§ 8. From Biology we may pass, by an easy transition, to what is commonly known as Anthropology,—the comparative study of the different races of men in respect either of their physical characteristics, or of the early rudiments of what afterwards develops into civilisation.

The connection of anthropology with psychical research will be evident to any reader who has acquainted himself with recent expositions of Primitive Man. He may think, indeed, that the connection is too evident, and that we can hardly bring it into notice without proving a good deal more than we desire. For as the creeds and customs of savage races become better known, the part played by sorcery, divination, apparitions becomes increasingly predominant. {i-xlv} Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock have made this abundantly clear, and Mr. Spencer has gone so far as to trace all early religion to a fear of the ghosts of the dead. In the works of these and similar authors, I need hardly say, we are led to regard all these beliefs and tendencies as due solely to the childishness of savage man—as absurdities which real progress in civilisation must render increasingly alien to the developed common-sense, the rational experience of humanity. Yet it appears to me that as we trace the process of evolution from savage to civilised man, we come to a point at which the inadequacy of this explanation is strongly forced on our attention. Certainly this was my own case when I undertook some years ago to give a sketch of the Greek oracles. It soon became evident to me that the mass of phenomena included under this title had, at any rate, a psycho-physical importance which the existing works on the subject for the most part ignored. I scarcely ventured myself to do more than indicate where the real nodi of the inquiry lay. But when a massive treatise on Ancient Divination appeared from the learned pen of M. Bouché-Leclercq, I looked eagerly to see whether his erudition had enabled him to place these problems in a new light. I found, however, that he explicitly renounced all attempt to deal with the phenomena in more than a merely external way. He would record, but he would make no endeavour to explain;—taking for granted, as it appeared, that the explanation depended on fraud alone, and on fraud whose details it would now be impossible to discover.

I cannot think that such a view can any longer satisfy persons adequately acquainted with the facts of hypnotism. Whatever else, whether of fraud or reality, there may have been on the banks of Cassotis or Castaly,—unde superstitiosa primum sacra evasit vox fera, whence the wild voice first sounded out from the prophetic holy places—there were at least the hypnotic trance and hystero-epilepsy. And until these and similar elements can be sifted out of the records left to us, with something of insight gained by familiarity with their modern forms, our knowledge of Pythia or of Sibyl will be shallow indeed.

Still more markedly is such insight and experience needed in anthropology proper—in the actual observation of the savage peoples who still exist. It is to be hoped that shamans and medicine-men will not vanish before the missionary until they have yielded some fuller lessons to the psycho-physicist—until the annals of the Salpêtrière and the experiments of Dean’s Yard have been invoked in explanation of the weird terrors of the Yenisei and the Congo.

§ 9. Passing on from Anthropology to history in its wider acceptation, we find these psycho-physical problems perpetually recurring, and forming a disturbing element in any theory of social or religious evolution. The contagious enthusiasms of the Middle Ages—the strange endemic maladies of witchcraft, vampirism, lycanthropy—even the individual inspiration of a Mahomet or a Joan of Arc—these are phenomena which the professed historian feels obliged to leave to the physician and the alienist, and for which the physician and the alienist, in their turn, have seldom a satisfactory explanation.

Nor do phenomena of this kind cease to appear with the advance of civilisation. In detailed modern histories, in the biographies of eminent men, we still come upon incidents which are, at any rate at first sight, of a supernormal^{1 1} “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 every-day life. By higher (either in a psychical or in a physiological sense), I mean ‘apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution.’”—Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. iii., p. 30. Throughout this treatise we naturally need a designation for phenomena which are inexplicable by recognised physiological laws, and belong to the general group into the nature of which we are inquiring. The term psychical (which is liable to misapprehension even in the title of our Society) can hardly be used without apology in this specialised sense. The occasional introduction of the word supernormal may perhaps be excused. kind, and over which the narrator is forced to pass with vague or inadequate comment.

But it is, of course, in dealing with the history of religions that our lack of any complete grasp of psychical phenomena is most profoundly felt. And here, also, it is as a result of recent progress,—of the growth of the comparative study of religions,—that we are able to disengage, in a generalised form, the chief problems with which our “psychical” science, if such could be established, would be imperatively called on to deal.

For we find throughout the world’s history a series of great events which, though differing widely in detail, have a certain general resemblance both to each other and to some of those incidents both of savage and of ordinary civilised life to which reference has already been made.

The elements which are common to the great majority of religions seem to be mainly two—namely, the promulgation of some doctrine which the religious reformer claims to have received, or actually to communicate, in some supernormal manner; and the report of a {i-xlvii} concurrent manifestation of phenomena apparently inexplicable by ordinary laws.

Now, with the rise of one religion our Society has already had practically to deal. Acting through Mr. Hodgson, whose experiences in the matter have been elsewhere detailed,^{1 1} Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. iii. a committee of the Society for Psychical Research has investigated the claim of the so-called “Theosophy,” of which Madame Blavatsky was the prophetess, to be an incipient world-religion, corroborated by miraculous, or at least supernormal, phenomena,—and has arrived at the conclusion that it is merely a réchauffé Literally “warmed leftover food” of ancient philosophies, decked in novel language, and supported by ingenious fraud. Had this fraud not been detected and exposed, and had the system of belief supported thereon thriven and spread, we should have witnessed what the sceptic might have cited as a typical case of the origin of religions. A Gibbon of our own day, reviewing the different motives and tendencies which prompt, or spread, revelations, might have pointed to Theosophy and Mormonism as covering between them the whole ground;—from the adroit advantage taken of mystical aspiration in the one religion, to the commonplace action of greed and lust upon helplessness and stupidity which forms the basis of the other.

§ 10. But reflections like these lie on the outskirts of a still larger and graver question. What (it is naturally asked) is the relation of our study—not to eccentric or outlying forms of religious creed—but to central and vital conceptions; and especially to that main system of belief to which in English-speaking countries the name of religion is by popular usage almost confined?

Up till this time those who have written on behalf of the Society for Psychical Research have studiously refrained from entering on this important question. Our reason for this reticence is obvious enough when stated, but it has not been universally discerned. We wished to avoid even the semblance of attracting the public to our researches by any allurement which lay outside the scientific field. We could not take for granted that our inquiries would make for the spiritual view of things, that they would tend to establish even the independent existence, still less the immortality, of the soul. We {i-xlix} shrank from taking advantage of men’s hopes or fears, from representing ourselves as bent on rescuing them from the materialism which forms so large a factor in modern thought, or from the pessimism which dogs its steps with unceasing persistency. We held it to be incumbent on us, in an especial degree, to maintain a neutral and expectant attitude, and to conduct our inquiries in the “dry light” of a dispassionate search for truth.

And this position we still maintain. This book, as will be seen, does not attempt to deal with the most exciting and popular topics which are included in our Society’s general scheme. And we shall be careful in the pages that follow to keep within our self-assigned limits, and to say little as to any light which our collected evidence may throw on the possibility of an existence continued after our physical death.

That master-problem of human life must be assailed by more deliberate approaches, nor must we gild our solid arguments with the radiance of an unproved surmise. But it would, nevertheless, be impossible, in a discussion of this general kind, to pass over the relation of psychical research to religion altogether in silence. And, indeed, since our inquiries began, the situation has thus far changed that we have now not anticipation merely, but a certain amount of actual achievement, to which to appeal. We hold that we have proved by direct experiment, and corroborated by the narratives contained in this book, the possibility of communications between two minds, inexplicable by any recognised physical laws, but capable (under certain rare spontaneous conditions) of taking place when the persons concerned are at an indefinite distance from each other. And we claim further that by investigations of the higher phenomena of mesmerism, and of the automatic action of the mind, we have confirmed and expanded this view in various directions, and attained a standing-point from which certain even stranger alleged phenomena begin to assume an intelligible aspect, and to suggest further discoveries to come.

Thus far the authors of this book, and also the main group of their fellow-workers, are substantially agreed. But their agreement as to the facts actually proved does not extend,—it is not even to be desired that it should extend—to the speculations which in one direction or another such facts must inevitably suggest. They are facts which go too deep to find in any two minds a precisely similar lodgment, or to adjust themselves in the same way to the complex of {i-l} pre-existent conceptions. The following paragraphs, therefore, must be taken merely as reflecting the opinions provisionally held by a single inquirer.

I may say, then, at once that I consider it improbable that telepathy will ever receive a purely physical explanation,—an explanation, that is to say, wholly referable to the properties of matter, as molecular matter is at present known to us. I admit, of course, that such an explanation is logically conceivable; that we can imagine that undulations should be propagated, or particles emitted, from one living organism to another, which should excite the percipient organism in a great variety of ways. But it seems to me,—and I imagine that in this view at any rate the majority of Materialists will concur,—that if the narratives in this book are to be taken as, on the whole, trustworthy, the physical analogies are too faint, and the physical difficulties too serious, to allow of our intruding among the forces of material Nature a force which—unlike any other—would seem (in some cases at least) neither to be diminished by any distance nor to be impeded by any obstacle whatsoever.

I lay aside, for the purposes of the present argument, the possibility of a monistic scheme of the universe,—of a consentiens conspirans continuata cognatio rerum the harmonious, concordant, and unbroken connection which there is in things [Cicero, De Natura Deorum Liber Secundus vii:19; trans. Francis Brooks, 1896] which may present in an unbroken sequence both what we know as Matter and what we know as Mind. Such a view,—though to higher intelligences it may perhaps be an intuitive certainty,—can for us be nothing more than a philosophic opinion. Our scientific arguments must needs be based on the dualism which our intellects, as at present constituted, are in fact unable to transcend.

I maintain, therefore, that if the general fact of telepathic communication between mind and mind be admitted, it must also be admitted that an element is thus introduced into our conception of the aggregate of empirically known facts which constitutes a serious obstacle to the materialistic synthesis of human experience. The psychical element in man, I repeat, must henceforth almost inevitably be conceived as having relations which cannot be expressed in terms of matter.

§ 11. I shall leave this proposition expressed thus in its most abstract and general form. And I may add—it is a reflection which I must ask the reader to keep steadily in mind,—that any support or illumination which religious creeds may gain from psychical inquiry is likely to affect not their clauses but their preamble; is likely to come, not as a sudden discovery bearing directly on some specific dogma, but as the gradual discernment of laws which may fundamentally modify the attitude of thoughtful minds.

Now, in what I have called the preamble of all revelations two {i-lii} theses are generally involved, quite apart from the subject-matter, or the Divine sanction, of the revelation itself. We have to assume, first, that human testimony to supernormal facts may be trustworthy; and secondly, that there is something in the nature of man which is capable of responding to—I may say of participating in—these supernormal occurrences. That is to say, revelations are not proved merely by large external facts, perceptible to every one who possesses the ordinary senses, nor again are they proved solely by what are avowedly mere subjective impressions, but they are largely supported by a class of phenomena which comes between these two extremes; by powers inherent in certain individuals of beholding spiritual visions or personages unseen by common eyes, of receiving information or guidance by interior channels, of uttering truths not consciously acquired, of healing sick persons by the imposition of hands, with other faculties of a similarly supernormal kind.

And I hope that I shall not be thought presumptuous or irreverent if (while carefully abstaining from direct comment on any Revelation) I indicate what, in my view, would be the inevitable effect on the attitude of purely scientific minds towards these preliminary theses,—this preamble, as I have said, of definite religions,—were the continued prosecution of our inquiry to lead us after all to entirely negative conclusions, were all our evidence to prove untrustworthy, and all our experiments unsound.

For in the first place it is plain that this new science of which we are endeavouring to lay the foundations stands towards religion in a very different position from that occupied by the rising sciences, such as geology or biology, whose conflict or agreement with natural or revealed religion has furnished matter for so much debate. The discoveries of those sciences can scarcely in themselves add support to a doctrine of man’s soul and immortality, though they may conceivably come into collision with particular forms which that doctrine has assumed. Religion, in short, may be able to assimilate them, but it would in no way have suffered had they proved altogether abortive.

But with our study the case is very different. For, to take the first of the two preliminary theses of religion already referred to, the question whether human evidence as to supernormal occurrences can ever be trusted has been raised by our inquiries in a much more crucial form than when Hume and Paley debated it with reference to historical incidents only. We discuss it with reference to alleged {i-liii} contemporary incidents; we endeavour to evaluate by actual inspection and cross-examination the part which is played in supernormal narratives by the mere love of wonder, “the mythopoeic faculty,” the habitual negligence and ignorance of mankind. And if all the evidence offered to us should crumble away on exact investigation—as, for instance, the loudly-vaunted evidence for the marvels connected with Theosophy has crumbled—it will no doubt be questioned whether the narratives on which the historic religions depend for their acceptance could have stood the test of a contemporaneous inquiry of a similarly searching kind.

And more than this, it will not only be maintained that the collapse of our modern evidence to supernormal phenomena discredits all earlier records of the same kind by showing the ease with which such marvels are feigned or imagined, but also that it further discredits those records by making them even more antecedently improbable than they were before. Not only will it be said that the proved fallibility of the modern witnesses illustrates the probable fallibility of the ancient ones, but the failure of the inquiry to elicit any indication that supernormal faculties do now exist in man will pro tantoto that extent throw a retrospective improbability on the second of the preliminary theses of religion, which assumes that some such supernormal faculty did at any rate exist in man at a given epoch. It may indeed be urged that such faculties were given for a time, and for a purpose, and were then withdrawn. But the instinct of scientific continuity, which even in the shaping of the solid continents is fain to substitute for deluge and cataclysm the tideway and the ripple and the rain, will rebel against the hypothesis of a bygone age of inward miracles,—a catastrophic interference with the intimate nature of man.

I will illustrate my meaning by a concrete example, which does not involve any actual article of Protestant faith. The ecstacy and the stigmata of St. Francis are an important element in Roman Catholic tradition. They are to some extent paralleled in the present day by the ecstacy and the stigmata of Louise Lateau. And Catholic instinct has discerned that if this modern case be decided to be merely morbid, and in no true sense supernormal, a retrospective discredit will be cast on the earlier legend. The old reluctance of the Catholic Church to submit her phenomena to scientific assessors has therefore to some extent been overcome; and Catholic physicians, under ecclesiastical authority, have discussed Louise Lateau’s case in the forms of an ordinary medical report.

Enough will have been said to indicate the reality of the connection between our inquiries and the preliminary theses of religion. And so far as our positive results go in this direction, they will perhaps carry the more weight in that they are independently obtained, and intended to subserve scientific rather than religious ends;—coming, indeed, from men who have no developed theory of their own to offer, and are merely following the observed facts wherever they may seem to lead. I see no probability, I may add, that our results can ever supply a convincing proof to any specialised form of religion. The utmost that I anticipate is, that they may afford a solid basis of general evidence to the independence of man’s spiritual nature, and its persistence after death, on which basis, at any rate, religions in their specialised forms may be at one with science, and on which the structure of definite revelation (which must be up-built by historical or moral arguments) may conceivably be planted with a firmness which is at present necessarily lacking.

§ 12. I have been speaking thus far of religion in its full sense, as a body of doctrine containing some kind of definite assurance as to an unseen world. But the form of religious thought which specially characterises our own day is somewhat different from this. We are accustomed rather to varying attempts to retain the spirit, the aroma of religion, even if its solid substratum of facts previously supposed provable should have to be abandoned. The discoursers on things spiritual who have been most listened to in our own day—as Carlyle, Emerson, Mazzini, Renan, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, &c.,—have been to a very small extent dogmatic on the old lines. They have expressed vague, though lofty, beliefs and aspirations, in which the eye of science may perhaps see little substance or validity, but which nevertheless have been in a certain sense more independent, more spontaneous, than of old, since they are less often prompted by any faith instilled from without, and resemble rather the awakening into fuller consciousness of some inherited and instinctive need.

And this brings us by an easy transition to the next topic, on which I wish to dwell. For I wish to point out that the emotional creed of educated men is becoming divorced from their scientific creed; that just as the old orthodoxy of religion was too narrow to contain men’s knowledge, so now the new orthodoxy of materialistic science is too narrow to contain their feelings and aspirations; and {i-lv} consequently that just as the fabric of religious orthodoxy used to be strained in order to admit the discoveries of geology or astronomy, so now also the obvious deductions of materialistic science are strained or overpassed in order to give sanction to feelings and aspirations which it is found impossible to ignore. My inference will, of course, be that in this vaguer realm of thought, as well as in the more distinctly-defined branches of knowledge which we have already discussed, the time is ripe for some such extension of scientific knowledge as we claim that we are offering here—an extension which, in my view, lifts us above the materialistic standpoint altogether, and which gives at least a possible reality to those subtle intercommunications between spirit and spirit, and even between visible and invisible things, of which Art and Literature are still as full as in any “Age of Faith” which preceded us.

I point, then, to the obvious fact that the spread of Materialism has not called into being Materialists only of those simple types which were commonly anticipated a century since as likely to fill a world of complete secularity.

