Part 18 (2/2)

Let the observer gaze, steadily but not fatiguingly, into some speculum, or clear depth, so arranged as to return as little reflection as possible. A good example of what is meant will be a gla.s.s ball enveloped in a black shawl, or placed in the back part of a half-opened drawer; so arranged, in short, that the observer can gaze into it with as little distraction as may be from the reflection of his own face or of surrounding objects. After he has tried (say) three or four times, for ten minutes or so at a time--preferably in solitude, and in a state of mental pa.s.sivity--he will perhaps begin to see the gla.s.s ball or crystal _clouding_, or to see some figure or picture apparently _in_ the ball.

Perhaps one man or woman in twenty will have some slight occasional experience of this kind; and perhaps one in twenty of these seers (the percentages must as yet be mainly guess-work) will be able by practice to develop this faculty of inward vision up to a point where it will sometimes convey to him information not attainable by ordinary means.

How comes it, in the first place, that he sees any figure in the crystal at all? Common hypnotic experiments supply two obvious answers, each of which no doubt explains some part of the phenomena.

In the first place, we know that the hypnotic trance is often induced by gazing at some small bright object. This may or may not be a mere effect of suggestion; but it certainly sometimes occurs, and the ”scryer”

consequently may be partially hypnotised, and in a state which facilitates hallucinations.

In the second place, a hypnotised subject--hypnotised but in a fully alert state--can often be caused by suggestion to see (say) a portrait upon a blank card; and will continue to see that portrait on that card, after the card has been shuffled with others; thus showing that he discerns with unusual acuteness such _points de repere_, or little guiding marks, as may exist on the surface of even an apparently blank card.

Correspondently with the _first_ of these observations, we find that crystal-vision is sometimes accompanied by a state of partial hypnotisation, perhaps merging into trance. This has been the case with various French hysterical subjects; and not only with them but with that exceptionally sound and vigorous observer, Mr. J. G. Keulemans. His evidence (in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 516-521) is just what one would have expected _a priori_ on such a matter.

Correspondently with the _second_ of the above observations, we find that _points de repere_ do occasionally seem to determine crystal visions.

This, again, has been noticed among the French hysterical subjects; and not only with them, but with another among our best observers, Mrs.

Verrall.

These things being so--both these causes being apparently operative along the whole series of ”scryers,” or crystal-gazers, from the most unstable to the most scientific--one might be tempted to a.s.sume that these two clues, if we could follow them far enough, would explain the whole group of phenomena. Persons who have not _seen_ the phenomena, indeed, can hardly be persuaded to the contrary. But the real fact is, as even those who have seen much less of crystal-gazing than I have will very well know, that these explanations cannot be stretched to cover a quarter--perhaps not even a tenth--of the phenomena which actually occur.

Judging both from the testimony of scryers themselves, and from the observations of Dr. Hodgson and others (myself included), who have had many opportunities of watching them, it is very seldom that the gaze into the gla.s.s ball induces any hypnotic symptoms whatever. It does not induce such symptoms with successful scryers any more than with unsuccessful. Furthermore, there is no proof that the gift of crystal-vision goes along with hypnotic sensibility. The most that one can say is that the gift often goes along with _telepathic_ sensibility; but although telepathic sensibility may sometimes be quickened by hypnotism, we have no proof that those two forms of sensitiveness habitually go together.

The ordinary att.i.tude of the scryer, I repeat, is one of complete detachment; an interested and often puzzled scrutiny and a.n.a.lysis of the figures which display themselves in swift or slow succession in the crystal ball.

This last sentence applies to the theory of _points de repere_ as well.

As a general rule, the crystal vision, however meaningless and fantastic, is a thing which changes and develops somewhat as a dream does; following, it may be, some trivial chain of a.s.sociations, but not maintaining, any more than a dream maintains, any continuous scheme of line or colour. At the most, the sc.r.a.ps of reflection in the crystal could only _start_ such a series of pictures as this. And the start, the initiation of one of these series, is often accompanied by an odd phenomenon mentioned above--a _milky clouding_ of the crystal, which obscures any fragments of reflected images, and from out of which the images of the vision gradually grow clear. I cannot explain this clouding. It occurs too often and too independently to be a mere effect of suggestion. It does not seem to depend on any optical condition--to be, for instance, a result of change of focus of the eye, or of prolonged gazing. It is a picture like other pictures; it may come when the eyes are quite fresh (nor ought they ever to be strained); and it may persist for some time, so that the scryer looks away and back again, and sees it still. It comes at the beginning of a first series of pictures, or as a kind of drop scene between one series of pictures and another. Its closest parallel, perhaps, is the mist or cloud out of which phantasmal figures, ”out in the room,” sometimes seem to form themselves.

