983. Coming now to precognitions, we must first observe that there are many where what looks like knowledge of the future can be analysed into an enlarged knowledge of what actually exists.

There are, indeed, certain phenomena - "monitions" as we may term them - which in common parlance are often spoken of as premonitions, and used as a type of knowledge of the future, where it is nevertheless plain that all that is needed is a somewhat extended perception of near facts.

These monitions - of which several instances were given in 818-825, - range from incidents so trivial and momentary that it would seem absurd to ascribe them to anything more dignified than a barely subliminal stratum of the percipient's own consciousness, up to important warnings which claim the authority of some departed but still watchful friend.

At the lower end of this series come the obscure intimations which restrain us from action on grounds which perhaps are only just forgotten and still by effort recoverable. The chess player, returning after various trains of calculation to the temptation of a specious move, will dimly feel a sense of restraint; - "I must not do that, though I cannot recollect why." Sometimes this subliminal warning presents itself as a physical hesitation; - the hand refusing to execute an order which is really unreasonable; - and which is felt to be such so soon as some trivial recent fact is remembered. (See 818 A).

One step further, and we have an actual externalised hallucination of touch checking the inconsiderate action. (See 818 B).

Next we come to monitions based upon a fact apparently not forgotten merely, but never known; a fact lying demonstrably beyond the normal sensory cognisance of the percipient.

A fact beyond his normal sensory cognisance, I say; but obviously before we assume that he has perceived that fact in a transcendental or telaesthetic fashion, we must make the fullest allowance for hyperaesthesia, - for an extension of the bodily senses which may include this strange knowledge within its range. Nay, more; our search for possible hyperaesthesia is bound to be much wider than any search which the physiologist is likely thus far to have found worth his pains. His interest has lain in definite measurable extensions of the higher senses, rather than in obscure and novel sensations which led to no clear end. It is for these last, on the other hand, that it is our special duty to search. We have obscure and novel facts to explain, and before we confidently assign them to psychical and transcendental causes, we must try and think of everything which the human body might conceivably discern or discover.

I say "the body" rather than "the senses"; for we must go back in our inquiry (though of course without expectation of immediate success) to an ancestral condition far anterior to any senses which we now know. We must go back to the first germ of life, and in place of merely crediting it with "irritability," which is all the power of reaction which it can actually show us, we must credit it with all the potentialities which the history of its descendants teaches us to infer as already latent in it. We know into how wide a gamut of feeling the germ's vague internal sensation, its vague external sensation, have diffused and specialised themselves in man. We dimly conjecture into what other rays the spectrum of that dim primal gleam of consciousness has been fanned out in animals other than man. And we may feel assured also, as I have already pointed out, that all the known or guessed sensations of men and animals are but a small selection from the range of sensations potentially educible from the vague panoes-thesia, - so to term it, - of the primal germ. Average experience within average limits - that is all that our known senses cover.

If the stimulus be too weak, we are liable to mistake the sense through which it comes to us; if it be too strong, we are liable to feel a mere distress or bewilderment, not referred to any definite sense. It is surely conceivable, then, that all our known sensibilities may form merely a kind of bull's eye; - the place where outer and inner influences oftenest touch our central sensorium; - while round this bull's-eye all kinds of unclassified obscure sensations probably scatter.

It follows that when we have to explain very strange perceptions we must be on the look-out, not only for the hyperaesthesia of known senses, but also for that more generalised form of hyperaesthesia which may involve senses (peripheral or central) as yet incipient and unrecognised, although still depending on the material world, - a wider selection from the potential panaesthesia of the primal germ. There may - there must - be evolution still going on in us in relation to our material as well as to our transcendental environment, and we must not claim phenomena for the latter without taking account of the former as well.

Once more, we must remember that the assumed new sensitivities, physical and transcendental, may be linked together in ways quite unknown to us. The synaesthesiae, which have only of late years been noted between the ordinary senses - of which "coloured audition," or sound-seeing, is the accepted type - may be carried yet further, and may connect in unlooked-for ways man's responses to his physical and to his transcendental environments. There will be nothing to surprise us if the same percipient should receive a number of subliminal intimations, of which some are to be referred to hyperesthesia and some to telaesthesia, or to telepathy from the living or from the dead.

I have said that hyperesthesia may be peripheral or central; - that is to say, that it may consist in the heightened perception of sensations coming from outside our organism, or from within the brain. I have already given (820-823) some cases of apparent telaesthesia, or of apparent prevision, which may possibly, though by no means certainly, be referable to an extension of the external senses.

From these cases of possible hyperesthesia of the external senses we may make our transition to central hyperesthesia, a heightening of inner sensations to a point where the future history of the organisation can be guessed or divined with unusual distinctness. This is virtually but another aspect of the knowledge of intimate processes which self-suggestion has so often shown. If the subliminal self can induce or arrest changes in the organism, it may well be able also to foresee such changes when they are approaching through natural causes. In whatever direction we have seen suggestion operate, in that direction may we expect to see organic prediction operate also. Thus, for instance, suggestion has produced fainting, and also bleeding at the nose, and we have cases of precisely similar predictions (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 339; and vol. xi. p. 426), or even predictions of death (see 425 A).