Chapter VI: Sensory Automatism (2)

Meantime cases of certain other definite types continued to come steadily to hand, although in lesser numbers than the cases of apparition at death. To mention two important types only--there were apparitions of the so-called _dead_, and there were cases of _precognition_. With regard to each of these classes, it seemed reasonable to defer belief until time should have shown whether the influx of first-hand cases was likely to be permanent; whether independent witnesses continued to testify to incidents which could be better explained on these hypotheses than on any other. Before Edmund Gurney's death in 1888 our cases of apparitions and other manifestations of the dead had reached a degree of weight and consistency which, as his last paper showed, was beginning to convince him of their veridical character; and since that date these have been much further increased; and especially have drawn from Mrs. Piper's and other trance-phenomena an unexpected enlargement and corroboration. The evidence for communication from the departed is now in my personal estimate quite as strong as that for telepathic communication between the living; and it is moreover evidence which inevitably alters and widens our conception of telepathy between living men.

The evidence for precognition, again, was from the first scantier, and has advanced at a slower rate. It has increased steadily enough to lead me to feel confident that it will have to be seriously reckoned with; but I cannot yet say--as I do say with reference to the evidence for messages from the departed--that almost every one who accepts our evidence for telepathy at all, must ultimately accept this evidence also. It must run on at any rate for some years longer before it shall have accreted a convincing weight.

But at whatever point one or another inquirer may happen at present to stand, I urge that this is the reasonable course for conviction to follow. First analyse the miscellaneous stream of evidence into definite types; then observe the frequency with which these types recur, and let your sense of their importance gradually grow, if the evidence grows also.

Now this mode of procedure evidently excludes all definite _a priori_ views, and compels one's conceptions to be little more than the mere grouping to which the facts thus far known have to be subjected in order that they may be realised in their _ensemble_.

"What definite reason do I know why this should _not_ be true?"--this is the question which needs to be pushed home again and again if one is to realise--and not in the ordinary paths of scientific speculation alone--how profound our ignorance of the Universe really is.

My own ignorance, at any rate, I recognise to be such that my notions of the probable or improbable in the Universe are not of weight enough to lead me to set aside any facts which seem to me well attested, and which are not shown by experts actually to conflict with any better-established facts or generalisations. Wide though the range of established science may be, it represents, as its most far-sighted prophets are the first to admit, a narrow glance only into the unknown and infinite realm of law.

The evidence, then, leading me thus unresisting along, has led me to this main difference from our early treatment of veridical phantasms. Instead of starting from a root-conception of a telepathic impulse merely passing from mind to mind, I now start from a root-conception of the dissociability of the self, of the possibility that different fractions of the personality can act so far independently of each other that the one is not conscious of the other's action.

Naturally the two conceptions coincide over much of the ground. Where experimental thought-transference is concerned--even where the commoner types of coincidental phantasms are concerned--the second formula seems a needless and unprovable variation on the first. But as soon as we get among the difficult types--reciprocal cases, clairvoyant cases, collective cases, above all, manifestations of the dead--we find that the conception of a telepathic impulse as a message despatched and then left alone, as it were, to effect its purpose needs more and more of straining, of manipulation, to fit it to the evidence. On the other hand, it is just in those difficult regions that the analogies of other splits of personality recur, and that phantasmal or automatic behaviour recalls to us the behaviour of segments of personality detached from primary personality, but operating through the organism which is common to both.

The innovation which we are here called upon to make is to suppose that segments of the personality can operate in apparent separation from the organism. Such a supposition, of course, could not have been started without proof of telepathy, and could with difficulty be sustained without proof of survival of death. But, given telepathy, we have _some_ psychical agency connected with man operating apart from his organism. Given survival, we have an element of his personality--to say the least of it--operating when his organism is destroyed. There is therefore no very great additional burden in supposing that an element of his personality may operate apart from his organism, while that organism still exists.

_Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte._ If we have once got a man's _thought_ operating apart from his body--if my fixation of attention on the two of diamonds does somehow so modify another man's brain a few yards off that he seems to see the two of diamonds floating before him--there is no obvious halting-place on _his_ side till we come to "possession" by a departed spirit, and there is no obvious halting-place on _my_ side till we come to "travelling clairvoyance," with a corresponding visibility of my own phantasm to other persons in the scenes which I spiritually visit. No obvious halting-place, I say; for the point which at first seems abruptly transitional has been already shown to be only the critical point of a continuous curve. I mean, of course, the point where consciousness is duplicated--where each segment of the personality begins to possess a separate and definite, but contemporaneous stream of memory and perception. That these can exist concurrently in the same organism our study of hypnotism has already shown, and our study of motor automatisms will still further prove to us.

_Dissociation of personality, combined with activity in the metetherial environment_; such, in the phraseology used in this book, will be the formula which will most easily cover those actually observed facts of veridical apparition on which we must now enter at considerable length. And after this preliminary explanation I shall ask leave to use for clearness in my argument such words as are simplest and shortest, however vague or disputable their connotation may be. I must needs, for instance, use the word "spirit," when I speak of that unknown fraction of a man's personality--not the supraliminal fraction--which we discern as operating before or after death in the metetherial environment. For this conception I can find no other term, but by the word _spirit_ I wish to imply nothing more definite than this. Of the spirit's relation to space, or (which is a part of the same problem) to its own spatial manifestation in definite form, something has already been said, and there will be more to say hereafter. And similarly those terms, _invader_ or _invaded_, from whose strangeness and barbarity our immediate discussion began, will depend for their meaning upon conceptions which the evidence itself must gradually supply.

That evidence, as it now lies before us, is perplexingly various both in content and quality. For some of the canons needed in its analysis I have already referred the reader to extracts from Edmund Gurney's writings. Certain points must still be mentioned here before the narrative begins.

It must be remembered, in the first place, that all these veridical or coincidental cases stand out together as a single group from a background of hallucinations which involve no coincidence, which have no claim to veridicality. If purely subjective hallucinations of the senses affected insane or disordered brains alone,--as was pretty generally the assumption, even in scientific circles, when our inquiry began,--our task would have been much easier than it is. But while there can be no question as to the sound and healthy condition of the great majority of our percipients, Edmund Gurney's "Census of Hallucinations" of 1884, confirmed and extended by the wider inquiry of 1889-1892, showed a frequency, previously unsuspected, of scattered hallucinations among sane and healthy persons, the experience being often unique in a lifetime, and in no apparent connection with any other circumstance whatever.[109]

Since casual hallucinations of the sane, then, are thus _frequent_, we can hardly venture to assume that they are all _veridical_. And the existence of all these perhaps merely subjective hallucinations greatly complicates our investigation of veridical hallucinations. It prevents the mere existence of the hallucinations, however strangely interposed in ordinary life, from having any evidential value, and throws us upon evidence afforded by external coincidence;--on the mere fact, to put such a coincidence in its simplest form, that I see a phantom of my friend Smith at the moment when Smith is unexpectedly dying at a distance. A coincidence of this general type, if it occurs, need not be difficult to substantiate, and we have in fact substantiated it with more or less completeness in several hundred cases.

The _primâ facie_ conclusion will obviously be that there is a causal connection between the death and the apparition. To overcome this presumption it would be necessary either to impugn the accuracy of the informant's testimony, or to show that chance alone might have brought about the observed coincidences.

On both of these questions there have been full and repeated discussions elsewhere. I need not re-argue them at length here, but will refer the reader to the "Report on the Census of Hallucinations," _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. x., where every source of error as yet discovered has been pretty fully considered.

To that volume also I must refer him for a thorough discussion of the arguments for and against chance-coincidence. The conclusion to which the Committee unanimously came is expressed in the closing words: "Between deaths and apparitions of the dying person a connection exists which is not due to chance alone."

