A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    413/446 page 395
    III. VERIDICAL PHENOMENA Reference must be made, in conclusion, to so-called veridical phenomena — experiences of people, events, or things, which are beyond the limit of the normal observation or communication. Prophetic dreams, clairvoyant visions, mediumistic revelations, are the phenomena most commonly grouped under this head. It should be noticed, first of all, that people are very readily mistaken in attributing a veridical character to their experiences. Nothing is more common than the false impression, after an important event, that one has previously experienced it. Just as places seem familiar to us, when we have never seen them before, so we meet events, especially overwhelming ones, with a curious sense of hav¬ ing always known or expected them. More than this, veridical experiences may be due to information normally acquired, but for¬ gotten. For example, Mrs. Holland’s automatic reproduction of Mr. Myers’s epitaph may be due not to the fact that the spirit of Mr. Myers is speaking through her, but to the fact that, though she has no memory of the epitaph, she has read parts of his auto¬ biography.* It is, however, believed by careful students that many veridical phenomena are incapable of explanation, either through coincidence or through forgotten normal experiences, and that they presuppose an influence of self by self through other than the usual means of language and bodily expression. Such supra- normal communication between living persons is named telepathy, or thought-transference; and it is held by some that it may have a physical basis — ethereal vibrations of extreme minuteness due to changes in one brain and resulting in changes in another.*)* Alleged instances of telepathy are either spontaneous or experimentally induced. Under the first head may be reckoned, in the first place, the ordinary cases in which people who know each other well * Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. XXI, Part LV., 1908, pp. 268 ft. f Cf. Podmore, “The Naturalization of the Supernatural,” pp. 10 ff., and note his remark: “No such connection between thinking brains has been proved,” and his statement (p. 12) of the main objection to the hypothesis: the difficulty of conceiving such vibrations to be effective at a distance.
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