(C) Extradition Of Will-Power Beyond The Organism; Telergy; Self-Projection

And if the despot chooses to ignore his own country's Constitution, what guarantee have we that he will respect treaty-obligations abroad? The access of one man to another, the power of one man over another is limited, so to say, by international laws so ancient that no one dreams of infringing them. Then suddenly - to take the best-known case of hypnotisation at a distance - Dr. Gibert throws the absent Leonie into a trance, and impels her to hasten through Havre to his house. This is an invasion of an independent kingdom, against all rules of war. And yet it finds, as Napoleon's invasions often found, a party in the invaded realm itself which supports the invader; the impulse given from a distance to Leonie's subliminal self finds something in that self not only competent to discern it but willing to obey.

Mere metaphor, however, cannot satisfy us here. We have reached a point where it is indispensable that we should form at least some provisional working conception not only of what telepathy is not - but of what it possibly may be. Its laws, we have concluded, are not cognate to the known laws of the material world. It is a transference, not of a pattern of vibrations, but of a knowledge, an impulse, which seems to implant itself in the percipient's mind like a living thing. The "telepathic impact," as we have sometimes called it, is no blunt shock. It may be sudden; but it may also be persistent; it may sometimes be overwhelming, but it can be insinuating too. It is not a bolt discharged and done with; it is a vital influence at work on the percipient's subliminal self.

No argument has been as yet urged in this discussion to show that man possesses a spirit which preceded birth or which survives death. The question of individual pre-existence, individual survival, belongs to a later stage of our review of vital faculty. But, nevertheless, I think that those who have been willing to go even thus far with the general scheme here set forth will feel that the subliminal self whose influence over the organism seems to be at once so latent and so profound must be regarded as something other than a mere coenesthetic focus. It must (so to express it) be at least an earthly soul, a provisional spirit.

We have, then, to imagine this spirit or quasi-spirit as acting first normally upon its own organism and then telepathically upon the organisms of others. How are we to conceive it at work? In its own organism, to begin with, it acts, I suppose, especially upon the nervous system; - primarily on the brain. To act on the brain - to direct its thought and volition - the spirit must, I again suppose, be able to modify in countless ways each individual cell. And must not such a selective or directive influence be intimate enough to affect severally each molecule of which each cell is composed? Something must so affect them; and to stop short of this power for the spirit would simply be to postulate some other intelligence engaged in preparing the spirit's work. Assuredly neither the molecule nor the atom is the last word of analysis, as even the ordinary physicist would now agree. The whole process may be something far subtler than an action on molecules; but thus much of subtlety there needs must be.

Selective guidance of each individual molecule; - let us at least, then, use this formula as a compendious expression for the entirely interpenetrating control which we must assume that a man's own spirit exercises over his brain.

And next, in a case of telepathy, the agent is somehow the cause that the percipient's brain shall be influenced in this same delicate, penetrating way. How shall we imagine the mechanism of such influence? Shall we say that the spirit of the agent affects the spirit of the percipient, and thus the spirit of the percipient influences his own brain? Or shall we say that the agent's spirit directly influences the percipient's brain in like manner as it influences his own? There may seem little to choose between two such unprovable conceptions. Yet, looking forward to evidence which we shall presently have to meet, I think that the second alternative should provisionally not be excluded. For we shall have cases where inanimate matter outside an organism is, as I believe, directly affected by some spirit; and the question will arise whether the spirit so acting must necessarily be a spirit discarnate, and outside the medium, or may also possibly be the medium's own. I do not wish to prejudge this question, as against the possibility that the medium's own spirit may be the agency which, in such a case, directly affects the external world; but if such is ever to be our explanation, it is certainly simpler to suppose that here also the agent's spirit is directly affecting the percipient's brain, - not needing, so to say, to invite the percipient's own spirit to accomplish that task.

On this view we shall have an intelligible series - though a series advancing by leaps and bounds - to represent the achievements of Will, as it shakes itself free from the limitations which are but shadows as contrasted with its own reality. In the first place we have hyperboulia; - the extension of the Will's power over tissues in the organism which its mandates have ordinarily failed to reach. In the second place, we have telergy; - the extension of its power over the brain molecules of an organism other than that with which it is primarily in connection. And in the third place we shall have "telekinesis" and the like; - a group of phenomena involving control over inorganic matter, and over organic matter both within and without its own organism.

This last extension, however, will lead to our third category, - the category of phenomena claimed as controlled by spirits external to the agent or medium himself. Before passing on to such matters we must briefly review the phases of personality which subliminal influence creates or reveals in the living or dying man. We must thus lead up to some comprehension of the nature of Death, before we deal with spirits whom we assume to have passed through that crisis undestroyed.