Part 23

From the natural or spontaneous cases of graphic automatism let us pass on to the induced or experimental cases. I will give first a singular transitional instance, where there is no voluntary muscular action, but yet a previous exercise of expectant attention is necessary to secure the result.

My friend Mr. A., who is much interested in mental problems, has practised introspection with assiduity and care. He finds that if he fixes his attention on some given word, and then allows his hand to rest laxly in the writing attitude, his hand presently writes the word without any conscious volition of his own; the sensation being as though the hand were moved by some power other than himself. This happens whether his eyes are open or shut, so that the gaze is not necessary to fix the attention. If he wills _not_ to write, he can remove his hand and avert the action. But if he chooses a movement simpler than writing, for instance, if he holds out his open hand and strongly imagines that it will close, a kind of spasm ensues, and the hand closes, even though he exert all his voluntary force to keep it open.

It is manifest how analogous these actions are to much which in bygone times has been classed as _possession_. Mr. A. has the very sensation of being possessed,—moved from within by some agency which overrules his volition, and yet we can hardly doubt that it is merely his _unconscious_ influencing his _conscious_ life. The act of attention, so to say, has stamped the idea of the projected movement so strongly on his brain that the movement works itself out automatically, in spite of subsequent efforts to prevent it. The best parallel will be the case of a promise made during the hypnotic trance, which the subject is irresistibly impelled to fulfil on waking.[28] From this curious transitional case we pass on to cases where no idea of the words written has passed through the writer’s consciousness. It is not easy to make quite sure that this is the case, and the _modus operandi_ needs some consideration.

First we have to find an automatic writer. Perhaps one person in a hundred possesses this tendency; that is, if he sits for half an hour on a dozen evenings, amid quiet surroundings and in an expectant frame of mind, with his hand on pencil or planchette, he will begin to write words which he has not consciously thought of. But if he sees the words as he writes them he will unavoidably guess at what is coming, and spoil the spontaneous flow. Some persons can avoid this by reading a book while they write, and so keeping eyes and thoughts away from the message.[29] Another plan is to use a _planchette_; which is no occult instrument, but simply a thin piece of board supported on two castors, and on a third leg consisting of a pencil which just touches the paper. A planchette has two advantages over the ordinary pencil; namely, that a slighter impulse will start it, and that it is easier to write (or rather scrawl) without seeing or feeling what you are writing. These precautions, of course, are for the operator’s own satisfaction; they are no proof to other people that he is not writing the words intentionally. That can only be proved to others if he writes facts demonstrably unknown to his conscious self; as in the telepathic cases to which we shall come further on. But as yet I am only giving fresh examples of a kind of mental action which physiology already recognizes: examples, moreover, which any reader who will take the requisite trouble can probably reproduce, either in his own person or in the person of some trusted friend.

I lately requested a lady whom I knew to be a careful observer, but who was quite unfamiliar with this subject, to try whether she could write with a pencil or planchette, and report to me the result. Her experience may stand as typical.

“I have tried the planchette,” she writes, “and I get writing, certainly not done by my hand consciously; but it is nonsense, such as _Mebew_. I tried holding a pencil, and all I got was _mm_ or _rererere_, then for hours together I got this: _Celen, Celen_. Whether the first letter was C or L I could never make out. Then I got _I Celen_. I was disgusted, and took a book and read while I held the pencil. Then I got _Helen_. Now note this fact: I never make H like that (like I and C juxtaposed); I make it thus: (like a printed H). I then saw that the thing I read as _I Celen_ was _Helen_, my name. For days I had only _Celen_, and never for one moment expected it meant what it did.”

