MENTAL TELEGRAPHY
A MANUSCRIPT WITH A HISTORY
Note to the Editor.—By glancing over the enclosed bundle of rusty old manuscript, you will perceive that I once made a great discovery: the discovery that certain sorts of things which, from the beginning of the world, had always been regarded as merely ‘curious coincidences’—that is to say, accidents—were no more accidental than is the sending and receiving of a telegram an accident. I made this discovery sixteen or seventeen years ago, and gave it a name—‘Mental Telegraphy.’ It is the same thing around the outer edges of which the Psychical Society of England began to grope (and play with) four or five years ago, and which they named ‘Telepathy.’ Within the last two or three years they have penetrated towards the heart of the matter, however, and have found out that mind can act upon mind in a quite detailed and elaborate way over vast stretches of land and water. And they have succeeded in doing, by their great credit and influence, what I could never have done—they have convinced the world that mental telegraphy is not a jest, but a fact, and that it is a thing not rare, but exceedingly common. They have done our age a service—and a very great service, I think.
In this old manuscript you will find mention of an extraordinary experience of mine in the mental telegraphic line, of date about the year 1874 or 1875—the one concerning the Great Bonanza book. It was this experience that called my attention to the matter under consideration. I began to keep a record, after that, of such experiences of mine as seemed explicable by the theory that minds telegraph thoughts to each other. In 1878 I went to Germany and began to write the book called A Tramp Abroad. The bulk of this old batch of manuscript was written at that time and for that book. But I removed it when I came to revise the volume for the press; for I feared that the public would treat the thing as a joke and throw it aside, whereas I was in earnest.
At home, eight or ten years ago, I tried to creep in under shelter of an authority grave enough to protect the article from ridicule—the North American Review. But Mr. Metcalf was too wary for me. He said that to treat these mere ‘coincidences’ seriously was a thing which the Review couldn’t dare to do; that I must put either my name or my nom de plume to the article, and thus save the Review from harm. But I couldn’t consent to that; it would be the surest possible way to defeat my desire that the public should receive the thing seriously, and be willing to stop and give it some fair degree of attention. So I pigeon-holed the MS., because I could not get it published anonymously.
Now see how the world has moved since then. These small experiences of mine, which were too formidable at that time for admission to a grave magazine—if the magazine must allow them to appear as something above and beyond ‘accidents’ and ‘coincidences’—are trifling and commonplace now, since the flood of light recently cast upon mental telegraphy by the intelligent labours of the Psychical Society. But I think they are worth publishing, just to show what harmless and ordinary matters were considered dangerous and incredible eight or ten years ago.
As I have said, the bulk of this old manuscript was written in 1878; a later part was written from time to time, two, three, and four years afterwards. The ‘Postscript’ I add to-day.
May, ‘78.—Another of those apparently trifling things has happened to me which puzzle and perplex all men every now and then, keep them thinking an hour or two, and leave their minds barren of explanation or solution at last. Here it is—and it looks inconsequential enough, I am obliged to say. A few days ago I said: ‘It must be that Frank Millet doesn’t know we are in Germany, or he would have written long before this. I have been on the point of dropping him a line at least a dozen times during the past six weeks, but I always decided to wait a day or two longer, and see if we shouldn’t hear from him. But now I will write.’ And so I did. I directed the letter to Paris, and thought, ‘Now we shall hear from him before this letter is fifty miles from Heidelberg—it always happens so.’
True enough; but why should it? That is the puzzling part of it. We are always talking about letters ‘crossing’ each other, for that is one of the very commonest accidents of this life. We call it ‘accident,’ but perhaps we misname it. We have the instinct a dozen times a year that the letter we are writing is going to ‘cross’ the other person’s letter; and if the reader will rack his memory a little he will recall the fact that this presentiment had strength enough to it to make him cut his letter down to a decided briefness, because it would be a waste of time to write a letter which was going to ‘cross,’ and hence be a useless letter. I think that in my experience this instinct has generally come to me in cases where I had put off my letter a good while in the hope that the other person would write.
Yes, as I was saying, I had waited five or six weeks; then I wrote but three lines, because I felt and seemed to know that a letter from Millet would cross mine. And so it did. He wrote the same day that I wrote. The letters crossed each other. His letter went to Berlin, care of the American minister, who sent it to me. In this letter Millet said he had been trying for six weeks to stumble upon somebody who knew my German address, and at last the idea had occurred to him that a letter sent to the care of the embassy at Berlin might possibly find me.