We have a right, I think, to say that only by another census of hallucinations, equally careful, more extensive, and yielding absolutely different results, could this conclusion be overthrown.

In forming this conclusion, apparitions at death are of course selected, because, death being an unique event in man's earthly existence, the coincidences between death and apparitions afford a favourable case for statistical treatment. But the coincidences between apparitions and crises other than death, although not susceptible of the same arithmetical precision of estimate, are, as will be seen, quite equally convincing. To this great mass of spontaneous cases we must now turn.

The arrangement of these cases is not easy; nor are they capable of being presented in one logically consequent series.

But the conception of _psychical invasion or excursion_ on which I have already dwelt has at any rate this advantage, that it is sufficiently fundamental to allow of our arrangement of all our recorded cases--perhaps of all possible cases of apparition--in accordance with its own lines.

Our scheme will include all observable telepathic action, from the faint currents which we may imagine to be continually passing between man and man, up to the point--reserved for the following chapter--where one of the parties to the telepathic intercourse has definitely quitted the flesh. The _first_ term in our series must be conveniently vague: the _last_ must lead us to the threshold of the spiritual world.

I must begin with cases where the action of the excursive fragment of the personality is of the weakest kind--the least capable of affecting other observers, or of being recalled into the agent's own waking memory.

Such cases, naturally enough, will be hard to bring up to evidential level. It must depend on mere chance whether these weak and aimless psychical excursions are observed at all; or are observed in such a way as to lead us to attribute them to anything more than the subjective fancy of the observers.

How can a casual vision--say, of a lady sitting in her drawing-room,--of a man returning home at six o'clock--be distinguished from memory-images on the one hand and from what I may term "expectation-images" on the other? The picture of the lady may be a slightly modified and externalised reminiscence; the picture of the man walking up to the door may be a mere projection of what the observer was hoping to see.

I have assumed that these phantoms coincided with no marked event. The lady may have been thinking of going to her drawing-room; the man may have been in the act of walking home;--but these are trivial circumstances which might be repeated any day.

Yet, however trivial, almost any set of human circumstances are sufficiently complex to leave room for coincidence. If the sitter in the drawing-room is wearing a distinctive article of dress, never seen by the percipient until it is seen in the hallucination;--if the phantasmal homeward traveller is carrying a parcel of unusual shape, which the real man does afterwards unexpectedly bring home with him;--there may be reason to think that there is a causal connection between the apparent agent's condition at the moment, and the apparition.

In Appendix VI. A, I quote one of these "arrival-cases," so to term them, where the peculiarity of dress was such as to make the coincidence between vision and reality well worth attention. The case is interesting also as one of our earliest examples of a psychical incident carefully recorded at the time; so that after the lapse of nearly forty years it was possible to correct the percipient's surviving recollection by his contemporary written statement.

In these _arrival_ cases, there is, I say, a certain likelihood that the man's mind may be fixed on his return home, so that his phantasm is seen in what might seem both to himself and to others the most probable place.[110] But there are other cases where a man's phantasm is seen, in a place where there is no special reason for his appearing, although these places seem always to lie within the beat and circuit of his habitual thought.

In such cases there are still possible circumstances which may give reason to think that the apparition is causally connected with the apparent agent. The phantasm of a given person may be seen _repeatedly_ by different percipients, or it may be seen _collectively_ by several persons at a time; or it may combine both these evidential characteristics, and may be seen several times and by several persons together.

Now considering the rarity of phantasmal appearances, considering that not one person in (say) five thousand is ever phantasmally seen at all; the mere fact that a given person's phantasm is seen even _twice_, by different percipients (for we cannot count a second appearance to the _same_ percipient as of equal value), is in itself a remarkable fact; while if this happens _three or four times_ (as in the case of Mrs. Hawkins)[111] we can hardly ascribe such a sequence of rare occurrences to chance alone.