Materialists, indeed, of that old unflinching temper do exist, and form a powerful and influential body. It would have been strange, indeed, if recent advances in physiology had not evoked new theories of human life, and a new ideal. For the accepted commonplaces of the old-fashioned moralist are being scattered with a ruthless hand. Our free will, over great portions at least of its once supposed extent, is declared to be an illusion. Our highest and most complex emotions are traced to their rudimentary beginnings in the instincts of self-preservation and reproduction. Our vaunted personality itself is seen to depend on a shifting and unstable synergy of a number of nervous centres, the defect of a portion of which centres may alter our character altogether. And meantime Death, on the other hand, has lost none of its invincible terrors. The easy way in which our forefathers would speak of “our mortal and immortal parts” is hard to imitate in face of the accumulating testimony to the existence of the one element in us, and the evanescence of the other. And since the decay and dissolution of man seem now to many minds to be so much more capable of being truly known than his survival or his further evolution, it is natural that much of the weight which once belonged to the prophets of what man hoped should pass to those who can speak with authority on what man needs must fear. Thus “mad-doctors” tend to supplant theologians, and the lives of {i-lvi} lunatics are found to have more lessons for us than the lives of saints. For these thinkers know well that man can fall below himself; but that he can rise above himself they can believe no more. A corresponding ideal is gradually created; an ideal of mere sanity and normality, which gets to look on any excessive emotion or fixed idea, any departure from a balanced practicality, with distrust or disfavour, and sometimes rising to a kind of fervour of Philistinism, classes genius itself as a neurosis.

The alienists who have taken this extreme view have usually, perhaps, been of opinion that in thus discrediting the higher flights of imagination or sentiment we are not losing much; that these things are in any case a mere surplusage, and that the ends which life is really capable of attaining can be compassed as well without them. But if the materialistic theory be the true one, these limitations of ideal might well be adopted even by men who would deeply regret what they were thus renouncing. It might well seem that, in abandoning the belief in any spiritual or permanent element in man, it were wise to abandon also that intensity of the affections which is ill-adapted to bonds so perishable and insecure, that reach of imagination which befitted only the illusory dignity which was once attached to human fates.

But in fact, as I have already implied, the characteristic movement of our own country, at any rate, at the present day, is hardly in this direction. Our prevalent temper is not so much materialistic as agnostic; and although this renouncement of all knowledge of invisible things does in a sense leave visible things in sole possession of the field, yet the Agnostic is as far as anyone from being “a hog from Epicurus’ sty.” Rather, instead of sinking into the materialistic ideal of plain sense and physical well-being, the rising schools of thought are transcending that ideal more and more. Altruism in morals, idealism in art, nay, even the sentiment of piety itself, as a decorative grace of life,—all these, it is urged, are consistent with a complete and contented ignorance as to aught beyond the material world.

I need not here embark on the controversy as to how far this aspiration towards “the things of the spirit” is logically consistent with a creed that stops short with the things of sense. It is quite enough for my present purpose to point out that here also, as in the case of more definite religions, we have a system of beliefs and emotions which may indeed be able to accommodate themselves to modern {i-lvii} science, but which are in no sense supported thereby; rather which science must regard as, at best, a kind of phosphorescence which plays harmlessly about minds that Nature has developed by other processes and for other ends than these.

For my argument is that here again, as in the case of religion, telepathy, as we affirm it in this book, would be the first indication of a possible scientific basis for much that now lacks not only experimental confirmation, but even plausible analogy. We have seen how much support the preliminary theses of religion may acquire from an assured conviction that the human mind is at least capable of receiving supernormal influences,—is not closed, by its very structure, as the Materialists would tell us, to any “inbreathings of the spirit” which do not appeal to outward eye or ear. And somewhat similar is the added reality which the discovery of telepathy gives to the higher flights, the subtler shades, of mere earthly emotion.

The lover, the poet, the enthusiast in any generous cause, has in every age unconsciously answered Lord Tennyson’s question for himself. To some men, as to Goethe, the assurance of this subtle intercommunication has come with vivid distinctness in some passion-shaken hour. Others, as Bacon, have seemed to gather it from the imperceptible indicia of a lifelong contemplation of man. But the step which actual experimentation, the actual collection and collation of evidence, has now, as we believe, effected, is a greater one than could have been achieved by any individual intuition of bard or sage. For we have for the first time a firm foothold in this impalpable realm; we know that these unuttered messages do truly travel, that these emotions mix and spread; and though we refrain as yet from further dwelling on the corollaries of this far-reaching law, it is not because such speculations need any longer be baseless, but because we desire to set forth the proof of our theorem in full detail before we do more than hint at the new fields which it opens to human thought.

§ 13. Pausing, therefore, on the threshold of these vaguer promises, I may indicate another direction, in which few will deny that a systematic investigation like ours ought to produce results eminently salutary. It ought to be as much our business to check the growth of error as to promote the discovery of truth. And there is plenty of evidence to show that so long as we omit to subject all alleged supernormal phenomena to a thorough comparative scrutiny, {i-lviii} we are not merely postponing a possible gain, but permitting an unquestioned evil.

§ 14. Enough, however, has now been said to indicate the general tenor of the task which the Society for Psychical Research has undertaken. It remains to indicate the place which the present work occupies in the allotted field, and the reasons for offering it to public consideration at this early stage of our inquiry.

We could not, of course, predict or pre-arrange the order in which opportunities of successful investigation might occur to the searchers in this labyrinth of the unknown. Among the groping experiments which seemed to have only too often led to mere mistake and confusion,—the “thousand pathways”

it was not easy to choose with confidence our adit of exploration. The approach which proved most quickly productive was one from which it might have seemed that there was little indeed to hope. A kind of drawing-room game sprang up—it is hard to say whence—a method of directing a subject to perform a desired act by a contact so slight that no conscious impulsion was either received or given. Careful observers soon ranked the “willing-game” as an illustration of involuntary muscular action on the willer’s part, affording a guidance to which the subject yielded sometimes without being aware of it. But while the modus operandi of public exhibitions of this misnamed “thought-reading” was not difficult to detect, Professor Barrett was one of the first who—while recognising all these sources of error—urged the duty of persistent watching for any residuum of true thought-transference which might from time to time appear. As will be seen from Chap. II. of this book it was not till after some six years of inquiry and experiment (1876–82) that definite proof of thought-transference in the normal state could be placed before the world. This was done in an article in the Nineteenth Century for June, 1882, signed by Professor Barrett, Mr. Gurney, and myself. The phenomenon of transmission of thought or sensation without the agency of the recognised organs of sense had been previously recorded in connection with the mesmeric state, but, so far as we know, its occasional occurrence in the normal state was now for the first time maintained on the strength of definite experiment. And the four years 1882–1886 have witnessed a great extension of those experiments, which no longer rest on the integrity and capacity of the earliest group of observers alone.

§ 15. The foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 gave an opportunity to Mr. Gurney and myself, as Hon. Secs. of a Literary Committee, to invite from the general public records of apparitions at or after death, and other abnormal occurrences. On reviewing the evidence thus obtained we were struck with the great predominance of alleged apparitions at or near the moment of death. And a new light seemed to be thrown on these phenomena by the unexpected frequency of accounts of apparitions of living persons, coincident with moments of danger or crisis. We were led to infer a strong analogy between our experimental cases of thought-transference and some of these spontaneous cases of what we call telepathy, or transference of a shock or impulse from one living person to another person at such a distance or under such conditions as to negative the possibility of any ordinary mode of transmission. An article, signed by Mr. Gurney and myself, in the Fortnightly Review for March, 1883, gave a first expression to the analogy thus suggested. The task of collection and scrutiny grew on our hands; Mr. Podmore undertook to share our labours; and the Council of the Society for Psychical Research requested us to embody the evidence received in a substantive work.

§ 16. In a certain sense it may be said that this hidden action of one mind on another comes next in order of psychical discovery to the hidden action of the mind within itself. It will be remembered that the earliest scientific attempts to explain the phenomena of so-called Spiritualism referred them mainly to “unconscious cerebration,” (Carpenter,) or to what was virtually the same thing, “unconscious muscular action” (Faraday).

Now these theories, in my view, were, so far as they went, not only legitimate, but the most logical which could have been suggested to explain the scanty evidence with which alone Faraday and Carpenter attempted to deal. This unconscious action of the mind was in reality the first thing which it was needful to take into account in approaching supernormal phenomena. I believe, indeed, that our knowledge of those hidden processes of mentation is still in its infancy, and I have elsewhere endeavoured to assign a wider range than orthodox science has yet admitted to the mind’s unconscious operation.^{1 1} See Proceedings of the S.P.E., Vols. ii. and iii. But the result of this further analysis has been (as I hold) not to show that ordinary physiological considerations will suffice (as Dr. Carpenter seems to suppose) to explain all the psychical problems involved, but rather to reveal the fact that these unconscious operations of the mind do not follow the familiar channels alone, but are themselves the facilitation or the starting-point of operations which to science are wholly new.

To state the matter broadly, so as to include in a common formula the unremembered utterances of the hypnotic subject, and the involuntary writings of the waking automatist, I would maintain that when the horizon of consciousness is altered, the opening field of view is not always or wholly filled by a mere mirage or refraction of objects already familiar, but does, on rare occasions, include new objects, as real as the old. And amongst the novel energies thus liberated, the power of entering into direct communication with other intelligences seems to stand plainly forth. Among the objects in the new prospect are fragments of the thoughts and feelings of distant minds. It seems, at any rate, that some element of telepathy is perpetually meeting us throughout the whole range of these inquiries. In the first place, thought-transference is the only supernormal phenomenon which we have as yet acquired the power of inducing, even occasionally, in the normal state. It meets us also in the {i-lxiii} hypnotic trance, under the various forms of “community of sensation,” “silent willing,” and the like. Among the alleged cases of “mesmeric clairvoyance” the communication of pictures of places from operator to subject seems the least uncertain ground. And again, among phenomena commonly attributed to “spirits,” (but many of which may perhaps be more safely ascribed to the automatic agency of the sensitive himself,) communication of thought still furnishes our best clue to “trance-speaking,” “clairvoyant vision,” answers to mental questions and the like. It need not, therefore, surprise us if, even in a field so apparently remote from all ordinary analogies as that of apparitions and death-wraiths, we still find that telepathy affords our most satisfactory clue.

§ 17. And here would seem to be the fitting place to explain why we have given the title of “Phantasms of the Living” to a group of records most of which will present themselves to the ordinary reader as narratives of apparitions of the dead.

When we began, in a manner to be presently described, to collect accounts of experiences which our informants regarded as inexplicable by ordinary laws, we were of course ignorant as to what forms these experiences would mainly take. But after printing and considering over two thousand depositions which seemed primâ facie to deserve attention, we find that more than half of them are narratives of appearances or other impressions coincident either with the death of the person seen or with some critical moment in his life-history.

The value of the accounts of apparitions after death is lessened, moreover, by a consideration which is obvious enough as soon as these narratives come to be critically considered. The difficulty in dealing with all these hallucinations—with all appearances to which no persistent three-dimensional reality corresponds—is to determine whether they are veridical, or truth-telling—whether, that is, they do in fact correspond to some action which is going on in some other place or on some other plane of being;—or whether, on the other hand, they are merely morbid or casual—the random and meaningless fictions of an over-stimulated eye or brain. Now in the case of apparitions at the moment of death or crisis, we have at any rate an objective fact to look to. If we can prove that a great number of apparitions coincide with the death of the person seen, we may fairly say, as we do say, that chance alone cannot explain this {i-lxiv} coincidence, and that there is a causal connection between the two events. But if I have a vision of a friend recently dead, and on whom my thoughts have been dwelling, we cannot be sure that this may not be a merely delusive hallucination—the mere offspring of my own brooding sorrow. In order to get at all nearly the same degree of evidence for a dead person’s appearance that we can get for a dying person’s appearance, it seems necessary that the apparition should either communicate some fact known only to the deceased, or should be noted independently by more than one person at once or successively. And our evidence of this kind is at present scarcely sufficient to support any assured conclusion.^{1 1} See Mrs. Sidgwick’s paper on “The Evidence, collected by the Society, for Phantasms of the Dead,” in Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. iii.

§ 18. The main theses of this book, then, are now capable of being stated in a very simple form.

I. Experiment proves that telepathy—the supersensory^{1 1} By “supersensory” I mean “independent of the recognised channels of sense.” I do not mean to assert that telepathic perception either is or is not analogous to sensory perception of the recognised kinds. transference of thoughts and feelings from one mind to another,—is a fact in Nature.

II. Testimony proves that phantasms (impressions, voices, or figures) of persons undergoing some crisis,—especially death,—are perceived by their friends and relatives with a frequency which mere chance cannot explain.

III. These phantasms then, whatever else they may be, are instances of the supersensory action of one mind on another. The second thesis therefore confirms, and is confirmed by, the first. For if telepathy exists, we should anticipate that it would exhibit some spontaneous manifestations, on a scale more striking than our experimental ones. And, on the other hand, apparitions are rendered more credible and comprehensible by an analogy which for the first time links them with the results of actual experiment.

Such are the central theses of this work,—theses on which its authors, and the friends whom they have mainly consulted, are in entire agreement. The first thesis may, of course, be impugned by urging that our experiments are fallacious. The second thesis may be impugned by urging that our testimony is insufficient. The third thesis, as I have here worded it, is hardly open to separate attack; being a corollary which readily follows if the first two theses are taken as proved.

This, however, is only the case so long as the third thesis, which asserts the analogy between thought-transference and apparitions—between experimental and spontaneous telepathy—is stated in a vague and general form. So soon as we attempt to give more precision to this analogy—to discuss how far the unknown agency at work can be supposed to be the same in both cases—or how far the apparitions may be referable to quite other, though cognate, laws,—we enter on a field where even those who have accepted the analogy in general terms are likely to find the evidence leading them to somewhat divergent conclusions. Of two men independently studying our records of apparitions, the one will almost inevitably press their analogy to simple telepathy further than the other. And each will be able to plead that he has been guided as far as possible by an instinct of scientific caution in thus judging of matters strange and new. The first will say that “causes are not to be multiplied without necessity,” and that we have now in telepathy a vera causatrue cause whose furthest possibilities we ought to exhaust before invoking still stranger, still remoter agencies, whose very existence we are not in a position to prove. He will feel bound therefore to dwell on the points on which our knowledge either of telepathy, or of the mechanism of hallucinations {i-lxvii} in general, throws some light; and he will set aside as at present inexplicable such peculiarities of our evidence as cannot well be brought within this scheme.

The second inquirer, on the other hand, will perhaps feel strongly that telepathy, as we now know it, is probably little more than a mere preliminary conception, a simplified mode of representing to ourselves a group of phenomena which, as involving relations between minds, may probably be more complex than those which involve even the highest known forms of matter. He will feel that, while we hold one clue alone, we must be careful not to overrate its efficacy; we must be on the watch for other approaches, for hints of inter-relation between disparate and scattered phenomena.

It is to the first of these two attitudes of mind,—the attitude which deprecates extraneous theorising,—that Mr. Gurney and Mr. Podmore have inclined; and the committal of the bulk of this work to Mr. Gurney’s execution indicates not only that he has been able to devote the greatest amount of time and energy to the task, but also that his view is on the whole the most nearly central among the opinions which we have felt it incumbent on us to consult. We have no wish, however, to affect a closer agreement than actually exists; and in a “Note on a Suggested Mode of Psychical Interaction,” which will be found in Vol. II., I shall submit a view which differs from Mr. Gurney’s on some theoretical points.

§ 19. The theories contained in this book, however, bear a small proportion to the mass of collected facts. A few words as to our method of collection may here precede Mr. Gurney’s full discussion (Chapter IV.) of the peculiar difficulties to which our evidence is exposed.

It soon became evident that if our collection was to be satisfactory it must consist mainly of cases collected by ourselves, and of a great number of such cases. The apparitions at death, &c., recorded by previous writers, are enough, indeed, to show that scattered incidents of the kind have obtained credence in many ages and countries. But they have never been collected and sifted with any systematic care; and few of them reach an evidential standard which could justify us in laying them before our readers. And even had the existing stock of testimony been large and well-assured, it would still have been needful for us to collect our own specimens in situ,—to see, talk with, and correspond with the persons to whose strange experiences {i-lxviii} so much weight was to be given. This task of personal inquiry,—whose traces will, we hope, be sufficiently apparent throughout the present work,—has stretched itself out beyond expectation, but has also enabled us to speak with a confidence which could not have been otherwise acquired. One of its advantages is the security thus gained as to the bona fides of the witnesses concerned. They have practically placed themselves upon their honour; nor need we doubt that the experiences have been, as a rule, recounted in all sincerity. As to unintentional errors of observation and memory, Mr. Gurney’s discussion will at least show that we have had abundant opportunities of learning how wide a margin must be left for human carelessness, forgetfulness, credulity. “God forbid,” said the flute-player to Philip of Macedon, “that your Majesty should know these things as well as I!”

