GLOSSARY
Note.—The
words and phrases here included fall under three main
heads:—
(1)
Words common only in philosophical or medical use.
(2)
Words or phrases used in psychical research with some special
significance.
(3)
A few words, distinguished by an asterisk, for which the author is
himself responsible.
Aboulia.
—Loss
of power of willing.
After-image.
—A
retinal picture of an object seen after removing the gaze from the
object.
Agent.
—The
person who seems to initiate a telepathic transmission.
Agraphia.
—Lack
of power to write words.
Alexia
or
Word-blindness
.—Lack
of power to understand words written.
Anæsthesia
,
or the loss of sensation generally, must be distinguished
from
analgesia
,
or the loss of the sense of pain alone.
Analgesia.
—Insensibility
to pain.
Aphasia.
—Incapacity
of coherent utterance, not caused by structural impairment of the
vocal organs, but by lesion of the cerebral centres for
speech.
Aphonia.
—Incapacity
of uttering sounds.
Automatic.
—Used
of mental images arising and movements made without the initiation,
and generally without the concurrence, of conscious thought and
will.
Sensory automatism
will thus include visual and auditory hallucinations.
Motor automatism
will include messages written and words uttered without intention
(automatic script, trance-utterance, etc.).
Automnesia.
—Spontaneous
revival of memories of an earlier condition of life.
Autoscope.
—Any
instrument which reveals a subliminal motor impulse or sensory
impression,
e.g.
,
a divining rod, a tilting table, or a planchette.
Bilocation.
—The
sensation of being in two different places at once, namely where
one's organism is, and in a place distant from it.
Catalepsy.
—"An
intermittent neurosis producing inability to change the position of
a
limb, while another person can place the muscles in a state of
flexion or contraction as he will." (Tuke's
Dictionary of Psychological Medicine
.)
Centre
of Consciousness.
—The
place where a percipient imagines himself to be. The point of view
from which he seems to himself to be surveying some phantasmal
scene.
Chromatism.
—See
Secondary Sensations
.
Clair-audience.
—The
sensation of hearing an internal (but in some way veridical)
voice.
Clairvoyance
(
Lucidité
).—The
faculty or act of perceiving, as though visually, with some
coincidental truth, some distant scene.
Cænesthesia.
—That
consensus or agreement of many organic sensations which is a
fundamental element in our conception of personal identity.
Control.
—This
word is used of the intelligence which purports to communicate
messages which are written or uttered by the
automatist
,
sensitive
or
medium
.
*Cosmopathic.
—Open
to the access of supernormal knowledge or emotion.
Cryptomnesia.
—Submerged
or subliminal memory of events forgotten by the supraliminal
self.
*Dextro-cerebral
(opposed to
*Sinistro-cerebral
)
of left-handed persons as employing preferentially the
right
hemisphere of the brain.
Diathesis.
—Habit,
capacity, constitutional disposition or tendency.
Dimorphism.
—In
crystals the property of assuming two incompatible forms: in plants
and animals, difference of form between members of the same
species.
Used of a condition of alternating personalities, in which memory,
character, etc., present themselves at different times in different
forms in the same person.
Discarnate.
—Disembodied,
opposed to
incarnate
.
Disintegration
of Personality.
—Used
of any condition where the sense of personality is not unitary and
continuous: especially when secondary and transitory personalities
intervene.
Dynamogeny.
—The
increase of nervous energy by appropriate stimuli, often opposed
to
inhibition
.
Ecmnesia.
—Loss
of memory of a period of time.
*Entencephalic.
—On
the analogy of
entoptic
:
of sensations, etc., which have their origin within the brain, not
in
the external world.
Eugenics.
—The
science of improving the race.
Falsidical.
—Of
hallucinations
delusive
,
i.e.
,
when there is nothing objective to which they correspond. The
correlative term to
veridical
.
Glossolaly.
—"Speaking
with tongues,"
i.e.
,
automatic utterance of words not belonging to any real
language.
Hallucination.
—Any
sensory perception which has no objective counterpart within the
field of vision, hearing, etc., is termed a hallucination.
Heteræsthesia.
—A
form of sensibility decidedly different from any of those which can
be referred to the action of the known senses.
Hyperboulia.
