telepathy exists among various forms of animal life. The “homing
instinct” of the cat and the pigeon, and bewildering facts connected
with the flight of birds of passage, inexplicable from any ordinary
laws of experience, may conceivably be examples of a form of telepathy
infinitely more regular and efficient than the fitful manifestations
on the part of _homo sapiens_ which engage the attention of psychical
researchers. It is not easy to find any ordinary explanation for the
immediate rush of a scattered herd of cattle to any available shelter,
when one of their number has been struck by the noiseless warble-fly.
Or when I watch the curving flight of the beautiful ruffs and reeves
round a Norwegian lake――the absolutely simultaneous rise, the
instantaneous wheel of the whole flock in the fraction of a second――or,
again, when I see hundreds of starlings rise together and afterwards
return to their trees in complete unison, I find it difficult to regard
these charming incidents as due to normal or even abnormal sight or
hearing, and wonder whether here again some rudimentary but efficient
form of telepathy may not be at work.
Can we go further, and suggest that some of the baffling phenomena
of heredity and instinct may ultimately find their origin in the
telepathic transference of thought? We accept the word ‘instinct’ as
an adequate explanation of the habits of sentient creatures, but it
explains nothing. Every manifestation of instinct is obviously due to
volition, however rudimentary――is, in other words, a mental as distinct
(so far as such distinction goes) from a physical phenomenon. It is
difficult to trace an “instinctive” movement to material spermatozoa
or germ-cells. “The burnt child dreads the fire” as the result of
its own experience, but no experience taught the baby how to use its
lips at its first meal, any more than it taught the chicken how to
escape from the eggshell. The “collective experience of the race”, the
alleged source of these phenomena, may sooner or later be recognized as
the telepathic transference from the mind of the parents of concepts
derived from the previous telepathy of successive generations. It
may appear at first sight fantastic to suggest that the mechanically
exact habits of a mother-wasp may be the result of mental telepathy,
but after all this seems a better _vera causa_ than the wasp’s-egg, a
minute fraction of matter which can explain nothing in the realms of
thought or of volition.
Charcot’s telepathic suggestion of a hot iron by the application
of a wooden ruler elicited a cry of agony, and produced a blister
filled with lymph on the percipient’s arm; other experiments at the
Salpêtriêre and elsewhere raised weals and other stigmata on human
bodies. Can it be that this same mysterious and powerful force may come
to be accepted as at any rate a partial solution of the vexed question
of heredity? A baby is born with marked physical characteristics of
its father or mother. During its prenatal existence you have two
main factors: the minds of the parents on the one side, on the other
the mind of the unborn child. The future of the little being lying
under her heart forms the constant thought of the expectant mother.
She thinks of it as reproducing certain characteristics of herself
or of the husband she loves; the husband applies his thoughts in the
same direction: and such concentrated suggestion, consciously or
unconsciously conveyed, may serve to shape the child’s body as well as
its mind, in accordance with the maternal or paternal hopes and desires.
Well established as it is in the simpler forms of direct communication
between agent and percipient, telepathy is sometimes called upon to
explain the whole series of phenomena which are grouped under such
heads as clairvoyance, psychometry, crystal-gazing, automatic writing,
etc. The more or less public exhibitions of alleged clairvoyance
which form the central feature of innumerable spiritualist services
in this and other countries do not, as a rule, furnish convincing
indications of supernormal activity. I have never myself seen any
public “trance-speaker” who, despite the conventional twitchings
and contortions which herald the ingress of the Red Indian or other
spirit-control, did not appear to be in complete possession of his or
her normal consciousness. But the prolonged and careful investigations
of Mrs Piper’s mediumship and those more recently undertaken with
continental clairvoyants by Drs Tischner, Osty, and others, stand on
a very different footing. In the face of the accumulated evidence
furnished by such research, those who rely on telepathy as the
universal solvent of psychic difficulties must often falter where they
firmly stood. Leaving for the moment all the concrete evidence derived
from experiments with the British Mrs Leonard or continental mediums
like “Mrs van B.”, or Mademoiselle de Berly, the records of the Piper
_séances_ form a rich store of evidential facts. Amid all the various
deceptions and failures of the quaint “Dr Phinuit” or the more precise
“George Pelham,” detailed and accurate messages are found, some of
which appear inexplicable by any conceivable exercise of telepathy
between living persons.
