Part 6 (1/2)

”First I saw diirl with brown hair down her back, tied with a ribbon in the usual way

She is sitting at a table with her back turned and see out scraps with a pair of scissors She has on a white pinafore, and I should guess her age to be between eight and twelve”

Miss Miles had not been trying toof the sort But the description fitted perfectly her landlady's little daughter, of whorove, says:

”I have a little girl aged eleven, with brown hair, tied with a ribbon in the usual way She wears a pinafore, and, being ill, often a out scraps”

Another tiot all about it, being busy writing letters to so an answer to an important letter from a Polish artist, written in a peculiar script Miss Ra was:

”I felt that you were not thinking ofThe letters have very long tails to them

Is there any truth in that?”[11]

[11] The experiments of the Misses Miles and Ras of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol xxi, and in the _Journal of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol viii The report of the Burt-Usher experiments appears in the _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_, January and February, 1910

Significant also is the fact that precisely the sa occurred in the more recent experiments between Mr Burt and Mr Usher, who, like Miss Miles and Miss Raations in a careful,period of time

Mr Usher, like Miss Miles, invariably acted as the sender of the telepathic communications, while Mr Burt was the percipient From first to last the latter remained in London, while Mr Usher was part of the time in Bristol, more than one hundred miles froue, a thousandit was Mr Usher's practice, at the hour previously agreed upon, to sit alone in a din on a piece of paper, and ren and ”willing” to transmit it to Mr Burt, who, at the sa the ies that passed before hisdown on paper the one or two that had seemed to him most vivid

Nearly fifty experi any explanation by the theory of chance coincidence And, as in the Miles-Ramsden experiments--for the matter of that, as also in Professor Hyslop's experiments--it at tin corresponding with that which Mr Usher had drawn, Mr Burt's design did correspond with ies demonstrably in Mr

Usher's mind at or immediately before the ue Mr Usher tried tocomposed of nuned a peculiar plunized as a picture of part of the unusual carving on the table at which he had been seated On another occasion--the eighteenth experin of a flower in a pot What Mr Burt actually dreas an excellent representation of a lighted cigarette with the s away fro that he drew this was the first evening I had s with him”

Such incidents, with those cited in connection with the experiments of Professor Hyslop and the Misses Miles and Rao to show exactly why it is that one cannot hope to obtain unfailing control over the process of telepathy For they indicate that at bottoht transference depends not so _ It is not necessarily the things about which one thinks ed with so, that are most likely to become subjects of telepathic communication

And these experiments further indicate that, on the receiver's part also, the es belongs rather to the subconscious than to the conscious portion of the ence of the transe, there seems to be always necessary some form of psychical ”dissociation”--as in a trance, dream, reverie, or moment of absentmindedness Such states of dissociation are not always easy to bring about voluntarily; and when they are brought about, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, it by no means follows that ideas received telepathically will forthwith and rapidly rise above the threshold of consciousness

For, as recent psychological experiment and observation have shown, in dissociated states the tendency is for the eh their enificance--as e dreas associated with events that once affected us profoundly Every one of us has subconscious reminiscences of this sort, and with these personal subconscious reminiscences any ideas which have been transence They h apparently depends in large ree of their own emotional intensity

Hence it is that that scientist is doomed to perpetual unbelief who boasts that he will never place credence in telepathy until he can play with it as he plays with the ches as one can handle a chemical compound, nor can one h it were a physical substance Hence, too, the case for telepathy h the Miles-Ramsden and Burt-Usher experiments demonstrate that this sometimes is--than on well-authenticated instances of spontaneous occurrence, which have been recorded in ever-increasing voluation of the subject was first undertaken a scant quarter of a century ago

In such instances, the records further show, one of the coe is received is that of an auditory hallucination, as in the ”voice” heard by me on the shore of the Canadian lake and on the bank of Niagara River When there is connected with the sending of the e some supreme crisis in the career of the sender--the crisis, it may be, of the moment of death--the auditory hallucination is so al e case reported, with ample corroborative evidence, to the Society for Psychical Research

The narrator, a well-to-do English at the tiht of his telepathic experience there had been a slight snowfall, just sufficient towriting until ten o'clock, when, to continue the story in his oords:

”I got up and left the roo it on a s in a recess of thein the breakfast-room The curtains were not drawn across theI had just taken down froillivray's British Birds' for reference, and was in the act of reading the passage, the book held close to the la theshutter, and in a position when alhtest sound would be heard, when I distinctly heard the front gate opened and shut again with a clap, and footsteps advancing at a run up the drive; when opposite thethe steps changed frorass-slip below the , and at the sa stood close to lass dividing us

”I could hear the quick, panting, labored breathing of theto recover breath before speaking

Had he been attracted by the light through the shutter? Suddenly, like a gunshot, inside, outside, and all around, there broke out the ed wail of horror, which seele shriek, but h key, and then less and less, wailing away toward the north, and beco pulsations of intense agony