SIR WILLIAM CROOKES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. 187 



brain whose special function it may be to receive impulses brought 

 from without through the connecting sequence of ether waves of 

 appropriate order of magnitude. Rontgen has familiarized us with an 

 order of vibrations of extreme minuteness compared with the smallest 

 waves with which we have hitherto been acquainted, and of dimensions 

 comparable with the distances between the centers of the atoms of 

 which the material universe is built up; and there is no reason to sup- 

 pose that we have here reached the limit of frequency. It is known 

 that the action of thought is accompanied by certain molecular move- 

 ments in the brain, and here we have physical vibrations capable, from 

 their extreme minuteness, of acting direct on individual molecules, 

 while their rapidity approaches that of the internal and external move- 

 ments of the atoms themselves. 



Confirmation of telepathic phenomena is afforded by many converg- 

 ing experiments and by many spontaneous occurrences only thus 

 intelligible. The most varied proof, perhaps, is drawn from analysis 

 of the subconscious workings of the mind, when these, whether by 

 accident or design, are brought into conscious survey. Evidence of a 

 region below the threshold of consciousness has been presented, since 

 its first inception, in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical 

 Research, and its various aspects are being interpreted and welded into 

 a comprehensive whole by the pertinacious genius of F. W. H. Myers. 

 Concurrently, our knowledge of the facts in this obscure region has 

 received valuable additions at the hands of laborers in other countries. 

 To mention a few names out of many, the observations of Richet, 

 Pierre Janet, and Binet (in France), of Breuer and Freud (in Austria), 

 of William James (in America), have strikingly illustrated the extent 

 to which patient experimentation can probe subliminal processes, and 

 can thus learn the lessons of alternating personalities and abnormal 

 states. While it is clear that our knowledge of subconscious men- 

 tation is still to be developed, we must beware of rashly assuming that 

 all variations from the normal waking condition are necessarily morbid. 

 The human race has reached no fixed or changeless ideal. In every 

 direction there is evolution as well as disintegration. It would be 

 hard to find instances of more rapid progress, moral and physical, 

 than in certain important cases of cure by suggestion — again to cite a 

 few names out of many — by Liebeault, Bernheim, the late Auguste 

 Voisin, Berillon (in France), Schrenck-Notzing (in Germany), Forel 

 (in Switzerland), van Eeden (in Holland), Wetterstrand (in Sweden), 

 Milne-Bramwell and Lloyd Tuckey (in England). This is not the place 

 for details, liut the vis medicatrix thus evoked, as it were, from the 

 depths of the organism, is of good omen for the upward evolution of 

 mankind, 



A formidal)le range of phenomena must be scientificall}^ sifted before 

 we effectually grasp a faculty so strange, so bewildering, and for ages 

 so inscrutable as the direct action of mind on mind. This delicate 



