Chapter VIII: Motor Automatism (1)

[Greek: Mêketi
monon sumpnein tô periechonti aeri, all' hêdê kai sumphronoin
tô periechonti panta noerô.]

--MARCUS AURELIUS.

At this point, one may broadly say, we reach the end of the phenomena whose existence is vaguely familiar to popular talk. And here, too, I might fairly claim, the evidence for my primary thesis,--namely, that the analysis of man's personality reveals him as a spirit, surviving death,--has attained an amplitude which would justify the reader in accepting that view as the provisional hypothesis which comes nearest to a comprehensive co-ordination of the actual facts. What we have already recounted seems, indeed, impossible to explain except by supposing that our inner vision has widened or deepened its purview so far as to attain some glimpses of a spiritual world in which the individualities of our departed friends still actually subsist.

The reader, however, who has followed me thus far must be well aware that a large class of phenomena, of high importance, is still awaiting discussion. _Motor_ automatisms,--though less familiar to the general public than the phantasms which I have classed as _sensory_ automatisms,--are in fact even commoner, and even more significant.

Motor automatisms, as I define them, are phenomena of very wide range. We have encountered them already many times in this book. We met them in the first place in a highly developed form in connection with multiplex personality in Chapter II. Numerous instances were there given of motor effects, initiated by secondary selves without the knowledge of the primary selves, or sometimes in spite of their actual resistance. All motor action of a secondary self is an automatism in this sense, in relation to the primary self. And of course we might by analogy extend the use of the word still further, and might call not only post-epileptic acts, but also maniacal acts, automatic; since they are performed without the initiation of the presumedly sane primary personality. Those degenerative phenomena, indeed, are not to be discussed in this chapter. Yet it will be well to pause here long enough to make it clear to the reader just what motor automatisms I am about to discuss as _evolutive_ phenomena, and as therefore falling within the scope of this treatise;--and what kind of relation they bear to the dissolutive motor phenomena which occupy so much larger a place in popular knowledge.

In order to meet this last question, I must here give more distinct formulation to a thesis which has already suggested itself more than once in dealing with special groups of our phenomena.

_It may be expected that supernormal vital phenomena will manifest themselves as far as possible through the same channels as abnormal or morbid vital phenomena, when the same centres or the same synergies are involved._

To illustrate the meaning of this theorem, I may refer to a remark long ago made by Edmund Gurney and myself in dealing with "Phantasms of the Living," or veridical hallucinations, generated (as we maintained), not by a morbid state of the percipient's brain, but by a telepathic impact from an agent at a distance. We observed that if a hallucination--a subjective image--is to be excited by this distant energy, it will probably be most readily excited in somewhat the same manner as the morbid hallucination which follows on a cerebral injury. We urged that this is _likely_ to be the case--we showed ground for supposing that it _is_ the case--both as regards the mode of evolution of the phantasm in the percipient's brain, and the mode in which it seems to present itself to his senses.

And here I should wish to give a much wider generality to this principle, and to argue that if there be within us a secondary self aiming at manifestation by physiological means, it seems probable that its readiest _path of externalisation_--its readiest outlet of visible action--may often lie along some track which has already been shown to be a line of low resistance by the disintegrating processes of disease. Or, varying the metaphor, we may anticipate that the partition of the primary and the secondary self will lie along some plane of cleavage which the _morbid_ dissociations of our psychical synergies have already shown themselves disposed to follow. If epilepsy, madness, etc., tend to _split up_ our faculties in certain ways, automatism is likely to split them up in ways somewhat resembling these.

But in what way then, it will be asked, do you distinguish the supernormal from the merely abnormal? Why assume that in these aberrant states there is anything besides hysteria, besides epilepsy, besides insanity?

The answer to this question has virtually been given in previous chapters of this book. The reader is already accustomed to the point of view which regards all psychical as well as all physiological activities as necessarily either developmental or degenerative, tending to evolution or to dissolution. And now, whilst altogether waiving any teleological speculation, I will ask him hypothetically to suppose that an evolutionary _nisus_, something which we may represent as an effort towards self-development, self-adaptation, self-renewal, is discernible especially on the psychical side of at any rate the higher forms of life. Our question, Supernormal or abnormal?--may then be phrased, Evolutive or dissolutive? And in studying each psychical phenomenon in turn we shall have to inquire whether it indicates a mere degeneration of powers already acquired, or, on the other hand, the "promise and potency," if not the actual possession, of powers as yet unrecognised or unknown.

Thus, for instance, Telepathy is surely a step in _evolution_.[160] To learn the thoughts of other minds without the mediation of the special senses, manifestly indicates the possibility of a vast extension of psychical powers. And any knowledge which we can amass as to the conditions under which telepathic action takes place will form a valuable starting-point for an inquiry as to the evolutive or dissolutive character of unfamiliar psychical states.[161]

For example, we may learn from our knowledge of telepathy that the superficial aspect of certain stages of psychical evolution, like the superficial aspect of certain stages of physiological evolution, may resemble mere _inhibition_, or mere _perturbation_. But the inhibition may involve latent dynamogeny, and the perturbation may mask evolution. The hypnotised subject may pass through a lethargic stage before he wakes into a state in which he has gained _community of sensation_ with the operator; somewhat as the silkworm (to use the oldest and the most suggestive of all illustrations) passes through the apparent torpor of the cocoon-stage before evolving into the moth. Again, the automatist's hand (as we shall presently see) is apt to pass through a stage of inco-ordinated movements, which might almost be taken for choreic, before it acquires the power of ready and intelligent writing. Similarly the development, for instance, of a tooth may be preceded by a stage of indefinite aching, which might be ascribed to the formation of an abscess, did not the new tooth ultimately show itself. And still more striking cases of a _perturbation which masks evolution_ might be drawn from the history of the human organism as it develops into its own maturity, or prepares for the appearance of the fresh human organism which is to succeed it.