Nor again can the agency of living minds always furnish a satisfactory
explanation in the rare but indubitable cases of prevision or
precognition exhibited by clairvoyance. From what source come those
precise statements made from time to time by trustworthy mediums,
under strict test-conditions, with respect to certain articles placed
in their hands? Clairvoyance of this type, often called psychometry,
might almost suggest the validity of Fechner’s theory of “odylic”
influences, which may appear less fantastic in an age when the dividing
line between matter and mind is becoming theoretically obsolete.
Moreover, to psychometry, once accepted as a scientific fact, an
interesting corollary would attach; for, if mere contact with a man’s
cravat can produce from the medium a detailed and accurate account of
the suicide of an unhappy prisoner who had worn the cravat, masonry
and woodwork might in the same inscrutable fashion be responsible for
suggesting the auditory and visual phenomena of a “haunted house.” Some
well-attested cases exist in which alteration of structure in a house
has been followed by the cessation of the “hauntings.”
If telepathy from the living breaks down when called upon to explain
all the facts of clairvoyance, there exists another explanation which
has received the enthusiastic support of those investigators who, while
they reject transference between normal minds, point enthusiastically
to the alleged efficiency of the “secondary” or “subliminal” self.
Fascinating descriptions are given of this “mysterious Mr Hyde which
lurks in each of us,” this subconscious mind working in the inner
sanctum, as director and controller, while the normal work-a-day self
transacts the conventional business of life in the open shop. The
amazing performances of a “calculating boy,” the sudden conversion of a
Bunyan or a Paul, the supreme genius of a Shakespeare or a Handel, are
alike referred to that comprehensive source of all things supernormal,
the secondary self! This subliminal self can, we are assured, furnish
a sensitive with information which otherwise could not possibly be
possessed by any other living person. It can not only explore the dim
recesses of past experience but foretell with accuracy the events of
the future. Driven from the outer trenches of telepathic defence, some
modern protagonists of psychical research find, as they think, an
impregnable stronghold in the limitless efficiency of the subliminal
self. The _soi-disant_ George Pelham may convince his friends that he
is what he claims to be, but he is only a manifestation of Mrs Piper’s
subconscious self――in other words, George Pelham in Mrs Piper. If a
medium announces in England the death in battle of an officer hours
before the bad news has even reached his battalion’s base, this (if not
a ‘happy shot’) is merely a striking instance of those abnormal powers
of cognition possessed by the medium’s subliminal consciousness.
Can this hypothesis bear the heavy strain put upon it? After all
the phrase “subliminal self”, “unconscious mind”――call it what you
will――embodies nothing at all beyond a hypothesis. Nobody has yet
demonstrated the existence of such a division of the mind attached
to each living personality, or defined its qualities or capacities.
There are indubitably certain depths in the human mind which may be
reached by the processes of psycho-analysis, but in these cases there
appears to be no compelling reason for any bewildering thesis of two
or more distinct minds attached to the same human organism. There may
be diversities of mental operation, but the same mind: the θεός and
θηρίον can form a composite mentality capable of moral excellence on
the one hand, and on the other exposing to the Freudian probe the lower
levels of a non-moral animal existence.
Not only have we failed to prove conclusively the existence or
determine the activities of an entity so improbable _a priori_ as a
second self, but this popular hypothesis cannot always justify itself
by fitting the facts, unless indeed we are prepared to assign to such
an additional human mind a considerable measure of omniscience. How
much further do we get by declaring that such intelligences as Phinuit,
George Pelham, or Feda are mere manifestations of a medium’s “secondary
self”?
