632. We must clearly realise that in telepathic experiment we encounter just the same difficulty which makes our results in hypnotic therapeutics so unpredictable and irregular. We do not know how to get our suggestions to take hold of the subliminal self. They are liable to fail for two main reasons. Either they somehow never reach the subliminal centres which we wish to affect, or they find those centres preoccupied with some self-suggestion hostile to our behest. This source of uncertainty can only be removed by a far greater number of experiments than have yet been made - experiments repeated until we have oftener struck upon the happy veins which make up for an immense amount of sterile exploration. Meantime we must record, but can hardly interpret. Yet there is one provisional interpretation of telepathic experiment which must be noticed thus early in our discussion, because, if true, it may conceivably connect our groping work with more advanced departments of science, while, if seen to be inadequate, it may bid us turn our inquiry in some other direction. I refer to the suggestion that telepathy is propagated by "brainwaves"; or, as Sir W. Crookes has more exactly expressed it, by ether-waves of even smaller amplitude and greater frequency than those which carry the X rays.

These waves are conceived as passing from one brain to another, and arousing in the second brain an excitation or image similar to the excitation or image from which they start in the first. The hypothesis is an attractive one; because it fits an agency which certainly exists, but whose effect is unknown, to an effect which certainly exists, but whose agency is unknown.

1 The abridged French translation, "Les Hallucinations Télépathiques" in the "Bibliothèque de Philosophic Contemporaine " (Alcan, Paris, 1891), is still procurable in a second edition. Mr. Podmore's book, " Apparitions and Thought-transference," contains much of the same material.

633. In this world of vibrations it may seem at first the simplest plan to invoke a vibration the more. It would be rash, indeed, to affirm that any phenomenon perceptible by men may not be expressible, in part at least, in terms of ethereal undulations. But in the case of telepathy the analogy which suggests this explanation, the obvious likeness between the picture emitted (so to say) by the agent and the picture received by the percipient - as when I fix my mind on the two of diamonds, and he sees a mental picture of that card - goes but a very short way. One has very soon to begin assuming that the percipient's mind modifies the picture despatched from the agent: until the likeness between the two pictures becomes a quite symbolical affair. We have seen that there is a continuous transition from experimental to spontaneous telepathy; from our transferred pictures of cards to monitions of a friend's death at a distance. These monitions may indeed be pictures of the dying friend, but they are seldom such pictures as the decedent's brain seems likely to project in the form in which they reach the percipient. Mr. L. - to take a well-known case in our collection (Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 210) - dies of heart disease when in the act of lying down undressed, in bed.

At or about the same moment Mr. N. J. S. sees Mr. L. standing beside him with a cheerful air, dressed for walking and with a cane in his hand. One does not see how a system of undulations could have transmuted the physical facts in this way.

A still greater difficulty for the vibration-theory is presented by collective telepathic hallucinations. It is hard to understand how A can emit a pattern of vibrations which, radiating equally in all directions, shall affect not only his distant friend B, but also the strangers C and D, who happen to be standing near B; - and affect no other persons, so far as we know, in the world.

634. The above points have been fair matter of argument almost since our research began. But as our evidence has developed, our conception of telepathy has needed to be more and more generalised in other and new directions, - still less compatible with the vibration theory. Three such directions may be briefly specified here - namely, the relation of telepathy (a) to telæsthesia or clairvoyance, (b) to time, and (c) to disembodied spirits, (a) It is increasingly hard to refer all the scenes of which percipients become aware to the action of any given mind which is perceiving those distant scenes. This is especially noticeable in crystal-gazing experiments. (b) And these crystal-visions also show what, from the strict telepathic point of view, we should call a great laxity of time relations. The scryer chooses his own time to look in the ball; - and though sometimes he sees events which are taking place at the moment, he may also see past events, - and even, as it seems, future events (cf. 663). I at least cannot deny precognition, nor can I draw a definite line amid these complex visions which may separate precognition from telepathy, (c) Precognition itself may be explained, if you will, as telepathy from disembodied spirits; - and this would at any rate bring it under a class of phenomena which I think all students of our subject must before long admit.

Admitting here, for argument's sake, that we do receive communications from the dead which we should term telepathic if we received them from the living, it is of course open to us to conjecture that these messages also are conveyed on ether-waves. But since those waves do not at any rate emanate from material brains, we shall by this time have got so far from the original brain-wave hypothesis that few will care still to defend it.

I doubt, indeed, whether we can safely say of telepathy anything more definite than this: Life has the power of manifesting itself to life. The laws of life, as we have thus far known them, have been only laws of life when already associated with matter. Thus limited, we have learnt little as to Life's true nature. We know not even whether Life be only a directive Force, or, on the other hand, an effective Energy. We know not in what way it operates on matter. We can in no way define the connection between our own consciousness and our organisms. Just here it is, I should say, that telepathic observations ought to supply us with some hint. From the mode in which some element of one individual life, - apart from material impact, - gets hold of another organism, we may in time learn something of the way in which our own life gets hold of our own organism, - and maintains, intermits, or abandons its organic sway.1

1 It is plain that on this view there is no theoretical reason for limiting telepathy to human beings. For aught we can say, the impulse may pass between man and the lower animals, or between the lower animals themselves. See 634 A.