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.