Among all the changes which are taking place in our conceptions of various parts of the universe, there is none more profound, or at first sight more disquieting, than the change which, at the touch of Science, is stealing over our conception of ourselves. For each of us seems to be no longer a sovereign state but a federal union; the kingdom of our mind is insensibly dissolving into a republic. Instead of the ens rationale of the schoolmen, protected from irreverent treatment by its metaphysical abstraction; instead of Descartes’ impalpable soul, seated bravely in its pineal gland, and ruling from that tiny fortress body and brain alike, we have physiologist and psychologist uniting in pulling us to pieces,—in analyzing into their sensory elements our loftiest ideas,—in tracing the diseases of memory, volition, intelligence, which gradually distort us past recognition,—in showing how one may become in a moment a different person altogether, by passing through a fit of somnambulism, or receiving a smart blow on the head. Our past self, with its stores of registered experience, continually revived in memory, seems to be held to resemble a too self-conscious phonograph, which should enjoy an agreeable sense of mental effort as its handle turned, and should preface its inevitable repetitions by some triumphant allusion to its own acumen. Our present self, this inward medley of sensations and desires, is likened to that mass of creeping things which is termed an “animal colony,”—a myriad rudimentary consciousnesses, which acquire a sort of corporate unity because one end of the amalgam has to go first and find the way.

Or one may say that the old view started from the sane mind as the normal, permanent, definite entity from which insanity was the unaccountable aberration; while in the new view it is rather sanity which needs to be accounted for; since the moral and physical being of each of us is built up from incoÖrdination and incoherence, and the microcosm of man is but a micro-chaos held in some semblance of order by a lax and swaying hand, the wild team which a Phaeton is driving, and which must needs soon plunge into the sea. Theories like this are naturally distasteful to those who care for the dignity of man. And such readers may perhaps turn aside in impatience when I say that much of this paper will be occupied by some reasons for my belief that this analysis of human consciousness must be carried further still; that we must face the idea of concurrent streams of being, flowing alongside but unmingled within us, and with either of which our active consciousness may, under appropriate circumstances, be identified. Many people have heard, for instance, of Dr. Azam’s patient, FÉlida X., who passes at irregular intervals from one apparent personality into another, memory and character changing suddenly as she enters her first or her second state of being. Such cases as hers I believe to be but extreme examples of an alternation which is capable of being evoked in all of us, and which in some slight measure is going on in us every day. Our cerebral focus (to use a metaphor) often shifts slightly, and is capable of shifting far. Or let me compare my active consciousness to a steam-tug, and the ideas and memories which I summon into the field of attention to the barges which the tug tows after it. Then the concurrent streams of my being are like Arve and Rhone, contiguous but hardly mingling their blue and yellow waves. I tug my barges down the Rhone, my consciousness is a blue consciousness, but the tail barge swings into the Arve and back again, and brings traces of the potential yellow consciousness back into the blue. In FÉlida’s case tug and barges and all swerve suddenly from one stream into the other; the blue consciousness becomes the yellow in a moment and altogether. Transitions may be varied in a hundred ways, and it may happen that the life-streams mix together, and that there is a memory of all.

Moreover, there seems no reason to assume that our active consciousness is necessarily altogether superior to the consciousnesses which are at present secondary, or potential only. We may rather hold that super-conscious may be quite as legitimate a term as sub-conscious, and instead of regarding our consciousness (as is commonly done) as a threshold in our being, above which ideas and sensations must rise if we wish to cognize them, we may prefer to regard it as a segment of our being, into which ideas and sensations may enter either from below or from above; say a thermometric tube, marking ordinary temperatures, but so arranged that water may not only rise into it, by expansion, from the bottom, but also fall into it, by condensation, from the top.

Strange and extravagant as this doctrine may seem, I shall hope to show some ground for it in the present paper. I shall hope, at least, to show not only that our unconscious may interact with our conscious mental action in a more definite and tangible manner than is usually supposed, but also that this unconscious mental action may actually manifest the existence of a capital and cardinal faculty of which the conscious mind of the same persons at the same time is wholly devoid.

For the sake of brevity I shall select one alone out of many forms of unconscious action which may, if rightly scrutinized, afford a glimpse into the recesses of our being.27

I shall take automatic writing; and I shall try, by a few examples from among the many which lie before me, to show the operation, first, of unconscious cerebral action of the already recognized kind, but much more complex and definite than is commonly supposed to be discernible in waking persons; and, secondly, of telepathic action,—of the transference, that is to say, of thoughts or ideas from the conscious or unconscious mind of one person to the conscious or unconscious mind of another person, from whence they emerge in the shape of automatically written words or sentences.