Now this case suggests several curious analogies. First, there is an analogy with those cases of double consciousness where the patient in the “second state” has to learn to write anew. He learns more rapidly than he learnt as a child, because the necessary adjustments do already exist in his brain, although he cannot use them in the normal manner. So here, too, the hidden other self was learning to write, but learnt more rapidly than a child learns, inasmuch as the process was now but the transference of an organized memory from one stream of the inner being to another. But, secondly, we must observe (and now I am referring to many other cases besides the case cited) that the hidden self does not learn to write just as a child learns, but rather by passing through the stages first of _atactic_, then of _amnemonic_ agraphy. That is to say, first, the pencil scrawls vaguely, like the patient who cannot form a single letter; then it writes the wrong letters or the wrong words, like the patient who writes blunderingly, or chooses the letters JICMNOS for James Simmonds, JASPENOS for James Pascoe, &c.; ultimately it writes correctly, though very likely (as here, and in a case of Dr. Macnish’s) the handwriting of the _secondary self_[30] (if I may suggest a needed term) is different from the handwriting of the _primary_.

Once more: the constant repetition of the same word (which I have seen to continue with automatic writers even for months) is more characteristic of aphasia than of agraphy. And we may just remark in passing that vocal automatism presents the same analysis with morbid aphasia which graphic automatism presents with morbid agraphy. When the enthusiasts in Irving’s church first yelled vaguely, then shouted some meaningless words many hundred times, and then gave a “trance-address,” their _secondary self_ (I may suggest) was attaining articulate speech through just the stages through which an aphasic patient will sometimes pass.[31] The parallel is at least a curious one; and if the theory which traces the automatic speech of aphasic patients to the _right_ (or less-used) cerebral hemisphere be confirmed, a singular light might be thrown on the _locus_ of the second self.

But I must pass on to one more case of automatic writing, a case which I select as marking the furthest limit to which, so far as I am at present aware, pure unconscious cerebration in the waking state can go. Mr. A., whom I have already mentioned, is not usually able to get any automatic writing except (as described above) of a word on which his attention has been previously fixed. But at one period of his life, when his brain was much excited by over-study, he found that if he held a pencil and wrote _questions_ the pencil would, in a feeble scrawling hand, quite unlike his own, write _answers_ which he could in nowise foresee. Moreover, as will be seen, he was not only unable to foresee these answers, he was sometimes unable even to comprehend them. Many of them were anagrams—transpositions of letters which he had to puzzle over before he could get at their meaning. This makes, of course, the main importance of the case; this proof of the concurrent action of a secondary self so entirely dissociated from the primary consciousness that the questioner is almost baffled by his own automatic replies. The matter of the replies is on the usual level of automatic messages, which are apt to resemble the conversations of a capricious dream. The interest of this form of self-interrogation certainly does not lie in the wisdom of the oracle received.

“The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil they got there.”

I abridge Mr. A.’s account, and give the _answers_ in italics.

“‘What is it,’ said Mr. A., ‘that now moves my pen?’ _Religion._ ‘What is religion?’ _Worship._ Here arose a difficulty. Although I did not expect either of these answers, yet, when the first few letters had been written, I expected the remainder of the word. This might vitiate the result. But now, as if the intelligent wished to prove by the manner of answering, that the answer could be due to _it_ alone, and in no part to mere expediency, my next question received a singular reply. ‘Worship of what?’ _Wbwbwbwb._ ‘What is the meaning of wb?’ _Win, buy._ ‘What?’ _Knowledge._ On the second day the first question was—‘What is man?’ _Flise._ My pen was at first very violently agitated, which had not been the case on the first day. It was quite a minute before it wrote as above. On the analogy of _wb_ I proceeded: ‘What does F stand for?’ _Fesi._ ‘L?’ ‘;_Le._’ ‘I?’ ‘;_Ivy._’ ‘S?’ _Sir._ ‘E?’ _Eye._ ‘Is _Fesi le ivy, sir, eye_, an anagram?’ _Yes._ ‘How many words in the answer?’ _Four._”

Mr. A. was unable to shift these letters into an intelligible sentence, and began again on the third day with the same question:

“‘What is man?’ _Tefi, Hasl, Esble, Lies._ ‘Is this an anagram?’ _Yes._ ‘How many words in the answer?’ _Five._ ‘Must I interpret it myself?’ _Try._ Presently I got out, _Life is the less able_. Next I tried the previous anagram, and at last obtained _Every life is yes_.”

