176

The medium's return to normal life--Speeches
made while the medium seems to hover between
the two worlds.

Chapter XX 182

Encouraging results obtained--The problem must be solved.

PREFACE

BY THE

President of the Society for Psychical Research

_One of the facts which by general consent in the present stage of
psychological science require study is the nature, and if possible the
cause, of a special lucidity, a sensitiveness of perception, or
accessibility to ideas appearing to arrive through channels other than
usual organs of sense, which is sometimes met with among simple
people[1] in a rudimentary form, and in a more developed form in certain
exceptional individuals. This lucidity may perhaps be regarded as a
modification or an exaggeration of the clearness of apprehension
occasionally experienced by ordinary persons while immersed in a brown
study, or while in the act of waking out of sleep, or when
self-consciousness is for a time happily suspended._

_In men of genius the phenomenon occurs in the most dignified form at
present known to us, and with them also it accompanies a lapse of
ordinary consciousness, at least to the extent that circumstances of
time and place and daily life become insignificant and trivial, or even
temporarily non-existent; but the notable thing is that a few persons,
not of genius at all, are liable to an access of something not
altogether dissimilar, and exhibit a kind of lucidity or clairvoyant
perceptivity, which, though doubtless of a lower grade, is of a
well-defined and readily-investigated type, during that state of
complete lapse of consciousness known to us as a specific variety of
trance._

_Not that all trance patients are lucid, any more than all brown studies
result in brilliant ideas; nor should it be claimed that some measure of
lucidity, even of the ultra-normal kind now under consideration, cannot
exist without complete bodily trance. The phenomenon called "automatic
writing" is an instance to the contrary,--when a hand liberated from
ordinary conscious control is found, automatically as it were, to be
writing sentences, sometimes beyond the knowledge of the person to whom
the hand belongs. Some approach to unconsciousness, however, either
general or local, seems essential to the access of the state, and such
conditions as ordinarily induce reverie or sleep are suitable for
br