The Whereabouts of the Sixth Sense

IT is a common experience among us — though much commoner among the insects, to take the two ends of the scale—to discover things, to apprehend and reach truth, by mysterious ways. We are most of us in some measure mystics, aware now and then of strange communions with reality, through unperceived sources of news that vibrate along unknown cords of our being. We have flashes of inspiration, or, as they used to say in the seventeenth century, ‘lucid intervals, a much better phrase then than now. We have no need to go to books of reference, to reports of psychic societies, to the salons of ‘spook merchants’ for our examples. The personal experiences among our own circle will supply plenty.

Now it has happened to me lately by a series of accidents to come across several suggestions of this hidden sense in several departments of natural history, and indeed human history; and when collated and compared they have suggested, not indeed an explanation of the experiences, but perhaps a certain or possible simplification of the mystery. The infinite variety of nature astonishes us; but as we move up or down the scale, passing from a study of man to plants, — via, say, domestic animals and insects, — we come upon likenesses and analogies so queer that they surprise us more than the variety. It is not a mere poet’s fancy that plants breathe and move or that men have their springs and winters. Eminent scientists are seeking examples and proof of the hidden sense. If we compare these investigations, along with our own personal experiences, we may discover at least the sign of a common quality. It is a step toward knowledge to know whereabouts lies the mystery we mean some day to drive into the open — so far as we are allowed. It will doubtless always be true that omnia exeunt in mysterium; but at least there is zest in widening the arch of twilight that surrounds our little camp pitched in the wilds of the universe.

I

A well-known man of letters in London has a notable personal likeness to one of his daughters; and this likeness in face seems to be correlated with a likeness of mind that appears not so much on the intellectual plane as in the sentimental. Their thoughts, differing greatly in power and direction, may be said to be of the corresponding wave length. A vibration in one brain is received by the other brain (if brain is the right word); and the two on occasion have a certain simultaneous knowledge of one another ’s state, however far apart they are in mere distance. They make no mystery of this mystic sympathy, and no parade. The daughter traveling in Italy had a sudden attack of influenza. She sent no news home, but on her second day in bed received a telegram from her father in London, asking whether all was well. He knew she was in some danger.

Of course many such sudden impulses as caused the sending of the telegram may be explicable by mere coincidence. A father thinking of an absent daughter may be struck by a sudden fear, which by mere accident may synchronize with the daughter’s illness; but the examples of this sort of telepathy between sympathetic or complementary human beings are so many and so salient that it needs a stronger dogmatism to deny them than to affirm them. Men and women of very common clay may be as ‘transcendental’ as any Kantian philosopher. Most of us in our circle have come across some example or alleged example of telepathy, of communication or emotional communion between two persons who cannot see or hear one another, who may be divided by seas or continents, and most of us are duly dumfounded with amazement; but I think that the company of naturalists, especially perhaps students of the ways of insects, are less amazed than others. They come across not less amazing powers among creatures of much less highly organized structure. The great difference, of course, bet ween the insect and the man is that the one has little intelligence agents scattered about its body, so-called ganglionic centres, while the other has his organs of apprehension centred in the head. But when you study the make-up of most insects you find the biggest of these nerve centres in the head and behind the eye; and, correspondingly, when you anatomize man you find that he has other brains besides that within the skull.

A great man of science has affirmed that woman is more ‘ganglionic’ than man. She apprehends things by senses not necessarily centred in one place only. Children perhaps excel both parents, not — in so far as common experience goes — in telepathic feats of any great seriousness, but in small intuitive perceptions of many sorts. An ingenious mother who lived in one of a long line of houses, all decorated in the same manner and so alike that she herself had to look at the number on the door, made every effort to induce her twin girls of six years or thereabouts to pass their proper door. The children always stopped, as a dog would, at the right steps, but no one could extract from them any information as to what distinguishing mark they noticed. The nearest explanation that was ever accorded was this: ‘When we get here, we know our little yellow bedsteads are upstairs.’ They felt the neighborhood of their lair, the little yellow bedsteads; and that is the thing we call instinct, or intuition, or the sixth sense, or, if the latest scientific coinage is preferred, ‘ cryptæsthesia ’ — the hidden or cryptic sense. Children possess this and exercise it in surprising force and in unexpected directions.

