825. In the next group of cases which I shall cite, we reach a class of massive motor impulses which are almost entirely free from any sensory admixture.

In the first of these, Mr. Garrison left a religious meeting in the evening, and walked eighteen miles under the strong impulse to see his mother, and found her dead. The account is taken from the Journal S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 125.

Mr. Garrison writes:-

Gardner & Garrison, Dealers in Fancy and Family Groceries.

Ozark, Mo., July 29th, 1896.

Mr. Richard Hodgson, - Dear Sir, - Answering your letter of July 15th in regard to my experience connected with the death of my mother, I will make the following statement. My mother, Nancy J. Garrison, died on Friday night, October 4th, 1888, at her home three miles north-east of Ozark, Christian County, Missouri. She was fifty-eight years old. I was then living at Fordland, in Webster County, Missouri, about eighteen miles north-east of my mother's home. I had not seen my mother for two months at the time of her death, but had heard from [her] by letter from week to week.

On the night of my mother's death there was a meeting in Fordland, and myself and wife attended the preaching. We had then one child, a baby a year old. The meetings had been going on a week or more. About ten o'clock, just before the meeting closed, while the congregation was singing, I felt the first desire to see my mother. The thought of my mother was suggested by the sight of some of the penitents at the altar, who were very warm and sweating. My mother was subject to smothering spells, and while suffering from these attacks she would perspire freely and we had to fan her. In the faces of the mourners I seemed to see my mother's suffering. And then the impulse to go to her became so strong that I gave the baby to a neighbour-woman and left the church without telling my wife. She was in another part of the house.

The train going west which would have taken me [to] Rogersville, seven miles of the distance to my mother's place, was due at 10.30 p.m., but before I got home and changed my clothes and returned to the depot, the cars had left the station. I still felt that I must see my mother, and started down the railroad track alone, and walked to Rogersville. Here I left the railroad and walked down the waggon way leading from Marshfield to Ozark, Mo. It was about three o'clock a.m. when I reached my mother's house. I knocked at the door two or three times and got no response. Then I kicked the door, but still made no one hear me. At last I opened the door with my knife and walked in and lighted a lamp. Then my sister, Mrs. Billie Gilley, the only person who had been living with my mother, awoke, and I asked her where mother was. She replied that she was in bed, and I said, "She is dead," for by that time I felt that she could not be alive. She had never failed to wake before when I had entered the room at night.

I went to my mother's bed and put my hand on her forehead. It was cold. She had been dead about three hours, the neighbours thought, from the condition of her body. She had gone to bed about ten o'clock at night, feeling better than usual. She and my sister had talked awhile after going to bed. They were aiming to come to Ozark the next morning, and intended to get up early.

The above facts cover my experience as fully as I can tell the story. I have no explanation for the matter. It is as much a mystery to me now as ever. I could not believe such a strange affair if told by any one else, and yet I could swear to every fact stated. . . . Thomas B. Garrison.

Ozark, Mo., August 17th, 1896.

Mr. Richard Hodgson, - Dear Sir, - I send you a statement made by my wife about the death of my mother. . . .

I have not yet been able to get my sister's statement. She lives a few miles out of town. I will get her to tell about the death of mother and my coming home that night when I see her.

After finding that mother was dead I went to three neighbour families right away and had the women come and stay with us till morning. Mrs. Green, Mrs. Walker, and Mrs. Gardner were the women who first heard of mother's death from me. They still live in that neighbourhood, and would confirm my story so far as it relates to my coming to my mother's that night and finding her dead.

Would you like a statement from these women? I shall be glad to give you all the facts connected with the strange occurrence, for it has been to me a mystery of the greatest perplexity. ... T. B. Garrison.

Corroborative statements are as follows:-

Ozark, Mo., August 12th, 1896.

Richard Hodgson, - Dear Sir, - We received your letter asking for a statement from me in regard to the death of my husband's mother.

I remember the occurrence just as my husband has written it. I was very much surprised to find him gone from the church, and more so when I got home to hear he had started seventeen miles after night without saying a word to me, as he never left home even for a few hours without telling me where he was going. My mother (Mrs. Butcher) was at the house. When he started he left word with her telling me he had gone to see his mother, but I could hardly believe it, it being such a strange time to start such a distance. He did not say anything about going to any one except my mother. He has always said he felt as if he must go. . . . Minnie Garrison.

Ozark, Mo., September 14th, 1896.

Mr. R. Hodgson, - Hearing that you were trying to find out the particulars about the remarkable circumstance of Mr. Garrison's experience about the time of his mother's death, I decided to write to you. I was living about 150 yards from Mrs. Garrison at the time, and Mr. Garrison came to our house between three and four that morning to tell us of his mother's death, and we learned the matter then just as it was printed in the newspaper. . . .

Mrs. C. C. Green.

Ozark, Mo., September 16th, 1896.

... I was living with my son-in-law, Thomas B. Garrison, at the time of his mother's death on October 3rd, 1888.

Garrison and his wife went to church in Fordland, Mo., and I remained at home. About ten o'clock that night T. B. Garrison returned home and said "Ma, I have took a notion to go home, in Christian Co., and see mother." I was surprised at his starting at that hour of the night. I asked him where Minnie was. He said she was at church, and he told me to tell his wife where he was gone when she returned. The above is true. . . .

Elvira Butcher.

