Preface

and how little insight he still has at his disposal is revealed by the example he brings from his own experience with that sick pregnant woman whose vomiting could not be stilled. In the case of this woman, he clearly had nothing other than a pronounced, excellent High-Sensitive Reichenbach’s term for individuals exceptionally reactive to "Odic force" or animal magnetism under his hands; but he did not notice it. Her high sensitivity was further exceedingly increased by pregnancy, as I have demonstrated this (§. 808). The stomach cramps into which she fell were evidently none other than those which he would have immediately stilled without any medication, namely by the mere laying of his right hand upon the pit of the stomach, just as I have immediately and thoroughly stilled them myself in such a way in similar cases (§. 1054—1058. 2763 et seq.). The side-effects he observed—that the sufferer recognized people on the street by their footsteps, and this at considerable distances—is a thing that has happened a thousand times, but never in cases of merely increased simple nervous excitement; rather, always and without exception only with High-Sensitives.

If he wishes to call this "magnetic clairvoyance," he is free to do so, and for that he requires absolutely no "fraudulent persons," unless he wishes to deceive himself by denying palpable facts that occurred before his eyes, or the undeniable conclusions drawn from them. Had he been willing to take the trouble, without preconceived prejudices, to investigate more closely the nature of the extraordinary qualities of this remarkable woman, or if finer observation of this kind and deeper pursuit were his forte at all, he would soon have found that her hearing was by no means so heightened that she could have heard and recognized persons by the sound of their footsteps at a distance where he was hardly able to see them (wherein some embellishment of the pen original: "decoratio calami"; a Latin phrase meaning rhetorical exaggeration or literary flourish likely flowed in); rather, she must have received this perception through entirely different channels. He would indeed be able to find them described in the present writing, but he will not find them, because it is impossible for such a gentleman to work his way into the "fumes of my nonsense" The author is sarcastically quoting his critic's dismissal of his work. With all this, however, he reveals without knowing it that he completely lacked the grasp and the entire deeper understanding of the case he had before him; indeed, that he was not even a participant in the few hints that could have been helpful to him in solving the interesting riddle lying before him