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XIII

X-RAY VISION AND OTHER ADVANCED PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

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ESS than a quarter-century ago, any person who seriously devoted himself to the investigation of spiritual phenomena was regarded as a psychasthenic. A suggestionist was outside the pale of professional respect. Mental treatment in sleep was moon-struck madness. Every psychic was insane. To-day the world's deepest thinkers are accepting the truths and construing the facts of abnormal psychology. Learned societies are chronicling the events of the séance; and men of broad culture and unquestioned sincerity are seeking to prove thereby the immortality of the soul and the possibility of bodily resurrection; and what is more, they are doing it without incurring any liability to the charge of superstition-"a belief in the supernatural without sufficient evidence."

Careful observers have proved, as we have seen in the foregoing chapter, that ideas actively present in one mind can be transmitted to an

other by what is called telepathy, the modus operandi of which is entirely unknown, though a transmitting agent must be implied: that is to say, a brain from which is liberated-whether voluntarily or subconsciously-something supremely active, which for want of a better term we will define as an initial physiopsychic vibration.

Sir Oliver Lodge is teaching that ether has density and is practically a solid; and Balfour has declared that "the beliefs of all mankind about the material surroundings in which it dwells are not only imperfect, but fundamentally wrong. It may seem singular that down to, say, ten years ago, our race has without exception lived and died in a world of illusions, and that its illusions, or those with which we are here alone concerned, have not been about things remote or abstract, or transcendental or divine, but about what men see and handle, about those plain matters of fact among which common sense daily moves with most confident step."

No wonder the question has been asked: Have we approached even within telescopic view of the reality of things? What is behind the obvious and the apparent in the superphysical world? Can it be that man is nothing but a frightened God?

Akin to telepathic clairvoyance is X-ray

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vision, the power to see through opaque bodiessupernormal penetration—which argues an elevated level of spiritual vitality, for the self that consciously is lacks subliminal discernment.

In 1899 Dr. F. M. Brett, at that time Professor of Bacteriology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Boston, discovered that his twelveyear-old son Leo, when hypnotized by him, possessed X-ray power. Many experiments involving the detection of tumors, the presence of foreign bodies, valvular lesions, fractures, etc., were reported in detail by Dr. Brett in The Coming Age of November, 1899, and are fully described in Hypnotic Therapeutics, page 319. Coming from such a source, the facts are incontestable.

A similar case, which had previously excited great interest in Boston, was investigated by the author about three years ago-the case of Beulah Miller, a simple ten-year-old country girl of Warren, Rhode Island. During the previous year this child had attracted the attention of pyschologists, and had been investigated by Professor James H. Hyslop, Secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research, who believes her capable of exploiting supernormal faculty, and by Professor Hugo Münsterberg, of Harvard University.

An early exhibition of her faculty is reported

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as follows in the Boston Watchman (Tremont Temple) of January 30, 1913, by the Rev. H. W. Watjen, pastor of the Baptist church at Warren: There is in my Sunday-school a little girl ten years of age who possesses a strange mental power. Children told me that Beulah Miller had 'second sight,' that she could see things behind your back, that she could tell you what you had in your mind. At first I thought it was child's talk, that perhaps she knew some cunning tricks; but, passing her home, one day, I stopped and asked the mother concerning Beulah and what I had heard.

"The mother seemed anxious about the child, and told me how she had surprised them on various occasions, telling her father the exact amount of money he had in his pocket, when jokingly he had said he had none. What troubled the mother was, whether this was a gift from God or whether Beulah was aided by Satan in the performance of her wonderful feats.

“I had a jar of honey in my pocket which I was carrying to a boy in the neighborhood. I thought, 'Surely she will never guess that,' but to my surprise, instantly with a smile on her face she called out, 'Honey.' I tested her in various ways and always with the same result. Her family physician told me that he had carefully

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