3 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for instance, the very common case when we sleep in a strange bed, 

 it may he in an inn that is not very clean, and we begin to be a little 

 suspicions of what other inhabitants there may be in that bed ; and 

 then we begin to feel a " creepy, crawly " sensation about us, which 

 that idea will at once suggest. Now, those are subjective sensations ; 

 those sensations are produced by the mental idea. And so in this case 

 I am perfectly satisfied that a very large number of these spiritual 

 phenomena are simply subjective sensations ; that is, that they are the 

 result of expectation on the part of the individual. The sensations are 

 real to them. You know that, when a man has suffered amputation of 

 his leg, he will tell you at first that he feels his toes, that he feels his limb ; 

 and, perhaps to the end of his life, every now and then he will have 

 this feeling of the limb moving, or of a pain in it ; and yet we know 

 perfectly well that this is simply the result of certain changes in the 

 nerve, to which, of course, there is nothing answering in the limb that 

 was removed. These subjective sensations, then, will be felt by the 

 individuals as realities, and will be presented to others as realities, 

 when, really, they are simply the creation of their own minds, that 

 creation arising out of the expectation which they have themselves 

 formed. These parties believed that the table would rise ; and, when 

 they felt the pressure against their hands, they fully believed that the 

 table was rising. 



Take the case of Table-turning, which occurred earlier. I dare say 

 many of you remember that epidemic which preceded the spiritualism ; 

 in fact, the spiritualism, in some degree, arose out of table-turning. 

 My friend the chairman (Dr. Noble) and I hunted in couples, a good 

 many years ago, with a third friend, the late Sir John Forbes, and we 

 went a great deal into these inquiries ; and I very well remember sitting 

 at a table with him, I suppose twenty-five years ago, waiting in solemn 

 expectation for the turning of the table ; and the table wont round. 

 This was simply the result of one of the party, who was not influenced 

 by the philosophical skepticism that we had on the subject, having a 

 strong belief that the phenomenon would occur ; and when he had sat 

 for some time with his hands pressed down upon the table, an involun- 

 tary muscular motion, of the kind I mentioned in my last lecture, took 

 place, which sent the table turning. There was nothing to the Physi- 

 ologist at all difficult in the understanding of this. Prof. Faraday 

 was called upon to explain the table-turning, which many persons set 

 down to electricity ; but he was perfectly satisfied that this was a most 

 untrue account of it, and that the explanation was (as, in fact, I had 

 previously myself stated in a lecture at the Royal Institution) that the 

 movements took place in obedience to ideas. Movements of this class 

 are what I call " ideo-motor," or reflex actions of the brain ; and the 

 occurrence of these movements in obedience to the idea entertained is 

 the explanation of all the phenomena of table-turning. Prof. Faraday 

 constructed a very simple testing apparatus, merely two boards, one 



