Mr. Rathbone is a well-known dealer in old Wedgwood and
eighteenth-century art. As a friend of my hospitable entertainer, Mr.
Willett, he had shown me many attentions in England, but I was
not expecting any communication from him; and when, fresh from my
conversation, I found this letter just arrived by mail, and left while
I was at table, and on breaking the seal read what I had a few moments
before been; telling, I was greatly surprised, and immediately made a
note of the occurrence, as given above.
I had long been familiar with all the details of this celebrated case,
but had not referred to it, so far as I can remember, for months or
years. I know of no train of thought which led me to speak of it on that
particular day. I had never alluded to it before in that company, nor
had I ever spoken of it with Mr. Rathbone.
I told this story over our teacups. Among the company at the table is a
young English girl. She seemed to be amused by the story. “Fancy!” she
said,--“how very very odd!” “It was a striking and curious coincidence,”
said the professor who was with us at the table. “As remarkable as
two teaspoons in one saucer,” was the comment of a college youth who
happened to be one of the company. But the member of our circle whom the
reader will hereafter know as Number Seven, began stirring his tea in
a nervous sort of way, and I knew that he was getting ready to say
something about the case. An ingenious man he is, with a brain like a
tinder-box, its contents catching at any spark that is flying about. I
always like to hear what he says when his tinder brain has a spark fall
into it. It does not follow that because he is often wrong he may not
sometimes be right, for he is no fool. He treated my narrative very
seriously.
The reader need not be startled at the new terms he introduces. Indeed,
I am not quite sure that some thinking people will not adopt his view
of the matter, which seems to have a degree of plausibility as he states
and illustrates it.
“The impulse which led you to tell that story passed directly from the
letter, which came charged from the cells of the cerebral battery of
your correspondent. The distance at which the action took place [the
letter was left on a shelf twenty-four feet from the place where I was
sitting] shows this charge to have been of notable intensity.
“Brain action through space without material symbolism, such as speech,
expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction. Charge the prime
conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf electrometer, far
off from it, will at once be disturbed. Electricity, as we all know, can
be stored and transported as if it were a measurable fluid.
“Your incident is a typical example of cerebral induction from a source
containing stored cerebricity. I use this word, not to be found in
my dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power corresponding to
electricity. Think how long it was before we had attained any real
conception of the laws that govern the wonderful agent, which now works
in harness with the other trained and subdued forces! It is natural
that cerebricity should be the last of the unweighable agencies to be
understood. The human eye had seen heaven and earth and all that in them
is before it saw itself as our instruments enable us to see it. This
fact of yours, which seems so strange to you, belongs to a great series
of similar facts familiarly known now to many persons, and before
long to be recognized as generally as those relating to the electric
telegraph and the slaving `dynamo.'
“What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cerebricity fastening itself
on a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was shuffling
about in mail-bags, rolling over the ocean, and shaken up in railroad
cars? And yet the odor of a grain of musk will hang round a note or a
dress for a lifetime. Do you not remember what Professor Silliman says,
in that pleasant journal of his, about the little ebony cabinet which
Mary, Queen of Scots, brought with her from France,--how 'its drawers
still exhale the sweetest perfumes'? If they could hold their sweetness
for more than two hundred years, why should not a written page retain
for a week or a month the equally mysterious effluence poured over
it from the thinking marrow, and diffuse its vibrations to another
excitable nervous centre?”
I have said that although our imaginative friend is given to wild
speculations, he is not always necessarily wrong. We know too little
about the laws of brain-force to be dogmatic with reference to it. I
am, myself, therefore, fully in sympathy with the psychological
investigators. When it comes to the various pretended sciences by which
men and women make large profits, attempts at investigation are very apt
to be used as lucrative advertisements for the charlatans. But a series
of investigations of the significance of certain popular beliefs and
superstitions, a careful study of the relations of certain facts to each
other,--whether that of cause and effect, or merely of coincidence,--is
a task not unworthy of sober-minded and well-trained students of nature.
Such a series of investigations has been recently instituted, and was
reported at a late meeting held in the rooms of the Boston Natural
History Society. The results were, mostly negative, and in one sense a
disappointment. A single case, related by Professor Royce, attracted
a good deal of attention. It was reported in the next morning's
newspapers, and will be given at full length, doubtless, in the next
number of the Psychological Journal. The leading facts were, briefly,
these: A lady in Hamburg, Germany, wrote, on the 22d of June last, that
she had what she supposed to be nightmare on the night of the 17th, five
days before. “It seemed,” she wrote, “to belong to you; to be a horrid
pain in your head, as if it were being forcibly jammed into an iron
casque, or some such pleasant instrument of torture.” It proved that on
that same 17th of June her sister was undergoing a painful operation at
the hands of a dentist. “No single case,” adds Professor Royce, “proves,
or even makes probable, the existence of telepathic toothaches; but if
there are any more cases of this sort, we want to hear of them, and that
all the more because no folk-lore and no supernatural horrors have as
yet mingled with the natural and well-known impressions that people
associate with the dentist's chair.”
