CRYSTAL-GAZING. What is known as crystal-gazing consists in looking fixedly into a crystal, or into a mirror, or into water in a vessel or pond. Many persons who do this fall into a kind of daze or trance and see visions. There are reports of such visions in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. The phenomenon may be explained as due to the working of the subcon scious mind. William James mentions the case of a lady who had the power of seeing these visions. " Miss X. has this susceptibility in a remarkable degree, and is, moreover, an unusually intelligent critic. She reports many visions which can only be described as apparently clairvoyant, and others which beautifully fill a vacant niche in our knowledge of subconscious mental opera tions. For example, looking into the crystal before breakfast one morning she reads in printed characters of the death of a lady of her acquaintance, the date and other circumstances all duly a.ppearing in type. Startled
by this, she looks at the ' Times ' of the previous day for verification, and there among the deaths are the identical words which she has seen. On the same page of the Times' are other items which she remembers reading the day before; and the only explanation seems to be that her eyes then inattentively observed, so to speak, the death-item, which forthwith fell into a special corner of her memory, and came out as a visual hallu cination when the peculiar modification of consciousness induced by the crystal-gazing set in." As Andrew Lang says, crystal-gazing in one form or another has been practised in most countries, and among primitive folk has served to increase the influence of priests and medicine-men. Where crystal-gazing is not understood, the visions seem to .be supernatural. See T. J. Hudson: William James, The Will to Believe, 1908; Hastings' E.R.E.