These diverse movements are normal: that is to say, they are executed according to the recognised rules of muscular activity; they do not go beyond the peripheral limit of the body; the nervous influx is diffused along the nerves in the ordinary manner.
If the nervous influx, or more correctly speaking, the mode of energy which constitutes it, goes beyond the material limits of the body, we have phenomena designated by de Rochas under the name of extériorisation de la motricité. These are again automatic phenomena for me, since the personal consciousness and the will do not participate in them. But they present a feature which distinguishes them from normal automatisms: they are exosomatic, if I may use that expression, while the others are endosomatic. These two expressions signify for me, the one exosomatic, that the movements are produced beyond the limits of the body; the other endosomatic, that they are produced within the limits of the body, that is to say by muscular activity acting physiologically. The first, which are apparently contrary to the ordinary data of experience, are paranormal phenomena, that is to say, outside the usual rule; the second, on the contrary, are normal. Parakinesis is a paranormal movement with contact; telekinesis is a paranormal movement without contact.
Sensibility presents the same categories of facts. Properly speaking there is no veritable automatism in phenomena of sensitivity; but we can nevertheless distinguish therein, first, normal sensitive phenomena—that is to say, phenomena produced under physiological conditions, more or less well-known, but frequent, such as hallucinations, hypermnesiæ; and second, paranormal phenomena, that is to say, phenomena which imply the existence of modes of perception to which the normal personality is foreign—clairvoyance, clairaudience, tele-æsthesia, telepathy (Myers, Gurney, Podmore), exteriorisation of motor power (de Rochas).
I have already indicated that these perceptions appear to depend upon the impersonal consciousness, and that the impressions thus perceived are transmitted to the personal consciousness in a given form analogous to that of dream perceptions—that is to say, in a dramatic form, with a concrete and symbolical setting. The impersonal consciousness seems, therefore, to be affected in a vague, general manner: the perceptions only assume an appearance of precision in those strata of the consciousness, where the notion of personality is determined. Hence the following conclusions, which I only give as probabilities: (1) that the notion of personality is susceptible of diverse degrees; (2) that the impressions perceived by the general consciousness are agreeable or disagreeable—that is to say, only impart to the personal consciousness a very vague message, moral comfort or indefinable discomfort; that, in rarer cases, the transmitted message is more precise, and takes the form of a detailed hallucination; (3) that, if telepathy exists, the general consciousness is capable of being affected by channels other than those of the ordinary senses, which have only a value in ratio to the personal consciousness of which they are, perhaps, the condition.
This last consideration brings us back to the definition which I gave a little while ago of consciousness, which is, for me, the common property of all living matter: its sensuality is limited and specified by the senses, is limited and specified by the personality and the will.
I beg the reader to excuse me for having entered into these explanations. I wished, as I said before, to state as clearly as possible the meanings I attach to the terms I use; I have still another task to accomplish somewhat similar to the last: which is to classify medianic phenomena before studying their relations with fraud. In the first place I divide them into two wide categories, each capable of penetrating into the other, for, with the exception of luminosities, physical phenomena are rarely devoid of all meaning, and intellectual phenomena have always some fact of a physical nature as substratum. Therefore, these two categories are two different aspects of the same phenomena rather than two distinct categories.
If we consider the purely physical side, we have the following approximate series:—
PHYSICAL PHENOMENA