VI. SENSORY AUTOMATISM…

VI. SENSORY AUTOMATISM

[Greek: Blepomen gar arti di' esuptrou en ainigmati.]

Each of the several lines of inquiry pursued in the foregoing chapters has brought indications of something transcending sensory experience in the reserves of human faculty; and we have come to a point where we need some further colligating generalisation--some conception under which these scattered phenomena may be gathered in their true kinship.

Some steps at least towards such a generalisation the evidence to be presented in these next chapters may allow us to take. Considering together, under the heading of sensory and motor automatism, the whole range of that subliminal action of which we have as yet discussed fragments only, we shall gradually come to see that its distinctive faculty of telepathy or telæsthesia is in fact an introduction into a realm where the limitations of organic life can no longer be assumed to persist. Considering, again, the evidence which shows that that portion of the personality which exercises these powers during our earthly existence does actually continue to exercise them after our bodily decay, we shall recognise a relation--obscure but indisputable--between the subliminal and the surviving self.

I begin, then, with my definition of automatism, as the widest term under which to include the range of subliminal emergences into ordinary life. The turbulent uprush and downdraught of hysteria; the helpful uprushes of genius, co-operating with supraliminal thought; the profound and recuperative changes which follow on hypnotic suggestion; these have been described under their separate headings. But the main mass of subliminal manifestations remains undescribed. I have dealt little with veridical hallucinations, not at all with automatic writing, nor with the utterances of spontaneous trance. The products of inner vision or inner audition externalised into quasi-percepts,--these form what I term sensory automatisms. The messages conveyed by movement of limbs or hand or tongue, initiated by an inner motor impulse beyond the conscious will--these are what I term motor automatisms. And I claim that when all these are surveyed together their essential analogy will be recognised beneath much diversity of form. They will be seen to be messages from the subliminal to the supraliminal self; endeavours--conscious or unconscious--of submerged tracts of our personality to present to ordinary waking thought fragments of a knowledge which no ordinary waking thought could attain.

I regard supraliminal life merely as a privileged case of personality; a special phase of our personality, which is easiest for us to study, because it is simplified for us by our ready consciousness of what is going on in it; yet which is by no means necessarily either central or prepotent, could we see our whole being in comprehensive view.

Now if we thus regard the whole supraliminal personality as a special case of something much more extensive, it follows that we must similarly regard all human faculty, and each sense severally, as mere special or privileged cases of some more general power.

All human terrene faculty will be in this view simply a selection from faculty existing in the metetherial world; such part of that antecedent, even if not individualised, faculty as may be expressible through each several human organism.

Each of our special senses, therefore, may be conceived as straining towards development of a wider kind than earthly experience has as yet allowed. And each special sense is both an internal and an external sense; involves a tract of the brain, of unknown capacity, as well as an end-organ, whose capacity is more nearly measurable. The relation of this internal, mental, mind's-eye vision to non-sensory psychological perception on the one hand, and to ocular vision on the other hand, is exactly one of the points on which some profounder observation will be seen to be necessary. One must at least speak of "mind's eye" perception in these sensory terms, if one is to discuss it at all.

But ordinary experience at any rate assumes that the end-organ alone can acquire fresh information, and that the central tract can but combine this new information already sent in to it. This must plainly be the case, for instance, with optical or acoustic knowledge;--with such knowledge as is borne on waves of ether or of air, and is caught by a terminal apparatus, evolved for the purpose. But observe that it is by no means necessary that all seeing and all hearing should be through eye or ear.

The vision of our dreams--to keep to vision alone for greater simplicity--is non-optical vision. It is usually generated in the central brain, not sent up thither from an excited retina. Optical laws can only by a stretch of terms be said to apply to it at all.

Let us attempt some rough conspectus, which may show something of the relation in which central and peripheral vision stand to each other.

We start from a region below the specialisation of visual faculty. The study of the successive dermal and nervous modifications which have led up to that faculty belongs to Biology, and all that our argument needs here is to point out that the very fact that this faculty has been developed in a germ, animated by metetherial life, indicates that some perceptivity from which sight could take its origin pre-existed in the originating, the unseen world. We know vaguely how vision differentiated itself peripherally, with the growing sensibility of the pigment-spot to light and shadow. But there must have been a cerebral differentiation also, and also a psychological differentiation, namely, a gradual shaping of a distinct feeling from obscure feelings, whose history we cannot recover.

Yet I believe that we have still persistent in our brain-structure some dim vestige of the transition from that early undifferentiated continuous sensitivity to our existing specialisation of sense. Probably in all of us, though in some men much more distinctly than in others, there exist certain synæsthesiæ or concomitances of sense-impression, which are at any rate not dependent on any recognisable link of association.[101] My present point is that such synæsthesiæ stand on the dividing line between percepts externally and internally originated. These irradiations of sensitivity, sometimes apparently congenital, cannot, on the one hand, be called a purely mental phenomenon. Nor again can they be definitely classed under external vision; since they do sometimes follow upon a mental process of association. It seems safer to term them entencephalic, on the analogy of entoptic, since they seem to be due to something in brain-structure, much as entoptic percepts are due to something in the structure of the eye.

I will, then, start with the synæsthesiæ as the most generalised form of inward perception, and will pass on to other classes which approach more nearly to ordinary external vision.

From these entencephalic photisms we seem to proceed by an easy transition to the most inward form of unmistakable entoptic vision--which is therefore the most inward form of all external vision--the flash of light consequent on electrisation of the optic nerve. Next on our outward road we may place the phosphenes caused by pressure on the optic nerve or irritation of the retina. Next Purkinje's figures, or shadows cast by the blood-vessels of the middle layer upon the bacillary layer of the retina. Then muscæ volitantes, or shadows cast by motes in the vitreous humour upon the fibrous layer of the retina.

Midway, again, between entoptic and ordinary external vision we may place after-images; which, although themselves perceptible with shut eyes, presuppose a previous retinal stimulation from without;--forming, in fact, the entoptic sequelæ of ordinary external vision.

Next comes our ordinary vision of the external world--and this, again, is pushed to its highest degree of externality by the employment of artificial aids to sight. He who gazes through a telescope at the stars has mechanically improved his end-organs to the furthest point now possible to man.

And now, standing once more upon our watershed of entencephalic vision, let us trace the advancing capacities of internal vision. The forms of vision now to be considered are virtually independent of the eye; they can persist, that is to say, after the destruction of the eye, if only the eye has worked for a few years, so as to give visual education to the brain. We do not, in fact, fully know the limits of this independence, which can only be learnt by a fuller examination of intelligent blind persons than has yet been made. Nor can we say with certainty how far in a seeing person the eye is in its turn influenced by the brain. I shall avoid postulating any "retropulsive current" from brain to retina, just as I have avoided any expression more specific than "the brain" to indicate the primary seat of sight. The arrangement here presented, as already explained, is a psychological one, and can be set forth without trespassing on controverted physiological ground.

We may take memory-images as the simplest type of internal vision. These images, as commonly understood, introduce us to no fresh knowledge; they preserve the knowledge gained by conscious gaze upon the outer world. In their simplest spontaneous form they are the cerebral sequelæ of external vision, just as after-images are its entoptic sequelæ. These two classes of vision have been sometimes confounded, although the distinction is a marked one. Into the cerebral storage of impressions one element habitually enters which is totally absent from the mere retinal storage, namely, a psychical element--a rearrangement or generalisation of the impressions retinally received.

Next we come to a common class of memory-images, in which the subliminal rearrangement is particularly marked. I speak of dreams--which lead us on in two directions from memory-images; in the direction of imagination-images, and in the direction of hallucinations. Certain individual dreams, indeed, of rare types point also in other directions which later on we shall have to follow. But dreams as a class consist of confused memory-images, reaching a kind of low hallucinatory intensity, a glow, so to say, sufficient to be perceptible in darkness.

I will give the name of imagination-images to those conscious recombinations of our store of visual imagery which we compose either for our mere enjoyment, as "waking dreams," or as artifices to help us to the better understanding of facts of nature confusedly discerned. Such, for instance, are imagined geometrical diagrams; and Watt, lying in bed in a dark room and conceiving the steam-engine, illustrates the utmost limit to which voluntary internal visualisation can go.

Here at any rate the commonly admitted category of stages of inward vision will close. Thus far and no farther the brain's capacity for presenting visual images can be pushed on under the guidance of the conscious will of man. It is now my business to show, on the contrary, that we have here reached a mere intermediate point in the development of internal vision. These imagination-images, valuable as they are, are merely attempts to control supraliminally a form of vision which--as spontaneous memory-images have already shown us--is predominantly subliminal. The memory-images welled up from a just-submerged stratum; we must now consider what other images also well upward from the same hidden source.

To begin with, it is by no means certain that some of Watt's images of steam-engines did not well up from that source,--did not emerge ready-made into the supraliminal mind while it rested in that merely expectant state which forms generally a great part of invention. We have seen in Chapter III. that there is reason to believe in such a conveyance in the much inferior mental processes of calculating boys, etc., and also in the mental processes of the painter. In short, without pretending to judge of the proportion of voluntary to involuntary imagery in each several creative mind, we must undoubtedly rank the spontaneously emergent visual images of genius as a further stage of internal vision.

And now we have reached, by a triple road, the verge of a most important development of inward vision--namely, that vast range of phenomena which we call hallucination. Each of our last three classes had led up to hallucination in a different way. Dreams actually are hallucinations; but they are usually hallucinations of low intensity; and are only rarely capable of maintaining themselves for a few seconds (as hypnopompic illusions) when the dreamer wakes to the stimuli of the material world. Imagination-images may be carried to a hallucinatory pitch by good visualisers.[102] And the inspirations of genius--Raphael's San Sisto is the classical instance--may present themselves in hallucinatory vividness to the astonished artist.

A hallucination, one may say boldly, is in fact a hyperæsthesia; and generally a central hyperæsthesia. That is to say, the hallucination is in some cases due indirectly to peripheral stimulation; but often also it is the result of a stimulus to "mind's-eye vision," which sweeps the idea onwards into visual form, regardless of ordinary checks.

Here, then, is a comprehensive and reasonable way of regarding these multifarious hallucinations or sensory automatisms. They are phenomena which must neither be feared nor ignored, but rather controlled and interpreted. Nor will that interpretation be an easy matter. The interpretation of the symbols by which the retina represents the external world has been, whether for the race or for the individual, no short or simple process. Yet ocular vision is in my view a simple, easy, privileged case of vision generally; and the symbols which represent our internal percepts of an immaterial world are likely to be far more complex than any impressions from the material world on the retina.

All inward visions are like symbols abridged from a picture-alphabet. In order to understand any one class of hallucinations we ought to have all classes before us. At the lower limit of the series, indeed, the analysis of the physician should precede that of the psychologist. We already know to some extent, and may hope soon to know more accurately, what sensory disturbance corresponds to what nervous lesion. Yet these violent disturbances of inward perception--the snakes of the drunkard, the scarlet fire of the epileptic, the jeering voices of the paranoiac--these are perhaps of too gross a kind to afford more than a kind of neurological introduction to the subtler points which arise when hallucination is unaccompanied by any observable defect or malady.

It is, indeed, obvious enough that the more idiognomonic the hallucination is, the more isolated from any other disturbance of normality, the greater will be its psychological interest. An apparently spontaneous modification of central percepts--what phenomenon could promise to take us deeper into the mystery of the mind?