It must not, however, be inferred from what has been said that our informants as a body have shown themselves less shrewd or less accurate than the generality of mankind. On the contrary, we have observed with pleasure that our somewhat persistent and probing method of inquiry has usually repelled the sentimental or crazy wonder-mongers who hang about the outskirts of such a subject as this; while it has met with cordial response from an unexpected number of persons who feel with reason that the very mystery which surrounds these incidents makes it additionally important that they should be recounted with sobriety and care. The straightforward style in which most of our informants have couched their narratives, as well as the honoured names which some of them bear, may enable the reader to share something of the confidence which a closer contact with the facts has inspired in our own minds.

Again, it seemed necessary that the collection offered to the public should be a very large one, even at the cost of including in a Supplement some remote or second-hand cases besides the first-hand cases which alone are admitted into the chapters of this book. If, indeed, our object had been simply to make out a case for the connection of deaths with apparitions, we might have offered a less assailable front, and should certainly have spared ourselves much trouble, had we confined ourselves to giving in detail a few of the best-attested instances. But what we desired was not precisely this. We hope, no doubt, that most of our readers may ultimately be led to conclusions resembling our own. But before our conclusions can expect to gain general acceptance, many other {i-lxix} hypotheses will doubtless be advanced, and coincidence, superstition, fraud, hysteria, will be invoked in various combinations to explain the evidence given here. We think, therefore, that it is our duty in so new a subject to afford full material for hypotheses discordant with our own; to set forth cases drawn from so wide a range of society, and embracing such a variety of circumstances, as to afford scope for every mode of origination or development of these narratives which the critic may suggest.

Furthermore, the whole subject of hallucinations of the sane—which hitherto has received very scanty treatment—seems fairly to belong to our subject, and has been treated by Mr. Gurney in Chap. XI. We have throughout contended that a knowledge of abnormal or merely morbid phenomena is an indispensable pre-requisite for the treating of any supernormal operations which may be found to exist under somewhat similar forms of manifestation.

Once more, it was plainly desirable to inquire whether hypotheses, now admitted to be erroneous, had ever been based in past times on evidence in any way comparable to that which we have adduced. The belief in witchcraft, from its wide extent and its nearness to our own times, is the most plausible instance of such a parallelism. And Mr. Gurney, in his Note on Chapter IV., has given the results of an analysis of witch-literature more laborious than previous authors had thought it worth while to undertake. The result is remarkable; for it appears that the only marvels for which respectable testimony was adduced consist obviously of ignorant descriptions of hypnotic and epileptiform phenomena now becoming familiar to science; while as to the monstrous stories—copied from one uncritical writer into another—which have given to this confused record of hypnotic and hysterical illusions the special aromas (so to say) of witchcraft or lycanthropy,—these prodigies have scarcely ever the slightest claim to be founded on any first-hand evidence at all.

§ 20. But while the material here offered for forming an opinion on all these points is, no doubt, much larger than previous writers have been at the pains to amass, we are anxious, nevertheless, to state explicitly that we regard this present collection of facts as merely preliminary; this present work as merely opening out a novel subject; these researches of a few persons during a few years as the mere first instalment of inquiries which will need {i-lxx} repetition and reinforcement to an extent which none of us can as yet foresee.

A change in the scientific outlook so considerable as that to which these volumes point must needs take time to accomplish. Time is needed not only to spread the knowledge of new facts, but also to acclimatise new conceptions in the individual mind. Such, at least, has been our own experience; and since the evidence which has come to us slowly and piecemeal is here presented to other minds suddenly and in a mass, we must needs expect that its acceptance by them will be a partial and gradual thing. What we hope for first is an increase in the number of those who are willing to aid us in our labours; we trust that the fellow-workers in many lands to whom we already owe so much may be encouraged to further collection of testimony, renewed experiment, when they see these experiments confirming one another in London, Paris, Berlin,—this testimony vouching for cognate incidents from New York to New Zealand, and from Manchester to Calcutta.

With each year of experiment and registration we may hope that our results will assume a more definite shape—that there will be less of the vagueness and confusion inevitable at the beginning of a novel line of research, but naturally distasteful to the savant accustomed to proceed by measurable increments of knowledge from experimental bases already assured. Such an one, if he reads this book, may feel as though he had been called away from an ordnance survey, conducted with a competent staff and familiar instruments, to plough slowly with inexperienced mariners through some strange ocean where beds of entangling seaweed cumber the trackless way. We accept the analogy; but we would remind him that even floating weeds of novel genera may foreshow a land unknown; and that it was not without ultimate gain to men that the straining keels of Columbus first pressed through the Sargasso Sea.

§ 21. Yet one word more. This book is not addressed to savants alone, and it may repel many readers on quite other than scientific grounds. Attempting as we do to carry the reign of Law into a sanctuary of belief and emotion which has never thus been invaded in detail,—lying in wait, as it were, to catch the last impulse of the dying, and to question the serenity of the dead,—we may seem to be incurring the poet’s curse on the man “who would peep and botanize upon his mother’s grave,”—to be touching the Ark of sacred {i-lxxi} mysteries with hands stained with labour in the profane and common field.

How often have men thus feared that Nature’s wonders would be degraded by being closelier looked into! How often, again, have they learnt that the truth was higher than their imagination; and that it is man’s work, but never Nature’s, which to be magnificent must remain unknown! How would a disciple of Aristotle,—fresh from his master’s conception of the fixed stars as types of godhead,—of an inhabitance by pure existences of a supernal world of their own,—how would he have scorned the proposal to learn more of those stars by dint of the generation of fetid gases and the sedulous minuteness of spectroscopic analysis! Yet how poor, how fragmentary were Aristotle’s fancies compared with our conception, thus gained, of cosmic unity! our vibrant message from Sirius and Orion by the heraldry of the kindred flame! Those imagined gods are gone; but the spectacle of the starry heavens has become for us so moving in its immensity that philosophers, at a loss for terms of wonder, have ranked it with the Moral Law.

If man, then, shall attempt to sound and fathom the depths that lie not without him, but within, analogy may surely warn him that the first attempts of his rude psychoscopes to give precision and actuality to thought will grope among “beggarly elements,”—will be concerned with things grotesque, or trivial, or obscure. Yet here also one handsbreadth of reality gives better footing than all the castles of our dream; here also by beginning with the least things we shall best learn how great things may remain to do.

The insentient has awoke, we know not how, into sentiency; the sentient into the fuller consciousness of human minds. Yet even human self-consciousness remains a recent, a perfunctory, a superficial thing; and we must first reconstitute our conception of the microcosm, as of the macrocosm, before we can enter on those “high capacious powers” which, I believe, “lie folded up in man.”

F. W. H. M.

§ 3. The novelty of this departure—as has been already intimated—consists in the fact that successful results have been obtained when the percipient was apparently in a perfectly normal state, and had been subjected to no mesmerising or hypnotising process. The dawn of the discovery must be referred to the years 1875 and 1876. It was in the autumn of the latter year that our colleague, Professor W. F. Barrett, brought under the notice of the British Association, at Glasgow, a cautious statement of some remarkable facts which he had encountered, and a suggestion of the expediency of ascertaining how far recognised physiological laws would account for them. The facts themselves were connected with mesmerism;^{1 1} Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. i., pp. 241–2. but the discussion in the Press to which the paper gave rise led to a considerable correspondence, in which Professor Barrett found his first hints of a faculty of thought-transference existing independently of the specific mesmeric rapport.

That these hints happened to be forthcoming, just at the right moment, was a piece of great good fortune, and was due {i-14} primarily to a circumstance quite unconnected with science, and from which serious results would scarcely have been anticipated—the invention of the “willing-game.” In some form or other this pastime is probably familiar to most of my readers, either through personal trials or through the exhibitions of platform performers. The ordinary process is this. A member of the party, who is to act as “thought-reader,” or percipient, leaves the room; the rest determine on some simple action which he, or she, is to perform, or hide some object which he is to find. The would-be percipient is then recalled, and his hand is taken or his shoulders are lightly touched by one or more of the willers. Under these conditions the action is often quickly performed or the object found. Nothing could at first sight look less like a promising starting-point for a new branch of inquiry. The “willer” usually asserts, with perfect good faith, and often perhaps quite correctly, that he did not push; but so little is it necessary for the guiding impression to be a push that it may be the very reverse—a slight release of tension when the “willed” performer, after various minute indications of a tendency to move in this, that, or the other wrong direction, at last hits on the right one. Even when the utmost care is used to maintain the light contact with absolute neutrality, it is impossible to lay down the limits of any given subject’s sensibility to such slight tactile and muscular hints. The experiments of Drs. Carpenter and Beard, and especially those of a member of our own Society, the Rev. E. H. Sugden, of Bradford,^{1 1} Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. i, p. 291; Vol. ii., p. 11. and other unpublished ones on which we can rely, have shown us that the difference between one person and another in this respect is very great, and that with some organisations a variation of pressure so slight that the supposed “willer” may be quite unaware of exercising it, but which he applies according as the movements of the other person are on the right track or not, may afford a kind of yes or no indication quite sufficient for a clue. This, indeed, is the one direct piece of instruction which the game has supplied. We might perhaps have been to some extent prepared for the result by observing the infinitesimal touches to which a horse will respond, or the extremely slight indications on which we ourselves often act in ordinary life. But till this game was played, probably no one fully realised that muscular hints, so slight as to be quite unconsciously given, could be equally unconsciously {i-15} taken; and that thus a definite course of action might be produced without the faintest idea of guidance on either side. In some cases it appeared that even contact could be dispensed with, and the guidance was presumably of an auditory kind—the “subject” extracting from the mere footsteps of the “willer”, who was following him about, hints of satisfaction or dissatisfaction at the course he was taking.^{1 1}See the record of Mr. A. E. Outerbridge’s experiments, published by Dr. Beard in the American Popular Science Monthly for July, 1877. But though this remarkable susceptibility to a particular order of impressions was an interesting discovery, the results which could be thus explained clearly involved nothing new in kind. That recognised faculties may exhibit unsuspected degrees of refinement is a common enough conception. The more important point was that there were certain results which, apparently, could not be thus explained, at any rate, in any off-hand way. Occasionally the actions required of the “willed” performer were of so complicated a sort, and so rapidly carried out, as to cast considerable doubt on the adequacy of any muscular hints to evoke and guide them. Here, then, was the first indication of something new—of a hitherto unrecognised faculty; and by good fortune, as I have said, Professor Barrett’s appeal for further evidence as to transferred impressions came just at the time when the game had obtained a certain amount of popularity, and when its more delicate and unaccountable phenomena had attracted attention.

Meanwhile similar observations were being made in America. America, indeed, was the original home of the “willing” entertainment; and it is to an American, Dr. McGraw, that the credit belongs of having been the first (as far as I am aware) to detect in it the possible germ of something new to science. In the Detroit Review of Medicine for August, 1875, Dr. McGraw gave a clear account of the ordinary physiological process—“the perception by a trained operator of involuntary and unconscious muscular movements”; and then proceeded as follows:—

But though there might be enough in the phenomena to justify cautious suggestions of this sort, the ground is at best very uncertain. Even where some nicety of selection is involved, as, for instance, when a particular note is to be struck on the piano, or a particular book to be taken out of a shelf, still, unless the subject’s hand moves with extreme rapidity, it will be perfectly possible for an involuntary and unconscious indication to be given by the “willer” at the instant that the right note or book is reached. In reports of such cases it is sometimes stated that there was no tentative process, and that the “subject’s” hand seemed to obey the other person’s will with almost the same directness as that person’s own hand would have done. But this is a question of degree as to which the confidence of an eye-witness cannot easily be imparted to others. It may be worth while, however, to give an instance of a less common type by which the theory of muscular guidance does undoubtedly seem to be somewhat strained.

The case was observed by Mr. Myers on October 31st, 1877. The performers were two sisters.

§ 4. If, then, the ground of experiment had remained unchanged—if the old “willing-game” had merely continued to appear in various forms—no definite advance could have been made. But on the path of the old experiments, a quite new phenomenon now presented itself, which no one could have confidently anticipated, but for which the suggestions drawn from the most advanced phenomena of the “willing-game” had to some extent prepared the way. It was discovered that not only transferences of impression could take place without contact, but that there was no necessity for the result aimed {i-18} at to involve movements; the fact of the transference might be shown, not—as in the “willing-game”—by the subject’s ability to do something, but by his ability to discern and describe an object thought of by the “willer.” Both parties could thus remain perfectly still; which was really a more important condition than even the absence of contact. In this form of experiment, muscle-reading and all the subtler forms of unconscious guidance are completely excluded; and the dangers which remain are such as can, with sufficient care, be clearly defined and safely guarded against. Indications of a visual kind—for instance, by the involuntary direction of glances—have no scope if the object which the percipient is to name is not present or visible in the room. There is, of course, an obvious danger in low whispering, or even soundless movements of the lips; while the faintest accent of approval or disapproval in question or comment may give a hint as to whether the effort is tending in the right direction, and thus guide to the mark by successive approximations. Any exhibition of the kind before a promiscuous company is nearly sure to be vitiated by the latter source of error. But when the experiments are carried on in a limited circle of persons known to each other, and amenable to scientific control, it is not hard for those engaged to set a watch on their own and on each other’s lips; and questions and comments can be entirely forbidden.

I have been speaking of the danger of involuntary guidance. There is, of course, another danger to be considered—that of voluntary guidance—of actual collusion between the agent and percipient. Contact being excluded, such guidance would have to be by signals; and it is impossible to lay down any precise limit to the degree of perfection that a plan of signalling may reach. The long and short signs of the Morse code admit of many varieties of application; and though the channels of sight and touch may be cut off, it is difficult entirely to cut off that of hearing. Shufflings of the feet, coughs, irregularities of breathing, all offer available material. But though the precise line of possibilities in this direction cannot be drawn, we are at any rate able to suggest cases where the line would be clearly overpassed. For instance, if the idea to be transferred from the agent to the percipient is inexpressible in less than twenty words; and if hearing is the only sensory channel left open; and if it is carefully observed that there are no coughs or shufflings, and that the agent’s breathing appears regular, then one seems justified in saying that the necessary information could not be conveyed by a code {i-19} without a very considerable expenditure of time, and a very abnormally acute sense of hearing on the percipient’s part. There is no relation whatever between a private experiment performed under such conditions as these, and the feats of a conjurer, like Mr. Maskelyne, who commands secret apparatus, and whose every word and gesture may be observed and interpreted by a concealed confederate.

It would be rash, however, to represent as crucial any apparent transferences of thought between persons not absolutely separated, where the good faith of at least one of the two is not accepted as beyond question, and where the genuineness of the result is left to depend on the perfection with which third parties have arranged conditions and guarded against signs. The conditions of a crucial result, for one’s own mind, are either (1) that the agent or the percipient shall be oneself; or (2) that the agent or percipient shall be someone whose experience, as recorded by himself, is indistinguishable in certainty from one’s own; or (3) that there shall be several agents or percipients, in the case of each of whom the improbability of deceit, or of such imbecility as would take the place of deceit, is so great that the combination of improbabilities amounts to a moral impossibility. The third mode of attaining conviction is the most practically important. For it is not to be expected of most people that, within a short time, they will either themselves be, or have intimate friends who are, successful agents or percipients; and they are justified, therefore, in demanding that the evidence to which they might fairly refuse credence if it depended on the veracity and intelligence of one or two persons, of however unblemished a reputation, shall be multiplied for their benefit. Whatever be the experimenter’s assurance as to the perfection of his conditions, it is in the nature of things impossible that strangers, who only read and have not seen, should be infected by it. They cannot be absolutely certain that this, that, or the other stick might not break; then enough sticks must be collected and tied together to make a faggot of a strength which shall defy suspicion.^{1 1} In reference to the objection that the demand for quantity of evidence shows that we know the quality of each item to be bad, I may quote the following passage from a presidential address of Professor Sidgwick’s: “The quality of much of our evidence—when considered apart from the strangeness of the matters to which it refers—is not bad, but very good: it is such that one or two items of it would be held to establish the occurrence, at any particular time and place, of any phenomenon whose existence was generally accepted. Since, however, on this subject the best single testimony only yields an improbability of the testimony being false that is outweighed by the improbability of the fact being true, the only way to make the scale fall on the side of the testimony is to increase the quantity. If the testimony were not good, this increase of quantity would be of little value; but if it is such that the hypothesis of its falsity requires us to suppose abnormal motiveless deceit, or abnormal stupidity or carelessness, in a person hitherto reputed honest and intelligent, then an increase in the number of cases in which such a supposition is required adds importantly to the improbability of the general hypothesis. It

§ 5. I mentioned above the correspondence which followed Professor Barrett’s appeal for evidence. In this correspondence, among many instances of the higher aspects of the “willing-game,” there was a small residue which pointed to a genuine transference of impression without contact or movement. Of this residue the most important item was that supplied by our friend, the Rev. A. M. Creery, then {i-21} resident at Buxton, and now working in the diocese of Manchester. He had his attention called to the subject in October, 1880; and was early struck by the impossibility of deciding, in cases where contact was employed, how far the powers of unconscious muscular guidance might extend. He, therefore, instituted experiments with his daughters and with a young maid-servant, in which contact was altogether eschewed. He thus describes the early trials:—