Again, impressive as is the _repetition_ of the apparition in these cases, it is yet less so to my mind than the _collective_ character of some of the perceptions. In Mrs. Hawkins's first case there were two simultaneous percipients, and in Canon Bourne's first case (given in Appendix VI. B) there were three.

And we now come to other cases, where the percipience has been collective, although it has not been repeated. There is a case[112] where two persons at one moment--a moment of no stress or excitement whatever--see the phantasm of a third; that third person being perhaps occupied with some supraliminal or subliminal thought of the scene in the midst of which she is phantasmally discerned. Both the percipients supposed at the moment that it was their actual sister whom they saw; and one can hardly fancy that a mere act of tranquil recognition of the figure by one percipient would communicate to the other percipient a telepathic shock such as would make _her_ see the same figure as well.

The question of the true import of collectivity of percipience renews in another form that problem of _invasion_ to which our evidence so often brings us back. When two or three persons see what seems to be the same phantom in the same place and at the same time, does that mean that that special part of space is somehow modified? or does it mean that a mental impression, conveyed by the distant agent--the phantom-begetter--to one of the percipients is reflected telepathically from that percipient's mind to the minds of the other--as it were secondary--percipients? The reader already knows that I prefer the former of these views. And I observe--as telling against that other view, of psychical contagion--that in certain collective cases we discern no probable link between any one of the percipient minds and the distant agent.

In some of that group of collective cases which we are at this moment considering, this absence of link is noticeable in a special way. There is nothing to show that any thought or emotion was passing from agent to percipients at the moment of the apparition. On the contrary, the indication is that there is no necessary connection whatever between the agent's condition of mind at the moment and the fact that such and such persons observed his phantasm. The projection of the phantasm, if I may so term it, seems a matter wholly automatic on the agent's part, as automatic and meaningless as a dream.

Assuming, then, that this is so--that these _bilocations_ or self-projections to a point apparently remote from one's body do occur without any appreciable stimulus from without, and in moments of apparent calm and indifference--in what way will this fact tend to modify previous conceptions?

It suggests that the continuous dream-life which we must suppose to run concurrently with our waking life is potent enough to effect from time to time enough of dissociation to enable some element of the personality to be perceived at a distance from the organism. How much of consciousness, if any, may be felt at the point where the excursive phantasm is seen, we cannot say. But the notion that a mere incoherent quasi-dream should thus become perceptible to others is fully in accordance with the theories suggested in this work. For I regard subliminal operation as _continuously_ going on, and I hold that the degree of dissociation which can generate a perceptible phantasm is not necessarily a profound change, since that perceptibility depends so largely upon idiosyncrasies of agent and percipient as yet wholly unexplained.

That special idiosyncracy on the part of the agent which tends to make his phantasm easily visible has never yet, so far as I know, received a name, although for convenience' sake it certainly needs one. I propose to use the Greek word [Greek: psuchorragô], which means strictly "to let the soul break loose," and from which I form the words _psychorrhagy_ and _psychorrhagic_, on obvious analogies. When I say that the agents in these cases were born with the _psychorrhagic diathesis_, I express what I believe to be an important fact, physiological as well as psychological, in terms which seem pedantic, but which are the only ones which mean exactly what the facts oblige me to say. That which "breaks loose" on my hypothesis is not (as in the Greek use of the word) the whole principle of life in the organism; rather it is some psychical element probably of very varying character, and definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion or other of space. I hold that this phantasmogenetic effect may be produced either on the mind, and consequently on the brain of another person--in which case he may discern the phantasm somewhere in his vicinity, according to his own mental habit or prepossession--or else directly on a portion of space, "out in the open," in which case several persons may simultaneously discern the phantasm in that actual spot.

