Phantasms of the Living - Volume I.. Frank Podmore

as completely satisfactory; but our more striking successes in this line happen to have been with hypnotic subjects.¹ The form of experiment has difficulties of its own. For, in mercy to the agent, the pain which it is hoped to transfer cannot be very severely inflicted; and, moreover, in such circumstances of investigation as Mr. Guthrie’s, it is only a very limited amount of the area of the body that can practically be used—a fact which of course increases the percipient’s chances of accidental success. Still, the amount of success obtained with Mr. Guthrie’s “subjects,” in a normal state, is such as certainly excludes the hypothesis of accident. In some of the most remarkable series, contact has been permitted, it being difficult to suppose that unconscious pressure of the hand could convey information as to the exact locality of a pain.² But complete isolation of the percipient is, no doubt, a more satisfactory condition; and at seven of the Liverpool meetings, which took place at intervals from November, 1884, to July, 1885, the experiment was arranged in the following way. The percipient being seated blindfolded, and with her back to the rest of the party, all the other persons present inflicted on themselves the same pain on the same part of the body. Those who took part in this collective agency were three or more of the following: Mr. Guthrie, Professor Herdman, Dr. Hicks, Dr. Hyla Greves, Mr. R. C. Johnson, F.R.A.S., Mr. Birchall, Miss Redmond, and on one occasion another lady. The percipient throughout was Miss Relph.

      In all, 20 trials were made. The parts pained were—

      1.—Back of left hand pricked. Rightly localised.

      2.—Lobe of left ear pricked. Rightly localised.

      3.—Left wrist pricked. “Is it in the left hand?”—pointing to the back near the little finger.

      4.—Third finger of left hand tightly bound round with wire. A lower joint of that finger was guessed.

      5.—Left wrist scratched with pins. “It is in the left wrist, like being scratched.”

      6.—Left ankle pricked. Rightly localised.

      7.—Spot behind left ear pricked. No result.

      8.—Right knee pricked. Rightly localised.

      9.—Right shoulder pricked. Rightly localised.

      10.—Hands burned over gas. “Like a pulling pain . . then tingling, like cold and hot alternately”—localised by gesture only.

      11.—End of tongue bitten. “It is in the lip or the tongue.”

      12.—Palm of left hand pricked. “Is it a tingling pain in the hand, here?”—placing her finger on the palm of the left hand.

      13.—Back of neck pricked. “Is it a pricking of the neck?”

      14.—Front of left arm above elbow pricked. Rightly localised.

      15.—Spot just above left ankle pricked. Rightly localised.

      16.—Spot just above right wrist pricked. “I am not quite sure, but I feel a pain in the right arm, from the thumb upwards, to above the wrist.”

      17.—Inside of left ankle pricked. Outside of left ankle guessed.

      18.—Spot beneath right collarbone pricked. The exactly corresponding spot on the left side was guessed.

      19.—Back hair pulled. No result.

      20.—Inside of right wrist pricked. Right foot guessed.

      Thus in 10 out of the 20 cases, the percipient localised the pain with great precision; in 6 the localisation was nearly exact, and with these we may include No. 10, where the pain was probably not confined to a single well-defined area in the hands of all the agents; in 2 no local impression was produced; and in 1, the last, the answer was wholly wrong.

§ 11. We may pass now to a totally new division of experimental cases. So far the effect of thought-transference on the receiving mind has been an effect in consciousness—the actual emergence of an image or sensation which the percipient has recognised and described. But it is not necessary that the effect should be thus recognised by the percipient; his witness to it may be unconscious, instead of conscious, and yet may be quite unmistakeable. The simplest example of this is when some effect is produced on his motor system—when the impression received causes him to perform some action which proves to have distinct reference to the thought in the agent’s mind.¹

The cases fall into two classes. In one class the actions are purely automatic: in the other some conscious idea of what was to be done has preceded and accompanied the muscular effect; so that that effect would be at most semi-automatic. To begin with this semi-automatic class; it might be thought that examples would be found in those rarer cases of the “willing-game” where contact, and movement on the agent’s part, are avoided. But we have received no records of such cases where it is certain that the precautions necessary to exclude the barest possibility of slight unconscious physical signs were rigidly enforced; and it will be preferable to describe some experiments made by members of our own group, where this point was kept steadily in view. We have had several interesting series in which the “subject’s” power of utterance has been inhibited by the silent determination of the operator. Our first experiments of this sort were made in January, 1883. The “subject” was our friend, Mr. Sidney Beard, who had been thrown into a light hypnotic trance by Mr. G. A. Smith. A list of twelve Yeses and Noes in arbitrary order was written by one of ourselves and put into Mr. Smith’s hand, with directions that he should successively “will” the “subject” to respond or not to respond, in accordance with the order of the list. Mr. Beard was lying back with closed eyes; and a tuning-fork was struck and held at his ear, with the question, “Do you hear?” asked by one of ourselves. This was done twelve times with a completely successful result, the answer or the failure to answer corresponding in each case with the “yes” or “no” of the written list—that is to say, with the silently concentrated will of the agent.¹

      A much more prolonged series of trials was made in November, 1883, by Professor Barrett, at his house in Dublin. The hypnotist was again Mr. G. A. Smith.

      “The ‘subject’ was an entire stranger to Mr. Smith, a youth named Fearnley, to whom nothing whatever was said as to the nature of the experiment about to be tried, until he was thrown into the hypnotic state in my study. He was then in a light sleep-waking condition—his eyes were closed and the pupils upturned—apparently sound asleep; but he readily answered in response to any questions addressed to him by Mr. Smith or by myself.

      “I first told him to open the fingers of his closed hand, or not to open them, just as he felt disposed, in response to the question addressed to him. That question, which I always asked in a uniform tone of voice, was in each case, ‘Now, will you open your hand?’ and at the same moment I pointed to the word ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ written on a card, which was held in sight of Mr. Smith, but entirely out of the range of vision of the ‘subject,’ even had his eyes been open, which they were not. Without the slightest change of expression or other observable muscular movement, and quite out of contact with the ‘subject,’ Mr. Smith then silently willed the subject to open or not to open his hand, in accordance with the ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Twenty successive experiments were made in this way; seventeen of these were quite successful, and three were failures. But these three failures were possibly due to inadvertence on Mr. Smith’s part, as he subsequently stated that on those occasions he had not been prompt enough to direct his will in the right direction before the question was asked.

      “The experiment was now varied as follows: The word ‘Yes’ was written on one, and the word ‘No’ on the other, of two precisely similar pieces of card. One or other of these cards was handed to Mr. Smith at my arbitrary pleasure, care, of course, being taken that the ‘subject’ had no opportunity of seeing the card, even had he been awake. When ‘Yes’ was