Some years ago, when living near New York, I had a curious dream that made a deep impression on me. In this dream I seemed to be at a club or hotel, when a messenger boy entered and announced that I was wanted up-stairs. There I found in a large room a family with whom I had been intimate in my boyhood in Canada. I had heard nothing of them for years, and naturally was delighted to see them. But I was struck with the absence of one of the sons, Archie, who, as a youngster of about my own age, had been one of my closest friends.

To my inquiry as to why he was not with them, I was told: “He’s gone,” a statement which, despite its vagueness, seemed in the dream a wholly adequate and satisfactory reply. When I awoke, however, with the dream details vividly in mind, I had a strong feeling that, as I said to my wife: “Something serious must have happened to Archie Tisdale.” The sequel proved that this feeling was amply justified.

For it developed that, at about the time of my dream, he had died from an illness of which I knew nothing until, prompted by the dream, I made inquiries about him.

Again, many years earlier, whiling away the time one summer evening in a green lane that led to the shore of a beautiful Canadian lake, I had an experience which similarly gave me food for thought. I had been leaning on a rail fence, taking in the glories of the fading sunset. It was one of those evenings and one of those scenes of which poets delight to sing, and as I gazed across the lake at the changing hues on the distant hills, slowly turning from blue to gray as the twilight deepened, I gave myself up to the pleasurable day-dreaming so common in the romantic age of youth.

Suddenly I was roused by hearing my name called, in a tone so faint, albeit perfectly audible, that for a moment I could fancy the call came from beyond the lake. The next instant, however, I realized that it was what, with my larger psychological knowledge of to-day, I should term wholly subjective, coming from within me rather than from without; and at the same time I distinctly got the impression that it was connected in some way with accident or illness befalling a young lady in whom I was then much interested—the young lady, in fact, who afterwards became my wife.

It was in vain that I sought to dismiss this impression as a mere freak of the imagination. So insistent did it at last become that I returned to the house and hastily scribbled a note, stating what I had heard—or, rather, thought I had heard—and expressing the hope that all was well.

My letter had to go to a distant city, and it was therefore several days before an answer could arrive. I well remember how, in the interval, I fretted and worried. But by return mail a reassuring reply reached me. Only, most strangely, the writer added that late in the afternoon of the day on which I heard the hallucinatory call, she had been overcome by heat, and was for some hours thought to be in a serious condition.

Once again I heard the same weird inward calling of my name—this time at eleven o’clock on the night of a Fourth of July celebration, when I was lounging in a hammock on the bank of the Niagara River, watching the last of the fireworks on the American side. I was quite alone, as the friends with whom I was staying had retired an hour or more before; and, for that matter, it was not their custom to address me by my first name. Yet I heard myself called, faintly but distinctly, and seemingly from across the water, precisely as in my previous experience.

As in that experience, also, I instinctively associated the calling with my absent sweetheart, and wrote to her at once. Two days later, our letters crossing, I received word that on the night of the Fourth she had taken an overdose of headache powder, with consequences that might have been serious had not medical assistance been promptly obtained.

But even more singular than any of the foregoing is a happening connected with an accident that occurred to my wife while she was still a mere schoolgirl.

With a party of young people she had gone on an outing to a Maine lake resort, and in the dusk of a pleasant evening started for a drive in an old-fashioned hay-wagon. There was no thought of danger, and the drive was thoroughly enjoyed by all until, coming down a long and rather steep hill, the breeching broke, and the horses ran away. At a sharp turn in the road, half-way down the hill, the drive came to a sudden and disastrous end with the overturning of the wagon.

A number of its occupants were seriously hurt, my wife, with great presence of mind, saving herself by jumping clear of the wagon just as it began to go over. Even so, she did not escape uninjured, her face being badly cut.

Now comes the curious part of the affair. Early the next morning a telegram from her mother in Boston was handed to her. It read: “Are you hurt or ill? Wire at once. Am writing.” The letter which followed gave the amazing information that the previous night—that is, the night of the accident—the mother had had an unusually vivid dream in which she saw her daughter driving in a carriage, thrown out of the carriage, and badly cut about the face. So realistic was the dream that on waking it frightened her, and led to the sending of the telegram.

Obviously the question arises: Were these four strange experiences representative merely of extraordinary chance coincidences, or were they indicative of the action of some direct means of communication from mind to mind by other than the ordinary recognized channels of communication?

Personally I am satisfied that chance alone will not suffice to account for them, and that they are veritable instances of the workings of a faculty latent in all mankind and operable in accordance with a true, if as yet little understood, law of nature—call it telepathy, thought transference, or what you will.

