629. To make such experiment possible has indeed been no easy matter. It has been needful to elicit and to isolate from the complex emotions and interactions of common life a certain psychical element of whose nature and working we have beforehand but a very obscure idea.

If indeed we possessed any certain method of detecting the action of telepathy, - of distinguishing it from chance-coincidence or from unconscious suggestion, - we should probably find that its action was widely diffused and mingled with other more commonplace causes in many incidents of life. We should find telepathy, perhaps, at the base of many sympathies and antipathies, of many wide communities of feeling; operating, it may be, in cases as different as the quasi-recognition of some friend in a stranger seen at a distance just before the friend himself unexpectedly appears, and the Phêmê or Rumour which in Hindostan or in ancient Greece is said to have often spread far an inexplicable knowledge of victory or disaster.

Could the growing influence of telepathy be thus traced onwards from communications where it merely vivifies, so to say, an emotion or a knowledge mainly due to common sensory sources - to communications where no such ordinary means of knowledge can have intervened, we might learn much of the interweaving of sensory and supersensory faculty which we cannot at present reach.

We cannot do this, I say, because we are obliged, for the sake of clearness of evidence, to set aside, when dealing with experimentation, all these mixed emotional cases, and to start from telepathic communications intentionally planned to be so trivial, so devoid of associations or emotions, that it shall be impossible to refer them to any common memory or sympathy; to anything save a direct transmission of idea, or impulse, or sensation, or image, from one to another mind.

The history of the first sporadic attempts at this form of experiment in the early days of mesmerism, of the various steps by which recent workers have developed and systematised the investigation, and of the varied, yet concordant, results already obtained, must, I think, be regarded as one of the most important chapters in psychology.

630. On that chapter, then, it would be needful for me now to embark, but that, in my view, it has been already written by a master-hand. I speak from too intimate a connection of friendship with the late Edmund Gurney to allow me to give full expression to my opinion of the quality of his work, and of its value to the world. But at this special point the argument of my own book comes into contact so close with Phantasms of the Living, that I am forced to choose between two courses. I must either myself rewrite his Chapters II. and III. - with much additional evidence, indeed, but with less of freshness and of scientific skill - or I must transfer much of those chapters to my own pages, working in our additional evidence where I deem that he would himself have inserted it. I have chosen the second alternative. The fate of Phantasms of the Living has been in one way peculiarly unfortunate. A pioneer book on a novel and complex subject, it needed to create its own public; while at the same time it was not only the opinion but the confident hope of its author and his collaborators that if the demand for a second issue came, the accretion of evidence and the progress of the inquiry would then necessitate an amount of change, enlargement, reconsideration, such as is seldom called for between a first and a second edition.

By the time that the first large edition was exhausted - 1886-1889 - this expectation of progress in our knowledge of the subject had been amply fulfilled. But in the meantime the author had passed from earth. No one of the survivors felt competent to the task of reproducing the work in such form as Gurney would now have wished it to assume. Reluctantly we gave up the attempt.1 However, the book, of course, subsists; it can be found in many libraries; it is still indispensable for any one who desires to make his study of the subject complete. For those who cannot consult it, the numerous extracts in my Appendices will give some notion of its style and methods.

631. Meanwhile, the evidence collected in the Appendices to 630 will carry us over certain stepping-stones of great importance to our general argument. Setting aside for the present the motor automatisms to be discussed later (in Chapter VIII (Motor Automatism).), and confining our attention to the sensory alone, we see that telepathy may act upon each definite type of sensation in turn, or may generate vague impressions not referable to any special organ of sense. We have seen that the hypnotic trance assists but is not essential to its action. We see that there is a fairly continuous "transition from experimental to spontaneous telepathy" (e.g. in the case of Dr. and Mrs. S., 630 F); so that at no point is there a decisive gap; although it is of course impossible to say that the agency operative in close proximity is absolutely identical with the agency operative at indefinite distances. The one may differ from the other, for example, in some such way as cohesion differs from gravitation.

The reader, I trust, will carry away from the evidence originally included in these chapters of Edmund Gurney's, and from that which I quote in addition, a pretty clear notion of what can at present actually be done in the way of experimental transferences of small definite ideas or pictures from one or more persons - the "agent" or "agents " - to one or more persons - the "percipient" or "percipients." In these experiments actual contact has been forbidden, to avoid the risk of unconscious indications by pressure. In many cases, however, the agent and percipient have been in the same room; and there has therefore still been some possible risk of unconscious whispering - a risk which has been fully discussed (see 573 A), and, as I believe, successfully avoided. It is, however, at present still doubtful how far close proximity really operates in aid of telepathy, or how far its advantage is a mere effect of self-suggestion - on the part either of agent or of percipient. Some few pairs of experimenters - notably the late Mr. Kirk with Miss G. (630 D) and Mr. Glardon with Mrs. M. (630 E) - have obtained results of just the same type at distances of half a mile or more.

Similarly, in the case of induction of hypnotic trance, Dr. Gibert, as we have already seen (568 A), attained at the distance of nearly a mile results which are usually supposed to require close and actual presence.