Analogy, therefore, both physiological and psychical, warns us not to conclude that any given psychosis is merely degenerative until we have examined its results closely enough to satisfy ourselves whether they tend to bring about any enlargement of human powers, to open any new inlet to the reception of objective truth. If such there prove to be, then, with whatever morbid activities the psychosis may have been intertwined, it contains indications of an evolutionary _nisus_ as well.

These remarks, I hope, may have sufficiently cleared the ground to admit of our starting afresh on the consideration of such motor automatisms as are at any rate not morbid in their effect on the organism, and which I now have to show to be _evolutive_ in character. I maintain that we have no valid ground for assuming that the movements which are _not_ due to our conscious will must be less important, and less significant, than those that _are_. We observe, of course, that in the organic region the movements which are _not_ due to conscious will are really the most important of all, though the voluntary movements by which a man seeks food and protects himself against enemies are also of great practical importance--he must first live and multiply if he is to learn and know. But we must guard against confusing importance for immediate practical life with importance for science--on which even practical life ultimately depends. As soon as the task of living and multiplying is no longer all-engrossing, we begin to change our relative estimate of values, and to find that it is not the broad and obvious phenomena, but the residual and elusive phenomena, which are oftenest likely to introduce us to new avenues of knowledge. I wish to persuade my readers that this is quite as truly the case in psychology as in physics.

As a first step in our analysis, we may point out certain main characters which unite in a true class all the automatisms which we are here considering--greatly though these may differ among themselves in external form.

In the first place, then, our automatisms are _independent_ phenomena; they are what the physician calls _idiognomonic_. That is to say, they are not merely symptomatic of some other affection, or incidental to some profounder change. The mere fact, for instance, that a man writes messages which he does not consciously originate will not, when taken alone, prove anything beyond this fact itself as to the writer's condition. He may be perfectly sane, in normal health, and with nothing unusual observable about him. This characteristic--provable by actual observation and experiment--distinguishes our automatisms from various seemingly kindred phenomena. Thus we may have to include in our class the occasional automatic utterance of words or sentences. But the continuous exhausting vociferation of acute mania does not fall within our province; for those shouts are merely _symptomatic_; nor, again, does the _cri hydrocéphalique_ (or spontaneous meaningless noise which sometimes accompanies water on the brain); for that, too, is no independent phenomenon, but the direct consequence of a definite lesion. Furthermore, we shall have to include in our class certain simple movements of the hands, co-ordinated into the act of writing. But here, also, our definition will lead us to exclude _choreic_ movements, which are merely symptomatic of nervous malnutrition; or which we may, if we choose, call _idiopathic_, as constituting an independent malady. But our automatisms are not _idiopathic_ but _idiognomonic_; they may indeed be associated with or facilitated by certain states of the organism, but they are neither a symptom of any other malady, nor are they a malady in themselves.

Agreeing, then, that our peculiar class consists of automatisms which are idiognomonic,--whose existence does not necessarily imply the existence of some profounder affection already known as producing them,--we have still to look for some more positive bond of connection between them, some quality common to all of them, and which makes them worth our prolonged investigation.

This we shall find in the fact that they are all of them _message-bearing_ or _nunciative_ automatisms. I do not, of course, mean that they all of them bring messages from sources external to the automatist's own mind. In some cases they probably do this; but as a rule the so-called messages seem more probably to originate within the automatist's own personality. Why, then, it may be asked, do I call them _messages_? We do not usually speak of a man as sending a message to himself. The answer to this question involves, as we shall presently see, the profoundest conception of these automatisms to which we can as yet attain. They present themselves to us as messages communicated from one stratum to another stratum of the same personality. Originating in some deeper zone of a man's being, they float up into superficial consciousness, as deeds, visions, words, ready-made and full-blown, without any accompanying perception of the elaborative process which has made them what they are.

Can we then (we may next ask) in any way predict the possible _range_ of these motor automatisms? Have we any limit assignable _a priori_, outside which it would be useless to look for any externalisation of an impulse emanating from sub-conscious strata of our being?

The answer to this must be that no such limit can be with any confidence suggested. We have not yet learnt with any distinctness even how far the wave from a _consciously_-perceived stimulus will spread, or what changes its motion will assume. Still less can we predict the limitations which the resistance of the organism will impose on the radiation of a stimulus originated within itself. We are learning to consider the human organism as a practically infinite complex of interacting vibrations; and each year adds many new facts to our knowledge of the various transformations which these vibrations may undergo, and of the unexpected artifices by which we may learn to cognise some stimulus which is not directly felt.

