Like most men who have not made a
special study of the questions, he imagined that telepathy meant
above all a deliberate and conscious transmission of thought; and
he assured me that he never made any effort to transmit his and
that, for the most part, the horses gave a reply which was the
exact opposite of what he was expecting. I did not doubt this for
a moment; in fact, direct and deliberate transmission of thought
is, even among men, a very rare, difficult and uncertain,
phenomenon, whereas involuntary, unpremeditated and unsuspected
communications between one subconsciousness and another can no
longer be denied except by those who of set purpose ignore
studies and experiments that are within the reach of any one who
will take the trouble to engage in them. I was persuaded
therefore that the horses acted exactly like the "tipping-tables"
which simply translate the subliminal ideas of one or another of
those present by the aid of conventional little taps. When all is
said, it is much less surprising to see a horse than a table lift
its foot and much more natural that the living substance of an
animal rather than the inert matter of a thing should be
sensitive and susceptible to the mysterious influence of a
medium. I knew quite well that experiments had been made in order
to eliminate this theory.
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