A SIXTH SENSE.
THOSE of us who have foregathered on terms of intimacy with men of a very debased standard of civilisation— men who, in fact, are as near to the folk of the Neolithic
period as any now remaining on this over-cultivated, over- travelled earth—have often been forced to recognise that they possess some faculty which we, who have improved upon our beginnings, are able neither to exercise nor to understand. "I feel them!" says the S'emang, the little Negrit of the jungle. smotheredhighlands of the Malay Peninsula, and thus explains in no illuminative fashion his power of detecting the presence of strangers when they are still far beyond the reach of eight or hearing or smell. Here is a creature so primitive that he has never got beyond the stage of the nomadic hunter; so lacking in the instinct for social organisa- tion that he has never welded the family into the clan, but has been content to head his own tiny group when the time came for manhood and mating ; so restricted in his ideas that blue, green, and white are all known by the same term—and this in a land alive with varied colour—and that his arithmetical notions do not extend beyond the numeral three. Yet he " feels " things that we cannot "feel," and " feels " them with a precision and certainty which with us belong only to sight or to touch ! It must be remembered that from time immemorial, until the white men came to bring peace and order and monotony to a troubled, distraught, but picturesque land, the Rmang had been hunted by those who sought to sell his children into slavery. He disliked this excessively, but I question whether he ever dreamed of quarrelling with the decrees of fate. He himself subsisted by hunting game. It was probably to him quite natural that others should live by chasing him. None the less, the instinct of self-preservation, and the constant watchfulness and fear in which his days were passed, served doubtless to develop in him the faculties best suited to his ends. From this grim necessity there sprang in the course of ages the faculty to " feel " without the aid of any of the five senses, and the man who possessed this ability in its most acute form escaped capture, and so lived to propagate his kind, till in the fulness of time most Sgmangs of the far interior received as their inheritance this uncanny power.
Quite recently, and not for the first time, attention has been called in the correspondence columns of the Spectator to the standing miracle which men name the "native telegraph." Most people who have lived much among brown, black, or yellow folk have known instances of the extraordinarily rapid dissemination of news, usually of a calamitous character, in country where no means of speedy communication were available. The suggestion made by some writer from South Africa, that this is to be accounted for by a secret system of signals transmitted from man to man across the open veld; will not bear examination, for it is notorious that in lands which are one vast tangle of forest, with rivers for the only highways, news spreads no whit less quickly, and comes with equal ease against and with the current. My own experience, however, tends to the conclusion that such rumours usually lack anything approaching to accuracy of detail. The native population knows and says that such-and-such a thing has befallen long before the word has come in by mail or telegraph, but all it appears to feel sure about is that something disastrous has happened. Known facts may aid a shrewd guess. Danger may threaten from a certain quarter, and that may serve as a hint as to the direction whence the trouble is to be expected; but above and beyond this there is, it would appear, a foreknowledge of the fact that something momentous has occurred. Does some native " feel " the shock of the event just as the Rmang " feels " the presence of the alien in his deep jungle strongholds ? To me it seems that this must be so ; that one or more natives, in whose acute perceptions others have learned to repose confidence, experience in an. intensified form what we less sensitive Europeans call a presentiment, and putting two and two together, hazard a prophecy which nine times out of ten proves to be curiously near the truth.
This sounds a simple explanation, because a " presentiment " is something which comes within the experience of most white men; but the native prophecy of evil differs from that of the European in that it is more often right than wrong. What it comes to, then, is this. The primitive &mang says frankly that he " feels " that which, according to all known laws, it is quite impossible that he should feel ; the Kaffir of the veld or the native of our Eastern bazaars " feels " distant happenings also, and by means of a similar faculty, but his somewhat higher civilisation tends to blunt the acuteness of his per- ceptions, and gives him but a scant grasp of detail ; the white man, more insensitive still, " feels " only very vaguely, and often, it should be noted, without sufficient cause. Have we not in this at any rate the hint of a faculty, dulled by disuse or sharpened by constant and prolonged employment, but which must, none the less, be recognised as actually extant, and capable, it may be, of immense development ?
Personally, I seem to see yet another trace of this faculty in a phenomenon now generally, if vaguely, appreciated, which has been forced upon the recognition of white men by numerous events of recent history. I refer to the de. nationalisation to which so many Europeans become subject after living in more or less isolated positions surrounded by savage or barbarous folk. We have, for instance, the in- numerable whites who have "gone Fantee " in Western Africa, probably the most savage part of the most savage of all the continents; the two French officers who in 1899 made such trouble in the Hinterland of Lake Chad ; well-authenti- cated cases of white men who have indulged in cannibal prac- tices, and have even allowed human sacrifices to be offered to them ; many terrible excesses which occurred at the time of the Indian Mutiny ; and the, to the Americans, inexplicable conduct of too many citizens of the United States during the war in the Philippines. There are also instances which I might quote from personal experience of the demoniacal cruelty of which isolated Europeans have from time to time been guilty in South-Eastern Asia,—acts which could only be accounted for by something like what used to be called "possession," a radical change wrought in the nature of the men who committed them.
Such matters as these may appear at first sight to be wholly disconnected with the faculty of which I have been writing. But are they in truth so utterly divorced from such connection ? Is it not possible that both phenomena are due to the same operation,—the unconscious effect of mind upon mind ? If the human soul or brain is sensitive to the workings of other souls or brains, have we not in that fact an explanation of all that puzzles us, not only in the case of the S6mang who " feels " the presence of his enemy, and of the bazaar-native who is made aware that a calamity has befallen ere ever the news is flashed along the telegraph wires, but also of the white man who unconsciously absorbs the savagery of his surroundings ? In each case the emission of a telepathic current would appear to be wholly involuntary. The slave. hunter has no sort of desire to warn his quarry of his approach ; the native who receives an impression concerning some momentous event is in all probability as unconscious of being en rapport with another's mind as is the man from whom unknowingly the message emanates; while the individuals of a barbarous populace it is probable make no effort to influence.
the soul of the white man dwelling in their midst. Yet involun- tarily, unconsciously, mind would appear, if my theory be correct, to work upon mind; to convey impressions, to transmit news, at any rate in broad outline ; to crush it, even when strengthened and blunted by training and civilisation, under the sheer weight of numbers. Climate, conceivably, may aid the process of degeneration to which some white men are sub- ject, but climate alone cannot serve as a complete explanation. There is something more behind, and that something, there are at least reasonable grounds for thinking, may be in the nature of a telepathetic influence. By means of no other supposition can all the phenomena which I have quoted be accounted for in a satisfactory fashion, and here we seem to find an indication of a sixth sense, which is neither sight, nor hearing, nor taste, nor smell, nor touch; which, though more subtle than all, is in some cases as sure as any of these; and which, moreover, would appear to be possessed in greater per- fection by the least civilised and most primitive of our kind.
HUGH CLIFFORD.
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