Part 20 (2/2)
To a certain limited extent such co-ordination is possible. In each approach to telaesthesia in turn we find a tendency to something like a dream-excursion. Hyperaesthesia, 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 hyperaesthesia which can still be referred to the action of the sense-organs into a telaesthesia 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 a.n.a.logies. 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 telaesthetic 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 hyperaesthesia to telaesthesia, 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 superieure_, the telaesthetic knowledge, however it may really be acquired, will present itself mainly as clairvoyance or clairaudience--as some form of sight or sound. Yet these telaesthetic 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 pa.s.sing inattentively in front of the gla.s.s door of a restaurant thought that he had seen _Verbasc.u.m Thapsus_ printed thereon. The real word was _Bouillon_; and that happens to be the trivial name in French for the plant Verbasc.u.m Thapsus. The actual optical perception had thus been subliminally transformed; the words Verbasc.u.m 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 att.i.tude 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.
a.s.suredly 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 const.i.tuted 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 const.i.tutes, 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 telaesthesia 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, telaesthesia, retrocognition, precognition; and in the cases reported by Cahagnet, which will be referred to in Chapter IX., there is apparently something more besides. We see, in short, that any empirical inlet into the metetherial world is apt to show us those powers, which we try to distinguish, coexisting in some synthesis by us incomprehensible. Here, therefore, just as with the crystal-visions, we have artificially to separate out the special cla.s.s of phenomena with which we wish first to deal.
In these experiments, then, there seems to be an independent power of visiting almost any desired place, its position having been perhaps first explained by reference to some landmark already known. The clairvoyante (I use the female word, but in several cases a man or boy has shown this power) will frequently miss her way, and describe houses or scenes adjacent to those desired. Then if she--almost literally--gets on the scent,--if she finds some place which the man whom she is sent to seek has some time traversed,--she follows up his track with greater ease, apparently recognising past events in his life as well as present circ.u.mstances.
In these prolonged experimental cases there is thus time enough to allow of the clairvoyante's traversing certain places, such as empty rooms, factories, and the like, whither no a.s.signable link from any living person could draw her. The evidence to prove telaesthesia, unmixed with telepathy, has thus generally come _incidentally_ in the course of some experiment mainly telepathic in character.
These long clairvoyant wanderings are more nearly paralleled by _dreams_ than by waking hallucinations.
In a case which I will here quote a physician is impressed, probably in dream, with a picture of a special place in a street, where something is happening, which, though in itself unemotional--merely that a man is standing and talking in the street--is of moment to the physician, who wants to get un.o.btrusively into the man's house.
From _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 267. The case is there described as coming ”from a Fellow of the College of Physicians, who fears professional injury if he were 'supposed to defend opinions at variance with general scientific belief,' and does not therefore allow his name to appear.”
_May 20th, 1884._
Twenty years ago [abroad] I had a patient, wife of a parson. She had a peculiar kind of delirium which did not belong to her disease, and perplexed me. The house in which she lived was closed at midnight, that is--the outer door had no bell. One night I saw her at nine. When I came home I said to my wife, ”I don't understand that case; I wish I could get into the house late.” We went to bed rather early. At about one o'clock I got up. She said, ”What are you about? are you not well?” I said, ”Perfectly so.”
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