Telepathic Transfer of Brain Action. 895 



mother and son, in which the mother exclaimed : ' Oh, dear son, thou 

 art dead ! " shows the tendenc} T to form this inference whether there is 

 any ground for it or not. Cases are cited in " Phantasms " in which 

 the percipient, upon seeing the agent, has concluded as a matter of 

 course he was dead, when it was not so. 



In the case last cited above, in which the agent felt a strong desire to 

 see two persons, each person felt the effect of that part onl} r of the 

 agent's longing which concerned him or her, Mr. Done hearing his 

 name only, and Rosanna hers. Obviously, the different organs of the 

 brain each developed by and attuned to a particular pitch, are restimu- 

 lated only by vibrations in their proper pitch, and supposing that in the 

 above example the same series of tones came to both the percipients, 

 some only of these tones could affect one of them, while others would 

 affect the other. 



It cannot, in the nature of things, be otherwise than that we are all 

 of us constantly assailed by the mental exhalations of other people, 

 and it is hardly possible that we escape being sometimes influenced by 

 them. It is a matter of at least plausible conjecture that sometimes 

 when we are in a passive state, either waking or sleeping, our thoughts 

 receive unconscious influence from these wandering stimuli. While 

 there are instances of the transference of ideas of a happy nature, such 

 as a wedding, it is remarkable that the great majorit} 7 , in fact almost 

 all the observed cases of spontaneous telepathy, relate to death, illness 

 or accident. From this, the authors of Phantasms infer that pain is 

 more vivid than pleasure. It may be suggested that when in pain, es- 

 pecially hopeless pain, the agent is in a condition demanding and long- 

 ing for help and sympathy. The mind goes out of itself to seek for 

 the support which fails within. On the other hand, I take it, we as 

 percipients are more impressible by painful than by pleasurable emo- 

 tions. We are more passive and negative toward them because our at- 

 tention is ordinarily not occupied with our own pains, but our own pleas- 

 ures. This would not be true if pain on the whole predominated over 

 pleasure in our lives. Lastly, the pleasurable impressions we may 

 chance to get, may fail of interpretation by being confounded with our 

 own, and unrecognized as having an extraneous origin. 



The experiments made by the Psychical Research Society, of London, 

 are of very satisfactory and convincing nature, settling beyond reasona- 

 ble doubt the fact of purposive thought transference. The two princi- 

 pals concerned are the Agent, who concentrates his mind on the idea he 

 wishes to transfer, as the name of a person or a card, a color, a picture 

 or whatever he pleases, and the Percipient, or reader of the thought of 

 the agent. The agent must expend considerable energy in keeping up 

 the necessary concentration. The percipient must become as passive as 



