In this case it seems unlikely that Mrs. W., the original percipient, was mistaken in supposing that she had not mentioned her first experience, and that Miss W. was also mistaken in her statement that she had not heard of what Mrs. W. had seen until after the apparition to herself. And it is still more unlikely that either lady would have allowed any hint of the matter to reach the ears of the children. Whilst, therefore, in the absence of contemporary notes, or of any identification of the figure, the degree of resemblance between the apparitions seen by the two ladies may have been exaggerated, we are still confronted with the problem that three persons living in the same house are credibly reported to have seen independently the hallucinatory figure of a man, and that in the two instances in which the apparitions were compared they were found to exhibit certain resemblances. That the first figure was a subjective hallucination, and that the later apparitions were reproductions of that hallucination by means of telepathic suggestion, is a solution which is, at any rate, worthy of consideration. We have in our records many cases of the kind, in which hallucinatory figures, in some cases presenting strong resemblances, are alleged to have been seen by two or more independent witnesses in the same house or locality. Thus we have accounts from Miss Kathleen Leigh Hunt, Miss Laurence, and Mr. Paul Bird, of a woman's figure seen independently by each of them in 1881 (Proc. S.P.R., vol. iii. pp. 106 et seq.). In another case (Proc. S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 270 et seq.) a doctor in a provincial town, his two daughters, and a young lady visitor saw the figure of a young child. In other cases different hallucinatory figures have been seen independently by successive occupants of the same house, the later percipients appearing not to have heard of the earlier apparitions. Thus we have accounts of figures seen during the period from 1861 to 1875 by three different families in an old Elizabethan manor-house (Proc. S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 118); and in a quite modern house in the South of England various phantasmal figures were seen between 1882 and 1888 by two successive sets of occupants. (Proc. S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 256 et seq.[131])
CHAPTER XIV.
ON CLAIRVOYANCE IN TRANCE.
The word "clairvoyance" was used by the older mesmerists to denote somewhat heterogeneous phenomena. It was applied in the first place to a supposed faculty by which the subject was enabled to ascertain facts not within human knowledge,[132] and in the second place to a power of discerning facts within the knowledge of some living mind. Of "clairvoyance" in the first sense there is not at present so much evidence as need cause hesitation in appropriating the name for other uses; and it is obvious that if such a faculty could be shown to exist, a discussion of it would find no place in a work which treats only of the affection of one human mind by another. But we have abundant evidence of clairvoyance in the second sense, that is, of a form of telepathy in which the transmitted idea seems to reach the mind of the percipient no longer as the meagre result of a serious crisis, or of a direct and often prolonged effort of attention on the part of the agent, but spontaneously, with great fulness of detail, and often with remarkable ease and rapidity, as the outcome of a special receptivity on the part of the percipient. Such clairvoyance—and the word must be understood to include the impressions of other senses than sight—occurs in its most striking form with hypnotised percipients; and in the present chapter I propose to deal with results obtained in hypnotism and analogous states, reserving for the following chapter instances of what appears to be the same faculty occurring in the normal state.[133]
MRS. PIPER.
The phenomena of clairvoyance, as thus defined, have been observed with great care in the case of an American lady, Mrs. Piper. Mrs. Piper had been known for some years in the United States as a clairvoyante and spirit medium, and her trance utterances had been carefully studied by Professor James and Dr. Hodgson. In the winter of 1888-89 she spent two months and a half in this country, at the invitation of certain members of the S.P.R. She came to England as a complete stranger, and was met on her landing at Liverpool by Professor Lodge, and during the whole period she stayed either in the houses of Professor Sidgwick or Mr. Myers at Cambridge, in Professor Lodge's house at Liverpool, or in rooms in London selected by Dr. Leaf. Neither at Cambridge nor Liverpool were there any opportunities of her acquiring knowledge of the histories and circumstances of the persons who visited her for experiments, other than those afforded during the actual progress of the experiment, or by inquiries of servants and children, the examination of books and photograph albums, or from the newspapers and private correspondence. Practically she was under close and almost continuous surveillance during the whole period, and, independently of the special precautions taken to guard against the acquisition of knowledge by any of the means above indicated (Proc. S.P.R., vol. vi. pp. 438-440, 446-447, etc.), it is important to note that the sitters were in almost every instance introduced to Mrs. Piper under an assumed name; that some of them, and those not the least successful, were persons in no way connected with the S.P.R., whose admission was due to circumstances more or less accidental; and that on several occasions she stated facts which were not within the conscious knowledge of any person present, and which could not conceivably have been discovered by any process of private inquiry.[134]
The actual method of experiment was as follows: Mrs. Piper would sit in a room partially darkened, holding the hands of the sitter, whilst some other person (generally Mr. Myers, Dr. Leaf, Professor Lodge, or a shorthand writer) would be present to take notes. Mrs. Piper would presently go off into a trance, attended at its outset by slight convulsive movements resembling those of an epileptic attack, and would after a brief interval assume the voice, gestures, and phraseology of a man. In this guise she gave herself out as one "Dr. Phinuit," a medical man who had studied medicine in Paris in the first quarter of the present century. In the impersonation of this character Mrs. Piper used occasionally broken English, pronounced some words, proper names especially, with a French accent, and was admittedly sometimes very successful in diagnosing and prescribing for the complaints of her sitters and their friends. "Dr. Phinuit" would then pour out a more or less coherent flood of conversation, questions, and remarks about the relatives and friends of those present, their past history and personal affairs generally, some of which was apparently mere padding, some obviously chance shots, or "fishing" for further information; whilst, in the midst of all the irrelevancy and incoherence, there would occasionally be clear, detailed statements on intimate matters of which it is inconceivable that Mrs. Piper could have attained any knowledge by normal means; just as, to quote the apt metaphor of Professor Lodge, in listening at a telephone "you hear the dim and meaningless fragments of a city's gossip, till back again comes the voice obviously addressed to you, and speaking with firmness and decision." In regard to the trance itself, it has no doubt close analogy with the hypnotic trance, though Mrs. Piper is not readily amenable to hypnotism by ordinary means, and when hypnotised her condition is described by Professor James as very different from that of the "medium trance." (Proc., vol. vi. p. 653; viii. p. 56.) In the latter state Mrs. Piper is, occasionally at least, anæsthetic in certain senses, and analgesic in various parts of the body (viii. pp. 4-6), and her eyes are closed, with the eyeballs turned upwards.