907. But here let us pause, and consider what is the truest conception which we are by this time able to form of telepathy. The word has been a convenient one; the central notion - of communication beyond this range of sense - can at any rate thus be expressed in simple terms. But nevertheless there has been nothing to assure us that our real comprehension of telepathic processes has got much deeper than that verbal definition. Our conception of telepathy, indeed, to say nothing of telaesthesia, has needed to be broadened with each fresh stage of our evidence. That evidence at first revealed to us certain transmissions of thoughts and images which suggested the passage of actual etherial vibrations from brain to brain. Nor indeed can any one say at any point of our evidence that etherial vibrations are demonstrably not concerned in the phenomena. We cannot tell how far from the material world (to use a crude phrase) some etherial agency may possibly extend. But telepathic phenomena are in fact soon seen to overpass any development which imaginative analogy can give to the conception of etherial radiation from one material point to another.

For from the mere transmission of isolated ideas or pictures there is, as my readers know, a continuous progression to impressions and apparitions far more persistent and complex. We encounter an influence which suggests no mere impact of etherial waves, but an intelligent and responsive presence, resembling nothing so much as the ordinary human intercourse of persons in bodily nearness. Such visions or auditions, inward or externalised, are indeed sometimes felt to involve an even closer contact of spirits than the common intercourse of earth allows. One could hardly assign etherial undulations as their cause without assigning that same mechanism to all our emotions felt towards each other, or even to our control over our own organisms.

Nay, more. There is - as I have striven to show - a further progression from these telepathic intercommunications between living men to intercommunications between living men and discarnate spirits. And this new thesis, - in every way of vital importance, - while practically solving one problem on which I have already dwelt, opens also a possibility of the determination of another problem, nowise accessible until now. In the first place, we may now rest assured that telepathic communication is not necessarily propagated by vibrations proceeding from an ordinary material brain. For the discarnate spirit at any rate has no such brain from which to start them.

908. So much, in the first place, for the agent's end of the communication.

And in the second place, we now discern a possibility of getting at the percipient's end; of determining whether the telepathic impact is received by the brain or by the spirit of the living man, or by both inseparably, or sometimes by one and sometimes by the other.

On this problem, I say, the phenomena of automatic script, of trance-utterance, of spirit-possession, throw more of light than we could have ventured to hope.

Stated broadly, our trance-phenomena show us to begin with that several currents of communication can pass at once from discarnate spirits to a living man; - and can pass in very varying ways. For clearness' sake I will put aside for the present all cases where the telepathic impact takes an externalised or sensory form, and will speak only of intellectual impressions and motor automatisms.

Now these may pass through all grades of apparent centrality. If a man, awake and in other respects fully self-controlled, feels his hand impelled to scrawl words on a piece of paper, without consciousness of motor effort of his own, the impulse does not seem to him a central one, although some part of his brain is presumably involved. On the other hand, a much less conspicuous invasion of his personality may feel much more central; as, for instance, a premonition of evil, - an inward heaviness which he can scarcely define. Well, the motor automatism goes on until it reaches the point of possession; - that is to say, until the man's own consciousness is absolutely in abeyance, and every part of his body is utilised by the invading spirit or spirits. What happens in such conditions to the man's ruling principle - to his own spirit - we must consider presently. But so far as his organism is concerned, the invasion seems complete: and it indicates a power which is indeed telepathic in a true sense; - yet not quite in the sense which we originally attached to the word.

We first thought of telepathy as of a communication between two minds, whereas what we have here looks more like a communication between a mind and a body, - an external mind, in place of the mind which is accustomed to rule that particular body.

There is in such a case no apparent communication between the discarnate mind and the mind of the automatist. Rather there is a kind of contact between the discarnate mind and the brain of the automatist, in so far that the discarnate mind, pursuing its own ends, is helped up to a certain point by the accumulated capacities of the automatist's brain; - and similarly is hindered by its incapacities.

909. Yet here the most characteristic element of telepathy, I repeat, seems to have dropped out altogether. There is no perceptible communion between the mind of the entranced person and any other mind whatever. He is possessed, but is kept in unconsciousness, and never regains memory of what his lips have uttered during his trance.

But let us see whether we have thus grasped all the trance-phenomena; - whether something else may not be going on, which is more truly, more centrally telepathic.

To go back to the earliest stage of telepathic experience, we can see well enough that the experimental process might quite possibly involve two different factors. The percipient's mind must somehow receive the telepathic impression; - and to this reception we can assign no definite physical correlative; - and also the percipient's motor or sensory centres must receive an excitation; - which excitation may be communicated, for aught we know, either by his own mind in the ordinary way, or by the agent's mind in some direct way, - which I may call telergic, thus giving a more precise sense to a word which I long ago suggested as a kind of correlative to telepathic. That is to say, there may even in these apparently simple cases be first a transmission from agent to percipient in the spiritual world, and then an action on the percipient's physical brain, of the same type as spirit-possession. This action on the physical brain may be due either to the percipient's own spirit, or subliminal self, or else directly to the agent's spirit. For I must repeat that the phenomena of possession seem to indicate that the extraneous spirit acts on a man's organism in very much the same way as the man's own spirit habitually acts on it.

One must thus practically regard the body as an instrument upon which a spirit plays; - an ancient metaphor which now seems actually our nearest approximation to truth.

Proceeding to the case of telepathic or veridical apparitions, we see the same hints of a double nature in the process; - traces of two elements mingling in various degrees. At the spiritual end there may be what we have called "clairvoyant visions," - pictures manifestly symbolical, and not located by the observer in ordinary three-dimensional space. These seem analogous to the views of the spiritual world which the sensitive enjoys during entrancement. Then comes that larger class of veridical apparitions where the figure seems to be externalised from the percipient's mind, some stimulus having actually been applied, - whether by agent's or percipient's spirit, - to the appropriate brain-centre. These cases of "sensory automatism" resemble those experimental transferences of pictures of cards, etc. And beyond these again, on the physical or rather the ultra-physical side, come those collective apparitions which in my view involve some unknown kind of modification of a certain portion of space not occupied by any organism, - as opposed to a modification of centres in one special brain.

Here comes in, as I hold, the gradual transition from subjective to objective, as the portion of space in question is modified in a manner to affect a larger and larger number of percipient minds.