Yet until quite recently--until, in short, Edmund Gurney took up the inquiry in 1882--this wide, important subject was treated, even in serious text-books, in a superficial and perfunctory way. Few statistics were collected; hardly anything was really known; rather there was a facile assumption that all hallucinations or sensory automatisms must somehow be due to physical malady, even when there was no evidence whatever for such a connection. I must refer my readers to Gurney's résumé in his chapter on "Hallucinations" in Phantasms of the Living, if they would realise the gradual confused fashion in which men's minds had been prepared for the wider view soon to be opened, largely by Gurney's own statistical and analytical work. The wide collection of first-hand experiences of sensory automatisms of every kind which he initiated, and which the S.P.R. "Census of Hallucinations" continued after his death, has for the first time made it possible to treat these phenomena with some surety of hand.[103]

The results of these inquiries show that a great number of sensory automatisms occur among sane and healthy persons, and that for many of these we can at present offer no explanation whatever. For some of them, however, we can offer a kind of explanation, or at least an indication of a probable determining cause, whose mode of working remains wholly obscure.

Thus, in some few instances, although there is no disturbance of health, there seems to be a predisposition to the externalisation of figures or sounds. Since this in no way interferes with comfort, we must simply class it as an idiosyncratic central hyperæsthesia--much like the tendency to extremely vivid dreams, which by no means always implies a poor quality of sleep.

In a few instances, again, we can trace moral predisposing causes--expectation, grief, anxiety.

These causes, however, turn out to be much less often effective than might have been expected from the popular readiness to invoke them. In two ways especially the weakness of this predisposing cause is impressed upon us. In the first place, the bulk of our percipients experience their hallucinations at ordinary unexciting moments; traversing their more anxious crises without any such phenomenon. In the second place, those of our percipients whose hallucination is in fact more or less coincident with some distressing external event, seldom seem to have been predisposed to the hallucination by a knowledge of the event. For the event was generally unknown to them when the corresponding hallucination occurred.

This last remark, it will be seen, introduces us to the most interesting and important group of percipients and of percepts; the percipients whose gift constitutes a fresh faculty rather than a degeneration; the percepts which are veridical--which are (as we shall see cause to infer) in some way generated by some event outside the percipient's mind, so that their correspondence with that event conveys some new fact, in however obscure a form. It is this group, of course, which gives high importance to the whole inquiry; which makes the study of inward vision no mere curiosity, but rather the opening of an inlet into forms of knowledge to which we can assign no bound.

Now these telepathic hallucinations will introduce us to very varying forms of inward vision. It will be well to begin their study by recalling and somewhat expanding the thesis already advanced: that man's ocular vision is but a special or privileged case of visual power, of which power his inner vision affords a more extensive example.

Ocular vision is the perception of material objects, in accordance with optical laws, from a definite point in space. Our review of hallucinations has already removed two of these limitations. If I see a hallucinatory figure--and figures seen in dreams come under this category--I see something which is not a material object, and I see it in a manner not determined by optical laws. A dream-figure may indeed seem to conform to optical laws; but that will be the result of self-suggestion, or of organised memories, and will vary according to the dreamer's visualising power. While a portrait-painter may see a face in dream which he can paint from memory when he wakes, the ordinary man's dream-percept will be vague, shifting, and unrememberable.

Similarly, if I see a subjective hallucinatory figure "out in the room," its aspect is not determined by optical laws (it may even seem to stand behind the observer, or otherwise outside his visual field), but it will more or less conform--by my mere self-suggestion, if by nothing else--to optical laws; and, moreover, it will still seem to be seen from a fixed point in space, namely, from the stationary observer's eyes or brain.

All this seems fairly plain, so long as we are admittedly dealing with hallucinatory figures whose origin must be in the percipient's own mind. But so soon as we come to quasi-percepts which we believe to exist or to originate somewhere outside the percipient's mind, our difficulties come thick and fast.

If there be some external origin for our inward vision (which thereby becomes veridical) we must not any longer assume that all veridical inward vision starts or is exercised from the same point. If it gets hold of facts (veridical impressions or pictures, not mere subjective fancies), we cannot be sure a priori whether it somehow goes to find the facts, or the facts come to find it. Again, we cannot any longer take for granted that it will be cognisant only of phantasmal or immaterial percepts. If it can get at phantasmal percepts outside the organism, may it not get at material percepts also? May it not see distant houses, as well as the images of distant souls?

Hazardous as these speculations may seem, they nevertheless represent an attempt to get our notions of supersensory things as near down to our notions of sensory things as we fairly can. Whatever may be our ultimate conception of an ideal world, we must not for the present attempt to start from any standpoint too far removed from the temporal and spatial existence which alone we know.

As telepathy is a conception intermediate between the apparent isolation of minds here communicating only as a rule through material organs, and the ultimate conception of the unity of all mind, so the conception which I am about to propose, of a recognition of space without our concomitant subjection to laws of matter, is strictly intermediate between man's incarnate condition and the condition which we may imagine him ultimately to attain. We cannot possibly infer a priori that all recognition of space must needs disappear with the disappearance of the particular bodily sensations by means of which our conception of space has been developed. But we can imagine that a spirit should be essentially independent of space, and yet capable of recognising it.

Provisionally admitting this view, let us consider what range we are now led to assign to inner vision, when it is no longer merely subjective but veridical; bringing news to the percipient of actual fact outside his own organism.

We infer that it may represent to us (1) material objects; or (2) symbols of immaterial things; (3) in ways not necessarily accordant with optical laws; and (4) from a point of view not necessarily located within the organism, by means of what I have called a psychical excursion. I will take an illustration from a case which is recorded in detail in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 41 [666 C].

A Mrs. Wilmot has a vision of her husband in a cabin in a distant steamer. Besides her husband, she sees in the cabin a stranger (who was in fact present there), with certain material details. Now here I should say that Mrs. Wilmot's inner vision discerned material objects, from a point of view outside her own organism. But, on the other hand, although the perception came to her in visual terms, I do not suppose that it was really optical, that it came through the eye.

Mrs. Wilmot might believe, say, that her husband's head concealed from her some part of the berth in which he lay; but this would not mean a real optical concealment, but only a special direction of her attention, guided by preconceived notions of what would be optically visible from a given point.

As we proceed further we shall see, I think, in many ways how needful is this excursive theory to explain many telepathic and all telæsthetic experiences; many, I mean, of the cases where two minds are in communication, and all the cases where the percipient learns material facts (as words in a closed book, etc.) with which no other known mind is concerned.

Another most important corollary of this excursive theory must just be mentioned here. If there be spiritual excursion to a particular point of space, it is conceivable that this should involve not only the migrant spirit's perception from that point, but also perception of that point by persons materially present near it. That point may become a phantasmogenetic centre, as well as a centre of outlook. In plain words, if A has spiritually invaded B's room, and there sees B, B on his part may see A symbolically standing there; and C and D if present may see A as well.

This hint, here thrown out as an additional argument for the excursive theory, will fall to be developed later on. For the present we must confine our attention to our immediate subject: the range of man's inner vision, and the means which he must take to understand, to foster, and to control it.

The first and simplest step in the control of inner vision is the repression by hypnotic suggestion of degenerative hallucinations. It is a noteworthy fact that such of these as are at all curable are much more often curable by hypnotism than in any other way.

The next step is one to which, as the reader of my chapter on hypnotism already knows, I attribute an importance much greater than is generally accorded to it. I refer to the hypnotiser's power not only of controlling but of inducing hallucinations in his subject.

As I have already said, the evocation of hallucinations is commonly spoken of as a mere example of the subject's obedience to the hypnotiser. "I tell my subject to raise his arm, and he raises it; I tell him to see a tiger in the room, and he sees one accordingly." But manifestly these two incidents are not on the same level, and only appear to be so through a certain laxity of language. The usage of speech allows me to say, "I will make my subject lift his arm," although I am of course unable to affect the motor centres in his brain which start that motion. But it is so easy for a man to lift his arm that my speech takes that familiar power for granted, and notes, only his readiness to lift it when I tell him--the hypnotic complaisance which prompts him to obey me if I suggest this trivial action. But when I say, "I will make him see a tiger," I take for granted a power on his part which is not familiar, which I have no longer a right to assume. For under ordinary circumstances my subject simply cannot see a tiger at will; nor can I affect the visual centres which might enable him to do so. All that I can ask him to do, therefore, is to choose this particular way of indicating that in his hypnotic condition he has become able to stimulate his central sensory tracts more powerfully than ever before.

And not only this. His hallucinations are in most cases elaborate products--complex images which must have needed intelligence to fashion them--although the process of their fashioning is hidden from our view. In this respect they resemble the inspirations of genius. For here we find again just what we found in those inspirations--the uprush of a complex intellectual product, performed beneath the threshold, and projected ready-made into ordinary consciousness. The uprushing stream of intelligence, indeed, in the man of genius flowed habitually in conformity with the superficial stream. Only rarely does the great conception intrude itself upon him with such vigour and such untimeliness as to bring confusion and incoherence into his ordinary life. But in the case of these induced hallucinations the incongruity between the two streams of intelligence is much more marked. When a subject, for instance, is trying to keep down some post-hypnotic hallucinatory suggestion, one can watch the smooth surface of the supraliminal river disturbed by that suggestion as though by jets of steam from below, which sometimes merely break in bubbles, but sometimes force themselves up bodily through the superficial film.

It is by considering hallucinations in this generalised manner and among these analogies, that we can best realise their absence of necessary connection with any bodily degeneration or disease. Often, of course, they accompany disease; but that is only to say that the central sensory tracts, like any other part of the organism, are capable of morbid as well as of healthful stimulus. Taken in itself, the mere fact of the quasi-externalisation of a centrally initiated image indicates strong central stimulation, and absolutely nothing more. There is no physiological law whatever which can tell us what degree of vividness our central pictures may assume consistently with health--short of the point where they get to be so indistinguishable from external preceptions that, as in madness, they interfere with the rational conduct of life. That point no well-attested case of veridical hallucinations, so far as my knowledge goes, has yet approached.

It was, of course, natural that in the study of these phantasms, as elsewhere, the therapeutic interest should have preceded the psychological, but in the newer practical study of eugenics--the study which aims at improving the human organism, instead of merely conserving it--experimental psychology is indispensable, and one branch of this is the experimental study of mental visions.

Let us consider whether, apart from such a rare and startling incident as an actual hallucination, there is any previous indication of a habit of receiving, or a power of summoning, pictures from a subliminal store-house? Any self-suggestion, conscious or unconscious, which places before the supraliminal intelligence visual images apparently matured elsewhere?

Such indications have not been wanting. In the chapter on Genius, and in the chapter on Sleep, we have traced the existence of many classes of these pictures; all of them ready, as it would seem, to manifest themselves on slight inducement. Dream-figures will rise in any momentary blur of consciousness; inspirations will respond to the concentrated desire or the mere passing emotion of the man of genius; after-images will recur, under unknown conditions, long after the original stimulus has been withdrawn; memory-images will surge up into our minds with even unwished-for vividness; the brilliant exactness of illusions hypnagogiques will astonish us in the revealing transition from waking to sleep.

All is prepared, so to say, for some empirical short-cut to a fuller control of these subjacent pictures; just as before Mesmer and Puységur all was prepared for an empirical short-cut to trance, somnambulism, suggestibility.

All that we want is to hit on some simple empirical way of bringing out the correlation between all these types of subjacent vision, just as mesmerism was a simple empirical way of bringing out the correlation between various trances and sleep-waking states.

Crystal-vision, then, like hypnotic trance, might have been gradually evolved by a series of reasoned experiments, along an unexceptionable scientific road.

In reality, of course, this prehistoric practice must have been reached in some quite different way. It does not fall within the scope of this book to trace the various streams of divination which converge into Dr. Dee's magic, and "the attracting of spirits into the ball." But it is really to the Elizabethan Dr. Dee--one of the leading savants of his time--that the credit must be given of the first systematic attempt to describe, analyse, and utilise these externalised pictures.[104]

I will describe briefly the general type of the experiment, and we shall see how near we can get to a psychological explanation.