And in saying this, I am well aware that, even if my belief is in agreement with that entertained by many eminent men of science—such as Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes, Camille Flammarion, Charles Richet, Theodore Flournoy, Henri Morselli, Professor W.F. Barrett and the late William James—it is contrary to the opinion held by the great majority of scientists at the present day. Their view, to put it briefly, is that there is no such thing as telepathy; that chance coincidence, deliberate or unconscious falsification, and errors of memory are sufficient to explain most instances of alleged telepathic communication; and that the remainder are reducible to the operation of more or less familiar principles in the psychology of the subconscious—notably the law of hyperÆsthesia, or unusual extension of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, etc.

I am perfectly willing to admit that much which passes as telepathy may be thus reducible. For example, I am seated writing at the desk in my study. Unexpectedly there flashes into my mind an idea concerning a person of whom I have not thought for weeks or months. The next instant the doorbell rings, and presently the maid informs me that the very person of whom I have that moment been thinking has entered the house.

This is a not infrequent experience, as most of my readers will concede. So frequent is it that it is absurd to attempt to account for it on the hypothesis of chance coincidence. But neither would it be always safe to raise the theory of telepathy. For it might well happen that while I was seated intent on my work, with the study windows closed, my ear nevertheless caught the sound of footsteps coming down the street, or on my porch; that I subconsciously recognized in them my friend’s walk, and that I consequently, though without knowing why, thought of him at that precise moment. This is assuredly a possible explanation—though I am far from conceding that in all such cases it is the only explanation properly applicable.

So, likewise, one must be constantly on guard against over-readily accepting as evidences of telepathic action the feats of “mind reading” often undertaken by way of parlor amusement. Stage “mind reading” by professional entertainers may be safely left out of the reckoning, as undoubtedly based on methods of conscious trickery and deceit. But in a private gathering, where there can be no question of confederates and deliberate signaling, surprising results are sometimes obtained in the finding of hidden objects, etc. On the surface this would seem explicable only on a telepathic basis, yet in reality it is commonly brought about by “muscle reading” rather than by true “mind reading.”

Experiment has shown that the effort to concentrate thought on a given matter—a name or an object—tends to produce some form of muscular activity, either subconscious whispering of the name thought of, or subconscious movement in the direction of the object. If, as is the rule, the spectators are supposed to keep their minds fixed intently on the name or object they have selected for the “test,” some of them are apt to give these involuntary muscular hints, which the performer will accept and act upon, it may be without being clearly conscious of the source of his information.

Still it must be added that experiments in the “willing game” have been carried out under conditions and with results indicating that occasionally, at all events, successes are achieved without any such subconscious guidance. Not so very long ago some interesting and most striking experiments of this sort were described to me by Professor J.H. Hyslop.

“The subject of my experiments,” said he, “was a young woman of good family, who was credited with having exceptional ability in divining the thoughts and wishes of others. It was arranged that I should investigate her powers, and accordingly for a period of some weeks I had frequent sittings with her, in the presence of a few interested and trustworthy friends.

“The plan followed in every experiment was this: The young woman having left the room, I mentally selected some more or less complicated action for her to perform upon her return. I then wrote down on a slip of paper what I wished her to do, showed it to the others, and concealed it in a book, which did not leave my hand until after the completion of the experiment. From first to last not a word was spoken by any one, so as to guard against any possible hyperÆsthesia of hearing on her part.

“The young woman was then called back, and almost invariably proceeded to execute the commands mentally given her. She did this so promptly that I cannot conceive how she could possibly have got any unconscious hints from those present, and conscious signaling was out of the question.

“For instance, I once wrote on my paper an order for her to pick out of a vase a bunch of keys I had hidden there, cross the room with the keys, and place them on the mantel-piece. She entered, stood for but a moment with her eyes closed, and then, swiftly passing to the vase, which was on the floor, picked up the keys, turned, and deposited them on the mantel-piece as I had mentally suggested. It was all done so quickly and spontaneously that to my mind it afforded strong evidential proof of true thought transference.

“She was not always successful, but some of her failures were quite as instructive as her successes. On three occasions she executed, not the commands I had written on the paper, but commands I had thought of writing but for one reason or another had abandoned. No one in the room excepting myself knew of these previous intentions, so she could have derived her knowledge of them from the involuntary movements of no one excepting me; and if it had actually been a matter of subconscious guidance, it is obvious that my muscular indications would have related not to the abandoned commands but to the commands I actually wished her to carry out.

