Page:The Naturalisation of the Supernatural.pdf/351

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CHAPTER XIV
ON CLAIRVOYANCE AND PREVISION

TELEPATHY, as we have seen, furnishes a key which will unlock many things hitherto occult. But not all doors can thus be opened. There are incidents reported by competent witnesses which would seem to point to other unrecognised faculties of acquiring knowledge beyond the scope of the normal senses. Provisionally the chief of these hypothetical faculties have been named Clairvoy— ance, and Prevision or Precognition. The proof of such faculties, however, is on an entirely different footing from the proof of telepathy. We have seen that the hypothesis of the transmission of ideas from one brain to another by means of ethereal vibrations presents, so far as we can see, no insuperable difficulty. Moreover, if such a faculty should be proved to exist, we could understand how it might have been called into being by the pressure of the environment to meet the needs of an earlier stage in human, perhaps even in animal history. We should see in it the last traces of a faculty which rose before the birth of speech, and is already passing below the human horizon, at

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