Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/235

222 E. GUENEY : between the two broad classes of communication which exhaust all possibilities of thought-conveyance between man and man, and which may be conveniently distinguished as- the physical and the psychical. I hasten to explain what I mean by this distinction, which is very liable to be misunderstood, though it would be difficult to express it shortly in any other terms. It is by no means to be taken to imply the absence of a physical basis for the ' psychical ' transferences. The word ' psychical ' does not in- volve any hypothesis as to the manner of transference, whe- ther as connected or as unconnected with physical events ; it implies simply the fact that particular ideas in two minds have corresponded in such a manner as to lead to the con- clusion that they were connected as cause and effect, though the recognised channels of sense have not been employed, and there has been no peripheral stimulation passing from one organism to the other. Now the condition from which we should most readily conclude that there was such a causal connexion between the two ideas is clearly that they should resemble one another. When one organism acts peripherally on another when A hits B, for instance we connect A's anger with B's pain without requiring to perceive any resem- blance between the two affections ; but apart from ascertain- able physical communication, it would not occur to us to regard a particular idea of B's as due to a particular idea of A's, unless they presented at least some point of identity. And the facts in Phantasms of the Living afford, I think, strong grounds for supposing such resemblance to be the general law of telepathic action. In cases of experimental thought- transference the resemblance is obvious and often complete ; and the same is true of those ' transitional ' cases where the agent sets himself to impress some idea or percept on some one at a distance ; while in the ' spontaneous ' cases it is rarely that there is a difficulty in tracing the effect on the percipient's senses or emotions to an idea reproduced (though it may be below the level of consciousness) from the agent's mind. This at once suggests the particular cha- racter which, supposing the psychical transference to be dependent on a physical effect of one organism on the other, that physical effect would naturally be held to possess ; it must apparently be of the nature of vibratory energy trans- mitted through a medium that being the only means by which changes in one piece of matter are found to reproduce themselves in a distant piece of matter ; and its place of origination in one organism and place of operation in the other must be the brain. Whether such a mode of physical