WORLD CALAMITY

Southland Times, Issue 19435, 26 December 1924, Page 5

WORLD CALAMITY

IS IT IMPENDING? CONAN DOYLE’S SPIRIT MESSAGE EXTRAORDINARY MANIFESTATIONS (Sun Special.) LONDON, December 17. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the well-known spiritualist, addressing a spiritualist service in London, declared that the recent spirit messages were a final attempt to warn mankind of the terrible calamity impending, in which great psychic phenomena, accompanied by extraordinary manifestations of natural forces, would purge mankind and prepare the way for the millenium. Spiritualists, however, might face the future hopefully and happily, he said. Professor Gilbert Murray, explaining his experiences in thought transference experiments, which he asserts resulted in 85 successful tests, declares that they lead to the belief that telepathy is continually operating everywhere. “It is hard to see how language could originally have grown, how a child could learn it, how we could ever understand a new idea, without telepathy based on an unconscious sense of perception outside our normal five senses,” he says. “I believe that we are continually sensitive to the state of other peoples’ minds.” The Graphic whimsically comments, that Professor Gilbert Murray’s gift is subject to limitations. When his wife became a Socialist, the trend of her mind from Liberalism was not conveyed to her husband, who was completely surprised when the conversion was announced. Mrs Henry Sedge wick, wife of the wellknown historian, revealed at a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research remarkably successful experiments of thought transference which Professor Gilbert Murray carried out, with the aid of his daughter, Mrs Toynbee, and others. Of 236 tests spread over a decade, it was stated that 85 were successful, 59 partially successful, and 96 failures. Usually Professor Murray went into an adjoining room, and returning, held the hand of the person who had previously written what he had been thinking of. The successes included incidents in ancient Roman history, English, French, Swedish and Russian literature, poetical quotations, fantasies, dreams and actual incidents. Lord Balfour said that the experiments seemed to prove the existence of some wholly unknown, unexplainable and unconjectured method of traversing space between two conscious organisms.