Let the observer gaze, steadily but not fatiguingly, into some speculum, or clear depth, so arranged as to return as little reflection as possible. A good example of what is meant will be a glass ball enveloped in a black shawl, or placed in the back part of a half-opened drawer; so arranged, in short, that the observer can gaze into it with as little distraction as may be from the reflection of his own face or of surrounding objects. After he has tried (say) three or four times, for ten minutes or so at a time--preferably in solitude, and in a state of mental passivity--he will perhaps begin to see the glass ball or crystal clouding, or to see some figure or picture apparently in the ball. Perhaps one man or woman in twenty will have some slight occasional experience of this kind; and perhaps one in twenty of these seers (the percentages must as yet be mainly guess-work) will be able by practice to develop this faculty of inward vision up to a point where it will sometimes convey to him information not attainable by ordinary means.

How comes it, in the first place, that he sees any figure in the crystal at all? Common hypnotic experiments supply two obvious answers, each of which no doubt explains some part of the phenomena.

In the first place, we know that the hypnotic trance is often induced by gazing at some small bright object. This may or may not be a mere effect of suggestion; but it certainly sometimes occurs, and the "scryer" consequently may be partially hypnotised, and in a state which facilitates hallucinations.

In the second place, a hypnotised subject--hypnotised but in a fully alert state--can often be caused by suggestion to see (say) a portrait upon a blank card; and will continue to see that portrait on that card, after the card has been shuffled with others; thus showing that he discerns with unusual acuteness such points de repère, or little guiding marks, as may exist on the surface of even an apparently blank card.

Correspondently with the first of these observations, we find that crystal-vision is sometimes accompanied by a state of partial hypnotisation, perhaps merging into trance. This has been the case with various French hysterical subjects; and not only with them but with that exceptionally sound and vigorous observer, Mr. J. G. Keulemans. His evidence (in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 516-521) is just what one would have expected a priori on such a matter.

Correspondently with the second of the above observations, we find that points de repère do occasionally seem to determine crystal visions.

This, again, has been noticed among the French hysterical subjects; and not only with them, but with another among our best observers, Mrs. Verrall.

These things being so--both these causes being apparently operative along the whole series of "scryers," or crystal-gazers, from the most unstable to the most scientific--one might be tempted to assume that these two clues, if we could follow them far enough, would explain the whole group of phenomena. Persons who have not seen the phenomena, indeed, can hardly be persuaded to the contrary. But the real fact is, as even those who have seen much less of crystal-gazing than I have will very well know, that these explanations cannot be stretched to cover a quarter--perhaps not even a tenth--of the phenomena which actually occur.

Judging both from the testimony of scryers themselves, and from the observations of Dr. Hodgson and others (myself included), who have had many opportunities of watching them, it is very seldom that the gaze into the glass ball induces any hypnotic symptoms whatever. It does not induce such symptoms with successful scryers any more than with unsuccessful. Furthermore, there is no proof that the gift of crystal-vision goes along with hypnotic sensibility. The most that one can say is that the gift often goes along with telepathic sensibility; but although telepathic sensibility may sometimes be quickened by hypnotism, we have no proof that those two forms of sensitiveness habitually go together.

The ordinary attitude of the scryer, I repeat, is one of complete detachment; an interested and often puzzled scrutiny and analysis of the figures which display themselves in swift or slow succession in the crystal ball.

This last sentence applies to the theory of points de repère as well. As a general rule, the crystal vision, however meaningless and fantastic, is a thing which changes and develops somewhat as a dream does; following, it may be, some trivial chain of associations, but not maintaining, any more than a dream maintains, any continuous scheme of line or colour. At the most, the scraps of reflection in the crystal could only start such a series of pictures as this. And the start, the initiation of one of these series, is often accompanied by an odd phenomenon mentioned above--a milky clouding of the crystal, which obscures any fragments of reflected images, and from out of which the images of the vision gradually grow clear. I cannot explain this clouding. It occurs too often and too independently to be a mere effect of suggestion. It does not seem to depend on any optical condition--to be, for instance, a result of change of focus of the eye, or of prolonged gazing. It is a picture like other pictures; it may come when the eyes are quite fresh (nor ought they ever to be strained); and it may persist for some time, so that the scryer looks away and back again, and sees it still. It comes at the beginning of a first series of pictures, or as a kind of drop scene between one series of pictures and another. Its closest parallel, perhaps, is the mist or cloud out of which phantasmal figures, "out in the room," sometimes seem to form themselves.

Moreover, the connection, if one can so call it, between the crystal and the vision is a very variable one. Sometimes the figures seem clearly defined within the crystal and limited thereby; sometimes all perception of the crystal or other speculum disappears, and the scryer seems clairvoyantly introduced into some group of life-sized figures. Nay, further, when the habit of gazing is fully acquired, some scryers can dispense with any speculum whatever, and can see pictures in mere blackness; thus approximating to the seers of "faces in the dark," or of illusions hypnagogiques.

On the whole it seems safest to attempt at present no further explanation of crystal-gazing than to say that it is an empirical method of developing internal vision; of externalising pictures which are associated with changes in the sensorial tracts of the brain, due partly to internal stimuli, and partly to stimuli which may come from minds external to the scryer's own. The hallucinations thus induced appear to be absolutely harmless. I at least know of no kind of injury resulting from them; and I have probably heard of most of the experiments made in England, with any scientific aim or care, during the somewhat limited revival of crystal-gazing which has proceeded for the last few years.

The crystal picture is what we must call (for want of knowledge of determining causes) a random glimpse into inner vision, a reflection caught at some odd angle from the universe as it shines through the perturbing medium of that special soul. Normal and supernormal knowledge and imaginings are blended in strangely mingled rays. Memory, dream, telepathy, telæsthesia, retrocognition, precognition, all are there. Nay, there are indications of spiritual communications and of a kind of ecstasy.[105]

We cannot pursue all these phenomena at once. In turning, as we must now turn, to the spontaneous cases of sensory automatism--of every type of which the induced visions of the crystal afford us a foretaste--we must needs single out first some fundamental phenomenon, illustrating some principle from which the rarer or more complex phenomena may be in part at least derived. Nor will there be difficulty in such a choice. Theory and actual experience point here in the same direction. If this inward vision, this inward audition, on whose importance I have been insisting, are to have any such importance--if they are to have any validity at all--if their contents are to represent anything more than dream or meditation--they must receive knowledge from other minds or from distant objects;--knowledge which is not received by the external organs of sense. Communication must exist from the subliminal to the subliminal as well as from the supraliminal to the supraliminal parts of the being of different individual men. Telepathy, in short, must be the prerequisite of all these supernormal phenomena.

Actual experience, as we shall presently see, confirms this view of the place of telepathy. For when we pass from the induced to the spontaneous phenomena we shall find that these illustrate before all else this transmission of thought and emotion directly from mind to mind.

Now as to telepathy, there is in the first place this to be said, that such a faculty must absolutely exist somewhere in the universe, if the universe contains any unembodied intelligences at all. If there be any life less rooted in flesh than ours--any life more spiritual (as men have supposed that a higher life would be), then either it must not be social life--there can be no exchange of thought in it at all--or else there must exist some method of exchanging thought which does not depend upon either tongue or brain.

Thus much, one may say, has been evident since man first speculated on such subjects at all. But the advance of knowledge has added a new presumption--it can be no more than a presumption--to all such cosmic speculations. I mean the presumption of continuity. Learning how close a tie in reality unites man with inferior lives,--once treated as something wholly alien, impassably separated from the human race--we are led to conceive that a close tie may unite him also with superior lives,--that the series may be fundamentally unbroken, the essential qualities of life the same throughout. It used to be asked whether man was akin to the ape or to the angel. I reply that the very fact of his kinship with the ape is proof presumptive of his kinship with the angel.

It is natural enough that man's instinctive feeling should have anticipated any argument of this speculative type. Men have in most ages believed, and do still widely believe, in the reality of prayer; that is, in the possibility of telepathic communication between our human minds and minds above our own, which are supposed not only to understand our wish or aspiration, but to impress or influence us inwardly in return.

So widely spread has been this belief in prayer that it is somewhat strange that men should not have more commonly made what seems the natural deduction--namely, that if our spirits can communicate with higher spirits in a way transcending sense, they may also perhaps be able in like manner to communicate with each other. The idea, indeed, has been thrown out at intervals by leading thinkers--from Augustine to Bacon, from Bacon to Goethe, from Goethe to Tennyson.

Isolated experiments from time to time indicated its practical truth. Yet it is only within the last few years that the vague and floating notion has been developed into definite theory by systematic experiment.

To make such experiment possible has indeed been no easy matter. It has been needful to elicit and to isolate from the complex emotions and interactions of common life a certain psychical element of whose nature and working we have beforehand but a very obscure idea.

If indeed we possessed any certain method of detecting the action of telepathy,--of distinguishing it from chance coincidence or from unconscious suggestion,--we should probably find that its action was widely diffused and mingled with other more commonplace causes in many incidents of life. We should find telepathy, perhaps, at the base of many sympathies and antipathies, of many wide communities of feeling; operating, it may be, in cases as different as the quasi-recognition of some friend in a stranger seen at a distance just before the friend himself unexpectedly appears, and the Phêmê or Rumour which in Hindostan or in ancient Greece is said to have often spread far an inexplicable knowledge of victory or disaster.

But we are obliged, for the sake of clearness of evidence, to set aside, when dealing with experimentation, all these mixed emotional cases, and to start from telepathic communications intentionally planned to be so trivial, so devoid of associations or emotions, that it shall be impossible to refer them to any common memory or sympathy; to anything save a direct transmission of idea, or impulse, or sensation, or image, from one to another mind.

The reader who has studied the evidence originally set forth in Chapters II. and III. of Phantasms of the Living will, I trust, carry away a pretty clear notion of what can at present actually be done in the way of experimental transferences of small definite ideas or pictures from one or more persons--the "agent" or "agents"--to one or more persons--the "percipient" or "percipients."[106] In these experiments actual contact has been forbidden, to avoid the risk of unconscious indications by pressure. It is at present still doubtful how far close proximity really operates in aid of telepathy, or how far its advantage is a mere effect of self-suggestion--on the part either of agent or of percipient. Some few pairs of experimenters have obtained results of just the same type at distances of half a mile or more.[107] Similarly, in the case of induction of hypnotic trance, Dr. Gibert attained at the distance of nearly a mile results which are usually supposed to require close and actual presence. [See Appendix V. C.]

We must clearly realise that in telepathic experiment we encounter just the same difficulty which makes our results in hypnotic therapeutics so unpredictable and irregular. We do not know how to get our suggestions to take hold of the subliminal self. They are liable to fail for two main reasons. Either they somehow never reach the subliminal centres which we wish to affect, or they find those centres preoccupied with some self-suggestion hostile to our behest. This source of uncertainty can only be removed by a far greater number of experiments than have yet been made--experiments repeated until we have oftener struck upon the happy veins which make up for an immense amount of sterile exploration. Meantime we must record, but can hardly interpret. Yet there is one provisional interpretation of telepathic experiment which must be noticed thus early in our discussion, because, if true, it may conceivably connect our groping work with more advanced departments of science, while, if seen to be inadequate, it may bid us turn our inquiry in some other direction. I refer to the suggestion that telepathy is propagated by "brain-waves"; or, as Sir W. Crookes has more exactly expressed it, by ether-waves of even smaller amplitude and greater frequency than those which carry the X rays. These waves are conceived as passing from one brain to another, and arousing in the second brain an excitation or image similar to the excitation or image from which they start in the first. The hypothesis is an attractive one; because it fits an agency which certainly exists, but whose effect is unknown, to an effect which certainly exists, but whose agency is unknown.

