Frank Podmore

“ The evening of Easter Sunday was so fine that when Miss Jowett (the landlady's daughter) brought in the lamp, I begged her not to pull down the blinds, and lay on the sofa looking out at the sea, while my son was reading at the table. Owing to a letter I had just received from my sister at home, stating that one of the servants had again seen 'the old lady,' my thoughts had been directed towards ghosts and such things. But I was not a little astonished when, on presently looking out of the window, I saw the figure of a woman standing at the edge of the verandah. ”

“ Yet dreams belong to the same order of mental phenomena as hallucinations, and are commonly so classed—such differences as exist being mainly due to the conditions under which the two sets of phenomena respectively occur. In fact, a hallucination is simply a hypertrophied thought—the last member of a series, whose intermediate terms are to be found in the mind's-eye pictures of ordinary life, in the vivid images which some artists can summon at will, and in the Faces in the Dark which many persons see before passing into sleep, with its more familiar and abundant imagery. ”

“ That a dying man, whilst failing to impress the idea of his own personality upon the mind of a distant acquaintance, should succeed in calling up the image—to himself of quite secondary importance—of the clothes which he habitually wore, would seem at first sight a paradox. But the difficulty disappears if we recognise that the telepathic impression in such cases is probably received and the hallucination elaborated by a subconscious stratum of the intelligence, and that the picture is in due time flashed up thence fully formed to the ordinary consciousness. ”

“ Again, one of the most marked characteristics of the subliminal consciousness, whether in dream, hypnosis, spontaneous trance, or in crystal vision and other automatism, is its power of visualisation—a power which, as Mr. Galton has shown, and our daily experience proves, tends to become aborted in later life. And beyond these indications of memories lost and imagery crowded out in the lifetime of the individual, we come across traces of faculties which have long ceased to obey the guidance or minister to the needs of civilised man—the psychological lumber of many generations ago. ”

“ Ideas may be only paler sensations, and a train of thought nothing else than a series of suppressed hallucinations. But at any rate the distinction, whether fundamental or not, serves a useful purpose as a rough-and-ready means of classing our mental experiences. A visual or auditory image either is on the same level of intensity as the series of impressions which represent for us the external world, or it falls below that level. ”

“ But the kind of evidence now to be considered—the coincidence of some spontaneous affection of the percipient with some event in the life-history of the person presumed to be the agent, as when one sees the apparition of a friend at the time of his death—is of inferior cogency in two ways. ”

“ There are, indeed, some competent inquirers at the present time who incline to attribute thought-transference to the direct action of mind upon mind, or to some process yet more transcendent, just as in the last generation there were some who thought they were able to discern, in such instances as came under their notice, proof of the agency of disembodied spirits. And Von Hartmann, boldly accepting the facts wholesale, ascribes them to a communication between finite minds effected through the inter-mediation of the Absolute. ”

“ Our main justification at the present time for discussing theories which aim at some solution is that they may indicate the lines on which experiment and observation may be usefully directed. Thus, it is not known how far the results depend on the state of health of the parties to the experiments, on their occupations and state of consciousness at the time; whether blood-relationship or familiar intimacy between agent and percipient is conducive to success; or whether the transmission is in any way affected by the introduction of more than one agent. ”

“ An image—whether of an object, diagram, or name—which is chosen by the agent may be correctly described by the percipient simply because their minds are set to move in the same direction. It must be remembered that, however unexpected and spontaneous they may appear, ideas do not come by chance, but have their origin mostly in the previous experience of the thinker. Persons living constantly in the same physical and intellectual environment are apt to present a close similarity in their ideas. ”

“ This close connection of the activity of thought-transference with the subliminal consciousness, the consciousness which appears in hypnosis, and occasionally in dream-life and in spontaneous trance and automatism, may perhaps offer a clue to the origin of the faculty. For the future place of telepathy in the history of the race concerns us even more nearly than the mode of its operation; and we are led therefore to ask whether the faculty as we know it is but the germ of a more splendid capacity, or the last vestige of a power grown stunted through disuse. ”

“ Sometimes a story is improved by the narrator that it may the better serve for instruction and edification. This tendency is especially liable to distort the evidence in cases connected with death. It must be remembered that though we may view a coincident hallucination, for instance, as merely an instance of an idea transferred from a living mind, to the percipient it frequently represents the spirit of the dead. From a certain class of witnesses the account of such an incident is as little to be trusted as the text of an apocryphal gospel. ”

“ At the same time, the investigators of the Society for Psychical Research have come across some instances of fraud in cases where they had grounds for assuming good faith, and it may be useful, therefore, to illustrate some of the less obvious methods of acquiring intelligence fraudulently. The conditions of the experiment should of course, as far as possible, preclude, even where there is no ground for suspecting fraud, communication between the percipient and the agent, or any one else knowing the idea which it is sought to transfer. ”

“ In the experiments conducted in the same room or house, and in most of the spontaneous cases at close quarters, the idea transferred corresponds to a mental image consciously present to the mind of the agent. But the cases, whether experimental or spontaneous, of such detailed transference at a distance of more than a mile or two are very few—too few to justify any valid generalisation. For in most cases of thought-transference at a distance the idea transferred is one not consciously present to the agent's mind at all—the idea of his own personality. ”

