Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 20

In some of that group of collective cases which we are at this moment considering, this absence of link is noticeable in a special way. There is nothing to show that any thought or emotion was pa.s.sing from agent to percipients at the moment of the apparition. On the contrary, the indication is that there is no necessary connection whatever between the agent's condition of mind at the moment and the fact that such and such persons observed his phantasm. The projection of the phantasm, if I may so term it, seems a matter wholly automatic on the agent's part, as automatic and meaningless as a dream.

a.s.suming, then, that this is so--that these _bilocations_ or self-projections to a point apparently remote from one's body do occur without any appreciable stimulus from without, and in moments of apparent calm and indifference--in what way will this fact tend to modify previous conceptions?

It suggests that the continuous dream-life which we must suppose to run concurrently with our waking life is potent enough to effect from time to time enough of dissociation to enable some element of the personality to be perceived at a distance from the organism. How much of consciousness, if any, may be felt at the point where the excursive phantasm is seen, we cannot say. But the notion that a mere incoherent quasi-dream should thus become perceptible to others is fully in accordance with the theories suggested in this work. For I regard subliminal operation as _continuously_ going on, and I hold that the degree of dissociation which can generate a perceptible phantasm is not necessarily a profound change, since that perceptibility depends so largely upon idiosyncrasies of agent and percipient as yet wholly unexplained.

That special idiosyncracy on the part of the agent which tends to make his phantasm easily visible has never yet, so far as I know, received a name, although for convenience' sake it certainly needs one. I propose to use the Greek word f?????a??, which means strictly "to let the soul break loose," and from which I form the words _psychorrhagy_ and _psychorrhagic_, on obvious a.n.a.logies. When I say that the agents in these cases were born with the _psychorrhagic diathesis_, I express what I believe to be an important fact, physiological as well as psychological, in terms which seem pedantic, but which are the only ones which mean exactly what the facts oblige me to say. That which "breaks loose" on my hypothesis is not (as in the Greek use of the word) the whole principle of life in the organism; rather it is some psychical element probably of very varying character, and definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion or other of s.p.a.ce. I hold that this phantasmogenetic effect may be produced either on the mind, and consequently on the brain of another person--in which case he may discern the phantasm somewhere in his vicinity, according to his own mental habit or prepossession--or else directly on a portion of s.p.a.ce, "out in the open," in which case several persons may simultaneously discern the phantasm in that actual spot.

Let us apply this view to one of our most bizarre and puzzling cases--that of Canon Bourne (see Appendix VI. B). Here I conceive that Canon Bourne, while riding in the hunting-field, was also subliminally dreaming of himself (imagining himself with some part of his submerged consciousness) as having had a fall, and as beckoning to his daughters--an incoherent dream indeed, but of a quite ordinary type. I go on to suppose that, Canon Bourne being born with the psychorrhagic diathesis, a certain psychical element so far detached itself from his organism as to affect a certain portion of s.p.a.ce--near the daughters of whom he was thinking--to effect it, I say, not materially nor even optically, but yet in such a manner that to a certain kind of immaterial and non-optical sensitivity a phantasm of himself and his horse became discernible. His horse was of course as purely a part of the phantasmal picture as his hat. The non-optical distinctness with which the words printed inside his hat were seen indicates that it was some inner non-retinal vision which received the impression from the phantasmogenetic centre. The other phantasmal appearance of Canon Bourne chanced to affect only one percipient, but was of precisely the same character; and of course adds, so far as it goes, to the plausibility of the above explanation.

That explanation, indeed, suffers from the complexity and apparent absurdity inevitable in dealing with phenomena which greatly transcend known laws; but on the other hand it does in its way colligate Canon Bourne's case with a good many others of odd and varying types. Thus appearances such as Canon Bourne's are in my view exactly parallel to the _hauntings_ ascribed to departed spirits. There also we find a psychorrhagic diathesis--a habit or capacity on the part of certain spirits of detaching some psychical element in such a manner as to form a phantasmal picture, which represents the spirit as going through some dream-like action in a given place.

The phantasmogenetic centre may thus, in my view, be equally well produced by an incarnate or by a discarnate spirit.

