The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1900-01-07
PORTRAIT OF W. T. STEAD.

ings. is now the possession Of every one
who is capable Of using the ROentgen
rays.
Wireless biography and the ROentgen
rays nave opened the windows OF new
world for the ordinary man. he be-
gins to perceive possibilities before IN
dreamed of, and things which he would
formerly have dismissed as the fantasy
of a disordered imagination, he now ad-
mits may quite possibly be within the
pale of practical achievements. Hence
it is that I no longer feel that Specula-
tions which have been familiar to ne
for years will be regarded as proof of
incipient lunacy, if they are set forth
in print.
Facts of Thought Transferenee.
I therefore proceed to put forth brief
" a statement of what has already
been demonstrated as possible in q re
gion Of thought transference, and base
upOn that d statement as TO what I
think may be regarded as lying we'll
within the possibilities of the future
Thought tranSference or, as II is usu-
ally called, telepathy, or the traEsmis-
sion OF an idea from one mind TO an
other, without spoken word or Ian
guage or sign Of any kind, has now
taken its place as one of those facts,
honest investigator.
No doubt the laws OF telepathic trans
mission of thought from mind TO mind
are very obscure. Their opera ton is
little understood. and even in the best
subjects continually occur strange
lapses and mistakes difficult to account
for, perpIexing and embarrassing; but
a thousand mistakes, a thousand mis-
carriages do not count for anything
compared with one success, and in the
case of telepathy we have much more
than the one success
The best way of Illustrating tl-is SUBJ
ject is to imagine q modern city, evac-
uated by all its inhabitants, on the
approach of an army of men who have
never heard Of the telephone The in
vading force would find telephones
everywhere and would naturally be
immensely puzzled TO explain their
meaning. In the effort to understand
the significance Of the wires. many -
them would be destroyed, and multi
tudes of telephone boxes would be bat
tered 20 pieces in the vain effort to
make them yield up their secret But
some day, by the merest chance. one
of the strangers might happen to talk
into a telephone that was switched on
to some one else whose ear was at thu
receiver at the other end. The chances
against such an occurrence would be a
million to one, more; but it might
happen.
4 thousand. 100000 abortive ex-
periments. with other telephones which
were not switched on at the receiver, or
which was not held TO the ear Of any
one would prove nothing as against
the fact that on a certain occasion two
persons in their sane senses had m
dof1bfadTv snOken and been heard BY
the telephone.
Tt is just so with telepathy We are
like those barbarians in the modern
city. our telephone boxes are not Wis
ible to the eve, but they exist. A few
have found out that they can be used,
and such communications having once
been established and Tepea tcdly veri-
fed by subsequent experiments estab-
lish the fact eff the existence Of tele-
pathv on a foundation which is not in
the least affected by the feSluTe Of any
number Of other experiInenters or even
of the same experimenIers to reproduce
the same success.
The methods of telepathy vary. The
simplest Is that in which q. thought in
tine mind Of one passes directly with
out any intervening medium, unless it
be that of the ether upon which the
mind wave travels to the brain of an
other person. with whom it is in
condition Of receptivity In that case,
the receipt Of the telepathie message IS
usually regarded merely as an impress
sion upon the mind. Every one is
aware of thoughts which seera sudden
~ 20 arise in ones mind. without any
apparent cause AN idea strikes me-
we saw There is reason to believe
that the idea strikes US in a very real
sense; that a brain wave Sc up by the
thought Of some other person has ira
versed the space between the two
brains and impinged upon the brain Of