“All things considered, my experiments with this young woman satisfy me that the hypothesis of subconscious guidance is not always properly applicable, even when the ‘mind reader’ is in a position to see or hear the persons testing him.”

Assuming, however, for the sake of argument, that Professor Hyslop’s conclusion is erroneous, and that the involuntary movement theory does always suffice as an explanatory hypothesis when experimenter and subject are in the same rooms, it becomes manifestly and hopelessly inadequate when applied to explain the transmission of ideas between persons a considerable distance apart. Yet what I consider abundant proof has been experimentally obtained that such transmission may, and sometimes does, take place—occasionally in most dramatic form.

Take, for example, the experience of a French lady, Mme. Clarence de Vaux-Royer, who, feeling uneasy one day about a friend who was then living in the United States, thought she would cable to him. Unfortunately it was Sunday, and her maid found the cable office closed. Mme. de Vaux-Royer then decided to attempt a telepathic experiment, and, knowing that her friend was mourning the death of his mother and of a favorite sister, decided to try and impress him with an idea that they were near him and would comfort him in any trial he might be undergoing. She told her maid of her intention, and asked the maid to note the date, so as to be able to give corroborative evidence if the experiment succeeded.

This was on November 7. Ten days later the American mail brought to Mme. de Vaux-Royer a letter from her absent friend, who, after referring to some matters of wholly private interest, stated:

“Last night (the 7th), while I was praying, I saw, hovering above my head, some gold circles, which gradually floated away until I could no longer see them. At the same time I seemed to hear some one calling to me: ‘Mother! Mother! Sister Minnie!’ Then the circles floated back, approaching until they almost touched my head. Oh, how much comfort I felt! How they inspired me with sentiments of goodness and happiness!”

From this it is manifestly only a step to the experimental production of telepathic phantasms of the human form, as in the two instances given in the previous chapter (the Wesermann and Sinclair experiments), and in numerous other instances, of which one or two additional may well be narrated here. In one, a Harvard professor, an acquaintance of Professor James, on whose authority I quote the story, having heard of the possibility of telepathic hallucinations, determined one evening that he would try to make an apparition of himself appear to a friend, a young lady who lived half a mile from his home. He did not mention his intention to her or to anybody else. The next day he received a letter, in which she said:

“Last night about ten o’clock I was in the dining-room at supper with B. Suddenly I thought I saw you looking in through the crack of the door at the end of the room, toward which I was looking. I said to B.: ‘There is Blank, looking through the crack of the door!’ B., whose back was toward the door, said: ‘He can’t be there. He would come right in.’ However, I got up and looked in the other room, but there was nobody there. Now, what were you doing last night, at that time?”

At that precise moment, as he told Professor James, “Blank” had been at home, sitting alone in his room, and trying “whether I could project my astral body to the presence of A.”

Possibly had the young lady been alone, and not actively engaged, she might have had a more definite view of the phantasm of her absent friend, for experience has shown that solitude and quiet are favoring conditions for the perception of telepathic apparitions. In nearly every instance reported to the Society for Psychical Research the percipient of the phantasm is alone and in a more or less passive, quiescent frame of mind. Such a condition usually obtains immediately before or immediately after sleep, and it is then that experimental apparitions are seen most plainly. Though occasionally they are vividly experienced when the percipient is in a state of the most active consciousness, as in the following case, reported by the agent—that is, the person sending the telepathic message—and confirmed by the percipient, an English clergyman now dead, the Reverend W. Stainton Moses.

“One evening,” runs the agent’s account, “I resolved to try to appear to Z., at some miles distance. I did not inform him beforehand of the intended experiment; but retired to rest shortly before midnight with thoughts intently fixed on Z., with whose rooms and surroundings, however, I was quite unacquainted. I soon fell asleep, and awoke next morning unconscious of anything having taken place. On seeing Z. a few days afterward, I inquired:

“‘Did anything happen at your rooms on Saturday night?’

“‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘a great deal happened. I had been sitting over the fire with M., smoking and chatting. About twelve-thirty he rose to leave, and I let him out myself. I returned to the fire to finish my pipe, when I saw you sitting in the chair just vacated by him.

“‘I looked intently at you, and then took up a newspaper to assure myself I was not dreaming, but on laying it down I saw you still there. While I gazed without speaking, you faded away.’”

Of course in the case of all single experiments like these,[10] the skeptically inclined might plausibly fall back on the theory of chance coincidence. But it is impossible seriously to entertain this hypothesis in cases where experiments in the telepathic transmission of ideas have been carried on repeatedly and with an astonishing measure of success.

