‘person’ or ‘spirit.’ _Wife._
“(15) Give first the wife’s Christian name; then my favorite name for
her. (_This was accurately done._)
“(27) What is your own name? _Only you._
“(28) We are not quite sure of the meaning of the answer. Explain.
_Wife._
“The subject was resumed on a later day.
“(118) But does no one tell wife what to write? if so, who? _Spirit._
“(119) Whose spirit? _Wife’s brain._
“(120) But how does wife’s brain know masonic secrets? _Wife’s spirit
unconsciously guides._
“(190) Why are you not always influenced by what I think? _Wife knows
sometimes what you think._ (191) How does wife know it? _When her
brain is excited, and has not been much tried before._ (192) But by
what means are my thoughts conveyed to her brain? _Electrobiology._
(193) What is electrobiology? _No one knows._ (194) But do not you
know? _No, wife does not know._
“My object,” says Mr. Newnham, “in quoting this large number of
questions and replies [many of them omitted here] has been not merely
to show the instantaneous and unfailing transmission of thought from
questioner to operator, but more especially to call attention to a
remarkable character of the answers given. These answers, consistent
and invariable in their tenor from first to last, did not correspond
with the opinion or expectation of either myself or my wife. Something
which takes the appearance of a source of intelligence distinct from
the conscious intelligence of either of us was clearly perceptible
from the very first. Assuming, at the outset, that if her source of
percipience could grasp my question, it would be equally willing
to reply in accordance with my request, in questions (13) (14) I
suggested the form of answer; but of this not the slightest notice was
taken. Neither myself nor my wife had ever taken part in any form of
(so-called) ‘spiritual’ manifestations before this time; nor had we
any decided opinion as to the agency by which phenomena of this kind
were brought about. But for such answers as those numbered (14), (27),
(144), (192), (194), we were both of us totally unprepared; and I may
add that, so far as we were prepossessed by any opinion whatever,
these replies were distinctly opposed to such opinions. In a word,
it is simply impossible that these replies should have been either
suggested, or composed, by the _conscious_ intelligence of either of
us.”
Mr. Newnham obtained some curious results by questioning “planchette”,
on Masonic archæology—a subject which he had long studied, but of
which Mrs. Newnham knew nothing. It is to be observed, moreover, that
throughout the experiments Mrs. Newnham “was quite unable to follow
the motions of the planchette. Often she only touched it with a single
finger; but even with all her fingers resting on the board she never
had the slightest idea of what words were being traced out,” In this
case, therefore, we have Mrs. Newnham ignorant at once of all three
points:—of what was the question asked; of what the true answer would
have been; and of what answer was actually being written. Under these
circumstances the answer showed a mixture—
(1) Of true Masonic facts, as known to Mr. Newnham;
(2) Of Masonic theories, known to him, but held by him to be erroneous;
(3) Of ignorance, sometimes, avowed, sometimes endeavoring to conceal
itself by subterfuge.