I shall be able to cover a corner only of a vast and unexplored field. I venture to think that the phenomena of automatic writing will before long claim the best attention of the physiological psychologist. They have been long neglected, and I can only conjecture that this neglect is due to the eagerness with which certain spiritualists have claimed such writings as the work of Shakespeare, Byron, and other improbable persons. The message given has too often fallen below the known grammatical level of those eminent authors, and the laugh thus raised has drowned the far more instructive question as to whence in reality the automatic rubbish came. Yet surely to decline to investigate “planchette” because “the trail of Katie King is over it all,” is very much as though one refused to analyse the meteorite at Ephesus because the town-clerk cried loudly that it was “an image which fell down from Jupiter.”

Automatic writing in its simplest form is merely a variety of the tricks of unconscious action to which, in excited moments, we are all of us prone. The surplus nervous energy escapes along some habitual channel—movements of the hand, for instance, are continued or initiated; and among such hand-movements—drumming of tunes, piano-playing, drawing, and the like—writing naturally holds a prominent place. There is incipient graphic automatism when the nervous student scribbles Greek words on the margin of the paper on which he is striving to produce a copy of iambics. If the paper be suddenly withdrawn he will have no notion what he has written. And more, the words written will sometimes be imaginary words, which have needed some faint unconscious choice in order to preserve a look of real words in their arrangement of letters. A complete graphic automatism is seen in various morbid states. A man attacked by a slight epileptiform seizure while in the act of writing will sometimes continue to write a few sentences unconsciously, which, although probably nonsensical, will often be correct in spelling and grammar. Again, in the case of certain cerebral troubles, the patient will write the wrong word—say, “table” for “chair;”—or at least some meaningless sequence of letters, in which, however, each letter is properly formed. In each of these cases, therefore, there is graphic automatism. And they incidentally show that to write words in a sudden state of unconsciousness, or to write words against one’s will, is not necessarily a proof that any intelligence is at work besides one’s own.

Still further; in spontaneous somnambulism, the patient will often write long letters or essays. Sometimes these are incoherent, like a dream; sometimes they are on the level of his waking productions; sometimes they even seem to rise above it. They may contain at any rate ingenious manipulations of data known to his waking brain, as where a baffling mathematical problem is solved during sleep.

From the natural or spontaneous cases of graphic automatism let us pass on to the induced or experimental cases. I will give first a singular transitional instance, where there is no voluntary muscular action, but yet a previous exercise of expectant attention is necessary to secure the result.

My friend Mr. A., who is much interested in mental problems, has practised introspection with assiduity and care. He finds that if he fixes his attention on some given word, and then allows his hand to rest laxly in the writing attitude, his hand presently writes the word without any conscious volition of his own; the sensation being as though the hand were moved by some power other than himself. This happens whether his eyes are open or shut, so that the gaze is not necessary to fix the attention. If he wills not to write, he can remove his hand and avert the action. But if he chooses a movement simpler than writing, for instance, if he holds out his open hand and strongly imagines that it will close, a kind of spasm ensues, and the hand closes, even though he exert all his voluntary force to keep it open.

It is manifest how analogous these actions are to much which in bygone times has been classed as possession. Mr. A. has the very sensation of being possessed,—moved from within by some agency which overrules his volition, and yet we can hardly doubt that it is merely his unconscious influencing his conscious life. The act of attention, so to say, has stamped the idea of the projected movement so strongly on his brain that the movement works itself out automatically, in spite of subsequent efforts to prevent it. The best parallel will be the case of a promise made during the hypnotic trance, which the subject is irresistibly impelled to fulfil on waking.28 From this curious transitional case we pass on to cases where no idea of the words written has passed through the writer’s consciousness. It is not easy to make quite sure that this is the case, and the modus operandi needs some consideration.

First we have to find an automatic writer. Perhaps one person in a hundred possesses this tendency; that is, if he sits for half an hour on a dozen evenings, amid quiet surroundings and in an expectant frame of mind, with his hand on pencil or planchette, he will begin to write words which he has not consciously thought of. But if he sees the words as he writes them he will unavoidably guess at what is coming, and spoil the spontaneous flow. Some persons can avoid this by reading a book while they write, and so keeping eyes and thoughts away from the message.29 Another plan is to use a planchette; which is no occult instrument, but simply a thin piece of board supported on two castors, and on a third leg consisting of a pencil which just touches the paper. A planchette has two advantages over the ordinary pencil; namely, that a slighter impulse will start it, and that it is easier to write (or rather scrawl) without seeing or feeling what you are writing. These precautions, of course, are for the operator’s own satisfaction; they are no proof to other people that he is not writing the words intentionally. That can only be proved to others if he writes facts demonstrably unknown to his conscious self; as in the telepathic cases to which we shall come further on. But as yet I am only giving fresh examples of a kind of mental action which physiology already recognizes: examples, moreover, which any reader who will take the requisite trouble can probably reproduce, either in his own person or in the person of some trusted friend.