Again, my hypothesis of a real modification of a part of s.p.a.ce, transforming it into a phantasmogenetic centre, applies to a phantasmal voice just as well as to a phantasmal figure. The voice is not heard acoustically any more than the figure is seen optically. Yet a phantasmal voice may in a true sense "come from" a given spot.

These psychorrhagic cases are, I think, important as showing us the earliest or feeblest stages of self-projection--where the dissociation belongs to the dream-stratum--implicating neither the supraliminal will nor the profounder subliminal strata.

And now let us pa.s.s on from these, which hardly concern anybody beyond the phantom-begetter himself--and do not even add anything to his own knowledge--to cases where there is some sort of communication from one mind to another, or some knowledge gained by the excursive spirit.

It is impossible to arrange these groups in one continuous logical series. But, roughly speaking, the degree in which the psychical collision is _recollected_ on either side may in some degree indicate its _intensity_, and may serve as a guide to our provisional arrangement.

Following this scheme I shall begin with a group of cases which seem to promise but little information,--cases, namely, where A, the agent, in some way impresses or invades P, the percipient,--but nevertheless neither A nor P retains in supraliminal memory any knowledge of what has occurred.

Now to begin with we shall have no difficulty in admitting that cases of this type are likely often to occur. The psychical _rapprochement_ of telepathy takes place, _ex hypothesi_, in a region which is subliminal for both agent and percipient, and from whence but few and scattered impressions rise for either of them above the conscious threshold.

Telepathy will thus probably operate far more continuously than our scattered glimpses would in themselves suggest.

But how can we outside inquirers know anything of telepathic incidents which the princ.i.p.als themselves fail altogether to remember?

In ordinary life we may sometimes learn from bystanders incidents which we cannot learn from the princ.i.p.als themselves. Can there be bystanders who look on at a psychical invasion?

The question is of much theoretical import. On my view that there is a real transference of something from the agent, involving an alteration of some kind in a particular part of s.p.a.ce, there might theoretically be some bystander who might discern that alteration in s.p.a.ce more clearly than the person for whose benefit, so to say, the alteration was made.

If, on the other hand, what has happened is merely a transference of some impulse "from mind to mind";--then one can hardly understand how any mind except the mind aimed at could perceive the telepathic impression. Yet, in _collective_ cases, persons in whom the agent feels no interest, nay, of whose presence along with the intended percipient he is not aware, do in fact receive the impression in just the same way as that intended percipient himself. This was explained by Gurney as probably due to a fresh telepathic transmission,--this time from the due or original percipient's mind to the minds of his neighbours of the moment.

Such a supposition, however, in itself a difficult one, becomes much more difficult when the telepathic impulse has never, so far as we know, penetrated into the due or intended percipient's mind at all. If in such a case a bystander perceives the invading figure, I must think that he perceives it merely as a bystander,--not as a person telepathically influenced by the intended percipient, who does not in fact perceive anything whatsoever. I quote in ill.u.s.tration a bizarre but well-attested case (see Appendix VI. C) which this explanation seems to fit better than any other.

In a somewhat similar case[113] there is strong attestation that a sailor, watching by a dying comrade, saw figures around his hammock, apparently representing the dying man's family, in mourning garb. The family, although they had no ordinary knowledge of the sailor's illness, had been alarmed by noises, etc., which rightly or wrongly they took as indications of some danger to him. I conceive, then, that the wife paid a psychical visit to her husband; and I take the mourning garb and the accompanying children's figures to be symbolical accompaniments, representing her thought, "My children will be orphans." I think this more likely than that the sailor's children also should have possessed this rare peculiarity of becoming perceptible at a distant point in s.p.a.ce. And secondary figures, as we shall see later on, are not uncommon in such telepathic presentations. One may picture oneself as though holding a child by the hand, or even driving in a carriage and pair, as vividly as though carrying an umbrella or walking across a room; and one may be thus pictured to others.