Let us apply this view to one of our most bizarre and puzzling cases--that of Canon Bourne (see Appendix VI. B). Here I conceive that Canon Bourne, while riding in the hunting-field, was also subliminally dreaming of himself (imagining himself with some part of his submerged consciousness) as having had a fall, and as beckoning to his daughters--an incoherent dream indeed, but of a quite ordinary type. I go on to suppose that, Canon Bourne being born with the psychorrhagic diathesis, a certain psychical element so far detached itself from his organism as to affect a certain portion of space--near the daughters of whom he was thinking--to effect it, I say, not materially nor even optically, but yet in such a manner that to a certain kind of immaterial and non-optical sensitivity a phantasm of himself and his horse became discernible. His horse was of course as purely a part of the phantasmal picture as his hat. The non-optical distinctness with which the words printed inside his hat were seen indicates that it was some inner non-retinal vision which received the impression from the phantasmogenetic centre. The other phantasmal appearance of Canon Bourne chanced to affect only one percipient, but was of precisely the same character; and of course adds, so far as it goes, to the plausibility of the above explanation.

That explanation, indeed, suffers from the complexity and apparent absurdity inevitable in dealing with phenomena which greatly transcend known laws; but on the other hand it does in its way colligate Canon Bourne's case with a good many others of odd and varying types. Thus appearances such as Canon Bourne's are in my view exactly parallel to the _hauntings_ ascribed to departed spirits. There also we find a psychorrhagic diathesis--a habit or capacity on the part of certain spirits of detaching some psychical element in such a manner as to form a phantasmal picture, which represents the spirit as going through some dream-like action in a given place.

The phantasmogenetic centre may thus, in my view, be equally well produced by an incarnate or by a discarnate spirit.

Again, my hypothesis of a real modification of a part of space, transforming it into a phantasmogenetic centre, applies to a phantasmal voice just as well as to a phantasmal figure. The voice is not heard acoustically any more than the figure is seen optically. Yet a phantasmal voice may in a true sense "come from" a given spot.

These psychorrhagic cases are, I think, important as showing us the earliest or feeblest stages of self-projection--where the dissociation belongs to the dream-stratum--implicating neither the supraliminal will nor the profounder subliminal strata.

And now let us pass on from these, which hardly concern anybody beyond the phantom-begetter himself--and do not even add anything to his own knowledge--to cases where there is some sort of communication from one mind to another, or some knowledge gained by the excursive spirit.

It is impossible to arrange these groups in one continuous logical series. But, roughly speaking, the degree in which the psychical collision is _recollected_ on either side may in some degree indicate its _intensity_, and may serve as a guide to our provisional arrangement.

Following this scheme I shall begin with a group of cases which seem to promise but little information,--cases, namely, where A, the agent, in some way impresses or invades P, the percipient,--but nevertheless neither A nor P retains in supraliminal memory any knowledge of what has occurred.

Now to begin with we shall have no difficulty in admitting that cases of this type are likely often to occur. The psychical _rapprochement_ of telepathy takes place, _ex hypothesi_, in a region which is subliminal for both agent and percipient, and from whence but few and scattered impressions rise for either of them above the conscious threshold. Telepathy will thus probably operate far more continuously than our scattered glimpses would in themselves suggest.

But how can we outside inquirers know anything of telepathic incidents which the principals themselves fail altogether to remember?

In ordinary life we may sometimes learn from bystanders incidents which we cannot learn from the principals themselves. Can there be bystanders who look on at a psychical invasion?

The question is of much theoretical import. On my view that there is a real transference of something from the agent, involving an alteration of some kind in a particular part of space, there might theoretically be some bystander who might discern that alteration in space more clearly than the person for whose benefit, so to say, the alteration was made. If, on the other hand, what has happened is merely a transference of some impulse "from mind to mind";--then one can hardly understand how any mind except the mind aimed at could perceive the telepathic impression. Yet, in _collective_ cases, persons in whom the agent feels no interest, nay, of whose presence along with the intended percipient he is not aware, do in fact receive the impression in just the same way as that intended percipient himself. This was explained by Gurney as probably due to a fresh telepathic transmission,--this time from the due or original percipient's mind to the minds of his neighbours of the moment.