I lately requested a lady whom I knew to be a careful observer, but who was quite unfamiliar with this subject, to try whether she could write with a pencil or planchette, and report to me the result. Her experience may stand as typical.

“I have tried the planchette,” she writes, “and I get writing, certainly not done by my hand consciously; but it is nonsense, such as Mebew. I tried holding a pencil, and all I got was mm or rererere, then for hours together I got this: Celen, Celen. Whether the first letter was C or L I could never make out. Then I got I Celen. I was disgusted, and took a book and read while I held the pencil. Then I got Helen. Now note this fact: I never make H like that (like I and C juxtaposed); I make it thus: (like a printed H). I then saw that the thing I read as I Celen was Helen, my name. For days I had only Celen, and never for one moment expected it meant what it did.”

Now this case suggests several curious analogies. First, there is an analogy with those cases of double consciousness where the patient in the “second state” has to learn to write anew. He learns more rapidly than he learnt as a child, because the necessary adjustments do already exist in his brain, although he cannot use them in the normal manner. So here, too, the hidden other self was learning to write, but learnt more rapidly than a child learns, inasmuch as the process was now but the transference of an organized memory from one stream of the inner being to another. But, secondly, we must observe (and now I am referring to many other cases besides the case cited) that the hidden self does not learn to write just as a child learns, but rather by passing through the stages first of atactic, then of amnemonic agraphy. That is to say, first, the pencil scrawls vaguely, like the patient who cannot form a single letter; then it writes the wrong letters or the wrong words, like the patient who writes blunderingly, or chooses the letters JICMNOS for James Simmonds, JASPENOS for James Pascoe, &c.; ultimately it writes correctly, though very likely (as here, and in a case of Dr. Macnish’s) the handwriting of the secondary self30 (if I may suggest a needed term) is different from the handwriting of the primary.

Once more: the constant repetition of the same word (which I have seen to continue with automatic writers even for months) is more characteristic of aphasia than of agraphy. And we may just remark in passing that vocal automatism presents the same analysis with morbid aphasia which graphic automatism presents with morbid agraphy. When the enthusiasts in Irving’s church first yelled vaguely, then shouted some meaningless words many hundred times, and then gave a “trance-address,” their secondary self (I may suggest) was attaining articulate speech through just the stages through which an aphasic patient will sometimes pass.31 The parallel is at least a curious one; and if the theory which traces the automatic speech of aphasic patients to the right (or less-used) cerebral hemisphere be confirmed, a singular light might be thrown on the locus of the second self.

But I must pass on to one more case of automatic writing, a case which I select as marking the furthest limit to which, so far as I am at present aware, pure unconscious cerebration in the waking state can go. Mr. A., whom I have already mentioned, is not usually able to get any automatic writing except (as described above) of a word on which his attention has been previously fixed. But at one period of his life, when his brain was much excited by over-study, he found that if he held a pencil and wrote questions the pencil would, in a feeble scrawling hand, quite unlike his own, write answers which he could in nowise foresee. Moreover, as will be seen, he was not only unable to foresee these answers, he was sometimes unable even to comprehend them. Many of them were anagrams—transpositions of letters which he had to puzzle over before he could get at their meaning. This makes, of course, the main importance of the case; this proof of the concurrent action of a secondary self so entirely dissociated from the primary consciousness that the questioner is almost baffled by his own automatic replies. The matter of the replies is on the usual level of automatic messages, which are apt to resemble the conversations of a capricious dream. The interest of this form of self-interrogation certainly does not lie in the wisdom of the oracle received.

I abridge Mr. A.’s account, and give the answers in italics.

“‘What is it,’ said Mr. A., ‘that now moves my pen?’ Religion. ‘What is religion?’ Worship. Here arose a difficulty. Although I did not expect either of these answers, yet, when the first few letters had been written, I expected the remainder of the word. This might vitiate the result. But now, as if the intelligent wished to prove by the manner of answering, that the answer could be due to it alone, and in no part to mere expediency, my next question received a singular reply. ‘Worship of what?’ Wbwbwbwb. ‘What is the meaning of wb?’ Win, buy. ‘What?’ Knowledge. On the second day the first question was—‘What is man?’ Flise. My pen was at first very violently agitated, which had not been the case on the first day. It was quite a minute before it wrote as above. On the analogy of wb I proceeded: ‘What does F stand for?’ Fesi. ‘L?’ ‘;Le.’ ‘I?’ ‘;Ivy.’ ‘S?’ Sir. ‘E?’ Eye. ‘Is Fesi le ivy, sir, eye, an anagram?’ Yes. ‘How many words in the answer?’ Four.”