To mention only the most notable experiments of this systematic kind, I would call attention to the results obtained by two sets of English investigators, the first comprising two ladies named Clarissa Miles and Hermione Ramsden, the second two gentlemen, F.R. Burt and F.L. Usher. As I see it, indeed, the Miles-Ramsden and Burt-Usher experiments have the additional interest that they not only make clear some of the fundamental laws of genuine thought transference, but also show just why it is that we can never hope to obtain such absolute control of the telepathic process as to be able to send mental messages from one to another with the same ease and certainty as we now send ordinary telegrams and marconigrams.

This inability of control has long been a stock objection against belief in telepathy, especially among the scientifically trained. “Not until we can repeat at will, and with invariable success, the experiment of direct transference of thought, will we accept telepathy as established,” say these scientific skeptics. “We know that if, in our chemical and physical laboratories, we bring such and such elements together, such and such action will always follow. We must be able to do as much with telepathy before we will accept it.” But the Miles-Ramsden and Burt-Usher experiments show that there are excellent reasons for affirming that telepathy is a fact, and that nevertheless its processes cannot be governed with the certitude possible in the case of chemical and physical processes. There are factors involved which elude, and must always elude, the directive control of the experimenter.

In the experiments by the Misses Miles and Ramsden it was arranged that, at a stated hour of a stated evening in each week, Miss Ramsden—who acted throughout as the percipient, or receiver of the telepathic messages—was to remain for a few minutes in a condition of complete passivity, and immediately afterwards was to note on a post-card whatever ideas came into her mind during that time. The post-card was then to be mailed to Miss Miles, who, for her part, was to think of Miss Ramsden at intervals during the day agreed on, and in the evening was to make a post-card entry—to be mailed to her friend forthwith—of the idea or ideas she had tried to convey to her telepathically. Thus, in the event of achieving any degree of success, they would have a perfect documentary record to substantiate their claims.

As to the distance separating them, it ranged from a few score to several hundred miles. They made, in fact, three distinct series of experiments, with about a year’s interval between each series. During the first they were at their homes, Miss Miles in London, Miss Ramsden in Buckinghamshire. During the second, Miss Ramsden was in Inverness, in northern Scotland, and Miss Miles visiting friends in various parts of England. The third series was carried on while Miss Miles was making a tour of the beautiful Ardennes region of France and Belgium, Miss Ramsden at the same time being again in the Scottish Highlands.

Thus there was a progressive increase in the distance between them for each series, but this seems to have made no difference in the result. In each, as the attested record shows, Miss Ramsden succeeded in getting, completely or in part, no fewer than two out of every five of the messages her co-experimenter tried to “telepath” to her. Such a proportion is clearly too high to be explained away on the theory of chance coincidence, and this theory is rendered still more untenable by the attendant circumstances which the record reveals.

On one occasion Miss Miles, who is an artist, had been busy in the afternoon painting a model’s hands. She thought of this when evening came, and determined to endeavor to impress Miss Ramsden with the idea “hands”. In her post-card, written at seven o’clock the same evening, Miss Ramsden stated that of several ideas which had come into her mind at the experiment-hour the “most vivid” was “a little black hand, quite small, much smaller than a child’s, well formed, and the fingers straight. This was the chief thing.

Similarly, having noticed at a meeting in London a curious pair of spectacles worn by a gentleman seated near her, Miss Miles, on returning home in the early evening, wrote down the word “spectacles,” with the idea of “telepathing” it to Miss Ramsden. The latter’s post-card entry for that evening noted that “spectacles” was “the only idea that came to me after waiting a long time.”

Again, while on a sketching expedition to an English village, Miss Miles was much amused by an adventure with a large white pig. She selected this pig as the subject of her next telepathic communication, the result of which Miss Ramsden, writing as almost always on the night of the experiment, thus reported:

“You were out of doors rather late, a cold, raw evening, near a railway station; there was a pig with a long snout, and some village children. It was getting dark.”

On the other hand, in several instances Miss Ramsden’s impressions contained much which Miss Miles had not consciously sought to convey to her. And this brings us to what is unquestionably the most important feature of the experiments.

As was said, about two out of every five messages were correctly received, in whole or in part. But it frequently happened in the case of the seeming failures, that while Miss Ramsden did not get the ideas which Miss Miles was endeavoring to send to her, she did get ideas relating to people, things and events much in Miss Miles’s mind at that moment, or which had been more or less in her mind during the day of the experiment.

