Psychic Science 587 



Apports 



Such joint clairvoyance may perhaps be only a vivid kind 

 of reciprocal telepathy; but there are some asserted instances of 

 what cannot be wholly accounted for by any form of telepathy, in 

 which an actual movement is produced, and some object is dis- 

 placed and left displaced, or brought from a distance or carried 

 away to another place: this being a variety of the phenomenon 

 known as "apports," which need not be necessarily associated 

 with clairvoyance at all. Things are asserted to happen in a 

 seance as if a far-fetched object, such as a live parrot or a piece 

 of Chinese jade or some rare Egyptian relic made its appearance 

 in the closed and locked room in which a party are assembled, 

 without (so it is said) anyone having brought it in. 



That these things sound incredible is obvious; the question 

 is whether anything like them ever occurs, or whether honest 

 testimony that they have occurred, on a given occasion, is merely 

 the result of a conjuring device. 



Every kind of deception is not fraudulent. The tricks of a 

 conjurer are deception, but not fraud. Deception is what he 

 is paid for; it might even be regarded as fraudulent if he failed 

 to produce some sort of rabbit out of a hat. It is charitably 

 thought that the subconsciousness of a medium sometimes resorts 

 to deception in order to achieve desired results without any inten- 

 tion of fraud. 



Accusation of conscious fraud is a serious thing, and should 

 be held to require substantial proof. Such proof has at times 

 been forthcoming with legitimate consequences, but appear- 

 ances may suggest it without being really convincing; and care 

 should be taken in this as in all other matters connected with an 

 obscure subject. That deception and fraud are both possible is 

 manifest; that they are more probable a priori than the phenom- 

 ena themselves may be admitted ; the question is what substratum 

 of truth remains when these v ercc causce are effectively allowed 

 for or thoroughly guarded against. It is known in business that 



