Adventurings in the Psychical

by H. Addington Bruce

“She was not always successful, but some of her failures were quite as instructive as her successes. On three occasions she executed, not the commands I had written on the paper, but commands I had thought of writing but for one reason or another had abandoned. No one in the room excepting myself knew of these previous intentions, so she could have derived her knowledge of them from the involuntary movements of no one excepting me; and if it had actually been a matter of subconscious guidance, it is obvious that my muscular indications would have related not to the abandoned commands but to the commands I actually wished her to carry out.

“All things considered, my experiments with this young woman satisfy me that the hypothesis of subconscious guidance is not always properly applicable, even when the ‘mind reader’ is in a position to see or hear the persons testing him.”

Assuming, however, for the sake of argument, that Professor Hyslop’s conclusion is erroneous, and that the involuntary movement theory does always suffice as an explanatory hypothesis when experimenter and subject are in the same rooms, it becomes manifestly and hopelessly inadequate when applied to explain the transmission of ideas between persons a considerable distance apart. Yet what I consider abundant proof has been experimentally obtained that such transmission may, and sometimes does, take place—occasionally in most dramatic form.

Take, for example, the experience of a French lady, Mme. Clarence de Vaux-Royer, who, feeling uneasy one day about a friend who was then living in the United States, thought she would cable to him. Unfortunately it was Sunday, and her maid found the cable office closed. Mme. de Vaux-Royer then decided to attempt a telepathic experiment, and, knowing that her friend was mourning the death of his mother and of a favorite sister, decided to try and impress him with an idea that they were near him and would comfort him in any trial he might be undergoing. She told her maid of her intention, and asked the maid to note the date, so as to be able to give corroborative evidence if the experiment succeeded.

This was on November 7. Ten days later the American mail brought to Mme. de Vaux-Royer a letter from her absent friend, who, after referring to some matters of wholly private interest, stated:

“Last night (the 7th), while I was praying, I saw, hovering above my head, some gold circles, which gradually floated away until I could no longer see them. At the same time I seemed to hear some one calling to me: ‘Mother! Mother! Sister Minnie!’ Then the circles floated back, approaching until they almost touched my head. Oh, how much comfort I felt! How they inspired me with sentiments of goodness and happiness!”

From this it is manifestly only a step to the experimental production of telepathic phantasms of the human form, as in the two instances given in the previous chapter (the Wesermann and Sinclair experiments), and in numerous other instances, of which one or two additional may well be narrated here. In one, a Harvard professor, an acquaintance of Professor James, on whose authority I quote the story, having heard of the possibility of telepathic hallucinations, determined one evening that he would try to make an apparition of himself appear to a friend, a young lady who lived half a mile from his home. He did not mention his intention to her or to anybody else. The next day he received a letter, in which she said:

“Last night about ten o’clock I was in the dining-room at supper with B. Suddenly I thought I saw you looking in through the crack of the door at the end of the room, toward which I was looking. I said to B.: ‘There is Blank, looking through the crack of the door!’ B., whose back was toward the door, said: ‘He can’t be there. He would come right in.’ However, I got up and looked in the other room, but there was nobody there. Now, what were you doing last night, at that time?”

At that precise moment, as he told Professor James, “Blank” had been at home, sitting alone in his room, and trying “whether I could project my astral body to the presence of A.”