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276 CEITICAL NOTICES :

psychoses and neuroses. Assuredly Mr. Myers would not. He believes that, "besides sub-conscious and unconscious operations, super-conscious operations also are going on within us, operations, that is to say, which transcend the limitations of ordinary faculties of cognition, and which yet remain not below the threshold but rather above the horizon of consciousness, and illumine our normal experience only in transient and clouded gleams ". We may liken the mind to a river with its surface of consciousness and its undercurrents of unconscious and sub-conscious operations. To these, if I take him aright, Mr. Myers would add condensations on the surface from a surrounding atmosphere of the super-con- scious. In any case, in the Introduction, Mr. Myers emphasises his antagonism to " the materialistic synthesis of human experi- ence. The psychical element in man," he insists, must hence- forth almost inevitably be conceived as having relations which cannot be expressed in terms of matter." I have thought it well to draw attention to the authors' attitude towards this vexed question. It is not a question, however, on which they themselves lay much stress ; nay rather they feel constrained to leave the physical aspect of the problems with which they deal on one side ; and in this we will for the rest follow them. " However things may be," they say, " on the phy- sical plane, the facts of which we present evidence are purely psychical facts ; and on the psychical plane, we can give to a heterogeneous array of them a certain orderly coherence, and present them as a graduated series of natural phenomena." Now from the study of any graduated series of natural pheno- mena the laws of their nature and origin are apt to emerge. Let us therefore turn to the phenomena and their emergent laws. The phenomena of telepathy seem to fall under two heads : first, what may perhaps be termed simple or ideal transference, where an idea, mental image or motor impulse is transferred as such from an agent or agents to a percipient ; secondly, phantasmal or clairvoyant transference, where that which is transferred is not an affection of the agent but an idea of the agent as affected. An example of each will serve to bring out the difference between them : (1) Mrs. Severn, at Brantwood, Conis- ton, wakes up with a start, feeling that she has had a severe blow on the mouth. At the same moment her husband, sailing on the lake, was caught in a squall and was struck in the mouth by the tiller of his little craft. Here a painful affection of the husband is transferred as such to his distant wife. (2) Mrs. Bettany, when a child of about ten years old, was walking in a country lane reading geometry ; suddenly she saw a vision of a bedroom on the floor of which lay her mother, to all appearance dead. She fetched a doctor and led him to the room, where they found her mother actually lying as in her vision. Here that which was transferred was not a sensation of swooning but a vision of the swooning mother. This inverted transference is so noteworthy

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