Appendix. Sensory Automatism. Part 22

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This section is from the book "Human Personality And Its Survival Of Bodily Death", by Frederic W. H. Myers. Also available from Amazon: Human Personality And Its Survival Of Bodily Death.

Appendix. Sensory Automatism. Part 22

I give a few specimens - not unduly favourable ones, but illustrating the "spreading of responsibility" to which Mr. Guthrie refers. The agents concerned were Mr. Guthrie; Mr. Steel, the President of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society; Mr. Birchall, mentioned above; Mr. Hughes, B.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge; and myself. The names of the percipients were Miss Relph and Miss Edwards. The conditions which I shall describe were those of the experiments in which I myself took part; and I have Mr. Guthriés authority for stating that they were uniformly observed in the other cases. The originals were for the most part drawn in another room from that in which the percipient was placed. The few executed in the same room were drawn while the percipient was blindfolded, at a distance from her, and in such a way that the process would have been wholly invisible to her or any one else, even had an attempt been made to observe it. During the process of transference, the agent looked steadily and in perfect silence at the original drawing, which was placed upon an intervening wooden stand; the percipient sitting opposite to him, and behind the stand, blindfolded and quite still.

The agent ceased looking at the drawing, and the blindfolding was removed, only when the percipient professed herself ready to make the reproduction, which happened usually in times varying from half a minute to two or three minutes. Her position rendered it absolutely impossible that she should obtain a glimpse of the original. Apart from the blindfolding, she could not have done so without rising from her seat and advancing her head several feet; and as she was very nearly in the same line of sight as the drawing, and so very nearly in the centre of the agent's field of vision, the slightest approach to such a movement must have been instantly detected. The reproductions were made in perfect silence, the agent forbearing to follow the actual process of the drawing with his eyes, though he was, of course, able to keep the percipient under the closest observation.

In the case of all the diagrams, except those numbered 7 and 8, the agent and the percipient were the only two persons in the room during the experiment. In the case of numbers 7 and 8, the agent and Miss Relph were sitting quite apart in a corner of the room, while Mr. Guthrie and Miss Edwards were talking in another part of it. Numbers 1-6 are specially interesting as being the complete and consecutive series of a single sitting.

[There was no contact between the agent and percipient in the case of any of the diagrams here reproduced].