Part 5 (1/2)

But evenconnected with an accident that occurred to irl

With a party of young people she had gone on an outing to a Maine lake resort, and in the dusk of a pleasant evening started for a drive in an old-fashi+oned hay-wagon There was no thought of danger, and the drive was thoroughly enjoyed by all until, co broke, and the horses ran away At a sharp turn in the road, half-way down the hill, the drive ca of the wagon

A nureat presence of on just as it began to go over Even so, she did not escape uninjured, her face being badly cut

Now co a telegram from her mother in Boston was handed to her It read: ”Are you hurt or ill? Wire at once A inforht of the accident--the mother had had an unusually vivid dreae, thrown out of the carriage, and badly cut about the face So realistic was the drea of the telegrae experiences representative merely of extraordinary chance coincidences, or were they indicative of the action of some direct means of conized channels of communication?

Personally I am satisfied that chance alone will not suffice to account for thes of a faculty latent in all mankind and operable in accordance with a true, if as yet little understood, law of nature--call it telepathy, thought transference, or what you will

And in saying this, I areement with that entertained by e, Sir William Crookes, Camille Flammarion, Charles Richet, Theodore Flournoy, Henri Morselli, Professor W F Barrett and the late Williareat majority of scientists at the present day Their view, to put it briefly, is that there is no such thing as telepathy; that chance coincidence, deliberate or unconscious falsification, and errors of ed telepathic communication; and that the remainder are reducible to the operation of y of the subconscious--notably the law of hyperaesthesia, or unusual extension of the senses of sight, hearing, s to admit that much which passes as telepathyat the desk in my study Unexpectedly there flashes into ht for weeks or s, and presently the maid informs me that the very person of who has entered the house

This is a not infrequent experience, as most of my readers will concede So frequent is it that it is absurd to attempt to account for it on the hypothesis of chance coincidence But neither would it be always safe to raise the theory of telepathy For it ht well happen that while I was seated intent on my work, with the study s closed,down the street, or on nized in theh without knohy, thought of him at that precise h I a that in all such cases it is the only explanation properly applicable

So, likewise, oneas evidences of telepathic action the feats of ””

often undertaken by way of parlor a” by professional entertainers , as undoubtedly based on athering, where there can be no question of confederates and deliberate signaling, surprising results are so of hidden objects, etc On the surface this would seem explicable only on a telepathic basis, yet in reality it is co” rather than by true ””

Experiiven matter--a name or an object--tends to produce so of the naht of, or subconscious movement in the direction of the object If, as is the rule, the spectators are supposed to keep their minds fixed intently on the name or object they have selected for the ”test,” soive these involuntary muscular hints, which the perfor clearly conscious of the source of his information

Still it ame” have been carried out under conditions and with results indicating that occasionally, at all events, successes are achieved without any such subconscious guidance Not so very long ago so experiments of this sort were described to me by Professor J H Hyslop

”The subject of ood fa exceptional ability in divining the thoughts and wishes of others It was arranged that I should investigate her powers, and accordingly for a period of sos with her, in the presence of a few interested and trustworthy friends

”The plan followed in every experi left the room, I mentally selected some more or less complicated action for her to perform upon her return I then wrote down on a slip of paper what I wished her to do, showed it to the others, and concealed it in a book, which did not leave my hand until after the completion of the experiment Frouard against any possible hyperaesthesia of hearing on her part

”The young woman was then called back, and aliven her She did this so proot any unconscious hints fro was out of the question

”For instance, I once wrote on my paper an order for her to pick out of a vase a bunch of keys I had hidden there, cross the room with the keys, and place them on the mantel-piece She entered, stood for but ato the vase, which was on the floor, picked up the keys, turned, and deposited theested It was all done so quickly and spontaneously that to ht transference

”She was not always successful, but some of her failures were quite as instructive as her successes On three occasions she executed, not the coht of writing but for one reason or another had abandoned No one in the roo myself knew of these previous intentions, so she could have derived her knowledge of the uidance, it is obvious that my muscular indications would have related not to the abandoned commands but to the cos considered,wouidance is not always properly applicable, even when the 'mind reader' is in a position to see or hear the persons testing hiument, that Professor Hyslop's conclusion is erroneous, and that the involuntary movement theory does always suffice as an explanatory hypothesis when experimenter and subject are in the same rooms, it becomes manifestly and hopelessly inadequate when applied to explain the transmission of ideas between persons a considerable distance apart Yet what I consider abundant proof has been experimentally obtained that such transmission may, and sometimes does, take place--occasionally in most dramatic form

Take, for example, the experience of a French lady, M uneasy one day about a friend as then living in the United States, thought she would cable to him

Unfortunately it was Sunday, and her maid found the cable office closed

Mme de Vaux-Royer then decided to atte that her friend wasthe death of his mother and of a favorite sister, decided to try and impress him with an idea that they were near hi

She told her maid of her intention, and asked the ive corroborative evidence if the experiment succeeded

This was on Noveht to Mme