Mr. A. was unable to shift these letters into an intelligible sentence, and began again on the third day with the same question:

“‘What is man?’ Tefi, Hasl, Esble, Lies. ‘Is this an anagram?’ Yes. ‘How many words in the answer?’ Five. ‘Must I interpret it myself?’ Try. Presently I got out, Life is the less able. Next I tried the previous anagram, and at last obtained Every life is yes.”

Other anagrams also were given, as wfvs yoitet (Testify! vow!); ieb; iov ogf wle (I go, vow belief!); and in reply to the question, “How shall I believe?” neb 16 vbliy ev 86 e earf ee (Believe by fear even! 1866). How unlikely it is that all this was due to mere accident may be seen by any one who will take letters (the vowels and consonants roughly proportioned to the frequency of their actual use), and try to make up a series of handfuls completely into words possessing any grammatical coherence or intelligible meaning. Now in Mr. A.’s case all the professed anagrams were real anagrams (with one error of i for e); some of the sentences were real answers to the questions; and not even the absurdest sentences were wholly meaningless. In the two first given, for instance, Mr. A. was inclined to trace a reference to books lately read; the second sentence alluding to such doctrines as that “Death solves mysteries which life cannot unlock;” the first to Spinoza’s tenet that all existence is affirmation of the Deity. We seem therefore to see the secondary self struggling to express abstract thought with much the same kind of incoherence with which we have elsewhere seen it struggle to express some concrete symbol. To revert to our former parallel, we may say that “Every life is yes” bears something the same relation to a thought of Spinoza’s which the letters JICMNOS bear to the name James Simmonds.

Let us consider, then, how far we have got. Mr. A. (on the view here taken) is communing with his second self, with another focus of cerebral activity within his own brain. And I imagine this other focus of personality to be capable of exhibiting about as much intelligence as one exhibits in an ordinary dream. Mr. A. awake is addressing Mr. A. asleep; and the first replies, Religion, Worship, &c., are very much the kind of answer that one gets if one addresses a man who is partially comatose, or muttering in broken slumber. Such a man will make brief replies which show at least that the words of the question are caught, though perhaps not its meaning. In the next place, the answer wb must, I think, as Mr. A. suggests, be taken as an attempt to prove independent action, a confused inchoate response to the writer’s fear that his waking self might be suggesting the words written. The same trick of language—abbreviation by initial letters, occurs on the second day again; and this kind of continuity of character, which automatic messages often exhibit, has been sometimes taken to indicate the persisting presence of an extraneous mind. But perhaps its true parallel may be found in the well-known cases of intermittent memory, where a person repeatedly subjected to certain abnormal states, as somnambulism or the hypnotic trance, carries on from one access into another a chain of recollections of which his ordinary self knows nothing.

In Mr. A.’s case, however, some persons might think that the proof of an independent intelligence went much further than this; for his hand wrote anagrams which his waking brain took an hour or more to unriddle. And certainly there could hardly be a clearer proof that the answers did not pass through the writer’s primary consciousness; that they proceeded, if from himself at all, from a secondary self such as I have been describing. But further than this we surely need not go. The answers contain no unknown facts, no new materials, and there seems no reason À priori why the dream-self should not puzzle the waking self; why its fantastic combinations of old elements of memory should not need some pains to unravel. I may perhaps be permitted to quote in illustration a recent dream of my own, to which I doubt not that some of my readers can supply parallel instances. I dreamt that I saw written in gold on a chapel wall some Greek hexameters, which, I was told, were the work of an eminent living scholar. I gazed at them with much respect, but dim comprehension, and succeeded in carrying back into waking memory the bulk of one line:—? ?? ?at? ??? ?a?e??? ??se da???e??? p??. On waking, it needed some little thought to show me that ?at? ??? was a solecism for ?p? ???, revived from early boyhood, and that the line meant: “He indeed beneath the earth embraced the ever-burning, biting fire.” Further reflection reminded me that I had lately been asked to apply to the Professor in question for an inscription to be placed over the tomb of a common acquaintance. The matter had dropped, and I had not thought of it again. But here, I cannot doubt, was my inner self’s prevision of that unwritten epitaph; although the drift of it certainly showed less tact and fine feeling than my scholarly friend would have exhibited on such an occasion.

Now just in this same way, as it seems to me, Mr. A.’s inner self retraced the familiar path of one of his childish amusements, and mystified the waking man with the puzzles of the boy. It may be that the unconscious self moves more readily than the conscious along these old-established and stable mnemonic tracks, that we constantly retrace our early memories without knowing it, and that when some recollection seems to have left us it has only passed into a storehouse from which we can no longer summon it at will.

