It seems hardly necessary to recapitulate here the experiments on which the doctrine of telepathy or thought-transference is established--experiments which have been carefully made by so many well qualified persons, and which have proved convincing to nearly every one, whether scientific or unscientific, who has patiently followed them, though of course not convincing to those who choose to remain ignorant of the facts.
The same is true regarding the subject of automatism and the existence and action of the subliminal self. It remains to show the interesting relations which these subjects bear to hallucinations in general, and especially to phantasms and apparitions.
It is well known that hallucinations can be voluntarily or purposely produced by one person in the mind of another, and in various ways, though few perhaps consider to what an extent this is possible. In many of the most astonishing feats of the conjurer, and especially of the Indian fakir, suggestion and the imagination are brought into service to aid in producing the illusions.
Regarding the hallucinations which may be produced in the mind of the hypnotized subject by the hypnotizer there can be no doubt.
The following case is in point and illustrates telepathic influence excited at a distance as well. It is from _Phantasms of the Living_, and the agent, Mr. E. M. Glissold, of 3 Oxford Square, W., writes substantially as follows:--
"In the year 1878 there was a carpenter named Gannaway employed by me to mend a gate in my garden; when a friend of mine (Moens) called upon me and the conversation turned upon mesmerism. He asked me if I knew anything about it myself. On my replying in the affirmative he said, 'Can you mesmerize any one at a distance?' I said that I had never tried to do so, but that there was a man in the garden whom I could easily mesmerize, and that I would try the experiment with this man if he (Moens) would tell me what to do. He then said, 'Form an impression of the man whom you wish to mesmerize, in your own mind, and then wish him strongly to come to you.'
"I very much doubted the success of the experiment, but I followed the directions of my friend, and I was extremely astonished to hear the steps of the man whom I wished to appear, running after me; he came up to me directly and asked me what I wanted with him. I will add that my friend and I had been walking in the garden and had seen and spoken with the carpenter, but when I wished him to come to me I was quite out of his sight behind the garden wall, one hundred yards distant, and had neither by conversation nor otherwise led him to believe that I intended to mesmerize him.