to be of all things most impossible. I do not, of course, quote these few experiences as proving the existence of telepathy, but merely as illustrating what I mean by "apparently telepathic phenomena."
The vast majority of apparently supernormal phenomena are susceptible of a telepathic explanation, but in a few cases one is driven to other conceptions. Sometimes knowledge is shown of events not known to any one, and at other times a percipient will seem to "see" things at a distance, or to become aware of events remote in time.
These phenomena are ascribed to "clairvoyance," "precognition," and "retrocognition." They are much less common than those of the telepathic type, and the evidence for them is by no means as good.
Occasionally the information thus got professes to come from the spirit of some person deceased, and sometimes the claim seems plausible. Thus I once got from an automatic writer in Boston what purported to be messages from several of my deceased relatives, one of them being an aunt who died in my childhood, twenty-one years ago. Among the messages was an allusion to "Carson the Dr." This meant nothing to me at the time, but upon making inquiries I learned that an old doctor named Corson had attended my aunt during her last illness for about two weeks while she was at our house, although he was not her regular physician. She was afterward removed to a hospital in New York, and died there. The doctor has long been dead. I do not quote this to prove that the spirit of my aunt was really there, which I think very questionable, but to show how plausible these automatic utterances sometimes are. Probably my parents were the only persons living who knew that Dr. Corson attended my aunt for two weeks in 1875, and they have never seen the automatist.
Now, psychic phenomena nearly always occur in automatic form. Ungrounded emotions, inner or outer voices, apparitions, automatic writing and speech, irrational impulses—all these provide the garb for the appearance of knowledge for which we cannot account. Hence it is impossible to study automatism without taking these alleged phenomena into consideration at some stage of the inquiry, even if they are considered only to be rejected.
There are three practicable methods of viewing the facts of suggestibility, automatism, and secondary states. In the first place, we may adopt the conception which underlies most of our modern thought, and regard mind as essentially a function of matter—that is, of the brain. We will then naturally look to physiology only for our explanation of these facts. Or we may hold to the purely psychological point of view, and endeavor to