To illustrate, Miss Miles once tried to make Miss Ramsden think of “pussies, or cats.” What Miss Ramsden did think of was “a manuscript, pinned by a patent fastener in one corner.” And, oddly enough, Miss Miles had spent a good part of that afternoon reading to a friend from a manuscript “fastened together,” as the friend has testified, “with a patent fastener.” Similarly, during Miss Miles’s visit to the English village above mentioned, Miss Ramsden’s report for one experiment ran:

“First I saw dimly a house, but I think that you wish me to see a little girl with brown hair down her back, tied with a ribbon in the usual way. She is sitting at a table with her back turned and seems very busy indeed. I think she is cutting out scraps with a pair of scissors. She has on a white pinafore, and I should guess her age to be between eight and twelve.”

Miss Miles had not been trying to make Miss Ramsden think of anything of the sort. But the description fitted perfectly her landlady’s little daughter, of whom the mother, Mrs. Laura Lovegrove, says:

“I have a little girl aged eleven, with brown hair, tied with a ribbon in the usual way. She wears a pinafore, and, being ill, often amuses herself cutting out scraps.”

Another time, when the hour for the experiment arrived, Miss Miles forgot all about it, being busy writing letters to some friends. In particular she was absorbed in framing an answer to an important letter from a Polish artist, written in a peculiar script. Miss Ramsden’s report for that evening was:

“I felt that you were not thinking of me, but were reading a letter in a sort of half-German writing. The letters have very long tails to them. Is there any truth in that?”[11]

Significant also is the fact that precisely the same sort of thing occurred in the more recent experiments between Mr. Burt and Mr. Usher, who, like Miss Miles and Miss Ramsden, conducted their investigations in a careful, methodical, conscientious way, and over a long period of time.

Mr. Usher, like Miss Miles, invariably acted as the sender of the telepathic communications, while Mr. Burt was the percipient. From first to last the latter remained in London, while Mr. Usher was part of the time in Bristol, more than one hundred miles from London, and part of the time in the Austrian city of Prague, a thousand miles away. On each experiment-evening it was Mr. Usher’s practice, at the hour previously agreed upon, to sit alone in a dimly lighted room, draw some design on a piece of paper, and remain for fifteen minutes thinking intently of the design and “willing” to transmit it to Mr. Burt, who, at the same hour, would be seated in a darkened room in London, noting the images that passed before his mind’s eye, and, at the expiration of fifteen minutes, setting down on paper the one or two that had seemed to him most vivid.

Nearly fifty experiments were thus made, with results defying any explanation by the theory of chance coincidence. And, as in the Miles-Ramsden experiments—for the matter of that, as also in Professor Hyslop’s experiments—it at times happened that when Mr. Burt totally failed to draw a design corresponding with that which Mr. Usher had drawn, Mr. Burt’s design did correspond with images demonstrably in Mr. Usher’s mind at or immediately before the moment of the experiment.

Thus, one evening in Prague Mr. Usher tried to make Mr. Burt get the impression of an oblong composed of numerous small dots. Instead Mr. Burt saw and designed a peculiar plume-like ornamentation, which Mr. Usher instantly recognized as a picture of part of the unusual carving on the table at which he had been seated. On another occasion—the eighteenth experiment—Mr. Usher sought to transmit a crude design of a flower in a pot. What Mr. Burt actually drew was an excellent representation of a lighted cigarette with the smoke curling away from it.

“And,” says Mr. Usher, “the evening that he drew this was the first evening I had smoked a cigarette while experimenting with him.”

Such incidents, with those cited in connection with the experiments of Professor Hyslop and the Misses Miles and Ramsden, in my opinion go to show exactly why it is that one cannot hope to obtain unfailing control over the process of telepathy. For they indicate that at bottom genuine thought transference depends not so much on conscious willing as on subconscious feeling. It is not necessarily the things about which one thinks most strongly, but rather things which are tinged with some emotional coloring, that are most likely to become subjects of telepathic communication.

And these experiments further indicate that, on the receiver’s part also, the mechanism involved in the transmission of telepathic messages belongs rather to the subconscious than to the conscious portion of the mind. In order to allow the emergence of the transmitted ideas into the field of conscious knowledge, there seems to be always necessary some form of psychical “dissociation”—as in a trance, dream, reverie, or moment of absentmindedness. Such states of dissociation are not always easy to bring about voluntarily; and when they are brought about, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, it by no means follows that ideas received telepathically will forthwith and rapidly rise above the threshold of consciousness.

For, as recent psychological experiment and observation have shown, in dissociated states the tendency is for the emergence chiefly of ideas which, through their emotional associations, are of deep personal significance—as when we dream of persons or things associated with events that once affected us profoundly. Every one of us has subconscious reminiscences of this sort, and with these personal subconscious reminiscences any ideas which have been transmitted telepathically have of necessity to compete for emergence. They may get through or they may not; whether they will get through apparently depends in large measure on the degree of their own emotional intensity.

