"On the 16th (28th) of February of this year, between nine and ten o'clock in the evening, I, the undersigned, was sitting in our drawing-room—the small one—facing the large drawing-room, which I could see in its entire length. My husband, his brother, with his wife, and my mother, were also sitting in the same room with me round a large round table. I was writing down my household accounts for the day, while the others were carrying on some gay conversation. Having accidentally raised my head and looked into the large drawing-room, I noticed, with astonishment, that a large grey shadow had passed from the door of the dining-room to that of the antechamber; and it came into my head that the figure I had seen bore a striking resemblance in stature to Colonel Ave-Meinander, an acquaintance of ours, who had lived in this very lodging for a long time. At the first moment, I wished to say at once that a ghost had just flashed before me, but stopped, as I was afraid of being laughed at by my husband's brother and his wife, and also of being scolded by my husband, who, in view of the excitement which I showed when such phenomena were taking place, tried to convince me that they were the fruits of my fancy. As I knew that Meinander was alive and well, and was commander of the Malorossüsky 40th Regiment of Dragoons, I did not say anything then; but when I was going to bed I related to my mother what I had seen, and the next morning could not refrain from mentioning it to my husband.
"Our astonishment was extreme when, on the 18th of February (2nd of March), we learned Nicholas Ottovitch Ave-Meinander had actually died after a short illness on the 16th (28th) of February at nine o'clock in the evening, in the town of Strashovo, where his regiment is stationed.
"The above account is confirmed by the percipient's mother, Marie von Hagemeister, and by the husband, Colonel Alexis Alexeievitch Broussiloff. Both state solemnly that Colonel Meinander died at nine P.M. on the evening of 16th February (28th) at Stashovo, 1200 versts from St Petersburg."
To explain this phenomenon in the terms of telepathy, the grey shadow seen by Madame Broussiloff was not a ghost, not the "bodiless spirit in the likeness of a man," but "a waking dream projected from the brain of the seer under the impulse of the dying man's thought."
But telepathy itself requires consideration and explanation. Sir William Crookes has repeatedly given publicity to his theory of brain-waves and to a kindred conception of ether substance, along which intelligence can be transmitted at an almost incalculable rate of speed to virtually interminable distances.
That mind should effect mind in a new mode may mean no more than that brain can act upon brain by means of ethereal vibrations hitherto unsuspected. The power itself may be but a lingering vestige of our inheritance from primeval times, a long-disused faculty "dragged from the dim lumber-room of a primitive consciousness, and galvanised into a belated and halting activity."
Or, on the other hand, may not such faculty be regarded not as vestigial, but as rudimentary? Telepathy, if we follow the gifted author of "Human Personality," is a promise for the future, not an idle inheritance from the past.
Our business now is, all mystic speculations apart, to consider the phenomena in the order in which, if not yet actually accepted, they would seem to evoke least opposition from the academic science of the day. What is the net result of the evidence for all classes of supernormal phenomena? That I shall endeavour to point out, as concisely and lucidly as I can, in the following chapters.
CHAPTER II
THE HYPNOTIC STATE
Not least of the wonders of modern psychical research is the discovery that nothing in all the phenomena is new—that under other names and by other races every sort of manifestation was familiar to the most remote peoples. This would certainly seem to meet the argument of the physicist—it is not necessary to refer again to Professor Tyndall's uncomplimentary phraseology—who declares that all this popular occultism is a product of the last generation or two. Take hypnotism. Hypnotism (or mesmerism) was formerly alleged to be an emanation from the body—an effluence of intense will-power. The belief in such an emanation is centuries old. "By the magic power of the will," wrote Paracelsus, "a person on this side of the ocean may make a person on the other side hear what is said on that side ... the ethereal body of a man may know what another man thinks at a distance of 100 miles or more." Twenty years ago this creed was laughed out of court by Huxley, Tyndall, and other leading men of science. To-day we are told by those who have witnessed the experiments of Charcot, Janet, and others that "the existence of an aura of spirit-force surrounding the body like an atmosphere, in some cases at all events, can be proved as a physical fact."