Lavie Enrose
Graduate Poster
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Chapter 12
Thought Reading
The Art Possible to All
It is really curious and astonishing to observe the readiness some persons display in ridiculing anything and everything they fail to understand. Thought reading is one of these, and people who fail to understand it simply put it down as trickery. Place before them the notion of some enterprise the accomplishment of which militates against the evidence of their former experiences, and they at once treat it with every form of derision conceivable, and at the same time feel highly indignant that such an endeavor should have been made to impose upon their credulity.
Take the experience of Mr. Irving Bishop as a case in point. He introduces to the notice of the public a unique and curious natural phenomenon, and mental faculty and power which almost every person possesses more or less, but which is lying dormant and only requires cultivation, though at first sight it may appear to partake of the supernatural, or, as some of its opponents prefer to say, of omniscience.
What was the result of Mr. Bishop's experiments? He was received by a large section of people with jeers, insults, and various expressions of disgust, terms being leveled at him of an unjust and un-English description. Mr. Bishop happened to be a conjurer, and therefore the popular notion chose to attribute to him an inherent inability to accomplish any really genuine feat without the aid of deception creeping in somewhere.
If he had come forward at first incognito, without his reputation as a conjurer known, the probability is that his reception would have been different, and the spirit of opposition and suspicion he aroused would have taken a less destructive form.
- The Art Of Modern Conjuring by, Professor Henri Garenne, first published in 1886 by Ward, Lock & Co.
Thought Reading
The Art Possible to All
It is really curious and astonishing to observe the readiness some persons display in ridiculing anything and everything they fail to understand. Thought reading is one of these, and people who fail to understand it simply put it down as trickery. Place before them the notion of some enterprise the accomplishment of which militates against the evidence of their former experiences, and they at once treat it with every form of derision conceivable, and at the same time feel highly indignant that such an endeavor should have been made to impose upon their credulity.
Take the experience of Mr. Irving Bishop as a case in point. He introduces to the notice of the public a unique and curious natural phenomenon, and mental faculty and power which almost every person possesses more or less, but which is lying dormant and only requires cultivation, though at first sight it may appear to partake of the supernatural, or, as some of its opponents prefer to say, of omniscience.
What was the result of Mr. Bishop's experiments? He was received by a large section of people with jeers, insults, and various expressions of disgust, terms being leveled at him of an unjust and un-English description. Mr. Bishop happened to be a conjurer, and therefore the popular notion chose to attribute to him an inherent inability to accomplish any really genuine feat without the aid of deception creeping in somewhere.
If he had come forward at first incognito, without his reputation as a conjurer known, the probability is that his reception would have been different, and the spirit of opposition and suspicion he aroused would have taken a less destructive form.
- The Art Of Modern Conjuring by, Professor Henri Garenne, first published in 1886 by Ward, Lock & Co.