I may conclude this chapter by calling attention to an argument of a different kind, on which Mr. Gurney,[84] in reviewing the material amassed chiefly in this country, laid considerable stress, and in which he has been followed by an independent observer, Professor Royce, dealing with narratives received from correspondents in America.[85] Both these investigators have pointed out, and probably all who make an equally careful and dispassionate study of the evidence will agree with them, that the phenomena vouched for in the best-attested narratives form a true natural group. They are manifestly not the products of folk-lore, nor of popular superstition, nor of the mere love of the marvellous. They are singularly free from the more sensational and bizarre features—dramatic gestures or speech on the part of the phantasms, prophetic warnings, movement of objects, etc.—which are conspicuous in second-hand narratives. If these accounts were purely fictitious, it would be difficult to conceive by what process, coming from persons of widely separated social grades, of various degrees of education, and of different nationalities, they could have been moulded to present such strong internal resemblances; resemblances consisting not merely in the possession of many common features, but in the absence of others which, by their frequent occurrence in admittedly fictitious accounts, are proved to be the natural fruits of the unrestrained imagination. This undesigned unanimity is strong evidence that the restraint operating throughout has been the restraint of fidelity to fact, and that the narratives themselves owe little to the imagination, and much to their reflection of genuine experience.
CHAPTER VII.
TRANSFERENCE OF IDEAS AND EMOTIONS.
Before proceeding to give examples of the evidence for spontaneous thought-transference, it may be well to repeat something of what has been said in the preceding chapter. In the first place, the narratives quoted in this book are offered as samples only of the evidence of this kind actually accumulated. No single narrative can afford to stand alone. Each contains one or more elements of weakness; and in the last resort chance coincidence, memory-hallucination, or even deliberate deception would be in any single case a more probable explanation than a new mode of mental affection. It is only, to borrow Mr. Gurney's metaphor, as a faggot, and not as a bundle of separate sticks, that the evidence can finally be judged. But, in the second place, it is not claimed that the evidence reviewed even in its entirety is by itself sufficient to demonstrate the possibility of the affection of one mind by another at a distance. The main proof of such affection is based on the experiments already described, to which the spontaneous evidence so far adduced must be regarded as illustrative and in some degree auxiliary.
It will be more convenient, as a matter of arrangement, that the spontaneous experiences first considered should be those which resemble most closely the results of direct experiment, though this classification has the disadvantage of placing in the forefront cases of the least definite and striking kind; cases, that is, which are most readily explicable as due to chance coincidence. It is on all grounds, therefore, expedient that the reader should reserve his final verdict until he has the whole case before him.
In the present chapter there will be adduced instances of the spontaneous transference of (1) simple sensations; (2) ideas and mental pictures; (3) emotional states; (4) impulses tending to action. The first two classes, and in some measure the last, resemble the results described in the first five chapters of this book; for the third probably no direct experimental parallel can be offered, for the sufficient reason that vivid and intense emotion cannot be evoked at will.
Transference of Simple Sensations.