There is a distinction between thought-transference and thought-reading. It is no mere fanciful distinction either. Thought-transference occurs when the ideas, thoughts, and emotions of one mind are projected by intense action and received by the sensitive and impressionable mind of another—awake or asleep is immaterial—so long as it occurs without pre-arrangement and contact.
Telepathy is a more vivid form of sudden and unexpected thought-transference, in which the intense thoughts and wishes of one person, more or less in sympathy, are suddenly transferred to the consciousness of another. The thoughts transmitted are often so intense as to be accompanied by the vision of the person, and by the sound of their voice.
Telepathy bears about the same relation to thought-transference as “second sight” does to clairvoyance. Thought-transference and clairvoyance can be cultivated. Not so telepathy and second sight. They are phenomena, which belong to the unexpected, portents of the unusual, or sudden revelations of what is, and what is about to happen. Doubtless, there are conditions more favourable than others for inception of these. One needs to be “in spirit on the Lord’s day,” or any day, before telepathic and second sight messages are secured. Hence it is noticed telepathic revelations mostly come in the quietude of the evening, just before sleep, between sleep and waking, and under similar conditions favourable to passivity and receptivity in the sensitive or percipient.
In thought-reading both operator and sensitive are aware that something is to be done, and indications, intentional or otherwise, are given to make the thought-reader find out what is required. More or less sensitiveness is required in both phases. In telepathy and thought-transference the psychic elements are in the ascendency; in thought-reading they may be more or less present, but intention, sensitiveness, and muscular contact are adequate enough, I think, to account for the phenomena, as witnessed at public entertainments—so far, at least, as these entertainments are genuine.
How do we think? what are thoughts? and how are thoughts transferred? are reasonable questions, and merit more elaborate solution than is possible in an elementary work like this.
We think in pictures: words are but vehicles of thought. In thought-transference we can successfully project actions, or a series of actions, by forming in our minds a scene or picture of what is done and what is to be reproduced. When, however, we think of a sentence consisting of few or many words, there is nothing more difficult to convey. Words belong to our external life here, and are but arbitrary expressions and signs for what in the internal or soul-life is flashed telepathically from mind to mind.
Thoughts are things for good or ill, veritable and living realities, apart from our exterior selves, independent of words. The more words, often the less thought. Try to teach a child by the slow, dry-as-dust method of words, and the road to knowledge is hard and wearisome. Convey the same thoughts by illustrations and experiments, and the child’s mind at once grasps the ideas we desire to convey.
Thoughts are living entities (how poor are words!) which our own souls have given birth to, or created in the intensity of our love, wisdom, or passion. One Eastern adept has taught, “A good thought is perpetuated as an active, beneficent power, an evil one as a malignant demon. The Hindoo calls this karma. The adept evolves these shapes consciously; other men throw them off unconsciously.” How true in our experience! The thoughts of some men blast, while those of others bless. There is wisdom in thinking deliberately, intelligently, and therefore conscientiously, not passionately, impulsively, or carelessly.
In thought-transference the reproduction of exact words and dates seems to be most difficult. Indeed, the transmission of arbitrary words and signs is apparently the most difficult. The reason, I conclude, is, ideas belong to our inner, real, and spiritual life, and names, words, and dates to our exterior existence. The ideas can be expressed in the language of the sensitive, according to culture or the want of it. If the true lineaments of the picture are given, need we be too exacting as to the special frame surrounding the picture?
Notwithstanding the difficulty in transference and the reading of the exact words, this has also been frequently done. A very high state of receptivity and sensitiveness, however, is necessary in the percipient.