THE PROGRESS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. 489 



the mental percept been evoked directly without any antecedent sense- 

 percept ? 



Space will not permit me to more than mention the nature of the 

 evidence which the society has collected for the purpose of answering 

 these questions. Experiments have been made, and repeated again and 

 again in order to reduce to a minimum all chances of collusion and 

 error. Sometimes contact between the agent and the percipient has 

 been permitted, and sometimes not.* Much of the evidence is very 

 remarkable, but must be read in its entirety to have its full effect, and 

 we refer any inquiring reader to the full reports of the various com- 

 mittees as published in the proceedings of the society. 



As a scientific result, the committee felt justified in drawing up the 

 following : 1. That much of what is popularly known as " thought- 

 reading " is, in reality, due to the interpretation by the so-called 

 "reader" of signs, consciously or unconsciously imparted by the 

 touches, looks, or gestures of those present ; and that this is to be 

 taken as the prima facie explanation whenever the thing thought of is 

 not some visible or audible object, but some action or movement to be 

 performed. 2. That there does exist a group of phenomena to which 

 the word " thought-reading," or, as the committee prefers to call it, 

 thought-transference, may be fairly applied ; and which consists in the 

 mental perception, by certain individuals at certain times, of a word 

 or other object kept vividly before the mind of another person or per- 

 sons, without any transmission of impressions through the recognized 

 channels of sense. 



Concerning these phenomena, Mr. Myers writes : " We have got, 

 as we hold, a definite fact to start from a fact of immense and un- 

 known significance. If, as we believe, we can truly say * mind acts on 

 mind otherwise than by the recognized organs of sense,' this is proba- 

 bly a statement far more pregnant with consequences than the state- 

 ments, ' rubbed amber attracts straw,' or ' the loadstone attracts iron.' 

 And it must be our business to turn our new fact over in every direc- 

 tion, to speculate upon it in every way, or, rather, in every way which 

 can possibly suggest a new form of experiment. We must remember 

 that the experimental cases which we have already collected are 

 probably only what Bacon calls ' ostensive instances ' ; ' instances,' as 

 he expresses it, * which show the nature under investigation naked, in 

 an exalted condition, or in the highest degree of power ; and which 

 are, so to speak, mere emergent summits from a great ocean, which 

 lies beyond our present reach of observation, and, perhaps, even be- 

 neath the level of our consciousness.' " 



As might have been supposed, most progress has been made in this 

 field of thought-transference, for its phenomena are the simplest, and 



* The agent is the technical name for the person who concentrates his thoughts upon 

 the chosen object, and the subject or percipient is the person who " reads " the thought, 

 and tells what the object thought of is. 