And here I note a gradual transition to the next large cla.s.s of cases on which I am about to enter. I am about to deal with _telaesthesia_;--with cases where an agent-percipient--for he is both in one--makes a clairvoyant excursion (of a more serious type than the mere psychorrhagies already described), and brings back some memory of the scene which he has psychically visited. Now, of course, it may happen that he fails to bring back any such memory, or that if he _does_ bring it back, he tells no one about it. In such cases, just as in the telepathic cases of which I have just spoken, the excursive phantom may possibly be observed by a bystander, and the circ.u.mstances may be such as to involve some coincidence which negatives the supposition of the bystander's mere subjective fancy. Such, I think, is the case which I give in Appendix VI. D.

There is a similar case in _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. ii. p. 541, where a girl, who is corporeally present in a certain drawing-room, is seen phantasmally in a neighbouring grove, whither she herself presently goes and hangs herself.

Ponderings on projected suicide form perhaps the strongest instance of mental preoccupation with a particular spot. But of course, in our ignorance of the precise quality of thought or emotion needed to prompt a psychical excursion, we need not be surprised to find such an excursion observed on some occasions as trivial as the "arrival-case" of Col. Reed, with which I prefaced the mere psychorrhagic cases.

Again, there is a strange case,[114] which comes to us on good authority, where we must suppose one man's subliminal impulse to have created a picture of himself, his wife, a carriage and a horse, persistent enough to have been watched for some seconds at least by three observers in one place, and by a fourth and independent observer at another point in the moving picture's career. The only alternative, if the narrative be accepted as substantially true, will be the hypothesis before alluded to of the flashing of an impending scene, as in crystal-vision, from some source external to any of the human minds concerned. I need hardly at this point repeat that in my view the wife and the horse will be as purely a part of the man's conception of his own aspect or environment as the coat on his back.

And here, for purposes of comparison, I must refer to one of the most bizarre cases in our collection.[115] Four credible persons, to some extent independently, see a carriage and pair, with two men on the box and an inside occupant, under circ.u.mstances which make it impossible that the carriage was real. Now this vision cannot have been _precognitive_; nothing of the kind occurred for years after it, nor well _could_ occur; and I am forced to regard it as the externalisation of some dream, whether of an incarnate or of a discarnate mind. The parallel between this case and the one mentioned above tends therefore to show that the first, in spite of the paraphernalia of wife, horse, and dog-cart, may have been the outcome of a single waking dream;--of the phantasmogenetic dissociation of elements of one sole personality.

In the cases which I have just been discussing there has been a psychical excursion, with its possibilities of clairvoyance; but the excursive element has not brought home any a.s.signable knowledge to the supraliminal personality. I go on now to cases where such knowledge _has_ thus been garnered. But here there is need of some further pause, to consider a little in how many ways we can imagine that knowledge to be reached.

Firstly, the distant knowledge may, it would seem, be reached through hyperaesthesia,--an extended power of the ordinary senses. Secondly, it sometimes seems to come through crystal-gazing or its correlative sh.e.l.l-hearing,--artifices which seem to utilise the ordinary senses in a new way. And besides these two avenues to distant knowledge there is a _third_, the telepathic avenue, which, as we have already surmised, sometimes shades off into the purely telaesthetic; when no distant _mind_, but only the distant _scene_, seems to be attracting the excursive spirit. And in the _fourth_ place we must remember that it is mainly in the form of _dream or vision_ that the most striking instances of telaesthesia which I have as yet recorded have come. Can we in any way harmonise these various modes of perception? Can we discover any condition of the percipient which is common to all?

To a certain limited extent such co-ordination is possible. In each approach to telaesthesia in turn we find a tendency to something like a dream-excursion. Hyperaesthesia, in the first place, although it exists sometimes in persons wide awake, is characteristically an attribute of sleep-waking states.

We have seen in discussing hypnotic experiments that it is sometimes possible to extend the subject's perceptive faculty by gradual suggestion, so far as to transform a hyperaesthesia which can still be referred to the action of the sense-organs into a telaesthesia which cannot be so referred. It is observable that percipients in such cases sometimes describe their sensation as that of receiving an impression, or seeing a picture placed before them; sometimes as that of _travelling_ and visiting the distant scene or person. Or the feeling may oscillate between these two sensations, just as the sense of _time-relation_ in the picture shown may oscillate between past, present, and future.

