Phantasms of the Living - Volume I.. Frank Podmore
‘Well, Edith, it is all humbug, but if planchette tells you the name and sum of money which are on a cheque which 1 have in my pocket, and which I am going to cash for mother, I will believe there is something in it.’ Edith, on her arrival at my house in the evening, told me of this, and I said, ‘We must not expect that; planchette never does what one wants,’ or words to that effect. A couple of hours after, we tried the planchette, Edith’s hand alone touching it. It almost immediately wrote, quite clearly:—
‘I. SPALDING. £6:13:4.’
I had forgotten about the cheque, and I said, ‘What can that mean?’ Upon which Edith replied, ‘It is ‘H.’s cheque, perhaps.’ I was incredulous, having a long acquaintance with planchette. I said, ‘If it is right, send me word directly you get home; I am sure it will not be.’ But the next day I received a letter from Edith, telling me that she had astonished her brother greatly by telling him the name and the amount on the cheque, which was perfectly correct. I have read this account to the young lady and her brother, who sign it as well as myself.
“NORA ROBERTSON.
“E. C.
“D. C. H. C.”
In answer to an inquiry, Miss Robertson adds, on Feb. 12, 1885:—
“Miss E. C. says, in answer to your question, that she is quite certain she could not have known, or surmised, the name and amount of the cheque.
“I can confirm her on the first point, for I remember questioning everybody all round at the time. She had just returned from school, and knew nothing at all about her mother’s business or money matters.”
Here, it will be observed, the impression seems not only to have been unconscious, but to have remained latent for several hours before taking effect; for it is at any rate the most natural supposition that the transference actually occurred at the time when the conversation on the subject took place between the brother and sister.
This latency of an impression which finally takes effect in distinct automatic or semi-automatic movements, may be seen in cases which have no connection with telepathy. It occurs, for instance, in the following “muscle-reading” experiment, described to us by Mr. George B. Trent, of 65, Sandgate Road, Folkestone:—
“March 24th, 1883.
“Some two months back, I was asked by a gentleman, who had read of my experiments in the paper, to oblige him with a séance. I called upon him one afternoon, and he told me that he had hidden some object, in the early morning, and he thought he had given me a puzzle. I first experimented with pins; I led him to their hiding-places at once, without the least hesitation. I then asked him to concentrate the whole of his thoughts on what he had done in the morning. I immediately led him to a davenport, unlocked it, and from amongst, I may say, perhaps a hundred papers and other articles, I selected three photographs, and from the three I fixed upon one—that of his wife. He then said he was perfectly astonished, as I had positively gone through an experiment he had set himself to do, but abandoned in favour of another he had done.”
It seems probable that, at any rate in the earlier stages of this performance, the idea of what was to be done was not consciously present in the “willer’s” mind, which was apparently concentrated on something else. And if so, his muscular indications must have been the result of unconscious cerebration—an effect of nervous activity, continuing to act in accordance with a previous impulse which had lapsed from consciousness.
1 I have given a fuller description and criticism of M. Richet’s investigations in Vol. ii. of the Proceedings of the S.P.R.
1 This procedure of counting neighbouring letters seems to require some justification. It might be justified by the difficulty, on the theory of mental suggestion, of obtaining an exact coincidence of time between the tilting and the pointing. But I think that M. Richet does justify it (Rev. Phil., p. 654), by reference to some other experiments—not yet published, but of which he has shown us the record—where intelligible words were produced of which no one in the room was, or had been, thinking. For here also neighbouring letters appeared, but in such a way as left no room for doubt, in the reader’s mind, as to what the letter should have been.
1 Moreover the E in the 4th place had appeared in two of the preceding trials and the final O D in one of them.
1 For a curious case of the automatic production of anagrams, see Proceedings of the S.P.R., Vol. ii., pp. 226-31.
1 When A, in pointing, began at the beginning of the alphabet, the sense of time might conceivably have led to an unconscious judgment as to the point arrived at. This idea had occurred to M. Richet. It seems, however, an unnecessary multiplication of hypotheses; for we learn from him that in some trials A began at uncertain places, and that under these conditions coherent words were obtained. The fact that so often the approximate letter was given, instead of the exact one, might seem at first sight to favour the hypothesis of unconscious reckoning; but it will be observed that exactly the same approximations took place in our own experiment (pp.77-8), where the alphabet was in the “medium’s” sight.
1 The impulse might no doubt be otherwise accounted for if we supposed that a close connection was established in F’s mind between the idea of the object—i.e., the successive letters—and the idea of the movement, and that this complex idea was what was transferred and what ultimately took effect. But it is hard to apply this hypothesis to cases where a word is produced which, though latent in F’s mind, has no resemblance to the word whose production he is willing. The transference of the idea of the latent word, even to the exclusion of the right word, can be quite conceived; but can we suppose that, subconsciously or unconsciously, an idea of movement was combined with the idea of its letters in the agent’s mind, at the very moment when that on which his attention was fixed, and with which exhypothesi the conscious idea of movement was connected, was a quite different set of letters? Can we suppose that the idea of movement overflowed into the unconscious region of his mind, and there on its own account formed an alliance with alien elements, the effect of which on the percipient would prevent the effect intended? It must be remembered that where a word which is not the one intended gets transferred from F to the “medium,” there is no knowledge, conscious or unconscious, on F’s part, as to what that word will be. A number of words are latent in his mind; one of these finds an echo in another mind. But how should the idea of movement find out which particular one, out of all the words, is destined thus to find an echo, so as to associate itself with its letters and no others? And if we suppose the association to be between the unconscious idea of movement and the unconscious idea of letters in general, this is no less dissimilar and opposed to anything that the conscious part of F’s mind has conceived. For it is not in letters as such, but in the exclusive constituents of a particular word, that he is interested; if indeed he is interested in anything beyond the word as a whole. The difficulty here seems to justify the suggestion—with which I imagine that M. Richet would agree—that the physiological impulse does not depend on any idea of movement, or any special direction of the agent’s will to that result. This might be tested, if F were a person ignorant of the form of the experiment, and out of sight of the table.
1 It will be seen that the results of such “unconscious intelligence” go considerably beyond the received results of mere “unconscious cerebration.” Unconscious cerebration is amply competent to produce such seemingly intelligent actions as ordinary writing; but what is now done more resembles the formation of a word by picking letters from a heap, or type-writing