Prof. Denton carried the results of psychometry far beyond the boundaries reached by Dr. Buchanan. If the world is one vast picture gallery of every act and thought since the beginning of time, the fossil shell, the rock-fragment, the broken arrow head, the shred of mummy, and the rush leaf from the banks of the Nile should reproduce in the sensitive the story of their origin and age. By a great number of experiments, the details of which fill three volumes, Prof. Denton sought to establish this generalization and write the geological and pre-historic history of the earth. That he found a kernel of truth can not be denied, but he allowed sources of error to creep in and vitiate his wonderfully suggestive and patient research. A person sensitive to the degree that enables him to feel the influences given to a fragment of stone thousands of years ago, would be more strongly impressed with the influence imparted by the one who secured it, and held it in his hands before the experiment. It is from this cause that uncertainty rests on his otherwise well-planned experiments. Yet he has proved that such sensitiveness exists, and that by it the story of history from fragments of ruined architecture may be read, and scenes in geological ages by fossil, bone or shell be described.
How? Really psychometry, depending on the sensitiveness of the brain, is a lower degree of clairvoyance, and is merged, in its clearest forms, therein. Sensitiveness means the capability of receiving the psycho-ether waves as they pulsate from some center, and as everything touched by life is in a state of such vibration, the recognition is only a question of the delicacy of the receiving organization.
There is a vast accumulation of narratives of ghosts, witches, apparitions, hallucinations, illusions, dreams, etc., which it is the present fashion to relegate to the sphere of superstition and ignorance. Many of these, however anomalous, have a foundation in fact, and will be found, when stripped of the portions superstition has added, readily explainable, either as subjective, arising from impressions on the sensitive, or as objective and manifested by the same principles. As sensitiveness to these subtile influences greatly varies in different individuals and at different times in the same individual, and at times becomes clairvoyance, scarcely an illustration can be given of one without introducing the other. We must constantly bear in mind that there is one fundamental cause back of all these so-called occult phenomena, varying in the degree of its manifestation in accord with the channel through which it flows.
Subjective Spectral Illusions.—Dr. Abercrombie is authority for the following illustration of subjective spectral illusions: “A gentleman of high mental endowments, and now upwards of eighty years of age, of spare habits and enjoying uninterrupted health, has been for eleven years subject to the daily visits of spectral figures. They in general present human countenances; the head and body are distinctly defined, the lower parts are for the most part, lost in a kind of cloud. The figures are various, but he recognizes the same countenances repeated from time to time, especially of late years, that of an elderly woman, with a peculiarly arch and playful expression, and a dazzling brilliancy of eye, who seems just ready to speak with him.... This female is dressed in an old-fashioned Scottish plaid of Tartan, drawn up and brought forward over the head, and then crossed below the chin, as the plaid was worn by aged women in his younger day. He can seldom recognize among the spectres any figure or countenance which he remembers to have seen; but his own face has been presented to him, gradually undergoing the change from youth to manhood, and from manhood to old age.”
It is not necessary to call in the aid of an invisible being to explain such appearances. The house had been occupied by Scotch who dressed as described, and the influence they left impressed itself on the gentleman’s sensitive brain.
“All houses where men have lived and died are haunted houses,” not by actual ghosts, but by the subtile force which persons impart to everything with which they come in contact. That he was subject to some influence outside of himself is shown by the appearances always being of some one that he had never seen, and hence they could not have been revived pictures from his own brain. After he had been in the house for a long time he began to see his own face; that is, after he had imparted his own influence to his surroundings, he received them back as from a mirror.
Dendy, in his “Philosophy of Mystery,” mentions “M. Andral, who in his youth saw, in La Pitie, the putrid body of a child covered with larvæ, and during the next morning the spectre of this corpse lying on his table was as perfect as reality.” He could not see it by a mental effort, nor any where else than on his table, and whenever he looked at that, the appearance at once came. It may be said in explanation, that the sight of the disgusting object produced a strong impression on the optic nerves and mind, and a suggestive object, as the table reproduced the same state. We have no evidence that one object, under the same light, affects the optic nerves more than any other would under the same circumstances. Vivid mental impressions are more readily reproduced than those that scarcely ruffle the surface of thought; but this does not account for the student not seeing the appearance at any other time or place than on the table where it had laid, and which we would say retained the influence imparted to it by the body having lain there.
Professor Hitchcock says that during a severe sickness, “day after day visions of strange landscapes spread out before him—mountain, lake and forest; vast rocks, strata upon strata piled to the clouds; the panorama of a world shattered and upheaved, disclosing the grim secrets of creation, the unshapely and monstrous rudiments of organic being.” His son, Professor Charles Hitchcock, adds that his father saw the sandstone beds of the Connecticut valley spread out before him, covered with tracks, and by the superior insight wrought by sickness, cleared up some doubtful points to which he had vainly given his attention. Professor Hitchcock became, in consequence of his sickness, exceedingly sensitive, and the geological specimens near him, or that he had handled, brought up in his mind the pictures of their primeval age.
Hallucinations.—The received definition of an hallucination is a false perception without any material basis, being formed entirely in the mind. An individual who sees pictures on a blank wall, or who hears voices when no sound reaches his ear, is hallucinated. “The reason for this being that the erroneous perception constituting the hallucination is found in that part of the brain which ordinarily requires the excitation of sensorial impressions for its functions.” In this view, hallucination is evidence of mental derangement and incipient insanity. This explanation is by no means sufficient for this class of facts. That a certain tract of brain can of itself give the mind complicated representations, never before seen or imaged in the mind, is not established. The reappearance of objects that have been seen is better explained, and still more satisfactorily, by causes which unite them all together, and with all like phenomena. George Combe says of a painter who inherited much of the patronage of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and believed himself to possess a talent superior to his, was so fully engaged that he had painted three hundred large and small portraits in one year. The fact appeared physically impossible, but the secret of his rapidity and astonishing success was this: He required but one sitting of his model. His method was as follows, as given by himself: “When a sitter came, I looked attentively on him for half an hour, sketching from time to time on the canvas. I did not require a longer sitting. I removed the canvas, and passed to another person. When I wished to continue the first portrait, I recalled the man to my mind. I placed him on the chair, where I perceived him as distinctly as though really there, and, I may add, in form and color more decidedly brilliant. I looked from time to time at the imaginary figure and went on painting, occasionally stopping to examine the picture exactly as though the original was before me; whenever I looked towards the chair I saw the man. This method made me very popular, and as I always caught the resemblance, the sitters were delighted that I spared them the annoying sittings of other painters.”
This painter was far from incipient insanity. He was sensitive to impressions, and able by that organization to recall the image of the sitter, but not that of one who had not occupied the chair.