To all these complex sensations the phenomena of crystal-gazing offer close a.n.a.logies. I have already remarked on the curious fact that the simple artifice of gazing into a speculum should prove the avenue to phenomena of such various types. There may be very different origins even for pictures which in the crystal present very similar aspects; and certain sensations do also accompany these pictures; sensations not merely of _gazing_ but sometimes (though rarely) of partial _trance_; and oftener of _bilocation_;--of psychical _presence_ among the scenes which the crystal has indeed initiated, but no longer seems to limit or to contain.

The idea of psychical excursion thus suggested must, however, be somehow reconciled with the frequently _symbolic_ character of these visions. The features of a crystal-vision seem often to be no mere transcription of material facts, but an abbreviated selection from such facts, or even a bold modification of such facts with a view of telling some story more quickly and clearly. We are familiar with the same kind of succession of symbolical scenes in dream, or in waking reverie. And of course if an intelligence outside the crystal-gazer's mind is endeavouring to impress him, this might well be the chosen way.

And moreover through all telaesthetic vision some element of similar character is wont to run--some indication that _mind_ has been at work upon the picture--that the scene has not been presented, so to say, in crude objectivity, but that there has been some _choice_ as to the details discerned; and some _symbolism_ in the way in which they are presented.

Let us consider how these characteristics affect different theories of the mechanism of clairvoyance. Let us suppose first that there is some kind of transition from hyperaesthesia to telaesthesia, so that when peripheral sensation is no longer possible, central perception may be still operating across obstacles otherwise insurmountable.

If this be the case, it seems likely that central perception will shape itself on the types of perception to which the central tracts of the brain are accustomed; and that the _connaissance superieure_, the telaesthetic knowledge, however it may really be acquired, will present itself mainly as clairvoyance or clairaudience--as some form of sight or sound. Yet these telaesthetic sights and sounds may be expected to show some trace of their unusual origin. They may, for instance, be _imperfectly co-ordinated_ with sights and sounds arriving through external channels; and, since they must in some way be a translation of supernormal impressions into sensory terms, they are likely to show something _symbolic_ in character.

This tendency to subliminal symbolism, indeed, meets us at each point of our inquiry. As an instance of it in its simplest form, I may mention a case where a botanical student pa.s.sing inattentively in front of the gla.s.s door of a restaurant thought that he had seen _Verbasc.u.m Thapsus_ printed thereon. The real word was _Bouillon_; and that happens to be the trivial name in French for the plant Verbasc.u.m Thapsus. The actual optical perception had thus been subliminally transformed; the words Verbasc.u.m Thapsus were the report to the inattentive supraliminal self by a subliminal self more interested in botany than in dinner.

Nay, we know that our own optical perception is in its own way highly symbolic. The scene which the baby sees instinctively,--which the impressionist painter manages to see by a sort of deliberate self-simplification,--is very different from the highly elaborate interpretation and selection of blotches of colour by which the ordinary adult figures to himself the visible world.

Now we adults stand towards this subliminal symbolism in much the same att.i.tude as the baby stands towards our educated optical symbolism. Just as the baby fails to grasp the third dimension, so may we still be failing to grasp a fourth;--or whatever be the law of that higher cognisance which begins to report fragmentarily to man that which his ordinary senses cannot discern.

a.s.suredly then we must not take the fact that any knowledge comes to us symbolically as a proof that it comes to us from a mind outside our own.

The symbolism may be the inevitable language in which one stratum of our personality makes its report to another. The symbolism, in short, may be either the easiest, or the only possible psychical record of actual objective fact; whether that fact be in the first instance discerned by our deeper selves, or be conveyed to us from other minds in this form;--elaborated for our mind's digestion, as animal food has been elaborated for our body's digestion, from a primitive crudity of things.

But again one must question, on general idealistic principles, whether there be in such cases any real distinction between symbolism and reality,--between subjective and objective as we commonly use those terms. The resisting matter which we see and touch has "solid" reality for minds so const.i.tuted as to have the same subjective feeling awakened by it. But to other minds, endowed with other forms of sensibility--minds possibly both higher and more numerous than our own--this solid matter may seem disputable and unreal, while thought and emotion, perceived in ways unknown to us, may be the only reality.

