"Go and fetch me the watch that is hidden behind some books in the bookcase."
I sat in my armchair with M. behind me, and was careful not to look in the direction where the object was hidden.
M. suddenly got up from her armchair and went straight to the bookcase, but could not open it; making energetic movements the while, whenever she touched the door, and especially the glass.
"It is there! It is there! I am certain; but this glass burns me!"
I decided to open it myself; she rushed at my books, took them out, and seized the watch, delighted to have found it.
Similar trials have been made with commands that one of my friends passed to me, written beforehand, and not in the presence of the subject, and the success has been complete; but if the person who passes me the order is unknown to her, she refuses to obey, saying that the command is not mine.
M. N., who was convinced that mental transmission is a fraud, assured me that I should never be able to transmit an order from him to M.
I invited him to come to my house, at five o'clock in the evening, with a command written, which he was to give me only when M. was asleep, and outside my study.
At 5.10 N. arrived and we went out, leaving M. in a trance; when we were separated from my study by the two intervening rooms, with all the doors shut, N. pulled out a small paper and said—
"You will read this command, we will both come back to M., and without any gestures, you will communicate it to her."
"Certainly."
In the note was written, "Give the mental command to M. to count out loud from 5 to 1; 5, 4, 3, 2, 1."
We came back to my study; I sat at my desk as usual—I am in the habit of making notes during the progress of the experiments, so as to report them with scrupulous accuracy—and I sent N.'s mental command, while pretending to write. M. suddenly exclaimed—
"Doubtless, you imagine that I cannot count! I can count from 1 to 50,000, if I wish."
Mental command—"Count from 5 to 1."
"No, I will not obey a strange command; it is not a command of yours."
All my efforts were useless; we had to abandon the experiment. The command was certainly understood; but M. N. retired, convinced that it had not been understood, and that even the trance was a sham!
Automatic Writing.
Sometimes the working of the telepathic impulse is of a more apparently mysterious kind. We have seen that Mr. Beard was fully conscious of the action of a restraining force; and Mrs. Thaw, who was in a condition little if at all removed from the normal, appears also to have been aware of what she was doing, if perhaps without explicit recognition of her motives at the time of performing the prescribed actions. But in the various cases now to be described the telepathic impulse seems never to have affected the normal consciousness of the percipient at all; and the results produced through the agency of his organism were due to no recognised volition on his part. The intelligence directing his hand was an intelligence working below and apart from his ordinary life.
Now this subterranean intelligence presents many points of analogy with the secondary consciousness of the hypnotic subject; in both states we find indications of thought and will distinct from those of waking life, and of a memory not shared with that life. Moreover, it has been shown experimentally, by Mr. Edmund Gurney,[46] Professor Pierre Janet,[47] and others, that the consciousness which makes itself known through planchette is, in certain persons at any rate, identical with the consciousness found in the hypnotic trance, so far as the test of a common memory can be relied upon to prove identity. The superior susceptibility to telepathic influences, already referred to, of the hypnotic subject, may perhaps, therefore, in the light of these later experiments, be found to indicate a superior susceptibility of those parts of the brain whose workings lie below the ordinary consciousness, and reveal themselves only in the activities of trance and automatism.
The following is an illustrative case. The account is derived from contemporary notes, made by the late Mr. P. H. Newnham, Vicar of Maker, Devonport, of a series of experiments conducted by himself and his wife during eight months in 1871.[48] Mr. Newnham would write, in a book kept for the purpose, a question of the purport of which Mrs. Newnham was in ignorance; and Mrs. Newnham, holding her hand on a planchette, would write an answer to the question. The conditions of the experiments are described by Mr. Newnham, in an account written in 1884, as follows:—
No. 24.
"My wife always sat at a small low table, in a low chair, leaning backwards. I sat about eight feet distant, at a rather higher table, and with my back towards her while writing down the questions. It was absolutely impossible that any gesture, or play of features, on my part, could have been visible or intelligible to her. As a rule she kept her eyes shut; but never became in the slightest degree hypnotic, or even naturally drowsy."