Metapsychical Phenomena: Methods and ObservationsMaxwell, J. (Joseph)
Philosophy
Metapsychical Phenomena: Methods and Observations
Maxwell, J. (Joseph)
Parapsychology -- Investigation
has the feeling, more or less precise, that a phenomenon is about to
take place. Eusapia Paladino often announces what is coming. In this
case the nervous energy, employed to realise the phenomenon, would be
in connection with the conscious nervous centres of the medium only;
and she would appear to the sitters to be subjected to an extraneous
personal will. Eusapia attributes it to ‘John,’ who seems to have the
characteristics of a secondary personality. Such appears to me to be
the genesis of the personification, in the greater number of cases
observed by me. There are others, however, where this explication is
less satisfactory.
I do not hide from myself how difficult it is to admit the hypothesis
I have just formulated. We are ill-prepared to consider the _psychic
force_ as identical, at least in its essence, with that which
circulates in our nerves; and we are no better prepared to believe,
that this force may be able to serve as a vehicle to a part of our
personal or subliminal consciousness, or to think that it can preserve
any connection with our psychic centres, when it acts beyond the limits
of the body. Nevertheless, it looks as though it were really so, in the
greater number of cases.
These data suffice to render comprehensible the possible mechanism
of raps and movements without contact. It is not even necessary to
suppose that the nervous force acts beyond the limits of the body, if
we admit that the experimenters create around them a sort of magnetic
field. The nervous force would reach a maximum of potentiality in the
experimenters or in the medium; the objects placed within the field
would have a different potentiality; according to the conditions, we
would have phenomena of attraction or repulsion.
In this way we could understand motor phenomena. Raps are less easily
explained, unless we consider them as facts analogous to electrical
discharges. The rap would then be equivalent to the noise of a spark;
it would be invisible, though in some cases it might be perceived.
Lights and forms raise problems much more difficult of solution. They
may be susceptible of the following explanation: we will suppose that
particles of a very attenuated substance, _e.g._ the ether or any other
kind of rarefied matter, existed capable of being acted upon by nerve
force; they would become charged, and dispersed, according to the lines
of force, and these lines would be determined by the action of nerve
centres, and would take form corresponding to those particular centres.
They would have a certain plasticity, if I may thus express myself, and
this plasticity would be in connection with those centres, possessing
preponderating physiological activity.
If this connection existed with the superior ideative centres, we would
have intelligible, definite forms, such as faces of human beings, heads
of animals, and objects; should connection with the inferior centres be
established, undefined forms only would be obtained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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