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.

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    make the same remark at the same instant, or respond, as we say, to unspoken questions. More impressive are the cases in which figures of absent people appear in dress and surroundings corresponding, as afterward discovered, with their position and surroundings at the time of the ‘vision’ or ‘message.’ Thus, Captain Beau¬ mont, in London, rises to greet his wife, who is wearing a ‘ mauve dress,’ which he has never seen, at a moment when she, in Tenby, is speaking to friends of his absence.* Far more important, evidently, than the accounts of these ‘ spontaneous ’ cases are the records of experiments in thought-transference. The most impor¬ tant of these were carried out, in 1889-1891, under the direction of Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick and of Miss Johnson. In 90 out of 617 cases one numeral, out of-81 possible, was intently fixated by the experimenter and correctly stated by the subject of the experi¬ ment, who was so placed that he could not see the numerals. By chance alone, only 8 correct statements would, presumably, have been made. The number of correct statements is reduced when subject and experimenter are in different rooms, yet is still too large to be attributed merely to chance. There are also a few cases in which one person, at an hour previously set, draws dia¬ grams or fixates an object which (in one instance four times out of ten) is reproduced or distinctly imagined by a person far distant.f Similar communications, many people hold, are made to living persons by those who have died. The evidences brought forward for this conclusion are mainly (1) the occurrence of clairvoyant visions concerned with death; and (2) alleged communications, through mediums, from the dead. One may quote, in illustration of the first sort of evidence, the authenticated story J of Captain Colt, an officer of the British army, who had a vision on the eighth of September, 1855, of the kneeling image of his brother, a soldier who was then before Sebastopol. The figure had a wound on the * “Phantasms of the Living,” II., p. 91; also quoted by Myers, “Human Personality,” I., p. 649. t Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1896, pp. 325 ff.; also noted by Podmore, op. cit., pp. 33 ff. J “Phantasms of the Living,” Vol. I., p. 556.
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