980. And next let us look forward into the Future; - across that impalpable, almost imaginary line of the Present Moment, which for us is the greatest reality of all. Naturally enough, the first time-confusion which we find is a confusion affecting that present moment itself; namely, that sensation of already remembering what is happening or is just about to happen to which some authors have applied the too wide term paramnesia, but for which promnesia seems a more exact and distinctive name.1 Next we have the wide range of suggestive phenomena, where the subliminal self possesses knowledge of the future unshared by the supraliminal; since the subliminal self has in fact wound up the organism to strike a given note at a given hour. Self-suggestion in turn merges into organic prevision; where the subliminal self foresees what will happen - not in consequence of any determining effort of its own, but by virtue of its deeper knowledge of the organism and of the changes which that organism must by physiological laws undergo.

This organic prevision may lead us far; but as it grows more distant and complex, involving more and more of a man's future environment, as well as of his future organic history, it merges into a form of precognition which cannot depend on insight into material bodies alone.

We now proceed, that is to say, along a line which is an extension of ordinary intellectual inference. First comes hyperaesthetic inference; - that enlarged span of anticipation which acuter sensory impressions permit; as a sensitive patient will be able to predict her doctor's visit when his step is merely heard in the street, although others cannot recognise that step until it is close to the bedroom door. Then comes an obscure point where this hyperaesthesia seems to pass into telaesthesia; - where sensory perception seems to cease, and supersensory, telepathic, or clairvoyant perception to begin.

Well then, when we have definitely passed from the sensory to the transcendental mode of perception, it is probable that our power of inference as to the future will be greatly enlarged. We cannot, indeed, guess how far this enlargement will extend. There is nothing absolutely to forbid us to regard all precognitions as the result of this wider outlook of the subliminal self. (See 980 A).

1 For a discussion of this subject with illustrative cases, see pp. 341-347 of my article on "The Subliminal Self: Retrocognition and Precognition," in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi.

981. Nor shall I attempt to draw the line at which this telaesthetic inference ceases. If I do still look further for other sources of precognition, this is partly because in some cases I think that there is actual evidence that the precognition comes from a disembodied intelligence; and partly also on the wider ground that I distrust all explanations which give to man, embodied or disembodied, any monopoly of the transcendental world. The simplicity of our instinctive anthropomorphism is not the simplicity of truth; - it is no more so, when we are thus dealing with intelligences which may be far above our ken, than when the savage ascribes to a man-like demon the movements and influences of gross inanimate things.

But first, as I have said, I ascribe some precognitions to the reasoned foresight of disembodied spirits, just as I ascribe some retrocognitions to their surviving memory. I have tried to show ground for believing that some spirits have a continued knowledge of some earthly affairs; and if they have such knowledge, and can show us that they have it, they may presumably reveal to us also their not infallible inferences from what they know.

Thus far I have been indicating roads along which I fancy that believers in any kind of transcendental faculty will some day be forced to travel. What follows is a speculation, or suspicion, which no record or experiments of ours can prove, but which seems to me to loom behind them all. I suspect, then, that it is not by wider purview, wiser inference alone, that finite minds, in the body or out of it, have attained to knowledge of what yet must be. I imagine that the Continuity of the Universe is complete; and that therefore the hierarchy of intelligences between our minds and the World-Soul is infinite; and that somewhere in that ascent a point is reached where our conception of time loses its accustomed meaning. To Plato's "Spectator of all Time and of all Existence" there may be no barrier between Then and Now. The idea, of course, is familiar enough to philosophical speculation. The novelty is that this, with many other ideas which have hitherto floated gaseously inter apices philosophioe, like helium in the atmosphere of the sun, may now conceivably be tested in earthly laboratories and used as a working explanation for undeniable facts.