The messages which we receive from clairvoyant experiments with
entranced or controlled mediums, table tiltings, planchette, ouija
boards, etc., present a bewildering congeries of good sense and
stupidity, relevancy and irrelevancy, truth and falsehood, sobriety and
flippancy. Such communications possess two marked characteristics.
They display intelligence, however low the level of that intelligence
may sink; and they invariably claim to proceed from the surviving
minds of dead men and women, or at any rate from discarnate beings or
“spirits”.
These messages fall into two classes; in the first place, the most
important of them, which offer evidential matter either spontaneously
or in compliance with a sitter’s request. In such dark and unaccustomed
paths the thoughtful researcher must walk warily and form his judgments
dispassionately. Suffice it to say that persons of real ability and
calm judgment are to be found who are intellectually convinced that
in certain instances the agencies which have communicated with them
through mediums are actually what they claim to be, the surviving
personalities of dead friends or relatives. I found it difficult during
some sittings under an assumed name with Mrs Piper to resist the
belief that I was being addressed by two lost friends, so amazing was
the relevancy of a single message in the one case, and the force of
accumulated details in the other. Of a communication through the same
medium given to his sister-in-law for transmission to himself Professor
William James of Harvard writes as follows:
“The point is that the message is an allusion to a matter
known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in
the world but me――not possibly either to the medium or to my
sister-in-law; and an allusion so pertinent and intimate, and
tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly
knowledge on anyone’s part, that it quite astounds as well
as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had been
conceivably in my sister-in-law’s mind, it would have been an
interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but as I say
it could not possibly have been, and she only transmits it to
me after the fact not even understanding it.”
The second group of messages possess little or no evidential value with
regard to the personal survival of individuals, though they too always
claim to proceed from “spirits” of some kind. Trivial, vulgar, and
unworthy as they often are, these communications cannot be ignored by
the student of psychical research. When we have eliminated trickery,
collusion and self-deception from these experiments, there remains a
residuum of communications more or less intelligent which obviously do
not proceed from the normal consciousness of either sitter or medium;
in most cases, indeed, there is no medium employed, for the messages
are spelt out through movements of a table or an instrument of the
planchette type.
Many of these messages are of a perplexing character. Some show
indications of a rather colourless goodwill, others are freakish and
deceptive with a flavour of feeble practical joking. Occasionally they
are blasphemous or indecent. A very common feature is the giving of
addresses connected with the sitter or with the former life of the
alleged spirit-communicator. Full names of individuals, the names of
streets and the numbers of houses are freely given. Nevertheless, in
nearly every instance it is found that the facts as given are partially
or entirely inaccurate. The whole procedure is baffling and obscure. If
on the one hand the false information is due to the conscious action
of any of the sitters, why does not the person in question take the
trouble to provide a more complete deception? How easy it would be for
such devotees of trickery to equip themselves with a stock-in-trade
of really accurate names and addresses from any list of obituary
notices contemporary or of older date. If these tiresome and misleading
statements proceed from the subliminal consciousness of the sitter or
medium, it is obvious that this entity is unable to secure various
simple items of current information; and in that case, again, what is
the motive of such transparent deception?
Nor, indeed, if the subliminal consciousness be accepted as the
source of such perplexing messages, can we feel altogether happy in
the possession of a secondary self or subconscious mind which is
admittedly guilty in many instances of trickery, evasion, flippancy,
deliberate and often cruel deception. Any clouds of glory that such a
self may have trailed behind it are at times sadly tarnished, nor is
the conviction either agreeable or inspiring that we harbour within
us a force capable of præternatural knowledge and amazing achievement
and yet characterized at times by conduct which the ordinary mind of
any decent person would utterly condemn; for such a secondary self is
frequently exhibited as “repressed, conative, infantile, unreasoning,
predominantly sexual” and, one may add, sometimes fraudulent and
usually non-moral. So many difficulties, indeed, appear to be involved
in connecting these messages with any conscious activity that some
investigators take refuge in the view that they consist only of the
“stuff that dreams are made of,” proceeding from the lumber-room of the
mind, and no more fraudulent or immoral than the elusive vagaries and
incongruities of some fantastic dream.
