SIR WILLIAM CROOKES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. 199 



seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now 

 believe in the heats of the Carboniferous era. The motions of organic 

 beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. 

 The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from 

 change, and so on. But now reverse the h^^pothesis, and suppose a 

 being to get onl}^ one one-thousandth part of the sensations that we get 

 in a given time, and consequently to live 1,000 times as long. Winters 

 and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms 

 and the swifter-growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to 

 appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from 

 the earth like restlessly boiling water springs; the motions of ani- 

 mals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and 

 cannon l)alls; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving 

 a fiery trail behind him, etc. That such imaginary cases (barring the 

 superhuman longevitv) niay be realized somewhere in the animal king- 

 dom it would be rash to deny." (James's Principles of Psychology, 

 Vol. I, p. 639.) 



And now let me specially apply this general conception of the irapos- 

 sibilit}" of predicting what secrets the universe may still hold, what 

 agencies undivined may habitually be at work around us. 



Telepathy, the transmission of thought and images directly from 

 one mind to another without the agency of the recognized organs of 

 sense, is a conception new and strange to science. To judge from the 

 comparative slowness with which the accumulated evidence of our 

 society penetrates the scientitic world, it is, I think, a conception even 

 scientifically repulsive to many minds. We have supplied striking 

 experimental evidence; but few have been found to repeat our experi- 

 ments. We have offered good evidence in the observation of spon- 

 taneous cases, as apparitions at the moment of death and the like, 

 but this evidence has failed to impress the scientific world in the same 

 way as evidence less careful and less coherent has often done before. 

 Our evidence is not confronted and refuted; it is shirked and evaded 

 as though there were some great a priori improbability which absolved 

 the world of science from considering it. I at least see no a priori 

 improbability whatever. Our alleged facts might be true in all kinds 

 of ways without contradicting any truth already known. I will dwell 

 now on only one possible line of explanation, not that I see any way 

 of elucidating all the new phenomena I regard as genuine, but because 

 it seems probable I may shed a light on some of those phenomena. 



All the phenomena of the universe are presumably in some way 

 continuous; and certain facts, plucked as it were from the ver}- heart 

 of nature, are likely to be of use in our gradual discoverv of facts 

 which lie deeper still. 



Let us, then, consider the vibi-ations we trace, not only in solid bod- 

 ies, but in the air, and in a still more remarkable manner in the ether. 



These vibrations differ in their velocity and in their frequency. 

 That they exist, extending from one vibration to two thousand millions 