But we have not yet done with Mr. A.’s experiences. Yielding to the suggestion that these anagrams were the work of some intelligence without him, he placed himself in the mental attitude of colloquy with some unknown being. Note the result:

“Who art thou? Clelia. Thou art a woman? Yes. Hast thou ever lived upon the earth? No. Wilt thou? Yes. When? Six years. Wherefore dost thou speak with me? E if Clelia el.”

There is a disappointing ambiguity about this last very simple anagram, which may mean “I Clelia feel,” or, “I Clelia flee.”

But mark what has happened. Mr. A. has created and is talking to a personage in his own dream. In other words, his secondary self has produced in his primary self the illusion that there is a separate intelligence at work; and this illusion of the primary self reacts on the secondary, as the words which we whisper back to the muttering dreamer influence the course of a dream which we cannot follow. The fact, therefore, of Clelia’s apparent personality and unexpected rejoinders do not so much as suggest any need to look outside Mr. A’s mind for her origin. The figures in our own ordinary dreams say things which startle and even shock us; nay, these shadows sometimes even defy our attempts at analyzing them away. On the rare occasions, so brief and precious, when one dreams and knows it is a dream, I always endeavor to get at my dream-personages and test their independence of character by a few suitable inquiries. Unfortunately they invariably vanish under my perhaps too hasty interrogation. But a shrewd Northumbrian lately told me the following dream, unique in his experience, and over which he had often pondered.

“I was walking in my dream,” he said, “in a Newcastle street, when suddenly I knew so clearly that it was a dream, that I thought I would find out what the folk in my dream thought of themselves. I saw three foundrymen sitting at a yard door. I went up and said to all three: ‘Are you conscious of a real objective existence?’ Two of the men stared and laughed at me. But the man in the middle stretched out his two hands to his two mates and said, ‘Feel that,’ They said, ‘We do feel you,’ Then he held out his hand to me, and I told him that I felt it solid and warm; then he said: ‘Well, sir, my mates feel that I am a real man of flesh and blood, and you feel it, and I feel it. What more would you have?’ Now I had not formed any notion of what this man was going to say. And I could not answer him, and I awoke.”

Now I take this self-assertive dream-foundry-man to be the exact analogue of Clelia. Let us now see whether anything of Clelia survived the excited hour which begat her.

“On the fourth day,” says Mr. A., “I began my questioning in the same exalted mood, but to my surprise did not get the same answer. ‘Wherefore,’ I asked, ‘dost thou speak with me?’ (The answer was a wavy line, denoting repetition, and meaning.—‘Wherefore dost thou speak with me?’) ‘Do I answer myself?’ Yes. ‘Is Clelia here?’ No. ‘Who is it, then, now here?’ Nobody. ‘Does Clelia exist?’ No. ‘With whom did I speak yesterday?’ No one. ‘Do souls exist in another world?’ Mb. ‘What does mb mean? ’May be.”

And this was all the revelation which our inquirer got. Some further anagrams were given, but Clelia came no more. Such indeed, on the view here set forth, was the natural conclusion. The dream passed through its stages, and faded at last away.

I have heard of a piece of French statuary entitled “Jeune homme caressant sa ChimÈre.” Clelia, could the sculptor have caught her, might have been his fittest model; what else could he have found at once so intimate and so fugitive, discerned so elusively without us, and yet with such a root within?

I might mention many other strange varieties of graphic automatism; as reversed script, so written as to be read in a mirror;32 alternating styles of handwriting, symbolic arabesque, and the like. But I must hasten on to the object towards which I am mainly tending, which is to show, not so much the influence exercised by a man’s own mind on itself as the influence exercised by one man’s mind on another’s. We have been watching, so to say, the psychic wave as it washed up deep-sea products on the open shore. But the interest will be keener still if we find that wave washing up the products of some far-off clime; if we discover that there has been a profound current with no surface trace—a current propagated by an unimagined impulse, and obeying laws as yet unknown.

The psychical phenomenon here alluded to is that for which I have suggested the name Telepathy; the transference of ideas or sensations from one conscious or unconscious mind to another, without the agency of any of the recognized organs of sense.

Our first task in the investigation of this influence has naturally been to assure ourselves of the transmission of thought between two persons, both of them in normal condition; the agent, conscious of the thought which he wishes to transmit, the percipient, conscious of the thought as he receives it.

