the mental percept been evoked directly without any antecedent sense-percept?
Space will not permit me to more than mention the nature of the evidence which the society has collected for the purpose of answering these questions. Experiments have been made, and repeated again and again in order to reduce to a minimum all chances of collusion and error. Sometimes contact between the agent and the percipient has been permitted, and sometimes not.[1] Much of the evidence is very remarkable, but must be read in its entirety to have its full effect, and we refer any inquiring reader to the full reports of the various committees as published in the proceedings of the society.
As a scientific result, the committee felt justified in drawing up the following: 1. That much of what is popularly known as "though-treading" is, in reality, due to the interpretation by the so-called "reader" of signs, consciously or unconsciously imparted by the touches, looks, or gestures of those present; and that this is to be taken as the prima facie explanation whenever the thing thought of is not some visible or audible object, but some action or movement to be performed. 2. That there does exist a group of phenomena to which the word "thought-reading," or, as the committee prefers to call it, thought-transference, may be fairly applied; and which consists in the mental perception, by certain individuals at certain times, of a word or other object kept vividly before the mind of another person or persons, without any transmission of impressions through the recognized channels of sense.
Concerning these phenomena, Mr. Myers writes: "We have got, as we hold, a definite fact to start from—a fact of immense and unknown significance. If, as we believe, we can truly say 'mind acts on mind otherwise than by the recognized organs of sense,' this is probably a statement far more pregnant with consequences than the statements, 'rubbed amber attracts straw,' or 'the loadstone attracts iron.' And it must be our business to turn our new fact over in every direction, to speculate upon it in every way, or, rather, in every way which can possibly suggest a new form of experiment. We must remember that the experimental cases which we have already collected are probably only what Bacon calls 'ostensive instances'; 'instances,' as he expresses it, 'which show the nature under investigation naked, in an exalted condition, or in the highest degree of power; and which are, so to speak, mere emergent summits from a great ocean, which lies beyond our present reach of observation, and, perhaps, even beneath the level of our consciousness.'"
As might have been supposed, most progress has been made in this field of thought-transference, for its phenomena are the simplest, and
- ↑ The agent is the technical name for the person who concentrates his thoughts upon the chosen object, and the subject or percipient is the person who "reads" the thought, and tells what the object thought of is.
