§ 1. In all the cases of the action of one mind on another that were considered in the last chapter, both the parties concerned - percipient as well as agent - were consciously and voluntarily taking part in the experiment with a definite idea of certain results in view. Spontaneous telepathy, as its name implies, differs from experimental in precisely this particular - that neither agent nor percipient has consciously or voluntarily formed an idea of any result whatever. Something happens for which both alike are completely unprepared. But between these two great classes of cases there is a sort of transitional class, which is akin to each of the others in one marked feature. In this class the agent acts consciously and voluntarily; he exercises a concentration of mind with a certain object, as in experimental thought-transference; he is in this way truly experimenting.1 But the percipient is not consciously or voluntarily a party to the experiment; as in spontaneous telepathy, his mind has not been in any way adjusted to the result; he finds himself affected in a certain manner, he knows not by what means.

In another way, also, this class of cases serves as a connecting link between the other two. For it introduces us to results produced at a much greater distance than any of those that have been so far described. Not that greater distance between the agent and percipient is in any way a distinguishing mark of the spontaneous, as opposed to the experimental, effects; the former no less than the latter - as we shall see reason to think - may take place between persons in the same room. But in the large majority of the spontaneous cases that we shall have to notice, the distance was considerable. And in the transitional class we meet with specimens of both kinds - effects produced in the same room, and effects produced at a distance of many miles.

§ 2. In these transitional cases - as in those of the last chapter - the effect may show itself either in ideas and sensations which the percipient describes, or in actions of a more or less automatic sort. The motor cases have been by far the most heard of, and are, indeed, popularly supposed to be tolerably common; but this idea has no real foundation. The allegations of certain persons that, e.g., they can make strangers in church or in the theatre turn their heads, by "willing" that they should do so, cannot be accepted as establishing even a prima facie case. Till accurate records are kept, such cases must clearly be reckoned as mere illusions of post hoc propter hoc - of successes noted and failures forgotten. Authentic instances of the kind seem, as it happens, always to be more or less closely connected with mesmerism. And even as regards mesmeric cases where a definite action or course of action is produced by silent or distant control, the first thing to remark is that many phenomena are popularly referred to this category which have not the slightest claim to a place in it.

The common platform exhibition, where a profession is made of "willing" a particular person to attend, and he rushes into the room at the appointed moment, is not to be attributed to any influence then and there exercised, but is the effect of the command or the threat impressed on his mind when in its wax-like condition of trance on a previous evening. Nor, as a rule, do the cases where "subjects" are said to be drawn by their controller from house to house, or even to a distant town, prove any specific power of his will, or anything beyond the general influence and attraction which he has established, and which is liable every now and then to recrudesce in his absence, and to manifest itself in this startling form.1

1 It should be observed, however, that unless he records his experiment at the time, the case will stand on a different footing from those of the last chapter.

Very much rarer are the really crucial cases where the intended effect - the origination or inhibition of a motor-impulse - is brought about at the moment by a deliberate exercise of volition. In some of the more striking instances, the inhibition has been of that specific sort which temporarily alters the whole condition of the "subject," and induces the mesmeric trance. In the Zoist for April, 1849, Mr. Adams, a surgeon of Lymington, writing four months after the event, describes how a guest of his own twice succeeded in mesmerising the man-servant of a common friend at a distance of nearly fifty miles, the time when the attempt was to be made having in each case been privately arranged with the man's master. On the first occasion, the unwitting "subject" fell at the time named, 7.30 p.m., into a state of profound coma not at all resembling natural sleep, from which he was with difficulty aroused. He said that "before he fell asleep he had lost the use of his legs; he had endeavoured to kick the cat away, and could not do so." On the second occasion a similar fit was induced at 9.30 a.m., when the man was in the act of walking across a meadow to feed the pigs.

But the following case is more striking, as resting on the testimony of a man whose name must perforce be treated with respect. Dr. Esdaile says: - 2

(1) "I had been looking for a blind man on whom to test the imagination theory, and one at last presented himself. This man became so susceptible that, by making him the object of my attention, I could entrance him in whatever occupation he was engaged, and at any distance within the hospital enclosure. . . . My first attempt to influence the blind man was made by gazing at him silently over a wall, while he was engaged in the act of eating his solitary dinner, at the distance of twenty yards. He gradually ceased to eat, and in a quarter of an hour was profoundly entranced and cataleptic. This was repeated at the most untimely hours, when he could not possibly know of my being in his neighbourhood, and always with like results".

1Signs of this general mesmeric influence occur occasionally in the records of witchcraft. (See, e.g., The Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft practised by Jane Wenham, London, 1712).

2Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance, pp. 227-8. See also Mr. Cattell's case in the Zoist, vol. viii., p. 143; where the special circumstances seem sufficiently to exclude the hypothesis of expectancy.