In this world of vibrations it may seem at first the simplest plan to invoke a vibration the more. It would be rash, indeed, to affirm that any phenomenon perceptible by men may not be expressible, in part at least, in terms of ethereal undulations. But in the case of telepathy the analogy which suggests this explanation, the obvious likeness between the picture emitted (so to say) by the agent and the picture received by the percipient--as when I fix my mind on the two of diamonds, and he sees a mental picture of that card--goes but a very short way. One has very soon to begin assuming that the percipient's mind modifies the picture despatched from the agent: until the likeness between the two pictures becomes a quite symbolical affair. We have seen that there is a continuous transition from experimental to spontaneous telepathy; from our transferred pictures of cards to monitions of a friend's death at a distance. These monitions may indeed be pictures of the dying friend, but they are seldom such pictures as the decedent's brain seems likely to project in the form in which they reach the percipient. Mr. L.--to take a well-known case in our collection (Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 210)--dies of heart disease when in the act of lying down undressed, in bed. At or about the same moment Mr. N. J. S. sees Mr. L. standing beside him with a cheerful air, dressed for walking and with a cane in his hand. One does not see how a system of undulations could have transmuted the physical facts in this way.

A still greater difficulty for the vibration-theory is presented by collective telepathic hallucinations. It is hard to understand how A can emit a pattern of vibrations which, radiating equally in all directions, shall affect not only his distant friend B, but also the strangers C and D, who happen to be standing near B;--and affect no other persons, so far as we know, in the world.

The above points have been fair matter of argument almost since our research began. But as our evidence has developed, our conception of telepathy has needed to be more and more generalised in other and new directions,--still less compatible with the vibration theory. Three such directions may be briefly specified here--namely, the relation of telepathy (a) to telæsthesia or clairvoyance, (b) to time, and (c) to disembodied spirits. (a) It is increasingly hard to refer all the scenes of which percipients become aware to the action of any given mind which is perceiving those distant scenes. This is especially noticeable in crystal-gazing experiments. (b) And these crystal visions also show what, from the strict telepathic point of view, we should call a great laxity of time relations. The scryer chooses his own time to look in the ball;--and though sometimes he sees events which are taking place at the moment, he may also see past events,--and even, as it seems, future events. I at least cannot deny precognition, nor can I draw a definite line amid these complex visions which may separate precognition from telepathy (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 408-593). (c) Precognition itself may be explained, if you will, as telepathy from disembodied spirits;--and this would at any rate bring it under a class of phenomena which I think all students of our subject must before long admit. Admitting here, for argument's sake, that we do receive communications from the dead which we should term telepathic if we received them from the living, it is of course open to us to conjecture that these messages also are conveyed on ether-waves. But since those waves do not at any rate emanate from material brains, we shall by this time have got so far from the original brain-wave hypothesis that few will care still to defend it.

I doubt, indeed, whether we can safely say of telepathy anything more definite than this: Life has the power of manifesting itself to life. The laws of life, as we have thus far known them, have been only laws of life when already associated with matter. Thus limited, we have learnt little as to Life's true nature. We know not even whether Life be only a directive Force, or, on the other hand, an effective Energy. We know not in what way it operates on matter. We can in no way define the connection between our own consciousness and our organisms. Just here it is, I should say, that telepathic observations ought to supply us with some hint. From the mode in which some element of one individual life,--apart from material impact,--gets hold of another organism, we may in time learn something of the way in which our own life gets hold of our own organism,--and maintains, intermits, or abandons its organic sway.[108]

The hypothesis which I suggested in Phantasms of the Living itself, in my "Note on a possible mode of psychical interaction," seems to me to have been rendered increasingly plausible by evidence of many kinds since received; evidence of which the larger part falls outside the limits of this present work. I still believe--and more confidently than in 1886--that a "psychical invasion" does take place; that a "phantasmogenetic centre" is actually established in the percipient's surroundings; that some movement bearing some relation to space as we know it is actually accomplished; and some presence is transferred, and may or may not be discerned by the invaded person; some perception of the distant scene in itself is acquired, and may or may not be remembered by the invader.

But the words which I am here beginning to use carry with them associations from which the scientific reader may well shrink. Fully realising the offence which such expressions may give, I see no better line of excuse than simply to recount the way in which the gradual accretion of evidence has obliged me, for the mere sake of covering all the phenomena, to use phrases and assumptions which go far beyond those which Edmund Gurney and I employed in our first papers on this inquiry in 1883.

When in 1882 our small group began the collection of evidence bearing upon "veridical hallucinations"--or apparitions which coincided with other events in such a way as to suggest a causal connection--we found scattered among the cases from the first certain types which were with difficulty reducible under the conception of telepathy pure and simple--even if such a conception could be distinctly formed. Sometimes the apparition was seen by more than one percipient at once--a result which we could hardly have expected if all that had passed were the transference of an impression from the agent's mind to another mind, which then bodied forth that impression in externalised shape according to laws of its own structure. There were instances, too, where the percipient seemed to be the agent also--in so far that it was he who had an impression of having somehow visited and noted a distant scene, whose occupant was not necessarily conscious of any immediate relation with him. Or sometimes this "telepathic clairvoyance" developed into "reciprocity," and each of the two persons concerned was conscious of the other;--the scene of their encounter being the same in the vision of each, or at least the experience being in some way common to both. These and cognate difficulties were present to my mind from the first; and in the above-mentioned "Note on a suggested mode of psychical interaction," included in vol. ii of Phantasms of the Living, I indicated briefly the extension of the telepathic theory to which they seemed to me to point.

Meantime cases of certain other definite types continued to come steadily to hand, although in lesser numbers than the cases of apparition at death. To mention two important types only--there were apparitions of the so-called dead, and there were cases of precognition. With regard to each of these classes, it seemed reasonable to defer belief until time should have shown whether the influx of first-hand cases was likely to be permanent; whether independent witnesses continued to testify to incidents which could be better explained on these hypotheses than on any other. Before Edmund Gurney's death in 1888 our cases of apparitions and other manifestations of the dead had reached a degree of weight and consistency which, as his last paper showed, was beginning to convince him of their veridical character; and since that date these have been much further increased; and especially have drawn from Mrs. Piper's and other trance-phenomena an unexpected enlargement and corroboration. The evidence for communication from the departed is now in my personal estimate quite as strong as that for telepathic communication between the living; and it is moreover evidence which inevitably alters and widens our conception of telepathy between living men.

The evidence for precognition, again, was from the first scantier, and has advanced at a slower rate. It has increased steadily enough to lead me to feel confident that it will have to be seriously reckoned with; but I cannot yet say--as I do say with reference to the evidence for messages from the departed--that almost every one who accepts our evidence for telepathy at all, must ultimately accept this evidence also. It must run on at any rate for some years longer before it shall have accreted a convincing weight.

But at whatever point one or another inquirer may happen at present to stand, I urge that this is the reasonable course for conviction to follow. First analyse the miscellaneous stream of evidence into definite types; then observe the frequency with which these types recur, and let your sense of their importance gradually grow, if the evidence grows also.

Now this mode of procedure evidently excludes all definite a priori views, and compels one's conceptions to be little more than the mere grouping to which the facts thus far known have to be subjected in order that they may be realised in their ensemble.

"What definite reason do I know why this should not be true?"--this is the question which needs to be pushed home again and again if one is to realise--and not in the ordinary paths of scientific speculation alone--how profound our ignorance of the Universe really is.

My own ignorance, at any rate, I recognise to be such that my notions of the probable or improbable in the Universe are not of weight enough to lead me to set aside any facts which seem to me well attested, and which are not shown by experts actually to conflict with any better-established facts or generalisations. Wide though the range of established science may be, it represents, as its most far-sighted prophets are the first to admit, a narrow glance only into the unknown and infinite realm of law.

The evidence, then, leading me thus unresisting along, has led me to this main difference from our early treatment of veridical phantasms. Instead of starting from a root-conception of a telepathic impulse merely passing from mind to mind, I now start from a root-conception of the dissociability of the self, of the possibility that different fractions of the personality can act so far independently of each other that the one is not conscious of the other's action.

Naturally the two conceptions coincide over much of the ground. Where experimental thought-transference is concerned--even where the commoner types of coincidental phantasms are concerned--the second formula seems a needless and unprovable variation on the first. But as soon as we get among the difficult types--reciprocal cases, clairvoyant cases, collective cases, above all, manifestations of the dead--we find that the conception of a telepathic impulse as a message despatched and then left alone, as it were, to effect its purpose needs more and more of straining, of manipulation, to fit it to the evidence. On the other hand, it is just in those difficult regions that the analogies of other splits of personality recur, and that phantasmal or automatic behaviour recalls to us the behaviour of segments of personality detached from primary personality, but operating through the organism which is common to both.

The innovation which we are here called upon to make is to suppose that segments of the personality can operate in apparent separation from the organism. Such a supposition, of course, could not have been started without proof of telepathy, and could with difficulty be sustained without proof of survival of death. But, given telepathy, we have some psychical agency connected with man operating apart from his organism. Given survival, we have an element of his personality--to say the least of it--operating when his organism is destroyed. There is therefore no very great additional burden in supposing that an element of his personality may operate apart from his organism, while that organism still exists.

Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte. If we have once got a man's thought operating apart from his body--if my fixation of attention on the two of diamonds does somehow so modify another man's brain a few yards off that he seems to see the two of diamonds floating before him--there is no obvious halting-place on his side till we come to "possession" by a departed spirit, and there is no obvious halting-place on my side till we come to "travelling clairvoyance," with a corresponding visibility of my own phantasm to other persons in the scenes which I spiritually visit. No obvious halting-place, I say; for the point which at first seems abruptly transitional has been already shown to be only the critical point of a continuous curve. I mean, of course, the point where consciousness is duplicated--where each segment of the personality begins to possess a separate and definite, but contemporaneous stream of memory and perception. That these can exist concurrently in the same organism our study of hypnotism has already shown, and our study of motor automatisms will still further prove to us.

Dissociation of personality, combined with activity in the metetherial environment; such, in the phraseology used in this book, will be the formula which will most easily cover those actually observed facts of veridical apparition on which we must now enter at considerable length. And after this preliminary explanation I shall ask leave to use for clearness in my argument such words as are simplest and shortest, however vague or disputable their connotation may be. I must needs, for instance, use the word "spirit," when I speak of that unknown fraction of a man's personality--not the supraliminal fraction--which we discern as operating before or after death in the metetherial environment. For this conception I can find no other term, but by the word spirit I wish to imply nothing more definite than this. Of the spirit's relation to space, or (which is a part of the same problem) to its own spatial manifestation in definite form, something has already been said, and there will be more to say hereafter. And similarly those terms, invader or invaded, from whose strangeness and barbarity our immediate discussion began, will depend for their meaning upon conceptions which the evidence itself must gradually supply.

That evidence, as it now lies before us, is perplexingly various both in content and quality. For some of the canons needed in its analysis I have already referred the reader to extracts from Edmund Gurney's writings. Certain points must still be mentioned here before the narrative begins.