Other anagrams also were given, as _wfvs yoitet_ (Testify! vow!); _ieb; iov ogf wle_ (I go, vow belief!); and in reply to the question, “How shall I believe?” _neb 16 vbliy ev 86 e earf ee_ (Believe by fear even! 1866). How unlikely it is that all this was due to mere accident may be seen by any one who will take letters (the vowels and consonants roughly proportioned to the frequency of their actual use), and try to make up a series of handfuls _completely_ into words possessing any grammatical coherence or intelligible meaning. Now in Mr. A.’s case all the _professed_ anagrams were _real_ anagrams (with one error of _i_ for _e_); some of the sentences were real answers to the questions; and not even the absurdest sentences were wholly meaningless. In the two first given, for instance, Mr. A. was inclined to trace a reference to books lately read; the second sentence alluding to such doctrines as that “Death solves mysteries which life cannot unlock;” the first to Spinoza’s tenet that all existence is affirmation of the Deity. We seem therefore to see the secondary self struggling to express abstract thought with much the same kind of incoherence with which we have elsewhere seen it struggle to express some concrete symbol. To revert to our former parallel, we may say that “Every life is yes” bears something the same relation to a thought of Spinoza’s which the letters JICMNOS bear to the name James Simmonds.

Let us consider, then, how far we have got. Mr. A. (on the view here taken) is communing with his second self, with another focus of cerebral activity within his own brain. And I imagine this other focus of personality to be capable of exhibiting about as much intelligence as one exhibits in an ordinary dream. Mr. A. awake is addressing Mr. A. asleep; and the first replies, _Religion_, _Worship_, &c., are very much the kind of answer that one gets if one addresses a man who is partially comatose, or muttering in broken slumber. Such a man will make brief replies which show at least that the _words_ of the question are caught, though perhaps not its meaning. In the next place, the answer _wb_ must, I think, as Mr. A. suggests, be taken as an attempt to prove independent action, a confused inchoate response to the writer’s fear that his waking self might be suggesting the words written. The same trick of language—abbreviation by initial letters, occurs on the second day again; and this kind of _continuity of character_, which automatic messages often exhibit, has been sometimes taken to indicate the persisting presence of an extraneous mind. But perhaps its true parallel may be found in the well-known cases of intermittent memory, where a person repeatedly subjected to certain abnormal states, as somnambulism or the hypnotic trance, carries on from one access into another a chain of recollections of which his ordinary self knows nothing.

In Mr. A.’s case, however, some persons might think that the proof of an independent intelligence went much further than this; for his hand wrote anagrams which his waking brain took an hour or more to unriddle. And certainly there could hardly be a clearer proof that the answers did not pass through the writer’s primary consciousness; that they proceeded, if from himself at all, from a secondary self such as I have been describing. But further than this we surely need not go. The answers contain no unknown facts, no new materials, and there seems no reason _à priori_ why the dream-self should not puzzle the waking self; why its fantastic combinations of old elements of memory should not need some pains to unravel. I may perhaps be permitted to quote in illustration a recent dream of my own, to which I doubt not that some of my readers can supply parallel instances. I dreamt that I saw written in gold on a chapel wall some Greek hexameters, which, I was told, were the work of an eminent living scholar. I gazed at them with much respect, but dim comprehension, and succeeded in carrying back into waking memory the bulk of one line:—ὁ μὲν κατὰ γᾶν θαλερὸν κύσε δακνόμενον πῦρ. On waking, it needed some little thought to show me that κατὰ γᾶν was a solecism for ὑπὸ γᾶν, revived from early boyhood, and that the line meant: “He indeed beneath the earth embraced the ever-burning, biting fire.” Further reflection reminded me that I had lately been asked to apply to the Professor in question for an inscription to be placed over the tomb of a common acquaintance. The matter had dropped, and I had not thought of it again. But here, I cannot doubt, was my inner self’s prevision of that unwritten epitaph; although the drift of it certainly showed less tact and fine feeling than my scholarly friend would have exhibited on such an occasion.

