orts of all those who relied on their amateur art
of experimenting and on their mere memory account.

What kind of signs could be in question? It may seem to outsiders that
the most wonderful system of signs would be needed for every content
of one mind to be communicated to another. But here again we must
first reduce the exaggerated claims to the simpler reality. When
Beulah makes card experiments, the whole words jack, queen, king,
spade, club, heart, diamond, come to her mind, but when she makes word
experiments, never under any circumstances does a real word come to
her consciousness, but only single letters. Why is this? If king and
queen can be transmitted from mind to mind, why not dog and cat? Yet
when the mother thinks of dog, it is always only first D, and after a
while O, and finally G which creeps into her mind. This difference
seems to me most characteristic, because it indicates very clearly
that the whole performance is possible only when the communicated
content belongs to a small list which can be easily counted. There are
only three face cards, only four suites, only ten numbers, and only
twenty-six letters, but there are ten thousand words and more. It is
easy to connect every one of the ten numbers or every one of the
twenty-six letters with a particular sign, but it would be impossible
to have a sign for every one of the ten thousand words. Yet if we had
to do with real mind-reading, it ought to make no difference whether
we transmit the letter D or the word dog. This fact that she can
recognize words only by slow spelling, while the faces and the suites
of the cards and the names of the numbers come as full words, seems to
me to point most clearly to the whole key of the situation. Anything
which cannot be brought into such a simple number series, for
instance, a colour impression, can never be transmitted. If the mother
looks at the ace of diamonds, Beulah says that she sees the red of the
diamond before her in her mind, but if the mother looks at the picture
of a blue lake, this blue impression can never arise in Beulah's mind,
but only the letters B-L-U-E.

Moreover, I observed that for Beulah the letters of the alphabet were
indeed connected with numbers, as in seeking a letter she has a habit
of going through the alphabet and at the same time moving one finger
after another. Thus she feels each letter as having a definite place
in her series of finger movements, and the finger movements them