Such a supposition, however, in itself a difficult one, becomes much more difficult when the telepathic impulse has never, so far as we know, penetrated into the due or intended percipient's mind at all. If in such a case a bystander perceives the invading figure, I must think that he perceives it merely as a bystander,--not as a person telepathically influenced by the intended percipient, who does not in fact perceive anything whatsoever. I quote in illustration a bizarre but well-attested case (see Appendix VI. C) which this explanation seems to fit better than any other.

In a somewhat similar case[113] there is strong attestation that a sailor, watching by a dying comrade, saw figures around his hammock, apparently representing the dying man's family, in mourning garb. The family, although they had no ordinary knowledge of the sailor's illness, had been alarmed by noises, etc., which rightly or wrongly they took as indications of some danger to him. I conceive, then, that the wife paid a psychical visit to her husband; and I take the mourning garb and the accompanying children's figures to be symbolical accompaniments, representing her thought, "My children will be orphans." I think this more likely than that the sailor's children also should have possessed this rare peculiarity of becoming perceptible at a distant point in space. And secondary figures, as we shall see later on, are not uncommon in such telepathic presentations. One may picture oneself as though holding a child by the hand, or even driving in a carriage and pair, as vividly as though carrying an umbrella or walking across a room; and one may be thus pictured to others.

And here I note a gradual transition to the next large class of cases on which I am about to enter. I am about to deal with _telæsthesia_;--with cases where an agent-percipient--for he is both in one--makes a clairvoyant excursion (of a more serious type than the mere psychorrhagies already described), and brings back some memory of the scene which he has psychically visited. Now, of course, it may happen that he fails to bring back any such memory, or that if he _does_ bring it back, he tells no one about it. In such cases, just as in the telepathic cases of which I have just spoken, the excursive phantom may possibly be observed by a bystander, and the circumstances may be such as to involve some coincidence which negatives the supposition of the bystander's mere subjective fancy. Such, I think, is the case which I give in Appendix VI. D.

There is a similar case in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 541, where a girl, who is corporeally present in a certain drawing-room, is seen phantasmally in a neighbouring grove, whither she herself presently goes and hangs herself.

Ponderings on projected suicide form perhaps the strongest instance of mental preoccupation with a particular spot. But of course, in our ignorance of the precise quality of thought or emotion needed to prompt a psychical excursion, we need not be surprised to find such an excursion observed on some occasions as trivial as the "arrival-case" of Col. Reed, with which I prefaced the mere psychorrhagic cases.

Again, there is a strange case,[114] which comes to us on good authority, where we must suppose one man's subliminal impulse to have created a picture of himself, his wife, a carriage and a horse, persistent enough to have been watched for some seconds at least by three observers in one place, and by a fourth and independent observer at another point in the moving picture's career. The only alternative, if the narrative be accepted as substantially true, will be the hypothesis before alluded to of the flashing of an impending scene, as in crystal-vision, from some source external to any of the human minds concerned. I need hardly at this point repeat that in my view the wife and the horse will be as purely a part of the man's conception of his own aspect or environment as the coat on his back.

And here, for purposes of comparison, I must refer to one of the most bizarre cases in our collection.[115] Four credible persons, to some extent independently, see a carriage and pair, with two men on the box and an inside occupant, under circumstances which make it impossible that the carriage was real. Now this vision cannot have been _precognitive_; nothing of the kind occurred for years after it, nor well _could_ occur; and I am forced to regard it as the externalisation of some dream, whether of an incarnate or of a discarnate mind. The parallel between this case and the one mentioned above tends therefore to show that the first, in spite of the paraphernalia of wife, horse, and dog-cart, may have been the outcome of a single waking dream;--of the phantasmogenetic dissociation of elements of one sole personality.

In the cases which I have just been discussing there has been a psychical excursion, with its possibilities of clairvoyance; but the excursive element has not brought home any assignable knowledge to the supraliminal personality. I go on now to cases where such knowledge _has_ thus been garnered. But here there is need of some further pause, to consider a little in how many ways we can imagine that knowledge to be reached.

Firstly, the distant knowledge may, it would seem, be reached through hyperæsthesia,--an extended power of the ordinary senses. Secondly, it sometimes seems to come through crystal-gazing or its correlative shell-hearing,--artifices which seem to utilise the ordinary senses in a new way. And besides these two avenues to distant knowledge there is a _third_, the telepathic avenue, which, as we have already surmised, sometimes shades off into the purely telæsthetic; when no distant _mind_, but only the distant _scene_, seems to be attracting the excursive spirit. And in the _fourth_ place we must remember that it is mainly in the form of _dream or vision_ that the most striking instances of telæsthesia which I have as yet recorded have come. Can we in any way harmonise these various modes of perception? Can we discover any condition of the percipient which is common to all?

To a certain limited extent such co-ordination is possible. In each approach to telæsthesia in turn we find a tendency to something like a dream-excursion. Hyperæsthesia, in the first place, although it exists sometimes in persons wide awake, is characteristically an attribute of sleep-waking states.

We have seen in discussing hypnotic experiments that it is sometimes possible to extend the subject's perceptive faculty by gradual suggestion, so far as to transform a hyperæsthesia which can still be referred to the action of the sense-organs into a telæsthesia which cannot be so referred. It is observable that percipients in such cases sometimes describe their sensation as that of receiving an impression, or seeing a picture placed before them; sometimes as that of _travelling_ and visiting the distant scene or person. Or the feeling may oscillate between these two sensations, just as the sense of _time-relation_ in the picture shown may oscillate between past, present, and future.

To all these complex sensations the phenomena of crystal-gazing offer close analogies. I have already remarked on the curious fact that the simple artifice of gazing into a speculum should prove the avenue to phenomena of such various types. There may be very different origins even for pictures which in the crystal present very similar aspects; and certain sensations do also accompany these pictures; sensations not merely of _gazing_ but sometimes (though rarely) of partial _trance_; and oftener of _bilocation_;--of psychical _presence_ among the scenes which the crystal has indeed initiated, but no longer seems to limit or to contain.

The idea of psychical excursion thus suggested must, however, be somehow reconciled with the frequently _symbolic_ character of these visions. The features of a crystal-vision seem often to be no mere transcription of material facts, but an abbreviated selection from such facts, or even a bold modification of such facts with a view of telling some story more quickly and clearly. We are familiar with the same kind of succession of symbolical scenes in dream, or in waking reverie. And of course if an intelligence outside the crystal-gazer's mind is endeavouring to impress him, this might well be the chosen way.

And moreover through all telæsthetic vision some element of similar character is wont to run--some indication that _mind_ has been at work upon the picture--that the scene has not been presented, so to say, in crude objectivity, but that there has been some _choice_ as to the details discerned; and some _symbolism_ in the way in which they are presented.

Let us consider how these characteristics affect different theories of the mechanism of clairvoyance. Let us suppose first that there is some kind of transition from hyperæsthesia to telæsthesia, so that when peripheral sensation is no longer possible, central perception may be still operating across obstacles otherwise insurmountable.

If this be the case, it seems likely that central perception will shape itself on the types of perception to which the central tracts of the brain are accustomed; and that the _connaissance supérieure_, the telæsthetic knowledge, however it may really be acquired, will present itself mainly as clairvoyance or clairaudience--as some form of sight or sound. Yet these telæsthetic sights and sounds may be expected to show some trace of their unusual origin. They may, for instance, be _imperfectly co-ordinated_ with sights and sounds arriving through external channels; and, since they must in some way be a translation of supernormal impressions into sensory terms, they are likely to show something _symbolic_ in character.