It must be remembered, in the first place, that all these veridical or coincidental cases stand out together as a single group from a background of hallucinations which involve no coincidence, which have no claim to veridicality. If purely subjective hallucinations of the senses affected insane or disordered brains alone,--as was pretty generally the assumption, even in scientific circles, when our inquiry began,--our task would have been much easier than it is. But while there can be no question as to the sound and healthy condition of the great majority of our percipients, Edmund Gurney's "Census of Hallucinations" of 1884, confirmed and extended by the wider inquiry of 1889-1892, showed a frequency, previously unsuspected, of scattered hallucinations among sane and healthy persons, the experience being often unique in a lifetime, and in no apparent connection with any other circumstance whatever.[109]

Since casual hallucinations of the sane, then, are thus frequent, we can hardly venture to assume that they are all veridical. And the existence of all these perhaps merely subjective hallucinations greatly complicates our investigation of veridical hallucinations. It prevents the mere existence of the hallucinations, however strangely interposed in ordinary life, from having any evidential value, and throws us upon evidence afforded by external coincidence;--on the mere fact, to put such a coincidence in its simplest form, that I see a phantom of my friend Smith at the moment when Smith is unexpectedly dying at a distance. A coincidence of this general type, if it occurs, need not be difficult to substantiate, and we have in fact substantiated it with more or less completeness in several hundred cases.

The primâ facie conclusion will obviously be that there is a causal connection between the death and the apparition. To overcome this presumption it would be necessary either to impugn the accuracy of the informant's testimony, or to show that chance alone might have brought about the observed coincidences.

On both of these questions there have been full and repeated discussions elsewhere. I need not re-argue them at length here, but will refer the reader to the "Report on the Census of Hallucinations," Proceedings S.P.R., vol. x., where every source of error as yet discovered has been pretty fully considered.

To that volume also I must refer him for a thorough discussion of the arguments for and against chance-coincidence. The conclusion to which the Committee unanimously came is expressed in the closing words: "Between deaths and apparitions of the dying person a connection exists which is not due to chance alone."

We have a right, I think, to say that only by another census of hallucinations, equally careful, more extensive, and yielding absolutely different results, could this conclusion be overthrown.

In forming this conclusion, apparitions at death are of course selected, because, death being an unique event in man's earthly existence, the coincidences between death and apparitions afford a favourable case for statistical treatment. But the coincidences between apparitions and crises other than death, although not susceptible of the same arithmetical precision of estimate, are, as will be seen, quite equally convincing. To this great mass of spontaneous cases we must now turn.

The arrangement of these cases is not easy; nor are they capable of being presented in one logically consequent series.

But the conception of psychical invasion or excursion on which I have already dwelt has at any rate this advantage, that it is sufficiently fundamental to allow of our arrangement of all our recorded cases--perhaps of all possible cases of apparition--in accordance with its own lines.

Our scheme will include all observable telepathic action, from the faint currents which we may imagine to be continually passing between man and man, up to the point--reserved for the following chapter--where one of the parties to the telepathic intercourse has definitely quitted the flesh. The first term in our series must be conveniently vague: the last must lead us to the threshold of the spiritual world.

I must begin with cases where the action of the excursive fragment of the personality is of the weakest kind--the least capable of affecting other observers, or of being recalled into the agent's own waking memory.

Such cases, naturally enough, will be hard to bring up to evidential level. It must depend on mere chance whether these weak and aimless psychical excursions are observed at all; or are observed in such a way as to lead us to attribute them to anything more than the subjective fancy of the observers.

How can a casual vision--say, of a lady sitting in her drawing-room,--of a man returning home at six o'clock--be distinguished from memory-images on the one hand and from what I may term "expectation-images" on the other? The picture of the lady may be a slightly modified and externalised reminiscence; the picture of the man walking up to the door may be a mere projection of what the observer was hoping to see.

I have assumed that these phantoms coincided with no marked event. The lady may have been thinking of going to her drawing-room; the man may have been in the act of walking home;--but these are trivial circumstances which might be repeated any day.

Yet, however trivial, almost any set of human circumstances are sufficiently complex to leave room for coincidence. If the sitter in the drawing-room is wearing a distinctive article of dress, never seen by the percipient until it is seen in the hallucination;--if the phantasmal homeward traveller is carrying a parcel of unusual shape, which the real man does afterwards unexpectedly bring home with him;--there may be reason to think that there is a causal connection between the apparent agent's condition at the moment, and the apparition.

In Appendix VI. A, I quote one of these "arrival-cases," so to term them, where the peculiarity of dress was such as to make the coincidence between vision and reality well worth attention. The case is interesting also as one of our earliest examples of a psychical incident carefully recorded at the time; so that after the lapse of nearly forty years it was possible to correct the percipient's surviving recollection by his contemporary written statement.

In these arrival cases, there is, I say, a certain likelihood that the man's mind may be fixed on his return home, so that his phantasm is seen in what might seem both to himself and to others the most probable place.[110] But there are other cases where a man's phantasm is seen, in a place where there is no special reason for his appearing, although these places seem always to lie within the beat and circuit of his habitual thought.

In such cases there are still possible circumstances which may give reason to think that the apparition is causally connected with the apparent agent. The phantasm of a given person may be seen repeatedly by different percipients, or it may be seen collectively by several persons at a time; or it may combine both these evidential characteristics, and may be seen several times and by several persons together.

Now considering the rarity of phantasmal appearances, considering that not one person in (say) five thousand is ever phantasmally seen at all; the mere fact that a given person's phantasm is seen even twice, by different percipients (for we cannot count a second appearance to the same percipient as of equal value), is in itself a remarkable fact; while if this happens three or four times (as in the case of Mrs. Hawkins)[111] we can hardly ascribe such a sequence of rare occurrences to chance alone.

Again, impressive as is the repetition of the apparition in these cases, it is yet less so to my mind than the collective character of some of the perceptions. In Mrs. Hawkins's first case there were two simultaneous percipients, and in Canon Bourne's first case (given in Appendix VI. B) there were three.

And we now come to other cases, where the percipience has been collective, although it has not been repeated. There is a case[112] where two persons at one moment--a moment of no stress or excitement whatever--see the phantasm of a third; that third person being perhaps occupied with some supraliminal or subliminal thought of the scene in the midst of which she is phantasmally discerned. Both the percipients supposed at the moment that it was their actual sister whom they saw; and one can hardly fancy that a mere act of tranquil recognition of the figure by one percipient would communicate to the other percipient a telepathic shock such as would make her see the same figure as well.

The question of the true import of collectivity of percipience renews in another form that problem of invasion to which our evidence so often brings us back. When two or three persons see what seems to be the same phantom in the same place and at the same time, does that mean that that special part of space is somehow modified? or does it mean that a mental impression, conveyed by the distant agent--the phantom-begetter--to one of the percipients is reflected telepathically from that percipient's mind to the minds of the other--as it were secondary--percipients? The reader already knows that I prefer the former of these views. And I observe--as telling against that other view, of psychical contagion--that in certain collective cases we discern no probable link between any one of the percipient minds and the distant agent.

In some of that group of collective cases which we are at this moment considering, this absence of link is noticeable in a special way. There is nothing to show that any thought or emotion was passing from agent to percipients at the moment of the apparition. On the contrary, the indication is that there is no necessary connection whatever between the agent's condition of mind at the moment and the fact that such and such persons observed his phantasm. The projection of the phantasm, if I may so term it, seems a matter wholly automatic on the agent's part, as automatic and meaningless as a dream.

Assuming, then, that this is so--that these bilocations or self-projections to a point apparently remote from one's body do occur without any appreciable stimulus from without, and in moments of apparent calm and indifference--in what way will this fact tend to modify previous conceptions?

It suggests that the continuous dream-life which we must suppose to run concurrently with our waking life is potent enough to effect from time to time enough of dissociation to enable some element of the personality to be perceived at a distance from the organism. How much of consciousness, if any, may be felt at the point where the excursive phantasm is seen, we cannot say. But the notion that a mere incoherent quasi-dream should thus become perceptible to others is fully in accordance with the theories suggested in this work. For I regard subliminal operation as continuously going on, and I hold that the degree of dissociation which can generate a perceptible phantasm is not necessarily a profound change, since that perceptibility depends so largely upon idiosyncrasies of agent and percipient as yet wholly unexplained.

That special idiosyncracy on the part of the agent which tends to make his phantasm easily visible has never yet, so far as I know, received a name, although for convenience' sake it certainly needs one. I propose to use the Greek word [Greek: psuchorragô], which means strictly "to let the soul break loose," and from which I form the words psychorrhagy and psychorrhagic, on obvious analogies. When I say that the agents in these cases were born with the psychorrhagic diathesis, I express what I believe to be an important fact, physiological as well as psychological, in terms which seem pedantic, but which are the only ones which mean exactly what the facts oblige me to say. That which "breaks loose" on my hypothesis is not (as in the Greek use of the word) the whole principle of life in the organism; rather it is some psychical element probably of very varying character, and definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion or other of space. I hold that this phantasmogenetic effect may be produced either on the mind, and consequently on the brain of another person--in which case he may discern the phantasm somewhere in his vicinity, according to his own mental habit or prepossession--or else directly on a portion of space, "out in the open," in which case several persons may simultaneously discern the phantasm in that actual spot.

Let us apply this view to one of our most bizarre and puzzling cases--that of Canon Bourne (see Appendix VI. B). Here I conceive that Canon Bourne, while riding in the hunting-field, was also subliminally dreaming of himself (imagining himself with some part of his submerged consciousness) as having had a fall, and as beckoning to his daughters--an incoherent dream indeed, but of a quite ordinary type. I go on to suppose that, Canon Bourne being born with the psychorrhagic diathesis, a certain psychical element so far detached itself from his organism as to affect a certain portion of space--near the daughters of whom he was thinking--to effect it, I say, not materially nor even optically, but yet in such a manner that to a certain kind of immaterial and non-optical sensitivity a phantasm of himself and his horse became discernible. His horse was of course as purely a part of the phantasmal picture as his hat. The non-optical distinctness with which the words printed inside his hat were seen indicates that it was some inner non-retinal vision which received the impression from the phantasmogenetic centre. The other phantasmal appearance of Canon Bourne chanced to affect only one percipient, but was of precisely the same character; and of course adds, so far as it goes, to the plausibility of the above explanation.

That explanation, indeed, suffers from the complexity and apparent absurdity inevitable in dealing with phenomena which greatly transcend known laws; but on the other hand it does in its way colligate Canon Bourne's case with a good many others of odd and varying types. Thus appearances such as Canon Bourne's are in my view exactly parallel to the hauntings ascribed to departed spirits. There also we find a psychorrhagic diathesis--a habit or capacity on the part of certain spirits of detaching some psychical element in such a manner as to form a phantasmal picture, which represents the spirit as going through some dream-like action in a given place.

The phantasmogenetic centre may thus, in my view, be equally well produced by an incarnate or by a discarnate spirit.

Again, my hypothesis of a real modification of a part of space, transforming it into a phantasmogenetic centre, applies to a phantasmal voice just as well as to a phantasmal figure. The voice is not heard acoustically any more than the figure is seen optically. Yet a phantasmal voice may in a true sense "come from" a given spot.

These psychorrhagic cases are, I think, important as showing us the earliest or feeblest stages of self-projection--where the dissociation belongs to the dream-stratum--implicating neither the supraliminal will nor the profounder subliminal strata.

And now let us pass on from these, which hardly concern anybody beyond the phantom-begetter himself--and do not even add anything to his own knowledge--to cases where there is some sort of communication from one mind to another, or some knowledge gained by the excursive spirit.

It is impossible to arrange these groups in one continuous logical series. But, roughly speaking, the degree in which the psychical collision is recollected on either side may in some degree indicate its intensity, and may serve as a guide to our provisional arrangement.

Following this scheme I shall begin with a group of cases which seem to promise but little information,--cases, namely, where A, the agent, in some way impresses or invades P, the percipient,--but nevertheless neither A nor P retains in supraliminal memory any knowledge of what has occurred.

