TELEPATHIC IMPRESSIONS.
MESSRS. Gurney and Myers, in their Nineteenth Century article on " Visual Apparitions," have brought together a very curious and interesting collection of facts,—on the whole, as well attested as it is conceivable that facts of that nature should be,—to prove that under particular conditions of excitement, the rationale of which we probably do not under- stand, though insensibility and the near approach of death are apparently some of the most effectual of these conditions, certain persons appear to have the faculty of communicating
to other persons at a distance what is happening to them, often without either any intention to do so or any consciousness of doing so on their own parts. They give us cases where the impression of the distant event was produced with- out apparently any beneficial result at all; others in which the impression produced undoubtedly prepared the mind of the recipient for a shock which might otherwise have been severer ; and one, at least, in which the impression produced had the effect of bringing a daughter to her mother's bedside where she was much wanted, though her mother would not allow her to be called. This case, however,—we refer to Lady Chat- terton's sudden vision of her mother suffering from hemorrhage, —is the only one in which it can be said that a distinctly useful purpose was answered by the vision, and in that case it is clear that the purpose answered was certainly not the mother's purpose, who, in spite of her desire for her daughter's presence, took every step in her power to keep her sudden illness from her knowledge, so that it would appear as if the mother's eager wish to have her daughter with her had had more effect in involun- tarily communicating her state, than her fixed intention to keep her daughter in ignorance of her illness, had in withholding the truth. In all the other cases, as we have said, there does not appear to have been any distinctly useful purpose answered by the impression telepathically experienced; and in several of these cases, it is extremely difficult to suppose that, if the story is rightly told, we are in presence of any result of purpose at all, or of anything but the incidental consequence of some general law of nature, such as that for instance which compels any one who is passing at the time of a carriage accident to be a witness of that accident, whether he can give any help or not. Take the following, for instance :-
" We shall now give an example of a less unusual type, where there is more distinctly a transference of actual sensation. It has a re- semblance to the experiments where the percipient is able to repro- duce a diagram at which the agent is actually gazing ; or, again, to our previously cited case, where Mrs. Severn felt the precise pain suffered by her husband at a distance from an accidental blow on the mouth. The account was sent to us by the Rev. Canon Warburton, The Close, Winchester :---` Somewhere about the year 1818 I went up from Oxford to stay a day or two with my brother, Acton Warburton, then a barrister, living at 10 Fish Street, Lincoln's Inn. When I got to his chambers I found a note on the table apologising for his absence, and saying that he had gone to a dance somewhere in the West End, and intended to be home soon after one o'clock. In- stead of going to bed, I dozed in an armchair, but started up wide awake exactly at one, ejaculating, " By 'rove, he's down !" and seeing him come out of a drawing-room into a brightly illuminated landing, catching his foot in the edge of the top stair, and falling headlong, just saving himself by his elbows and hands. (The house was one which I had never seen, nor did I know where it was.) Thinking very little of the matter, I fell a-doze again for half an hour, and was awakened by my brother suddenly coming in and saying, " 06, there you are ! I have just had as narrow an escape of breaking my neck as I ever had in my life. Coming out of the ball- room, I caught my foot, and tumbled full length down the stairs."— W. WARBURTON.' " " In a second letter Canon Warburton adds My brother was hurrying home from his dance, with some little self-reproach in his mind for not having been at his chambers to receive his guest, so the chances are that he was thinking of me. The whole scene was vividly present to me at the moment, but I did not note particulars, any more than one would in real life. The general impression was of a narrow landing brilliantly illuminated, and I remember verifying the correctness of this by questions at the time. This is my sole ex- perience of the kind.' " It is clear that this is not a case in which any particular pur- pose was answered by Canon Warburton's vision of the acci- dent which had befallen his brother. There was no great shock to be broken by it. There was no change of conduct produced by it. Indeed, the accident itself, though it might have been serious, was not serious ; and the brothers met just when they would have met even if no impression of what was going on had visited the one who was awaiting the return of the other. Yet it is not easy to suppose that had there been no accident at all, the Canon would have seen his brother running, and, in that case, running successfully, down the distant stairs, instead of falling down them. If he had been liable to flashes of vision of this nature, they would have been much more frequent, which, as we are expressly assured, they have not been. We must assume that the nervous shock of the fall produced some spontaneous effect on the organisation of the dis- tant brother, though how that shock should have translated itself into a distinct vision of what had actually occurred, is what Messrs. Gurney and Myers seem to us neither to explain, nor even to suggest. As far as we understand their theory, it comes to this,—that the sensations connected with the fall would excite sympathetic sensations in the mind of the distant brother ;
