They possess no importance in
themselves, no intrinsic virtue, and are worth exactly what the
medium who uses them is worth. As M. Duchatel well says:
"In reality, there is only one solitary MANCY. The faculty of
seeing in TIME, like the faculty of seeing in SPACE, is ONE,
whatever its outward form or the process employed."
We will not linger now over those manifestations which, under
appearances that are sometimes childish and vulgar, often conceal
surprising and incontestable truths, but will devote the present
chapter exclusively to a series of phenomena which includes
almost all the others and which has been classed under the
generic and rather ill-chosen and ill-constructed title of
"psychometry." Psychometry, to borrow Dr. Maxwell's excellent
definition, is "the faculty possessed by certain persons of
placing themselves in relation, either spontaneously or, for the
most part, through the intermediary of some object, with unknown
and often very distant things and people."
The existence of this faculty is no longer seriously denied; and
it is easy for any one who cares to do so to verify it for
himself; for the mediums who possess it are not extremely rare,
nor are they inaccessible. It has formed the subject of a number
of experiments (see, among others, M. Warcollier's report in the
Annales des Sciences Psychiques of July, 1911) and of a few
treatises, in the front rank of which I would mention M.
Pages:
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50