§ 4. I now turn to the second class of transitional cases; that where ideas and sensations unconnected with movement are excited, in a person who is not a conscious party to the experiment, by the concentrated but unexpressed will of another. And here, even more than before, I have to admit how scanty in every sense are the accounts which former observers have published. Of ideational cases, one of the most striking, if correctly reported, is that given by the Rev. L. Lewis in the Zoist, vol. v., p. 324 [No. (8) not reproduced here. - Ed.].

The following instance, however, has more weight with us, who know the observer, and have had ample proof of his accuracy. Mr. G. A. Smith, of 2, Elms Road, Dulwich (who has assisted us in most of our mesmeric work), narrated the incident to us within two months of its occurrence; and has now supplied a written account.

(9) " One evening in September, 1882, at Brighton, I was trying some experiments with a Mrs. W., a 'subject' whom I had frequently hypnotised. I found that she could give surprisingly minute descriptions of spots which she knew - with details which her normal recollection could never have furnished. I did not for a moment regard these descriptions as implying anything more than intensified memory, but resolved to see what would happen when she was requested to examine a place where she had never been to. I therefore requested her to look into the manager's room at the Aquarium, and to tell me all about it. Much to my surprise, she immediately began to describe the apartment with great exactness, and in perfect conformity with my own knowledge of it. I was fairly astonished; but it occurred to me that although my subject's memory could not be at work, my own mind might be acting on hers. To test this, I imagined strongly that I saw a large open umbrella on the table, and in a minute or so the lady said, in great wonder: 'Well! how odd, there's a large open umbrella on the table,' and then began to laugh.

It, therefore, seemed clear that her apparent knowledge of the room had been derived somehow from my own mental picture of it; but I may add I was never able to produce the same effect again".

This may be fairly reckoned among transitional cases, inasmuch as the lady was quite unaware at the time that any person's influence was being brought to bear upon her.

[Cases 687, 688, 689, 690, belonging to this and the previous section, which include important recent examples of telepathic results obtained by French men of science in connection with hypnotism, were given by Gur-ney in his "additional chapter," but are not reproduced here. - Ed].

§ 5. It will be seen that in both these last examples the agent and percipient were close together, and the latter was in the hypnotic state. And among transitional cases, we have absolutely no specimens of the deliberate transference of a perfectly unexciting idea - as of a card or a name - to a distant and normal percipient. This may appear an unfortunate lacuna in the transition that I am attempting to make; but the fact itself can hardly surprise us. It must be remembered that in most of our experimental cases there was a true analogy to the passivity of hypnotism, in the adjustment of the percipient's mind, the sort of inward blankness and receptivity which he or she established by a deliberate effort; that even where this was absent, the rapport involved in the mere sense of personal proximity to the agent probably went for something in the results; and also that (with few exceptions) the sort of image to be expected was known - that the percipient realised whether it was a card, a name, or a taste.

That an impression should flash across a mind in this state of preparation is clearly no guarantee that anything similar will occur when the percipient is occupied with wholly different things, while the agent is secretly concentrating his thoughts on a card or a taste in another place. And indeed the supposed conditions - a purely unemotional idea on the part of the would-be agent, and a state of complete unpreparedness on the part of the person whom it is attempted to influence - seem the most unfavourable possible: where the percipient mind is unprepared - that is, where the condition on one side is unfavourable - we should naturally expect that a stronger impulsive force must be supplied from the other side. But we have further to note that, even if the trial succeeded, the success would be hard to establish. For to the percipient the impression would only be a fleeting and uninteresting item in the swarm of faint ideas that pass every minute through the mind; and as he is ex hypothesi ignorant that the trial is being made, there would be nothing to fix this particular faint item in his memory. It would come and go unmarked, like a thousand others. And this same possibility must be equally borne in mind in respect of spontaneous telepathy.

For though in most of the cases to be quoted in the sequel, a special impulsive force will be inferred from the fact that the agent was at the time in a state psychically or physically abnormal, we must not be too positive that the telepathic action is confined to the well-marked or ostensive instances on which the proof of it has to depend. The abnormality of the agent's state, though needed to make the coincidence striking enough to be included in this book, may not for all that be an indispensable condition; genuine transferences of idea, of which we can take no account, may occur in the more ordinary conditions of life; and the continuity of the experimental and the spontaneous cases may thus conceivably be complete. Meanwhile, however, a certain gap in the evidence has to be admitted; and there is nothing for it but to pass on to the more extreme cases where the senses begin to be effected - the percipients having been for the most part in a normal state, and at various distances from the agents.