MESMERISM, ODYLISM, TABLE-TURNING, ETC. 173 



experience we are continually encountering in other walks of life, that 

 particular persons are guided, some apparently by an original and 

 othei-s by an acquired intuition, to conclusions for which they can 

 give no adequate reasons, but which subsequent events prove to have 

 been correct ; and I look upon the divining-rod in its various appli- 

 cations as only a peculiar method of giving expression to results 

 worked out by an automatic process of this kind, even before they 

 rise to .distinct mental consciousness. Various other methods of 

 divination that seem to be practised in perfectly good faith such, 

 for example, as the Bible and key test, used for the discovery of stolen 

 property are probably to be attributed to the same agency ; the 

 cerebral traces of past occurrences supplying materials for the auto- 

 matic evolution of a result (as they unquestionably do in dreams) 

 when the occurrences themselves have been forgotten. 



Many of the cases of so-called thought-reading are clearly of the 

 same kind ; the communication being made by unconscious muscular 

 action on the part of one person, and automatically interpreted by 

 the other as in the following instance : Several persons being as- 

 sembled, one of them leaves the room, and during his ^ absence 

 some object is hidden. On the absentee's reentrance, two persons, 

 who know the hiding-place, stand one on either side of him, and 

 establish some personal contact with him ; one method being for each 

 to place a finger on his shoulder, and another for each to place a hand 

 on his body, one on the front and the other on the back. He walks 

 about the room between the two, and generally succeeds before long 

 in finding the hidden object; being led toward it (as careful observa- 

 tion and experiment have fully proved) by the involuntary muscular 

 action of his unconscious guides, one or the other of them pressing 

 more heavily when the object is on his side, and the finder as involun- 

 tarily turning toward that side. 



These and other curious results of recent inquiry, while strictly 

 conformable to physiological principles, greatly extend our knowledge 

 of the modes in which states of mind express themselves uncon- 

 sciously and involuntarily in muscular action: and I dwell on them 

 the more because they seem to me to afibrd the key (as I shall explain 

 in my next lecture) to some of these phenomena of spiritualistic 

 divination, which have been most perplexing to many who have come 

 in contact with them, without being disposed to accept the sim'itual- 

 istic interpretation of them. Fraser's Magazine. 



1 The experiment succeeds equally well, or perhaps better, with ladies. 



