farther than most, we must attribute to the medium faculties that have
ceased to be human. She must have put herself in touch, whether by
perception of events at a distance, or by transmission of thought from
one subconscious mind to another, or again by subliminal clairvoyance,
with the two surviving brothers of the deceased owner of the watch; and,
in the past subconsciousness of those two brothers, distant from each
other, she had to rediscover a host of circumstances which they
themselves had forgotten and which lay hidden beneath the heaped-up dust
and darkness of six-and-sixty years. It is certain that a phenomenon of
this kind passes the bounds of the imagination and that we should refuse
to credit it if, first of all, the experiment had not been controlled
and certified by a man of the standing of Sir Oliver Lodge and if,
moreover, it did not form one of a group of equally significant facts
which clearly show that we are not here concerned with an absolutely
unique miracle or with an unhoped-for and unprecedented concourse of
coincidences. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal
clairvoyance and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three
manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and
classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained: that
is another question. When, in connexion with electricity, we use such
terms as positive, negative, induction, potential and resistance, we are
also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of whose inward
essence we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with
these, pending better. There is, I insist, between these extraordinary
manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in
the name of the dead, but a difference of the greater and the lesser, a
difference of extent or degree and in no wise a difference in kind.
-----
Footnote 11:
For a discussion of these cases, which would take us too far from our
subject, see Mr. J. G. Piddington’s paper, _Phenomena in Mrs.
Thompson’s Trance_ (_Proceedings_, Vol. XVIII, pp. 180 _et seq._);
also Professor A. C. Pigou’s article in Vol. XXIII (pp. 286 _et
seq._), which treats of “Cross Correspondence” without the agency of
spirits.
-----
8
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