I am not here expressing either agreement or disagreement with this general view. I am merely pointing out that here is an opinion which, whether right or wrong, is formed as a result not of vagueness but of distinctness of physiological conceptions. And my illustration shows at any rate that the development of physiology is tending not always to make the old psychical problems seem meaningless or sterile, but rather to give them actuality and urgency, and even to suggest new possibilities of their solution.
§ 6. But, to come to my second instance, it is perhaps from the present position of hypnotism that the strongest argument may be drawn for the need of such researches as ours, to supplement and co-ordinate the somewhat narrower explorations of technical physiology. For the actual interest of the mesmeric or hypnotic trance—I am not now dealing with the rival theories which these words connote—the central interest, let us say, of induced somnambulism, or the sleep-waking state—has hardly as yet revealed itself to any section of inquirers.
That interest lies neither in mesmerism as a curative agency, as Elliotson would have told us, nor in hypnotism as an illustration of inhibitory cerebral action, as Heidenhain would tell us now. It lies in the fact that here is a psychical experiment on a larger scale than was ever possible before; that we have at length got hold of a handle which turns the mechanism of our being; that we have found a mode of shifting the threshold of consciousness which is a dislocation as violent as madness, a submergence as pervasive as sleep, and yet is waking sanity; that we have induced a change of personality which is not per se either evolutive or dissolutive, but seems a mere allotropic modification of the very elements of man. The prime value of the hypnotic trance lies not in what it inhibits, but in what it reveals; not in the occlusion of the avenues of peripheral stimulus, but in the emergence of unnoted sensibilities, nay, perhaps even in the manifestation of new and centrally-initiated powers.
The hypnotic trance is an eclipse of the normal consciousness which can be repeated at will. Now the first observers of eclipses of the sun ascribe them to supernatural causes, and attribute to them an occult influence for good or evil. Then comes the stage at which men note their effects on the animal organism, the roosting of birds, the restlessness of cattle. Then come observations on the intensity of the darkness, the aspect of the lurid shade. But to the modern astronomer all this is trifling as compared with the knowledge which those brief moments give him of the orb itself in its obscuration. He learns from that transient darkness more than the noon of day can tell; he sees the luminary no longer as a defined and solid ball, but as the centre of the outrush of flaming energies, the focus of an effluence which coruscates untraceably through immeasurable fields of heaven.
There is more in this parallel than a mere empty metaphor. It suggests one of the primary objects which psychical experiment must seek to attain. Physical experiment aims at correcting the deliverances of man’s consciousness with regard to the external world by instruments which extend the range, and concentrate the power, and compensate the fallacies of his senses. And similarly, our object must be to correct the deliverances of man’s consciousness concerning the processes which are taking place within him by means of artificial displacements of the psycho-physical threshold; by inhibiting normal perception, obliterating normal memory, so that in this temporary freedom from preoccupation by accustomed stimuli his mind may reveal those latent and delicate capacities of which his ordinary conscious self is unaware.
§ 7. It was thus, in fact, that thought-transference, or telepathy, was first discovered. In the form of community of sensation between operator and subject, it was noted nearly a century ago as a phenomenon incident to the mesmeric trance. Its full importance was not perceived, and priceless opportunities of experiment were almost wholly neglected. In order to bring out the value and extent of the phenomenon it was necessary, we venture to think, that it should be investigated by men whose interest in the matter lay not in the direction of practical therapeutics but of psychical theory, and who were willing to seek and “test for it” under a wide range of conditions, not in sleep-waking life only, but in normal waking, and normal sleep, and, as this book will indicate, up to the very hour of death.
The difficulties of this pursuit are not physiological only. But, nevertheless, in our endeavours to establish and to elucidate telepathy, we look primarily for aid to the most recent group of physiological inquirers, to the psycho-physicists whose special work—as yet in its infancy—has only in our own day been rendered possible by the increased accuracy and grasp of experimental methods in the sciences which deal with Life.
The list of Corresponding Members of our Society will serve to show that this confidence on our part is not wholly unfounded, and to indicate that we are not alone in maintaining that whatever may be the view of these perplexing problems which ultimately prevails, the recent advances of physiology constitute in themselves a strong reason—not, as some hold, for the abandonment of all discussion of the old enigmas, but rather for their fresh discussion with scientific orderliness, and in the illumination of our modern day.1
§ 8. From Biology we may pass, by an easy transition, to what is commonly known as Anthropology,—the comparative study of the different races of men in respect either of their physical characteristics, or of the early rudiments of what afterwards develops into civilisation.
The connection of anthropology with psychical research will be evident to any reader who has acquainted himself with recent expositions of Primitive Man. He may think, indeed, that the connection is too evident, and that we can hardly bring it into notice without proving a good deal more than we desire. For as the creeds and customs of savage races become better known, the part played by sorcery, divination, apparitions becomes increasingly predominant. Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock have made this abundantly clear, and Mr. Spencer has gone so far as to trace all early religion to a fear of the ghosts of the dead. In the works of these and similar authors, I need hardly say, we are led to regard all these beliefs and tendencies as due solely to the childishness of savage man—as absurdities which real progress in civilisation must render increasingly alien to the developed common-sense, the rational experience of humanity. Yet it appears to me that as we trace the process of evolution from savage to civilised man, we come to a point at which the inadequacy of this explanation is strongly forced on our attention. Certainly this was my own case when I undertook some years ago to give a sketch of the Greek oracles. It soon became evident to me that the mass of phenomena included under this title had, at any rate, a psycho-physical importance which the existing works on the subject for the most part ignored. I scarcely ventured myself to do more than indicate where the real nodi of the inquiry lay. But when a massive treatise on Ancient Divination appeared from the learned pen of M. Bouché-Leclercq, I looked eagerly to see whether his erudition had enabled him to place these problems in a new light. I found, however, that he explicitly renounced all attempt to deal with the phenomena in