MIND-EEADING. 



509 



results were obtained. I do not know to what 

 caifce to attribute this declension. Personally, 

 I find I am not equal to my former self in my 

 power to give off impressions, and if I exert 

 myself to do so I experience unpleasant effects 

 in the head and nervous system. I therefore 

 seldom join in the active experiments, but 

 leave the thinking for the most part for others. 

 Then we have lost one of our percipients ; and, 

 as the novelty and vivacity of our seances have 

 departed, there is not the same geniality and 

 freshness as at the outset. The thing has be- 

 come monotonous, whereas it was formerly a 

 succession of surprises. We have now nothing 

 new to try. I do not know if there is loss of 

 power on the part of the percipient ; it is just 

 as likely that the agents are in fault." 



With such overwhelming testimony as to the 

 resulting phenomena of thought-transference, 

 there is little denial of their existence. The 

 controversy arises over the media of the trans- 

 fer. Whether a nervous energy acts by induc- 

 tion across space as well as along the nerve- 

 fibers is a mooted question ; although the anal- 

 ogies between electricity and nervous stimuli 

 would readily lead to such an inference. Many 

 of those who once scoffed at the whole subject 

 have " remained to pray." Their answer to a 

 demand for an explanation and a definition of 

 thought-transference is the inquiry, " Can you 

 explain or define life, light, electricity, magnet- 

 ism, or any other of the forces?" And yet 

 this unsolved problem is championed, or at 

 least looked upon kindly, by Profs. Balfour 

 Stewart, Henry Sidgwick, J. 0. Adams, Mr. 

 Gladstone, Mr. Ruskin, Lord Tennyson, Alfred 

 Russel Wallace, and many other men of re- 

 pute. On the other hand, Prof. Simon New- 

 comb, of Washington, Prof. G. Stanley Hall, 

 of Johns Hopkins University, and Prof. Josiah 

 Royce, of Harvard, all members of the Ameri- 

 can Society for Psychical Research, hold that 

 there is no evidence in the reports of the Eng- 

 lish society, or anywhere else, that justifies a 

 belief in the possibility of mind acting upon 

 mind without the ordinary sense-perceptions. 

 This opinion is based upon examination of the 

 evidence reported by the English committee, 

 and a careful and elaborate study of the con- 

 ditions that surround the work of the psychic 

 investigator. The late experiments of Mr. 

 Bishop in Boston are also declared to be not a 

 condition of true mind-reading, but of " muscle- 

 reading," because the unconscious action of the 

 muscles of the subject, when his mind is in- 

 tensely fixed in a given direction, affords Mr. 

 Bishop a clew by which he is able to interpret 

 the former's thought. It is further and more 

 comprehensively said on this side of the ques- 

 tion, that thus fur the phenomenon has been 

 shown only in regard to unimportant physical 

 objects; that the actual thoughts of another 

 are not read ; and that therefore the art, or 

 whatever else it may be called, is of no more 

 practical value than are kindred phenomena in 

 the regions of mesmerism and spiritualism. 



Psychical Research Societies. The initial society 

 of this name was founded in England under 

 the presidency of Prof. H. Sidgwick, of Cam- 

 bridge, " for the purpose of making an organ- 

 ized attempt to investigate that large group of 

 debatable phenomena designated by such 

 terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualis- 

 tic." Six committees were appointed to ex- 

 amine (1) the nature and extent of any influ- 

 ence which may be exerted by one mind upon 

 another otherwise than through the recognized 

 sensory channels ; (2) hypnotism and mesmer- 

 ism ; (3) obscure relations between living 

 organisms and electric and magnetic forces ; 

 (4) haunted houses and ghosts ; (5) spiritual- 

 ism ; (6) for the collection of existing evidence 

 in connection wifch these subjects, and espe- 

 cially in connection with apparitions at the 

 moment of death, or otherwise. A special 

 committee was appointed in 1885 to investi- 

 gate the abnormal occurrences reported by the 

 Theosophical Society. But these committees 

 were afterward dissolved, and the experi- 

 mental investigations and collection of evidence 

 were left in the hands of individual members, 

 the result of their inquiry to be embodied in 

 papers and read before the society, and, if ap- 

 proved, to be published in the proceedings 

 thereof. The society has thus published re- 

 ports containing papers on telepathy, or 

 thought-reading, in its various forms; on mes- 

 merism, with records of valuable experiments ; 

 on apparitions of the dead, and haunted houses ; 

 on automatic writing, divining-rods, and other 

 subjects. The society has 613 members, it has 

 branches in Cambridge and Oxford, and it 

 publishes a monthly journal. It also possesses 

 a large and growing and valuable library of 

 works, in various languages, on subjects cog- 

 nate to those enumerated as topics for psy- 

 chical research. Besides the regular reporto of 

 the society, there have been numerous articles 

 contributed by individual members of the 

 organization, notably by Edmund Gurney and 

 Frederic W. H. Myers, to the "Nineteenth 

 Century," the "Fortnightly Review," and 

 other periodicals. These contributions cover 

 a vast amount of ground, being in large part 

 the correspondence and other information ob- 

 tained by the society or its members on the 

 subjects under consideration. Added to the 

 voluminous collection of narratives of spectral 

 appearances, cases of mind- reading, mesmerism, 

 clairvoyance, etc., reported by the society, 

 they probably include a larger collection of 

 material of this character than was ever before 

 brought together, not excepting Mrs. Crowe's 

 "Night-side of Nature," and Robert Dale 

 Owen's "Foot-falls on the Boundary of 

 Another World." In fact, the society has 

 mainly devoted itself to the collection of " evi- 

 dences," while its deductions from these have 

 been few and unsatisfactory. This modesty 

 as to declarations of opinion, or the enuncia- 

 tion of nny laws to account for the phenomena 

 recorded, may, in a measure, be due to the 



