It is well known that an object as seen by us and its image on the retina of the eye, are not exactly the same in position, but quite the reverse.  How the image of an object on the retina is inverted in sensation, is a mystery which physical science is admittedly incapable of solving.  Western metaphysics, too, with regard to this point, hardly fares any better; there are as many theories as there are metaphysicians.  The only philosopher who has obtained a glimpse of the truth is the idealist Berkeley, who says that a child does really see a thing inverted from our standpoint; to touch its head it stretches out its hands in the same direction of its body as we do of ours to reach our feet.  Repeated failures give experience and lead to the correction of the notions born of one sense by those derived through another; the sensations of distance and solidity are produced in the same way.

The application of this knowledge to the above mentioned experiments of the Psychic Research Society will lead to very suggestive results.  If the trained adept is a person who has developed all his interior faculties, and is on the psychic plane in the full possession of his senses, the individual, who accidentally, that is, without occult training, gains the inner sight, is in the position of a helpless child—­a sport of the freaks of one isolated inner sense.  Such was the case with the sensitives with whom Mr. Myers and his colleagues experimented.  There are instances, however, when the correction of one sense by another takes place involuntarily and accurate results are brought out.  When the sensitive reads the thoughts in a man’s mind, this correction is not required, for the will of the thinker shoots the thoughts, as it were, straight into the mind of the sensitive.  The introversion under notice will, moreover, be found to take place only in the instance of such images which cannot be corrected by the already acquired sense-experience of the sensitive.  A difficulty may here suggest itself with regard to the names of persons or the words thought of for the sensitive’s reading.  But allowance must in such cases be made for the operation of the thinker’s will, which forces the thought into the sensitive’s mind, and thereby obviates introversion.  It is abundantly clear from this that the best way of studying these phenomena is when only one set of inner faculties, that of the sensitive, is in play.  This takes place always when the object the sensitive has to abnormally perceive is independent of the will of any other person, as in the case of its being represented on paper.

Applying the same law to dreams, we can find the rationale of the popular superstition that facts are generally inverted in dreams.  To dream of something good is generally taken to be the precursor of something evil.  In the exceptional cases in which dreams have been found to be prophetic, the dreamer was either affected by another’s will or under the operation of some disturbing forces, which cannot be calculated except for each particular case.