In another case, that of Major Kobbe (given in Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 288), the percipient was prompted to visit a distant cemetery, without any conscious reason, and there found his father, who had, in fact, for certain unexpected reasons, sent to his son, Major Kobbe, a request (accidentally not received) to meet him at that place and hour.

In a third case, Mr. Skirving (see 825 A) was irresistibly compelled to leave his work and go home - why, he knew not - at the moment when his wife was in fact calling for him in the distress of a serious accident. See also a case given in Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 377, where a bricklayer has a sudden impulse to run home, and arrives just in time to save the life of his little boy, who had set himself on fire.

This special sensibility to the motor element in an impulse recalls to us the special susceptibilities to different forms of hallucination or suggestion shown by different hypnotic subjects. Some can be made to see, some to hear, some to act out the conception proposed to them. Dr. Berillon1 has even shown that certain subjects who seem at first quite refractory to hypnotisation are nevertheless at once obedient, even in the waking state, to a motor suggestion. This was the case both with a very strong man, with weak men and women, and with at least one subject actually suffering from locomotor ataxy. Thus the loss of supraliminal motor control over certain muscular combinations may actually lead to motor suggestibility as regards those combinations; just as the loss of supraliminal sensation in some anaesthetic patch may lead to a special subliminal sensitiveness in the very directions where the superficial sensibility has sunk away. On the other hand, a specially well-developed motor control may predispose in a similar way; - as for instance, the subject who can sing already is more easily made to sing by suggestion.

We must, then, await further observations before we can pretend to say beforehand with which auto-matist the messages will take a sensory, and with which a motor form.

1 Revue de l'Hypnotisme, March 1893, p. 268.

Still less can we explain the special predisposition of each experimenter to one or more of the common kinds of motor automatism - as automatic speech, automatic writing, table movements, raps, and so forth. These forms of messages may themselves be variously combined; and the contents of a message of any one of these kinds may be purely dream-like and fantastic, or may be veridical in various ways.

Let us enumerate the modes of subliminal motor message as nearly as we can in order of their increasing specialisation.

1. We may place first the massive motor impulses (like Mr. Garrison's) which mark a kind of transition between coenesthetic affections and motor impulses proper. There was here no impulse to special movement of any limb; but an impulse to reach a certain place by ordinary methods.

2. Next, perhaps, in order of specialisation come the simple subliminal muscular impulses which give rise to table-tilting and similar phenomena.

3. Musical execution, subliminally initiated, might theoretically be placed next; although definite evidence of this is hard to obtain, since the threshold of consciousness with musical performers is notoriously apt to be shifting and indefinite. ("When in doubt, play with your fingers, and not with your head.")

4. Next we may place automatic drawing and painting. This curious group of messages has but seldom a telepathic content, and, as was suggested in Chapter III (Genius). (324), is more akin to genius and similar non-telepathic forms of subliminal faculty.1

5. Next comes automatic writing, on which much remains to be said in this chapter.

6. Automatic speech, which would not seem to be per se a more developed form of motor message than automatic script,' is often accompanied by profound changes of memory or of personality which raise the question of "inspiration" or "possession"; - for the two words, however different their theological import, mean much the same thing from the standpoint of experimental psychology.

7. I must conclude my list with a class of motor phenomena which I shall here merely record in passing, without attempting any explanation. I allude to raps, and to those telekinetic movements of objects whose real existence is still matter of controversy.

Comparing this list of motor automatisms with the sensory automatisms enumerated in Chapter VI (Sensory Automatism)., we shall find a certain general tendency running through each alike. The sensory automatisms began with vague un-specialised sensations. They then passed through a phase of definition, of specialisation on the lines of the known senses. And finally they reached a stage beyond these habitual forms of specialisation: beyond them, as of wider reach, and including in an apparently unanalysable act of perception a completer truth than any of our specialised forms of perception could by itself convey. With motor messages, too, we begin with something of similar vagueness. They, too, develop from modifications of the percipient's general organic condition, or coenesthesia; and the first dim telepathic impulse apparently hesitates between several channels of expression. They then pass through various definitely specialised forms; and finally, as we shall see when automatic script is considered, they, too, merge into an unanalysable act of cognition in which the motor element of the message has disappeared.

1 When the automatic drawings have any telepathic or other supernormal content, they are usually associated with automatic writing. Compare the case of Mr. Cameron Grant, 736 B, and two cases in the experience of Mr. Stainton Moses, that connected with "Blanche Abercromby" (see 949), and the case of the man crushed by a steamroller (see 948 A).

But these motor messages point also in two other even more perplexing directions. They lead, as I have said above, towards the old idea of possession; - using the word no longer in an unfavourable sense, but simply as an expression for some form of temporary manifestation of some veritably distinct and alien personality through the physical organism of some living man or woman. And they appear to lead also to another class of phenomena in which (just as in "possession") the influence at work, instead of becoming more and more identified with the automatist's conscious thought, appears to become more and more markedly distinguished from it. 1 allude to telekinesis, or hyperboulia, or whatever name we may decide to give to effects apparently exercised in the automatist's presence, but not through his normal agency, upon the physical world.

These two last-named topics, so-called "possession," and so-called "telekinetic phenomena," although unavoidably mentioned here, must be reserved for fuller description in my next chapter. It will be enough for the present to consider motor messages as running parallel to sensory messages; - as covering much the same ground, and presenting the old problems as to their source and initiation in an instructively different light.