7 6o SCIENCE PROGRESS 



The experimental evidence is the best adapted to exact 

 statement and safe inference, but a provisional telepathic 

 hypothesis is indicated— as the doctors say — by other phenomena 

 such as are often observed in trance mediums and normal 

 clairvoyants. Few if any serious investigators have remained 

 unconvinced that some supernormal agency or mode of function 

 is occasionally concerned in these curious happenings. Says 

 the late William James, who investigated these things, off and 

 on, for about thirty years, without accepting any particular 

 theory : 



11 Knowing these trances at first hand, I cannot escape 

 the conclusion that in them the medium's knowledge of facts 

 increases enormously, and in a manner impossible of explana- 

 tion by any principles of which our existing science takes 

 account. . . . The trances I speak of (Mrs. Piper's) have broken 

 down for my own mind the limits of the admitted order of 

 nature. Science, so far as science denies such exceptional 

 facts, lies prostrate in the dust for me ; and the most urgent 

 intellectual need which I feel at present is that science be built 

 up again in a form in which such facts shall have a positive 

 place." 



That expresses the feelings of many of us. 



Trance-Phenomena and Normal Clairvoyance 



It is fairly common for a trance-control to give information 

 about the sitter's deceased relatives, quite beyond what any 

 amount of inquiry would account for. So long as the informa- 

 tion given is within the knowledge of the sitter, telepathy is a 

 possible explanation; and even if he has no conscious recollection 

 of it, the knowledge may exist in his subliminal memory — where 

 " forgotten " things go — and may be " telepathing" itself from 

 that dim abode, or may be accessible to the medium's foraging 

 mind. This is a permissible guess, but nothing more. Some- 

 times, however, evidential communications are received from 

 soi-disant spirits who are quite unconnected with the sitter, and 

 who were, indeed, unknown to him in life ; and these messages 

 have been verified by inquiry of the spirit's relatives, who did 

 not even know of the medium's existence. This requires an 

 extension of telepathy — if telepathy is urged at all — far beyond 

 what experiment justifies. I cordially agree with Mr. Shelton 

 about the rash folly of experimentally unsupported speculation. 



