The cases, or rather a selection of the cases, are printed in A. Lang’s book, The Making of Religion (2nd ed., London, 1902, pp. 87-104). Others are chronicled in A. Lang’s Introduction to Mr N. W. Thomas’s work, Crystal Gazing (1905). The experiments took this form: any person might ask the scryer (a lady who had never previously heard of crystal-gazing) “to see what he was thinking of.” The scryer, who was a stranger in a place which she had not visited before, gave, in a long series of cases, a description of the person or place on which the inquirer’s thoughts were fixed. The descriptions, though three or four entire failures occurred, were of remarkable accuracy as a rule, and contained facts and incidents unknown to the inquirers, but confirmed as accurate. In fact, some Oriental scenes and descriptions of incidents were corroborated by a letter from India which arrived just after the experiment; and the same thing happened when the events described were occurring in places less remote. On one occasion a curious set of incidents were described, which happened to be vividly present to the mind of a sceptical stranger who chanced to be in the room during the experiment; events unknown to the inquirer in this instance. As an example of the minuteness of description, an inquirer, thinking of a brother in India, an officer in the army, whose hair had suffered in an encounter with a tiger, had described to her an officer in undress uniform, with bald scars through the hair on his temples, such as he really bore. The number and proportion of successes was too high to admit of explanation by chance coincidence, but success was not invariable. On one occasion the scryer could see nothing, “the crystal preserved its natural diaphaneity,” as Dr Dee says; and there were failures with two or three inquirers. On the other hand no record was kept in several cases of success.
Whoever can believe that the successes were numerous and that descriptions were given correctly—not only of facts present to the minds of inquirers, and of other persons present who were not consciously taking a share in the experiments, but also of facts necessarily unknown to all concerned—must of course be most impressed by the latter kind of success. If the process commonly styled “telepathy” exists (see Telepathy), that may account for the scryer’s power of seeing facts which are in the mind of the inquirer. But when the scryers see details of various sorts, which are unknown to the inquirer, but are verified on inquiry, then telepathy perhaps fails to provide an explanation. We seem to be confronted with actual clairvoyance (q.v.), or vue à distance. It would be vain to form hypotheses as to the conditions or faculties which make vue à distance possible. This way lie metaphysics, with Hegel’s theory of the Sensitive Soul, or Myers’ theory of the Subliminal Self. “The intuitive soul,” says Hegel, “oversteps the conditions of time and space; it beholds things remote, things long past, and things to come.”[1]
What we need, if any progress is to be made in knowledge of the subject, is not a metaphysical hypothesis, but a large, carefully tested, and well-recorded collection of examples, made by savants of recognized standing. At present we are where we were in electrical science, when Newton produced curious sparks while rubbing glass with paper. By way of facts, we have only a large body of unattested anecdotes of supra-normal successes in crystal-gazing, in many lands and ages; and the scanty records of modern amateur investigators, like the present writer. Even from these, if the honesty of all concerned be granted (and even clever dishonesty could not have produced many of the results), it would appear that we are investigating a strange and important human faculty. The writer is acquainted with no experiments in which it was attempted to discern the future (except in trivial cases as to events on the turf, when chance coincidence might explain the successes), and only with two or three cases in which there was an attempt to help historical science and discern the past by aid of psychical methods. The results were interesting and difficult to explain, but the experiments were few. Ordinary scryers of fancy pictures are common enough, but scryers capable of apparently supra-normal successes are apparently rare. Perhaps something depends on the inquirer as well as the scryer.
The method of scrying, as generally practised, is simple. It is usual to place a glass ball on a dark ground, to sit with the back to the light, to focus the gaze on the ball (disregarding reflections, if these cannot be excluded), and to await results. Perhaps from five to ten minutes is a long enough time for the experiment. The scryer may let his consciousness play freely, but should not be disturbed by lookers-on. As a rule, if a person has the faculty he “sees” at the first attempt; if he fails in the first three or four efforts he need not persevere. Solitude is advisable at first, but few people can find time amounting to ten minutes for solitary studies of this sort, so busy and so gregarious is mankind. The writer has no experience of trance, sleep or auto-hypnotization produced in such experiments; scryers have always seemed to retain their full normal consciousness. As regards scepticism concerning the faculty we may quote what Mr Galton says about the faculty of visualization: “Scientific men as a class have feeble power of visual reproduction.... They had a mental deficiency of which they were unconscious, and, naturally enough, supposed that those who affirmed they were possessed of it were romancing.”
Authorities.—A useful essay is that of “Miss X” (Miss Goodrich Freer) in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, v. The history of crystal-gazing is here traced, and many examples of the author’s own experiments are recorded. A. Lang’s The Making of Religion, ch. v., contains anthropological examples and a series of experiments. In N. W. Thomas’s Crystal Gazing the history and anthropology of the subject are investigated, with modern instances. For Egypt, see Lane’s Modern Egyptians, and the Journal of Sir Walter Scott, xi. 419–421, with Quarterly Review, No. 117, pp. 196–208. These Egyptian experiments of 1830 were vitiated by their method, the scryer being asked to see and describe a given person, named. He ought not, of course, to be told more than that he is to descry the inquirer’s thoughts, and there ought never to be physical contact, as in holding hands, between the inquirer and the scryer during the experiment. There is a chapter on crystal-gazing in Les Névroses et les idées fixes of Dr Janet (1898). His statements are sometimes demonstrably inaccurate (see Making of Religion, Appendix C). A curious passage on the subject, by Ibn Khaldun, an Arabian medieval savant, is quoted by Mr Thomas from the printed Extracts of MSS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale. There is also a chapter on crystal-gazing in Myers’ Human Personality. (A. L.)
CRYSTALLITE. In media which, on account of their viscosity,
offer considerable resistance to those molecular movements
which are necessary for the building and growth of crystals,
rudimentary or imperfect forms of crystallization very frequently
occur. Such media are the volcanic rocks when they
are rapidly cooled, producing various kinds of pitchstone,
obsidian, &c. When examined under the microscope these
rocks consist largely of a perfectly amorphous or glassy base,
through which are scattered great numbers of very minute
crystals (microliths), and other bodies, termed crystallites, which
seem to be stages in the formation of crystals. Crystallites
may also be produced by allowing a solution of sulphur in carbon
disulphide mixed with Canada balsam to evaporate slowly, and
their development may be watched on a microscopic slide.
Small globules appear (globulites), spherical and non-crystalline
(so far as can be ascertained). They may coalesce or may
arrange themselves into rows like strings of beads—margarites—(Gr.
μαργαρίτης, a pearl) or into groups with a somewhat
radiate arrangement—globospherites. Occasionally they take
elongated shapes—longulites and baculites (Lat. baculus, a staff).
The largest may become crystalline, changing suddenly into
polyhedral bodies with evident double refraction and the optical
properties belonging to crystals. Others become long and
thread-like—trichites (Gr. θρίξ, τριχός, hair)—and these are
often curved, and a group of them may be implanted on the
surface of a small crystal. All these forms are found in vitreous
igneous rocks. H. P. J. Vogelsang, who was the first to direct
much attention to them, believes that the globulites are preliminary
stages in the formation of crystals.
Microliths, as distinguished from crystallites, have crystalline properties, and evidently belong to definite minerals or salts. When sufficiently large they are often recognizable, but usually
- ↑ “Philosophie der Geistes,” Hegel’s Werke, vii. 179, 406, 408 (Berlin, 1845). Cf. Wallace’s translation (Oxford, 1894).