In the course of the years 1881 and 1882, a large number of experiments were made with the Creery family, first by Professor Barrett, then by Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick, by Professor Balfour Stewart, F.R.S., and Professor Alfred Hopkinson, of Owens College, Manchester, and, after the formation of the Society for Psychical Research, by the Thought-transference Committee of that body, of which Mr. Myers and myself were members. The children in turn acted as “percipients,” the other persons present being “agents,” i.e., concentrating their minds on the idea of some selected word or thing, with the intention that this idea should be transferred to the percipient’s mind. The thing selected was either a card, taken at random from a full pack; or a name chosen also at random; or a number, usually of two figures; or occasionally some domestic implement or other object in the house. The percipient was, of course, absent when the selection was made, and when recalled had no means of discovering through the exercise of the senses what it was, unless by signals, consciously or unconsciously {i-22} given by one or other of the agents. Strict silence was maintained throughout each experiment, and when the group of agents included any members of the Creery family, the closest watch was kept in order to detect any passage of signals; but in hundreds of trials nothing was observed which suggested any attempt of the sort. Still, such simple objects would not demand an elaborate code for their description; nor were any effective means taken to block the percipient’s channels of sense—it being thought expedient in these early trials not to disturb their minds by obtrusive precautions. We could not, therefore, regard the testimony of the investigators present as adding much weight to the experiments in which any members of the family were among the group of agents, unless the percipient was completely isolated from that group. Such a case was the following:—

§ 6. I have dwelt at some length on our series of trials with the members of the Creery family, as it is to those trials that we owe our own conviction of the possibility of genuine thought-transference between persons in a normal state. I have sufficiently explained that we do not expect the results to be as crucial for persons who were not present, and to whom we are ourselves unknown, as they were for us; and that it cannot be “in the mouth of two or three witnesses” only that such a stupendous fact as the transmission of ideas otherwise than through the recognised sensory channels will be established. The testimony must be multiplied; the responsibility must be spread; and I shall immediately proceed to describe further results obtained with other agents and other percipients. But first it may perhaps be asked of us why we did not exploiterwork with this remarkable family further. It was certainly our intention to do what we could in this direction, and by degrees to procure for our friends an opportunity of judging for themselves. This point, however, was one which could only be cautiously pressed. Mr. Creery was certainly justified in regarding his daughters as something more than mere subjects of experiments, and in hesitating to make a show of them to persons who might, or rather who reasonably must, begin by entertaining grave doubts as to their good faith. It must be remembered that we were dealing, not with chemical substances, but with youthful minds, liable to be reduced to confusion by anything in the demeanour of visitors which inspired distaste or alarm; and even with the best intentions, “a childly way {i-30} with children” is not easy to adopt where the children concerned are objects of suspicious curiosity. More especially might these considerations have weight, when failure was anticipated for the first attempts made under new conditions. And this suggests another difficulty, which has more than once recurred in the experimental branches of our work. The would-be spectators themselves may be unable or unwilling to fulfil the necessary conditions. Before introducing them, it is indispensable to obtain some guarantee that they on their part will exercise patience, make repeated trials, and give the “subjects” a fair opportunity of getting used to their presence. Questions of mood, of goodwill, of familiarity, may hold the same place in psychical investigation as questions of temperature in a physical laboratory; and till this is fully realised, it will not be easy to multiply testimony to the extent that we should desire.

In the case of the Creery family, however, we met with a difficulty of another kind. Had the faculty of whose existence we assured ourselves continued in full force, it would doubtless have been possible in time to bring the phenomena under the notice of a sufficient number of painstaking and impartial observers. But the faculty did not continue in full force; on the contrary, the average of successes gradually declined, and the children regretfully acknowledged that their capacity and confidence were deserting them. The decline was equally observed even in the trials which they held amongst themselves; and it had nothing whatever to do with any increased stringency in the precautions adopted. No precautions, indeed, could be stricter than that confinement to our own investigating group of the knowledge of the idea to be transferred, which was, from the very first, a condition of the experiments on which we absolutely relied. The fact has just to be accepted, as an illustration of the fleeting character which seems to attach to this and other forms of abnormal sensitiveness. It seems probable that the telepathic faculty, if I may so name it, is not an inborn, or lifelong possession; or, at any rate, that very slight disturbances may suffice to paralyse it. The Creerys had their most startling successes at first, when the affair was a surprise and an amusement, or later, at short and seemingly casual trials; the decline set in with their sense that the experiments had become matters of weighty importance to us, and of somewhat prolonged strain and tediousness to them. So, on a minor scale, in trials among our own friends, we have seen a fortunate evening, when the spectators were interested and the percipient {i-31} excited and confident, succeeded by a series of failures when the results were more anxiously awaited. It is almost inevitable that a percipient who has aroused interest by a marked success on several occasions, should feel in a way responsible for further results; and yet any real pre-occupation with such an idea seems likely to be fatal. The conditions are clearly unstable. But of course the first question for science is not whether the phenomena can be produced to order, but whether in a sufficient number of series the proportion of success to failure is markedly above the probable result of chance.

§ 7. Before leaving this class of experiments, I may mention an interesting development which it has lately received. In the Revue Philosophique for December, 1884, M. Ch. Richet, the well-known savant and editor of the Revue Scientifique, published a paper, entitled “La Suggestion Mentale et le Calcul des Probabilités,” in the first part of which an account is given of some experiments with cards precisely similar in plan to those above described. A card being drawn at random out of a pack, the “agent” fixed his attention on it, and the “percipient” endeavoured to name it. But M. Richet’s method contained this important novelty—that though the success, as judged by the results of any particular series of trials, seemed slight (showing that he was not experimenting with what we should consider “good subjects”), he made the trials on a sufficiently extended scale to bring out the fact that the right guesses were on the whole, though not strikingly, above the number that pure accident would account for, and that their total was considerably above that number.

§ 8. I may now pass to another class of experiments, in which the impression transferred was almost certainly of the visual sort, inasmuch as any verbal description of the object would require a group of words too numerous to present any clear and compact auditory character. An object of this kind is supplied by any irregular figure or arrangement of lines which suggests nothing in particular. We have had two remarkably successful series of experiments, extending over many days, in which the idea of such a figure has been telepathically transferred from one mind to another. A rough diagram being first drawn by one of the investigating Committee, the agent proceeded to concentrate his attention on it, or on the memory which he retained of it; and in a period varying from a few seconds to a few minutes the percipient was able to reproduce the diagram, or a close approximation to it, on paper. No contact was permitted, except on a few occasions, which, on that very account, we should not present as crucial; and in order to preclude the agent from giving unconscious hints—e.g., by drawing with his finger on the table or making movements suggestive of the figure in the air—he was kept out of the percipient’s sight.

Of the two series mentioned, the second is evidentially to be preferred. For in the first series the agent, as well as the percipient, was always the same person; and we recognise this as pro tantoto that extent an objection. Not indeed that the simple hypothesis of collusion would {i-36} at all meet the difficulties of the case. Faith in the power of a secret code must be carried to the verge of superstition, before it will be easy to believe that auditory signals, the material for which (as I pointed out above) is limited to the faintest variations in the signaller’s method of breathing, can fully and faithfully describe a complicated diagram; especially when the variations, imperceptible to the closest observation of the bystanders, would have to penetrate to the intelligence of a percipient whose head was enveloped in bandage, bolster-case, and blanket. But in spite of all, suspicion will, reasonably or unreasonably, attach to results which are, so to speak, a monopoly of two particular performers. In our second series of experiments this objection was obviated. There were two percipients, and a considerable group of agents, each of whom, when alone with one or other of the percipients, was successful in transferring his impression. It is this series, therefore, that I select for fuller description.

We owe these remarkable experiments to the sagacity and energy of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie, J.P., of Liverpool. At the beginning of 1883, Mr. Guthrie happened to read an article on thought-transference in a magazine, and though completely sceptical, he determined to make some trials on his own account. He was then at the head of an establishment which gives employment to many hundreds of persons; and he was informed by a relative who occupied a position of responsibility in this establishment that she had witnessed remarkable results in some casual trials made by a group of his employées after business hours. He at once took the matter into his own hands, and went steadily, but cautiously, to work. He restricted the practice of the novel accomplishment to weekly meetings; and he arranged with his friend, Mr. James Birchall, the hon. secretary of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, that the latter should make a full and complete record of every experiment made. Mr. Guthrie thus describes the proceedings:—

I must pass over the record of the earlier experiments, where the ideas transferred were of colours, geometrical figures, cards, and visible objects of all sorts, which the percipient was to name—these being similar in kind, though on the whole superior in the proportion of successes, to those already described.^{1 1} The full record of the experiments will be found in the Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. i., p. 264, &c., and Vol. ii., p. 24, &c. There is one point of novelty which is thus described by Mr. Guthrie: “We tried also the perception of motion, and found that the movements of objects exhibited could be discerned. The idea was suggested by an experiment tried with a card, which in order that all present should see, I moved about, and was informed by the percipient that it was a card, but she could not tell which one because it seemed to be moving about. On a subsequent occasion, in order to test this perception of motion, I bought a toy monkey, which worked up and down on a stick by means of a string drawing the arms and legs together. The answer was: ‘I see red and yellow, and it is darker at one end than the other. It is like a flag moving about—it is moving. … Now it is opening and shutting like a pair of scissors.’” The reproduction of diagrams was introduced in October, 1883, and in that and the following month about 150 trials were made. The whole series has been carefully mounted and preserved by Mr. Guthrie. No one could look through them without perceiving that the hypothesis of chance or guess-work is out of the question; that in most instances some idea, and in many a complete idea, of the original must, by whatever means, have been present in the mind of the person who made the reproduction. In Mr. Guthrie’s words,—

§ 9. Soon after the publication of these results, Mr. Guthrie was fortunate enough to obtain the active co-operation of Dr. Oliver J. Lodge, Professor of Physics in University College, Liverpool, who carried out a long and independent series of experiments with the same two percipients, and completely convinced himself of the genuineness of the phenomena. In his report^{1 1} Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. ii., p. 189, &c. he says:—

The objects of which the idea was transferred were sometimes things with names (cards, key, teapot, flag, locket, picture of donkey, and so on), sometimes irregular drawings with no name. Professor Lodge satisfied himself that auditory as well as visual impressions played a part—that in some cases the idea transferred was that of the object itself, and in others, that of its name; thus confirming the conclusion which we had come to in the experiments with the Creery family. Of the two percipients one seemed more susceptible to the visual, and the other to the auditory impressions. A case where the auditory element seems clearly to have come in is the following. The object was a tetrahedron rudely drawn in projection, thus—

The percipient said: “Is it another triangle?” No answer was given, but Professor Lodge silently passed round to the agents a scribbled message, “Think of a pyramid.” The percipient then said, “I only {i-50} see a triangle “—then hastily, “Pyramids of Egypt. No, I shan’t do this.” Asked to draw, she only drew a triangle.

I will give only one other case from this series, which is important as showing that the percipient may be simultaneously influenced by two minds, which are concentrated on two different things. The two agents being seated opposite to one another, Professor Lodge placed between them a piece of paper, on one side of which was drawn a square, and on the other a cross. They thus had different objects to contemplate, and neither knew what the other was looking at; nor did the percipient know that anything unusual was being tried. There was no contact. Very soon the percipient said, “I see things moving about … I seem to see two things … I see first one up there and then one down there … I don’t know which to draw … I can’t see either distinctly.” Professor Lodge said: “Well, anyhow, draw what you have seen.” She took off the bandage and drew first a square, and then said, “Then there was the other thing as well … afterwards they seemed to go into one,”—and she drew a cross inside the square from corner to corner, adding afterwards, “I don’t know what made me put it inside.” The significance of this experimental proof of joint agency will be more fully realised in connection with some of the spontaneous cases.

The following passage from the close of Professor Lodge’s report has a special interest for us, confirming, as it does, the accounts which we had received from our own former “subjects,” and the views above expressed as to the conditions of success and failure:—

§ 10. So far the present sketch has included transference of impressions of the visual and auditory sorts only—impressions, moreover, which for the most part represented formed objects or definite groups of sensations, not sensations pure and simple. These are not only by far the most important forms of the phenomenon, in relation to the wider spontaneous operations of telepathy which we shall consider in the sequel; but are also the most convenient forms for experiment. Moreover, I have been tracing the development of the subject historically; and it was in connection with ideas belonging to the higher forms of sense that the transferences to percipients who were in a normal state were first obtained. But the existence of such cases would {i-52} prepare us for transferences of a more elementary type,—transferences of a simple formless sensation and nothing more, which should impress the percipient not as an idea, but in its direct sensational character; and if the phenomena be arranged in a logical scale from the less to the more complex, such cases would have the priority. For their exhibition, it is naturally to the lower senses that we should look—taste, smell, and touch—which last (since a certain intensity of experience seems necessary) we should hardly expect to prove effective till it reached the degree of pain. These lower forms are, in fact, those which preponderate in the earlier observations of mesmeric rapport in this country; and our own experiments in mesmerism have included several instances of this sort.^{1 1} It is impossible here to give more than a selection of cases. I must refer the reader to Chap. i of the Supplement, and to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. i. p. 225, &c., Vol. ii., p. 17, &c., and p. 205, &c.; and Mr. Guthrie’s “Further Report” in Vol. iii. Thus the discovery that a similar “community of sensation” might exist between persons in a normal state, and without any resort to mesmeric or hypnotic processes, not only filled up an obvious lacuna, but gave a fresh proof of the fundamental unity of our many-sided subject.

In the case of taste, we owe the discovery to Mr. Guthrie—the phenomenon having been, we believe, first observed by him on August 30th, 1883, and first fully examined in the course of a visit which Mr. Myers and the present writer paid to him in the following week. Failing to obtain very marked success in other lines of experiment, it occurred to us to introduce this novel form; but the superiority of the results was probably due simply to the fact that they were obtained on the later days of our visit, when the “subjects” had become accustomed to our presence.

I will quote the report made at the time:—

In later experiments, Mr. Guthrie endeavoured to meet the difficulty caused by odorous substances, and even succeeded in obtaining what appeared to be transferences of smell-impressions. The “subjects” and the agents were placed in different rooms. An opening, 10½ inches square, had been made in the wooden partition between the two rooms; and this had been filled in with a frame, covered with india-rubber and fitting tightly. Through a slit in this frame the agent (Mr. Guthrie or his relative, Miss Redmond) passed a hand, which both the “subjects” could then touch. Under these conditions, as far as could be judged, it was impossible for any scent to pass; and, certainly, if any did pass, it would have needed extreme hyperæsthesia to detect it. The following results were obtained on December 5th, 1883:—

I will quote one more taste-series, for the sake of illustrating a special point—namely, the deferment of the percipient’s consciousness of the sensation until a time when the agent had himself ceased to feel it. This fact is of great interest, on account of the marked analogy to it which we shall encounter in many of the spontaneous telepathic cases. The instances below are too few to be conclusive; but we used to notice the same thing in our experiments with the Creery family—the object on which the attention of the agents had been concentrated being sometimes correctly named after the experiment had been completely abandoned as a failure. (Cf., Vol. II., p. 327.)

§ 11. We may pass now to a totally new division of experimental cases. So far the effect of thought-transference on the receiving mind has been an effect in consciousness—the actual emergence of an image or sensation which the percipient has recognised and described. But it is not necessary that the effect should be thus recognised by the percipient; his witness to it may be unconscious, instead of conscious, and yet may be quite unmistakeable. The simplest example of this is when some effect is produced on his motor system—when the impression received causes him to perform some action which proves to have distinct reference to the thought in the agent’s mind.^{1 1} Even an effect on the sensory system may bear witness to an unconscious impression, if it is an indirect effect, led up to by certain hidden processes. In the Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. i., pp. 257–60, Vol. ii., pp. 203–4, and Vol. iii., pp. 453–9, a case in point is given. A young man’s fingers having been concealed from him by a paper screen, anæsthesia and rigidity were repeatedly produced in one or another of them, by a process in which the concentrated attention of the “agent” on the particular finger proved to be an indispensable element. A psychical account of this result seems possible, if thought-transference can work, so to speak, underground. Such a case, however, may possibly indicate something beyond simple thought-transference—some sort of specific physical influence; and it should be noted that the “subject,” though at the time he was wide awake and in a perfectly normal state, had frequently on former occasions been hypnotised by the agent. It is only in connection with hypnotism, again, that we find authentic cases of the direct effect of volition in producing the identical movement willed—such as raising the hand, dropping a book, &c. Some of these will be given in the next chapter.