Now just in this same way, as it seems to me, Mr. A.’s inner self retraced the familiar path of one of his childish amusements, and mystified the waking man with the puzzles of the boy. It may be that the unconscious self moves more readily than the conscious along these old-established and stable mnemonic tracks, that we constantly retrace our early memories without knowing it, and that when some recollection seems to have _left_ us it has only passed into a storehouse from which we can no longer summon it at will.

But we have not yet done with Mr. A.’s experiences. Yielding to the suggestion that these anagrams were the work of some intelligence without him, he placed himself in the mental attitude of colloquy with some unknown being. Note the result:

“Who art thou? _Clelia._ Thou art a woman? _Yes._ Hast thou ever lived upon the earth? _No._ Wilt thou? _Yes._ When? _Six years._ Wherefore dost thou speak with me? _E if Clelia el._”

There is a disappointing ambiguity about this last very simple anagram, which may mean “I Clelia feel,” or, “I Clelia flee.”

But mark what has happened. Mr. A. has created and is talking to a personage in his own dream. In other words, his secondary self has produced in his primary self the illusion that there is a separate intelligence at work; and this illusion of the primary self reacts on the secondary, as the words which we whisper back to the muttering dreamer influence the course of a dream which we cannot follow. The fact, therefore, of Clelia’s apparent personality and unexpected rejoinders do not so much as suggest any need to look outside Mr. A’s mind for her origin. The figures in our own ordinary dreams say things which startle and even shock us; nay, these shadows sometimes even defy our attempts at analyzing them away. On the rare occasions, so brief and precious, when one dreams and knows it is a dream, I always endeavor to get at my dream-personages and test their independence of character by a few suitable inquiries. Unfortunately they invariably vanish under my perhaps too hasty interrogation. But a shrewd Northumbrian lately told me the following dream, unique in his experience, and over which he had often pondered.

“I was walking in my dream,” he said, “in a Newcastle street, when suddenly I knew so clearly that it was a dream, that I thought I would find out what the folk in my dream thought of themselves. I saw three foundrymen sitting at a yard door. I went up and said to all three: ‘Are you conscious of a real objective existence?’ Two of the men stared and laughed at me. But the man in the middle stretched out his two hands to his two mates and said, ‘Feel that,’ They said, ‘We do feel you,’ Then he held out his hand to me, and I told him that I felt it solid and warm; then he said: ‘Well, sir, my mates feel that I am a real man of flesh and blood, and you feel it, and I feel it. What more would you have?’ Now I had not formed any notion of what this man was going to say. And I could not answer him, and I awoke.”

Now I take this self-assertive dream-foundry-man to be the exact analogue of Clelia. Let us now see whether anything of Clelia survived the excited hour which begat her.

“On the fourth day,” says Mr. A., “I began my questioning in the same exalted mood, but to my surprise did not get the same answer. ‘Wherefore,’ I asked, ‘dost thou speak with me?’ (The answer was a wavy line, denoting repetition, and meaning.—‘Wherefore dost _thou_ speak with _me_?’) ‘Do I answer myself?’ _Yes._ ‘Is Clelia here?’ _No._ ‘Who is it, then, now here?’ _Nobody._ ‘Does Clelia exist?’ _No._ ‘With whom did I speak yesterday?’ _No one._ ‘Do souls exist in another world?’ _Mb._ ‘What does _mb_ mean? ’_May be._”

And this was all the revelation which our inquirer got. Some further anagrams were given, but Clelia came no more. Such indeed, on the view here set forth, was the natural conclusion. The dream passed through its stages, and faded at last away.

I have heard of a piece of French statuary entitled “Jeune homme caressant sa Chimère.” Clelia, could the sculptor have caught her, might have been his fittest model; what else could he have found at once so intimate and so fugitive, discerned so elusively without us, and yet with such a root within?