The “Proceedings” of the Society for Psychical Research must for a long time be largely occupied with experiments of this definite kind. But, of course, if such an influence truly exists, its manifestations are not likely to be confined to the transference of a name or a cypher, a card or a diagram, from one man’s field of mental vision to another’s, by deliberate effort and as a preconcerted experiment. If Telepathy be anything at all, it involves one of the profoundest laws of mind, and, like other important laws, may be expected to operate in many unlooked for ways, and to be at the root of many scattered phenomena, inexplicable before. Especially must we watch for traces of it wherever unconscious mental action is concerned. For the telepathic impact, we may fairly conjecture, may often be a stimulus so gentle as to need some concentration or exaltation in the percipient’s mind, or at least some inhibition of competing stimuli, in order to enable him to realize it in consciousness at all. And in fact (as we have shown or are prepared to show), almost every abnormal mental condition (consistent with sanity) as yet investigated yields some indication of telepathic action.

Telepathy, I venture to maintain, is an occasional phenomenon in somnambulism and in the hypnotic state; it is one of the obscure causes which generate hallucinations; it enters into dream and into delirium; and it often rises to its maximum of vividness in the swoon that ends in death.

In accordance with analogy, therefore, we may expect to find that automatic writing—this new glimpse into our deep-sea world—will afford us some fresh proof of currents which set obscurely towards us from the depths of minds other than our own. And we find, I believe, that this is so. Had space permitted it, I should have liked to detail some transitional cases, to have shown by what gradual steps we discover that it is not always one man’s intelligence alone which is concerned in the message given, that an infusion of facts known to some spectator only may mingle in the general tenor which the writer’s mind supplies. Especially I should have wished to describe some attempts at this kind of thought-transference attended with only slight or partial success. For the mind justly hesitates to give credence to a palmary group of experiments unless it has been prepared for them by following some series of gradual suggestions and approximate endeavor.

But the case which I am about to relate, although a culminant, is not an isolated one in the life-history of the persons concerned. The Rev. P. H. Newnham, Rector of Maker, Devonport, experienced an even more striking instance of thought-transference with Mrs. Newnham, some forty years ago, before their marriage; and during subsequent years there has been frequent and unmistakable transmission of thought from husband to wife of an involuntary kind, although it was only in the year 1871 that they succeeded in getting the ideas transferred by intentional effort.

Mr. Newnham’s communication consists of a copy of entries in a note-book made during eight months in 1871, at the actual moments of experiment. Mrs. Newnham independently corroborates the account. The entries had previously been shown to a few personal friends, but had never been used, and were not meant to be used, for any literary purpose. Mr. Newnham has kindly placed them at my disposal, from a belief that they may serve to elucidate important truth.

“Being desirous,” says the first entry in Mr. Newnham’s note-book, “of investigating accurately the phenomena of ‘planchette,’ myself and my wife have agreed to carry out a series of systematic experiments, in order to ascertain the conditions under which the instrument is able to work. To this end the following rules are strictly observed:

“1. The question to be asked is written down before the planchette is set in motion. This question, as a rule, is not known to the operator. [The few cases were the question was known to Mrs. Newnham are specially marked in the note-book, and are none of them cited here.]

“2. Whenever an evasive, or other, answer is returned, necessitating one or more new questions to be put before a clear answer can be obtained, the operator is not to be made aware of any of these questions, or even of the general subject to which they allude, until the final answer has been obtained.

“My wife,” adds Mr. Newnham, “always sat at a small low table, in a low chair, leaning backwards. I sat about eight feet distant, at a rather high table, and with my back towards her while writing down the questions. It was absolutely impossible that any gesture or play of feature on my part could have been visible or intelligible to her. As a rule she kept her eyes shut; but never became in the slightest degree hypnotic, or even naturally drowsy.

“Under these conditions we carried on experiments for about eight months, and I have 309 questions and answers recorded in my note-book, spread over this time. But the experiments were found very exhaustive of nerve power, and as my wife’s health was delicate, and the fact of thought-transmission had been abundantly proved, we thought it best to abandon the pursuit.

“The planchette began to move instantly with my wife. The answer was often half written before I had completed the question.

“On finding that it would write easily, I asked three simple questions, which were known to the operator, then three others unknown to her, relating to my own private concerns. All six having been instantly answered in a manner to show complete intelligence, I proceeded to ask:

“(7) Write down the lowest temperature here this week. Answer: 8. Now, this reply at once arrested my interest. The actual lowest temperature had been 7·6°, so that 8 was the nearest whole degree; but my wife said at once that, if she had been asked the question, she would have written 7, and not 8; as she had forgotten the decimal, but remembered my having said that the temperature had been down to 7 something,

“I simply quote this as a good instance, at the very outset, of perfect transmission of thought, coupled with a perfectly independent reply; the answer being correct in itself, but different from the impression on the conscious intelligence of both parties.

“Naturally, our first desire was to see if we could obtain any information concerning the nature of the intelligence which was operating through the planchette, and of the method by which it produced the written results. We repeated questions on this subject again and again, and I will copy down the principal questions and answers in this connection.