The cases fall into two classes. In one class the actions are purely automatic: in the other some conscious idea of what was to be done has preceded and accompanied the muscular effect; so that that effect would be at most semi-automatic. To begin with this semi-automatic class; it might be thought that examples would be found in those rarer cases of the “willing-game” where contact, and {i-59} movement on the agent’s part, are avoided. But we have received no records of such cases where it is certain that the precautions necessary to exclude the barest possibility of slight unconscious physical signs were rigidly enforced; and it will be preferable to describe some experiments made by members of our own group, where this point was kept steadily in view. We have had several interesting series in which the “subject’s” power of utterance has been inhibited by the silent determination of the operator. Our first experiments of this sort were made in January, 1883. The “subject” was our friend, Mr. Sidney Beard, who had been thrown into a light hypnotic trance by Mr. G. A. Smith. A list of twelve Yeses and Noes in arbitrary order was written by one of ourselves and put into Mr. Smith’s hand, with directions that he should successively “will”; the “subject” to respond or not to respond, in accordance with the order of the list. Mr. Beard was lying back with closed eyes; and a tuning-fork was struck and held at his ear, with the question, “Do you hear?” asked by one of ourselves. This was done twelve times with a completely successful result, the answer or the failure to answer corresponding in each case with the “yes” or “no” of the written list—that is to say, with the silently concentrated will of the agent.

§ 12. But in experiments of this class it is clearly difficult to be sure that the conscious idea of the evoked or the inhibited action does not precede or accompany the muscular effects. Indeed, as we have seen, the percipient’s own account has sometimes shown that it did so. I proceed, then, to our second class of cases. There is, fortunately, one sort of act where the verdict of the performer that it was {i-63} automatically performed may be taken as conclusive; the act of writing. If words are written down which the writer is obliged to read over, and even to puzzle over, just as anyone else might do, in order to learn what they are, his unconsciousness of them in the act of writing may be taken as established. Now written words are of course as good as spoken ones, as evidence that a particular idea has been in some way communicated. If, then, one person’s automatic writing corresponds unmistakeably to the idea on which another person’s mind was concentrated at the time, and if the possibility of sensory indications has been excluded, we have a clear example of some novel influence acting, not only without the participation of the recognised organs of sense, but without the participation of the percipient’s conscious intelligence. Here again we find the advantage of the generic word “telepathy”—for it would clearly be inaccurate to call a phenomenon “thought-transference” where what is transferred does not make its appearance, on the percipient’s side, as thought or any other form of conscious perception.

We have in our collection several examples of this motor form of experimental telepathy; where a mental question on the part of some one present has been answered in writing, with a planchette^{1 1} A planchette has two advantages over a simple pencil. It is very much more easily moved to write; and it is very much easier to make with it the movements necessary for the formation of letters without realising what the letters are. or a simple pencil, without any consciousness of either the question or the answer on the part of the person whose hand was automatically acting. But the following group of cases is decidedly the most remarkable that has come under our notice.

The Rev. P. H. Newnham, Vicar of Maker, Devonport, has had many indications of spontaneous transference of thought from himself to his wife;^{2 2} See, e.g., the cases quoted in Chap. v., §§2 and 8. and at one period of his life, in 1871, he carried out a long and systematic series of experiments, which were of the motor type that we are now considering—he writing down a question, and the planchette under his wife’s hands replying to it. He recorded the results, day by day, in a private diary, which he has kindly placed at our disposal. From this diary I quote the following extracts:—

The above quotations form a fair sample of Mr. Newnham’s 309 experiments of the same type; and no one who admits the bona fides of the record, and believes that Mrs. Newnham, sitting with closed eyes eight feet behind her husband, did not obtain through her senses an unconscious knowledge of what he wrote, will deny that some sort of telepathic influence was at work, acting below the level of the percipient’s consciousness. The experiments are further interesting as suggesting, in the character of many of the replies, an unconscious intelligence—a second self quite other than Mrs. Newnham’s conscious self. “Unconscious intelligence” is no doubt a somewhat equivocal phrase, and it is necessary to know in every case exactly what is meant by it. It may be used in a purely physical sense—to describe the unconscious cerebral processes whereby actions are produced which as a rule are held to imply conscious intelligence; as, for instance, when complicated movements, once performed with thought and effort, gradually become mechanical. But it may be used also to describe psychical processes which are severed from the main conscious current of an individual’s life. Unconsciousness in any further sense it would be rash to assert; for intelligent psychic process without consciousness of some sort, if not a contradiction in terms, is at any rate something as impossible to imagine as a fourth dimension in space. The events in question are outside the individual’s consciousness, as the events in another person’s consciousness are; but they differ from these last in not revealing themselves as part of any continuous stream of conscious life; and no one, therefore, can give an account of them as belonging to a self. What their range and conditions of emergence may be we cannot tell; since, in general, their very existence can only be inferred from certain sensible effects to which they lead.^{1 1} It may be asked what right I have to make any such inference; since à la rigueur the effects, being sensible and physical, do not require us to suppose that they had any other than physical antecedents. It is true that it is impossible to demonstrate that the physical antecedents, which undoubtedly exist, have any psychical correlative. But the results in question have often no analogy to the automatic actions which we are accustomed to attribute to “unconscious cerebration.” They are not the effects of habit and practice; they are new results, of a sort which has in all our experience been preceded by intention and reflection, and referable to a self. But perhaps the simplest illustration of what is here meant by “unconscious intelligence” is to be found in occasional facts of dreaming. Thus, it has occurred to me at least once, in a dream, to be asked a riddle, to give it up, and then to be told the answer—which, on waking, I found quite sufficiently pertinent to show that the question could not have been framed without distinct reference to it. Yet for the consciousness which I call mine, that reference had remained wholly concealed: so little had I known myself as the composer of the riddle that the answer came to me as a complete surprise. The philosophical problem of partial selves cannot be here enlarged on. For a discussion of the subject from the point of view of cerebral localisation, as well as for further quotations from Mr. Newnham’s record, I may refer the reader to Mr. Myers’ paper on “Automatic Writing,” in Vol. iii. of the Proceedings of the S.P.R. I may recall the undoubted phenomena of what {i-70} has been termed “double consciousness,” where a double psychical life is found connected with a single organism. In those cases the two selves, one of which knows nothing of the other, appear as successive; but if we can regard such segregated existences as united or unified by bonds of reference and association which, for the partial view of one of them at least, remain permanently out of sight, then I do not see what new or fundamental difficulty is introduced by conceiving them as simultaneous; and simultaneity of the sort is what seems to be shown, in a fragmentary way, by cases like the present. I shall have to recur to this conception in connection with some of the facts of spontaneous telepathy (see pp. 230–1).

A further noteworthy point is that so often the questions and not the answers in the agent’s mind should have been telepathically discerned; but we may perhaps conceive that the impulse first conveyed set the percipient’s independent activity to work, and so put an end for the moment to the receptive condition. The power to reproduce the actual word thought of is sufficiently shown in the cases where names were given (15 and 87), and in some of the Masonic answers; and the following examples belong to the same class.

48. What name shall we give to our new dog?

A. Yesterday was not a fair trial.

49. Why was not yesterday a fair trial?

A. Dog.

And again:—

108. What do I mean by chaffing C. about a lilac tree?

A. Temper and imagination.

109. You are thinking of somebody else. Please reply to my question.

A. Lilacs.

§ 13. I may now proceed to some further results which were obtained with percipients of less abnormal sensibility, and which demand, therefore, a careful application of the theory of probabilities.

For the development of the motor form of experiment in this direction, we have again to thank M. Richet; who here, as in the case of the card-guessing, has brought the calculus to bear effectively on various sets of results many of which, if looked at in separation, would have had no significance.^{1 1} I have given a fuller description and criticism of M. Richet’s investigations in Vol. ii. of the Proceedings of the S.P.R. The fact that the “subjects” of his trials were persons who had betrayed no special aptitude for “mental suggestion,” made it clearly desirable that the bodily action required should be of the very simplest sort. The formation of words by a planchette-writer requires, of course, a very complex set of muscular co-ordinations: all that M. Richet sought to obtain was a single movement or twitch. In the earlier trials an object was hidden, and the percipient endeavoured to discover it by means of a sort of divining-rod—the idea being that he involuntarily twitched the rod at the right moment under the influence of “mental suggestion” from the agent, who was watching his movements. But where the subject of communication is of such an extremely simple kind, very elaborate precautions would be needed to guard against unconscious hints. Indications from the expression or attitude of the “agent” may be prevented by blindfolding the “percipient,” and in other ways; but if the two are in close proximity, it is harder to exclude such signs as may be given by involuntary movements, or by changes of breathing. M. Richet’s later experiments were ingeniously contrived so as to obviate this objection.

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.

§ 14. The above sketch (for it is little more) may give an idea of the chief experimental results so far obtained in the course of serious and systematic research.^{2 2} Some further experimental cases will be found in Chap. i. of the Supplement, and in the Additional Chapter at the end of Vol. ii. But though the investigation may be laboriously and consecutively pursued by those who make a special study of the subject, it is one which admits also of being prosecuted in a more haphazard and sporadic manner. A group of friends may take it up for a few evenings, and then get tired of it; and it is quite possible for valuable results to be obtained without any recognition of their value. One or two specimens of these casual successes that we so {i-82} frequently hear of may be worth citing, if only because the knowledge that such results are obtainable may stimulate further trials. Our own satisfaction in such fragments of evidence is often more than counterbalanced by the impossibility of getting our friends to devote time and trouble to the work.

The following case, received in September, 1885, from Mrs. Wilson, of Westal, Cheltenham, is interesting as an apparent victory of “thought-reading” over “muscle-reading.” A group of five “willers” one of whom was in contact with the would-be percipient, were to concentrate their minds on the desire that the latter should sit down to the piano and strike the middle C. Had she done so, the result would have been worth little; but this was what happened:—

“MARY A. WILSON.

“ALICE M. W. INGRAM.”

The percipient in both the following cases was our friend, the Hon. Alexander Yorke. In the summer of 1884 he mentioned to two nieces, as a joke, that some one had suggested to him the possibility of discerning the contents of letters pressed to the forehead; and this quack suggestion led by accident to an apparently genuine experiment in thought-transference.

The account is from the Misses Adeane, of 19, Ennismore Gardens, S.W.

“MARIE C. ADEANE.

“MAUDE ADEANE.”

Again, the mother of these informants, Lady Elizabeth Biddulph, writes to us, on June 12, 1884:—

On another similar occasion, the present writer saw a letter taken up casually from a writing-table, and held to Mr. Yorke’s forehead, in such a way that he could not possibly catch a glimpse of the writing. He correctly described the writer as an elderly man, formerly connected with himself, but could not name him. The writer had, in fact, been his tutor at one time. It need hardly be said that no importance is to be attributed to the holding of the letters to the forehead. In every case the writer and the contents of the letter were known to some person in the percipient’s immediate vicinity, and that being so, any other hypothesis than that of thought-transference is gratuitous.

The following incident is an excellent casual illustration of the motor form of experiment to which the cases described on pp. 78–9 belonged. It presents, indeed, a point which would lead some to place it in a separate category: the names unexpectedly produced were those of dead persons. But where the “communication” contains nothing {i-84} beyond the content, or the possible manufacture, of the minds of the living persons present, it seems reasonable to refer it to those minds—at any rate until the power of the dead to communicate with the living be established by accumulated and irrefragable evidence.

It is, of course, a matter of interest to know what indications of genuine telepathy may be afforded by these less systematic trials. For experiments with a comparatively small number of “subjects” (like those before described), however conclusive we may consider them as to the existence of a special faculty, afford no means of judging how common that faculty may be. If it exists, {i-85} we have no reason to expect it to be extremely uncommon; on the contrary, we should rather expect to find an appreciable degree of it tolerably widely diffused. But (putting aside the results of §7, above,) our only means, at present, for judging how far this is the case is by considering the evidence of persons who were, so to speak, amateur observers, and who in some cases were not even aware that the matter had any scientific importance. Such evidence must, of course, be received with due allowances, and, if it stood alone, might be wholly inadequate to establish the case for telepathic phenomena; but if these be otherwise established, it would be illogical to shut our eyes to alleged results which fall readily into the same class, provided the trials appear to have been conducted with intelligence and care.

It is unnecessary to say that this last proviso at once excludes the vast majority of the cases which one reads about in the newspapers, or hears discussed in private circles. We have already seen that the subject of “thought-reading” has obtained its vogue by dint of exhibitions which, however clever and interesting, have no sort of claim to the name. The prime requisite is that the conditions shall preclude the possibility of unconscious guidance; that contact between the agent and the percipient shall be avoided; or that the form of experiment shall not require movements, but the percipient shall give his notion of the transferred impression—card, number, taste, or whatever it may be—by word of mouth. That these conditions have been observed is itself an indication that experiments have been intelligently conducted; and the cases of this sort of which we have received records are at any rate numerous enough to dispel the disquieting sense that the possibility of accumulating evidence for our hypothesis depends on the transient endowment of a few most exceptional individuals. I have spoken above of the urgent importance of spreading the responsibility for the evidence as widely as possible—in other words, of largely increasing the number of persons, reputed honest and intelligent, who must be either knaves or idiots if the alleged transference of thought took place through any hitherto recognised channels. And our hopes in this direction are, of course, the better founded, in so far as the necessary material for experimentation is not of extreme rarity. If what has been here said induces a wider and more systematic search for this material, and increased perseverance in following up all indications of its existence, a very distinct step will have been taken towards the general acceptance of the facts.

§ 8. In the examples that I am about to quote, one grave defect must at once be admitted. Though in all of them testimony is given by both agent and percipient, the agent in every case, and the percipient in one, withhold their names from publication. We, of course, regret this restriction exceedingly; but it can hardly be deemed unnatural or unreasonable. It must be remembered that {i-103} these cases of apparitions intentionally produced stand in a most peculiar position, as compared even with the other remarkable incidents with which we are concerned in the present work. In the case of the more normal telepathic phantasm, neither party is in the least responsible for what occurs. A dies or breaks his leg; B thinks that he sees A’s form or hears his voice: neither can help it; if their experiences coincide, that is not their business; perhaps it is a chance. But in the present class of cases, the agent determines to do something that to most of his educated fellow-creatures will appear a miracle; and however little he himself may share that view, he may still have good grounds for shrinking from the reputation either of a miracle-worker or of a miracle-monger. The percipient’s position is somewhat different; but modern miracles are by no means tempting things to get publicly mixed up with, even for a person whose share in them has been passive. And the extreme rarity of the phenomenon is another daunting fact. For a single specimen of this deliberate type of phantasm, we have a hundred specimens of the wholly spontaneous type: and the witness who is willing to give his name for publication, where he is assured that he will find himself in numerous and respectable company, may fairly hesitate when aware that the incident he records is almost unexampled.

However, it may be hoped that this difficulty, like others, will gradually be removed by a modification of public opinion on the whole subject. Meanwhile, I can but give the evidence under the conditions imposed. In the first case, the agent is slightly known to us. The percipient is our friend, the Rev. W. Stainton Moses, who believes that he has kept a written memorandum of the incident, but has been prevented by a long illness, and by pressure of work, from hunting for it among a large mass of stored-away papers. The agent’s account was written in February, 1879, and includes a few purely verbal alterations made in 1883, when Mr. Moses pronounced it correct.

The present writer 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.

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. We can therefore only wait, in the hope that time will bring fresh opportunities, and that other persons may be {i-110} induced to make the trial.¹ [☼]¹ Since this was written two further cases have been received—Nos. 685 and 686 in the Additional Chapter at the end of Vol. ii. I am strongly sensible of the natural repulsion which descriptions of such isolated marvels are likely to produce in most educated minds, and the more so when the details are of a slightly ludicrous kind. But the evidence to the facts is of such a quality that it could not have been suppressed without doing grave injustice to the case for telepathy.^{2 2}It is, of course, of prime importance in cases of this sort to obtain the direct testimony of both the parties concerned. Partly for the lack of this, and partly because the percipient had received an intimation (though a considerable time before) that the experiment was some day to be tried, I do not lay stress on the following example. At the same time it is worth quoting, as I believe the narrator (who is personally known to me) to be a careful, as he is certainly an honest, witness. Mr. John Moule, of Codicote, Welwyn, Herts, after describing how, as a young man, he had considerable success as a mesmerist, adds:— “In the year 1855, I felt very anxious to try and affect the most sensitive of my mesmeric subjects away from my house, and unknown to them. I chose for this purpose a young lady, a Miss Drasey, and stated that some day I intended to visit her wherever she might be, although the place might be unknown to me; and told her, if anything particular should occur, to note the time, and when she called at my house again, to state if anything had occurred. One day about two months after (I not having seen her in the interval) I was by myself in my chemical factory, Redman’s Row, Mile End, London, all alone, and I determined to try the experiment, the lady being in Dalston, about three miles off. I stood up, raised my hands, and willed to act upon the lady. I soon felt that I had expended energy. I immediately sat down in a chair, and went to sleep. I then saw in a dream, my friend coming down the kitchen stairs, where I dreamt I was. She saw me, and suddenly exclaimed, ‘Oh! Mr. Moule,’ and fainted away. This I dreamt, and then awoke. I thought very little about it, supposing I had had an ordinary dream; but about three weeks after she came to my house, and related to my wife the singular occurrence of her seeing me sitting in the kitchen, where she then was, and that she fainted away, and nearly dropped some dishes she had in her hands. All this I saw exactly in my dream, so that I described the kitchen furniture, and where I sat, as perfectly as if I had been there, though I had never been in the house. I gave many details, and she said, ‘It is just as if you had been there.’ After this, she made me promise that I would never do it again, as she would never feel happy with the idea of me appearing to her. Some time after this, she left this country for Australia, and died a few years afterwards.” If this record is accurate, the case differs from those given in the text, inasmuch as the effect was reciprocal, the agent himself being telepathically impressed. Cf. case 685.