One other source of the perplexing messages under discussion remains
for our consideration. There is, as we have said, a feature common
to them all: they invariably claim to proceed from disembodied
personalities.
If the devotees of the ‘subliminal self’ hypothesis persist in
bringing these agencies also within the broad compass of the human
mind, conscious or unconscious, it may, I suppose, be urged that the
claim to discarnate existence put forward by these _animulae vagulae,
blandulae_, is a delusion which is built upon the accumulated mental
experience of the human race, always believing, or striving to believe
in a life beyond the grave. From the dim recesses of our racial history
this pathetic protest against annihilation has, as it were, become
a stereotyped portion of the human mind, and so it comes to pass
that while the normal self may reject a personal survival, faint and
fleeting echoes of the primaeval faith still rise from the depths of
the unconscious self.
If it really be the case, however, as suggested above, that no activity
of the human mind, whether normal or subliminal, can furnish an
adequate explanation of the communications in question, we are left
to face the facts and ask ourselves whether, after all, the claim put
forward by the agencies involved may not be a valid one, viz., that
they are what they invariably allege themselves to be, the product of
discarnate intelligences. It is easy for those unacquainted with the
accumulated phenomena of automatic writing, the planchette and ouija
boards, and so on, to sneer at such an interpretation of the facts.
But sneers have often dogged the earlier footsteps of scientific
enterprise, and in any case――sneers or no sneers――the scientific
researcher must, if he can, provide a solution of the phenomena which
in this department of his work are so abundant and so easily repeated,
that nothing else is needed beyond a careful sifting of the material,
and above all, a mind as free as possible from any conscious bias
towards either a normal or supernormal explanation. Once it is accepted
that modern science does not necessarily preclude the existence of
intelligences independent of those associated with the functions of the
human brain, we may frankly admit that the theory of spirit-agencies
in the case of these erratic messages does at least fit the facts. The
existence would seem to be suggested of those alleged unseen entities,
sometimes described as “elementals,” an order of low-grade spirits,
able and apparently eager to communicate with us. The presence of such
beings around us has, in earlier centuries, been widely accepted by a
veritable _consensus gentium_; and the general characteristics of the
communications in many a table-tilting or planchette experiment would
seem to correspond closely to those of the fairies, efrits, demons,
gnomes, “little folk,” _et hoc genus omne_――an intermixture of good
humour and mischief coupled with a limited intelligence and the almost
complete absence of any moral standard.
Before leaving the subject of telepathy, one more reference to this
force as the origin of psychic phenomena must be briefly considered.
The well-known “Census of hallucinations” conducted by the Society for
Psychical Research revealed the fact that (a) 9.9 per cent. of the
17,000 persons questioned declared that they had at one time or another
seen an apparition, (b) that very few recognizable phantasms were seen
after the lapse of one year from the day of death, (c) that of the
veridical cases the vast majority coincided more or less accurately
with the moment of death. Modern research has also revealed a fact
never before established, that phantasms of the living are far more
frequent and generally far better attested than those of the dead.
In summary, it may be claimed that men and women with sound minds in
sound bodies do occasionally see phantasms of both living and dead
persons under circumstances which entirely preclude malobservation
or deception. No fact could, indeed, be better established than that
ghosts are seen now as they have been seen all down the ages. What,
however, is new in respect to this interesting phenomenon is the modern
explanation that a ghost is a subjective impression conveyed to the
mind of A by a conscious or unconscious suggestion from the mind of
B. Deeply interesting as are the well-established and comparatively
numerous telepathic images conveyed from the living to the living,
these do not lead us outside the range of ordinary telepathic activity:
“There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave
To shew us this.”
But what are we to say to similar phantasms when the person they
represent has passed through the gates of Death? With the special
significance of these cases we shall deal later.
