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I ran into him shoving a plane in that carpenter shop underneath the lower level. The queer thing was that in all this time Tony had never been above ground, never seen daylight, never had a breath of outdoor air. He hadn't any home, and somehow he managed to sleep in some corner or other of these underground regions, and of course he ate at underground lunch-counters and bought his clothes, if he bought any, at underground shops."

"Very odd," said I.

"But this Tony was an ambitious fellow," my guide continued. "For quite a while I lost sight of him. Then one morning I caught his grin behind the counter of a fruit-stand just off the concourse. He was proprietor! 'Where are you living now?' I asked. He laughed, asked me to step in, and showed me a cot under the counter! Well, Tony prospered to beat the band. A year or so after that, he had a whole string of fruit and candy shops underground, and he was living at the Commodore, which of course he could reach without going outdoors. The day I met him, I hardly knew him, he was so dolled up. 'Been outdoors yet, Tony?' I said. 'No,' he replied, sort of sheepish. 'I've wanted to, but one day when I

poked my head out of the door of the hotel the sunlight just blinded me, and the outside air made me dizzy. I haven't tried it since." " "That's fantastic!"

a

"Yes, isn't it?" my guide agreed. "And then?"

"Tony's later career is absolutely knock-out. He's operator of a big restaurant here in the station; he has a clothing store, a dozen de luxe soda-fountains, practically all the fruit-stands-oh, I don't know what all! He lives in a suite in one of these apartment-houses above our heads, which he reaches by the underground route. The week of the Sargent Exhibition at the art gallery here in the station I saw him buying a tenthousand-dollar picture for his apartment. One day a rich friend of his turned up from Italy. Tony led him through these underground streets and caves; then he wanted to show him the rest of the city; but Tony didn't know anything about New York except its underground regions, so-what do you think?-he took his friend for a ride in the subway!"

"Oh, come now,' ," I protested; "you're spoofing me! There never was any such person as Tony." My guide grinned. "Well, maybe But why not?"

not.

I'

THE FUTURE OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Part Two-Modern Science Tends to Clear the Path for It

E. N. BENNETT

F WE accept the view that psychical research holds ample promise of a useful future, we may consider the various lines of our advance.

Any serious study of psychical research demands as its first essential a knowledge of the results secured from a careful consideration of telepathic phenomena. Many researchers would indeed maintain that their investigations need not extend beyond these limits. They regard telepathy, once scientifically established, as a working hypothesis which will cover the whole field of those abnormal phenomena which form our subject-matter. From this point of view, apparitions, clairvoyance, crystal visions, even the physical phenomena of the séance room-these and other abnormal happenings can be explained by the exercise in one shape or another of the transferences of human thought and volition outside the ordinary channels of sense.

Those who hold that thought transference is the solvent of all our perplexities in psychical research may point to the fact that down the centuries one marvel after another appears to have been directly attributable to this cause. It is easy to see how the miracles recorded in biblical and ecclesiastical literature, and the amazing records of witchcraft and

sorcery, may to a large extent be brought within the compass of the telepathic solution.

No serious attempts to investigate the conditions or results of thought transference appear to have been undertaken before the middle of the last century. It was not indeed until 1876 that Sir William Barrett really initiated the careful and scientific study of telepathic phenomena which has been continued by the Society for Psychical Research in England, and on the Continent by Boirac, Osty, Tischner, and many other distinguished savants. The results obtained have been, it is true, questioned and criticized at every turn by certain scientists who deny that telepathy is either proved or indeed possible. Professor Jodl (quoted by Tischner) goes so far as to say, "Such a direct transmission of ideas from one mind to another, without any perceptible physical method of communication, would indicate the presence of a crack in the very foundation of all our views on Nature." "Psycho-physics," writes Dr. Henning, "yes, even psychology as a science must be utterly wrecked before we have recourse to telepathy." It is, however, useless to indulge in mere a priori refutations or, in the case of telepathic experiments, to concen

trate on the failures and ignore the successes. Suffice it to say that evidence, varied, cumulative, irresistible, now exists which has established telepathy as a scientific fact.

The study of telepathic phenomena suggests the interesting question whether telepathy is a psychic factor of a permanent and regular character or whether it represents merely the dying embers of a once more active force. Can the transference of human thought apart from physical media be developed and systematized on such a scale as to suggest immense possibilities in the human relationships of the future? Or will such development be gradually checked by the fact that telepathic phenomena must be classed with those local and obscure eccentricities of the human body which serve merely as vestigial landmarks in the long history of the race? Despite the alluring possibilities of the first suggestion, indications exist which lend color to the pathetic belief that research has only discovered this force in the evening of its existence.

This view of telepathy as a rudimentary survival seems to be strengthened by the admitted fact that manifestations of telepathy are far more certain and more striking when the percipient is under hypnotic suggestion; for if it be the subliminal self which rises above the threshold in hypnotic slumber and obeys the suggestion of the agent's mind, this is itself in all probability a manifestation of the experience of the race rather than of the individual. The everyday self, the product of normal experience, is influenced to a much slighter degree by hypnotic suggestion than that mysterious entity, the

secondary self, trailing its clouds of precarnate existence.

In the dim recesses of our race history our pithecoid ancestors in default of language may well have possessed telepathic powers for the communication of their simple ideas, which powers have gradually been rendered less necessary as language developed, and may, unless stimulated and exercised, finally perish from atrophy. Such a theory would be illustrated by those stories which are furnished by reliable travelers and missionaries with reference to the amazing transmission of news which at times appears to take place among native races of a low level of civilization without any opportunity for normal methods of communication.

