The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sight Unseen, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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Title: Sight Unseen

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Posting Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #1960]
Release Date: November, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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SIGHT UNSEEN

By Mary Roberts Rinehart

I

The rather extraordinary story revealed by the experiments of the
Neighborhood Club have been until now a matter only of private record.
But it seems to me, as an active participant in the investigations, that
they should be given to the public; not so much for what they will add
to the existing data on psychical research, for from that angle they
were not unusual, but as yet another exploration into that still
uncharted territory, the human mind.

The psycho-analysts have taught us something about the individual mind.
They have their own patter, of complexes and primal instincts, of
the unconscious, which is a sort of bonded warehouse from which we
clandestinely withdraw our stored thoughts and impressions. They lay
to this unconscious mind of ours all phenomena that cannot otherwise
be labeled, and ascribe such demonstrations of power as cannot thus be
explained to trickery, to black silk threads and folding rods, to slates
with false sides and a medium with chalk on his finger nail.

In other words, they give us subjective mind but never objective mind.
They take the mind and its reactions on itself and on the body. But
what about objective mind? Does it make its only outward manifestations
through speech and action? Can we ignore the effect of mind on mind,
when there are present none of the ordinary media of communication? I
think not.

In making the following statement concerning our part in the strange
case of Arthur Wells, a certain allowance must be made for our ignorance
of so-called psychic phenomena, and also for the fact that since that
time, just before the war, great advances have been made in scientific
methods of investigation. For instance, we did not place Miss Jeremy's
chair on a scale, to measure for any loss of wei