§ 1. It is difficult to get a quite satisfactory name for the experimental branch of our subject. " Thought-reading" was the name that we first adopted; but this had several inconveniences. Oddly enough, the term has got identified with what is not thought-reading at all, but muscle -reading - of which more anon. But a more serious objection to it is that it suggests a power to read anything that may be going on in the mind of another person - to probe characters and discover secrets - which raises a needless prejudice against the whole subject. The idea of such a power has, in fact, been converted into an ad absurdum argument against the existence of the faculty for which we contend. To suppose that people's minds can be thus open to one another, it was justly enough said, would be to contradict the assumption on which all human intercourse has been carried on. Our answer, of course, is that we have never supposed people's minds to be thus open to one another; that such a supposition would be as remote as possible from the facts on which we rely; and that the most accomplished "thought-reader's " power is never likely to be a matter of social inconvenience.

The mode of experimentation may reassure those who look on the genuine faculty as dangerous or uncanny; for the results, as a rule, have to be tried for by a distinct, and often a very irksome, process of concentration on the part of the person whose " thought" is to be "read." And this being so, it is clearly important to avoid such an expression as "thought-reading," which conveys no hint that his thought is anything else than an open page, or that his mental attitude has anything to do with the phenomenon.

The experiments involve, in fact, the will of two persons; and of the two minds, it is rather the one which reads that is passive and the one which is read that is active. It is for the sake of recognising this that we distinguish the two parties as "agent" and "percipient," and that we have substituted for thought-reading the term thought-transference. Thought must here be taken as including more than it does in ordinary usage; it must include sensations and volitions as well as mere representations or ideas. This being understood, the name serves its purpose fairly well, as long as we are on experimental ground. It will not be forgotten, however, that our aim is to connect an experimental with a spontaneous class of cases; and according to that view it will often be convenient to describe the former no less than the latter as telepathic. We thus get what we need, a single generic term which embraces the whole range of phenomena and brings out their continuity - the simpler experimental forms being the first step in a graduated series.

§ 2. The history of experimental thought-transference has been a singular one. It was not by direct trial, nor in what we should now account their normal form, that the phenomena first attracted the attention of competent witnesses. Their appearance was connected with the discovery that the somnambulic state could be artificially induced. It was after the introduction of "mesmerism" or "magnetism" into France, and in the course of the investigation of that wider subject, that this special feature unexpectedly presented itself. The observations remained, it is true, extremely few and scattered. The greater part of them were made in this country, during the second quarter of the present [nineteenth] century; and took the form of community of sensation between the operator and the patient. The transference of impressions here depended on a specific rapport previously induced by mesmeric or hypnotic operations - passes, fixation, and the like. To us, now, this mesmeric rapport (in some, at any rate, of its manifestations) seems nothing more than the faculty of thought-transference confined to a single agent and percipient, and intensified in degree by the very conditions which limit its scope. But the course of discovery inverted the logical order of the phenomena.

The recognition of the particular case, where the exercise of the faculty was narrowed down to a single channel, preceded by a long interval the recognition of the more general phenomena, as exhibited by persons in a normal state. The transference of impressions was naturally regarded as belonging essentially to mesmerism. As such, it was only one more wonder in a veritable wonderland; and while obtaining on that account the readier acceptance among those who witnessed it, it to some extent shut out the idea of the possibility of similar manifestations where no specific rapport had been artificially established.

But there was a further result. The early connection of thought-transference with mesmerism distinctly damaged its chance of scientific recognition. Those who believed in cognate marvels might easily believe in this marvel: but cautious minds rejected the whole posse of marvels together. And one can hardly wonder at this, when one remembers the wild and ignorant manner in which the claims of Mesmer and his followers were thrust upon the world. A man who professed to have magnetised the sun could hardly expect a serious hearing; and even the operators who eschewed such extravagant pretensions still too often advocated their cause in a language that could only cover it with contempt. Theories of "odylic" force, and of imponderable fluids pervading the body - as dogmatically set forth as if they ranked in certainty with the doctrine of the circulation of the blood - were not likely to attract scientific inquiry to the facts. And in the later developments of hypnotism - in which many of the old "mesmeric" phenomena have been restudied from a truer point of view, and rapport of a certain sort between the hypnotist and the "subject" has been admitted - there has been so much to absorb observation in the extraordinary range of mental and physical effects which the operator can command by verbal or visible suggestion, that the far rarer telepathic phenomena have, so to speak, been crowded out.¹ The consequence is that after nearly a century of controversy, the most interesting facts of mesmeric history are quite as little recognised as the less specialised kinds of thought-transference, which have only within the last few years been seriously looked for or definitely obtained.