Now to begin with we shall have no difficulty in admitting that cases of this type are likely often to occur. The psychical rapprochement of telepathy takes place, ex hypothesi, in a region which is subliminal for both agent and percipient, and from whence but few and scattered impressions rise for either of them above the conscious threshold. Telepathy will thus probably operate far more continuously than our scattered glimpses would in themselves suggest.

But how can we outside inquirers know anything of telepathic incidents which the principals themselves fail altogether to remember?

In ordinary life we may sometimes learn from bystanders incidents which we cannot learn from the principals themselves. Can there be bystanders who look on at a psychical invasion?

The question is of much theoretical import. On my view that there is a real transference of something from the agent, involving an alteration of some kind in a particular part of space, there might theoretically be some bystander who might discern that alteration in space more clearly than the person for whose benefit, so to say, the alteration was made. If, on the other hand, what has happened is merely a transference of some impulse "from mind to mind";--then one can hardly understand how any mind except the mind aimed at could perceive the telepathic impression. Yet, in collective cases, persons in whom the agent feels no interest, nay, of whose presence along with the intended percipient he is not aware, do in fact receive the impression in just the same way as that intended percipient himself. This was explained by Gurney as probably due to a fresh telepathic transmission,--this time from the due or original percipient's mind to the minds of his neighbours of the moment.

Such a supposition, however, in itself a difficult one, becomes much more difficult when the telepathic impulse has never, so far as we know, penetrated into the due or intended percipient's mind at all. If in such a case a bystander perceives the invading figure, I must think that he perceives it merely as a bystander,--not as a person telepathically influenced by the intended percipient, who does not in fact perceive anything whatsoever. I quote in illustration a bizarre but well-attested case (see Appendix VI. C) which this explanation seems to fit better than any other.

In a somewhat similar case[113] there is strong attestation that a sailor, watching by a dying comrade, saw figures around his hammock, apparently representing the dying man's family, in mourning garb. The family, although they had no ordinary knowledge of the sailor's illness, had been alarmed by noises, etc., which rightly or wrongly they took as indications of some danger to him. I conceive, then, that the wife paid a psychical visit to her husband; and I take the mourning garb and the accompanying children's figures to be symbolical accompaniments, representing her thought, "My children will be orphans." I think this more likely than that the sailor's children also should have possessed this rare peculiarity of becoming perceptible at a distant point in space. And secondary figures, as we shall see later on, are not uncommon in such telepathic presentations. One may picture oneself as though holding a child by the hand, or even driving in a carriage and pair, as vividly as though carrying an umbrella or walking across a room; and one may be thus pictured to others.

And here I note a gradual transition to the next large class of cases on which I am about to enter. I am about to deal with telæsthesia;--with cases where an agent-percipient--for he is both in one--makes a clairvoyant excursion (of a more serious type than the mere psychorrhagies already described), and brings back some memory of the scene which he has psychically visited. Now, of course, it may happen that he fails to bring back any such memory, or that if he does bring it back, he tells no one about it. In such cases, just as in the telepathic cases of which I have just spoken, the excursive phantom may possibly be observed by a bystander, and the circumstances may be such as to involve some coincidence which negatives the supposition of the bystander's mere subjective fancy. Such, I think, is the case which I give in Appendix VI. D.

There is a similar case in Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 541, where a girl, who is corporeally present in a certain drawing-room, is seen phantasmally in a neighbouring grove, whither she herself presently goes and hangs herself.

Ponderings on projected suicide form perhaps the strongest instance of mental preoccupation with a particular spot. But of course, in our ignorance of the precise quality of thought or emotion needed to prompt a psychical excursion, we need not be surprised to find such an excursion observed on some occasions as trivial as the "arrival-case" of Col. Reed, with which I prefaced the mere psychorrhagic cases.

Again, there is a strange case,[114] which comes to us on good authority, where we must suppose one man's subliminal impulse to have created a picture of himself, his wife, a carriage and a horse, persistent enough to have been watched for some seconds at least by three observers in one place, and by a fourth and independent observer at another point in the moving picture's career. The only alternative, if the narrative be accepted as substantially true, will be the hypothesis before alluded to of the flashing of an impending scene, as in crystal-vision, from some source external to any of the human minds concerned. I need hardly at this point repeat that in my view the wife and the horse will be as purely a part of the man's conception of his own aspect or environment as the coat on his back.

And here, for purposes of comparison, I must refer to one of the most bizarre cases in our collection.[115] Four credible persons, to some extent independently, see a carriage and pair, with two men on the box and an inside occupant, under circumstances which make it impossible that the carriage was real. Now this vision cannot have been precognitive; nothing of the kind occurred for years after it, nor well could occur; and I am forced to regard it as the externalisation of some dream, whether of an incarnate or of a discarnate mind. The parallel between this case and the one mentioned above tends therefore to show that the first, in spite of the paraphernalia of wife, horse, and dog-cart, may have been the outcome of a single waking dream;--of the phantasmogenetic dissociation of elements of one sole personality.

In the cases which I have just been discussing there has been a psychical excursion, with its possibilities of clairvoyance; but the excursive element has not brought home any assignable knowledge to the supraliminal personality. I go on now to cases where such knowledge has thus been garnered. But here there is need of some further pause, to consider a little in how many ways we can imagine that knowledge to be reached.

Firstly, the distant knowledge may, it would seem, be reached through hyperæsthesia,--an extended power of the ordinary senses. Secondly, it sometimes seems to come through crystal-gazing or its correlative shell-hearing,--artifices which seem to utilise the ordinary senses in a new way. And besides these two avenues to distant knowledge there is a third, the telepathic avenue, which, as we have already surmised, sometimes shades off into the purely telæsthetic; when no distant mind, but only the distant scene, seems to be attracting the excursive spirit. And in the fourth place we must remember that it is mainly in the form of dream or vision that the most striking instances of telæsthesia which I have as yet recorded have come. Can we in any way harmonise these various modes of perception? Can we discover any condition of the percipient which is common to all?

To a certain limited extent such co-ordination is possible. In each approach to telæsthesia in turn we find a tendency to something like a dream-excursion. Hyperæsthesia, in the first place, although it exists sometimes in persons wide awake, is characteristically an attribute of sleep-waking states.

We have seen in discussing hypnotic experiments that it is sometimes possible to extend the subject's perceptive faculty by gradual suggestion, so far as to transform a hyperæsthesia which can still be referred to the action of the sense-organs into a telæsthesia which cannot be so referred. It is observable that percipients in such cases sometimes describe their sensation as that of receiving an impression, or seeing a picture placed before them; sometimes as that of travelling and visiting the distant scene or person. Or the feeling may oscillate between these two sensations, just as the sense of time-relation in the picture shown may oscillate between past, present, and future.

To all these complex sensations the phenomena of crystal-gazing offer close analogies. I have already remarked on the curious fact that the simple artifice of gazing into a speculum should prove the avenue to phenomena of such various types. There may be very different origins even for pictures which in the crystal present very similar aspects; and certain sensations do also accompany these pictures; sensations not merely of gazing but sometimes (though rarely) of partial trance; and oftener of bilocation;--of psychical presence among the scenes which the crystal has indeed initiated, but no longer seems to limit or to contain.

The idea of psychical excursion thus suggested must, however, be somehow reconciled with the frequently symbolic character of these visions. The features of a crystal-vision seem often to be no mere transcription of material facts, but an abbreviated selection from such facts, or even a bold modification of such facts with a view of telling some story more quickly and clearly. We are familiar with the same kind of succession of symbolical scenes in dream, or in waking reverie. And of course if an intelligence outside the crystal-gazer's mind is endeavouring to impress him, this might well be the chosen way.

And moreover through all telæsthetic vision some element of similar character is wont to run--some indication that mind has been at work upon the picture--that the scene has not been presented, so to say, in crude objectivity, but that there has been some choice as to the details discerned; and some symbolism in the way in which they are presented.

Let us consider how these characteristics affect different theories of the mechanism of clairvoyance. Let us suppose first that there is some kind of transition from hyperæsthesia to telæsthesia, so that when peripheral sensation is no longer possible, central perception may be still operating across obstacles otherwise insurmountable.

If this be the case, it seems likely that central perception will shape itself on the types of perception to which the central tracts of the brain are accustomed; and that the connaissance supérieure, the telæsthetic knowledge, however it may really be acquired, will present itself mainly as clairvoyance or clairaudience--as some form of sight or sound. Yet these telæsthetic sights and sounds may be expected to show some trace of their unusual origin. They may, for instance, be imperfectly co-ordinated with sights and sounds arriving through external channels; and, since they must in some way be a translation of supernormal impressions into sensory terms, they are likely to show something symbolic in character.

This tendency to subliminal symbolism, indeed, meets us at each point of our inquiry. As an instance of it in its simplest form, I may mention a case where a botanical student passing inattentively in front of the glass door of a restaurant thought that he had seen Verbascum Thapsus printed thereon. The real word was Bouillon; and that happens to be the trivial name in French for the plant Verbascum Thapsus. The actual optical perception had thus been subliminally transformed; the words Verbascum Thapsus were the report to the inattentive supraliminal self by a subliminal self more interested in botany than in dinner.

Nay, we know that our own optical perception is in its own way highly symbolic. The scene which the baby sees instinctively,--which the impressionist painter manages to see by a sort of deliberate self-simplification,--is very different from the highly elaborate interpretation and selection of blotches of colour by which the ordinary adult figures to himself the visible world.

Now we adults stand towards this subliminal symbolism in much the same attitude as the baby stands towards our educated optical symbolism. Just as the baby fails to grasp the third dimension, so may we still be failing to grasp a fourth;--or whatever be the law of that higher cognisance which begins to report fragmentarily to man that which his ordinary senses cannot discern.

Assuredly then we must not take the fact that any knowledge comes to us symbolically as a proof that it comes to us from a mind outside our own. The symbolism may be the inevitable language in which one stratum of our personality makes its report to another. The symbolism, in short, may be either the easiest, or the only possible psychical record of actual objective fact; whether that fact be in the first instance discerned by our deeper selves, or be conveyed to us from other minds in this form;--elaborated for our mind's digestion, as animal food has been elaborated for our body's digestion, from a primitive crudity of things.

But again one must question, on general idealistic principles, whether there be in such cases any real distinction between symbolism and reality,--between subjective and objective as we commonly use those terms. The resisting matter which we see and touch has "solid" reality for minds so constituted as to have the same subjective feeling awakened by it. But to other minds, endowed with other forms of sensibility--minds possibly both higher and more numerous than our own--this solid matter may seem disputable and unreal, while thought and emotion, perceived in ways unknown to us, may be the only reality.

This material world constitutes, in fact, a "privileged case"--a simplified example--among all discernible worlds, so far as the perception of incarnate spirits is concerned. For discarnate spirits it is no longer a privileged case; to them it is apparently easier to discern thoughts and emotions by non-material signs.[116] But they need not therefore be wholly cut off from discerning material things, any more than incarnate spirits are wholly cut off from discerning immaterial things--thoughts and emotions symbolised in phantasmal form. "The ghost in man, the ghost that once was man," to use Tennyson's words, have each of them to overcome by empirical artifices certain difficulties which are of different type for each, but are not insurmountable by either.

