Part 19 (1/2)
Yet it is only within the last few years that the vague and floating notion has been developed into definite theory by systematic experiment.
To make such experiment possible has indeed been no easy matter. It has been needful to elicit and to isolate from the complex emotions and interactions of common life a certain psychical element of whose nature and working we have beforehand but a very obscure idea.
If indeed we possessed any certain method of detecting the action of telepathy,--of distinguis.h.i.+ng it from chance coincidence or from unconscious suggestion,--we should probably find that its action was widely diffused and mingled with other more commonplace causes in many incidents of life. We should find telepathy, perhaps, at the base of many sympathies and antipathies, of many wide communities of feeling; operating, it may be, in cases as different as the quasi-recognition of some friend in a stranger seen at a distance just before the friend himself unexpectedly appears, and the _Pheme_ or Rumour which in Hindostan or in ancient Greece is said to have often spread far an inexplicable knowledge of victory or disaster.
But we are obliged, for the sake of clearness of evidence, to set aside, when dealing with experimentation, all these mixed emotional cases, and to start from telepathic communications intentionally planned to be so trivial, so devoid of a.s.sociations or emotions, that it shall be impossible to refer them to any common memory or sympathy; to anything save a direct transmission of idea, or impulse, or sensation, or image, from one to another mind.
The reader who has studied the evidence originally set forth in Chapters II. and III. of _Phantasms of the Living_ will, I trust, carry away a pretty clear notion of what can at present actually be done in the way of experimental transferences of small definite ideas or pictures from one or more persons--the ”agent” or ”agents”--to one or more persons--the ”percipient” or ”percipients.”[106] In these experiments actual _contact_ has been forbidden, to avoid the risk of unconscious indications by pressure. It is at present still doubtful how far close proximity really operates in aid of telepathy, or how far its advantage is a mere effect of self-suggestion--on the part either of agent or of percipient. Some few pairs of experimenters have obtained results of just the same type at distances of half a mile or more.[107] Similarly, in the case of induction of hypnotic trance, Dr. Gibert attained at the distance of nearly a mile results which are usually supposed to require close and actual presence. [See Appendix V. C.]
We must clearly realise that in telepathic experiment we encounter just the same difficulty which makes our results in hypnotic therapeutics so unpredictable and irregular. We do not know how to get our suggestions to _take hold_ of the subliminal self. They are liable to fail for two main reasons. Either they somehow never _reach_ the subliminal centres which we wish to affect, or they find those centres preoccupied with some self-suggestion hostile to our behest. This source of uncertainty can only be removed by a far greater number of experiments than have yet been made--experiments repeated until we have oftener struck upon the happy veins which make up for an immense amount of sterile exploration.
Meantime we must record, but can hardly interpret. Yet there is one provisional interpretation of telepathic experiment which must be noticed thus early in our discussion, because, if true, it may conceivably connect our groping work with more advanced departments of science, while, if seen to be inadequate, it may bid us turn our inquiry in some other direction. I refer to the suggestion that telepathy is propagated by ”brain-waves”; or, as Sir W. Crookes has more exactly expressed it, by ether-waves of even smaller amplitude and greater frequency than those which carry the X rays. These waves are conceived as pa.s.sing from one brain to another, and arousing in the _second_ brain an excitation or image similar to the excitation or image from which they start in the _first_. The hypothesis is an attractive one; because it fits an agency which certainly exists, but whose effect is unknown, to an effect which certainly exists, but whose agency is unknown.
In this world of vibrations it may seem at first the simplest plan to invoke a vibration the more. It would be rash, indeed, to affirm that any phenomenon perceptible by men may not be expressible, in part at least, in terms of ethereal undulations. But in the case of telepathy the a.n.a.logy which suggests this explanation, the obvious likeness between the picture emitted (so to say) by the agent and the picture received by the percipient--as when I fix my mind on the two of diamonds, and he sees a mental picture of that card--goes but a very short way. One has very soon to begin a.s.suming that the percipient's mind _modifies_ the picture despatched from the agent: until the likeness between the two pictures becomes a quite symbolical affair. We have seen that there is a continuous transition from experimental to spontaneous telepathy; from our transferred pictures of cards to monitions of a friend's death at a distance. These monitions may indeed be pictures of the dying friend, but they are seldom such pictures as the decedent's brain seems likely to project in the form in which they reach the percipient. Mr. L.--to take a well-known case in our collection (_Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 210)--dies of heart disease when in the act of lying down undressed, in bed. At or about the same moment Mr. N. J. S. sees Mr. L. standing beside him with a cheerful air, dressed for walking and with a cane in his hand. One does not see how a system of undulations could have trans.m.u.ted the physical facts in this way.
