Inventing the Vocabulary

A surprising amount of the language in which this whole subject is still discussed was coined by Myers, and the coinages were arguments in compressed form. Telepathy, from the Greek for feeling at a distance, replaced the older thought-transference and was deliberately neutral about mechanism. Supraliminal and subliminal, above and below the threshold, gave him a way to describe a mind whose ordinary waking consciousness is only the visible portion of something much larger, without committing to any particular theory of the unconscious. He also introduced the term veridical for a hallucination that corresponds to a real distant event, which allowed the society to separate the question of whether someone saw something from the question of whether anything was there to see. This vocabulary let a Victorian gentleman scholar discuss apparitions and mediums in language that sounded like psychology rather than religion, which was precisely the point, since the society existed to move these questions out of the seance room and into something resembling a scientific literature. Modern psychology kept subliminal and discarded the framework it belonged to. Telepathy, however, it kept whole, and it is now a common English word owned by nobody in particular.