Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/42

30 for instance, the very common case—when we sleep in a strange bed, it may be in an inn that is not very clean, and we begin to be a little suspicions of what other inhabitants there may be in that bed; and then we begin to feel a "creepy, crawly" sensation about us, which that idea will at once suggest. Now, those are subjective sensations; those sensations are produced by the mental idea. And so in this case I am perfectly satisfied that a very large number of these spiritual phenomena are simply subjective sensations; that is, that they are the result of expectation on the part of the individual. The sensations are real to them. You know that, when a man has suffered amputation of his leg, he will tell you at first that he feels his toes, that he feels his limb; and, perhaps to the end of his life, every now and then he will have this feeling of the limb moving, or of a pain in it; and yet we know perfectly well that this is simply the result of certain changes in the nerve, to which, of course, there is nothing answering in the limb that was removed. These subjective sensations, then, will be felt by the individuals as realities, and will be presented to others as realities, when, really, they are simply the creation of their own minds, that creation arising out of the expectation which they have themselves formed. These parties believed that the table would rise; and, when they felt the pressure against their hands, they fully believed that the table was rising.

Take the case of Table-turning, which occurred earlier. I dare say many of you remember that epidemic which preceded the spiritualism; in fact, the spiritualism, in some degree, arose out of table-turning. My friend the chairman (Dr. Noble) and I hunted in couples, a good many years ago, with a third friend, the late Sir John Forbes, and we went a great deal into these inquiries; and I very well remember sitting at a table with him, I suppose twenty-five years ago, waiting in solemn expectation for the turning of the table; and the table went round. This was simply the result of one of the party, who was not influenced by the philosophical skepticism that we had on the subject, having a strong belief that the phenomenon would occur; and when he had sat for some time with his hands pressed down upon the table, an involuntary muscular motion, of the kind I mentioned in my last lecture, took place, which sent the table turning. There was nothing to the Physiologist at all difficult in the understanding of this. Prof. Faraday was called upon to explain the table-turning, which many persons set down to electricity; but he was perfectly satisfied that this was a most untrue account of it, and that the explanation was (as, in fact, I had previously myself stated in a lecture at the Royal Institution) that the movements took place in obedience to ideas. Movements of this class are what I call "ideo-motor," or reflex actions of the brain; and the occurrence of these movements in obedience to the idea entertained is the explanation of all the phenomena of table-turning. Prof. Faraday constructed a very simple testing apparatus, merely two boards, one