A still greater difficulty for the vibration-theory is presented by _collective_ telepathic hallucinations. It is hard to understand how A can emit a pattern of vibrations which, radiating equally in all directions, shall affect not only his distant friend B, but also the strangers C and D, who happen to be standing near B;--and affect no other persons, so far as we know, in the world.
The above points have been fair matter of argument almost since our research began. But as our evidence has developed, our conception of telepathy has needed to be more and more generalised in other and new directions,--still less compatible with the vibration theory. Three such directions may be briefly specified here--namely, the relation of telepathy (_a_) to telaesthesia or clairvoyance, (_b_) to time, and (_c_) to disembodied spirits. (_a_) It is increasingly hard to refer all the scenes of which percipients become aware to the action of any given mind which is perceiving those distant scenes. This is especially noticeable in crystal-gazing experiments. (_b_) And these crystal visions also show what, from the strict telepathic point of view, we should call a great laxity of time relations. The scryer chooses his own time to look in the ball;--and though sometimes he sees events which are taking place at the moment, he may also see past events,--and even, as it seems, future events. I at least cannot deny _precognition_, nor can I draw a definite line amid these complex visions which may separate precognition from telepathy (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 408-593). (_c_) Precognition itself may be explained, if you will, as telepathy from disembodied spirits;--and this would at any rate bring it under a cla.s.s of phenomena which I think all students of our subject must before long admit. Admitting here, for argument's sake, that we do receive communications from the dead which we should term telepathic if we received them from the living, it is of course open to us to conjecture that these messages also are conveyed on ether-waves. But since those waves do not at any rate emanate from material brains, we shall by this time have got so far from the original brain-wave hypothesis that few will care still to defend it.
I doubt, indeed, whether we can safely say of telepathy anything more definite than this: _Life has the power of manifesting itself to life._ The laws of life, as we have thus far known them, have been only laws of life when already a.s.sociated with matter. Thus limited, we have learnt little as to Life's true nature. We know not even whether Life be only a directive Force, or, on the other hand, an effective Energy. We know not in what way it operates on matter. We can in no way define the connection between our own consciousness and our organisms. Just here it is, I should say, that telepathic observations ought to supply us with some hint. From the mode in which some element of one individual life,--apart from material impact,--gets hold of another organism, we may in time learn something of the way in which our own life gets hold of our own organism,--and maintains, intermits, or abandons its organic sway.[108]
The hypothesis which I suggested in _Phantasms of the Living_ itself, in my ”Note on a possible mode of psychical interaction,” seems to me to have been rendered increasingly plausible by evidence of many kinds since received; evidence of which the larger part falls outside the limits of this present work. I still believe--and more confidently than in 1886--that a ”psychical invasion” does take place; that a ”phantasmogenetic centre” is actually established in the percipient's surroundings; that some movement bearing some relation to s.p.a.ce as we know it is actually accomplished; and some presence is transferred, and may or may not be discerned by the invaded person; some perception of the distant scene in itself is acquired, and may or may not be remembered by the invader.
But the words which I am here beginning to use carry with them a.s.sociations from which the scientific reader may well shrink. Fully realising the offence which such expressions may give, I see no better line of excuse than simply to recount the way in which the gradual accretion of evidence has obliged me, for the mere sake of covering all the phenomena, to use phrases and a.s.sumptions which go far beyond those which Edmund Gurney and I employed in our first papers on this inquiry in 1883.
When in 1882 our small group began the collection of evidence bearing upon ”veridical hallucinations”--or apparitions which coincided with other events in such a way as to suggest a causal connection--we found scattered among the cases from the first certain types which were with difficulty reducible under the conception of telepathy pure and simple--even if such a conception could be distinctly formed. Sometimes the apparition was seen by more than one percipient at once--a result which we could hardly have expected if all that had pa.s.sed were the transference of an impression from the agent's mind to another mind, which then bodied forth that impression in externalised shape according to laws of its own structure. There were instances, too, where the percipient seemed to be the agent also--in so far that it was he who had an impression of having somehow visited and noted a distant scene, whose occupant was not necessarily conscious of any immediate relation with him. Or sometimes this ”telepathic clairvoyance” developed into ”reciprocity,” and each of the two persons concerned was conscious of the other;--the _scene_ of their encounter being the same in the vision of each, or at least the experience being in some way common to both.
These and cognate difficulties were present to my mind from the first; and in the above-mentioned ”Note on a suggested mode of psychical interaction,” included in vol. ii of _Phantasms of the Living_, I indicated briefly the extension of the telepathic theory to which they seemed to me to point.
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 cla.s.ses, 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 a.n.a.lyse 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.n.a.logies 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 coute._ 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.