It seems clear, then, that the student of psychic phenomena will
find many promising lines of research in the ample field covered by
telepathy, clairvoyance, and the varied activities of motor automatism.
Fresh facts must be accumulated and sifted, fresh efforts made to
co-ordinate such facts and discover the laws through which they work.
Nevertheless, there remains another area of supernormal activities
which cannot be neglected――the physical phenomena alleged to occur from
time to time, almost invariably in the presence and apparently through
the mediumship of certain individuals. In this obscure region, however,
the opportunities for fraud have been so great, the detection of
trickery so frequent, and the general character of the mediums often so
indifferent, that, even with the experiences of a quarter of a century
behind them, many careful and able researchers find it difficult to
give any definite opinion either for or against the existence of such
startling phenomena as “materialization,” “ectoplastic” extrusions from
the body, or the movement of material objects without physical contact
(telekinesis). The only excuse for offering my own personal views is
the fact that I have over a long period of years had sittings with some
of the world’s best known “physical” mediums including Mrs Corner (née
Florence Cook), Eusapia Palladino, Eva C. (Marthe Béraud) and Willi
Schneider, and a considerable number of less known sensitives, and I am
unable to endorse the opinion recently suggested by a body of able and
experienced German investigators, Drs Gulat-Wellenburg and Rosenbusch
and Graf v. Klinckowstroen, that no scientific evidence exists for the
occurrence of physical phenomena. On one occasion I have witnessed the
production of a complete, visible and tangible figure which certainly
was not the medium herself: that it was a confederate――the only
other normal possibility――was ruled out by elaborate and convincing
precautions. Despite the open readiness of Eusapia Palladino to cheat
when left without control, many of the positive results secured through
the mediumship of this Neapolitan peasant-woman under test-conditions
appear to defy any normal explanation. The sceptic has still to explain
how after a searching examination, medical and otherwise, Eva C. under
stringent conditions of control and observation was able to exude from
her body solid and fluid masses of so-called ectoplasm, the existence
of which was duly recorded by photography. No reliable evidence exists
to disprove the claim made on behalf of D. D. Home, that he was never
detected in any kind of mediumistic fraud, and much of the evidence
resulting from the personal experience of cultured and educated persons
with this medium is staggering in its completeness. “On that very
hearthrug where you are standing,” said the late Sir William Crookes,
F.R.S., to me, “I saw Home raised eighteen inches from the ground in
broad daylight and verified the phenomenon _visu et tactu_.” “I do not
say,” remarked this same great scientist on another occasion, “that
these things are possible――I only say they happened.”
Telekinesis (the movement of material objects without personal
contact) in full light has been attested by men of unimpeachable
honesty and acknowledged ability――like Professors William James,
Lombroso, Schiaparelli, and Richet. Mr Dingwall quotes two axioms of
the professional conjurer――_Never tell your audience beforehand what
you are going to do_, and _Never perform the same trick twice on the
same evening_. But Mdlle Tomczyk of Warsaw repeated the same form of
telekinesis more or less continuously for six years. Is it conceivable
that throughout that period various groups of educated and experienced
investigators should have utterly failed to detect the use, say, of
threads or filaments however fine? It is childish and unscientific to
ignore sound testimony and regard every account which comes to hand of
supernormal physical phenomena as little else than the tale of an idiot
signifying nothing.
There is indeed ample work in this dark and dubious region for those
who have time, patience, and opportunity for the investigation of the
rare cases of well attested physical mediumship. In view, however, of
the more immediate results of real value which may be secured from a
study of the subjective phenomena of psychical research it is obvious
that, unless a physical medium is willing sooner or later to submit
himself frankly and honestly to every reasonable test proposed by the
best scientific minds, it is comparatively useless for a researcher to
spend his limited time in inconclusive sittings for the alleged marvels
of telekinesis or materialization.
* * * * *
We have sketched the main lines upon which the psychic student of
to-day is working, and the question which remains is simply _Cui bono_?
What is the practical, or even the theoretical value of our research?
Several adequate replies may, I think, be given.