Jan. 27, 1887] 



NA TURE 



291 



those in which the agent acts consciously and vohuitarily, 

 but the percipient is not consciously or voluntarily a party 

 to the experiment. Of these cases, a single example must 

 suffice. Two fellow-students of naval engineering at 

 Portsmouth had been in the habit of making experiments 

 in mesmerism. One, ere long, acquired mesmeric con- 

 trol over the other, who was able to see, in the mesmeric 

 trance, places in which he was interested, if he resolved 

 to see them before he was hypnotised. One day he ex- 

 pressed a wish to see a young lady living in Wandsworth. 

 He was hypnotised ; and when he came round, he said 

 he had seen her in the dining-room. A few days after- 

 wards, the experiment was repeated. He saw, as he lay 

 entranced, the young lady in a room with her little 

 brother ; she fell back in her chair in a sort of faint. A 

 letter was subsequently received from the young lady, 

 dated the morning following the last experiment, be- 

 ginning : " Has anything happened to you ?" and stating 

 that " she could have declared she saw him looking at 

 her " on two occasions, on the latter of which she was so 

 frightened that she nearly fainted. " Luckily," she adds, 

 " only my brother was there, or it would have attracted 

 attention." Although there is some discrepancy as to 

 the date of the first appearance, the second (January 18, 

 1 886) is accordant. 



After the enumeration of fifteen or sixteen transitional 

 cases, Mr. Gurney devotes a chapter to a general criticism 

 of the evidence (to which is added an appendix on witch- 

 craft), and then gives a chapter of specimens of the 

 various types of spontaneous telepathy. For these types 

 and their various sub-classes, the reader must be referred 

 to the work itself I must here again content myself with 

 quoting a single case (which is both "reciprocal" and 

 " collective") from among the 700 or so that are given. 



" On the evening of, I think, March 23, 1883," writes a 

 Mrs. Bettany, of Dulwich, " I was seized with an unac- 

 countable anxiety about a neighbour. I tried to shake off 

 the feeling, but I could not ; and after a sleepless night, 

 in which I constantly thought of her as dying, I decided 

 to send a servant to the house to ask if all were well.'' 

 (This is confirmed by the servant.) " The answer I 

 received was, 'Mrs. J. died last night.' Her daughter 

 afterwards told me that the mother had startled her by 

 saying, ' Mrs. Bettany knows I shall die.' " 



Mrs. Bettany adds : — " My cook, to whom I had not 

 mentioned my presentiment, remarked to me on the same 

 morning : ' I have had such a horrible dream about Mrs. 

 J., 1 think she must be going to die.' She distinctly 

 remembers that some one (she does not know zvho, and I 

 think never did) told her in her dream that Mrs. J. was 

 dead." (This is also confirmed by the cook.) 



Of somewhat analogous cases of phantasms, presenti- 

 ments, or dreams occurring to one or more percipients at 

 or shortly after the death of the agent, there is a surpris- 

 ing but wearisome abundance. 



So much for the evidence. The authors are fully alive 

 to its liability to error. But they note that their " some- 

 what persistent and probing method of inquiry has 

 usually repelled the sentimental or crazy wonder-mongers 

 who hang about the outskirts of such a subject as this ; 

 while it has met with cordial response from an unex- 

 pected number of persons who feel with reason that the 

 very mystery which surrounds these incidents makes it 



additionally important that they should be recounted with 

 sobriety and care." 



We turn now to the theory ; and though Mr. Gurney 

 tells us that the character of the present work is mainly 

 evidential, there is no lack of theory scattered up and 

 down throughout its multitudinous paragraphs. The 

 authors, it need hardly be said, regard their hypothesis as 

 strictly scientific. " We wish distinctly to say," writes 

 Mr. Myers, " that so far from aiming at any paradoxical 

 reversion of established scientific conclusions, we con- 

 ceive ourselves to be working (however imperfectly) in 

 the main track of scientific discovery." 



We must, however, carefully separate the views of Mr. 

 Myers from those of Mr. Gurney. Both of them, of 

 course, insist on the reality of experimental thought- 

 transference and of spontaneous telepathy — the radical 

 dift'erence between which is well brought out. In the 

 one an object or sensation kept steadily before the mind 

 of the agent or agents is transmitted as such to the mind 

 of the percipient ; in the other the case is different : not 

 the death-swoon of the agent, but the image of the agent 

 as dying is transmitted. And here it is that our authors 

 begin to part company. Calling to mind the facts (or 

 supposed facts) (l) that the dying man may have in inter- 

 vals of consciousness a vivid mental picture of himself 

 and his surroundings ; (2) that most of us have in the 

 background of consciousness a tolerably well-developed 

 conception of our own proper selves ; (3) that there is 

 some experimental evidence of collective telepathic in- 

 fluence, so that the percipient may be jointly influenced 

 by the dying man as principal agent, and by the bystanders 

 at the death-bed as subsidiary agents — taking these, avow- 

 edly or implicitly, into consideration, Mr. Gurney does 

 not feel forced to go beyond the theory of thought-trans- 

 ference. Not so Mr. Myers. He rises boldly into what 

 looks uncommonly like spiritualism, and accepts clair- 

 voyance, where the percipient " seems to visit scenes, or 

 discern objects, without needing that those scenes or 

 objects should form a part of the perception or memory 

 of any known mind." " Correspondently with clairvoyant 

 perxeption" he says (the italics are his own), '■^ there may 

 be pha?itasinogenetic efficacy" which in plain English 

 means that the percipient may visit in spirit scenes he 

 has never visited in the flesh, and that his spirit may be 

 visible as a phantasm to the human occupants of these 

 scenes. And in support of his view he adduces such 

 cases as that of the two students which I have summar- 

 ised above. 



On the question of the physical aspect of the psychical 

 phenomena, again, our authors do not agree. Mr. 

 Gurney holds that " mental facts are indissolubly linked 

 with the very class of material facts that science can 

 least penetrate — with the most complex sort of changes 

 occurring in the most subtly-woven sort of matter — the 

 molecular activities of brain-tissue." And though he sub- 

 sequently says : " Not only, as with other delicate phe- 

 nomena of life and thought, is the subjective side of the 

 problem the only one that we can yet attempt to analyse : 

 we do not even know where to look for the objective side : " 

 he rather advocates the limitation of the question for 

 the present to the psychical aspect, than dismisses the 

 physical as a piece of unwarrantable materialism. But 

 Mr. Myers goes further : " The psychical element, I 



