HPB-SB-8-341: Difference between revisions

{{Style S-Small capitals| I am}} much obliged to you for making reference to some old observations of mine, nil on, some time since, in treating of the Slade experiments of Professor Zollner, attention was called to peculiarities of vision in the case of the medium. I have known for the last seven years that in certain cases of nerve strain and disturbed tension of the two sides of the brain, mediums show marked peculiarities of the special senses, somewhat similar to those mentioned in the paper published in the ''Lancet ''of July 12th. This I first noticed in the case of a most remarkable medium who, with her sister, also showing related peculiarities, has for some years been astonishing investigators in London, scientific and otherwise, by well-authenticated and verified materialisations. This family I have studied closely off and on for the last seven years, and I know I am justified in saying that the derangement of functional sense activity can be ignored only by ignoring the fact of mediumship altogether. If not a consequence or a cause, it is at any rate a sign or an accompaniment of physical mediumship. Until the subject of mediumship is studied in connection with the present accepted theory of sensation, it is certainly premature to fall back on such a last resource as space of four dimensions as a theatre of operation for the manipulation of matter by living beings or spirits, when a missing link is perceived in the chain of natural knowledge. I, years ago, rejected that as a working hypothesis, on account of the breach of continuity it involves, for we cannot represent to ourselves or picture ''affairs ''in fourfold space, though we may grant to fourfold space as real an existence (mathematically speaking) as that which we allow to the threefold space in which we live. To adopt this extra-unit space as a possible explanation of extraordinary isolated parts is one thing; ''to picture affairs as they are related to one another ''in that space is quite another thing. This attempt secretly assumes an eye of which, in Kantian language, that fourfold space is the external sense form, and it further assumes that the languages of three and fourfold space are interchangeable to a certain extent. The doctrine may suggest much, but it cannot explain. It appears to me that, to those who adopt it, it finds its justification in the assumed continuity and permanence of matter, which are regarded as essential properties with which the observer is in no way related. For if (an essential “if”) matter be as permanent as a closed curve upon which knots cannot be made except by bending in a space other than that in which we are placed, it of course follows that to preserve the continuity of matter an extraordinary space has to be assumed, should corresponding changes take place in the case of real matter. {{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|8-343}}