186 SIR WILLIAM CROOKES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. 



retract. I adhere to my already published statements. Indeed, I 

 mififht add much thereto. I regret onh^ a certain crudity in those early 

 expositions which, no doubt justly-, militated against their acceptance 

 by the scientific world. My own knowledge at that time scarcely 

 extended beyond the fact that certain phenomena new to science had 

 assuredly occurred, and were attested l>y my own sober senses and, better 

 still, by automatic record. I was like some two-dimensional being who 

 might stand at the singular point of a Ri(Mnann\s surface, and thus find 

 himself in infinitesimal and inexplicable contact with a plane of exist- 

 ence not his own. 



I think I see a little farther now. I haye glimpses of something like 

 coherence among the strange elusiye phenomena; of something like 

 continuity between those unexplained forces and laws already known. 

 This adyance is largely due to the lal)()rs of another association, of which 

 I haye also this year the honor to ])e president— the Society for Psychi- 

 cal Research. And were 1 now introducing for the first time these 

 in({uiries to the world of science I should choose a starting point dif- 

 ferent from that of old. It would be well to begin with tdepatky; 

 with the fundamental law, as I belieye it to be, that thoughts and 

 images may be transferred from one mind to another without the 

 agency of the recognized organs of sense — that knowledge may enter 

 the human mind without being communicated in any hitherto known 

 or recognized ways. 



Although the inquiry has elicited important facts with reference to 

 the mind, it has not yet reached the scientific stage of certainty which 

 would entitle it to be usefully brought before one of our sections. I 

 will therefore confine mj^self to pointing out the direction in which 

 scientific inyestigation can legitimately adyance. If telepathy take 

 place we haye two physical facts — the physical change in the brain of 

 A, the suggester. and the analogous physical change in the l)rain of B, 

 the recipient of the suggestion. Between these two physical eyents 

 there must exist a train of ph3'sical causes. Wheneyer the connecting 

 sequence of intermediate causes begins to be reyealed, the inquiry will 

 then come within the range of one of the sections of the British 

 association. Such a sequence can only occur through an interyening 

 medium. All the phenomena of the uniyerse are presumably in some 

 way continuous, and it is unscientific to call in the aid of mysterious 

 agencies when, with eyery fresh adyance in knowledge, it is shown that 

 ether yibrations haye powers and attributes abundantly equal to any 

 demand — eyen to the transmission of thought. It is supposed by some 

 physiologists that the essential cells of neryes do not actually touch, 

 l)ut are separated by a narrow gap which widens in sleep, while it nar- 

 rows almost to extinction during mental activity. This condition is so 

 singularly like that of a Branly or Lodge coherer as to suggest a fur- 

 ther analogy. The structure of brain and nerye being similar, it is 

 conceiyable there ma}^ be present masses of such nerve coherers in the 



