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Page 53
The above indicates what we will provisionally call Possession. But it is
not possession to the extent of complete expulsion of the original
consciousness, as in the trances of Home, Moses, and Mrs. Piper.
And which is the following? (Bartlett, _op. cit._, 103):
[Letter to editor, written Nov. 30, 1874]
New York _Daily Graphic_: ... He told me he saw the spirit of an
old woman close to me, describing most perfectly my grandmother,
and repeating: "Resodeda, Resodeda is here; she kisses her
grandson." Arising from his chair, Foster embraced and kissed me
in the same peculiar way as my grandmother did when alive.
But here the Possession seems complete (Bartlett, _op. cit._, 140). From
the Melbourne _Daily Age_:
Mr. Foster ... in answer to the question, What he died of?
suddenly interrupted, "Stay, this spirit will enter and possess
me," and instantaneously his whole body was seized with quivering
convulsions, the eyes were introverted, the face swelled, and the
mouth and hands were spasmodically agitated. Another change, and
there sat before me the counterpart of the figure of my departed
friend, stricken down with complete paralysis, just as he was on
his death-bed. The transformation was so life-like, if I may use
the expression, that I fancied I could detect the very features
and physiognomical changes that passed across the visage of my
dying friend. The kind of paralysis was exactly represented, with
the palsied hand extended to me to shake, as in the case of the
original. Mr. Foster recovered himself when I touched it, and he
said in reply to one of my companions that he had completely lost
his own identity during the fit, and felt like waves of water
flowing all over his body, from the crown downwards.
Now for some tentative explanation of these rather unusual proceedings. It
is generally known that a hypnotized person will imagine things and do
things willed by the hypnotizer, that the sensibility of persons to
hypnotism varies, and that persons frequently hypnotized become
increasingly susceptible to the influence.
Now what is ordinarily called thought transference has all these symptoms,
and the combined indications seem to be that persons who readily
experience thought-transference are specially susceptible to hypnotic
influence, and get the transferred thought from almost anybody, just as
the recognized hypnotic subject gets it from his hypnotizer; and that
persons of excessive sensibility, like Foster, Home, Mrs. Holland, Mrs.
Piper and mediums generally--the genuine ones,--simply get their
impressions hypnotically from their sitters.
But this explanation (?) by no means covers the whole situation. In the
first place, it does not cover the vividness and the emotional content
often displayed by the sensitive. The sitter is very seldom conscious of
anything approaching it. It comes nearer to, in fact almost seems
identical with, the frequent vividness and intensity of dreams. But where
do dreams come from, whether in sleep, or in a waking "dream state" like
that of Foster and many other sensitives? They don't come from any
assignable "sitter." This present scribe dreams architecture and
bric-a-brac finer than any he ever saw, or than any ever made. Yet he is
no architect, or artist of any kind. Where does it all come from?
Dreams, moreover, are filled with memories of forgotten things. Where do
they come from? Dreams, too, are by no means devoid of truths not
previously known to the dreamer, or, it would sometimes seem, to anybody
else. Where do they come from?
Du Prel and his school say they come from a "subliminal self," and Myers
picks up the term and spreads it through Anglo-Saxondom. But those queer
dreams frequently include persons who oppose the self--argue with it, and
even down it, sometimes very much for its information, regeneration and
increased stability. That does not seem like a house divided against
itself; such an one, we have on very high authority, is apt to fall.
James, cornered by his studies in Psychical Research, was inclined to
posit a "cosmic reservoir" of all thoughts and feelings that ever existed,
and of potentialities of all the thoughts and feelings that are ever going
to exist; and under various designations, this cosmic reservoir or,--it
seems a better metaphor--the cosmic soul filling it, and dribbling into
our little souls,--is a guess of virtually all the philosophers from James
back to Plato, and farther still--into the mists.
Moreover this guess is powerfully backed up by another guess: men's
speculations have been reaching back for the beginning of mind, until they
recognize that a consistent doctrine of evolution finds no beginning, and
demands mind as a constituent of the star-dust, and, when it really comes
down to the scratch, is unable to imagine matter unassociated with mind.
This is admirably expressed by James (Psychology I, 140):
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