The crystal picture is what we must call (for want of knowledge of determining causes) a _random_ glimpse into inner vision, a reflection caught at some odd angle from the universe as it shines through the perturbing medium of that special soul. Normal and supernormal knowledge and imaginings are blended in strangely mingled rays. Memory, dream, telepathy, telæsthesia, retrocognition, precognition, all are there. Nay, there are indications of spiritual communications and of a kind of ecstasy.[105] We cannot pursue all these phenomena at once. In turning, as we must now turn, to the _spontaneous_ cases of sensory automatism--of every type of which the _induced_ visions of the crystal afford us a foretaste--we must needs single out first some fundamental phenomenon, illustrating some principle from which the rarer or more complex phenomena may be in part at least derived. Nor will there be difficulty in such a choice. Theory and actual experience point here in the same direction. If this inward vision, this inward audition, on whose importance I have been insisting, are to have any such importance--if they are to have any validity at all--if their contents are to represent anything more than dream or meditation--they must receive knowledge from other minds or from distant objects;--knowledge which is _not_ received by the external organs of sense. Communication must exist from the subliminal to the subliminal as well as from the supraliminal to the supraliminal parts of the being of different individual men. Telepathy, in short, must be the prerequisite of all these supernormal phenomena. Actual experience, as we shall presently see, confirms this view of the place of telepathy. For when we pass from the induced to the spontaneous phenomena we shall find that these illustrate before all else this transmission of thought and emotion directly from mind to mind. Now as to telepathy, there is in the first place this to be said, that such a faculty must absolutely exist somewhere in the universe, if the universe contains any unembodied intelligences at all. If there be any life less rooted in flesh than ours--any life more spiritual (as men have supposed that a higher life would be), then either it must not be _social_ life--there can be no exchange of thought in it at all--or else there must exist some method of exchanging thought which does not depend upon either tongue or brain.