I might mention many other strange varieties of graphic automatism; as _reversed script_, so written as to be read in a mirror;[32] alternating styles of handwriting, symbolic arabesque, and the like. But I must hasten on to the object towards which I am mainly tending, which is to show, not so much the influence exercised by a man’s own mind on itself as the influence exercised by one man’s mind on another’s. We have been watching, so to say, the psychic wave as it washed up deep-sea products on the open shore. But the interest will be keener still if we find that wave washing up the products of some far-off clime; if we discover that there has been a profound current with no surface trace—a current propagated by an unimagined impulse, and obeying laws as yet unknown.

The psychical phenomenon here alluded to is that for which I have suggested the name Telepathy; the transference of ideas or sensations from one conscious or unconscious mind to another, without the agency of any of the recognized organs of sense.

Our first task in the investigation of this influence has naturally been to assure ourselves of the transmission of thought between two persons, both of them in normal condition; the _agent_, conscious of the thought which he wishes to transmit, the _percipient_, conscious of the thought as he receives it.

The “Proceedings” of the Society for Psychical Research must for a long time be largely occupied with experiments of this definite kind. But, of course, if such an influence truly exists, its manifestations are not likely to be confined to the transference of a name or a cypher, a card or a diagram, from one man’s field of mental vision to another’s, by deliberate effort and as a preconcerted experiment. If Telepathy be anything at all, it involves one of the profoundest laws of mind, and, like other important laws, may be expected to operate in many unlooked for ways, and to be at the root of many scattered phenomena, inexplicable before. Especially must we watch for traces of it wherever unconscious mental action is concerned. For the telepathic impact, we may fairly conjecture, may often be a stimulus so gentle as to need some concentration or exaltation in the percipient’s mind, or at least some inhibition of competing stimuli, in order to enable him to realize it in consciousness at all. And in fact (as we have shown or are prepared to show), almost every abnormal mental condition (consistent with sanity) as yet investigated yields some indication of telepathic action.

Telepathy, I venture to maintain, is an occasional phenomenon in somnambulism and in the hypnotic state; it is one of the obscure causes which generate hallucinations; it enters into dream and into delirium; and it often rises to its maximum of vividness in the swoon that ends in death.

In accordance with analogy, therefore, we may expect to find that automatic writing—this new glimpse into our deep-sea world—will afford us some fresh proof of currents which set obscurely towards us from the depths of minds other than our own. And we find, I believe, that this is so. Had space permitted it, I should have liked to detail some transitional cases, to have shown by what gradual steps we discover that it is not always one man’s intelligence _alone_ which is concerned in the message given, that an infusion of facts known to some spectator only may mingle in the general tenor which the writer’s mind supplies. Especially I should have wished to describe some attempts at this kind of thought-transference attended with only slight or partial success. For the mind justly hesitates to give credence to a palmary group of experiments unless it has been prepared for them by following some series of gradual suggestions and approximate endeavor.

But the case which I am about to relate, although a _culminant_, is not an _isolated_ one in the life-history of the persons concerned. The Rev. P. H. Newnham, Rector of Maker, Devonport, experienced an even more striking instance of thought-transference with Mrs. Newnham, some forty years ago, before their marriage; and during subsequent years there has been frequent and unmistakable transmission of thought from husband to wife of an _involuntary_ kind, although it was only in the year 1871 that they succeeded in getting the ideas transferred by intentional effort.

Mr. Newnham’s communication consists of a copy of entries in a note-book made during eight months in 1871, at the actual moments of experiment. Mrs. Newnham independently corroborates the account. The entries had previously been shown to a few personal friends, but had never been used, and were not meant to be used, for any literary purpose. Mr. Newnham has kindly placed them at my disposal, from a belief that they may serve to elucidate important truth.

“Being desirous,” says the first entry in Mr. Newnham’s note-book, “of investigating accurately the phenomena of ‘planchette,’ myself and my wife have agreed to carry out a series of systematic experiments, in order to ascertain the conditions under which the instrument is able to work. To this end the following rules are strictly observed: