Following this scheme I shall begin with a group of cases which seem to promise but little information,—cases, namely, where A, the agent, in some way impresses or invades P, the percipient,—but nevertheless neither A nor P retains in supraliminal memory any knowledge of what has occurred.
Now to begin with we shall have no difficulty in admitting that cases of this type are likely often to occur. The psychical rapprochement of telepathy takes place, ex hypothesi, in a region which is subliminal for both agent and percipient, and from whence but few and scattered impressions rise for either of them above the conscious threshold. Telepathy will thus probably operate far more continuously than our scattered glimpses would in themselves suggest.
But how can we outside inquirers know anything of telepathic incidents which the principals themselves fail altogether to remember?
In ordinary life we may sometimes learn from bystanders incidents which we cannot learn from the principals themselves. Can there be bystanders who look on at a psychical invasion?
The question is of much theoretical import. On my view that there is a real transference of something from the agent, involving an alteration of some kind in a particular part of space, there might theoretically be some bystander who might discern that alteration in space more clearly than the person for whose benefit, so to say, the alteration was made. If, on the other hand, what has happened is merely a transference of some impulse "from mind to mind";—then one can hardly understand how any mind except the mind aimed at could perceive the telepathic impression. Yet, in collective cases, persons in whom the agent feels no interest, nay, of whose presence along with the intended percipient he is not aware, do in fact receive the impression in just the same way as that intended percipient himself. This was explained by Gurney as probably due to a fresh telepathic transmission,—this time from the due or original percipient's mind to the minds of his neighbours of the moment.
Such a supposition, however, in itself a difficult one, becomes much more difficult when the telepathic impulse has never, so far as we know, penetrated into the due or intended percipient's mind at all. If in such a case a bystander perceives the invading figure, I must think that he perceives it merely as a bystander,—not as a person telepathically influenced by the intended percipient, who does not in fact perceive anything whatsoever. I quote in illustration a bizarre but well-attested case (see Appendix VI. C) which this explanation seems to fit better than any other.
In a somewhat similar case[113] there is strong attestation that a sailor, watching by a dying comrade, saw figures around his hammock, apparently representing the dying man's family, in mourning garb. The family, although they had no ordinary knowledge of the sailor's illness, had been alarmed by noises, etc., which rightly or wrongly they took as indications of some danger to him. I conceive, then, that the wife paid a psychical visit to her husband; and I take the mourning garb and the accompanying children's figures to be symbolical accompaniments, representing her thought, "My children will be orphans." I think this more likely than that the sailor's children also should have possessed this rare peculiarity of becoming perceptible at a distant point in space. And secondary figures, as we shall see later on, are not uncommon in such telepathic presentations. One may picture oneself as though holding a child by the hand, or even driving in a carriage and pair, as vividly as though carrying an umbrella or walking across a room; and one may be thus pictured to others.
And here I note a gradual transition to the next large class of cases on which I am about to enter. I am about to deal with telæsthesia;—with cases where an agent-percipient—for he is both in one—makes a clairvoyant excursion (of a more serious type than the mere psychorrhagies already described), and brings back some memory of the scene which he has psychically visited. Now, of course, it may happen that he fails to bring back any such memory, or that if he does bring it back, he tells no one about it. In such cases, just as in the telepathic cases of which I have just spoken, the excursive phantom may possibly be observed by a bystander, and the circumstances may be such as to involve some coincidence which negatives the supposition of the bystander's mere subjective fancy. Such, I think, is the case which I give in Appendix VI. D.
There is a similar case in Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 541, where a girl, who is corporeally present in a certain drawing-room, is seen phantasmally in a neighbouring grove, whither she herself presently goes and hangs herself.
Ponderings on projected suicide form perhaps the strongest instance of mental preoccupation with a particular spot. But of course, in our ignorance of the precise quality of thought or emotion needed to prompt a psychical excursion, we need not be surprised to find such an excursion observed on some occasions as trivial as the "arrival-case" of Col. Reed, with which I prefaced the mere psychorrhagic cases.