1. The phenomena observable with good mediums are not those we observe in hysterical patients. I said I had obtained raps and movements without contact under conditions of control, which appeared to me to be convincing. I added that I had obtained by raps, or by the rappings of a table without contact, words and phrases which were extremely coherent. This is not quite the kind of phenomena to which hospital patients have accustomed us. What does Janet say on this point?
‘The essential point of spiritism is indeed, we believe, the disaggregation of psychological phenomena, and the formation beyond the personal perception of a second series of thoughts detached from the first. As for the means which the second personality employs to manifest itself unknown to the first—movements of tables, automatic writing or speaking, etc....—this is a secondary question (sic). Where do those sounds come from which are heard on tables and walls in answer to questions? Is it from a movement of the toes, of that contraction of the tendon supposed by Jobert de Lamballe...? Is it from a contraction of the stomach and from a veritable ventriloquism as Gros. Jean supposes, or from some other physical action yet unknown? Are they produced by the automatic movements of the medium himself, or, indeed, as appears to me most likely in some cases, in the obscurity demanded by the spirits(!) by the subconscious actions of one of the assistants, who deceives others and himself at the same time, and who becomes an accomplice without knowing it? It does not matter very much.’
That is not my opinion. I think, on the contrary, it matters a great deal. I am positive that every sincere and patient experimenter will observe, as I have done, in broad daylight, and not in obscurity, sounds and movements which will not appear to be explicable by any known cause. Those who, like myself, have verified these facts, will not dream of attributing them to unconscious or involuntary movements, to the cracking of a tendon, to ventriloquism. The cases observed by me will not admit of this explanation. Things happen as though some force or other were produced by the medium and the assistants, and could act beyond the limits of the body. If this fact be correct, can we consider it as secondary and without importance? On the contrary, does it not open to the psychology of the future the road of direct observation and experimentation, if, as I have tried to show, this force preserves certain relations with our general consciousness? Does this not make one think of those words of Proclus when speaking of souls:—
Τρίτη δὲ αὐταῖς πάρεστιν ἡ κατὰ τὴν ἰδίαν ὕπαρξιν ἐνέργεια, κινητικὴ μὲν ὕπάρχουσα τῶν φύσει ἑτεροκινήτων. Souls have a third force inherent to their essence, that of moving things which by their very nature are put into movement by an energy foreign to themselves.
Has not Janet a singular way of reasoning? He makes a reserve on the existence of another ‘physical action yet unknown,’ but quickly forgets it, and reasons as though that action were perfectly well known. ‘That action, whatever it may be, is always an involuntary and unconscious action of some one or other: the involuntary word from the intestines(!) is not more miraculous than is the involuntary word from the mouth; it is the psychological side of the problem which is the most interesting, and which ought to be the most studied.’
I am sure that those of my readers, whose patience has not been too severely tested by my long analysis of facts observed, will not consider my distinguished colleague’s conclusion as acceptable. The most interesting side of the phenomenon is, I think, the one which reveals to us an apparently new mode of action of the nervous influx upon matter.
2. These phenomena, again, are not the indication of a misère psychologique, as Janet thinks.
Let us discuss the cases observed by me. To follow my reasoning, it will be necessary to be familiar with the works of Gurney, Podmore, Sidgwick, Myers, Barrett, Hodgson, Lodge, Hyslop, du Prel, Perty, Hellenbach, Aksakow, Richet, de Rochas. To-day, it is no longer possible to shun the work of such savants, (when dealing with a question of such a nature as that which engrossed Janet) by simply saying as he did ‘that he had not had occasion to read the Philosophie der Mystik of a man like du Prel.’ He should have read that book ... and many more.
It seems to me to be now quite an established fact, that the impersonal consciousness is capable of perceiving accurate impressions independently of the senses. It translates these impressions in diverse ways in order to transmit them to the personal consciousness, but these translations are concrete and symbolical. It is a hallucination visual, auditory, or tactile. The form of subliminal messages, to use one of Myers’ expressions, is always the same, be the fact thus transmitted true or false, be it a reminiscence or a premonition. This is already a psychological ascertainment of great importance, for it puts us on the road we must follow, in order to discover the mental process of this psychological phenomenon. But there is something else. The hysteric who automatically simulates a drunkard, a general, a child, offers us a very different spectacle to the one offered us by the sensitive who telepathically sees an event happening afar off, or who predicts the future, or reveals facts unknown to himself and the assistants. There are thousands of examples of these facts; I have given a few which were observed by myself or related to me first-hand.
Is it possible to consider this extraordinary faculty as a ‘disaggregation’? Is it possible to class phenomena of this kind with the commonplace phenomena of somnambulism and ‘incarnation,’ the only ones Janet has observed? It suffices to put the question to receive the answer immediately. The psychological mechanism of these facts, so unlike one to the other, is probably the same, but the cause of the apparent automatism, motor or sensory, is certainly not the same. The sensitive, of whom I spoke, who sees in the mirror twenty-four hours beforehand, the very scenes she actually sees the next day, presents to us a phenomenon of considerable importance. It intimates that time and space are forms of the personal thought and consciousness, but that probably they have not the same signification for the impersonal consciousness. It is a phenomenon which, if it be true, demonstrates experimentally that Kant’s theory upon the contingency of these ‘categories’ necessary to all conscious and personal perception is exact.