The case I have given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every
source of error. I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had communicated
with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe a year ago last
Christmas. The account I received from him was cut out of “The Sporting
Times” of March 5, 1887. My own knowledge of the case came from “Kirby's
Wonderful Museum,” a work presented to me at least thirty years ago.
I had not looked at the account, spoken of it, nor thought of it for a
long time, when it came to me by a kind of spontaneous generation, as it
seemed, having no connection with any previous train of thought that I
was aware of. I consider the evidence of entire independence, apart
from possible “telepathic” causation, completely water-proof, airtight,
incombustible, and unassailable.
I referred, when first reporting this curious case of coincidence, with
suggestive circumstances, to two others, one of which I said was the
most picturesque and the other the most unlikely, as it would seem, to
happen. This is the first of those two cases:--
Grenville Tudor Phillips was a younger brother of George Phillips, my
college classmate, and of Wendell Phillips, the great orator. He lived
in Europe a large part of his life, but at last returned, and, in the
year 1863, died at the house of his brother George. I read his death
in the paper; but, having seen and heard very little of him during
his life, should not have been much impressed by the fact, but for the
following occurrence: between the time of Grenville Phillips's death and
his burial, I was looking in upon my brother, then living in the house
in which we were both born. Some books which had been my father's
were stored in shelves in the room I used to occupy when at Cambridge.
Passing my eye over them, an old dark quarto attracted my attention. It
must be a Bible, I said to myself, perhaps a rare one,--the “Breeches”
Bible or some other interesting specimen. I took it from the shelves,
and, as I did so, an old slip of paper fell out and fluttered to the
floor. On lifting it I read these words:
The name is Grenville Tudor.
What was the meaning of this slip of paper coming to light at this time,
after reposing undisturbed so long? There was only one way of explaining
its presence in my father's old Bible;--a copy of the Scriptures which
I did not remember ever having handled or looked into before. In
christening a child the minister is liable to forget the name, just at
the moment when he ought to remember it. My father preached occasionally
at the Brattle Street Church. I take this for granted, for I remember
going with him on one occasion when he did so. Nothing was more likely
than that he should be asked to officiate at the baptism of the younger
son of his wife's first cousin, Judge Phillips. This slip was handed him
to remind him of the name: He brought it home, put it in that old Bible,
and there it lay quietly for nearly half a century, when, as if it had
just heard of Mr. Phillips's decease, it flew from its hiding-place
and startled the eyes of those who had just read his name in the daily
column of deaths. It would be hard to find anything more than a mere
coincidence here; but it seems curious enough to be worth telling.
The second of these two last stories must be told in prosaic detail to
show its whole value as a coincidence.
One evening while I was living in Charles Street, I received a call from
Dr. S., a well-known and highly respected Boston physician, a particular
friend of the late Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Southern
Confederacy. It was with reference to a work which Mr. Stephens was
about to publish that Dr. S. called upon me. After talking that matter
over we got conversing on other subjects, among the rest a family
relationship existing between us,--not a very near one, but one which I
think I had seen mentioned in genealogical accounts. Mary S. (the
last name being the same as that of my visitant), it appeared, was
the great-great-grandmother of Mrs. H. and myself. After cordially
recognizing our forgotten relationship, now for the first time called
to mind, we parted, my guest leaving me for his own home. We had been
sitting in my library on the lower floor. On going up-stairs where Mrs.
H. was sitting alone, just as I entered the room she pushed a paper
across the table towards me, saying that perhaps it might interest me.
It was one of a number of old family papers which she had brought from
the house of her mother, recently deceased.
I opened the paper, which was an old-looking document, and found that it
was a copy, perhaps made in this century, of the will of that same Mary
S. about whom we had been talking down-stairs.
If there is such a thing as a purely accidental coincidence this must be
considered an instance of it.
All one can say about it is that it seems very unlikely that such a
coincidence should occur, but it did.
I have not tried to keep my own personality out of these stories.
But after all, how little difference it makes whether or not a writer
appears with a mask on which everybody can take off,--whether he bolts
his door or not, when everybody can look in at his windows, and all his
entrances are at the mercy of the critic's skeleton key and the jimmy of
any ill-disposed assailant!
The company have been silent listeners for the most part; but the reader
will have a chance to become better acquainted with some cf them by and
by.