These reflections, applicable at various points in our argument, have seemed specially needed when we had first to attack the meaning of the so-called "travelling clairvoyance," of which instances were given in the chapter on hypnotism. It was needful to consider how far there was a continuous transition between these excursions and directer transferences between mind and mind,--between telæsthesia and telepathy. It now seems to me that such a continuous transition may well exist, and that there is no absolute gulf between the supernormal perception of ideas as existing in other minds, and the supernormal perception of what we know as matter. All matter may, for aught we know, exist as an idea in some cosmic mind, with which mind each individual spirit may be in relation, as fully as with individual minds. The difference perhaps lies rather in the fact that there may be generally a summons from a cognate mind which starts the so-called agent's mind into action; his invasion may be in some way invited; while a spiritual excursion among inanimate objects only may often lack an impulse to start it. If this be so, it would explain the fact that such excursions have mainly succeeded under the influence of hypnotic suggestion.

We see in travelling clairvoyance,[117] just as we see in crystal-visions, a kind of fusion of all our forms of supernormal faculty. There is telepathy, telæsthesia, retrocognition, precognition; and in the cases reported by Cahagnet, which will be referred to in Chapter IX., there is apparently something more besides. We see, in short, that any empirical inlet into the metetherial world is apt to show us those powers, which we try to distinguish, coexisting in some synthesis by us incomprehensible. Here, therefore, just as with the crystal-visions, we have artificially to separate out the special class of phenomena with which we wish first to deal.

In these experiments, then, there seems to be an independent power of visiting almost any desired place, its position having been perhaps first explained by reference to some landmark already known. The clairvoyante (I use the female word, but in several cases a man or boy has shown this power) will frequently miss her way, and describe houses or scenes adjacent to those desired. Then if she--almost literally--gets on the scent,--if she finds some place which the man whom she is sent to seek has some time traversed,--she follows up his track with greater ease, apparently recognising past events in his life as well as present circumstances.

In these prolonged experimental cases there is thus time enough to allow of the clairvoyante's traversing certain places, such as empty rooms, factories, and the like, whither no assignable link from any living person could draw her. The evidence to prove telæsthesia, unmixed with telepathy, has thus generally come incidentally in the course of some experiment mainly telepathic in character.

These long clairvoyant wanderings are more nearly paralleled by dreams than by waking hallucinations.

In a case which I will here quote a physician is impressed, probably in dream, with a picture of a special place in a street, where something is happening, which, though in itself unemotional--merely that a man is standing and talking in the street--is of moment to the physician, who wants to get unobtrusively into the man's house.

From Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 267. The case is there described as coming "from a Fellow of the College of Physicians, who fears professional injury if he were 'supposed to defend opinions at variance with general scientific belief,' and does not therefore allow his name to appear."

May 20th, 1884.

Twenty years ago [abroad] I had a patient, wife of a parson. She had a peculiar kind of delirium which did not belong to her disease, and perplexed me. The house in which she lived was closed at midnight, that is--the outer door had no bell. One night I saw her at nine. When I came home I said to my wife, "I don't understand that case; I wish I could get into the house late." We went to bed rather early. At about one o'clock I got up. She said, "What are you about? are you not well?" I said, "Perfectly so." "Then why get up?" "Because I can get into that house." "How, if it is shut up?" "I see the proprietor standing under the lamp-post this side of the bridge, with another man." "You have been dreaming." "No, I have been wide awake; but dreaming or waking, I mean to try." I started with the firm conviction that I should find the individual in question. Sure enough there he was under the lamp-post, talking to a friend. I asked him if he was going home. (I knew him very well.) He said he was, so I told him I was going to see a patient, and would accompany him. I was positively ashamed to explain matters; it seemed so absurd that I knew he would not believe me. On arriving at the house I said, "Now I am here, I will drop in and see my patient." On entering the room I found the maid giving her a tumbler of strong grog. The case was clear; it was as I suspected--delirium from drink. The next day I delicately spoke to the husband about it. He denied it, and in the afternoon I received a note requesting me not to repeat the visits. Three weeks ago I was recounting the story and mentioned the name. A lady present said: "That is the name of the clergyman in my parish, at B., and his wife is in a lunatic asylum from drink!"

In conversation with Gurney, the narrator explained that the vision--though giving an impression of externality and seen, as he believes, with open eyes--was not definably located in space. He had never encountered the proprietor in the spot where he saw him, and it was not a likely thing that he should be standing talking in the streets at so late an hour.

In this case we cannot consider either the drunken patient or the indifferent proprietor as in any sense the agent. Somehow or other the physician's own persistent wish to get some such opportunity induced a collaboration of his subliminal with his supraliminal self, akin to the inspirations of genius. Genius, however, operates within ordinary sensory limits; while in this physician's case the subliminal self exercised its farthest-reaching supernormal powers.

With this again may be compared a case in Phantasms of the Living (vol. ii. p. 368), where a dreamer seems to himself to be present in the Thames Tunnel during a fatal accident, which did in fact occur during that night. Here again the drowned workman--who was quite unknown to the distant dreamer--can hardly be called an agent; yet it may have been the excitement surrounding his death which attracted the dreamer's spirit to that scene, as a conflagration might attract a waking night-wanderer.

There are, on the other hand, a good many cases where a scene thus discerned in a flash is one of special interest to the percipient, although no one in the scene may have actually wished to transfer it to him.

A case again of a somewhat different type is the sudden waking vision of Mr. Gottschalk,[118] who sees in a circle of light the chalked hands and ruffled wrists of Mr. Courtenay Thorpe--a well-known actor--who was opening a letter of Mr. Gottschalk's in that costume at the time. Trivial in itself, this incident illustrates an interesting class of cases, where a picture very much like a crystal-vision suddenly appears on a wall or even in the air with no apparent background.

I know one or two persons who have had in their lives one single round or oval hallucinatory picture of this kind, of which no interpretation was apparent,--a curious indication of some subliminal predisposition towards this somewhat elaborate form of message.

Somewhat like Mr. Gottschalk's projection of his picture upon a background of dark air is the experience of Mrs. Taunton.[119] In this case the phantasm was perfectly external; yet it certainly did not hold to the real objects around the same relation as a figure of flesh and blood would have held; it was in a peculiar way transparent. Gurney regards this transparency as indicating imperfect externalisation of the hallucinatory image.

My own phrase, "imperfect co-ordination of inner with outward vision," comes to much the same thing, and seems specially applicable to Mrs. Taunton's words: "The appearance was not transparent or filmy, but perfectly solid-looking; and yet I could somehow see the orchestra, not through, but behind it." There are a few cases where the percipient seems to see a hallucinatory figure behind him, out of the range of optical vision.[120] There is of course no reason why this should not be so,--even if a part of space external to the percipient's brain should be actually affected.

Mr. Searle's case also is very interesting.[121] Here Mrs. Searle faints when visiting a house a few miles from Mr. Searle's chambers in the Temple. At or about the same time, he sees as though in a looking-glass, upon a window opposite him, his wife's head and face, white and bloodless.

Gurney suggests that this was a transference from Mrs. Searle's mind simply of "the idea of fainting," which then worked itself out into perception in an appropriate fashion.

Was it thus? Or did Mr. Searle in the Temple see with inner vision his wife's head as she lay back faint and pallid in Gloucester Gardens? Our nearest analogy here is plainly crystal-vision; and crystal-visions, as we have observed, point both ways. Sometimes the picture in the crystal is conspicuously symbolical; sometimes it seems a transcript of an actual distant scene.

There are two further problems which occur as we deal with each class of cases in turn,--the problem of time-relations and the problem of spirit-agency. Can an incident be said to be seen clairvoyantly if it is seen some hours after it occurred? Ought we to say that a scene is clairvoyantly visited, or that it is spiritually shown, if it represents a still chamber of death,[122] where no emotion is any longer stirring; but to which the freed spirit might desire to attract the friend's attention and sympathy?

Such problems cannot at present be solved; nor, as I have said, can any one class of these psychical interchanges be clearly demarcated from other classes. Recognising this, we must explain the central characteristics of each group in turn, and show at what points that group appears to merge into the next.

And now we come to that class of cases where B invades A, and A perceives the invasion; but B retains no memory of it in supraliminal life. From one point of view, as will be seen, this is just the reverse of the class last discussed--where the invader remembered an invasion which the invaded person (when there was one) did not perceive.

We have already discussed some cases of this sort which seemed to be psychorrhagic--to have occurred without will or purpose on the part of the invader. What we must now do is to collect cases where there may probably have been some real projection of will or desire on the invader's part, leading to the projection of his phantasm in a manner recognisable by the distant friend whom he thus invades--yet without subsequent memory of his own. These cases will be intermediate between the psychorrhagic cases already described and the experimental cases on which we shall presently enter.

In the case of Canon Warburton--in Chapter IV.--the person undergoing the accident did recollect having had a vivid thought of his brother at the moment;--while his brother on the other hand was startled from a slight doze by the vision of the scene of danger as then taking place;--the steep stairs and the falling figure. This is an acute crisis, much resembling impending death by drowning, etc.; and the apparition may be construed either way--either as a scene clairvoyantly discerned by Canon Warburton, owing, as I say, to a spasmodic tightening of his psychical link with his brother, or as a sudden invasion on that brother's part, whose very rapidity perhaps helped to prevent his remembering it.

The case given in Appendix VI. E is interesting, both evidentially and from its intrinsic character. The narrative, printed in Phantasms of the Living, on the authority of one only of the witnesses concerned, led to the discovery of the second witness--whom we had no other means of finding--and has been amply corroborated by her independent account.

The case stands about midway between psychorrhagic cases and intentional self-projections, and is clearly of the nature of an invasion, since the phantasm was seen by a stranger as well as by the friend, and seemed to both to be moving about the room. The figure, that is to say, was adapted to the percipient's environment.

Cases of this general character, both visual and auditory, occupy a great part of Phantasms of the Living, and others have been frequently quoted in the S.P.R. Journal during recent years.[123]

Of still greater interest is the class which comes next in order in my ascending scale of apparent intensity; the cases, namely, where there is recollection on both sides, so that the experience is reciprocal.[124] These deserve study, for it is by noting under what circumstances these spontaneously reciprocal cases occur that we have the best chance of learning how to produce them experimentally. It will be seen that there have been various degrees of tension of thought on the agent's part.

And here comes in a small but important group--the group of what I may call death-compacts prematurely fulfilled. We shall see in the next chapter that the exchange of a solemn promise between two friends to appear to one another, if possible, after death is far from being a useless piece of sentiment. Such posthumous appearances, it is true, may be in most cases impossible, but nevertheless there is real ground to believe that the previous tension of the will in that direction makes it more likely that the longed-for meeting shall be accomplished. If so, this is a kind of experiment, and an experiment which all can make.

Now we have two or three cases where this compact has been made, and where an apparition has followed--but before and not after the agent's death--at the moment, that is to say, of some dangerous accident, when the sufferer was perhaps all but drowned, or was stunned, or otherwise insensible.[125]

Lastly, the lessons of these spontaneous apparitions have been confirmed and widened by actual experiment. It is plain that just as we are not confined to noting small spontaneous telepathic transferences when they occur, but can also endeavour to reproduce them by experiment, so also we can endeavour to reproduce experimentally these more advanced telepathic phenomena of the invasion of the presence of the percipient by the agent. It is to be hoped, indeed, that such experiment may become one of the most important features of our inquiry. The type of the experiment is somewhat as follows. The intending agent endeavours by an effort at self-concentration, made either in waking hours or just before sleep, to render himself perceptible to a given person at a distance, who, of course, must have no reason to expect a phantasmal visit at that hour. Independent records must be made on each side, of all attempts made, and of all phantoms seen. The evidential point is, of course, the coincidence between the attempt and the phantom, whether or not the agent can afterwards remember his own success.[126]

Now the experimental element here is obviously very incomplete. It consists in little more than in a concentrated desire to produce an effect which one can never explain, and seldom fully remember. I have seen no evidence to show that any one can claim to be an adept in such matters--has learned a method of thus appearing at will.[127] We are acting in the dark. Yet nevertheless the mere fact that on some few occasions this strong desire has actually been followed by a result of this extremely interesting kind is one of the most encouraging phenomena in our whole research. The successes indeed have borne a higher proportion to the failures than I should have ventured to hope. But nowhere is there more need of persistent and careful experimentation;--nowhere, I may add, have emotions quite alien from Science--mere groundless fears of seeing anything unusual--interfered with more disastrous effect. Such fears, one hopes, will pass away, and the friend's visible image will be recognised as a welcome proof of the link that binds the two spirits together.

