The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BORDERLAND SCIENCE

tion of this process in terms of established scientific fact. The analogy to wireless telegraphy is at best a very loose analogy ; a human brain has no structural resemblances to a wireless station, and the mechanism of transmission, if there is any transmission except through the normal sense-organs, must be upon widely different lines.

That distinguished man of science, Professor Charles Richet, who accepts telepathy as a fact, hypothecates a “ Sixth Sense ** which operates in these cases. This seems to be a sense without special senseorgans. Other critics resort to the phenomena of hyperesthesia with which we have already dealt. Others again either challenge the good faith of the experimenters or minimize their agreement down to the level of coincidence and natural parallelism. Kindred minds they say are parallel minds ; two people very intimately related and accustomed to each other’s society may follow closely similar paths of mental association and may respond in precisely the Same way to the same circumstances. In this way, too, by this insistence upon the parallel working of similar things, it may be possible to account for the remarkable unison in the flight of social birds and in the movements of gregarious herbivora.

It increases the difficulty of this discussion that every shade of credibility is to be found in the cases cited, from the unimpeachable integrity of Professor Murray to manifestly dishonest witnesses and observers. And there is hardly any form of telepathy that cannot be imitated by conjurers and other professional entertainers. There is an indefinable element of untrustworthiness in most of the witnesses: and possibly in all. Exaggeration of statement for the sake of emphasis is a common error of the human mind, and most of us would rather have an overaccentuated story to tell than nothing remarkable to say.

Moreover, these mental experiments are dependent upon the moods and health of the experimenters, and all are complicated by the fact that as frequently as not the recipient draws or relates something entirely different from what was in the mind of the transmitter. When the transmitter thinks of a lion, it is perhaps explicable if the recipient thinks of a cat, the British Empire, a battleship, the zodiac or the map of Asia, but it becomes more difficult if he records a pair of slippers or the North Pole. It is often very difficult to define what is relevant and continuous, and what irrelevant and discontinuous in mental association, but

when every concession has been made there remains a vast proportion of failure in telepathic endeavours. The public is too apt to hear only of telepathic successes.

It is to be noted that in chess tournaments and bridge clubs, where human brains intensely concentrated upon identical problems are brought into close proximity, telepathy is not observed, nor does the thought of it trouble us in the ordinary reservations, evasions and falsehoods of everyday intercourse ; it is unknown in the Jury-box and unused or not reported from the connubial pillow. The mind of the recipient must be lax; that is the claim ; and where people are too vividly interested, that laxity of mind is unattainable. It is not high-pressure strained activity but lowpressure activity. For all practical purposes at least the human cranium remains opaque.

These are reasons for keeping our heads when we hear marvellous stories of thoughttransmission, but there is no justification for an intolerant rejection of the idea. After the monstrous accumulations of half-evidence and pseudo-evidence in this field have been sifted and reduced, there remains enough to justify an attitude of critical indecision. Whether through Professor Richet’s as yet unlocated and undefined “sixth sense,’ or in some other way or ways, there does seem to be sufficient evidence of some unknown reaction of the thought process of one individual upon the thoughtprocess of another to invite further inquiry. There is certainly nothing in the idea of telepathy that runs counter to the general scientific ideology. But also there is nothing to forbid a practical scepticism in the matter.

It is arguable that if this telepathic faculty or “sixth sense’? is an actual possibility it should have played an important and recognizable part in the evolution of the animal world. Has it done so? If it possessed a survival value for any particular species, we might reasonably expect to find it highly developed in that species. But do we find it highly developed in any species ? It should have a use in social co-operation. A re-examination of the behaviour of wasps, bees, and ants from this point of view might shed new light on what Maeterlinck calls the “spirit of the hive.” Something may still remain unexplained in the emotional infection of crowds. ‘There are such things as undesirable possibilities and for the human type telepathy may be one of them. Man is an intensely “ individualized’ animal. Individuality is a biological device that, like

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