Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/189

XIV ] Go back to the experimenter drawing a picture and to the subject or percipient waiting to guess what it is. Both have the idea of this experiment in common. Therefore if one of them thinks of Cat and draws Cat, the experiment-idea is, as it were, drawing the cat-idea to it in the mind of the other person. Instead of trying to guess one object out of all creation, it comes to him by force of the ordinary process of association, barring of course emotional inhibitions that might prevent it.

Any idea which is shared by two or more people can, if it is associated with another idea in one of these minds, cause the latter idea to rise into the consciousness of the others. This linking idea Mr. Carington calls the "K" idea, for brevity (key idea).

But what is an "idea"? And what is a "mind"? Is it a box which holds things? Swedenborg pondered the same problems; distant as all this discussion may seem from him, it is really bringing us closer to him, as will appear eventually.

Mr. Carington adds to his association theory of telepathy his "psychon" theory of mind. (These curious terms are a legitimate attempt to get away from words that are shabby with too much use.)

Like Swedenborg, psychical researchers are interested in what a sense impression "really" is. It is a common fallacy, Swedenborg often lamented, when people think that the organ of the eye sees, or that the organ of the ear hears. Knock out the optic area of the brain and the most perfect eye can't see. Without the brain cells in whose company the sense impressions are changed into consciousness of them, the sense organ is nothing.

But neither can you depend on what the mind tells you about the sense reports. For instance, Swedenborg said, the sun, stars, and planets are not little molecules, the earth is not at rest, the antipodeans do not fall off into space, etc.; "if we have faith in our senses only we shall be more like animals than rational beings." 12

Mr. Carington would largely agree, yet he insists that these sense reports are all that one can know directly in perception. Your physical sight presents a white patch to you; then something takes place in the right brain cells, and you say, It is an egg!

But it may not be an egg. All you really know is the sense report