48 WIND AND MIND 



in my belief that there could be no explanation of 

 my strange experience other than the one given; 

 while the unbeliever will say, as usual, that it was 

 nothing but coincidence. 



My experience — the two appearances of phantas- 

 mal faces — has been described here solely because it 

 somehow appears to fit in with my whole idea about 

 the wind — its powerful effect on the mind, or shall 

 we say on the matter or substance of the mind; and 

 I do not find it impossible to believe that one of its 

 effects is to make the mind more sensitive to telepathic 

 communications. In both instances the wind, a strong 

 south-west wind and an east wind blowing a gale, 

 blew from the direction of the persons whose minds 

 were occupied with me at that time. 



Perhaps I should have seen the faces if the wind 

 had been blowing in other directions. I doubt it. As 

 I have said, they appeared to be in the wind, and of 

 it, or as if the wind had blown them like gossamer or 

 thistledown to me. Doubtless, they were images on 

 the brain, projected into the air, as it seemed, and 

 their incessant windy motions perhaps corresponded 

 with an agitation in the brain, or with that substance 

 of it in which the affections, memory, reason and 

 imagination reside, with perhaps other faculties we 

 know not of or are only just beginning to know. And 

 if, as I imagine, the wind was the cause of the agita- 

 tion of the brain — the wind or the subtle immaterial 

 substance which pervades the brain and the wind 

 alike, or perhaps moves with the wind — then the 

 direction in which it blows may be a fact to be taken 



