Part 10 (1/2)
”HENRY HARDEN.”
It is sometimes urged that only springs yielding a limited supply of water are found by dowsers, who fix on spots where more or less surface water can be got from shallow wells rather than run the risk of sinking a deep well. Many of the cases already cited refute this notion, and the following bears on the same point. It is from Messrs Beamish & Crawford, the well-known brewers, of Cork.
”Cork Porter Brewery, Cork,
”December 30th, 1896.
”In reply to your letter of 26th inst., we beg to state:
”1. We had an old well yielding a small supply of water. It was about 30 feet deep.
”2. No new well was fixed on by Mullins. He bored down to a depth of about 60 feet below the bottom of the old well, and therefore about 90 feet below the surface of the ground.
”3. The supply of water now obtained from the new pipes sunk by Mullins is, as nearly as we can estimate, about 10,000 gallons per hour.
”BEAMISH & CRAWFORD LTD.”
It goes without saying that professional dowsers are not always successful in their quests. ”I am inclined,” states Professor Barrett, ”to think we may take from ten to fifteen per cent. as the average percentage of failures which occur with most English dowsers of to-day, allowing a larger percentage for partial failures, meaning by this that the quant.i.ty of water estimated and the depth at which it is found have not realised the estimate formed by the dowser.”
What then is the secret of the dowser's often remarkable success? The question is whether, after making every allowance for shrewdness of eye, chance, coincidence, and local geological knowledge, the dowser has any instinctive or supernormal power of discovering the presence of underground water. Professor Barrett, who has perhaps devoted more time to the subject than any other man living, is inclined to answer in the affirmative.
”There appears to be evidence,” he writes, ”that a more profound stratum of our personality, glimpses of which we get elsewhere in our 'Proceedings,' is a.s.sociated with the dowser's art; and the latter seems to afford a further striking instance of information obtained through automatic means being more remarkable than, and beyond the reach of, that derived from conscious observation and inference.”
In another pa.s.sage he adds:
”For my own part, I have been driven to believe that some dowsers--
”Whose exterior semblance doth belie The soul's immensity”
nevertheless give us a glimpse of
”The eternal deep Haunted for ever by the eternal mind.”
CHAPTER IX
MEDIUMISTIC PHENOMENA
In my inquiry so far the reader will note that I have taken one thing for granted--the fact of telepathy. In order to convince him to the extent to which this great scientific truth has convinced me, it would be necessary for me to lead him through a thousand pages of evidence for telepathic phenomena, attested by some of the leading physicists of the day. I am aware that there are still sceptics on the subject of telepathy, but the testimony is overwhelming, and every year sees the ranks of scepticism growing thinner.
Not many years ago a very learned man, the late Professor von Helmholtz, although confronted with _prima-facie_ evidence of thought transference or telepathy, declared: ”I cannot believe it. Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, would lead me to believe in the transmission of them from one person to another. It is clearly impossible.” An opinion in these terms is very rare to-day. We are apt to express our incredulity in language far more guarded and less emphatic.
About hallucinations, however, there is no scepticism. We have remarked sensory hallucinations of an occasional nature; we now come to regard them as a cult, for I suppose there is no manifestation in the world, no gift, no prodigy even, that is not p.r.o.ne to the fate of being exploited for particular ends.
A poet, we will say, by some rare ”subliminal uprush,” produces a beautiful poem. He is at once chained to his desk by publishers and compelled to go on producing poetry for the rest of his life. It is inevitable that many of his manifestations will be false; and for that reason, in spite of an occasional jewel of truth, he runs serious risks of being denounced in the end as no poet.
I have no doubt it is the same with the producers or the agents of occult phenomena. Sensory hallucinations may be stimulated. They may be stimulated by intoxication and disease, or they may be stimulated by the morbid conditions of a spiritualistic _seance_. Everything in these conditions--the prolonged darkness, the emotional expectancy--promotes the peculiar frame of mind apparently requisite. Constant exercise--perpetual aspiration develops the power of seeing visions.
After a time, in well-known cases, they appear to need no inducement to come spontaneously.
One well-known medium, Mr Hill Tout, confesses that building and peopling _chateaux en Espagne_ was a favourite occupation of his in his earlier days. This long-practised faculty is doubtless a potent factor in all his characterisations, and probably also in those of many another full-fledged medium.