“ It was not until the minute organisms, whose existence had been so long suspected, had been actually isolated in the laboratory, and had been proved capable of reproducing the disease, that the connection of certain maladies with the presence of certain microbes in the body became, from a plausible hypothesis, an accepted conclusion of Science. So here it is important to bear in mind that dreams, visions, and apparitions, however captivating to the imagination, do not form the main argument for believing in some new mode of communication between human minds. ”

“ To extend the theory of thought-transference from living minds to cover a case such as that just quoted may seem to some extravagant. But if there is anything beyond chance in the occurrence—and it would be a very remarkable coincidence that three persons should independently be the subject of hallucination in the same house, and that one of the hallucinations should resemble a former occupant of the house, unknown to the percipient—some explanation is required, and an explanation which involves no novel or unproved agency is, ceteris paribus, to be preferred. ”

“ The amount of energy which has been proved capable, at the distance of half a mile, of inducing sleep in a French peasant woman may be readily conceived as not more attenuated than those "sweet influences" which are yet potent enough to summon up before us the vision of the Pleiades or the glowing nebula of Orion. Nor need the difficulty of selection trouble us much; for, after all, one of the chief characteristics of organic life in general is the power—a power ever more differentiated in the higher organisms—of reacting only to selected stimuli. ”

“ A dream is a hallucination in sleep, and a hallucination is only a waking dream; though it is probable that the waking impression, seeing that it can contend on equal terms with the impressions derived from external objects, is more vivid than the common run of dreams. But the evidence of dream coincidence is defective, primarily, from the frequency of dreams; it is only a small proportion of educated persons, at any rate, who ever experience a hallucination, but everybody dreams occasionally, and some persons dream every night. ”

“ To begin with, there is no sense-organ for our presumed new mode of sensation; nor at the present stage of physiological knowledge is there likelihood that we can annex any as yet unappropriated organ to register telepathic stimuli, as the semicircular canals are supposed to register the movements of the body in space. In lacking an elaborate machinery specially adapted for receiving its messages and concentrating them on the peripheral end of the nerves, telepathy would thus seem to be on a par with radiant energy affecting the general surface of the body. ”

“ If a man calls green what we call red, we may conclude that he is colour-blind; and if he asserts that he sees a human figure where we see none, that he is hallucinated; but in neither case have we warrant for saying that he is making an erroneous statement about his own sensations.
Errors of Inference.
But his interpretation of what he sees is a different matter. Not indeed that the mistake commonly made of taking a hallucination at the time for a figure of flesh and blood, and subsequently for a hypothetical entity of another kind, directly affects the percipient's testimony. ”

“ But it is perhaps worth while pointing out that we have no warrant in theory for concluding that in a case of death after prolonged illness the actual moment of dissolution is more favourable for the initiation of a telepathic impulse than any moment in the hours or days of illness preceding death; nor, if due allowance be made for the tendency to exaggerate the closeness of coincidence, is it clear that there is sufficient evidence at present to support any such conclusion. ”

“ As a matter of fact, in the best attested recent cases it can rarely be shown that the coincidence is precise, and the impression frequently follows the death by some hours. But there is risk also of the actual transformation of the experience itself. A dream after the lapse of years will be recalled as a hallucination, [75] a vague feeling of discomfort as a vivid emotion, or even a mental vision; a hallucination not recognised at the moment will in the retrospect seem to have been identified with some person who died at about that time ”

“ But since the idea of self is probably always present as part of the permanent substratum of consciousness, and since we have actual evidence that in some cases that idea may be communicated to the percipient, together with the idea consciously willed by the agent, it seems permissible to conclude that it may form an element in every case of transference. And if this be admitted, not merely will the difficulty referred to disappear, but some progress will have been made towards obtaining experimental verification of the physical effects of distance on telepathic transmission. ”

“ APPARITIONS AND THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY—SPECIAL GROUNDS OF CAUTION.
It is salutary sometimes to reflect how recent is the growth of our scientific cosmos, and how brief an interval separates it from the chaos which went before. This may be seen even in Sciences which deal with matters of common observation. Amongst material phenomena the facts of Geology are assuredly not least calculated to excite the curiosity or impress the imagination of men. Yet until the middle of the last century no serious attempt was made to solve the physical problems they presented. ”

“ In the cases now under consideration the substitute for such far-reaching community is to be found in the transitory occupation of both percipient and agent—the one in present sensation, the other in memory—with the same scene. Such partial community of perception, by a kind of extended association of ideas, tends under the hypothesis towards more complete community, and the agent thus imports into the sensorium of the percipient the image of his own or some other's presence in the scene which forms part of the present content of both minds. ”

“ Passing to visual phantasms, we will begin by citing a case in which there can be little doubt that the hallucination was purely subjective; a better case for illustrating the hypothesis of the infectious character of casual hallucination could hardly be found. It is to be noted indeed that the second percipient saw the apparition on the first occasion only after a distinct verbal suggestion, but, as already stated, there is no evidence that a single verbal suggestion can produce a hallucination in a healthy person in full possession of his normal faculties. ”