§ 9. But even a reader who can sufficiently rely on our knowledge of the witnesses to feel that the evidence is important, may find an objection of another kind. He may question our right to make any theoretic connection between the experimental results before discussed and these last-described cases. I have called the phenomena of the present chapter transitional, and have pointed out the way in which they form a bridge from the experimental thought-transference of the last chapter to the spontaneous telepathy that will occupy us for the future. But it may seem that the line of connection is after all only an external one; and that there is a deep essential difference—a gulf which cannot be thus lightly crossed—between the more ordinary facts of thought-transference and these apparitions of the agent. It is not only that in the latter the percipient’s impression has been of an external object—of something not merely flashed on the mind, but independently located in space: {i-111} that might be a mere question of degree. The more radical difference is this—that what the one party perceived was not that on which the mind of the other party had been concentrated. In a “thought-transference” experiment of the normal type, the percipient’s image or idea of a card or diagram is due (as we hold) to the fact that the agent has been directing his attention to that very image or idea. But in the case of these will-produced phantasms, the agent has not been picturing his own visible aspect. So far as he has been thinking of himself at all, it has been not of his aspect particularly, but of his personality, and of his personality in relation to the percipient. It is thus probable that the percipient’s aspect has formed a larger part of the agent’s whole idea than his own; yet it is his aspect, and nothing else, that is telepathically perceived. And a similar departure from the normal

§ 8. Taking the above four items in order, the first of them—the state of the agent—is the one where the risk is smallest. To take the commonest case, the very fact, death, which makes it impossible to obtain the agent’s personal testimony, is an event as to which, of all others in his history, it is least likely that a person who knew him should be in error. It is one also as to which corroboration of the percipient’s statement is often most easily obtained; either from the verbal testimony of surviving relatives and friends, or from contemporary letters, notices, and obituaries. And where the event which has befallen the agent falls short of this degree of gravity, it is probably still sufficiently out of the common for the ascertainment of it by the percipient and others to have been natural and easy; and à fortiori sufficiently out of the common to have stamped itself on {i-133} the memory of the agent himself, who may now be available as a witness.^{1 1} The less exceptional the event, the less of course is the evidential force of the case, and the more important it is to obtain the direct testimony of the agent. A lady of my acquaintance informed me that on the 21st of October, 1883, she had a startling and distressing vision of a kind unique in her experience—in which she seemed to pay a visit to a former school-fellow, whom she had not heard of for more than ten years, to console her in a recent bereavement. The extent of my informant’s agitation and distress was testified to by a near relative, to whom she had at once narrated her experience. A few days afterwards a notice in the Times obituary showed that her friend’s husband had died on October 20th. Had the widow’s thoughts, then, in her fresh sorrow, turned to her early associate and sympathetically impressed her? The widow, perhaps, might have told us; but on inquiry we find that the wife had died some years before her husband.

When we come to the next item—the experience of the percipient—the risk of misrepresentation seems decidedly to increase. For the witness is now recounting something purely personal, for the occurrence of which he can produce no objective proofs. He says that he saw something, or heard something, or felt something, which struck him as remarkable (in many cases, indeed, as unique in his experience), and this has to be taken on his word; no external observation of him (even were anyone present with him at the time) could reveal whether he was actually experiencing these sensations which he afterwards described. Now to a careless glance it may seem that there is a loophole here, through which enough error may enter to invalidate the whole case. It may be said that the percipient was perhaps nervous, or unwell, or imaginative; and that a report of impressions which are received under such conditions cannot be relied on as evidence. But in what was said above as to errors of observation, this objection has been practically answered. It would be in place if the question were whether what he thought he perceived was really there; but it is not in place when the question is simply what he thought he perceived. We are discussing the experience of the percipient as the second of the four heads under which misrepresentation may enter. Now, misrepresentation of this experience would consist simply in the statement that he had had certain sensations or impressions which he had not had: misinterpretation of the experience—e.g., if he imagined that his friend was actually physically present where his form had been seen or his voice heard—has nothing to do with the evidential point. Grant that the percipient’s senses played him false—that his impression was a hallucination; that, as I have implied, is the very light in which we ourselves regard it; it may even be the light in which he regarded it himself. That does not prevent its being an unusual experience; and it is simply as an {i-134} unusual experience, which included an impression of his friend, that it has a place in the evidence.

Now the probability that this unusual experience has been misrepresented will be very different, according as the mention of it by the percipient precedes or follows his knowledge of what has befallen the agent. If he gives his account in ignorance of that event, and independently of any ideas which it might be calculated to awake in his mind, there seems no ground at all for supposing that he has coloured his statement, at any rate in any way which would affect its evidential value. If A, a person with a general character for truthfulness, and with no motive to deceive, mentions having had an unusual experience—a hallucination of the senses, an unaccountable impression, or whatever he likes to call it—which was strongly suggestive of B, no one will tell him that he is romancing or exaggerating, and that he had no such impression as he reports. He will simply be told that his nerves are overstrung, or that he has had a waking dream, or something of that sort. And this assumption of the truth of the statement could of course not be impugned merely because it subsequently turned out that B died at the time.

Hence, one of the points to which we have, throughout our inquiry, attached the highest value, is the proof that evidence of the percipient’s experience was in existence prior to the receipt of the news of the agent’s condition. This prior evidence may be of various sorts. The percipient may at once make a written record in a diary, or in a letter which may have been preserved. Where this has been the case, we have always endeavoured to obtain the document for inspection.^{1 1} There are cases where a sort of exactitude is required which makes documentary evidence almost indispensable. An instance may be found in the following account, sent to us by Miss Weale, who wrote from Nepaul, Croft Road, Torquay. “January 26th, 1884. “I had been—not on the day when the following was heard, but for some days previously—wondering why Dr. Pusey had not replied to a letter which I had written to him; when, sitting in our London drawing-room one day at about half-past 2 in the day, I suddenly heard Dr. Pusey speaking as if in a low voice close beside me. I was not cogitating about him, but suddenly and distinctly heard his voice speaking. The words were an answer to my letter written many days previously, and I so felt it to be the reply that I went to my writing-table and wrote it all down, and the day and hour; and moreover (how I know not) it was borne in on me, ‘Why he is at Pusey Hall, and that is why he has not sooner replied,’ and so it turned out to be. A few days after came a letter from him, written from Pusey Hall. The beginning of the letter bore the date of the day in question when I had heard his voice, but the end was dated the day previous, and in the letter were the precise sentences I had heard. “C. J. DORATEA WEALE.” In answer to inquiries, Miss Weale adds:— “It was not one sentence or two, but one side full of a small sheet of note-paper, such as he usually wrote on, but I don’t carry long letters about with me, and could not tell you the wording now. I scribbled down my waking dream as to Dr. Pusey’s words, being amazed at the vivid sense of his presence and voice, and all I wrote down was in the note.” Now everything here depends on the exact accuracy of the words. They were admittedly an answer to a letter, and their general tenor might easily have been surmised; unless, therefore, the words were identical, the case could be explained as a hallucination of hearing of a sufficiently ordinary type. We have obtained no complete assurance as to the verbal identity: and we have not been able to compare the letter with the note made at the time, which has probably been destroyed. A similar criticism will apply to the following well-known case, written down in the first instance by the Rev. Joseph Wilkins, a Dissenting minister at Weymouth (who died in 1800), and endorsed by the late Dr. Abercrombie, of Edinburgh, a man, I need hardly say, of great scientific acumen:—

§ 9. Cases of this type are of course, as a class, less satisfactory. It is here that some of the recognised tendencies to error—the impulse to make vague things definite, and the impulse to make a group of facts compact and harmonious—may find their opportunity. The error will, of course, not arise without a certain foundation in fact: the news that a friend has died is not in itself calculated to create a wholly fictitious idea that one has had an unusual experience shortly before the news arrived. But an experience which has been somewhat out of the common may look quite different when recalled in the light of the subsequent knowledge. It may not only gain in significance; its very content may alter. A person perhaps heard his name called when no one was near, and, not being subject to hallucinations of hearing, he was momentarily struck by the fact, but dismissed it from his mind. A day or two afterwards he hears of a friend’s death. It then occurs to him that the events may have been connected. He endeavours to recall the sound that he heard, and seems to hear in it the tones of the familiar voice. Gradually the connection that he has at first only dimly surmised, becomes a certainty for him; and in describing the occurrence, without any idea of deceiving, he will mention his friend’s voice as though he had actually recognised it at the time. In the same way something dimly seen in an imperfect light may take for subsequent memory the aspect of a recognisable form; or a momentary hallucination of touch may recur to the mind as a clasp of farewell.

Now such possibilities cannot be too steadily kept in view, during the process of collecting and sifting evidence. At the same time, the {i-137} interrogation of witnesses, and the comparison of earlier and later accounts, have not revealed any definite instance of this sort of inaccuracy. Now the number of alleged telepathic cases which we have examined (a number of which the narratives given in this book form less than a third) seems sufficiently large for the various types of error that really exist to have come to light; and, as a matter of fact, certain types have come to light, and have helped us to a view of what may be called the laws of error in such matters. If, then, a particular form of inaccuracy is conspicuous by its absence from our considerable list of proved inaccuracies, it may be concluded, we think, not to have been widely operative. It would be a different matter if the cases of the lower evidential class stood alone—if we were unable to present any cases where the percipient’s identification of his impression with the particular personality of the agent had been established beyond dispute. But in face of the large number of those stronger instances, it would be unwarrantably violent to suppose that in all, or nearly all, the other cases where the percipient declares that the identification was clear and unmistakeable, he is giving fictitious shape and colour to a purely undistinctive experience.

But there is yet another reason for allowing this inferior evidence to stand for what it is worth. For even if we make very large allowance for inaccuracy, and suppose that in a certain number of these cases the visible or audible phantasm, afterwards described as recognised, was really unrecognised at the moment, the evidence for a telepathic production of it does not thereby vanish. If, indeed, a witness’s mental or moral status were such that he might be supposed capable of giving retrospective and objective distinctness to what was an utterly indefinite impression, with no external or sensory character at all, his testimony would, of course, be valueless; simply because we could not assure ourselves that he had not had experiences of that sort daily, so that the coincidence with the real event would lose all significance. But in the case of a witness of fair intelligence, the point remains that the presence of a human being was suggested to his senses in a manner which was in his experience markedly unusual or unique, at the time that a human being at a distance with whom he was more or less closely connected, was in a markedly unusual or unique condition. By itself such evidence might fairly, perhaps, be regarded as too uncertain to support any hypothesis. But if a case for telepathy can be founded on the stronger cases, where the immediate reference of the impression to the agent is as much {i-138} established as the fact of the impression itself, then we have no right to lay down as an immutable law of telepathic experience that such a reference is indispensable. Recognition is beyond doubt the best of tests; and in a vast majority of our cases we have the percipient’s testimony, and in a very large number corroborative testimony as well, to the fact of recognition. But distinctness and unusualness in the experience are also evidential points. We have, indeed, a whole class of cases where the percipient has expressly stated that a phantasm which coincided with the supposed agent’s death was unrecognised, and where, therefore, the distinctness and unusualness of the impression were the only grounds for paying any attention to the coincidence. Such cases may be far from proving telepathy; yet if telepathy be a vera causa,true cause it would be unscientific to leave them out of account.

§ 10. So much for the evidence of the state of the agent, and of the experience of the percipient, regarded simply as events, of which we want to know (1) to what extent we can rely on the description that we receive of them; (2) to what extent the presumption of a telepathic connection between them is affected by the sort of inaccuracies that may be revealed or surmised. The sketch that has been given is, of course, a mere outline. It must wait for further amplifications of detail till we come to examine the evidence itself. Meanwhile it may serve to prepare the reader’s mind, and to indicate what special points to be on the look-out for. But of those four essential items of a case, as to which the opportunities and the effect of misrepresentation were to be specially considered, two still remain, namely, the precise times of the two items already discussed—of the agent’s and the percipient’s respective shares in the incident. It is clearly essential to a telepathic case that these times should approximately coincide; and error in the assertion of this coincidence is a possibility requiring fully as much attention as error in the description of the two events.

But here the reader may fairly ask where the line of error is to be drawn. Must the coincidence be exact to the moment? And, if not, what degree of inexactness may be permitted before we cease to regard a case as supporting the telepathic hypothesis? It is unfortunately not easy for the moment to give any satisfactory answer to this question. Two distinct questions are in fact involved. The first is a question of natural fact: What are the furthest limits of time within which it {i-139} appears, on a review of the whole subject, that a single telepathic phenomenon may really be included? At what distance of time, from the death of an absent person, may a friend receive telepathic intimation of the fact? The second question is one of interpretation and argument. It will be a most important part of our task hereafter to estimate the probability that it was by chance, and not as cause and effect, that the two events occurred at no very great distance of time from one another. The wider the interval, the greater, of course, does this probability become; in other words, the larger the scope that we give to “coincidences” which we are willing to regard as primâ facie telepathic in origin, the greater is the chance that we shall be wrong in so regarding them. Now, unless some provisional limit were assigned to the interval which may separate the two events, it would be impossible to obtain numerical data for calculating what the force of the argument for chance really is, and how far the hypothesis of some cause beyond chance is justified. This point will be made clear in the first chapter of the second volume, which deals with “the theory of chance-coincidence”; meanwhile it will be convenient to defer both these questions, and to make the following brief statement without discussion or explanation.

There is one class of cases which are not available for a numerical estimate at all—those, namely, where the agent’s condition is not strictly limited in time; for instance, where he is merely very ill, and no particular crisis takes place at or near the time when the percipient’s impression occurs. This indefiniteness is, of course, a serious evidential weakness. But in a vast majority of the cases to be brought forward, the event that befalls the agent is short and definite. If, then, the experience of the percipient does not exactly coincide with that event, it must either follow or precede it. And, first, if it follows it; then it will be convenient to limit the interval within which this must happen to 12 hours. I may mention at once that in most of our cases the coincidence seems to have been very considerably closer than this. But in a few cases the 12 hours' limit has been reached; and if we found that, though some error in evidence had made the coincidence appear to have been closer than it really was, yet after correction the 12 hours seemed not to have been over-passed, we should still treat the case as having a primâ facie claim to be considered telepathic. Next as to the cases where the percipient’s impression precedes some marked event or crisis in the existence of the other {i-140} person concerned; the question will then be, What was that other person’s condition at the actual time that the impression occurred? If it was normal, we should not argue here for any connection between the experiences of the two parties. For instance, we should not treat as evidence for telepathy an impression, however striking, which preceded by an appreciable interval an accident or sudden catastrophe of any sort.¹ [☼]¹ For instance, a trustworthy informant has given us the following account:— “December, 1883. “On November 5th, 1855, I was staying at a country house with several friends. It being a wet day, we amused ourselves by reading aloud, of which I did a large share; but I was so overcome by the impression that a very dear brother was drowning, that ice had broken, and that he was drawn under it by the current, that I could not at all follow the purport of the book, and when alone, dressing for dinner, could only control my distress by arguing that there could be no fear of ice accidents, as the weather was exceptionally mild at that time. We afterwards learned my brother had been in very actual peril, having jumped into a canal dock to rescue a companion, who, being short-sighted, had fallen in in the dusk of the evening. He was then an undergraduate at Cambridge, and I was in Wales. He received a medal from the ‘Humane Society,’ and a watch, &c., from members of his college, in recognition of the act. I have never had any similar impression of death or danger to any one.” [The friends with whom our informant was staying perfectly remember her mentioning to them what she had experienced.] The brother—the Rev. J. C. Williams Ellis, of Gayton Rectory, Blisworth—confirms the facts as far as he was concerned; but from his account, and that of Mr. A. Tibbits, of 44, Oakfield Road, Clifton, who was also present, we can fix the time of the accident at about 6.30 p.m. Now further inquiry has elicited the fact that the sister’s depression began early in the afternoon, and reached its climax soon after 5. Her experience was certainly, therefore, not telepathic in origin. The history of the Wheatcroft case, quoted in Chap. ix., affords another illustration of this point: had the death not been eventually proved to have preceded, and not followed, the vision, the case could not have been used. I may add that in this instance, the 12 hours’ limit was possibly, but not certainly, exceeded. But it may happen that the percipient’s impression falls within a season in which the condition of the other party is distinctly abnormal—say a season of serious illness; and that it likewise precedes by less than 12 hours the crisis—usually death—with which that season closes. And these cases will not only have a primâ facie claim to be considered telepathic, but will also admit of being used in a strict numerical estimate.

