naming twelve cards out of sixty-eight. But no precautions were taken against hyperaesthesia further than enclosing the card in a second envelope. There is a power possessed by a certain number of people, of naming a card drawn by them or held in the hand face downwards, so that there is no normal knowledge of its suit and number. Few thorough trials have been made; but it seems to point to some kind of hyperaesthesia rather than to clairvoyance; in the Richet experiments even if the envelopes excluded hyperaesthesia of touch on the part of the medium, there may have been subliminal knowledge on Prof. Richet’s part of the card which he put in the envelope. The experience known as the déjà vu has sometimes been explained as due to clairvoyance.
Telepathic Clairvoyance.—For a discussion of this see Telepathy and Crystal-gazing. It may be noted here that some curious relation seems to exist between apparently telepathic acquisition of knowledge and the arrival of a letter, newspaper, &c, from which the same knowledge could be directly gained. We are confronted with a similar problem in attempting an explanation of the power of mediums to state correctly facts relating to objects placed in their hands. Of a somewhat different character is retrocognition (q.v.), where the knowledge in many cases, if telepathic, must be derived from a discarnate mind.
Clairvoyance, as a term of spiritualism, with its correlative clairaudience, is the name given to the power of seeing and hearing discarnate spirits of dead relatives and others, with whom the living are said to be surrounded. More vaguely it includes the power of gaining knowledge, either through the spirit world or by means of psychometry (i.e. the supernormal acquisition of knowledge about owners of objects, writers of letters, &c). Some evidence for these latter powers has been accumulated by the Society for Psychical Research, but in many cases the piecing together of normally acquired knowledge, together with shrewd guessing, suffices to explain the facts, especially where the investigator has had no special training for his task.
See Richet, Experimentelle Studien (1891); also in Proc. S.P.R. vi. 66. For a criticism see N. W. Thomas, Thought Transference, pp. 44-48. For Clairvoyance in general see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, and in Proc. S.P.R. xi. 334 et seq. For a criticism of the evidence see Mrs Sidgwick in Proc. S.P.R. vii. 30, 356. (N. W. T.)
CLAMECY, a town of central France, capital of an arrondissement
in the department of Nièvre, at the confluence of the Yonne
and Beuvron and on the Canal du Nivernais, 46 m. N.N.E. of
Nevers on the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop. (1906) 4455. Its
principal building is the church of St Martin, which dates chiefly
from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. The tower and façade
are of the 16th century. The chevet, which is surrounded by an
aisle, is rectangular—a feature found in few French churches.
Of the old castle of the counts of Nevers, vaulted cellars alone
remain. A church in the suburb of Bethlehem, dating from the
12th and 13th centuries, now serves as part of an hotel. The
public institutions include the sub-prefecture, tribunals of first
instance and of commerce and a communal college. Among the
industrial establishments are saw-mills, fulling-mills and flour-mills,
tanneries and manufactories of boots and shoes and
chemicals; and there is considerable trade in wine and cattle and
in wood and charcoal, which is conveyed principally to Paris, by
way of the Yonne.
In the early middle ages Clamecy belonged to the abbey of St Julian at Auxerre; in the 11th century it passed to the counts of Nevers, one of whom, Hervé, enfranchised the inhabitants in 1213. After the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1188, Clamecy became the seat of the bishops of Bethlehem, who till the Revolution resided in the hospital of Panthenor, bequeathed by William IV., count of Nevers. On the coup d’état of 1851 an insurrection broke out in the town, and was repressed by the new authorities with great severity.
CLAN (Gaelic clann, O. Ir. cland, connected with Lat. planta,
shoot or scion, the ancient Gaelic or Goidelic substituting k for p),
a group of people united by common blood, and usually settled in
a common habitat. The clan system existed in Ireland and the
Highlands of Scotland from early times. In its strictest sense the
system was peculiar to those countries, but, in its wider meaning
of a group of kinsmen forming a self-governing community, the
system as represented by the village community has been shown
by Sir H. Maine and others to have existed at one time or
another in all lands.
Before the use of surnames and elaborate written genealogies, a tribe in its definite sense was called in Celtic a tuath, a word of wide affinities, from a root tu, to grow, to multiply, existing in all European languages. When the tribal system began to be broken up by conquest and by the rise of towns and of territorial government, the use of a common surname furnished a new bond for keeping up a connexion between kindred. The head of a tribe or smaller group of kindred selected some ancestor and called himself his Ua, grandson, or as it has been anglicized O’, e.g. Ua Conchobair (O’ Conor), Ua Suilleabhain (O’Sullivan). All his kindred adopted the same name, the chief using no fore-name however. The usual mode of distinguishing a person before the introduction of surnames was to name his father and grandfather, e.g. Owen, son of Donal, son of Dermot. This naturally led some to form their surnames with Mac, son, instead of Ua, grandson, e.g. MacCarthaigh, son of Carthach (MacCarthy), MacRuaidhri, son of Rory (Macrory). Both methods have been followed in Ireland, but in Scotland Mac came to be exclusively used. The adoption of such genealogical surnames fostered the notion that all who bore the same surname were kinsmen, and hence the genealogical term clann, which properly means the descendants of some progenitor, gradually became synonymous with tuath, tribe. Like all purely genealogical terms, clann may be used in the limited sense of a particular tribe governed by a chief, or in that of many tribes claiming descent from a common ancestor. In the latter sense it was synonymous with síl, siol, seed e.g. Siol Alpine, a great clan which included the smaller clans of the Macgregors, Grants, Mackinnons, Macnabs, Macphies, Macquarries and Macaulays.
The clan system in the most archaic form of which we have any definite information can be best studied in the Irish tuath, or tribe.[1] This consisted of two classes: (1) tribesmen, and (2) a miscellaneous class of slaves, criminals, strangers and their descendants. The first class included tribesmen by blood in the male line, including all illegitimate children acknowledged by their fathers, and tribesmen by adoption or sons of tribeswomen by strangers, foster-sons, men who had done some signal service to the tribe, and lastly the descendants of the second class after a certain number of generations. Each tuath had a chief called a ríg, king, a word cognate with the Gaulish ríg-s or rix, the Latin reg-s or rex, and the Old Norse rik-ir. The tribesmen formed a number of communities, each of which, like the tribe itself, consisted of a head, ceann fine, his kinsmen, slaves and other retainers. This was the fine, or sept. Each of these occupied a certain part of the tribe-land, the arable part being cultivated under a system of co-tillage, the pasture land co-grazed according to certain customs, and the wood, bog and mountains forming the marchland of the sept being the unrestricted common land of the sept. The sept was in fact a village community.
What the sept was to the tribe, the homestead was to the sept. The head of a homestead was an aire, a representative freeman capable of acting as a witness, compurgator and bail. These were very important functions, especially when it is borne in mind that the tribal homestead was the home of many of the kinsfolk of the head of the family as well as of his own children. The descent of property being according to a gavel-kind custom, it constantly happened that when an aire died the share of his property which each member of his immediate family was entitled to receive was not sufficient to qualify him to be an aire. In this case the family did not divide the inheritance, but remained together as “a joint and undivided family,” one of the members being elected chief of the family or household, and in
- ↑ The following account of the Irish clan-system differs in some respects from that in the article on Brehon Laws (q.v.); but it is retained here in view of the authority of the writer and the admitted obscurity of the whole subject. (Ed. E. B.)
