As regards the distribution of the faculty the experimental evidence and the spontaneous evidence taken separately would suggest different conclusions. In all the experiments which have been conducted few percipients have been discovered capable of receiving impressions as complex as those which give rise to phantasms of the dying, with the same degree of vividness and accuracy that the numerous percipients of such phantasms have displayed. The divergence seems to be due to the presence in the case of phantasms of an emotional stimulus lacking in experi ments. The probable inference is that most persons are potential agents and percipients, but that some are better than others; with some the faculty is brought into action by the ordinary non emotional type of experiment with cards or diagrams; with others the faculty will only be aroused by some strong emotion. Dif ferences of age, sex, race, culture, education, seem to have no bearing on the distribution of the faculty.
If, as is generally supposed, telepathic impressions pass first from the agent's conscious to his subliminal mind, then from his subliminal to that of the percipient, and finally emerge from the percipient's subliminal mind to his consciousness, there are three stages at which the impression may become distorted; it is from the distortions observed in experiments where only partial success is obtained that it is possible to form some opinion as to the form in which impressions are transferred. For instance, the difficulty experienced in transmitting unfamiliar names suggests that, what ever form the impressions take, it is not usually that of definite words, still less sentences. Visual images are more easily trans mitted, but it would appear that what is usually transmitted is a series of more or less generalized ideas from which the per cipient, as each idea floats up into his consciousness, builds a complete impression more or less resembling that which the agent sought to convey.
This inference has an important bearing on the question whether the process of transmission is physical, by some sort of "waves" or "effluence" or purely psychic. All normal modes of communication depend on the existence of some pre-arranged code of sounds, symbols, dots and dashes, etc. ; what is the code by which generalized ideas can be transmitted as such, and who arranged it? Those who assume that telepathic transmission is by some kind of "waves" may fairly be asked to be rather more precise about the nature of these waves, their length, etc., and to indicate what organ of the human body is capable of transmitting physical waves to the opposite side of the globe. Why, again, does telepathy appear to be an exception to the general law of the inverse square? There is abundant evidence, both spon taneous and experimental, that it is not affected by distance.
Until these and other questions have been satisfactorily an swered, we must provisionally assume that the mode of telepathic transmission is psychic and not physical.
If "dowsing" (the discovery of underground water by other means than calculation based on geological knowledge) is to be reckoned one of the forms of clairvoyance, it is the best attested of them all. It is the only branch of psychical research which has yet established itself in the world of practical commercial utility. Government departments, business firms and landowners in many countries regard the employment of a dowser as an every day matter. Dowsing has a long history; it was formerly used to find other things hidden underground besides water, metals for in stance, and even dead bodies (see Barrett and Besterman, The Divining Rod, 1926) ; and Barrett, who had made the subject a special study for many years, maintained the view that the faculty of dowsing was purely psychic, and did not depend on any electrical current or other physical nexus between the dowser and the invisible water supply. Certain German investigators, on the other hand, consider that they have established that the dowser is influenced by electricity.
Dowsers habitually, though not always, hold a forked twig, which twists in their hands when they approach underground water; the movements of the twig are, it is generally agreed, "automatic," i.e., due to unconscious muscular action stimulated by the impression sub-consciously received by the dowser.