Spiritualism and the New Psychology

an introduction to it. Most of us have seen children mystified by a thought-reading performance dep

shoe or pushing on the hands of a clock to a certain hour. Then he returns and, according to arrangement, may be blindfolded or not, and one of the party may

and the result is taken as

er is then in a state resembling hypnosis, and, as we have seen before, in hypnosis the senses may be abnormally sharpened. This sharpness, together with the receptivity of the subject, makes him ready to pick up the faintest signs, and in the case w

glances at the object to be handled, are all picked up by the dissociated stream whilst the main personality of the subject is for the time almost obliterated. We must bear in mind that all the audience are concent

aking several halting steps before the right one is taken. It reminds one of

y be of use to the subject by allowing him to look

onscious people producing and receiving sounds we have a group of 'concentrated' (that is, partly d

to be of benefit to any one who misinterprets it. The human mind contains enoug

ith its chain will serve), direct a friend to sit in a chair and, resting his elbows upon his knees, to hold the cord by the fingers of both hands so that the weight is suspended between his separated knees. Let him keep his eyes upon the weight and assure him that it will begin to swing from knee to knee. T

hat is, at right angles to its swing in the first experiment). If you show sufficient assurance you will probably succeed in both experiments, but your chance of success is less than that of the man who has seen the trick and accepts the 'mag

d that action; hence this experiment must be placed among the automatisms like table-turning and water-divining. One is prepared to find that the trick has its place among the mechanical adjun

rstood that the trained medium, full of a belief in the supernatural, finds it an easy task to let the unconscious have possessi

aded from memory. A friend, who told me that he saw Planchette predict truly the month in which the Boer War ended, admitted that his family had toyed with the instrume

e with their hands placed upon it, and, after due 'concentration of mind', aided often by a dim light, the table begins to move an

of Raymond, that widely-circul

hands and arms, which caused the table to have a strange intermittent trembling sort of feeling, though it was not a movement of the whole table.... Nearly ever

feelings of the wate

m is affected by the presence of water.... I suppose it must have

truck dumb during a thunderstorm: ... 'I felt the electricity passing all ove

f the man known to be sick in mind is the real explanation likely to be accepted by the subject. They are all products of imagination, suggestion, self-deceit,

iated stream. As usual, once the dissociation is established, there is no limit to its manifestations. Picture three or four Dissociates at work at a table, all bent upon pro

ll are raised from the table their knees may still be under it; and if the knees

musement and the same thing done at a séance-the mechanism is the same, but one is treated as a jest whilst the other is som

should be enough to stop the cult; but handbooks of palmistry seem to profit their publishers, and the palmists and clairvoyants flourish. The girl who buys a handbook and amuses her fri

edium to 'see as in a glass darkly' and gain time for the help of his or her receptivity, it also allows of the indu

nce, and further of allowing one Dissociate to work the miracle, whilst no one, not even the Dissociate himself, knows who is doing it. This is illustrate

ustration of tapping the unconscious and

le source of information in history or tradition and thinking hard and often about the Edgar Chapel, a part of the Abbey whose site was und

t work combining the more superficial and obvious things written on the pages of memory, and by its dominant activity ex

at automatic writing was the means employed to switch off

xpect, for he disclaims 'the action of discarnate intelligences from the

y spiritualists as 'objective entities'; but the writer gives his opinion regarding Johannes (p. 50) as follows: 'Whethe

ical phenomena contains so many similar 'personalities' that I find no reason to call in the supernatural to account for this one. If a natural explanation is

oduced in the script and the 'veridical passages' concerning the discoveries of the Edgar Chapel, I have no need to crit

ing; the dissociated streams were entirely out of their control, and although I must, from the psychological standpoint, class the experiment w

Remembrance, but whoever reads the conclusion in the latter book will fin

are examples of a psychological automatism in which the agent is conscious neither of the mus

he unconscious, and if the agents remain in ignorance of their true mechanism