A teacher of mathematics in a naval college, which is joined by pupils at twelve years of age, came to the conclusion, after many tests and a long experience, that the small boys could apprehend advanced mathematical truths even though they might have trouble with the elements. They possessed this faculty, but they lost it a little later. The mathematical tutor held that Wordsworth was accurately imaginative when he said that mankind came into the world ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ girt about with splendors of feeling and intelligence that belong to another world than the one we can analyze and spell out. His own conviction was that education begins at the wrong end; that the dull drilling of obvious things — of addition and of grammar, for example — overlaid, if it did not kill, both the sense of rhythmic language and the perception of mathematical truths that are inborn in many children. They can write more musical verse and do more advanced sums at twelve than at twenty. Though he came to it by a different path, he arrived at much the same belief as Thomas Huxley, who held that education ought to begin with research, not merely end with it. We kill our instincts because we do not realize that they exist. That very small children, children even less than two years old, have on occasion musical perceptions that they may lose later, is hardly less certain than, for example, that the strong prehensile power of the fingers with which nearly all children are born leaves them after a few weeks. We come ‘trailing’ the grip of the monkey as well as the ‘clouds of glory,’ and may profitably take cognizance of both gifts. Browning’s ‘happy, prompt, instinctive way of youth’ touches a deeper truth than he had in mind. Most children have a sense or two more than their elder selves, but some few cling to this exotic power and develop it till, in Professor James’s phrase, they are ‘en rapport with existence.’

The telepathic and intuitive gift in mankind is not at all unlike the power of some of the insects, of which one may give a thousand examples, for their power is a commonplace. One may suffice for the illustration of the argument. In the Great War a student of insects, who had a period of temporary rest, was told by a local entomologist that there were no purple emperor moths in the vicinity. Long and careful search by many eyes had not discovered a single specimen. He said he quite believed it, but boasted that he would draw the moth to the neighborhood as easily as the Pied Piper drew the rats of Hamelin. So he wrote to England for a female specimen; and as soon as she came — it was by return of post, and from London!— he set her in a gauze cage in the garden. In the second night several purple emperors had gathered to the spot. The experiment was yet another proof, though one was hardly needed, that this species of moth can signal over a great distance, amounting probably to miles. The message may be some infinitely delicate but penetrating scent. It may be some note so thin and sharp that our gross ears and our less gross instruments cannot detect it. The sound or scent may shoot through the air and keep so level a diminuendo that the subtle recipient at the other end not only perceives it but can follow it in a direct line to the source, as a dog scents a hare. The message, whatever it is, carries far, and is, as they say of wireless waves, ‘directional.’ It is just possible that the tidings are conveyed by scent or sound, but neither anatomy nor analogy nor any experience suggests that the moth possesses the power either to emit or to receive such scent or sound. It is at least as likely — to say no more — that communication is made by some other sense than we wot of. Most instincts are inexplicable by the five senses, whatever perfection we grant to any one instinct. Every wasp of a certain species stings its prey, the caterpillar, in just the one minute spot where the puncture produces paralysis, but not death.

The nearest we can come to a definition of instinct is that it attains the end directly, without conscious or perhaps any other perception of the means. Of such a nature is telepathy, if we presume that it exists.

There is the query, and it is at least as plausible, as likely a truth to answer ‘yes’ as ’no.’

II

Let me abandon the higher flights of the mystic faculty and come down to more domestic appearances of it — to the sort of perceptions that we are apt to call uncanny. For several centuries, among many peoples both civilized and savage, to the accompaniment of queer rituals that have all some common chord, country people have been astonished at the art of the water-finder, at the craft of the divining rod which trembles at the presence of water or metal. When we have shaved off the nap of concealing superstitions that hide the proper tissue, we still find a residuum of fact that it is difficult to deny or disbelieve. Apparently sane and businesslike municipal councils are to-day officially employing their dowsers (that fine old word which no one can explain), and are satisfied with the honesty and efficiency of their services. More than this: an authentic man of science, with the help of other men of science, has for years been laboriously sifting the evidence of the ages and of to-day, and at the conclusion has quite firmly decided that some men and women, specially endowed by nature, can perceive by some mystic agency the neighborhood of water. Their being is affected. They do not smell or hear or feel or infer it. They just know it is there, as the twin girls knew that their little yellow bedsteads were upstairs. They are in control of that extra sense for which the chief author of this inquiry adopts that useful word ‘cryptæsthesia.’

How does the power we cannot explain by known senses express itself in the mammals and birds? The essence of their peculiar gift may be found in the awkward but useful adjective ‘directional.’ Dogs and horses do not travel the immense distances covered in one ecstatic rush by American robins or by the geese that move from Florida to Labrador or by the swallows that fly straight from South Africa to the eaves of a particular thatched cottage in England. But the four-footed mammals have as strong a sense, and it astonishes us more than the birds’ migrations. A friend of mine in Ireland was asked for the loan of a dog by a neighbor who lived just twenty miles away. He responded by packing his terrier in a hamper and putting it on the floor of his friend’s dogcart, the owner driving directly home. The dog had never made the journey before and knew nothing of the country where his new master lived. He could not see out of the hamper where he was confined. The road had many twists and turns. Yet that terrier, who managed to escape soon after he was released, reached his proper home the same night. He had traveled the twenty miles at express speed, just as the birds cross seas and continents, preferably by night. They do not need or desire light for exercising this peculiar gift.

