Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/412

 FURTHER PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. (II.) 399 as a rule has represented sights or sounds which have been occupying the ' agent's ' senses at some moment of crisis or excitement. This difference, however, can hardly surprise us. For in the first place we should expect some exceptional affection of the ' agent ' to be a necessary condition of the spontaneous transference, just as an exceptional and often painful concentration of attention is necessary in the card- and diagram-experiments. And in the second place, spon- taneous transferences of ideas unconnected with any specially-marked moment might occur between the same persons every day, without ever having a chance of exciting attention or being recorded. In the mind of a ' percipient ' who was not (as in the experiments) deliberately putting himself into a passive and receptive attitude, a transferred idea would probably at most reach the bare threshold of consciousness, where it would meet and jostle with a hundred others, while bearing in itself no sign of its origin : what, then, is the likelihood that the ' percipient ' would pick it out, note it, and ask all his absent acquaintance whether their minds were fixed on a similar one at that particular time ? And even if some sporadic correspondences of the sort were noted, they could scarcely be presented as ' ostensive instances ' of telepathy, considering the immense range for accidental coincidence that the world of ideas common to all of us contains. I think therefore that the ostensive instances which I have mentioned present in their content as much affinity to the experimental transference as could reasonably be expected. But yet a third link of connexion between the experi- mental and the spontaneous cases would be of this sort if an impression representative of the ' agent ' were made on the ' percipient's ' mind, without any affection of his senses. Such a case would resemble the majority of the spontaneous transferences in the nature of the idea transferred, and the majority of the experimental transferences in the absence of sensory affection on the ' percipient's ' side ; and the type would indirectly afford a strong indication that the sensory affections phantasms of forms and voices which charac- terise so many of the impressions that have coincided with the death or danger of friends at a distance, are really mental creations of the ' percipient's ' own (or, as I have never hesitated to call them, hallucinations), in which he invests the idea of the ' agent ' that has telepathically reached him. Now the cases of distant hypnotisation, explained as I have here endeavoured to explain them, supply exactly this transitional type. They are truly experimental, inas-