DISCOVERY 



55 



example, the reality of atoms and regard the theory 

 and experiment connected with them as an ingenious 

 superstition in which many apparently excellent 

 people seemingly believe and about which they are 

 apparently very consistent, no doubt because it suits 

 their book, attracts attention to themselves, and pro- 

 vides them with very nice posts at the Universities ! 

 ***** 



If one believes, as most psychologists do, that we are 

 only partially awake, or that we are only now emerg- 

 ing from what is analogous to a pre-natal sleep, one 

 need not get unduly excited because some men seem 

 to have gifts which the rest of us lack. If water- 

 divining is some kind of sense it must necessarily be 

 a difficult thing to investigate. All senses are. Think 

 how hard it would be for a man with sight to explain 

 his gift to a blind world. How wonderful a man with 

 a sense of smell would appear to us, supposing that 

 none of us could smell ! He could tell, for example, 

 liquid ammonia from alcohol or from water correctly 

 every time, without shaking them, tasting them, weigh- 

 ing them, or doing chemical analyses of them, as wo 

 should require to do, simply by bringing his nose into 

 the vicinity of each in turn. We, the lookers-on, might 

 reasonably be sceptical, might wonder what the nose 

 had to do with it, might suspect there was some 

 collusion between the smeller and the man who knew 

 which liquid was which. Twenty plausible hypotheses 

 on an assumption that the smeller was tricking us 

 in some way might be invented, yet the simpler ex- 

 planation that the man possessed a gift which we 

 lacked would be considered revolutionary', or, indeed, 

 might never occur to anyone at all. 



***** 



Telepathy or thought-transference is another subject 

 concerning the genuineness of which there is often 

 fierce discussion. Many physiologists and ps\'cholo- 

 gists do not beheve in it at all. Many, however, re- 

 gard it as one of the functions of the unconscious mind. 

 Freud and several other workers of importance ignore 

 its existence, but there seems no escape from the view 

 that it occupies a small but not unimportant place in 

 the list of functions of the unconscious mind. A 

 simple but illuminating description of telepathic 

 power is given by Dr. Paul Bousfield of Harley Street 

 in his recent book.' 



" I am fortunate in possessing a friend who has 

 developed telepathic powers to a considerable degree, 

 and from boj^hood upwards my relatives and I have 

 had every opportunity of testing his powers under our 

 own conditions. We have grown to look upon his 



' The Elements of Practical Psycho-Analysis. By Paul 

 Bousfield, M.R.C.S , L.R.C.P. (Kegan Paul, los. 6d.) 



powers as something more or less ordinary, and indeed 

 have devised a new drawing-room game based upon 

 them. I wish to give here one or two of the experi- 

 ments which have taken place, not once only but very 

 many times. In the following paragraphs I refer to 

 him as Mr. X. 



***** 

 " Mr. X. is sent into an adjoining room quite out 

 of earshot,' while we then decide upon some trivial 

 action which he shall perform, such as picking up the 

 poker and carrying it across the room and presenting 

 it to Mrs. B. Mr. X., blindfolded, is now called into 

 the room. Nobody touches him. Everyone sits per- 

 fectly quiet, no sound o" word of any kind is spoken. 

 Those sitting in the room now ' will ' his movements, 

 i.e. first that he shall walk to the right spot where 

 lies the poker, then that he shall stoop, then stretch 

 out his arm in the right direction, and so forth. As 

 a rule, with very little hesitation, the whole perform- 

 ance is gone through without a hitch. Such experi- 

 ments, however, must be fairly simple in character ; 

 thus, while we can make Mr. X. walk to the piano, 

 open it and sit down, we have never succeeded in con- 

 veying to his mind a particular tune which we wish 

 him to play. During these experiments he describes 

 his own part as consisting in ' making his mind a blank ' 

 and moving as if under compulsion. As the sitters 

 are not always the same on all occasions, there is no 

 possibility of any system of signs. 



***** 

 " A variant of this experiment is as follows : two 

 groups of persons are formed. One group settles upon 

 one set of actions, say, that Mr. X. shall take the poker 

 and present it to Mrs. B. The other group selects a 

 different set of actions — perhaps that he shall remove 

 a hairpin from the head of Mrs. C. and place it on a 

 given chair. When Mr. X. comes in a contest thus 

 takes place. Perhaps, after a pause, the concentrated 

 efforts of the first group succeed in getting him to 

 pick up the poker. There may be then a feeling of 

 triumph and relief in that group, with a consequent 

 momentary relaxation of concentration. Immediately 

 this takes place Mr. X. will perform part of the plan 

 formed by the second group ; he will rush to the 

 chair and place the poker on the chair where the hair- 

 pin should have been placed. A variety of similar 

 experiments have taken place. 



***** 

 " Perhaps the most convincing and at the same 

 time one of the simplest experiments is as follows, 

 and it is one which absolutely prevents any trickery 



' An ingenious explanation of telepathy in a case like this 

 is that the man outside really, but unconsciously, hears what 

 those inside are saying. 