and that these might be so vivid as to overflow into visual sensations, and so to give the dozer in Lincoln's Inn the im- pression of the brilliantly lighted staircase, and of the falling guest. But the curious point is that there seems to have been no sensation of sympathetic falling,—nothing, for instance, like Mrs. Severn's sense of pain when her husband, who was away from her, was struck violently on the mouth ; on the contrary, the sense of alarm was absent, and even the impression made on the eye was quite different from that made on the eye of the falling man,—who could not have seen the fall as his brother seems to have seen it, though he must have felt it far more vividly. If the feelings of the falling man had been reproduced in his brother, as the pain suffered by Mr. Severn was repro- duced in Mrs. Severn in the case referred to by our authors, he would have felt himself falling, and have seen, not his brother, but rather the stairs down which his brother fell. It seems to us perfectly clear that in by far the greater number of cases given in these papers, it is not a reproduction by sym- pathy in one place of the sensations experienced at the same time in another place, which occurs,—though in one or two cases this has been so,—but something very different indeed. There does seem to be evidence that, in some cases, the external scenery of the place where a shock has been experienced, is suddenly flashed upon persons in special sympathy with the sufferer, though at a distance, much as it would have been seen had the distant friends been present with them. Thus Lady Chatterton, though in a distant room, seems to have seen her mother exactly as she was seen by others after the hemorrhage had taken place. Again, Dr. Bowstead saw his brother-in-law just as he appeared before the hemorrhage which caused his death took place, dressed in a shooting suit, and with his gun on his arm. And it is clear enough that Canon Warburton saw, for a moment, his brother's fall much as he would have seen it, if he had been following him down the staircase. And so, once more, Mr. Searle seems to have seen his wife in a fainting-fit, at the very moment when she was in a fainting-fit, though he did not see her surroundings at the time the fainting-fit took place. But Mr. Searle did not feel any of the sensations of faintness which he would have felt if his wife's sensations had been repeated in him. And in almost all these cases we do not see how what Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers term " tele- pathy" accounts for the facts. What happens, in these cases, is rather an annihilation of distance, so far at least as vision is concerned, than a reproduction in one person and at one place of the sensations experienced by another person in another place. The central strand of the distant person's feel- ing is not in any way identical with the central strand of the feeling which appears to cause it, except in the rare cases where the wife felt the same pain which the husband felt, or the husband was conscious at the moment of an operation performed on his wife's eyes, of the very suffering which his wife was feeling But in the cases to which we are now referring, where the daughter did not feel either her mother's flow of blood or her mother's anxiety for her presence, but only saw the change in her mother's appearance ; where the brother did not cry out that he was falling, but that his brother was falling; where the husband did not feel his wife's faintness, but saw the blanched face of the fainting woman, —we do not see how telepathy, or feeling repro- duced at a distance, can be a correct term at all. Nor does the authors' theory that the shock of nervous sympathy overflows, as it were, into actual vision, help in any way to explain it; for the nervous sympathy surely, if it overflowed into vision at all, would overflow into the vision which was before the eyes of the sufferer, not into the vision which was before the eyes of a spectator of the suffering.
There are two statements made by Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers which seem to us to deserve notice as illustrating our difficulty. They are as follows :—" We cannot doubt the genuineness of the case which we published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (vol. i., p. 120), where a friend of our own, without having given the slightest hint of his intention, concentrated his mind for some minutes on the idea of appearing to two distant friends, in no way subject to hallucinations, who volunteered the information, when next he visited them, that they had distinctly seen him in their room at precisely that time." And again, " It might seem out of the ques- tion to obtain any experimental support for a transference of im- pression apart from consciousness on the ' agent's' part. Yet support of a kind has actually presented itself. We requested our friend above-mentioned secretly to determine, before going to sleep at about 10.30 p.m., that his form should appear at mid- night—that is, at a moment when he would be actually asleep— to one of the persons whom he had before succeeded in affecting, and whom he had not even seen for some time. On March 22nd he did so, determining not only to appear, but to touch his friend's head. The result is thus described by the latter:—' On Saturday night, March 22nd, 1884, I had a distinct impression that Mr. B. was in my room. I distinctly saw him, whilst widely awake. He came towards me and touched my head.' " Now, it is clear that if the first story is rightly reported, the " agent," as he is called, had the power by force of will to pro- duce a simulacrum of himself, visible to two persons at one and the same time ; and if the second story is true, he could do more than this, he could by force of will defer the appearance of this simulacrum for an hour and a half after he himself had gone to sleep, and yet compel this image of himself to keep the time he had destined for it, and to produce on his friend the impression that he himself had touched him, though it was at a moment when the contriver of all this elaborate illusion was fast asleep. Well, if these things are so,—and, of course, we are merely assuming for the moment that they are so, because Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers evidently think they have good. evidence for them,—surely the term " telepathy " does not in any sense describe the phenomena. The agent resolves, in his own mind, that his friends shall receive a certain im- pression on theirs; and they receive that impression as he desires, but they do not in any sense receive his impression, namely, the wish to impress them. On the contrary, they are affected as he willed them to be affected. Now, if his impression were transmitted to them, they would have repeated in their own minds the strong volition by which he succeeded in affecting them, instead of receiving the impression he desired. Aud, so far as we can judge, by far the greater number of Messrs. Gurney's and Myers' facts go to prove this,—that sometimes by volition, much oftener spontaneously but under great excitement, sometimes even in spite of volition, the strong excitation of one person's feelings practically has the effect of annihilating space, if not also time, for the senses of some other person, so that the latter either becomes what is called clairvoyant of an event at a distance, or—in those cases in which the effect is produced by the magic of the will—becomes clairvoyant of an illusion which the agent desired to impose upon the re- cipient. There is not much of what we should call " telepathy," —that is, strictly sympathetic affection produced at a distance, —in either class of cases.
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