'Now, this description is admirably exact. At 4 P.M. that day M. Langlois had wished to pour some bromine into a bottle. He had done this clumsily, so that some of the bromine flowed on to his left hand, which held the funnel, and at once burnt him severely. Although he at once put his hand into water, wherever the bromine had touched it a blister was formed in a few seconds—a blister which one could not better describe than by saying, "the skin puffed up." I need not say that Léonie had not left my house, nor seen anyone from my laboratory. Of this I am absolutely certain, and I am certain that I had not mentioned the incident of the burn to anyone. Moreover, this was the first time for nearly a year that M. Langlois had handled bromine, and when Léonie saw him six months before at the laboratory he was engaged in experiments of quite another kind.'
Here the savage reasoner would infer that Léonie's spirit had visited M. Langlois. The modern inquirer will probably say that Léonie became aware of what was passing in the mind of M. Richet. This supranormal way of acquiring knowledge was observed in the last century by M. de Puységur in one of his earliest cases of somnambulism. MM. Binet and Féré say: 'It is not yet admitted that the subject is able to divine the thoughts of the magnetiser without any material communication;' while they grant, as a minimum, that 'research should be continued in this direction.'[21] They appear to think that Léonie may have read 'involuntary signs' in the aspect of M. Richet. This is a difficult hypothesis.
Here follows a case recorded in his diary by Mr. Dobbie, of Adelaide,
Australia, who has practised hypnotism for curative purposes. He explains
(June 10, 1884) that he had mesmerised Miss —— on several occasions to
relieve rheumatic pain and sore throat. He found her to be clairvoyant.
'The following is a verbatim account of the second time I tested her powers in this respect, April 12, 1884. There were four persons present during the séance. One of the company wrote down the replies as they were spoken.
'Her father was at the time over fifty miles away, but we did not know exactly where, so I questioned her as follows: "Can you find your father at the present moment?" At first she replied that she could not see him, but in a minute or two she said, "Oh, yes; now I can see him, Mr. Dobbie." "Where is he?" "Sitting at a large table in a large room, and there are a lot of people going in and out." "What is he doing?" "Writing a letter, and there is a book in front of him." "Whom is he writing to?" "To the newspaper." Here she paused and laughingly said, "Well, I declare, he is writing to the A B" (naming a newspaper). "You said there was a book there. Can you tell me what book it is?" "It has gilt letters on it." "Can you read them, or tell me the name of the author?" She read, or pronounced slowly, "W.L.W." (giving the full surname of the author). She answered several minor questions re the furniture in the room, and I then said to her, "Is it any effort or trouble to you to travel in this way?" "Yes, a little; I have to think."
'I now stood behind her, holding a half-crown in my hand, and asked her if she could tell me what I had in my hand, to which she replied, "It is a shilling." It seemed as though she could see what was happening miles away easier than she could see what was going on in the room.
'Her father returned home nearly a week afterwards, and was perfectly astounded when told by his wife and family what he had been doing on that particular evening; and, although previous to that date he was a thorough sceptic as to clairvoyance, he frankly admitted that my clairvoyant was perfectly correct in every particular. He also informed us that the book referred to was a new one, which he had purchased after he had left his home, so that there was no possibility of his daughter guessing that he had the book before him. I may add that the letter in due course appeared in the paper; and I saw and handled the book.'
A number of cases of so-called 'clairvoyance' will be found in the 'Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.'[22] As the authors of these essays remark, even after discounting, in each case, fraud, malobservation, and misreporting, the residue of cases can seldom justify either the savage theory of the wandering soul (which is not here seriously proposed) or Hegel's theory that the fühlende Seele is unconditioned by space. For, if thought transference be a fact, the apparent clairvoyant may only be reading the mind of a person at a distance. The results, however, when successful, would naturally suggest to the savage thinker the belief in the wandering soul, or corroborate it if it had already been suggested by the common phenomena of dreaming.
To these instances of knowledge acquired otherwise than by the recognised channels of sense we might add the Scottish tales of 'second sight.' That phrase is merely a local term covering examples of what is called 'clairvoyance'—views of things remote in space, hallucinations of sight that coincide with some notable event, premonitions of things future, and so on. The belief and hallucinatory experiences are still very common in the Highlands, where I have myself collected many recent instances. Mr. Tylor observes that the examples 'prove a little too much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic omens.' This is perfectly true. I have found no cases of demon dogs; but wandering lights, probably of meteoric or miasmatic origin, are certainly regarded as tokens of death. This is obviously a superstitious hypothesis, the lights being real phenomena misconstrued. Again, funerals are not uncommonly seen where no funeral is taking place; it is then alleged that a real funeral, similar and similarly situated, soon afterwards occurred. On the hypothesis of believers, the percipients somehow behold
'Such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise.'