Moreover, the connection, if one can so call it, between the crystal and the vision is a very variable one. Sometimes the figures seem clearly defined within the crystal and limited thereby; sometimes all perception of the crystal or other speculum disappears, and the scryer seems clairvoyantly introduced into some group of life-sized figures. Nay, further, when the habit of gazing is fully acquired, some scryers can dispense with any speculum whatever, and can see pictures in mere blackness; thus approximating to the seers of ”faces in the dark,” or of _illusions hypnagogiques_.

On the whole it seems safest to attempt at present no further explanation of crystal-gazing than to say that it is an empirical method of developing internal vision; of externalising pictures which are a.s.sociated with changes in the sensorial tracts of the brain, due partly to internal stimuli, and partly to stimuli which may come from minds external to the scryer's own. The hallucinations thus induced appear to be absolutely harmless. I at least know of no kind of injury resulting from them; and I have probably heard of most of the experiments made in England, with any scientific aim or care, during the somewhat limited revival of crystal-gazing which has proceeded for the last few years.

The crystal picture is what we must call (for want of knowledge of determining causes) a _random_ glimpse into inner vision, a reflection caught at some odd angle from the universe as it s.h.i.+nes through the perturbing medium of that special soul. Normal and supernormal knowledge and imaginings are blended in strangely mingled rays. Memory, dream, telepathy, telaesthesia, retrocognition, precognition, all are there.

Nay, there are indications of spiritual communications and of a kind of ecstasy.[105]

We cannot pursue all these phenomena at once. In turning, as we must now turn, to the _spontaneous_ cases of sensory automatism--of every type of which the _induced_ visions of the crystal afford us a foretaste--we must needs single out first some fundamental phenomenon, ill.u.s.trating some principle from which the rarer or more complex phenomena may be in part at least derived. Nor will there be difficulty in such a choice.

Theory and actual experience point here in the same direction. If this inward vision, this inward audition, on whose importance I have been insisting, are to have any such importance--if they are to have any validity at all--if their contents are to represent anything more than dream or meditation--they must receive knowledge from other minds or from distant objects;--knowledge which is _not_ received by the external organs of sense. Communication must exist from the subliminal to the subliminal as well as from the supraliminal to the supraliminal parts of the being of different individual men. Telepathy, in short, must be the prerequisite of all these supernormal phenomena.

Actual experience, as we shall presently see, confirms this view of the place of telepathy. For when we pa.s.s from the induced to the spontaneous phenomena we shall find that these ill.u.s.trate before all else this transmission of thought and emotion directly from mind to mind.

Now as to telepathy, there is in the first place this to be said, that such a faculty must absolutely exist somewhere in the universe, if the universe contains any unembodied intelligences at all. If there be any life less rooted in flesh than ours--any life more spiritual (as men have supposed that a higher life would be), then either it must not be _social_ life--there can be no exchange of thought in it at all--or else there must exist some method of exchanging thought which does not depend upon either tongue or brain.

Thus much, one may say, has been evident since man first speculated on such subjects at all. But the advance of knowledge has added a new presumption--it can be no more than a presumption--to all such cosmic speculations. I mean the presumption of _continuity_. Learning how close a tie in reality unites man with inferior lives,--once treated as something wholly alien, impa.s.sably separated from the human race--we are led to conceive that a close tie may unite him also with superior lives,--that the series may be fundamentally unbroken, the essential qualities of life the same throughout. It used to be asked whether man was akin to the ape or to the angel. I reply that the very fact of his kins.h.i.+p with the ape is proof presumptive of his kins.h.i.+p with the angel.

It is natural enough that man's instinctive feeling should have antic.i.p.ated any argument of this speculative type. Men have in most ages believed, and do still widely believe, in the reality of prayer; that is, in the possibility of telepathic communication between our human minds and minds above our own, which are supposed not only to understand our wish or aspiration, but to impress or influence us inwardly in return.

So widely spread has been this belief in prayer that it is somewhat strange that men should not have more commonly made what seems the natural deduction--namely, that if our spirits can communicate with higher spirits in a way transcending sense, they may also perhaps be able in like manner to communicate with each other. The idea, indeed, has been thrown out at intervals by leading thinkers--from Augustine to Bacon, from Bacon to Goethe, from Goethe to Tennyson.

Isolated experiments from time to time indicated its practical truth.

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