Now what is ordinarily called thought transference has all these symptoms, and the combined indications seem to be that persons who readily experience thought-transference are specially susceptible to hypnotic influence, and get the transferred thought from almost anybody, just as the recognized hypnotic subject gets it from his hypnotizer; and that persons of excessive sensibility, like Foster, Home, Mrs. Holland, Mrs. Piper and mediums generally—­the genuine ones,—­simply get their impressions hypnotically from their sitters.

But this explanation (?) by no means covers the whole situation.  In the first place, it does not cover the vividness and the emotional content often displayed by the sensitive.  The sitter is very seldom conscious of anything approaching it.  It comes nearer to, in fact almost seems identical with, the frequent vividness and intensity of dreams.  But where do dreams come from, whether in sleep, or in a waking “dream state” like that of Foster and many other sensitives?  They don’t come from any assignable “sitter.”  This present scribe dreams architecture and bric-a-brac finer than any he ever saw, or than any ever made.  Yet he is no architect, or artist of any kind.  Where does it all come from?

Dreams, moreover, are filled with memories of forgotten things.  Where do they come from?  Dreams, too, are by no means devoid of truths not previously known to the dreamer, or, it would sometimes seem, to anybody else.  Where do they come from?

Du Prel and his school say they come from a “subliminal self,” and Myers picks up the term and spreads it through Anglo-Saxondom.  But those queer dreams frequently include persons who oppose the self—­argue with it, and even down it, sometimes very much for its information, regeneration and increased stability.  That does not seem like a house divided against itself; such an one, we have on very high authority, is apt to fall.  James, cornered by his studies in Psychical Research, was inclined to posit a “cosmic reservoir” of all thoughts and feelings that ever existed, and of potentialities of all the thoughts and feelings that are ever going to exist; and under various designations, this cosmic reservoir or,—­it seems a better metaphor—­the cosmic soul filling it, and dribbling into our little souls,—­is a guess of virtually all the philosophers from James back to Plato, and farther still—­into the mists.

Moreover this guess is powerfully backed up by another guess:  men’s speculations have been reaching back for the beginning of mind, until they recognize that a consistent doctrine of evolution finds no beginning, and demands mind as a constituent of the star-dust, and, when it really comes down to the scratch, is unable to imagine matter unassociated with mind.  This is admirably expressed by James (Psychology I, 140):