Hence it is that that scientist is doomed to perpetual unbelief who boasts that he will never place credence in telepathy until he can play with it as he plays with the chemicals in his test tubes. One cannot handle feelings as one can handle a chemical compound, nor can one manipulate at will the subconscious as though it were a physical substance. Hence, too, the case for telepathy must always rest less on experimental evidence—strong though the Miles-Ramsden and Burt-Usher experiments demonstrate that this sometimes is—than on well-authenticated instances of spontaneous occurrence, which have been recorded in ever-increasing volume since systematic investigation of the subject was first undertaken a scant quarter of a century ago.

In such instances, the records further show, one of the commonest forms in which the telepathic message is received is that of an auditory hallucination, as in the “voice” heard by me on the shore of the Canadian lake and on the bank of Niagara River. When there is connected with the sending of the message some supreme crisis in the career of the sender—the crisis, it may be, of the moment of death—the auditory hallucination is sometimes of such a nature as to make its dire meaning almost self-evident. In this respect I know of nothing more striking than a strange case reported, with ample corroborative evidence, to the Society for Psychical Research.

The narrator, a well-to-do Englishman, was living at the time in a country house. It was early spring, and on the night of his telepathic experience there had been a slight snowfall, just sufficient to make the ground white. After dinner he spent the evening writing until ten o’clock, when, to continue the story in his own words:

“I got up and left the room, taking a lamp from the hall table, and placing it on a small table standing in a recess of the window in the breakfast-room. The curtains were not drawn across the window. I had just taken down from the nearest bookcase a volume of ‘Macgillivray’s British Birds’ for reference, and was in the act of reading the passage, the book held close to the lamp, and my shoulder touching the window shutter, and in a position when almost the slightest sound would be heard, when I distinctly heard the front gate opened and shut again with a clap, and footsteps advancing at a run up the drive; when opposite the window the steps changed from sharp and distinct on gravel to dull and less clear on the grass-slip below the window, and at the same time I was conscious that some one or something stood close to me outside, only the thin shutter and a sheet of glass dividing us.

“I could hear the quick, panting, labored breathing of the messenger, or whatever it was, as if trying to recover breath before speaking. Had he been attracted by the light through the shutter? Suddenly, like a gunshot, inside, outside, and all around, there broke out the most appalling shriek—a prolonged wail of horror, which seemed to freeze the blood. It was not a single shriek, but more prolonged, commencing in a high key, and then less and less, wailing away toward the north, and becoming weaker and weaker as it receded in sobbing pulsations of intense agony.

“Of my fright and horror I can say nothing—increased tenfold when I walked into the dining-room and found my wife sitting quietly at her work close to the window, in the same line and distant only ten or twelve feet from the corresponding window in the breakfast-room. She had heard nothing. I could see that at once; and from the position in which she was sitting, I knew she could not have failed to hear any noise outside and any footsteps on the ground. Perceiving I was alarmed about something, she asked:

“‘What is the matter?’

“‘Only some one outside,’ I said.

“‘Then, why do you not go out and see? You always do when you hear any unusual noise.’

“‘There is something queer and dreadful about this noise,’ I replied. ‘I dare not face it.’”

Nothing more was heard, and early next morning he made a careful search in the grounds around the house, but not a footprint was to be seen in the snow, which had ceased falling long before the occurrence of the wailing cry. A little later in the day, however, word arrived that at ten o’clock the previous night one of his tenants, who lived half a mile distant and with whom he had spent the afternoon, had committed suicide by drinking prussic acid.

He had gone up to his bedroom, his groom testified at the inquest, had mixed the poison in a tumbler of water, drank it off, and, with a terrible scream, fell dead on the floor.

Fortunately, telepathic hallucinations do not usually come with such intensity or in such an alarming form. Often they are mere vague impressions that something unpleasant or disastrous is occurring to a relative or friend, and, as in the case of self-originating hallucinations like that reported by Lady Eardley, they occasionally impel to action that averts disaster. It was thus, to give a single instance, in an experience reported[12] by William Blakeway, a Staffordshire Englishman:

“I was in my usual place at chapel one Sunday afternoon, when all at once I thought I must go home. Seemingly against my will, I took my hat. When reaching the chapel gates I felt an impulse that I must hasten home as quick as possible, and I ran with all my might without stopping to take breath. Meeting a friend who asked why I hurried so, I passed him almost without notice.

