ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

Incipient M ediumship. 93
ment excluded· normal knowledge from the facts around which
the mental pictures played and the circumstance that chance
could hardly explain them removed them from a merely casual
interest.
In a melee of apparent guessing like this we have to be careful
to see either that the guessing is legitimate or that it is beyond
chance coincidence. I was helped in determining the choice between
these alternatives by the fact that the pertinent coincidences
were too frequent, and too apt, to be considered as due
to chance and, that once decided, the erroneous phenomena had to
be referred to attempts to interpret stimuli from without, whatever
they were. This fact threw light upon the procedure of
many psychics who seem only to be guessing wildly or to be the
victims of subliminal fancies.
In the first experiment the Whalen incident gave the clue
to what was going on. Taken alone, of course, it would not
suffice to determine this, but it was supported by exactly similar
instances later and they showed that the man's own memories
were elicited to interpret influences which did not appear on the
surface. There was a gap or chasm between what had been conveyed
to Mr. Moriarty's mind and what was evoked to give it
meaning. The thing conveyed was so like his knowledge of the
Whalen incident that his mind either could not get it or his
normal sensory memories had to be aroused to ascertain its
meaning, and whether subliminal association was employed or
some other process not recognized by ordinary psychology we
do not know, tho it is probable that association subliminally was
a factor in the result. In any case processes were supressed
between the sending of the stimulus and the interpretation of it.
Both subconscious and normal processes were invoked to find the
meaning and the memory of some actual incident in his experience
was elicited to enable the normal mind to guess or infer
the facts in the mind of the agent or sitter.
Not all the incidents are like this, or at least they do not
clearly exhibit elicitation of memories of specific incidents. They
are general, tho they illustrate the same process. Sometimes the
picture is evidently of the orthodox type in the pictographic
process and represents the appearance on the surface of an
image that is transferred and caught exactly. In such cases they
Digitized by Coogle