SENSE TRAIN IXG. 



By JOHN H. HLB1:K. A.M., M.l). 



To one ambitious of leading the scientific life, sense training 

 is from the beginning most essential. " Seeing is believing," 

 but the belief thus founded may not be ration.-il. Seeing, 

 reviewed and if necessary revised by the reasoning faculty, 

 will then be soundly based. Only from such process can 

 facts be born — facts, the only building material with which 

 science can work. The senses are by no means a sure guide; 

 the very best they can do is to appreciate phenomena : that is, 

 appear.inces. The stick appears broken in the pail of water ; 

 reason assures that it is not. Using a bright spoon for a 

 mirror, one appears variously, as he holds the spoon inside or 

 outside, or up and down, or sideways ; but it is to be hoped 

 one does not look any of those ways in reality. Cross the 

 middle over the index finger; roll their tops over a bread 

 pellet in the palm of the other hand, and the sense of touch 

 will convey the impression of two pellets ; but reason corrects 

 the impression, and convinces us there is but one. Reason 

 must ever bring judgment, memory and experience to bear 

 upon the perceptions which the senses convey to the cere- 

 brum ; by these means reason must constantly be rectifying 

 false sense. 



It is amazing how frequently the imagination plays fast and 

 loose with the sense functions; delusions, illusions and hallucin- 

 ations being the result. Le Bon, in his fascinating book 

 "The Crowd, A Study of the Popular Mind," tells of a crew 

 shipwrecked upon a raft, who kept eagerly scanning the 

 horizon for a sail. After some days of watching one of these 

 poor men, his psychism perturbed by his sufferings, being 

 obsessed through desiring to see a rescuing ship, unquestion- 

 ably saw something; and so desperate was the hope of his com- 

 panions, that one and all agreed with him that the thing he 

 pointed out was a vessel which could rescue them. When 

 they came upon it, however, they found it but a tree which 

 had evidently been uprooted and had gone adrift in an 

 equatorial storm. Tuke. in his admirable book " The Influ- 

 ence of the Mind on the Body," relates how a boy who bad on 

 an afternoon seen a hanging, which had naturally much 

 affected him, took a stroll along a country road in the evening 

 of that dreadful day. He presently saw projected against the 

 moon-lit sky the gibbet of the afternoon, and the criminal 

 suspended from it. He ran home dreadfully frightened, to 

 find that a cord dangling over the brim of his hat had by his 

 overwrought imagination been metamorphosed into the 

 aerial gallows. 



Every reader will recall how he has in like manner been 

 tricked by his senses. Hundreds of instances might be cited 

 of delusions entertained by the unscientific, the unsophisticated, 

 the highly emotional ; people in whom such aberrations are not 

 without excuse. We who pride ourselves upon our attain- 

 ments in science are so prone to consider such delusions the 

 exclusive property of geniuses, spiritualists, theosophists and 

 other people whose imaginations tend to work overtime, that 

 we feel distinctly humiliated to learn how men even eminent 

 in science have been the victims of psychic perturbations : as 

 for instance, when the telephone was invented, a lecturer who 

 was giving a public exhibition of the apparatus clearly and 

 repeatedly heard the notes of a trumpet which he had arranged 

 to be played at the other end. He declared that he heard ; 

 nor need the record be doubted. Yet none of his audience 

 could hear the trumpet : and for the all-sufficient reason that 

 the trumpeter had made a mistake in the day, and was not in 

 his place at all. 



A very modern instance of '' illusion caused by a species of 

 auto-suggestion based on preconcerted ideas," is furnished by 

 the episode of the N-rays, which all competent men now 

 agree never had any existence at all. Professor Blondlot 

 believed (in good faith, of course), that he discovered these 

 rays at Nancy in 1903, He described them before the French 

 Academy of Sciences, which body gave him a gold medal for 

 his discovery. 



Up to 1906, there were published one hundred and seventy- 

 six original papers concerning these rays, Blondlot's observa- 

 tions were in turn confirmed by such well-known physicists as 

 Charpentier and Becquerel, The N-rays were considered to 

 be given off by almost all substances when in a state of 

 strain ; a tempered steel bar, Nernst lamp, and even a human 

 nerve and muscle would emit them. The rather fanciful 

 suggestion was advanced that if a certain radiation were given 

 ofT by our bodies, according to their degree of activity, our 

 thoughts might possibly be photographed : " thoughts being 

 only brain rays." (Of course, the work within the last year of 

 Drs. Kilner and Fielkin in London, as to the photographing of 

 the " atmosphere " or the " aura " which the human body is 

 considered to exhale, springs at once to mind.) 



The N-rays, stated French investigators, could be reduced 

 or removed by anaesthetics ; a tempered steel bar, for that 

 matter, could be chloroformed into quiescence. Following 

 upon this the invitation came naturally enough to men of 

 science " to revise some of our notions on the difference 

 between the organic and the inorganic." The N-rays were 

 held to be even more wonderful than the X-rays or radium. 

 Oddly enough, however, the N-rays did not, like the X-rays, 

 affect either the spectroscope or photographic plates. Admit- 

 tedly they were rather batfling and elusive, at least to those 

 inexperienced in detecting them ; but they had one physical 

 effect upon which experimenters relied — their power to intensify 

 a light. A marked increase of luminosity was considered to 

 be perceptible when an N-rav was directed upon a spark ; or 

 if a bar of tempered steel were held near a clock in a dark 

 room, it was supposed to be possible to read the time. 



As the months rolled by Blondlot's experiments were con- 

 firmed, and were even extended outside France. Yet many 

 scientific men utterly failed from the first to observe any of 

 the phenomena described. English and German investigators 

 became particularly sceptical ; and rather absurdly a dispute 

 arose which, by the law of the crescendo in psychology, 

 accrued progressively as to bitterness ; compliments increased 

 in warmth as they lost in polish. Things became quite akin 

 to that immortal " Row upon the Stanislaus," Two camps 

 w-ere formed — the Latin and the Teutonic, The French 

 imputed racial prejudice and animosity to their foreign critics. 

 It was suggested that the rays could be distinguished only by 

 the more sensitive and finer-fibred brain of the Latin : whilst 

 what, sacre bleu .' could be expected of the fog-muddled 

 British brain, or of the beer- befuddled German psychism I 

 The matter in dispute threatened to place itself beyond the 

 bounds of any reasonable demonstration. Presently, however, 

 the coolest French scientific men gradually came to suspect 

 that if no results could really be obtained in England or 

 Germany, the explanation of the French experiments must be 

 subjective and psychological rather than objective and physical. 



Finally, the Revue Scientifiqiie settled the question in a 

 \ery simple way. It was proposed that several boxes of 

 exactly similar appearance, some containing pieces of lead, 

 others of tempered steel, should be sealed ; and Blondlot or 

 his assistants were to decide which of the boxes contained the 

 active material. Blondlot refused this test, saying that " the 

 phenomena were far too delicate for such a trial " ; and he left 

 "everyone to his own opinion on the N-rays, either from his 

 own experiments, or from his confidence in others." Thus 

 was the dispute transferred from the realm of fact to that of 

 opinion, experimentation ceased, and so far as science is con- 

 cerned the incident was closed. 



Such incidents as these are rather humiliating to the 

 scientific temperament, which, nowadays, is just a trifle 

 mclined to self-satisfaction. Fortunately, they are extremely 

 rare. Science is knowing ; good science is ever certainty 

 grounded upon demonstration. To this end the pre-requisite 

 is the trained senses. Science's votaries, moreover, if they 

 are to serve her well, must ever be free of auto-suggestions and 

 haphazard conjectures incapable of verification. 