A few concrete instances will make my meaning plainer. And my first example shall be taken from those experiments in _muscle-reading_--less correctly termed mind-reading--with which the readers of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R. are already familiar. Let us suppose that I am to hide a pin, and that some accomplished muscle-reader is to take my hand and find the pin by noting my muscular indications.[162] I first hide the pin in the hearth-rug; then I change my mind and hide it in the bookshelf. I fix my mind on the bookshelf, but resolve to make no guiding movement. The muscle-reader takes my hand, leads me first to the rug, then to the bookshelf, and finds the pin. Now, what has happened in this case? What movements have I made?

Firstly, I have made no _voluntary_ movement; and secondly, I have made no _conscious involuntary_ movement. But, thirdly, I have made an _unconscious involuntary_ movement which directly depended on conscious ideation. I strongly thought of the bookshelf, and when the bookshelf was reached in our vague career about the room I made a movement--say rather a tremor occurred--in my hand, which, although beyond both my knowledge and my control, was enough to supply to the muscle-reader's delicate sensibility all the indication required. All this is now admitted, and, in a sense, understood; we formulate it by saying that my conscious ideation contained a motor element; and that this motor element, though inhibited from any conscious manifestation, did yet inevitably externalise itself in a peripheral tremor.

But, fourthly, something more than this has clearly taken place. Before the muscle-reader stopped at the bookshelf he stopped at the rug. I was no longer consciously thinking of the rug; but the idea of the pin in the rug must still have been reverberating, so to say, in my sub-conscious region; and this unconscious memory, this unnoted reverberation, revealed itself in a peripheral tremor nearly as distinct as that which (when the bookshelf was reached) corresponded to the strain of conscious thought.

This tremor, then, was in a certain sense a message-bearing automatism. It was the externalisation of an idea which, once conscious, had become unconscious, though in the slightest conceivable degree--namely, by a mere slight escape from the field of direct attention.

Having, then, considered an instance where the automatic message passes only between two closely-adjacent strata of consciousness, externalising an impulse derived from an idea which has only recently sunk out of consciousness and which could easily be summoned back again;--let us find our next illustration in a case where the line of demarcation between the strata of consciousness through which the automatic message pierces is distinct and impassable by any effort of will.

Let us take a case of _post-hypnotic suggestion_;--say, for instance, an experiment of Edmund Gurney's (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 319). The subject had been trained to write with planchette, after he had been awakened, the statements which had been made to him when in the hypnotic trance. He wrote the desired words, or something like them, but while he wrote them his waking self was entirely unaware of what his hand was writing. Thus, having been told in the trance, "It has begun snowing again," he wrote, after waking, "It begun snowing," while he read aloud, with waking intelligence, from a book of stories, and was quite unconscious of what his hand (placed on a planchette behind a screen) was at the same time writing.

Here we have an automatic message of traceable origin; a message implanted in the hypnotic stratum of the subject's self, and cropping up--like a fault--in the waking stratum,--externalised in automatic movements which the waking self could neither predict nor guide.

Yet once more. In the discussion which will follow we shall have various instances of the transformation (as I shall regard it) of psychical shock into definite muscular energy of apparently a quite alien kind. Such transformations of so-called psychical into physical force--of will into motion--do of course perpetually occur within us.

For example, I take a child to a circus; he sits by me holding my hand; there is a discharge of musketry and his grip tightens. Now in this case we should call the child's tightened grip automatic. But suppose that, instead of merely holding my hand, he is trying with all his might to squeeze the dynamometer, and that the sudden excitation enables him to squeeze it harder--are we then to describe that extra squeeze as automatic? or as voluntary?

However phrased, it is the fact (as amply established by M. Féré and others[163]) that excitations of almost any kind--whether sudden and startling or agreeable and prolonged--do tend to increase the subject's dynamometrical power. In the first place, and this is in itself an important fact, the average of squeezing-power is found to be greater among educated students than among robust labouring men, thus showing that it is not so much developed muscle as active brain which renders possible a sudden concentration of muscular force. But more than this; M. Féré finds that with himself and his friends the mere listening to an interesting lecture, or the mere stress of thought in solitude, or still more the act of writing or of speech, produces a decided increase of strength in the grip, especially of the right hand. The same effect of dynamogeny is produced with hypnotic subjects, by musical sounds, by coloured light, especially red light, and even by a hallucinatory suggestion of red light. "All our sensations," says M. Féré in conclusion, "are accompanied by a development of potential energy, which passes into a kinetic state, and externalises itself in motor manifestations which even so rough a method as dynamometry is able to observe and record."

I would beg the reader to keep these words in mind. We shall presently find that a method apparently even rougher than dynamographic tracings may be able to interpret, with far greater delicacy, the automatic tremors which are coursing to and fro within us. If once we can get a spy into the citadel of our own being, his rudest signalling will tell us more than our subtlest inferences from outside of what is being planned and done within.

And now having to deal with what I define as messages conveyed by one stratum in man to another stratum, I must first consider in what general ways human messages can be conveyed. Writing and speech have become predominant in the intercourse of civilised men, and it is to writing and speech that we look with most interest among the communications of the subliminal self. But it does not follow that the subliminal self will always have such complex methods at its command. We have seen already that it often finds it hard to manage the delicate co-ordinations of muscular movement required for writing,--that the attempt at automatic script ends in a thump and a scrawl.