“When I reached home I found the house full of smoke, and my little boy, three years old, all on fire, alone in the house. I at once tore the burning clothes from off him, and was just in time to save his life. It has always been a mystery to me, as no person whispered a word to me, and no one knew anything about the fire till after I made the alarm at home, which was more than a quarter of a mile from the chapel.”

Here the wholly subconscious nature of the phenomenon, on the percipient’s part at all events, is plainly evident. It is even more evident in all cases where, as frequently occurs, the telepathic message is received in a dream like that which was recorded in the opening paragraphs of this chapter. As is to be expected, too, in telepathic dreams we often find an element of symbolism. The news of illness, of accident, of death, or whatever it may be, is not conveyed directly, but indirectly, amid a mass of more or less relevant details of dream imagery.

A couple of years ago I received a letter from a lady living in Brooklyn, describing an experience that admirably illustrates this point. Her dream, however, was of such an intimate character that the names of the persons and places must be suppressed. Five years ago, this lady writes, her daughter became interested in a young man, Mr. V., whose suit, however, the mother discouraged. Afterwards her daughter met, fell in love with, and was happily married to a physician in the Government service. She soon went abroad with her husband, to a remote and isolated post. My informant continues:

“We could not hear from them all winter because they were ice-bound, but my thoughts of them were always most delightful, for their last letters were bubbling over with happiness, and I was lovingly busy getting things ready for them.

“Mr. V. had almost passed from my mind, when one morning, in the middle of June, I arose, took a bath, and, having a half-hour to spare, went back to bed again, falling into a deep sleep.

“Suddenly Mr. V. appeared to me in one of my lower rooms. It seemed to be breakfast time, and I invited him to have some. He accepted, and we sat together for some time, but I do not remember any of our conversation. Suddenly he arose, faced me, and, looking straight into my eyes, said emphatically:

“‘Now she is mine! Nothing you can do will ever separate us again! This time she will belong to me!’

“I awoke with a start, much frightened. Then, realizing the situation, I thanked Heaven she was safely married, and promptly put the dream from me. This was about eight o’clock. At ten a despatch reached me saying that my daughter’s husband had died, from the result of a boating accident two weeks before.”

Or, when apprehended in dream, the telepathic message may be so distorted that its true meaning cannot possibly be recognized immediately. A characteristic case of this kind occurred at the time of President Lincoln’s assassination, though it is only recently that it was for the first time reported in detail by Mrs. E.H. Hughes, daughter of the San Francisco architect, S.C. Bugbee. It should be explained that before removing to California from Massachusetts in 1863, the Bugbees were well acquainted with the Booth family, and that John Wilkes Booth was an especial favorite of Mrs. Bugbee’s. Says Mrs. Hughes, in her report to the American Institute for Scientific Research:[13]

“One night my mother woke my father suddenly, saying: ‘Oh, Charles! I have had such a terrible dream! I dreamed that John Wilkes Booth shot me! It seemed that he sent me seats for a private box in a theater, and I took some young ladies with me. Between the acts he came to me, and asked me how I liked the play. I exclaimed, “Why, John Booth! I am surprised that you could put such a questionable play upon the stage. I am mortified to think that I have brought young ladies to see it.” At that he raised a pistol, and shot me in the back of the neck. It seems as if I felt a pain there now.’ After a while my mother fell asleep, and dreamed the same thing a second time.

“The next morning came the terrible news which plunged the nation into grief and mourning. Almost at the hour of my mother’s dream, President Lincoln was assassinated; shot, in the back of the neck, in a private box at a theater, by John Wilkes Booth.”

On the other hand, there may be no symbolism or distortion, the dream corresponding so realistically with the event as to make its significance manifest. To give an illustration, Mrs. Morris Griffith, an Englishwoman, reports:

“On the night of Saturday, the eleventh of March, I awoke in much alarm, having seen my eldest son, then at St. Paul de Loanda on the southwest coast of Africa, looking dreadfully ill and emaciated, and I heard his voice distinctly calling to me. I was so disturbed I could not sleep again, but every time I closed my eyes the appearance recurred, and his voice sounded distinctly, calling me ‘Mamma!’ I felt greatly depressed all through the next day, which was Sunday, but I did not mention it to my husband, as he was an invalid, and I feared to disturb him. Strange to say, he also suffered from intense low spirits all day, and we were both unable to take dinner, he rising from the table, saying: ‘I don’t care what it costs, I must have the boy back,’ alluding to his eldest son.