This material world const.i.tutes, in fact, a "privileged case"--a simplified example--among all discernible worlds, so far as the perception of incarnate spirits is concerned. For discarnate spirits it is no longer a privileged case; to _them_ it is apparently easier to discern thoughts and emotions by non-material signs.[116] But they need not therefore be wholly cut off from discerning material things, any more than incarnate spirits are wholly cut off from discerning immaterial things--thoughts and emotions symbolised in phantasmal form.

"The ghost in man, the ghost that once was man," to use Tennyson's words, have each of them to overcome by empirical artifices certain difficulties which are of different type for each, but are not insurmountable by either.

These reflections, applicable at various points in our argument, have seemed specially needed when we had first to attack the meaning of the so-called "travelling clairvoyance," of which instances were given in the chapter on hypnotism. It was needful to consider how far there was a continuous transition between these excursions and directer transferences between mind and mind,--between telaesthesia and telepathy.

It now seems to me that such a continuous transition may well exist, and that there is no absolute gulf between the supernormal perception of ideas as existing in other minds, and the supernormal perception of what we know as matter. All matter may, for aught we know, exist as an idea in some cosmic mind, with which mind each individual spirit may be in relation, as fully as with individual minds. The difference perhaps lies rather in the fact that there may be generally a _summons_ from a cognate mind which starts the so-called agent's mind into action; his invasion may be in some way _invited_; while a spiritual excursion among inanimate objects only may often lack an impulse to start it. If this be so, it would explain the fact that such excursions have mainly succeeded under the influence of hypnotic suggestion.

We see in travelling clairvoyance,[117] just as we see in crystal-visions, a kind of fusion of all our forms of supernormal faculty. There is telepathy, telaesthesia, retrocognition, precognition; and in the cases reported by Cahagnet, which will be referred to in Chapter IX., there is apparently something more besides. We see, in short, that any empirical inlet into the metetherial world is apt to show us those powers, which we try to distinguish, coexisting in some synthesis by us incomprehensible. Here, therefore, just as with the crystal-visions, we have artificially to separate out the special cla.s.s of phenomena with which we wish first to deal.

In these experiments, then, there seems to be an independent power of visiting almost any desired place, its position having been perhaps first explained by reference to some landmark already known. The clairvoyante (I use the female word, but in several cases a man or boy has shown this power) will frequently miss her way, and describe houses or scenes adjacent to those desired. Then if she--almost literally--gets on the scent,--if she finds some place which the man whom she is sent to seek has some time traversed,--she follows up his track with greater ease, apparently recognising past events in his life as well as present circ.u.mstances.

In these prolonged experimental cases there is thus time enough to allow of the clairvoyante's traversing certain places, such as empty rooms, factories, and the like, whither no a.s.signable link from any living person could draw her. The evidence to prove telaesthesia, unmixed with telepathy, has thus generally come _incidentally_ in the course of some experiment mainly telepathic in character.

These long clairvoyant wanderings are more nearly paralleled by _dreams_ than by waking hallucinations.

In a case which I will here quote a physician is impressed, probably in dream, with a picture of a special place in a street, where something is happening, which, though in itself unemotional--merely that a man is standing and talking in the street--is of moment to the physician, who wants to get un.o.btrusively into the man's house.

From _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 267. The case is there described as coming "from a Fellow of the College of Physicians, who fears professional injury if he were 'supposed to defend opinions at variance with general scientific belief,' and does not therefore allow his name to appear."

_May 20th, 1884._

Twenty years ago [abroad] I had a patient, wife of a parson. She had a peculiar kind of delirium which did not belong to her disease, and perplexed me. The house in which she lived was closed at midnight, that is--the outer door had no bell. One night I saw her at nine. When I came home I said to my wife, "I don't understand that case; I wish I could get into the house late." We went to bed rather early. At about one o'clock I got up. She said, "What are you about? are you not well?" I said, "Perfectly so."