—Increased
power over the organism,—resembling the power which we call
will
when it is exercised over the voluntary muscles,—which is seen in
the bodily changes effected by self-suggestion.
Hyperæsthesia.
—Unusual
acuteness of the senses.
Hypermnesia.
—"Over-activity
of the memory; a condition in which past acts, feelings, or ideas
are
brought vividly to the mind, which, in its normal condition, has
wholly lost the remembrance of them." (Tuke's
Dict.
)
*Hyperpromethia.
—Supernormal
power of foresight.
Hypnagogic.
—
Illusions
hypnagogiques
(Maury) are the vivid illusions of sight or sound—"faces in
the dark," etc.—which sometimes accompany the oncoming of
sleep. To similar illusions accompanying the
departure
of sleep, as when a dream-figure persists for a few moments into
waking life, I have given the name
*hypnopompic
.
Hypnogenous
zones.
—Regions
by pressure on which hypnosis is induced in some hysterical
persons.
*Hypnopompic.
—See
Hypnagogic
.
Hysteria.
—"A
disordered condition of the nervous system, the anatomical seat and
nature of which are unknown to medical science, but of which the
symptoms consist in well-marked and very varied disturbances of
nerve-function" (
Ency.
Brit.
).
Hysterical affections are not dependent on any discoverable
lesion.
Hysterogenous
zones.
—Points
or tracts on the skin of a hysterical person, pressure on which
will
induce a hysterical attack.
Ideational.
—Used
of impressions which display some distinct notion, but not of
sensory
nature.
Induced.
—Of
hallucinations, etc., intentionally produced.
Levitation.
—A
raising of objects from the ground by supposed supernormal means;
especially of living persons.
Medium.
—A
person through whom communication is deemed to be carried on
between
living men and spirits of the departed. It is often better replaced
by
automatist
or
sensitive
.
Message.
—Used
for any communication, not necessarily verbal, from one to another
stratum of the automatist's personality, or from an external
intelligence to the automatist's mind.
Metallæsthesia.
—A
form of sensibility alleged to exist which enables some hypnotised
or
hysterical subjects to discriminate between the contacts of various
metals by sensations not derived from their ordinary properties of
weight, etc.
Metastasis.
—Change
of the seat of a bodily function from one place (
e.g.
,
brain-centre) to another.
*Metetherial.
—That
which appears to lie after or beyond the ether: the metetherial
environment denotes the spiritual or transcendental world in which
the soul may be supposed to exist.
*Methectic.
—Of
communications between one stratum of a man's intelligence and
another.
Mirror-writing
(
écriture
renversée, Spiegel-schrift
).—Writing
so inverted, or, more exactly,
perverted
,
as to resemble writing reflected in a mirror.
Mnemonic
chain.
—A
continuous series of memories, especially when the continuity
persists after an interruption.
Motor.
—Used
of an impulse to action not carrying with it any definite idea or
sensory impression.
Negative
hallucination
or
systematised anæthesia
.—Signifies
the condition of an entranced subject who, as the result of a
suggestion, is unable to perceive some object or to hear some
sound,
etc.
Number
forms.
—See
Secondary sensations
.
Objectify.
—To
externalize a phantom as if it were a material object; to see it as
a
part of the waking world.
*Panmnesia.
—A
potential recollection of all impressions.
Paræsthesia.
—Erroneous
or morbid sensation.
Paramnesia.
—All
forms of erroneous memory.
Paraphasia.
—The
erroneous and involuntary use of one word for another.
Percipient.
—The
correlative term to Agent; the person on whose mind the telepathic
impact falls; or, more generally, the person who perceives any
motor
or sensory impression.
Phantasm
and Phantom.
—Phantasm
and phantom are, of course, mere variants of the same word; but
since
phantom has become generally restricted to
visual
hallucinations, it is convenient to take phantasm to cover a wider
range, and to signify any hallucinatory sensory impression,
whatever
sense—whether sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, or diffused
sensibility—may happen to be affected.
Phantasmogenetic
centre.
—A
point in space apparently modified by a spirit in such a way that
persons present near it perceive a phantasm.
Phobies.
—Irrational
restricting or disabling preoccupations or fears;
e.g.
,
agoraphobia
,
fear of open spaces.
Photism.