The subliminal self like the telegraphist begins its effort with full knowledge, indeed, of the alphabet, but with only weak and rude command over our muscular adjustments. It is therefore _a priori_ likely that its easiest mode of communication will be through a repetition of simple movements, so arranged as to correspond to letters of the alphabet.

And here, I think, we have attained to a conception of the mysterious and much-derided phenomenon of "table-tilting" which enables us to correlate it with known phenomena, and to start at least from an intelligible basis, and on a definite line of inquiry.

A few words are needed to explain what are the verifiable phenomena, and the less verifiable hypotheses, connoted by such words as "table-turning," "spirit-rapping," and the like.

If one or more persons of a special type--at present definable only by the question-begging and barbarous term "mediumistic"--remain quietly for some time with hands in contact with some easily movable object, and desiring its movement, that object will sometimes begin to move. If, further, they desire it to indicate letters of the alphabet by its movements,--as by tilting once for _a_, twice for _b_, etc., it will often do so, and answers unexpected by any one present will be obtained.

Thus far, whatever our interpretation, we are in the region of easily reproducible facts, which many of my readers may confirm for themselves if they please.

But beyond the simple movements--or table-turning--and the intelligible responses--or table-tilting--both of which are at least _primâ facie_ physically explicable by the sitters' unconscious pressure, without postulating any unknown physical force at all,--it is alleged by many persons that further physical phenomena occur; namely, that the table moves in a direction, or with a violence, which no unconscious pressure can explain; and also that percussive sounds or "raps" occur, which no unconscious action, or indeed no agency known to us, could produce. These raps communicate messages like the tilts, and it is to them that the name of "spirit-rapping" is properly given. But spiritualists generally draw little distinction between these four phenomena--mere table-turning, responsive table-tilting, movements of inexplicable vehemence, and responsive raps--attributing all alike to the agency of departed spirits of men and women, or at any rate to disembodied intelligences of some kind or other.

I am not at present discussing the physical phenomena of Spiritualism, and I shall therefore leave on one side all the alleged movements and noises of this kind for which unconscious pressure will not account. I do not prejudge the question as to their real occurrence; but assuming that such disturbances of the physical order do occur, there is at least no _primâ facie_ need to refer them to disembodied spirits. If a table moves when no one is touching it; this is not obviously more likely to have been effected by my deceased grandfather than by myself. We cannot tell how _I_ could move it; but then we cannot tell how _he_ could move it either. The question must be argued on its merits in each case; and our present argument is not therefore vitiated by our postponement of this further problem.

M. Richet[164] was, I believe, the first writer, outside the Spiritualistic group, who so much as showed any practical knowledge of this phenomenon, still less endeavoured to explain it. Faraday's well-known explanation of table-turning as the result of the summation of many unconscious movements--obviously true as it is for some of the simplest cases of table-movement--does not touch this far more difficult question of the origination of these intelligent messages, conveyed by distinct and repeated movements of some object admitting of ready displacement. The ordinary explanation--I am speaking, of course, of cases where fraud is not in question--is that the sitter unconsciously sets going and stops the movements so as to shape the word in accordance with his expectation. Now that he unconsciously sets going and stops the movements is part of my own present contention, but that the word is thereby shaped in accordance with his expectation is often far indeed from being the case. To those indeed who are familiar with automatic _written_ messages, this question as to the unexpectedness of the _tilted_ messages will present itself in a new light. If the written messages originate in a source beyond the automatist's supraliminal self, so too may the tilted messages;--even though we admit that the tilts are caused by his hand's pressure of the table just as directly as the script by his hand's manipulation of the pen.

One piece of evidence showing that _written_ messages are not always the mere echo of expectation is a case[165] where _anagrams_ were automatically written, which their writer was not at once able to decipher. Following this hint, I have occasionally succeeded in getting anagrams tilted out for myself by movements of a small table which I alone touched.

This is a kind of experiment which might with advantage be oftener repeated; for the extreme incoherence and silliness of the responses thus obtained does not prevent the process itself from being in a high degree instructive. Here, again (as in automatic writing), a man may hold colloquy with his own dream--may note in actual juxtaposition two separate strata of his own intelligence.

I shall not at present pursue the discussion of these tilted responses beyond this their very lowest and most rudimentary stage. They almost immediately suggest another problem, for which our discussion is hardly ripe, the participation, namely, of several minds in the production of the same automatic message. There is something of this difficulty even in the explanation of messages given when the hands of two persons are touching a planchette; but when the instrument of response is large, and the method of response simple, as with table-tilting, we find this question of the influence of more minds than one imperatively recurring.