§ 11. To return now to the evidential question, it is really in the matter of dates, rather than facts, that the risk of an important mistake is greatest. In the first place, dates are hard things to remember: many persons who have a fairly accurate memory for facts which interest them have a poor memory for dates. This is a natural failing, and it is also one that may easily escape notice; for in the vast majority of instances where a personal experience is afterwards recounted, the whole interest centres in the fact, and none at all in the date. But in examining the evidence for an {i-141} alleged telepathic case, much more than ordinary human frailty in the matter of dates has to be considered. It is just here that the action of the various positive tendencies to error, above enumerated, is really most to be apprehended. Two unusual events—say the death of a friend at a distance, and the hearing of a voice which certainly sounded like his—have happened at no very great distance of time. The latter event recalls the former to the mind of the person who experienced it; and on reflection he feels that the character of the one connects it in a certain way with the other. True, he has kept no record of the day and hour when he heard the voice; or his friend may have died in South America, and no accurate report of the date of the occurrence may ever have reached England; but the connection which has been surmised cannot but raise a presumption that the two events corresponded in time as well as in character. “Why, otherwise, should I have heard the voice at all?” the person who heard it will argue: “I am not given to hearing phantasmal voices. I did not know how to account for it before; but now I see my way to doing so.” This train of thought being pursued, it will seem in a very short time that the two events must

§ 12. Let us now examine the two dates separately, and see where the danger more particularly lies, and what tests and safeguards can be adopted. And first as to the date of the event that has befallen the {i-143} agent. As we have seen, it is almost always first from the percipient’s side that we hear of this event; and to him the knowledge of it came as a piece of news, sometimes by word of mouth, sometimes in a letter or telegram, occasionally in some printed form. In very many cases the date would, of course, be part of the news. Now, if his own experience was impressive enough to have caused him real anxiety or curiosity, and if his recollection is clear that the news came almost immediately afterwards—say within a couple of days—and that the time of the two events was there and then compared, and found to coincide, the coincidence will then rest on something better, at any rate, than the mere memory of a date. It will depend on the memory that a certain unusual and probably painful state of mind received remarkable justification, and that this justification in turn produced another state of mind which was also of an unusual type. If there was really no such synchronism as is represented, then not only the abstract fact of correspondence, but a distinct and interesting piece of mental experience must have been fictitiously imagined.^{1 1} The Rev. W. G. Payne, of Toppesfield, Essex, sends us a case of a parishioner Mrs. Ellen Dowsett—“a quiet, sensible person,” of whose good faith he was certain—who narrated to him the fact of her having been startled by the appearance of her husband who was absent at Alexandria, and who died suddenly at that very time. “Feeling sure that this foreboded evil tidings, she became very anxious; so much so that the clergyman of the parish came several times to try to console her. All his efforts to dismiss the thought from her mind availed nothing, and a settled conviction laid hold of her that her husband was dead.” The case is not one that we should lay any stress on, as it comes to us second-hand (the percipient being dead), and we do not know who the clergyman was who was told of the apparition before the news arrived. But it illustrates the point in the text. Where an apparition causes such distress and apprehension as this its date has at least a good chance of getting fixed in the mind; and the greater, therefore is the likelihood for the coincidence to be noted correctly. Now, it may be said, I think, as a rule, that a fictitious imagination of this sort needs some little time to grow up; that it is decidedly improbable that any case which is definitely recorded very soon after the event will have suffered this degree of misrepresentation. But a few years will give the imagination time to play very strange tricks. We have had one very notable proof of this, in a case where a curiously detailed vision of a dead man, which (so far as we can ascertain) must have followed the actual death by at least three months, was represented to us, after an interval of ten years, by the person who had seen it—a witness of undoubted integrity—as having occurred on the very night of the death. We may be right in regarding so complete a lapse of memory on the part of an intelligent witness as exceptional; but we should certainly not be justified in assuming that it is exceptional; and no case of anything like that degree of remoteness can be relied on, without some {i-144} evidence beyond the percipient’s mere present recollection that the event which befell the agent took place at the time mentioned. The evidence may be of various sorts. If the exact date of the percipient’s experience can be proved, then it is often possible to fix the other date as the same, by letters, diaries, or obituaries, or by the verbal testimony of some independent witness. If no such evidence is accessible, or even if the exact date of the percipient’s experience is forgotten, it may still be possible to obtain corroboration of the coincidence from someone who was immediately cognisant of the percipient’s experience, and who had independent means of ascertaining the further fact and of noting the connection at the time. But the absence of a written record of either event is, of course, a decidedly weak point.

§ 13. But on the whole, the danger that the closeness of the coincidence may be exaggerated depends rather on mis-statement of the date of the percipient’s than of the agent’s share in the alleged occurrence. Clearly the fact that some one has died or has had a serious accident, or has been placed in circumstances of some unusual sort, is likely to be known to more persons, and to be more frequently recorded in some permanent form, than the fact that some one has had, or says he has had, an odd hallucination. And clearly also, if one of the points is fixed, and the other, by hasty assumption or defective memory, is moved up to it, the moveable date is likely to be that of the event which has no ascertainable place in the world of objective fact. As a rule, it is at any rate possible at the time to obtain certainty as to the date of what has befallen the agent; and therefore if the percipient has been struck by his experience and retains evidence of its date, either in writing or in the memory of others to whom he mentioned it, he will very likely be prompted, when he hears of the other event, to assure himself as to what the degree of coincidence really was. But the converse case is very different. If the percipient does not record his experience at the time of its occurrence, even a week’s interval may destroy the possibility of making sure what its exact date was; and therefore, however certain the date of the other event may be, assurance as to the degree of coincidence will here be unattainable. It is often expressly recognised as such by the percipient himself; and then one can only regret that the importance of the class of facts—if facts indeed they are—has been so little realised that the simple measures which would have ensured {i-145} accurate evidence have not been taken. But where the account given is one of accurate coincidence, we cannot be satisfied without good evidence that the point was critically examined into at the time. It may, of course, happen that the percipient has a clear recollection that the coincidence was adequately made out at the time, although he can produce no documentary evidence which would establish it; and if others confirm his memory in this respect, that is so far satisfactory. Such unwritten confirmation, however, will have little independent force, unless the person who gives it was made aware of the percipient’s experience within a very short time of its occurrence.

But though the danger here must be explicitly recognised, it is important not to exaggerate its practical scope. The coincidence may have been reported as closer than it was; but it may still, in a majority of cases, be fairly concluded to have fallen within the 12 hours’ limit. As a rule, the news of what has befallen the agent arrives soon enough for not more than a space of two days to intervene between the percipient’s knowledge of this event and the time when, to make the coincidence complete, his own experience must have taken place. We are not, therefore, making a large demand on his memory; we are only requiring that he shall remember that an experience, which he represents as remarkable, befell him, or did not befall him, on the day before yesterday. No doubt, after a lapse of years, the evidential value of what a person reports ceases to have a close relation to the knowledge of the facts which it seems pretty certain he must have had at the time. But the demands made at the time on the intelligence either of the percipient, or of anyone else who had the opportunity of asking questions and forming conclusions, are so slight that we may fairly take contemporary written records of the matter, or even later verbal corroboration, as having a considerable claim to attention, even when the best evidence of all—evidence whose existence preceded the arrival of the news—is wanting. And it is important to notice that, while we have had several coincidences reported to us as having been close to the hour, which turned out, on further inquiry or examination of documents, to have been only close to the day, we have had very few cases where a similar correction has proved that the 12 hours’ limit was really overpassed.¹ [☼]¹ We have, however, a case where a death was reported to us as having taken place at 3 a.m., and where, on reference to the letter in which it was announced, it was found to have taken place at 6 p.m. The evidence on the percipient’s side seemed satisfactory, as we received confirmation of the fact that she mentioned her impression at the time as a unique and very distressing one, without any knowledge that her brother, who died in Jamaica, was even ill; and there can be no doubt that the impression did actually fall within the period of serious illness. But the impression was a dream; and a dream of death, however remarkable in its character, which is separated from the actual event by 18 hours, cannot be included in our evidence. In another very similar case, the percipient’s impression was stated, and apparently correctly, to have occurred in the Crimea on January 11th, 1878, and the death (of a sister) in England to have taken place on the same day. But on examining the letter in which the news was announced, we find that the death actually took place on a Wednesday; and Wednesday fell not on the 11th but on the 9th. The assumed coincidence, therefore, altogether breaks down. For some further instances see the “Additions and Corrections” which precede Chap. i. A good many coincidences, {i-146} no doubt, have been represented as extremely close, where no independent evidence on this point has been accessible, and closer inquiry has occasionally revealed that the assertion rested only on a guess. But wholly to neglect cases where the exactitude of the coincidence is not brought within the 12 hours’ limit would clearly be unreasonable, provided that—on the evidence—it is not likely that this limit was much exceeded,^{1 1} This question of likelihood must be carefully weighed, according to the circumstances. The following case, from the Rev. Canon Sherlock, of Sherlockstown, Naas, which was published in our first report on the subject as possibly telepathic, is a specimen of what we certainly should not now feel justified in regarding as evidence. “During the Indian Mutiny, my brother was serving (as ensign) in the 72nd Highlanders. At that time I was an undergraduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and living at Sandycove, near Kingstown. One night about 2 o’clock I was reading by the fire, when I heard myself distinctly called by my brother, the tone of his voice being somewhat raised and urgent; looking round I saw his head and the upper part of his body quite plainly. He appeared to be looking at me, and was about 7 or 8 feet distant. I looked steadily at him for about half a minute, when he seemed gradually to fade into a mist and disappear. The date of this occurrence I, unfortunately, lost note of, but upon my brother’s return from India and my casually mentioning that I had so seen him, we talked the matter over, and both came to the conclusion that the apparition coincided with a dangerous attack of illness, in which my brother suddenly awoke with the impression that he was suffocating, at which moment he thought of me. The attack was brought on by sleeping during a forced march through a country great part [sic] of which was under water. This is the only apparition that I have ever experienced, and there was no anxiety on my mind which could have given rise to it, as we had quite recently had a letter from my brother, written in good health and spirits. “W. SHERLOCK.” If one dismisses all à priori leanings to a telepathic explanation, there is nothing in this account which renders it unlikely that the two events were separated by (say) 10 days, or that the event in England preceded the one in India. and not certain that it was exceeded at all. Such cases must, of course, be excluded from any numerical estimate based on precise data; but they may fairly be allowed their own weight on the mind.

§ 14. We see, then, that cases where the alleged correspondence of facts and coincidence of dates are sufficiently close to afford a primâ facie presumption of telepathic action, may present very various degrees of strength and weakness; and it may be convenient to summarise the evidential conditions according to their value, in the following tabular form. (The words “the news” mean always the news of what has befallen the supposed agent.)

A. Where the event which befell the agent, with its date, is recorded in printed notices, or contemporary documents which we {i-147} have examined; or is reported to us by the agent himself independently, or by some independent witness or witnesses; and where

§ 15. The evidence which I have so far analysed is first-hand evidence—in the sense that the main account comes to us direct from the percipient. The present collection, however, includes (in the Supplement) a certain number of second-hand narratives; and it will be well, therefore, to consider briefly what are the best sorts of second-hand evidence, and what kinds of inaccuracy are most to be apprehended in the transmission of telepathic history from mouth to mouth.

There is one, and only one, sort of second-hand evidence which can on the whole be placed on a par with first-hand; namely, the evidence of a person who has been informed of the experience of the percipient while the latter was still unaware of the corresponding event; and who has had equal opportunities with the percipient for learning the truth of that event, and confirming the coincidence. The second-hand witness’s testimony in such a case is quite as likely to be accurate as the percipient’s; for though his impression of the actual details will no doubt be less vivid, {i-149} yet on the other hand he will not be under the same temptation to exaggerate the force or strangeness of the impression in subsequent retrospection. Specimens of this class have therefore been admitted to the body of the work, as well as to the Supplement. Putting this exceptional class aside, the value of second-hand evidence chiefly depends on the relation of the first narrator to the second. A second-hand account from a person only slightly acquainted with the original narrator is of very little value; not only because it is probably the report of a story which has been only once heard, and that, perhaps, in a hurried or casual way; but also because the less the reporter’s sense of responsibility to his informant, the less also will be his sense of responsibility to the facts, and the greater the temptation to improve on the original.¹ [☼]¹ A lady has described to us a hallucination which presented to her the form of her father-in-law, who had been dead 14 years. An acquaintance, to whom she once mentioned this experience, had reported it to us as the apparition of her brother, with the addition that “a short time afterwards she received news of her brother’s death, which had taken place at the very time of the apparition.” There is a touch of nature in the fact that the author of this amended version considers the original witness “not at all an imaginative person.” But we cannot so lightly dismiss the testimony of near relatives and close friends to a matter which they have heard the first-hand witness narrate more than once, or narrate in such a manner as convinced them that the alleged facts were to him realities, and had made a lasting impression on his mind. Here we at any rate have a chance of forming a judgment as to the character of the original authority; we can make tolerably certain that what we hear was never the mere anecdote of a raconteur; and we have grounds for assuming in our own informants a certain instinct of fidelity which may at any rate preserve their report from the errors of wilful carelessness and exaggeration. It not infrequently happens, too, that we can obtain several independent versions from several second-hand witnesses, which may mutually confirm one another; and contemporary documentary evidence may give further support to the case.

The risks of error in transmitted evidence are, of course, in many respects the same, in an intensified form, as those of original evidence. To a person who is told something which sounds surprising by some one else who has experienced it, the central marvel is apt to stand out in memory with undue relief; and the various details and considerations which might modify the marvellous element will drop out of sight. One is, of course, familiar with the same process in the case of almost any anecdote or witticism that gets at all répandu:spread the {i-150} point is retained, the details and surroundings vary. For purposes of amusement such variations may be wholly unimportant; for purposes of evidence they may be all-important. Facts, moreover, are very much easier to improve than bon mots and the like, and with the second-hand narrator the tendency to make things picturesque and complete, by the addition, omission, or transformation of details, is naturally stronger in that there is no deeply-graven sense of the reality to act as a check on it. A gentleman, who signs himself “Rector,” writes to the Daily Telegraph, and describes a number of clergymen sitting round a table, on the evening when the late Bishop of Winchester met with his fatal accident. “One of them said, ‘There is the Bishop looking in at that window.’ Another immediately said, ‘No, he is at this window.’” What really happened—as we learn from Mr. G. W. Paxon, who was present at the scene referred to—was that a strange figure passed the three windows of the dining-room at Wotton, but that “it was not possible for the gentlemen present” (who, by the way, were three only, and all laymen) to identify it. Mr. Evelyn went out to see who it could be, but it had disappeared with mysterious rapidity. And that is the whole story. Again, a young man, we are told, was dying in London, his friends being unaware of his whereabouts. A sister of his in Edinburgh, who was also dying, “said that she was present at the death-bed of her brother; she gave an outline of his room, and told the name and number of the street.” A friend of our informant’s, Mr.

§ 16. And now with regard to the cases that have been included in the evidential part of the present work. A certain separation has {i-158} been attempted. In the main body of the book, no cases are given which are not first-hand,[☼] or of the particular second-hand sort which (as explained on p. 148) is on a par with first-hand; or in which the primâ facie probability that the facts stated are substantially correct is not tolerably strong. But the Supplement includes a good many second-hand accounts;^{1 1} We have seen that there is one sort of second-hand evidence which must rank as on a par with first-hand. On the same principle there is one sort of third-hand evidence which must rank as on a par with second-hand. A few third-hand accounts of this type have been admitted to the Supplement; and one or two others by special exception. as well as first-hand accounts where the evidence, from lack of corroboration or other causes, falls short of the standard previously attained.^{2 2} There are, however, a few first-hand cases in the Supplement which would have found a place in the main body of the work (in substitution probably for some which now appear there), had they been received earlier. Our principle in selecting cases for the Supplement has been to take only those which—supposing telepathy to be established as a fact in Nature—would reasonably be regarded as examples of it. Their existence adds force to the proof of telepathy; but we should not have put them forward as an adequate proof by themselves. This separation, however, does not apportion the evidential weight of the two divisions with rigid precision. For, given a certain amount of assurance that the facts are correctly reported, the value of the facts in the argument for telepathy will vary according to the class to which they belong. There are strong classes and weak classes. Now the body of the work includes specimens of purely emotional impressions, and of dreams—classes which we shall find by their very nature to be weak; and more weight might reasonably be attached to some case in the Supplement, even though less completely attested, if it belonged to the strongest class, which we shall find to be the class of waking visual

§ 17. But there is quantity as well as quality to consider: the basis of our demonstration needs to be broad as well as strong. We might have a few correspondences perfect in every detail, a few {i-162} coincidences precise to the moment, established by evidence which was irresistible; and pure accident might still be the true explanation of them. Later, however, it will be proved, as I think, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that that line cannot be taken in respect of the several hundreds of coincidences included in these volumes. And the majority of persons who regard the book from an evidential point of view, and who start with the legitimate à priori prejudice against the whole class of phenomena, will certainly take other ground. They will take exception to the evidence as it stands. They will not be concerned to deny that there would be an enormously strong case for the reality of telepathy, supposing the correspondences and coincidences to have occurred exactly as stated; but they will take the ground that they did not so occur; and will frame various hypotheses, according to which it should be possible that the evidence should be thus, and the facts otherwise.

