Sinclair, Mary Craig, 1883-1961; Sinclair, Upton, 1878-1968; Telepathy; Telepathy -- Case studies
So Craig had a new set of experiments to try all by herself, without
bothering her busy husband. She would go to one of my bookcases, with
which she had hitherto had nothing to do, since her own books are kept
in her own place. With her back to the bookcase, she would draw a book,
and take it to her couch and lie down, placing the book upon her solar
plexus, and taking every precaution to make sure that it never came into
her line of vision. Most of the books, being new, were in their paper
jackets, so there was no lettering that could be felt with her fingers.
This, you note, is not a test of telepathy, for no human mind knew what
particular book Craig’s hand had fallen upon. If she could tell anything
about the contents of that book, it would appear to be clairvoyance, or
what is known as “psychometry.”
My books are oddly varied in character. There are new novels, and works
of history, biography, travel and economics. In addition, there are what
I call “crank books”; the queerly assorted volumes which are destined by
donors all over the world to convert me to vegetarianism,
antivivisection, anarchism, Mormonism, Mohammedanism, infanticide, the
abolition of money, or the doctrine that alopecia is caused by onanism.
Believe me, the person who sets out to guess the contents of the books
that come to me in the course of a month has his or her hands full!
But Craig was able to do it. She did it on so many occasions that she
would sit and stare at me and exclaim, “Now what do you make of _that_?”
She would insist that I sit and watch the process, so as to be able to
state that she never had the book in her line of vision. In my presence
she picked out a volume, and, keeping it hidden from both of us, she
said, “I see a blue cover, with a rising sun and a bare landscape.” It
happened to be a volume circulated by the followers of “Pastor Russell,”
and as the preface tells me that 1,405,000 have been sold, it may be
that you too have it in your library. The title is _Deliverence_, by J.
F. Rutherford, and it has a blue cloth cover, with a gold design of a
sun rising behind a mass of clouds and a globe.
On another occasion Craig wrote: “One big eye, with nothing else
distinct—then lines or spikes came around it, or maybe these project
from the head like stiff long hairs, or eye-lashes. Can’t tell what kind
of head—but feel it must be a tropical something, tho the eye looks
human,” etc. The book was _Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island_, by H. G.
Wells, and in this book is a chapter headed, “The Friendly Eye,” with
the following sentences: “I became aware that an Eye observed me
continually.... It was a reddish brown eye. It looked out from a system
of bandages that also projected a huge shock of brown hair upward and a
great chestnut beard ... the eye watched me with the illuminating but
expressionless detachment of a head-lamp.... Polyhemus, for that was my
private name for the man.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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