“(13) Is it the operator’s brain or some external force that moves the planchette? Answer ‘brain’ or ‘force.’ Will.

“(14) Is it the will of a living person, or of an immaterial spirit distinct from that person? Answer ‘person’ or ‘spirit.’ Wife.

“(15) Give first the wife’s Christian name; then my favorite name for her. (This was accurately done.)

“(27) What is your own name? Only you.

“(28) We are not quite sure of the meaning of the answer. Explain. Wife.

“The subject was resumed on a later day.

“(118) But does no one tell wife what to write? if so, who? Spirit.

“(119) Whose spirit? Wife’s brain.

“(120) But how does wife’s brain know masonic secrets? Wife’s spirit unconsciously guides.

“(190) Why are you not always influenced by what I think? Wife knows sometimes what you think. (191) How does wife know it? When her brain is excited, and has not been much tried before. (192) But by what means are my thoughts conveyed to her brain? Electrobiology. (193) What is electrobiology? No one knows. (194) But do not you know? No, wife does not know.

“My object,” says Mr. Newnham, “in quoting this large number of questions and replies [many of them omitted here] has been not merely to show the instantaneous and unfailing transmission of thought from questioner to operator, but more especially to call attention to a remarkable character of the answers given. These answers, consistent and invariable in their tenor from first to last, did not correspond with the opinion or expectation of either myself or my wife. Something which takes the appearance of a source of intelligence distinct from the conscious intelligence of either of us was clearly perceptible from the very first. Assuming, at the outset, that if her source of percipience could grasp my question, it would be equally willing to reply in accordance with my request, in questions (13) (14) I suggested the form of answer; but of this not the slightest notice was taken. Neither myself nor my wife had ever taken part in any form of (so-called) ‘spiritual’ manifestations before this time; nor had we any decided opinion as to the agency by which phenomena of this kind were brought about. But for such answers as those numbered (14), (27), (144), (192), (194), we were both of us totally unprepared; and I may add that, so far as we were prepossessed by any opinion whatever, these replies were distinctly opposed to such opinions. In a word, it is simply impossible that these replies should have been either suggested, or composed, by the conscious intelligence of either of us.”

Mr. Newnham obtained some curious results by questioning “planchette”, on Masonic archÆology—a subject which he had long studied, but of which Mrs. Newnham knew nothing. It is to be observed, moreover, that throughout the experiments Mrs. Newnham “was quite unable to follow the motions of the planchette. Often she only touched it with a single finger; but even with all her fingers resting on the board she never had the slightest idea of what words were being traced out,” In this case, therefore, we have Mrs. Newnham ignorant at once of all three points:—of what was the question asked; of what the true answer would have been; and of what answer was actually being written. Under these circumstances the answer showed a mixture—

(1) Of true Masonic facts, as known to Mr. Newnham;

(2) Of Masonic theories, known to him, but held by him to be erroneous;

(3) Of ignorance, sometimes, avowed, sometimes endeavoring to conceal itself by subterfuge.

I give an example:—

“(166) Of what language is the first syllable of the Great Triple R. A. word? Don’t know. (167) Yes, you do. What are the three languages of which the word is composed? Greek, Egypt, Syriac. First syllable (correctly given), rest unknown. (168) Write the syllable which is Syriac. (First Syllable correctly written.) (174) Write down the word itself. (First three and last two letters were written correctly, but four incorrect letters, partly borrowed from another word of the same degree, came in the middle.) (176) Why do you write a word of which I know nothing? Wife tried hard to catch the word, but could not quite catch it.”

So far the answers, though imperfect, honestly admit their imperfection. There is nothing which a second self of Mrs. Newnham’s, with a certain amount of access to Mr. Newnham’s mind, might not furnish. But I must give one instance of another class of replies—replies which seem to wish to conceal ignorance and to elude exact inquiry.

“(182) Write out the prayer used at the advancement of a Mark Master Mason. Almighty Ruler of the Universe and Architect of all worlds, we beseech Thee to accept this our brother whom we have this day received into the most honorable company of Mark Master Masons. Grant him to be a worthy member of our brotherhood; and may he be in his own person a perfect mirror of all Masonic virtues. Grant that all our doings may be to Thy honor and glory, and to the welfare of all mankind.

“This prayer was written off instantaneously and very rapidly. For the benefit of those who are not members of the craft, I may say that no prayer in the slightest degree resembling it is made use of in the Ritual of any Masonic degree; and yet it contains more than one strictly accurate technicality connected with the degree of Mark Mason. My wife has never seen any Masonic prayers, whether in ‘Carlile’ or any other real or spurious Ritual of the Masonic Order.”

