.■^20 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. 



may be concocted or misreportecl or misinterpreted. To wait 

 for a single conclusive instance, either for or against telepathy, 

 is to wait for the impossible. The only method is to weigh the 

 accumulated evidence. When this is done, it will be found that 

 the case for telepathy, as a hypothesis required to express at least 

 provisionally the nature of a vast number of occurrences, whose 

 authority as bare facts is beyond all reasonable doubt, has been 

 quite sufficiently made out. The explanation of the occurrences 

 in the sense of the laws of the actual working of the mode of 

 communication concerned, or its precise definition and its rela- 

 tion to known modes of communication, is still wanting. But 

 the onus now lies on objectors to formulate a hypothesis that 

 is anything like equally adequate to the facts. In the second 

 place, it is necessary to emphasize that it is not the conscious 

 but the subconscious factors of our mental life that are most 

 effective in the transmission and reception of telepathic impres- 

 sions. It is not mere volition as a deliberate process so much as 

 deep-lying interest and sympathy that counts in the occurrence. 



If we accept the evidence for telepathetic transmission as 

 sufficiently strong to constitute telepathy a vera causa, the diffi- 

 culty then becomes to decide how far all supernormal psychical 

 phenomena are to be explained as instances of telepathic im- 

 pression without the need of any further hypothesis, such as 

 a faculty of precognition or the survival of bodily death, to 

 account for them. Just as the simplest and most indubitable 

 principle, namely, that of motor automatism or unconscious 

 muscular guidance, must be used to explain all cases that require 

 nothing further than this, so telepathy, apart, in the first instance, 

 from any theory of the mode of transmission implied, is the 

 form of explanation that must be used wherever possible, 

 namely, that some other mind is, whether consciously or uncon- 

 sciously, impressing upon the subject of psychic phenomena 

 ideas and experiences which are interpreted as though they were, 

 for example, messages from departed spirits or manifestations 

 of supernormal intelligence. 



We may pass now to the next set of phenomena, those of 

 clairvoyance, or, as it is termed in Scotland, second-sight. 

 Investigation of the distinctive phenomena of dreams or the 

 dream-state belongs to general psychology, and dream interpre- 

 tation forms a particular branch of psychological analysis ; but 

 there are dream experiences that have a relation to the special 

 problems of psychical research. These are dreams in which 

 there are not only dream pictures, but apparently a supernormal 

 percipience or clairvoyance wherein the individual perceives 

 facts that are beyond the range of ordinary apprehension. The 

 most typical are the numerous cases where lost articles have been 

 found through their being visualized in their place of conceal- 

 ment, in a dream. Allowing for the possible explanation of 

 some cases by the emergence during sleep of a memory too faint 