Our immediate object, however, is rather to correlate the different attainable modes of automatic response in some intelligible scheme than to pursue any one of them through all its phases. We regarded the table-tilting process as in one sense the simplest, the least differentiated form of motor response. It is a kind of _gesture_ merely, though a gesture implying knowledge of the alphabet. Let us see in what directions the movement of response becomes more specialised,--as gesture parts into pictorial art and articulate speech. We find, in fact, that a just similar divergence of impulses takes place in automatic response. On the one hand the motor impulse specialises itself into _drawing_; on the other hand it specialises itself into _speech_. Of automatic drawing I have already said something (Chapter III.). Automatic speech will receive detailed treatment in Chapter IX. At present I shall only briefly indicate the position of each form of movement among cognate automatisms.

Some of my readers may have seen these so-called "spirit-drawings,"--designs, sometimes in colour, whose author asserts that he drew them without any plan, or even knowledge of what his hand was going to do. This assertion may be quite true, and the person making it may be perfectly sane.[166] The drawings so made will be found curiously accordant with what the view which I am explaining would lead us to expect. For they exhibit a fusion of arabesque with ideography; that is to say, they partly resemble the forms of ornamentation into which the artistic hand strays when, as it were, dreaming on the paper without definite plan; and partly they afford a parallel to the early attempts at symbolic self-expression of savages who have not yet learnt an alphabet. Like savage writing, they pass by insensible transitions from direct pictorial symbolism to an abbreviated ideography, mingled in its turn with writing of a fantastic or of an ordinary kind.

And here, before we enter on the study of automatic writing, I must refer to two great historic cases of automatism, which may serve as a kind of prologue to what is to follow. One case, that of Socrates, is a case of monitory _inhibition_; the other, that of Jeanne d'Arc, of monitory _impulse_.

The Founder of Science himself--the permanent type of sanity, shrewdness, physical robustness, and moral balance--was guided in all the affairs of life by a monitory Voice,--by "the Dæmon of Socrates." This is a case which can never lose its interest, a case which has been vouched for by the most practical, and discussed by the loftiest intellect of Greece,--both of them intimate friends of the illustrious subject;--a case, therefore, which one who endeavours to throw new light on hallucination and automatism is bound, even at this distance of time, to endeavour to explain.[167] And this is the more needful, since a treatise was actually written, a generation ago, as "a specimen of the application of the science of psychology to the science of history," arguing from the records of the [Greek: daimónion] in Xenophon and Plato that Socrates was in fact insane.[168]

I believe that it is now possible to give a truer explanation; to place these old records in juxtaposition with more instructive parallels; and to show that the messages which Socrates received were only advanced examples of a process which, if supernormal, is not abnormal, and which characterises that form of intelligence which we describe as _genius_.

The story of Socrates I take as a signal example of _wise automatism_; of the possibility that the messages which are conveyed to the supraliminal mind from subliminal strata of the personality,--whether as sounds, as sights, or as movements,--may sometimes come from far beneath the realm of dream and confusion,--from some self whose monitions convey to us a wisdom profounder than we know.

Similarly in the case of Joan of Arc, I believe that only now, with the comprehension which we are gradually gaining of the possibility of an impulse from the mind's deeper strata which is so far from madness that it is wiser than our sanity itself,--only now, I repeat, can we understand aright that familiar story.

Joan's condemnation was based on her own admissions; and the Latin _procès-verbal_ still exists, and was published from the MS. by M. Quicherat, 1841-9, for the French Historical Society.[169] Joan, like Socrates, was condemned mainly on the ground, or at least on the pretext of her monitory voices: and her Apology remarkably resembles his, in its resolute insistence on the truth of the very phenomena which were being used to destroy her. Her answers are clear and self-consistent, and seem to have been little, if at all, distorted by the recorder. Few pieces of history so remote as this can be so accurately known.

Fortunately for our purpose, her inquisitors asked her many questions as to her voices and visions; and her answers enable us to give a pretty full analysis of the phenomena which concern us.

I. The voices do not begin with the summons to fight for France. Joan heard them first at thirteen years of age,--as with Socrates also the voice began in childhood. The first command consisted of nothing more surprising than that "she was to be a good girl, and go often to church." After this the voice--as in the case of Socrates--intervened frequently, and on trivial occasions.

II. The voice was accompanied at first by a light, and sometimes afterwards by figures of saints, who appeared to speak, and whom Joan appears to have both seen and felt as dearly as though they had been living persons. But here there is some obscurity; and Michelet thinks that on one occasion the Maid was tricked by the courtiers for political ends. For she asserted (apparently without contradiction) that several persons, including the Archbishop of Rheims, as well as herself, had seen an angel bringing to the King a material crown.[170]

III. The voices came mainly when she was awake, but also sometimes roused her from sleep; a phenomenon often observed in our cases of "veridical hallucination." "Ipsa dormiebat, et vox excitabat eam." (Quicherat, i., p. 62.)

IV. The voice was not always fully intelligible (especially if she was half awake);--in this respect again resembling some of our recorded cases, both visual and auditory, where, on the view taken in _Phantasms of the Living_, the externalisation has been incomplete. "Vox dixit aliqua, sed non omnia intellexit." (Quicherat, i., p. 62.)

