The Success of Clairvoyants

1879

In a paper in the July Scribner on "The Delusions of Clairvoyance," Dr. George W. Beard, of New York, writes as follows:

The practical success of clairvoyants, public and private, is the result of these three factors: 1, guess-work reduced to a science and an art; 2, coincidences, and 3, trickery.

Guessing is at once a science and an art — a science, because it may be regulated by certain principles. The familiar "guessing game" illustrates what can be done by guessing scientifically carried out; with the privilege to the guesser of but twenty chances, he may yet, beginning with the kingdom to which the article belongs, reach the most minute object before his list is exhausted. Success in this game, as all who have played it know, depends much on practice. Clairvoyants devote their lives to the practice of this game, for they play it with every victim they meet.

The subject of coincidences is one that has excited far less attention among the students of history or of human nature than it deserves; little, indeed, has been written upon it. Among those who have given the subject any thought, the most erroneous impression prevails that it can be brought under the laws of pure mathematics. In the life of every active human being are frequent, almost daily occurring coincidences, which those who give any attention to them may, if they choose, make the basis of most absurd delusions. Usually we give no more attention to these occurrences than an exclamation of surprise, and then forget all about them. We are talking of a person whom, perhaps, we rarely meet, and have not seen for a long time; suddenly he appears. A thought — out of the ordinary course, it may be — enters our mind; we express it, when behold! the same thought has just been passing through the mind of our friend. We meet with a certain experience, and then we remember, or fancy we remember, that the same experience has happened to us in a dream. Of all these daily and hourly happening coincidences, clairvoyants skillfully avail themselves, and in that direction they are aided by the ignorance and eagerness of their victims.

The trickery of clairvoyants consists mainly in the art of making their victims unconsciously reveal, by word or look, facts of personal history, and then, at the proper time, in re-imparting the information to them. In this way they gain the credit, even among persons of keen intellect, of being endowed with divine powers.