PSYCHOMETRIC SENSITIVES.
Professor Denton was very fortunate in having in his wife, children, and in his sister, Mrs. Cridge, gifted psychometers. His sister possessed this psychic, intuitive faculty in a high degree. Dr. Buchanan was equally fortunate; not only was his wife a first-class sensitive, but he discovered the faculty in several university professors, and in students innumerable. Denton in his travels over America, Europe, and Australia found several hundred good sensitives, some of whom have since made a reputation both in Europe and America for their powers.
One important fact we learn from these pioneers in psychometric research is that not one of these persons knew they were endowed with the psychometric gift prior to taking part in classes or experiments.
The possession of the faculty is not confined to any age, or to the gentle sex; and Denton concludes, as an average, that one female in four and one man in ten are psychometric sensitives. The possibility is all healthy, sensitive, refined, intuitive, and impressionable persons possess the soul-measuring faculty, and this faculty, like all other innate human powers, can be cultivated and brought to a high stage of perfection.
The psychometer, unlike the induced clairvoyant or entranced medium, is in general, or outwardly at least, a mere spectator, as one who beholds a drama or witnesses a panorama, and tells in his own way to someone else what he sees and what he thinks about it. The sensitive can dwell on what is seen, examine it closely, and record individual opinions of the impressions of the persons, incidents, and scenes of the long hidden thus brought to light. The sensitive has merely to hold the object in hand—as Mrs. Coates is represented doing in [frontispiece]—or hold it to the forehead (temple), when he or she is enabled to come in contact with the soul of the person or thing with which the object has been in relation. There is no loss of external consciousness, no “up rush” of the subliminal, obliterating and overlapping that of common life. The sensitive appears to be in a perfectly normal condition during the whole time of examination, can lay the article down, noticing what takes place, and entering into conversation with those in the room, or drawing subjects, seen or not, as they think best.