Phantasms of the Living - Volume I.. Frank Podmore

confidence our adit of exploration. The approach which proved most quickly productive was one from which it might have seemed that there was little indeed to hope. A kind of drawing-room game sprang up—it is hard to say whence—a method of directing a subject to perform a desired act by a contact so slight that no conscious impulsion was either received or given. Careful observers soon ranked the “willing-game” as an illustration of involuntary muscular action on the willer’s part, affording a guidance to which the subject yielded sometimes without being aware of it. But while the modus operandi of public exhibitions of this misnamed “thought-reading” was not difficult to detect, Professor Barrett was one of the first who—while recognising all these sources of error—urged the duty of persistent watching for any residuum of true thought-transference which might from time to time appear. As will be seen from Chap. II. of this book it was not till after some six years of inquiry and experiment (1876-82) that definite proof of thought-transference in the normal state could be placed before the world. This was done in an article in the Nineteenth Century for June, 1882, signed by Professor Barrett, Mr. Gurney, and myself. The phenomenon of transmission of thought or sensation without the agency of the recognised organs of sense had been previously recorded in connection with the mesmeric state, but, so far as we know, its occasional occurrence in the normal state was now for the first time maintained on the strength of definite experiment. And the four years 1882-1886 have witnessed a great extension of those experiments, which no longer rest on the integrity and capacity of the earliest group of observers alone.

§ 15. The foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 gave an opportunity to Mr. Gurney and myself, as Hon. Secs. of a Literary Committee, to invite from the general public records of apparitions at or after death, and other abnormal occurrences. On reviewing the evidence thus obtained we were struck with the great predominance of alleged apparitions at or near the moment of death. And a new light seemed to be thrown on these phenomena by the unexpected frequency of accounts of apparitions of living persons, coincident with moments of danger or crisis. We were led to infer a strong analogy between our experimental cases of thought-transference and some of these spontaneous cases of what we call telepathy, or transference of a shock or impulse from one living person to another person at such a distance or under such conditions as to negative the possibility of any ordinary mode of transmission. An article, signed by Mr. Gurney and myself, in the Fortnightly Review for March, 1883, gave a first expression to the analogy thus suggested. The task of collection and scrutiny grew on our hands; Mr. Podmore undertook to share our labours; and the Council of the Society for Psychical Research requested us to embody the evidence received in a substantive work.

      It will be seen, then, that the theory of Telepathy, experimental and spontaneous, which forms the main topic of this book, was not chosen as our theme by any arbitrary process of selection, but was irresistibly suggested by the abundance and the convergence of evidence tending to prove that special thesis. We were, and are, equally anxious to inquire into many other alleged marvels—clairvoyance, haunted houses, Spiritualistic phenomena, &c.—but telepathy is the subject which has first shown itself capable of investigation appearing to lead to a positive result; and it seemed well to arrange its evidence with sufficient fulness to afford at least a solid groundwork for further inquiry.

      And having been led to this choice by the nature of the actual evidence before us, we may recognise that there is some propriety in dealing first with an issue which, complex though it is, is yet simple as compared to other articles of our programme. For the fact, if it be one, of the direct action of mind upon mind has at least a generality which makes it possible that, like the law of atomic combination in chemistry, it may be a generalisation which, though grasped at first in a very simplified and imperfect fashion, may prove to have been the essential pre-requisite of future progress.

§ 16. In a certain sense it may be said that this hidden action of one mind on another comes next in order of psychical discovery to the hidden action of the mind within itself. It will be remembered that the earliest scientific attempts to explain the phenomena of so-called Spiritualism referred them mainly to “unconscious cerebration,” (Carpenter,) or to what was virtually the same thing, “unconscious muscular action” (Faraday).

Now these theories, in my view, were, so far as they went, not only legitimate, but the most logical which could have been suggested to explain the scanty evidence with which alone Faraday and Carpenter attempted to deal. This unconscious action of the mind was in reality the first thing which it was needful to take into account in approaching supernormal phenomena. I believe, indeed, that our knowledge of those hidden processes of mentation is still in its infancy, and I have elsewhere endeavoured to assign a wider range than orthodox science has yet admitted to the mind’s unconscious operation.¹ But the result of this further analysis has been (as I hold) not to show that ordinary physiological considerations will suffice (as Dr. Carpenter seems to suppose) to explain all the psychical problems involved, but rather to reveal the fact that these unconscious operations of the mind do not follow the familiar channels alone, but are themselves the facilitation or the starting-point of operations which to science are wholly new.

      To state the matter broadly, so as to include in a common formula the unremembered utterances of the hypnotic subject, and the involuntary writings of the waking automatist, I would maintain that when the horizon of consciousness is altered, the opening field of view is not always or wholly filled by a mere mirage or refraction of objects already familiar, but does, on rare occasions, include new objects, as real as the old. And amongst the novel energies thus liberated, the power of entering into direct communication with other intelligences seems to stand plainly forth. Among the objects in the new prospect are fragments of the thoughts and feelings of distant minds. It seems, at any rate, that some element of telepathy is perpetually meeting us throughout the whole range of these inquiries. In the first place, thought-transference is the only supernormal phenomenon which we have as yet acquired the power of inducing, even occasionally, in the normal state. It meets us also in the hypnotic trance, under the various forms of “community of sensation,” “silent willing,” and the like. Among the alleged cases of “mesmeric clairvoyance” the communication of pictures of places from operator to subject seems the least uncertain ground. And again, among phenomena commonly attributed to “spirits,” (but many of which may perhaps be more safely ascribed to the automatic agency of the sensitive himself,) communication of thought still furnishes our best clue to “trance-speaking,” “clairvoyant vision,” answers to mental questions and the like. It need not, therefore, surprise us if, even in a field so apparently remote from all ordinary analogies as that of apparitions and death-wraiths, we still find that telepathy affords our most satisfactory clue.

§ 17. And here would seem to be the fitting place to explain why we have given the title of “Phantasms of the Living” to a group of records most of which will present themselves to the ordinary reader as narratives of apparitions of the dead.

      When we began, in a manner to be presently described, to collect accounts of experiences which our informants regarded as inexplicable by ordinary laws, we were of course ignorant as to what forms these experiences would mainly take. But after printing and considering over two thousand depositions which seemed primâ facie to deserve attention, we find that more than half of them are narratives of appearances or other impressions coincident either with the death of the person seen or with some critical moment in his life-history.

The value of the accounts of apparitions after death is lessened, moreover, by a consideration which is obvious enough as soon as these narratives come to be critically considered. The difficulty in dealing with all these hallucinations—with all appearances to which no persistent three-dimensional reality corresponds—is to determine whether they are veridical, or truth-telling—whether, that is, they do in fact correspond to some action which is going on in some other place or on some other plane of being;—or whether, on the other hand, they are merely morbid or casual—the random and meaningless fictions of an over-stimulated eye or brain. Now, in the case of apparitions at the moment of death or crisis, we have at any rate an objective