279. I did not ask how long but how?
A. Eating and drinking and sleeping and smoking.
That clergyman never consulted planchette again.
I will conclude with a very pretty instance of a mistake instantly corrected. It was on the same evening, May 10th; I had to preach on the following Whit-Monday, on the occasion of laying a foundation-stone with Masonic ceremonial, so I asked:—
275. Give me a text for Whit-Monday’s sermon.
A. If I go not away, the Comforter will not come to you.
The selection of a subject suitable for Whitsuntide is plainly the first idea caught by the intelligence; so I proceeded:—
276. That will not do for my subject. I want a text for the Monday’s sermon.
A. Let brotherly love continue.
I will add one example where, contrary to the usual rule, the idea of the answer, though not that of the question, reached the level of consciousness in Mrs. Newnham’s mind.
59. What name shall we give to our new dog?
A. Nipen.
The name of Nipen, from Feats on the Fiord, shot into the operator’s brain just as the question was asked.
The above quotations form a fair sample of Mr. Newnham’s 309 experiments of the same type; and no one who admits the bona fides of the record, and believes that Mrs. Newnham, sitting with closed eyes eight feet behind her husband, did not obtain through her senses an unconscious knowledge of what he wrote, will deny that some sort of telepathic influence was at work, acting below the level of the percipient’s consciousness. The experiments are further interesting as suggesting, in the character of many of the replies, an unconscious intelligence—a second self quite other than Mrs. Newnham’s conscious self. “Unconscious intelligence” is no doubt a somewhat equivocal phrase, and it is necessary to know in every case exactly what is meant by it. It may be used in a purely physical sense—to describe the unconscious cerebral processes whereby actions are produced which as a rule are held to imply conscious intelligence; as, for instance, when complicated movements, once performed with thought and effort, gradually become mechanical. But it may be used also to describe psychical processes which are severed from the main conscious current of an individual’s life. Unconsciousness in any further sense it would be rash to assert; for intelligent psychic process without consciousness of some sort, if not a contradiction in terms, is at any rate something as impossible to imagine as a fourth dimension in space. The events in question are outside the individual’s consciousness, as the events in another person’s consciousness are; but they differ from these last in not revealing themselves as part of any continuous stream of conscious life; and no one, therefore, can give an account of them as belonging to a self. What their range and conditions of emergence may be we cannot tell; since, in general, their very existence can only be inferred from certain sensible effects to which they lead.1 I may recall the undoubted phenomena of what has been termed “double consciousness,” where a double psychical life is found connected with a single organism. In those cases the two selves, one of which knows nothing of the other, appear as successive; but if we can regard such segregated existences as united or unified by bonds of reference and association which, for the partial view of one of them at least, remain permanently out of sight, then I do not see what new or fundamental difficulty is introduced by conceiving them as simultaneous; and simultaneity of the sort is what seems to be shown, in a fragmentary way, by cases like the present. I shall have to recur to this conception in connection with some of the facts of spontaneous telepathy (see pp. 230-1).
A further noteworthy point is that so often the questions and not the answers in the agent’s mind should have been telepathically discerned; but we may perhaps conceive that the impulse first conveyed set the percipient’s independent activity to work, and so put an end for the moment to the receptive condition. The power to reproduce the actual word thought of is sufficiently shown in the cases where names were given (15 and 87), and in some of the Masonic answers; and the following examples belong to the same class.
48. What name shall we give to our new clog?
A. Yesterday was not a fair trial.
49. Why was not yesterday a fair trial
A. Dog.
And again:—
108. What do I mean by chaffing C. about a lilac tree?
A. Temper and imagination.
109. You are thinking of somebody else. Please reply to my question.
A. Lilacs.
Here a single image or word seems to have made its mark on the percipient’s mind, without calling any originative activity into play; and we thus get the naked reproduction. In these last examples we again notice the feature of deferred impression. The influence only gradually became effective, the immediate answer being irrelevant to the question. We may suppose, therefore, that the first effect took place below the threshold of consciousness.1
§ 13. I may now proceed to some further results which were obtained with percipients of less abnormal sensibility, and which demand, therefore, a careful application of the theory of probabilities. For the development of the motor form of experiment in this direction, we have again to thank M. Richet; who here, as in the case of the card-guessing, has brought the calculus to bear effectively on various sets of results many of which, if looked at in separation, would have had no significance.1 The fact that the “subjects” of his trials were persons who had betrayed no special aptitude for “mental suggestion,” made it clearly desirable that the bodily action required should be of the very simplest sort. The formation of words by a planchette-writer requires, of course, a very complex set of muscular co-ordinations: all that M. Richet sought to obtain was a single movement or twitch. In the earlier trials an object was hidden, and the percipient endeavoured to discover it by means of a sort of divining-rod—the idea being that he involuntarily twitched the rod at the right moment under the influence of “mental suggestion” from the agent, who was watching his movements. But where the subject of communication is of such an extremely simple kind, very elaborate precautions would be needed to guard against unconscious hints. Indications from the expression or attitude of the “agent” may be prevented by blindfolding the “percipient,” and in other ways; but if the two are in close proximity, it is harder to exclude such signs as may be given by involuntary movements, or by changes of breathing. M. Richet’s later experiments were ingeniously contrived so as to obviate this objection.
The place of a planchette was taken by a table, and M. Richet prefaces his account by a succinct statement of the orthodox view as to “table-turning.” Rejecting altogether the three theories which attribute the phenomena to wholesale fraud, to spirits, and to an unknown force, he regards the gyrations and oscillations of séance-tables as due wholly to the unconscious muscular contractions of the sitters. It thus occurred to him to employ a table as an indicator of the movements that might be produced, by “mental suggestion.” The plan of the experiments was as follows. Three persons (C, D, and E,) took their seats in a semi-circle, at a little table on which their hands rested. One of these three was always a “medium”—a term used by M. Richet to denote a person liable to exhibit intelligent movements in which consciousness and will apparently take no part. Attached to the table was a simple electrical apparatus, the effect of which was to ring a bell whenever the current was broken by the tilting of the table. Behind the backs of the sitters at the table was another table, on which was a large alphabet, completely screened from the view of C, D, and E, even had they turned round and endeavoured to see it. In front of this alphabet sat A, whose duty was to follow the letters slowly and steadily with a pen, returning at once to the beginning as soon as he arrived at the end. At A’s