There was so much of this kind of untruthful evasion, and it was so unlike anything in Mrs. Newnham’s character, that observers less sober-minded would assuredly have fancied that some Puck or sprite was intervening with a “third intelligence” compounded of aimless cunning and childish jest. But Mr. Newnham inclines to a view fully in accordance with that which this paper has throughout suggested.

“Is this third intelligence,” he says, “analogous to the ‘dual state,’ the existence of which, in a few extreme and most interesting cases, is now well established? Is there a latent potentiality of a ‘dual state’ existing in every brain? and are the few very striking phenomena which have as yet been noticed and published only the exceptional developments of a state which is inherent in most or in all brains?”

And alluding to a theory, which has at different times been much discussed, of the more or less independent action of the two cerebral hemispheres, he asks:—

“May not the untrained half of the organ of mind, even in the most pure and truthful characters, be capable of manifesting tendencies like the hysterical girl’s, and of producing at all events the appearance of moral deficiencies which are totally foreign to the well-trained and disciplined portion of the brain which is ordinarily made use of?”

In this place, however, it will be enough to say that the real cause for surprise would have been if our secondary self had not exhibited a character in some way different from that which we recognize as our own. Whatever other factors may enter into a man’s character, two of the most important are undoubtedly his store of memories and his cÆnesthesia, or the sum of the obscure sensations of his whole physical structure. When either of these is suddenly altered, character changes too—a change for an example of which we need scarcely look further than our recollection of the moral obliquities and incoherences of an ordinary dream. Our personality may be dyed throughout with the same color, but the apparent tint will vary with the contexture of each absorptive element within. And not graphic automatism only, but other forms of muscular and vocal automatism must be examined and compared before we can form even an empirical conception of that hidden agency, which is ourselves, though we know it not. In the meantime I shall, I think, be held to have shown that, in the vast majority of cases where spiritualists are prone to refer automatic writing to some unseen intelligence, there is really no valid ground for such an ascription. I am, indeed, aware that some cases of a different kind are alleged to exist—cases where automatic writing has communicated facts demonstrably not known to the writer or to any one present. How far these cases can satisfy the very rigorous scrutiny to which they ought obviously to be subjected is a question which I may perhaps find some other opportunity of discussing.

But for the present our inquiry must pause here. Two distinct arguments have been attempted in this paper: the first of them in accordance with recognized physiological science, though with some novelty of its own; the second lying altogether beyond what the consensus of authorities at present admits. For, first, an attempt has been made to show that the unconscious mental action which is admittedly going on within us may manifest itself through graphic automatism with a degree of complexity hitherto little suspected, so that a man may actually hold a written colloquy with his own waking and responsive dream; and, secondly, reason has been given for believing that automatic writing may sometimes reply to questions which the writer does not see, and mention facts which the writer does not know, the knowledge of those questions or those facts being apparently derived by telepathic communication from the conscious or unconscious mind of another person.

Startling as this conclusion is, it will not be novel to those who have followed the cognate experiments on other forms of thought-transference detailed in the “Proceedings” of the Society for Psychical Research.33 And be it noted that our formula, “Mind can influence mind independently of the recognized organs of sense,” has been again and again foreshadowed by illustrious thinkers in the past. It is, for instance, but a more generalized expression of Cuvier’s dictum, “that a communication can under certain circumstances be established between the nervous systems of two persons.” Such communication, indeed, like other mental phenomena, may be presumed to have a neural as well as a psychical aspect; and if we prefer to use the word mind rather than brain, it is because the mental side is that which primarily presents itself for investigation, and in such a matter it is well to avoid even the semblance of theory until we have established fact.

Before concluding, let us return for a moment to the popular apprehensions to which my opening paragraphs referred. Has not some reason been shown for thinking that these fears were premature? that they sprang from too ready an assumption that all the discoveries of psycho-physics would reveal us as smaller and more explicable things, and that the analysis of man’s personality would end in analysing man away? It is not, on the other hand, at least possible that this analysis may reveal also faculties of unlooked-for range, and powers which our conscious self was not aware of possessing? A generation ago there were many who resented the supposition that man had sprung from the ape. But on reflection most of us have discerned that this repugnance came rather from pride than wisdom; and that with the race, as with the individual, there is more true hope for him who has risen by education from the beggar-boy than for him who has fallen by transgression from the prince. And now once more it seems possible that a more searching analysis of our mental constitution may reveal to us not a straitened and materialized, but a developing and expanding view of the “powers that lie folded up in man.” Our best hope, perhaps, should be drawn from our potentialities rather than our perfections; and the doubt whether we are our full selves already may suggest that our true subjective unity may wait to be realized elsewhere.—Contemporary Review.