—See
Secondary sensations
.
Point
de repère.
—Guiding
mark. Used of some (generally inconspicuous) real object which a
hallucinated subject sometimes sees as the nucleus of his
hallucination, and the movements of which suggest corresponding
movements of the hallucinatory object.
Polyzoism.
—The
property, in a complex organism, of being composed of minor and
quasi-independent organisms. This is sometimes called "colonial
constitution," from animal
colonies
.
Possession.
—A
developed form of motor automatism, in which the automatist's own
personality disappears for a time, while there appears to be a more
or less complete substitution of personality, writing or speech
being
given by another spirit through the entranced organism.
Post-hypnotic.
—Used
of a suggestion given during the hypnotic trance, but intended to
operate after that trance has ceased.
Precognition.
—Knowledge
of impending events supernormally acquired.
Premonition.
—A
supernormal indication of any kind of event still in the
future.
*Preversion.
—A
tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a further point of
the
evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached;
opposed
to reversion.
*Promnesia.
—The
paradoxical sensation of recollecting a scene which is only now
occurring for the first time; the sense of the
déjà vu
.
*Psychorrhagy.
—A
special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person
easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element,
definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible
by
one or more persons, in some portion of space.
*Psychorrhagic
diathesis.
—A
habit or capacity of detaching some psychical element,
involuntarily
and without purpose, in such a manner as to produce a
phantasm.
Psycho-therapeutics.
—"Treatment
of disease by the influence of the mind on the body."
(Tuke's
Dict.
)
Reciprocal.
—Used
of cases where there is both agency and percipience at each end of
the telepathic chain, so that A perceives P, and P perceives A
also.
*Retrocognition.
—Knowledge
of the past, supernormally acquired.
Secondary
personality.
—It
sometimes happens, as the result of shock, disease, or unknown
causes, that an individual experiences an alteration of memory and
character, amounting to a change of personality, which generally
seems to have come on during sleep. The new personality is in that
case termed
secondary
,
in distinction to the original, or
primary
,
personality.
Secondary
sensations
(
Secunddrempfindungen
,
audition colorée
,
sound-seeing
,
synæsthesia
,
etc.
).—With
some persons every sensation of one type is accompanied by a
sensation of another type; as for instance, a special sound may be
accompanied by a special sensation of colour or light (
chromatisms
or
photisms
).
This phenomenon is analogous to that of
number-forms
,—a
kind of diagrammatic mental picture which accompanies the
conception
of a progression of numbers. See Galton's
Inquiries into Human Faculty
.
Shell-hearing.
—The
induction of hallucinatory voices, etc., by listening to a shell.
Analogous to crystal-gazing.
Stigmatisation.
—The
production of blisters or other cutaneous changes on the hands,
feet,
or elsewhere, by suggestion or self-suggestion.
Subliminal.
—Of
thoughts, feelings, etc., lying beneath the ordinary
threshold
(
limen
)
of consciousness, as opposed to
supraliminal
,
lying
above
the threshold.
Suggestion.
—The
process of effectively impressing upon the subliminal intelligence
the wishes of some other person.
Self-suggestion
means a suggestion conveyed by the subject himself from one stratum
of his personality to another, without external
intervention.
*Supernormal.
—Of
a faculty or phenomenon which transcends ordinary experience. Used
in
preference to the word
supernatural
,
as not assuming that there is anything outside nature or any
arbitrary interference with natural law.
Supraliminal.
—See
Subliminal
.
Synæsthesia.
—See
Secondary Sensations
.
Synergy.
—A
number of actions correlated together, or combined into a
group.
Telekinesis.
—Used
of alleged supernormal movements of objects, not due to any known
force.
*Telepathy.
—The
communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another,
independently of the recognised channels of sense.
*Telæsthesia.
—Any
direct sensation or perception of objects or conditions
independently
of the recognised channels of sense, and also under such
circumstances that no known mind external to the percipient's can
be
suggested as the source of the knowledge thus gained.
*Telergy.
—The
force exercised by the mind of an agent in impressing a
percipient,—involving a direct influence of the extraneous spirit
on the brain or organism of the percipient.
Veridical.
—Of
hallucinations, when they correspond to real events happening
elsewhere and unknown to the percipient.