This presumed mode of communication between one individual and another,
without the intervention of any known sense, Professor Barrett, arguing
on electrical analogies, is inclined to suggest might be due to some
form of nervous induction. But is this faculty restricted in its
operation to a hypnotised subject? If it were, the significance of the
phenomena would be very much lessened. We should leave telepathy out of
our account. But it is not so restricted. The ideas and images are
capable of being projected not only to a hypnotised person, but to one
who is apparently not under any hypnotic influence whatever. Yet we
still must be careful of how we call in the aid of any "supernatural"
agency to account for the influences I am about to relate--the
translation of ideas and motor impulses from one person to another
without the aid of any known sense. The transference of pictures which
we described in the last article has been achieved in hundreds of cases
by an agent upon a hypnotised percipient. Here we have telepathy
apparently at work, but not, however, at any great distance, nor
successful in conjuring up really vivid or ominous hallucinations. The
scientific term for these is "sensory automatisms," and many instances
of these are given by Edmund Gurney, author of "Phantasms of the
Living."
At an early period the Society for Psychical Research began a "Census of
Hallucinations," which, with Gurney's book, now renders it possible for
us to consider these phenomena with some certainty. The net result of
all this investigation would seem to demonstrate that a large number of
sensory automatisms occur amongst sane and healthy persons. We will
later consider what difficulty lies in the way of attributing to
telepathy the bulk of these phenomena. There is a widely accepted theory
that telepathy is propagated by brain-waves, or, in Sir W. Crooke's
phraseology, by ether-waves, of even smaller amplitude and greater
frequency than those which carry X-rays. Such waves are supposed to pass
from one brain to another, arousing in the second brain an excitation
of image similar to the excitation or image from which they start in the
first place. It has been pointed out that on this view there is no
theoretical reason for limiting telepathy to human beings. Why may not
the impulse pass between men and the lower animals, or between the lower
animals themselves?
I myself have exhumed from the records a case in point. General J. C.
Thompson describes a remarkable apparition of a dog, with every mark of
reality, at the time when the dog was killed in a city more than a
hundred miles distant. General Thompson says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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