626. The crystal-visions which the reader will find in detail in those Appendices have been in one sense logically placed at this point in my argument. We are discussing the control of inward vision, and crystal-gazing stands along with hypnotic suggestion as an empirical method of establishing that control.

A general review of results already thus obtained was needed for comparison with the phenomena of spontaneous inward vision - the veridical hallucinations - of which we shall presently have to treat.

But from another point of view the crystal-visions come here too early in our scheme. For few of our phenomena are likely to strike the reader as more fantastic and incredible. The visions appear lawless; - it seems to depend on mere chance whether one sees a skeleton or a scene of one's childhood - a nonsensical string of letters, or a picture of what a friend is doing at a distance - a Punch and Judy show, or a prophetic vision.

In a sense this is so; the crystal picture is what we must call (for want of knowledge of determining causes) a random glimpse into inner vision, a reflection caught at some odd angle from the universe as it shines through the perturbing medium of that special soul. Normal and supernormal knowledge and imaginings are blended in strangely mingled rays. Memory, dream, telepathy, telæsthesia, retrocognition, precognition, all are there. Nay, there are indications of spiritual communications and of a kind of ecstasy.1

627. We cannot pursue all these phenomena at once. In turning, as we must now turn, to the spontaneous cases of sensory automatism - of every type of which the induced visions of the crystal have afforded us a foretaste - we must needs single out first some fundamental phenomenon, illustrating some principle from which the rarer or more complex phenomena may be in part at least derived. Nor will there be difficulty in such a choice. Theory and actual experience point here in the same direction. If this inward vision, this inward audition, on whose importance I have been insisting, are to have any such importance - if they are to have any validity at all - if their contents are to represent anything more than dream or meditation - they must receive knowledge from other, minds or from distant objects; - knowledge which is not received by the external organs of sense. Communication must exist from the subliminal to the subliminal as well as from the supraliminal to the supraliminal parts of the being of different individual men.

Telepathy, in short, must be the prerequisite of all these supernormal phenomena.

Actual experience, as we shall presently see, confirms this view of the place of telepathy. For when we pass from the induced to the spontaneous phenomena we shall find that these illustrate before all else this transmission of thought and emotion directly from mind to mind.

628. Now as to telepathy, there is in the first place this to be said, that such a faculty must absolutely exist somewhere in the universe, if the universe contains any unembodied intelligences at all. Only if all the life of the cosmos be incarnated in organisms like our own, is it conceivable that all communication may pass through sensory channels resembling ours. If there be any life less rooted in flesh - any life more spiritual (as men have supposed that a higher life would be), then either it must not be social life - there can be no exchange of thought in it at all - or else there must exist some method of exchanging thought which does not depend upon either tongue or brain.

1 It is right also to state, although I cannot here discuss the problems involved, that I believe these visions to be sometimes seen by more than one person, simultaneously or successively.

Thus much, one may say, has been evident since man first speculated on such subjects at all. But the advance of knowledge has added a new presumption - it can be no more than a presumption - to all such cosmic speculations. I mean the presumption of continuity. Learning how close a tie in reality unites man with inferior lives, - once treated as something wholly alien, impassably separated from the human race - we are led to conceive that a close tie may unite him also with superior lives, - that the series may be fundamentally unbroken, the essential qualities of life the same throughout. It used to be asked whether man was akin to the ape or to the angel. I reply that the very fact of his kinship with the ape is proof presumptive of his kinship with the angel.

It is natural enough that man's instinctive feeling should have anticipated any argument of this speculative type. Men have in most ages believed, and do still widely believe, in the reality of prayer; that is, in the possibility of telepathic communication between our human minds and minds above our own, which are supposed not only to understand our wish or aspiration, but to impress or influence us inwardly in return.

So widely spread has been this belief in prayer that it is somewhat strange that men should not have more commonly made what seems the natural deduction - namely, that if our spirits can communicate with higher spirits in a way transcending sense, they may also perhaps be able in like manner to communicate with each other. The idea, indeed, has been thrown out at intervals by leading thinkers - from Augustine to Bacon, from Bacon to Goethe, from Goethe to Tennyson.

Isolated experiments from time to time indicated its practical truth. Yet it is only within the last few years that the vague and floating notion has been developed into definite theory by systematic experiment.