V. The predictions of the voice, so far as stated, were mainly fulfilled; viz., that the siege of Orleans would be raised; that Charles VII. would be crowned at Rheims; that she herself would be wounded; but the prediction that there would be a great victory over the English within seven years was not fulfilled in any exact way, although the English continued to lose ground. In short, about so much was fulfilled as an ardent self-devoted mind might have anticipated; much indeed that might have seemed irrational to ordinary observers, but nothing which actually needed a definite prophetic power. Here, again, we are reminded of the general character of the monitions of Socrates. And yet in Joan's case, more probably than in the case of Socrates, there may have been one singular exception to this general rule. She knew by monition that there was a sword "retro altare"--somewhere behind the altar--in the Church of St. Catherine of Fierbois. "Scivit ipsum ibi esse per voces":--she sent for it, nothing doubting, and it was found and given to her. This was a unique incident in her career. Her judges asked whether she had not once found a cup, and a missing priest, by help of similar monitions, but this she denied; and it is remarkable that no serious attempt was made either to show that she had claimed this clairvoyant power habitually, or, on the other hand, to invalidate the one instance of it which she did in effect claim. It would be absurd to cite the alleged discovery of the sword as in itself affording a proof of clairvoyance, any more than Socrates' alleged intimation of the approaching herd of swine.[171] But when we are considering monitions given in more recent times it will be well to remember that it is in this direction that some supernormal extension of knowledge seems possibly traceable.

The cases of Socrates and of Joan of Arc, on which I have just dwelt, might with almost equal fitness have been introduced at certain other points of my discussion. At first sight, at any rate, they appear rather like sensory than like motor automatisms,--like hallucinations of hearing rather than like the motor impulses which we are now about to study. Each case, however, approaches motor automatism in a special way.

In the case of Socrates the "sign" seems to have been not so much a definite voice as a sense of _inhibition_. In the case of Joan of Arc the voices were definite enough, but they were accompanied--as such voices sometimes are, but sometimes are _not_--with an overmastering impulse to _act_ in obedience to them. These are, I may say, palmary cases of inhibition and of impulse: and inhibition and impulse are at the very root of motor phenomena.

They show moreover the furthest extent of the claim that can be made for the agency of the subliminal self, apart from any external influence,--apart from telepathy from the living, or possession by the departed. Each of those other hypotheses will claim its own group of cases; but we must not invoke them until the resources of subliminal wisdom are manifestly overtaxed.

These two famous cases, then, have launched us on our subject in the stress of a twofold difficulty in logical arrangement. We cannot always answer these primary questions, Is the subliminal impulse sensory or motor? is it originated in the automatist's own mind, or in some mind external to him?

In the first place, we must reflect that, if the subliminal self really possesses that profound power over the organism with which I have credited it, we may expect that its "messages" will sometimes express themselves in the form of deep organic modifications--of changes in the vaso-motor, the circulatory, the respiratory systems. Such phenomena are likely to be less noted or remembered as _coincidental_, from their very indefiniteness, as compared, for instance, with a phantasmal appearance; but we have, nevertheless, records of various telepathic cases of deep coenesthetic disturbance, of a profound _malaise_ which must, one would think, have involved some unusual condition of the viscera.[172]

In cases, too, where the telepathic impression has ultimately assumed a definite sensory form, some organic or emotional phenomena have been noted, being perhaps the _first_ effects of the telepathic impact, whether from the living or from the dead.[173]

And here I may mention an experience of Lady de Vesci's, who described to me in conversation a feeling of _malaise_, defining itself into the urgent need of definite action--namely, the despatch of a telegram to a friend who was in fact then dying at the other side of the world.[174] Such an impulse had one only parallel in her experience, which also was telepathic in a similar way.

Similar sensory disturbances are sometimes reported in connection with an important form of motor automatism,--that of "dowsing" or discovering water by means of the movement of a rod held in the hands of the automatist,--already treated of in Appendix V. A.

A small group of cases may naturally be mentioned here. From two different points of view they stand for the most part at the entrance of our subject. I speak of motor inhibitions, prompted at first by subliminal memory, or by subliminal hyperæsthesia, but merging into telæsthesia or telepathy. Inhibitions--sudden arrests or incapacities of action--(more or less of the Socratic type)--form a simple, almost rudimentary, type of motor automatisms. And an inhibition--a sudden check on action of this kind--will be a natural way in which a strong but obscure impression will work itself out. Such an impression, for instance, is that of _alarm_, suggested by some vague sound or odour which is only subliminally perceived. And thus in this series of motor automatisms, just as in our series of dreams, or in our series of sensory automatisms, we find ourselves beginning with cases where the subliminal self merely shows some slight extension of memory or of sensory perception,--and thence pass insensibly to cases where no "cryptomnesia" will explain the facts known in the past, and no hyperæsthesia will explain the facts discerned in the present.

We may most of us have observed that if we perform any small action to which there are objections, which we have once known but which have altogether passed from our minds, we are apt to perform it in a hesitating, inefficient way.

Similarly there are cases where some sudden muscular impulse or inhibition has probably depended on a subliminal perception or interpretation of a sound which had not reached the supraliminal attention. For instance, two friends walking together along a street in a storm just evade by sudden movements a falling mass of masonry. Each thinks that he has received some _monition_ of the fall; each asserting that he heard no noise whatever to warn him. Here is an instance where subliminal perception may have been slightly quicker and more delicate than supraliminal, and may have warned them just in time.

In the case which I now quote (from _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 416) there may have been some subliminal hyperæsthesia of hearing which dimly warned Mr. Wyman of the approach of the extra train.[175]

Mr. Wm. H. Wyman writes to the Editor of the _Arena_ as follows:--

DUNKIRK, N. Y., _June 26th, 1891_.

Some years ago my brother was employed and had charge as conductor
and engineer of a working train on the Lake Shore and Michigan
Southern Railway, running between Buffalo and Erie, which passes
through this city (Dunkirk, N. Y.). I often went with him to the
Grave Bank, where he had his headquarters, and returned on his
train with him. On one occasion I was with him, and after the train
of cars was loaded, we went together to the telegraph office to see
if there were any orders, and to find out if the trains were on
time, as he had to keep out of the way of all regular trains. After
looking over the train reports and finding them all on time, we
started for Buffalo. As we approached near Westfield Station,
running about 12 miles per hour, and when within about one mile of
a long curve in the line, my brother all of a sudden shut off the
steam, and quickly stepping over to the fireman's side of the
engine, he looked out of the cab window, and then to the rear of
his train to see if there was anything the matter with either. Not
discovering anything wrong, he stopped and put on steam, but almost
immediately again shut it off and gave the signal for breaks and
stopped. After inspecting the engine and train and finding nothing
wrong, he seemed very much excited, and for a short time he acted
as if he did not know where he was or what to do. I asked what was
the matter. He replied that he did not know, when, after looking at
his watch and orders, he said that he felt that there was some
trouble on the line of the road. I suggested that he had better run
his train to the station and find out. He then ordered his flagman
with his flag to go ahead around the curve, which was just ahead of
us, and he would follow with the train. The flagman started and had
just time to flag an extra express train, with the General
Superintendent and others on board, coming full 40 [forty] miles
per hour. The Superintendent inquired what he was doing there, and
if he did not receive orders to keep out of the way of the extra.
My brother told him that he had not received orders and did not
know of any extra train coming; that we had both examined the train
reports before leaving the station. The train then backed to the
station, where it was found that no orders had been given. The
train despatcher was at once discharged from the road, and from
that time to this both my brother and myself are unable to account
for his stopping the train as he did. I consider it quite a
mystery, and cannot give or find any intelligent reason for it. Can
you suggest any?

The above is true and correct in every particular.

In other cases again some subliminal sense of smell may be conjectured.[176]

_Tactile sensibility_, too, must be carefully allowed for. The sense of varying resistance in the air may reach in some seeing persons, as well as in the blind, a high degree of acuteness.[177]

But there are cases of sudden motor inhibition where no warning can well have been received from hyperæsthetic sensation, where we come, as it seems, to telæsthesia or to spirit guardianship.

(From _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. p. 459.)

Four years ago, I made arrangements with my nephew, John W.
Parsons, to go to my office after supper to investigate a case. We
walked along together, both fully determined to go up into the
office, but just as I stepped upon the door sill of the drug store,
in which my office was situated, some invisible influence stopped
me instantly. I was much surprised, felt like I was almost dazed,
the influence was so strong, almost like a blow, I felt like I
could not make another step. I said to my nephew, "John, I do not
feel like going into the office now; you go and read Flint and
Aitken on the subject." He went, lighted the lamp, took off his
hat, and just as he was reaching for a book the report of a large
pistol was heard. The ball entered the window near where he was
standing, passed near to and over his head, struck the wall and
fell to the floor. Had I been standing where he was, I would have
been killed, as I am much taller than he. The pistol was fired by a
man who had an old grudge against me, and had secreted himself in a
vacant house near by to assassinate me.

This impression was unlike any that I ever had before. All my
former impressions were slow in their development, grew stronger
and stronger, until the maximum was reached. I did not feel that I
was in any danger, and could not understand what the strong
impression meant. The fellow was drunk, had been drinking for two
weeks. If my system had been in a different condition--I had just
eaten supper--I think I would have received along with the
impression some knowledge of the character of the danger, and would
have prevented my nephew from going into the office.

I am fully satisfied that the invisible and unknown intelligence
did the best that could have been done, under the circumstances, to
save us from harm.

D. J. PARSONS, M.D., Sweet Springs, Mo.

(The above account was received in a letter from Dr. D. J. Parsons,
dated _December 15th, 1891_.)

Statement of Dr. J. W. PARSONS.

About four years ago my uncle, Dr. D. J. Parsons, and I were going
to supper, when a man halted us and expressed a desire for medical
advice. My uncle requested him to call the next morning, and as we
walked along he said the case was a bad one and that we would come
back after supper and go to the office and examine the authorities
on the subject. After supper we returned, walked along together on
our way to the office, but just as we reached the door of the drug
store he very unexpectedly, to me, stopped suddenly, which caused
me to stop too; we stood there together a few seconds, and he
remarked to me that he did not feel like going into the office
then, or words to that effect, and told me to go and examine Flint
and Aitken. I went, lit the lamp, and just as I was getting a book,
a pistol was fired into the office, the ball passing close to my
head, struck the east wall, then the north, and fell to the floor.

This 5th day of July, 1891.

JOHN W. PARSONS [Ladonia, Texas.]

In the next group of cases, we reach a class of massive motor impulses which are almost entirely free from any sensory admixture.