This tendency to subliminal symbolism, indeed, meets us at each point of our inquiry. As an instance of it in its simplest form, I may mention a case where a botanical student passing inattentively in front of the glass door of a restaurant thought that he had seen _Verbascum Thapsus_ printed thereon. The real word was _Bouillon_; and that happens to be the trivial name in French for the plant Verbascum Thapsus. The actual optical perception had thus been subliminally transformed; the words Verbascum Thapsus were the report to the inattentive supraliminal self by a subliminal self more interested in botany than in dinner.

Nay, we know that our own optical perception is in its own way highly symbolic. The scene which the baby sees instinctively,--which the impressionist painter manages to see by a sort of deliberate self-simplification,--is very different from the highly elaborate interpretation and selection of blotches of colour by which the ordinary adult figures to himself the visible world.

Now we adults stand towards this subliminal symbolism in much the same attitude as the baby stands towards our educated optical symbolism. Just as the baby fails to grasp the third dimension, so may we still be failing to grasp a fourth;--or whatever be the law of that higher cognisance which begins to report fragmentarily to man that which his ordinary senses cannot discern.

Assuredly then we must not take the fact that any knowledge comes to us symbolically as a proof that it comes to us from a mind outside our own. The symbolism may be the inevitable language in which one stratum of our personality makes its report to another. The symbolism, in short, may be either the easiest, or the only possible psychical record of actual objective fact; whether that fact be in the first instance discerned by our deeper selves, or be conveyed to us from other minds in this form;--elaborated for our mind's digestion, as animal food has been elaborated for our body's digestion, from a primitive crudity of things.

But again one must question, on general idealistic principles, whether there be in such cases any real distinction between symbolism and reality,--between subjective and objective as we commonly use those terms. The resisting matter which we see and touch has "solid" reality for minds so constituted as to have the same subjective feeling awakened by it. But to other minds, endowed with other forms of sensibility--minds possibly both higher and more numerous than our own--this solid matter may seem disputable and unreal, while thought and emotion, perceived in ways unknown to us, may be the only reality.

This material world constitutes, in fact, a "privileged case"--a simplified example--among all discernible worlds, so far as the perception of incarnate spirits is concerned. For discarnate spirits it is no longer a privileged case; to _them_ it is apparently easier to discern thoughts and emotions by non-material signs.[116] But they need not therefore be wholly cut off from discerning material things, any more than incarnate spirits are wholly cut off from discerning immaterial things--thoughts and emotions symbolised in phantasmal form. "The ghost in man, the ghost that once was man," to use Tennyson's words, have each of them to overcome by empirical artifices certain difficulties which are of different type for each, but are not insurmountable by either.

These reflections, applicable at various points in our argument, have seemed specially needed when we had first to attack the meaning of the so-called "travelling clairvoyance," of which instances were given in the chapter on hypnotism. It was needful to consider how far there was a continuous transition between these excursions and directer transferences between mind and mind,--between telæsthesia and telepathy. It now seems to me that such a continuous transition may well exist, and that there is no absolute gulf between the supernormal perception of ideas as existing in other minds, and the supernormal perception of what we know as matter. All matter may, for aught we know, exist as an idea in some cosmic mind, with which mind each individual spirit may be in relation, as fully as with individual minds. The difference perhaps lies rather in the fact that there may be generally a _summons_ from a cognate mind which starts the so-called agent's mind into action; his invasion may be in some way _invited_; while a spiritual excursion among inanimate objects only may often lack an impulse to start it. If this be so, it would explain the fact that such excursions have mainly succeeded under the influence of hypnotic suggestion.

We see in travelling clairvoyance,[117] just as we see in crystal-visions, a kind of fusion of all our forms of supernormal faculty. There is telepathy, telæsthesia, retrocognition, precognition; and in the cases reported by Cahagnet, which will be referred to in