Nor indeed is it easy to avoid the conclusion that some form of telepathy exists among various forms of animal life. The homing instinct of the cat and the pigeon, and bewildering facts connected with the flight of birds of passage, inexplicable from any ordinary laws of experience, may conceivably be examples of a form of telepathy infinitely more regular and efficient than those fitful manifestations on the part of Homo sapiens which engage the attention of psychical researchers. Or again when I watch the curving flight of the beautiful ruffs and reeves round a Norwegian lake the simultaneous rise, the instantaneous turn of the whole flock in the fraction of a second -or again when one sees hundreds of starlings rise together and afterward return to their trees in complete unison, I find it difficult to regard these charming incidents as due to normal or even abnormal sight or hearing.

Can we go further and suggest that some of the baffling phenomena of heredity and instinct may ultimately find their origin in the telepathic transference of thought? We accept the word instinct as an adequate explanation of the habits of sentient creatures, but it explains nothing. Every manifestation of instinct is obviously due to volition, however rudimentary; is, in other words, a mental as distinct (so far as such distinction goes) from a physical phenomenon. It is difficult to trace an instinctive movement to material germ-cells. A mental fact must have a mental origin. "The burned child dreads the fire" as the result of its own experience; but no experience taught the baby how to use its lips at its first meal, any more than it taught the chicken how to escape from the egg-shell. The collective experience of the race, the alleged source of these phenomena, may sooner or later be recognized as the telepathic transference from the mind of the parents of stereotyped concepts derived from the experiences of countless generations. Well established as it is in the simpler forms of direct communication between agent and percipient, telepathy is sometimes called on to explain the whole series of phenomena which are grouped under such heads as clairvoyance, psychometry, crystal-gazing, automatic writing. The more or less public exhibitions of alleged clairvoyance which form the central feature of innumerable spiritualist services in this and other countries do not, as a rule, furnish convincing indications of supernormal activity. I have never seen any public trance-speaker

who, despite the conventional twitchings and contortions which herald the ingress of the spirit control, did not appear to be in complete possession of his or her normal consciousness. But the prolonged and careful investigation of Mrs. Piper's mediumship, and those more recently undertaken with continental clairvoyants by Doctors Tischner, Osty, and others, stand on a very different footing. In the face of the accumulated evidence furnished by such research, those who rely on telepathy as the universal solvent of psychic difficulties must often falter where they firmly stood.

Nor again can the agency of living minds always furnish a satisfactory explanation in the rare but indubitable cases of prevision or precognition exhibited by clairvoyants. From what source again come those precise statements made from time to time by trustworthy mediums, under strict test conditions, with respect to certain articles placed in their hands? Clairvoyance of this type, often called psychometry, might almost suggest the validity of Fechner's odylic influences, which may perhaps appear rather less fantastic in an age when the dividing line between matter and spirit is becoming theoretically obsolete. Moreover, to psychometry, once accepted as a scientific fact, an interesting corollary would attach; for if mere contact with a man's cravat can produce from the medium a detailed and accurate account of the suicide of an unhappy prisoner who had worn the cravat, the walls of a house might in the same inscrutable fashion be responsible for suggesting the auditory and visual phenomena of a

haunted house. Some well attested cases exist in which alteration of structure in a house has been followed by the cessation of the hauntings.

22

If telepathy from the living breaks down when called on to explain all the facts of clairvoyance, there exists another explanation which has received the enthusiastic support of those investigators who, while they reject transference between normal minds, point enthusiastically to the alleged efficiency of the secondary or subliminal self. Fascinating descriptions are given of this "mysterious Mr. Hyde which lurks in each of us," this subconscious mind working in the inner sanctum, as director and controller, while the normal everyday self transacts the conventional business of life in the open shop. The amazing performances of a "calculating boy," the sudden conversion of a Bunyan or a Paul, the supreme genius of a Shakspere or a Handel, are alike referred to that comprehensive source of all things supernormal, the secondary self. This subliminal self can, we are assured, furnish a sensitive with information which otherwise could not possibly be possessed by any other living person. It not only explore the dim recesses of past experience but foretell with accuracy the events of the future. Abandoning the outer trenches of telepathic defense, some modern spokesmen of psychical research find, as they think, an impregnable stronghold in the limitless efficiency of the subliminal self. If the self-styled George Pelham convinces his friends that he is what he claims to be, this is simply a manifestation of Mrs. Piper's subcon

scious self; in other words, George Pelham is Mrs. Piper. If a medium announces in England the death in battle of an officer hours before the bad news has even reached his battalion's base, this (if not a happy shot) is merely a striking instance of those abnormal powers of cognition possessed by the medium's subliminal consciousness.

Can this hypothesis bear the heavy strain put upon it? After all, the phrase subliminal self, unconscious mind-call it what you will-embodies nothing at all beyond a hypothesis. Nobody has yet demonstrated the existence of such a division of the mind attached to each living personality, nor defined its qualities or capacities. There are indubitably certain depths in the human mind which may be reached by the processes of psychoanalysis, but in these cases there appears to be no adequate reason for any bewildering thesis of two or more distinct minds attached to the same human organism. There are diversities of mental operation, but the same mind; a composite mentality capable of moral excellence on the one hand, and on the other exposing to the Freudian probe the lower levels of a non-moral animal existence.

Nor only have we failed to prove the existence or determine the activities of an entity so improbable as a second self, but this popular hypothesis cannot even qualify itself by fitting the facts, unless indeed we are prepared to assign to such an additional human mind a considerable measure of omniscience. How much further do we get by declaring that such intelligences as Phinuit, George Pelham, or Feda are mere

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