Take for instance the case of Mr. Garrison, who left a religious meeting in the evening, and walked eighteen miles under the strong impulse to see his mother, and found her dead. The account is given in the _Journal_ S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 125 [§ 825].

In another case, that of Major Kobbé (given in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 288), the percipient was prompted to visit a distant cemetery, without any conscious reason, and there found his father, who had, in fact, for certain unexpected reasons, sent to his son, Major Kobbé, a request (accidentally _not received_) to meet him at that place and hour.

In a third case, Mr. Skirving (see _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 285 [825 A]) was irresistibly compelled to leave his work and go home--_why_, he knew not--at the moment when his wife was in fact calling for him in the distress of a serious accident. See also a case given in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 377, where a bricklayer has a sudden impulse to run home, and arrives just in time to save the life of his little boy, who had set himself on fire.

This special sensibility to the _motor_ element in an impulse recalls to us the special susceptibilities to different forms of hallucination or suggestion shown by different hypnotic subjects. Some can be made to see, some to hear, some to act out the conception proposed to them. Dr. Bérillon[178] has even shown that certain subjects who seem at first quite refractory to hypnotisation are nevertheless at once obedient, even in the waking state, to a motor suggestion. This was the case both with a very strong man, with weak men and women, and with at least one subject actually suffering from locomotor ataxy. Thus the loss of supraliminal motor control over certain muscular combinations may actually lead to _motor suggestibility_ as regards those combinations; just as the loss of supraliminal sensation in some anæsthetic patch may lead to a special subliminal sensitiveness in the very directions where the superficial sensibility has sunk away. On the other hand, a specially well-developed motor control may predispose in a similar way;--as for instance, the subject who can sing already is more easily made to sing by suggestion. We must, then, await further observations before we can pretend to say beforehand with which automatist the messages will take a sensory, and with which a motor form.

Still less can we explain the special predisposition of each experimenter to one or more of the common kinds of motor automatism--as automatic speech, automatic writing, table movements, raps, and so forth. These forms of messages may themselves be variously combined; and the contents of a message of any one of these kinds may be purely dream-like and fantastic, or may be veridical in various ways.

Let us enumerate the modes of subliminal motor message as nearly as we can in order of their increasing specialisation.

1. We may place first the massive motor impulses (like Mr. Garrison's) which mark a kind of transition between coenesthetic affections and motor impulses proper. There was here no impulse to special movement of any limb; but an impulse to reach a certain place by ordinary methods.

2. Next, perhaps, in order of specialisation come the simple subliminal muscular impulses which give rise to table-tilting and similar phenomena.

3. Musical execution, subliminally initiated, might theoretically be placed next; although definite evidence of this is hard to obtain, since the threshold of consciousness with musical performers is notoriously apt to be shifting and indefinite. ("When in doubt, play with your fingers, and not with your head.")

4. Next we may place automatic drawing and painting. This curious group of messages has but seldom a telepathic content, and, as was suggested in Chapter III., is more akin to _genius_ and similar non-telepathic forms of subliminal faculty.[179]

5. Next comes automatic writing, on which much remains to be said in this chapter.

6. Automatic _speech_, which would not seem to be _per se_ a more developed form of motor message than automatic script, is often accompanied by profound changes of memory or of personality which raise the question of "inspiration" or "possession";--for the two words, however different their theological import, mean much the same thing from the standpoint of experimental psychology.

7. I must conclude my list with a class of motor phenomena which I shall here merely record in passing, without attempting any explanation. I allude to raps, and to those telekinetic movements of objects whose real existence is still matter of controversy.

Comparing this list of motor automatisms with the sensory automatisms enumerated in Chapter VI., we shall find a certain general tendency running through each alike. The sensory automatisms began with vague unspecialised sensations. They then passed through a phase of definition, of specialisation on the lines of the known senses. And finally they reached a stage beyond these habitual forms of specialisation: beyond them, as of wider reach, and including in an apparently unanalysable act of perception a completer truth than any of our specialised forms of perception could by itself convey. With motor messages, too, we begin with something of similar vagueness. They, too, develop from modifications of the percipient's general organic condition, or coenesthesia; and the first dim telepathic impulse apparently hesitates between several channels of expression. They then pass through various definitely specialised forms; and finally, as we shall see when automatic script is considered, they, too, merge into an unanalysable act of cognition in which the motor element of the message has disappeared. But these motor messages point also in another even more perplexing direction. They lead, as I have said above, towards the old idea of _possession_;--using the word simply as an expression for some form of temporary manifestation of some veritably distinct and alien personality through the physical organism of some man or woman, as is well exemplified in many cases of automatic writing. In Europe and America the phenomenon of automatic writing first came into notice as an element in so-called "modern spiritualism" about the middle of the nineteenth century; but the writings of W. Stainton Moses--about 1870-80--were perhaps the first continuous series of such messages which could be regarded as worthy of serious attention. Mr. Moses--a man whose statements could not be lightly set aside--claimed for them that they were the direct utterances of departed persons, some of them lately dead, some dead long ago. However they were really to be explained, they strongly impressed Edmund Gurney and myself and added to our desire to work at the subject in as many ways as we could.