People say that we know
very little indeed about the inner working of our own selves. There's
instinct, for instance. We know nothing about that except that it is
so. 'Inherited experience' is only rather a clumsy phrase--a piece of
paper gummed up to cover a crack in the wall.
"And that brings me to my third theory."
Maggie poured out for herself a second cup of tea.
"My third theory I'm rather vague about, altogether. And yet I see
quite well that it may be the true one. (Please don't interrupt till
I've quite done.)
"We've got in us certain powers that we don't understand at all. For
instance, there's thought-projection. There's not a shadow of doubt
that that is so. I can sit here and send you a message of what I'm
thinking about--oh! vaguely, of course. It's another form of what we
mean by Sympathy and Intuition. Well, you know, some people think that
haunted houses can be explained by this. When the murder is going on,
the murderer and the murdered person are probably fearfully
excited--anger, fear, and so on. That means that their whole being is
stirred up right to the bottom, and that their hidden powers are
frightfully active. Well, the idea is that these hidden powers are
almost like acids, or gas--Hudson tells us all about that--and that
they can actually stamp themselves upon the room to such a degree that
when a sympathetic person comes in, years afterwards, perhaps, he sees
the whole thing just as it happened.
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