“I mentioned my dream and the bad night I had had to two or three friends, but begged that they would say nothing of it to Mr. Griffith. The next day a letter arrived, containing some photos of my son, saying he had had fever, but was better, and hoped immediately to leave for a much more healthy station. We heard no more till the ninth of May, when a letter arrived with the news of our son’s death from a fresh attack of fever, on the night of the eleventh of March, and adding that just before his death he kept calling repeatedly for me.”[14]

It is only a short transition from such a dream as this to a waking hallucination in which—as in the cases of experimental occurrence mentioned above, and those other cases detailed in the preceding chapter—phantom forms are discerned at the moment when the person seen is threatened by some danger or is passing through the supreme crisis of death.

But now, accepting telepathy as an established fact, the problem remains: How are we to explain it? What is the mechanism by which one person is able to transmit messages directly and instantaneously to another person although they may be half the world apart?

To this question, it must frankly be admitted, no positive answer can as yet be returned. But some extremely plausible hypotheses have been advanced, not by mere theorists but by eminent men of science, who, themselves affirming the actuality of telepathy, have given much thought to the problem of its mode of operation.

Sir William Crookes, for example, calling attention to the marvelous but undisputed facts of ethereal vibration as evidenced by the phenomena of wireless telegraphy and the RÖntgen rays, urges that here we have quite possibly an adequate explanation of the mystery of telepathy on a wholly naturalistic basis—that is to say, a basis which enables us to accept telepathy without dislocating our entire conception of the physical universe.

“It seems to me,” he suggests, “that in these rays [RÖntgen rays] we may have a possible way of transmitting intelligence which, with a few reasonable postulates, may supply the key to much that is obscure in psychical research. Let it be assumed that these rays, or rays of even higher frequency, can pass into the brain and act on some nervous center there. Let it be conceived that the brain contains a center which uses these rays as the vocal chords use sound vibrations (both being under the command of intelligence), and sends them out, with the velocity of light, to impinge on the receiving ganglion of another brain. In this same way the phenomena of telepathy, and the transmission of intelligence from one sensitive to another through long distances, seem to come into the domain of law and can be grasped.”[15]

This undoubtedly is the explanation that most strongly commends itself to those scientists who courageously acknowledge their belief in telepathy. Nor do they see any objection to it in the fact that people apparently are affected by the telepathic impulse only at certain times. For the brain of both sender and receiver may conceivably, on the analogy of wireless telegraphy, be set to transmit and receive telepathic communications only when attuned to vibrations of a certain amplitude. There is, however, as Sir William Crookes himself has recognized, another and really formidable objection to this vibratory hypothesis.

It is found in the fact that, assuming telepathic messages to be conveyed by a system of infinitely minute waves in the ether, we logically have also to assume that these waves would still obey what is known as the law of inverse squares. By this is meant that, spreading on every side in ever-expanding waves, they would lose power in proportion to the square of the distance from their source. Consequently, it would not only require a tremendous initial energy to project them any great distance, but the farther they were sent the feebler they would become, so that in the case of a percipient remote from the agent, either the telepathic message would not be received at all or at most it would be received in exceedingly attenuated fashion. Whereas the fact is that, according to the results of such experimentation as that which I have described, complete failure often occurs when the experimenters are only a few yards apart, and brilliant successes are sometimes achieved at distances of hundreds of miles.

This consideration has led some thinkers—notably Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor W.F. Barrett, and the late F.W.H. Myers—to abandon outright all attempt at an explanation on a naturalistic basis, and to advance instead the view that telepathy is not explicable in physical terms because it is a wholly psychical process—“a direct and supersensuous communion of mind with mind.” After all, though, as Mr. Frank Podmore has pointed out, this view rests simply on a negation—our present inability to conceive a thoroughly satisfactory explanation; and at any time scientific research may remove that inability, as has happened again and again in the past in the case of other and seemingly equally inexplicable phenomena.

Meanwhile, all that we, scientists and laymen alike, need do, is to remember that inability to explain gives us of itself no warrant to deny. We must acquaint ourselves with the facts before accepting or rejecting them. And for myself I can only say that the actuality of telepathy has to my mind been absolutely proved. With Sir Oliver Lodge:

“I am prepared to confess that the weight of testimony is sufficient to satisfy my own mind that such things do undoubtedly occur; that the distance between England and India is no barrier to the sympathetic communication of intelligence in some way of which we are at present ignorant; that just as a signaling-key in London causes a telegraphic instrument to respond instantaneously in Teheran—which is an everyday occurrence—so the danger or death of a distant child, or brother, or husband, may be signaled without wire or telegraph clerk, to the heart of a human being fitted to be the recipient of such a message.”