Now not only is the endeavour to frame such hypotheses legitimate: it has been throughout an indispensable part of our own work. Even improbable hypotheses ought to be carefully considered; for we have no desire to underrate the à priori improbability of our own hypotheses of telepathy. It is extremely difficult to compare the improbability of any particular combination of known conditions with the improbability of the existence of a hitherto unknown condition. But the point on which we desire to lay stress is the number of improbable hypotheses that will have to be propounded if the telepathic explanation is rejected. Of course, this point may be evaded by including all the hypotheses needed in a single sweeping assumption, as to the general untrustworthiness of human testimony. This mode of argument would be perfectly legitimate if we were presenting a collection of unsifted second and third-hand stories; but it will scarcely seem equally so in application to what we do present. The evidence (or at any rate a very large amount of it) is of a sort which merits attention, even from those who most fully share the views that I have endeavoured to express as to the chances of error in the records of unusual occurrences. It cannot be summarily dismissed; if it is to be got rid of, it must be explained away in detail. And it is the continued process of attempts to explain away which may, we think, produce on others the same cumulative effect as it has produced on ourselves. The attempts have been made on the lines already sketched; and so far as any reader agrees that the risks {i-163} and vulnerable points have been carefully considered in the abstract, he may be willing provisionally to accept an assurance that a similar careful and rationally sceptical mode of examination has been applied to the concrete instances. The work is, no doubt, wearisome; but there is no avoiding it, for anyone who wishes to form a fair independent opinion as to what the strength of the case for telepathy really is. The narratives are very various, and their force is derived from very various characteristics; the endeavour to account for them without resorting to telepathy must, therefore, be carried through a considerable number of groups, before it produces its legitimate effect on the mind. That effect arises from the number and variety of the improbable suppositions, now violent, now vague—contradictory of our experience of all sorts of human acts and human relations—that have to be made at every turn. Not only have we to assume such an extent of forgetfulness and inaccuracy, about simple and striking facts of the immediate past, as is totally unexampled in any other range of experience. Not only have we to assume that distressing or exciting news about another person produces a havoc in the memory which has never been noted in connection with distress or excitement in any other form. We must leave this merely general ground, and make suppositions as detailed as the evidence itself. We must suppose that some people have a way of dating their letters in indifference to the calendar, or making entries in their diaries on the wrong page and never discovering the error; and that whole families have been struck by the collective hallucination that one of their members had made a particular remark, the substance of which had never even entered that member’s head; and that it is a recognised custom to write mournful letters about bereavements which have never occurred; and that when A describes to a friend how he has distinctly heard the voice of B, it is not infrequently by a slip of the tongue for C; and that when D says he is not subject to hallucinations of vision, it is through momentary forgetfulness of the fact that he has a spectral illusion once a week; and that when a wife interrupts her husband’s slumbers with words of distress or alarm, it is only her fun, or a sudden morbid craving for undeserved sympathy; and that when people assert that they were in sound health, in good spirits, and wide awake, at a particular time which they had occasion to note, it is a safe conclusion rhat [sic] they were having a nightmare, or were the prostrate victims of nervous hypochondria. Every one of these improbabilities is, perhaps, in itself a possibility; but as the {i-164} narratives drive us from one desperate expedient to another, when time after time we are compelled to own that deliberate falsification is less unlikely than the assumptions we are making, and then again when we submit the theory of deliberate falsification to the cumulative test, and see what is involved in the supposition that hundreds of persons of established character, known to us for the most part and unknown to one another, have simultaneously formed a plot to deceive us—there comes a point where the reason rebels. Common-sense persists in recognising that when phenomena, which are united by a fundamental characteristic and have every appearance of forming a single natural group, are presented to be explained, an explanation which multiplies causes is improbable, and an explanation which multiplies improbable causes becomes, at a certain point, incredible.

§ 18. I am aware that in its abstract form, and apart from actual study of the cases, this reasoning must be wholly unconvincing. But meanwhile the argument for the general trustworthiness of our evidence may be put in another, and, perhaps, clearer light. Amid all their differences, the cases present one general characteristic—an unusual affection of one person, having no apparent relation to anything outside him except the unusual condition, otherwise unknown to him, of another person. It is this characteristic that gives them the appearance, as I have just said, of a true natural group. Now the full significance of these words may easily escape notice. They have an evidential as well as a theoretic bearing. They involve, of course, the hypothesis that the facts, if truly stated, are probably due to a single cause; but they involve, further, a very strong argument that the facts are truly stated. Let us suppose, for the moment, that any amount of laxity of memory and of statement may be expected even from first-hand witnesses, belonging to the educated class. And let us ignore all the heterogeneous improbabilities which we were just now considering; and assume that the mistakes mentioned, and others like them, may occur at any moment. What, then, is the likelihood that all these

§ 19. What I have here indicated is the general impression produced by the evidence in our own minds. In our view, the reality of telepathy (even apart from a consideration of the experimental evidence) may be not unreasonably taken as proved. Having formed this view, we are bound to state it; but we expressly refrain from putting it forward dogmatically, and from saying that to reject it would argue want of candour or intelligence. We hold that, in such a matter, it is idle to attempt to define the line of complete proof; and the proof given—if it be one—is far from being of an éclatant or overwhelming sort. To those who do not realise the strength of the à priori presumption against it, it may easily look more overwhelming than it is. To others, again, it may appear that, on the hypothesis that the faculty has acted as widely as we have supposed, the highest evidential standard ought to have been reached in a larger number of {i-167} cases. To us it rather seems that the evidence that we find is just about what might have been expected. We see nothing in the mere existence of telepathy that would tend to make reserved people mention strange experiences, or to make careless or busy people keep conscientious diaries—or generally that would lead the persons immediately connected with a telepathic case, in which their emotions may be deeply involved, to act with a single eye to producing a clinching piece of evidence for the future benefit of critical psychological inquirers. It would, of course, be useless for us to urge that evidence which falls short of the best is still as good as can be expected, unless we were able to present a certain nucleus of fairly conclusive cases, and this we think we can do. But if the proof is held to demand more cases of the highest evidential quality, we must trust to time for them. The ideal collection would, of course, be one where every independent instance should be so evidentially complete that it must be either (1) telepathic, or (2) a purely accidental coincidence of a most striking kind, or (3) the result of a fraudulent conspiracy to deceive, in which several persons of good character and reputation have taken part. In our view, this point has been reached in a sufficient number of the examples here given to exclude the second and third of these alternatives; but these examples constitute only a very small minority compared with the mass of cases which are merely confirmatory—strongly confirmatory, as we think, but still confirmatory only and not crucial. And the collection so far falls short of the ideal.

In saying, then, that telepathy may not unreasonably be taken as proved, I do not wish for a moment to imply that the proof which we give is the one which we should eventually desire to see given. To no reader, we think, will the various imperfections and weak spots of our case be more patent than they have been to ourselves. Some of these are beyond remedy—as the absence of contemporary documents. Others may possibly be remedied at a later stage—for instance, the suppression of names.¹ [☼]¹ The suppressed names have in all cases been given to us in confidence; and in some instances with permission to mention them to any persons who have any bonâ fide interest in the subject. Purely anonymous cases can of course have no weight at all. I subjoin a couple of cases which are of a normal type, and have quite the air of being bonâ fide, as samples of a numerous class which have to be treated as waste paper. The following account appeared in the Times for December 26th, 1868, in a review of Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft. The writer, who is here perforce anonymous, says that it “has quite recently fallen under our own observation.” “A young English lady had been betrothed to an officer before his departure to the East. During her lover’s absence she was taken abroad by her mother, and on their arrival late one evening at a French inn, they found it necessary to occupy rooms on different floors. As Miss C. was in the act of getting into bed late at night, she suddenly beheld the form of her lover standing in a remote corner of her chamber. His countenance was extremely sad, and she observed that round his right arm he wore a band of crape. Indignant at the conduct of her betrothed in entering her sleeping apartment, she called on him loudly to depart; the form of her lover remained speechless, but as she lifted up her voice, his brow grew yet sadder, and as he glided silently out of the room he seemed a prey to the gloomiest feelings. After a time Miss

§ 20. Meanwhile it may be just worth while to forestall an objection—which, as it has been made before, may be made again—to the argument from numbers. It has been urged that no accumulation of instances can make up a solid case, if no individual instance can be absolutely certified as free from flaw. But the different items of inductive proof are, of course, not like the links of a deductive chain. The true metaphor is the sticks and the faggot; and our right to treat any particular case as a stick depends, not on its being so flawlessly strong, as evidence for our hypothesis, that no other hypothesis can possibly be entertained with regard to it, but on the much humbler {i-170} fact that any other hypothesis involves the assumption of something in itself improbable. Third-hand ghost-stories, and the ordinary examples of popular superstitions, have no claim to be regarded as sticks at all, since the rejection of the popular explanation of them involves no improbable assumptions of any kind; at best they are dry reeds, and no multiplication of their number could ever make a respectable faggot. But in every one of the examples on which we rest the telepathic hypothesis, the rejection of that hypothesis does, as I have pointed out, involve the assumption of something in itself improbable; and every such example adds to the cumulative force of the argument for telepathy. The multiplication of such examples, therefore, makes a faggot of ever-increasing solidity.

When made explicit, this seems too plain to be denied; but an extreme case may perhaps make the point even clearer. If, since the world began, nobody had ever died without a phantasm of him appearing to one or more of his friends, the joint occurrence of the two events would have been a piece of universally recognised knowledge; of the cause of which we should to this day possibly not know more, and could not possibly know less, than we know of the cause of gravitation. Nor, if the attestation had been forthcoming in the case of only half the deaths, would its significance have been much more likely to be disputed; nor if it had been forthcoming in the case of a quarter, or a tenth, or even a hundredth of the number. But those who admit this, practically admit that there is a conceivable number of well attested cases which they would regard as conclusive evidence of telepathy. We may ask them, then, to name their number; and if they do so, we may not unreasonably proceed to inquire the grounds of their selection. A writer on the subject lately named 5000 as the mark; but can he make his reasons explicit for considering 5000 as conclusive, and 4000, or even 1000, as inconclusive? In course of time we hope that his minimum may be reached; but any limit must be to a great extent arbitrary. We shall be content if impartial readers, who do not feel convinced that an adequate inductive proof has been attained, are yet brought to see that our object and method are scientifically defensible; while we, on our side, fully admit that the adequacy of the

§ 21. Perhaps, after all, the difference of instinct as to what really is needed may be considerably less than at first sight appears. For we have not been able to regard the alleged phenomena in the completely detached fashion which most of those who consider them naturally adopt. We are unable to determine how far the impression on our own minds of the evidence for spontaneous telepathy has been dependent on our conviction of the genuineness of cognate experimental cases. These latter being for the most part trivial, recent, and little known, it is not surprising that comparatively few persons should have considered them, and that still fewer should have grasped their bearing on the spontaneous cases. But to anyone who accepts the experimental results, the à priori presumption against other forms of supersensuous communication can hardly retain its former aspect. The presumption is diminished—the hospitality of the mind to such phenomena is increased—in a degree which is none the less important that it does not admit of calculation. A further step of about equal importance is made when we advance to the better-evidenced of the transitional cases; though here again the effect on our own minds, due to our knowledge of the persons concerned, cannot be imparted to others. Attention has been duly drawn to the difficulty of embracing these several classes in a common physical conception; but on psychological ground we cannot doubt that we are justified (provisionally at any rate) in regarding them as continuous. Remembering the existence of the transitional class, we may regard the extremes as not more remote from one another than the electrical phenomena of the cat’s coat from those of the firmament. Electricity, indeed, affords in this way a singularly close parallel to telepathy. “The spontaneous apparitions of the dying” (I quote Mr. Myers’ words) “may stand for the lightning; while the ancient observations on the attraction of amber for straw may fairly be paralleled by our modest experiments with cards and diagrams. The spontaneous phenomena, on the one hand, have been observed in every age, but observed with mere terror and bewilderment. And, on the other hand, candid friends have expressed surprise at our taking a serious interest in getting a rude picture from one person’s mind into another, or proving that ginger may be hot in the mouth by the effect of unconscious sympathy alone. Yet we hold that these trivial cases of community of sensation are the germinal indications of a far-reaching force, whose higher manifestations {i-172} may outshine these as the lightning outshines the sparks on Puss’s back. We hold that the lowest telepathic manifestations may be used to explain and corroborate the highest.” Their conditions differ widely; so widely, indeed, as to supply indirectly an argument for the genuineness of the facts, since totally distinct and independent hypotheses—that of collusion in the one case, and of forgetfulness or exaggeration in the other—would be needed to refute them. Yet, with all this difference of conditions, when we compare the facts of either class with any facts which the accepted psychology includes, we cannot help recognising the great common characteristic—a supersensuous influence of mind on mind—as a true generic bond. Where that characteristic is found, there we have a natural group of phenomena which differ far more fundamentally from all other known phenomena than they can possibly differ among themselves. Their unity is found in contrast. Till more is known of their causes, it may be impossible for science to establish their inner relationships, just as it is impossible to establish the degrees of affinity between casually selected members of a single human community. But they draw together, so to speak, on the field of science, even as men of one race draw together when cast among an alien population.

NOTE ON WITCHCRAFT.

In saying that there is a total absence of respectable evidence, and an almost total absence of any first-hand evidence at all, for those alleged phenomena of magic and witchcraft which cannot be accounted for as the results of diseased imagination, hysteria, hypnotism, and occasionally, perhaps, of telepathy, I have made a sweeping statement which it may perhaps seem that nothing short of a knowledge of the whole witch-literature of the world could justify. I have, of course, no claim to this complete knowledge. My statement depends on a careful search through about 260 books on the subject (including, I think, most of the principal ones of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries), and a large number of contemporary records of trials.^{1 1} The greater part of this irksome task has been carried out for me with rare zeal and intelligence by my friend, Miss Porter, to whom I must here once again express my obligations. Such a list is certainly very far from exhaustive. But as, on the one hand, the 450 works which Le {i-173} Loyer professed to have studied, before writing his Livre des Spectres, did not fortify him with the trustworthy record of a single case, so, on the other hand, a much smaller assortment may suffice to support very wide negative conclusions. To those who have travelled over the same ground, the reason will be obvious. Every student of records of abnormal or “supernatural” events must have been struck by the way in which the same cases keep on reappearing in one work after another. Even the most credulous partisans exercise a sort of economy of the marvellous, in so far as they find that copying out old marvels is a great saving of time and responsibility. And this is very specially the case with the literature now in question. Bodin’s Démonomanie and the Malleus Maleficarum supplied generations of theorists with their pittance of facts; and not even the Beresford ghost has done such hard and continuous duty in the cause of superstition as some few of the witch-cases.

Considering the enormous place that lycanthropy, for instance, plays in the interminable discussions as to what the devil could do, and how he did it, it is strange to realise what the evidence (outside confessions¹) ¹ When we remember the ways in which confessions were obtained, the regard in which they were held appears the most amazing fact in the whole history of witchcraft. The common view is quaintly illustrated in an account of Peter Stubbe (translated from the Dutch, London, 1590); where it is said that Peter “after being put to the rack, and fearing the torture, volluntarilye confessed his whole life.” Even where no violent means were used, the mind of the accused would be unhinged by starvation, enforced sleeplessness, or mere despair. And as if this was not enough, we have the dismal record of cheats and quibbles—e.g., the promising his life to the accused if he would confess, meaning eternal life. We have also, no doubt, to allow for the morbid vanity and shame-lessness which is a symptom of advanced hysteria. (See Richet, Op. cit., p. 364.) actually was. Putting Nebuchadnezzar and Lot’s wife out of the question, the main burden of the proof seems really to rest on about four cases. Either it is the 11th century legend, quoted from William of Malmesbury, of the two old women who kept an inn, and transformed their guests into asses: or it is the equally mythical tale of the woodcutter who wounded three cats, and declared that three women afterwards accused him of having wounded them; or it is Peter Stubbe, against whom the evidence was that the villagers lit on him unexpectedly, while they were hunting a wolf; or it is the man who, having cut off a wolf’s paw, drew from his pocket the hand of his host’s wife, whom he found sitting composedly without it—a story told to Boguet (as a joke for aught we can tell) by a person who professed to have picked it up in travelling through the locality. Even the credulous De l’Ancre^{2 2} Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Démons (Paris, 1612), p. 312. admits that, with wide opportunities, he has not come on the track of any transformations—a fact which seems to have a good deal impressed him. But in the eyes of other writers, perpetual citation seems to have imparted to the classical legends just mentioned the virtue of good first-hand testimony. Glanvil gives {i-174} another case where a panting old woman was suddenly seen in the place of a hunted hare, on the authority of a huntsman;¹