It is further urged that whilst the dependence of telepathy on any material conditions is not obvious, it is constantly associated not only in popular belief, but in testimony from trustworthy sources, with phenomena which seem to point to supernormal faculties, such as clairvoyance, retrocognition, and prevision, themselves hardly susceptible of a physical explanation. This view has found its ablest exponent in Mr. F. W. H. Myers.[173]
And though Mr. Myers would himself readily admit that the evidence for these alleged supernormal faculties is not on a par with the evidence for telepathy, yet he maintains that such as it is it cannot be summarily dismissed. No doubt if it should appear with fuller knowledge that there are sufficient grounds for believing in faculties which give to man knowledge, not derivable from living minds, of the distant, the far past, and the future, it would be more reasonable to regard telepathy as a member of the group of such supernormal faculties, operating in ways wholly apart from the familiar sense activities, and not amenable, like these, to terrestrial laws.
Such considerations may at any rate be held to justify a suspension of judgment. We are not yet, it may be said, called upon to decide whether telepathy is a vestigial or a rudimentary faculty; whether its manifestations are governed by forces correlative with heat and electricity, or whether we are justified in discerning in them the operation of some vaster cosmic agencies. But there is another aspect of the question. The first stage of our inquiry is not yet complete. It would be futile for us to debate what manner of new agency we propose to believe in until it is generally admitted by competent persons that the facts are not to be attributed to such recognised, if insufficiently familiar, causes as illusion, misrepresentation, and the subconscious quickening of normal faculties. More and varied experiments are wanted, more and more accurate records of spontaneous phenomena; and at the present stage there should be no lack of either one or other. Most scientific inquiries demand of the investigator long years of special study and preparation, and an elaborate mechanical equipment. But experiments in thought-transference can be conducted by any one with sufficient leisure and patience to observe the requisite precautions; whilst telepathic visions need for their recording no other qualifications than accuracy and good faith. In fact Science, whose boast it was once
"Aerias tentasse domos animoque rotundum
Percurrisse polum,"
has now come down from those airy realms and turned its attention to the things of earth, and especially to the study of our human environment and the growth of human intelligence. And in this its latest phase Science has, of necessity, followed the tendency of the age and become democratic. Every parent can become a fellow-worker with Darwin in the laboratory of the infant mind; in investigating the faculties and idiosyncrasies of man, even the lines imprinted on his finger-tips and his shifts to remember the multiplication-table, there is not less need of the accumulated small contributions of the many than of the life-long labours of the expert. And in this newest field of scientific research there can be no doubt that results of permanent value await the worker who is content to walk upon the solid earth, and to turn his eyes from the mirage which has dazzled many of his predecessors.