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.
WHAT PSYCHOMETRY CAN DO.
We can do little more than give a few general illustrations. Professor Denton, having thoroughly satisfied himself of the reality of psychometry, wondered if letters had photographed upon them the impressions of the life and the image of the writer. Why not fossils? “He gave his sister a specimen from the carboniferous formation; closing her eyes, she described those swamps and trees, with their tufted heads and scaly trunks, with the great frog-like animals that existed in that age. To his inexpressible delight the key to the ages was in his hands. He concluded that nature had been photographing from the very first. The black islands that floated upon the fiery sea, the gelatinous dots, the first life on our planet, up through everything that flew or swam, had been photographed by Nature, and ten thousand experiments had confirmed the theory. He got a specimen of the lava that flowed from Kilava, in Hawaii, in 1848. His sister by its means described the boiling ocean, the cataract of molten lava that almost equalled Niagara in size. A small fragment of a meteorite that fell in Painesville, O., was given to his wife’s mother, a sensitive who did not then believe in psychometry. This is what she said: ‘I seem to be travelling away, away, through nothing, right forward. I see what look like stars and mist. I seem to be taken right up; the other specimens took me down.’ His wife, independently, gave a similar description, but saw it revolving, and its tail of sparks. He took steps to prove that this was not mind reading by wrapping the specimens in paper, shaking them up in a hat, and allowing the sensitive to pick out one and describe it, without anyone knowing which it was. Among them were a fragment of brick from ancient Rome, antimony from Borneo, silver from Mexico, basalt from Fingal’s Cave. Each place was described correctly by the sensitive in the most minute detail. A fragment from the Mount of Olives brought a description of Jerusalem; and one from the Great Pyramid enabled a young man of Melbourne to name and describe it. There was a practical side to the question. His wife had, from a chip of wood, described a suicide; this was subsequently confirmed. A number of experiments from a fragment of Kent’s Cave, fragments from Pompeii and other places brought minute descriptions from the sensitive.”
Mr. Stead bears his testimony to psychometry. He gave a shilling to two ladies, at different periods, and unknown to each other. In fact, they were perfect strangers. This shilling, in his mind, had a special story connected with it. The first lady lived in Wimbledon, and had the profession of being a clairvoyante. To use Mr. Stead’s own words, he states:—“I took from my purse a shilling which I most prized of all the pieces of money in my possession. I said nothing to her beyond that I had carried it in my pocket for several years. She held the shilling in her hand for sometime, and said:—‘This carries me back to a time of confusion and much anxiety, with a feeling that everything depended upon a successful result. This shilling brings me a vision of a very low woman, ignorant and drunken, with whom you had much better have nothing to do. There is a great deal of fever about. I feel great pains, as if I had rheumatic fever in my ankles and joints, but especially in my ankles and my throat. I suffer horribly in my throat; it is an awful pain. And now I feel a coarse, bare hand pass over my brow as distinctly as if you had laid your hand there. It must be her hand. I feel the loss of a child. This woman is brought to me by another. She is about thirty-two years; about five feet high, with dark brown hair, grey eyes, small, nicely-formed nose, large mouth.’” “Can you tell me her name?” asked Mr. Stead. “Not certain, but I think it seems like Annie.” “That is all right,” said Mr. Stead, and he told her the story of that shilling. About a month afterwards, Mr. Stead tried a Swedish opera singer, who had clairvoyant powers, with the shilling. She pressed it to her brow, and then she told Mr. Stead “she saw a poor woman give him, from her pocket-money, the last shilling she possessed. She has a great admiration for you, she said. She seems to think you have saved her, but she is not une grande dame. Indeed, she seems to be a girl of the town.” Mr. Stead said:—“I had not spoken a word, or given her the least hint of the story of the shilling.” Now, what are the facts? Mr. Stead says that he “was standing his trial at the Old Bailey, a poor outcast girl of the streets, who was dying of a loathsome disease in the hospital, asked that the only shilling that she possessed in the world, might be given to the fund which was being raised in his defence. It was handed to him when he came out of jail, with, ‘From a dying girl in hospital, who gives her last shilling,’ written on the paper.” He (Mr. Stead) has carried it about him ever since, never allowing it to be out of his possession for a single day.
The symptoms which the first clairvoyante, or psychometrix, described, were very like those which this poor creature was suffering from in her dying hours. It is too probable that the donor was a low, drunken woman.
These two readings are actually more psychometric than clairvoyant, because, from the clue furnished, they went back and described the conditions and surroundings of the woman who parted with this shilling. They were not thought-readers, because they did not describe what was passing in Mr. Stead’s mind. Mr. Stead’s experiences fairly illustrate the exercise, in the earlier stages of employment, of the psychometric faculty.