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Second Sight: A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance by Sepharial

VIII. ALLIED PSYCHIC PHASES

The faculty of second sight is not by any means the most common of the psychic powers. Psychometric impressions which proceed by the sense of touch into that of a superior order of feeling are far more general. We are affected much more than is generally recognized by the impressions gathered from the things we have contact with, and it is quite a common experience that very delicate and sensitive people take the "atmosphere" of places into which they go. I have in mind an instance of an extremely high-keyed person who invariably takes on the atmosphere of new localities, houses and even rooms. Going to view a house with the object of taking it on rental, she will as likely as not pronounce against the moment she enters on the ground that it is a "house of death" or a "quarrelsome house," full of sickness, intemperance or what not, and wherever enquiry has been possible it has invariably confirmed her impressions. On one occasion she had telegraphed to engage a room at an hotel in a seaside town, and on being shown to it by the maid found that it was locked. While the maid went to fetch the key the young lady tried the door and immediately received a psychometric impression. "Oh, M--," she said to her companion, "we cannot possibly have this room, there's a corpse in it!" This was confirmed, almost as soon as said, by the appearance of the proprietor, who explained that the maid had made a mistake in the number of the room, and then, feeling that there was a state of tension, confidentially informed his visitors that the locked room had really been booked to them but the old lady who was to have vacated it that morning had unfortunately died, and in order not to distress the other visitors the door had been locked pending the removal of the body, and even the servants had not been informed of it.

The experiments of Denton recorded in his _Soul of Things_ are full of interest for those who would learn something more about the phenomena of psychometry.

The suggestion is that every particle of matter has its own aura or "atmosphere" in which are stored up the experiences of that particle. What is said of the particle applies also to the mass of any body, and in effect we get the aura of a room, of a house, of a town, of a city; and so successively until we come to that of the planet itself. These stored-up impressions are not caused by the mental action of human beings in association with the material psychometrized, they appertain entirely to the associations of the material itself, and the psychometric sense consists in recovering these associations and bringing them into terms of human sense and consciousness. The experience seems to suggest a nexus between the individualized human soul and the world-soul in which the generic life is included; also that the human soul is a specialized evolution from the world-soul, and hence inclusive of all stages of experience beneath the human. I think it was Draper who suggested in his _Conflict_ that a man's shadow falling upon a wall produced an indelible impression which was capable of being revived. The cinematograph film is that brick wall raised to the nth power of impressibility. The occultist will point you to a universal medium as much above the cinema film as that is above the brick or stone, and in which are stored up the _memoria mundi_. It is this sensitized envelope of the planetary atom that your sensitive taps by means of his clairvoyant, psychometric and clairaudient senses.