Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/290

 E. GUENEY, ETC., PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING. 277 that I will illustrate it by another case. Mrs. C. is at church, and her children wish to remain for a christening ; ' I cannot,' she said ; ' somebody seems calling me ; something is the matter'. She was summoned next day to the deathbed of her husband, concerning whom she had no more cause to be anxious than that occasioned by his reporting himself to be a little bilious. Here, be it noted, it is not the sense of wanting but the sense of being wanted that is transferred. This change of voice from active to passive is hard to explain on any telepathic hypothesis. In both ideal and phantasmal transference we have (1) volun- tary and (2) involuntary cases. The voluntary transference of ideas^ tastes, smells, mental pictures, has been the subject of painstaking investigation on the part of some of the members of the Society for Psychical Eesearch, and constitutes what the authors term their " experimental basis ". I must refer the reader who is unacquainted with the nature of the evidence to the work under review or the Eeports of the Society. Suffice it to say that remarkable results have been obtained under conditions which, in the opinion of the investigators, preclude trickery. Still at present we seem to know absolutely nothing of the laws of the supposed transference. Those who have the percipient power are few ; and it is noteworthy, as Prof. S. Newcomb, in his presidential address last year to the American Society for Psychical Eesearch, has pointed out, that these few are strangely grouped three or four children and a waiting maid in one family, that of the Eev. A. M. Creery, and two or more in the employment of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie. It is also to be noted that the percipient power of Mr. Creery 's children gradually evaporated and eventually entirely deserted them. " The Creerys had their most startling successes at first, when the affair was a surprise and an amusement, or later, at short and seemingly casual trials ; the decline set in with the sense that the experiments had become matters of weighty importance to us, and of somewhat prolonged strain and tedious- ness to them.'' Is it hypercritical to draw attention to these facts ; and if so, ought we not perhaps to be hypercritical ? The authors are fully aware of the importance of their experimental basis. Accepting thought-transference as a working hypothesis, they must, if they would convince friendly sceptics, formulate its laws and enunciate its conditions. Of voluntary phantasmal transference we have some examples. Two students of naval engineering at Portsmouth were in the habit of holding mesmeric sittings. One of them before he was hypnotised resolved to appear phantasmally to a young lady a.t Wandsworth. He is reported to have done so, having a vision of her, and appearing to her as a phantasm. In the later copies of the work an additional case is given. The Eev. C. Godfrey, as he retired to bed, " set himself to work with all the volitional and determinative energy he possessed " to stand at the foot of a friend's bed. He vividly dreamt he met her and asked if she had