In my own experience, the first time I took out a certain spaniel puppy she grew suddenly frightened, lost all control, and after two short circling rushes, such as a carrier pigeon might make, ran straight home. She ran directly across a railway and through blind country she had never seen or smelled before. She had been with me only three or four days. She was clearly too terrified to exercise any power of inference. Some strange ‘handmaid behind the ear’ led her home by the straightest path.

Many explanations have been sought for the skill of birds in finding their route. It is indisputably true that

homer pigeons have long sight and use the power. They can be taught their way up to a certain distance by experience. It is their habit to circle up, and not to start off before they have taken their bearings. But even with such pigeons many individual journeys are recorded that are not explicable along the lines of experience; and the explanation falls down altogether in the case of most migrative birds. One of the many reasons is that the young often lead the way. At certain seasons they start before, at certain seasons after, the older birds; but in both spring and autumn (in certain species) the young and old fly off independently, and the young are as clever as their experienced elders in discovering the right road. No sort of explanation founded on any observed sense will explain this. Doubtless birds are naturally mobile and rejoice in their mobility. They are driven from one country to another by the need of warmth and food. Such causes would automatically produce movement; but they would not produce one long immense flight at a particular date and at exceptional speed to one particular spot on the earth’s surface. More than this: experience of birds in captivity proves sufficiently that at the hour of migration the other senses are dulled and numbed into partial insensibility. We know from experience of captive birds that their whole being is occupied at the two solstices by some deep compelling emotion which draws them and drives them as an engine is drawn and driven along an electric rail. When this external power reaches their machinery they must move or perish. The force is so little resistible that it may drive them — as on occasion it drives migratory lemmings — to destruction, but for the most part it is the agency of salvation.

The migration flights of insects, especially of butterflies, are much less regular and seem less useful to the species; but most insects, especially bees and wasps, have a very strong directional instinct. They find their way — and by a ‘bee line’ — straight back to the little hole in the ground where their home is, though they have strayed over a mile or two of country; and from what we know of their powers of sight, which are very small for any object more than a few inches away, they find their path by virtue of another faculty than belongs to the eyes, whether simple or complex. Thus they receive more impulses than are received by any facet of the eyes in the head.

It is remarkable how often the hidden sense, whatever it is, is directional. One gets glimpses of the birth of the faculty in several climbing plants. In an experiment with a hop plant I quite failed, in spite of all kinds of effort, to turn the tip away from its course, which was directly aimed at the nearest support. It would perhaps be extravagant to stress this skill in the climbing plant (in which Francis Darwin found what he called intelligence); but some of them, especially the hop, certainly appear to have directional inklings, and will suspend their natural tendency to circle while they are heading for a particular point.

III

Now it will be said, not without truth, that between all these and other examples of queer, inexplicable instincts there is a very vague analogy; and, at the best, analogy is no argument. But, as an astute logician has pointed out, though analogy is no argument, it is ‘an indication that an argument exists.’ And in this investigation we may come to certain conclusions that are tolerably definite and may conceivably be useful. First, most beings and some plants have capacities that do not come from the senses that we know and have named; they achieve results that seem miraculous, indeed that are miraculous if we limit possible explanations to the common senses. That is one point. The second is that these powers, until we come to exceptional man, are as a rule directional. The capacity, the faculty, the intuitive power is in touch with some stream of information not perceptible by the grosser senses as we understand them. Indeed, the more these senses are eliminated, the more surely and easily the hidden sense works. When we come to man the analogy, as usual, breaks down, except in one particular. Whenever he gives evidence of a hidden sense, — as in the water dowser, in the medium, in the telepathist, — his new power, as a rule, is in inverse ratio to the keenness of his other senses. He becomes, like the Scots when they are ‘fey,’ wrapt above the earth,’ and produces the best results, like Coleridge in the writing of ‘Kubla Khan,’ when self and the world are out of reach and forgotten. The ‘vision splendid’ has nothing to do with seeing. Direction which matters infinitely to most animals little concerns man. He has grosser finger posts. He has passed beyond the stage when life depends on the strength of the homing instinct. His hidden sense travels in search, not of a place, but of a kindred spirit. He seeks a mystic communion. He is borne ‘darkly, fearfully afar,’ where the soul of his Adonais

Now if we look at this hidden sense in its different manifestations it seems likely that it belongs to the invisible envelope of the earth, though that envelope is doubtless connected up with the universe. The birds, let us presume, are aware of a circumambient flow of force that guides them; and the hidden sense by which they are in touch with it, perhaps with the feeling of the swing of the earth, may follow the ordinary lines of heredity. It has been bred out of the English robin and enhanced in the American robin. It has been bred and taught out of man. He developed reason by way of the clash of conflicting instincts; and in consequence some of the best instincts have fallen in battle or are maimed. It may yet become an integral part of education to preserve the infant glory, and a part of our normal life to use the ether with our thoughts as our material messages use it. The hidden sense may be as real as those of eye and ear and touch.