What is it? The word is French, meaning, literally, clear-sightedness. It
is a power attributed to certain persons, or claimed by certain persons,
of seeing things not visible to the eye, or things at a distance. It is
the action of mind over mind,--the seeing, mentally, of one mind through
another.
By personal experiment with clairvoyants, I am positively convinced that
they follow the mind (thoughts) of the subject or patient. I have laid out
my programme before visiting one, and the operator, whether pretending or
not to a "trance" state, has followed that course to the end, but usually
adding something which was conjectural. Practice helps them very much. But
the most of those persons, male and female, who proclaim themselves
clairvoyants, are humbugs and impostors.
Let any clear-headed man, who has good intellectual qualities, go to a
good clairvoyant, and try the above plan. Think out just the places and
persons you wish the clairvoyant (or spiritualist, if he or she choose to
call themselves such) to bring up. Stick firmly to your text, and the
operator will follow it, if he or she is a clairvoyant. They can tell you
nothing that you do not already know. If they go beyond that, it is
guessed at.
No person of large causality can be a clairvoyant. The moment they employ
cause and effect, they are lost in doubt. How else can you account for
nearly all the professional clairvoyants (and spiritualists) being persons
of low intellectuality? Of course they deny this; but a fact is a fact,
and _it can't be rubbed out_!
There is a magnetizing feature in clairvoyance. The operator can make some
persons _think_ they see a thing, when it is an impossibility to see it.
This influence is sometimes passed from one person to another
imperceptibly.
When the earthquake shook up the minds of the Bostonians, in 1870, there
was one grand illustration of this fact. A gentleman standing in front of
the Old State House, on Washington Street, soon after the shock, asserted
that the earthquake had started a stone in the front end of the Sears
Building.
"There! don't you see it?" he exclaimed to the people on the sidewalk, who
are always ready to stop and look at any new or curious object, as he
pointed towards an imaginary crack in the marble. "It is just above the
corner of that window there"--pointing--"a crack in the stone a foot
long."
"O, yes, I see it," said one and another; and the gentleman moved on,
leaving the gaping crowd to gaze after the imaginary rent in the wall.
"Where is it?" inquired a new comer.
"Right up there over the door," replied one.
"No, over that third window," said another.
Some "saw it," and others didn't "see it," but all day long the tide of
curious humans ebbed and flowed. At eight o'clock in the morning I took a
look--not at the broken stone in the marble front, but at the magnetized
crowd looking upon an imaginary break. People with large causality looked,
exclaimed, "Pooh!" and went on. The credulous stood gazing, and pointing
out the rent to the "blind ones, who wouldn't see," hour after hour. At
noon I again visited the scene. The crowd had shifted, but the same class,
male and female, stood gazing at the "calico building," and the same sort
of people "saw the crack over the window."
[Illustration: EFFECTS OF AN EARTHQUAKE.]
[Illustration: A BELIEVER SEES HIS GRANDMOTHER.]
At six P. M., I again visited the Old State House, and at dusk still
again, to behold the crowd straining to get a last look at the rent before
darkness shut out the view. On the following day, the scene was repeated,
with no mitigation. The fact of the papers denying that there was any rent
went for nothing. The crowd came and went, from morning till evening.