2. On another occasion Mr. Higton was walking through a field as to which a legend ran that a young lady was murdered there, while she held a sprig of thyme, and that any one passing through the field and not thinking of the murder would smell thyme. Mr. Higton paid no credit to this legend; - often walked through the field, but thought about the murder. " However, I did walk through the field one gloomy November afternoon, absorbed so deeply in some new practical scheme that I did not think about the murder, and most certainly should not have thought about it if the strongest conceivable smell of thyme that ever rose to human nostrils had not risen to mine. The odour of it lasted at least a quarter of a minute, until my concentrated thoughts were disorganised, and made to dwell on the magical subject".

1 Proceedings of American S.P.R., vol. i. No. 4, p. 360.

3. "When I was at home assisting my father in his business it used to be my work to weigh the hides which were taken from the beasts we killed, preparatory to sending them to the dealer; and it was my custom before placing them in the scale to see how near the weight I would guess them to be. By this means I became tolerably expert in estimating their weight, invariably being not more than three or four pounds out. Now on several occasions before I guessed, or even thought of guessing, a certain weight came into my mind which (as in the case of the time indicated on the dial) I was inwardly assured was correct. I remember one case distinctly, in which the hide weighed 87¾ lb., which were the exact figures which occurred to me prior to weighing, and independently of any computation whatever. Indeed, on one occasion, the fourth, I think, I ventured to ticket the hide, without weighing it, in accordance with the figures which came into my mind; and on the following Tuesday exactly the number of pounds named on the ticket were paid for at the market to which the hides were delivered.

As you will easily believe, I did not tell my father I had not weighed the hide on the ground that I knew the weight without doing so!"

Setting aside for the moment the hallucination of the sense of smell, I would point out that we have here precisely such uprushes of subliminal faculty, concerned with the deep organic sensations of the efflux of time and of muscular resistance, as theory had led us to expect. We need not postulate any direct or supernormal knowledge, - but merely a subliminal calculation, such as we shall see in the case of "arithmetical prodigies," expressing itself supraliminally, sometimes in a phantasmal picture, sometimes as a mere " conviction," without sensory clothing. And I would interpret in much the same way the story of the smell of thyme in the haunted field. We may suppose, I think, that although Mr. Higton was not "consciously" thinking of the local legend, his subliminal self remembered it, and produced the appropriate hallucination of smell in the same way in which it produced the picture of the clock-face, as indicating that it knew the precise hour. Thus we have, I think, a reasonable explanation of what seems at first sight an extravagant ghost story; - an explanation which is the more probable insomuch as it is deduced from our own analysis of Mr. Higton's evidence, and does not seem to have occurred to himself.

312. Passing on here to subliminal products of visual type, I am glad to be able to quote the following passage, which seems to me to give in germ the very theory for which I am now contending on the authority of one of the most lucid thinkers of the last generation.

The passage occurs in an article by Sir John Herschel on "Sensorial Vision," in his Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 1816. Sir John describes some experiences of his own, " which consist in the involuntary production of visual impressions, into which geometrical regularity of form enters as the leading character, and that, under circumstances which altogether preclude any explanation drawn from a possible regularity of structure in the retina of the optic nerve."1 Twice these patterns appeared in waking daylight hours, - with no illness or discomfort at the time or afterwards. More frequently they appeared in darkness; but still while Sir John was fully awake. They appeared also twice when he was placed under chloroform; "and I should observe that I never lost my consciousness of being awake and in full possession of my mind, though quite insensible to what was going on.... Now the question at once presents itself - What are these Geometrical Spectres? and how, and in what department of the bodily or mental economy do they originate? They are evidently not dreams.

The mind is not dormant, but active and conscious of the direction of its thoughts; while these things obtrude themselves on notice, and by calling attention to them, direct the train of thought into a channel it would not have taken of itself.... If it be true that the conception of a regular geometrical pattern implies the exercise of thought and intelligence, it would almost seem that in such cases as those above adduced we have evidence of a thought, an intelligence, working within our own organisation distinct from that of our own personality." And Sir John further suggests that these complex figures, entering the mind in this apparently arbitrary fashion, throw light upon "the suggestive principle " to which " we must look for much that is determinant and decisive of our volition when carried into action." " It strikes me as not by any means devoid of interest to contemplate cases where, in a matter so entirely abstract, so completely devoid of any moral or emotional bearing, as the production of a geometrical figure, we, as it were, seize upon that principle in the very act, and in the performance of its office".

From my point of view, of course, I can but admire the acumen which enabled this great thinker to pierce to the root of the matter by the aid of so few observations. He does not seem to have perceived the connection between these "schematic phantasms," to borrow a phrase from Professor Ladd,2 and the hallucinatory figures of men or animals seen in health or in disease. But even from his scanty data his inference seems to me irresistible; - "we have evidence of a thought, an intelligence, working within our own organisation, distinct from that of our own personality." I shall venture to claim him as the first originator of the theory to which the far fuller evidence now accessible had independently led myself.

1 On this point see Professor James's Principles of Psychology, vol. ii. p. 84, note. Goethe's well-known phantasmal flower was clearly no mere representation of retinal structure. A near analogy to these patterns lies in the so-called "spirit-drawings," or automatic arabesques, discussed elsewhere in this chapter (see Section 324).

2 See Professor Ladd's paper on this subject in Mind, April 1892.