The case which I quote in Appendix VI. F illustrates both the essential harmlessness--nay, naturalness--of such an experiment, and the causeless fear which it may engender even in rational and serious minds.

In these experimental apparitions, which form, as it were, the spolia opima of the collector, we naturally wish to know all that we can about each detail in the experience. Two important points are the amount of effort made by the experimenter, and the degree of his consciousness of success. The amount of effort in Mr. S. H. B.'s case (for instance) seems to have been great; and this is encouraging, since what we want is to be assured that the tension of will has really some power. It seems to act in much the same way as a therapeutic suggestion from the conscious self; one can never make sure that any given self-suggestion will "take"; but, on the whole, the stronger the self-suggestions, the better the result. It is therefore quite in accordance with analogy that a suggestion from without, given to a hypnotised person, should be the most promising way of inducing these self-projections. It should be strongly impressed on hypnotised subjects that they can and must temporarily "leave the body," as they call it, and manifest themselves to distant persons--the consent, of course, of both parties to the experiment having been previously secured.

Of this type were Dr. Backman's experiments with his subject "Alma,"[128] and although that series of efforts was prematurely broken off, it was full of promise. There were some slight indications that Alma's clairvoyant excursions were sometimes perceptible to persons in the scenes psychically invaded; and there was considerable and growing evidence to her own retention in subsequent memory of some details of those distant scenes.

By all analogy, indeed, that subsequent memory should be an eminently educable thing. The carrying over of recollections from one stratum of personality into another--as hypnotic experiment shows us--is largely a matter of patient suggestion. It would be very desirable to hypnotise the person who had succeeded in producing an experimental apparition, of Mr. S. H. B.'s type, and to see if he could then recall the psychical excursion. Hypnotic states should be far more carefully utilised in connection with all these forms of self-projection.

In these self-projections we have before us, I do not say the most useful, but the most extraordinary achievement of the human will. What can lie further outside any known capacity than the power to cause a semblance of oneself to appear at a distance? What can be a more central action--more manifestly the outcome of whatsoever is deepest and most unitary in man's whole being? Here, indeed, begins the justification of the conception expressed at the beginning of this chapter;--that we should now see the subliminal self no longer as a mere chain of eddies or backwaters, in some way secluded from the main stream of man's being, but rather as itself the central and potent current, the most truly identifiable with the man himself. Other achievements have their manifest limit; where is the limit here? The spirit has shown itself in part dissociated from the organism; to what point may its dissociation go? It has shown some independence, some intelligence, some permanence. To what degree of intelligence, independence, permanence, may it conceivably attain? Of all vital phenomena, I say, this is the most significant; this self-projection is the one definite act which it seems as though a man might perform equally well before and after bodily death.

VII. PHANTASMS OF THE DEAD

[Greek: ouketi prhosô ebhatas ela kidnôu hyper Hrakleos perhas eumares ... thume, tiua prhos dllodapas xkras emos plsou paramelbeai];

--PINDAR

The course of our argument has gradually conducted us to a point of capital importance. A profound and central question, approached in irregular fashion from time to time in previous chapters, must now be directly faced. From the actions and perceptions of spirits still in the flesh, and concerned with one another, we must pass on to inquire into the actions of spirits no longer in the flesh, and into the forms of perception with which men still in the flesh respond to that unfamiliar and mysterious agency.

There need, I hope, be no real break here in my previous line of argument. The subliminal self, which we have already traced through various phases of growing sensitivity, growing independence of organic bonds, will now be studied as sensitive to yet remoter influences;--as maintaining an independent existence even when the organism is destroyed. Our subject will divide itself conveniently under three main heads. First, it will be well to discuss briefly the nature of the evidence to man's survival of death which may theoretically be obtainable, and its possible connections with evidence set forth in previous chapters. Secondly,--and this must form the bulk of the present chapter,--we need a classified exposition of the main evidence to survival thus far obtained;--so far, that is to say, as sensory automatism--audition or apparition--is concerned; for motor automatism--automatic writing and trance-utterance--must be left for later discussion. Thirdly, there will be need of some consideration of the meaning of this evidence as a whole, and of its implications alike for the scientific and for the ethical future of mankind. Much more, indeed, of discussion (as well as of evidence) than I can furnish will be needed before this great conception can be realised or argued from with the scientific thoroughness due to its position among fundamental cosmical laws. Considering how familiar the notion--the vague shadowy notion--of "immortality" has always been, it is strange indeed that so little should have been done in these modern days to grasp or to criticise it;--so little, one might almost say, since the Phædo of Plato.

Beginning, then, with the inquiry as to what kind of evidence ought to be demanded for human survival, we are met first by the bluff statement which is still often uttered even by intelligent men, that no evidence would convince them of such a fact; "neither would they be persuaded though one rose from the dead."

Extravagant as such a profession sounds, it has a meaning which we shall do well to note. These resolute antagonists mean that no new evidence can carry conviction to them unless it be continuous with old evidence; and that they cannot conceive that evidence to a world of spirit can possibly be continuous with evidence based upon our experience of a world of matter. I agree with this demand for continuity; and I agree also that the claims usually advanced for a spiritual world have not only made no attempt at continuity with known fact, but have even ostentatiously thrown such continuity to the winds. The popular mind has expressly desired something startling, something outside Law and above Nature. It has loved, if not a Credo quia absurdum, at least a Credo quia non probatum. But the inevitable retribution is a deep insecurity in the conviction thus attained. Unsupported by the general fabric of knowledge, the act of faith seems to shrink into the background as that great fabric stands and grows.

I can hardly too often repeat that my object in these pages is of a quite opposite character. Believing that all cognisable Mind is as continuous as all cognisable Matter, my ideal would be to attempt for the realm of mind what the spectroscope and the law of gravitation have effected for the realm of matter, and to carry that known cosmic uniformity of substance and interaction upwards among the essences and operations of an unknown spiritual world. And in order to explore these unreachable altitudes I would not ask to stand with the theologian on the summit of a "cloud-capt tower," but rather on plain earth at the measured base of a trigonometrical survey.

If we would measure such a base, the jungle must be cleared to begin with. Let us move for a while among first definitions; trying to make clear to ourselves what kind of thing it is that we are endeavouring to trace or discover. In popular parlance, we are looking out for ghosts. What connotation, then, are we to give to the word "ghost"--a word which has embodied so many unfounded theories and causeless fears? It would be more satisfactory, in the present state of our knowledge, simply to collect facts without offering speculative comment. But it seems safer to begin by briefly pointing out the manifest errors of the traditional view; since that tradition, if left unnoticed, would remain lodged in the background even of many minds which have never really accepted it.

Briefly, then, the popular view regards a "ghost" as a deceased person permitted by Providence to hold communication with survivors. And this short definition contains, I think, at least three unwarrantable assumptions.

In the first place, such words as permission and Providence are simply neither more nor less applicable to this phenomenon than to any other. We conceive that all phenomena alike take place in accordance with the laws of the universe, and consequently by permission of the Supreme Power in the universe. Undoubtedly the phenomena with which we are dealing are in this sense permitted to occur. But there is no a priori reason whatever for assuming that they are permitted in any especial sense of their own, or that they form exceptions to law, instead of being exemplifications of law. Nor is there any a posteriori reason for supposing any such inference to be deducible from a study of the phenomena themselves. If we attempt to find in these phenomena any poetical justice or manifest adaptation to human cravings, we shall be just as much disappointed as if we endeavoured to find a similar satisfaction in the ordinary course of terrene history.

In the second place, we have no warrant for the assumption that the phantom seen, even though it be somehow caused by a deceased person, is that deceased person, in any ordinary sense of the word. Instead of appealing to the crude analogy of the living friend who, when he has walked into the room, is in the room, we shall find for the ghost a much closer parallel in those hallucinatory figures or phantasms which living persons can sometimes project at a distance.

But experience shows that when--as with these post-mortem phantoms--the deceased person has gone well out of sight or reach there is a tendency, so to say, to anthropomorphose the apparition; to suppose that, as the deceased person is not provably anywhere else, he is probably here; and that the apparition is bound to behave accordingly. All such assumptions must be dismissed, and the phantom must be taken on its merits, as indicating merely a certain connection with the deceased, the precise nature of that connection being a part of the problem to be solved.

And in the third place, just as we must cease to say that the phantom is the deceased, so also must we cease to ascribe to the phantom the motives by which we imagine that the deceased might be swayed. We must therefore exclude from our definition of a ghost any words which assume its intention to communicate with the living. It may bear such a relation to the deceased that it can reflect or represent his presumed wish to communicate, or it may not. If, for instance, its relation to his post-mortem life be like the relation of my dreams to my earthly life, it may represent little that is truly his, save such vague memories and instincts as give a dim individuality to each man's trivial dreams.

Let us attempt, then, a truer definition. Instead of describing a "ghost" as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as a manifestation of persistent personal energy, or as an indication that some kind of force is being exercised after death which is in some way connected with a person previously known on earth. In this definition we have eliminated, as will be seen, a great mass of popular assumptions. Yet we must introduce a further proviso, lest our definition still seem to imply an assumption which we have no right to make. It is theoretically possible that this force or influence, which after a man's death creates a phantasmal impression of him, may indicate no continuing action on his part, but may be some residue of the force or energy which he generated while yet alive. There may be veridical after-images--such as Gurney hints at (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 417) when in his comments on the recurring figure of an old woman--seen on the bed where she was murdered--he remarks that this figure suggests not so much "any continuing local interest on the part of the deceased person, as the survival of a mere image, impressed, we cannot guess how, on we cannot guess what, by that person's physical organism, and perceptible at times to those endowed with some cognate form of sensitiveness."

Strange as this notion may seem, it is strongly suggested by many of the cases of haunting which do not fall within the scope of the present chapter. We shall presently find that there is strong evidence for the recurrence of the same hallucinatory figures in the same localities, but weak evidence to indicate any purpose in most of these figures, or any connection with bygone individuals, or with such tragedies as are popularly supposed to start a ghost on its career. In some of these cases of frequent, meaningless recurrence of a figure in a given spot, we are driven to wonder whether it can be some deceased person's past frequentation of that spot, rather than any fresh action of his after death, which has generated what I have termed the veridical after-image--veridical in the sense that it communicates information, previously unknown to the percipient, as to a former inhabitant of the haunted locality.

Such are some of the questions which our evidence suggests. And I may point out that the very fact that such bizarre problems should present themselves at every turn does in a certain sense tend to show that these apparitions are not purely subjective things,--do not originate merely in the percipient's imagination. For they are not like what any man would have imagined. What man's mind does tend to fancy on such topics may be seen in the endless crop of fictitious ghost stories, which furnish, indeed, a curious proof of the persistence of preconceived notions. For they go on being framed according to canons of their own, and deal with a set of imaginary phenomena quite different from those which actually occur. The actual phenomena, I may add, could scarcely be made romantic. One true "ghost story" is apt to be very like another, and most of them to be fragmentary and apparently meaningless. Their meaning, that is to say, lies in their conformity, not to the mythopoeic instinct of mankind, which fabricates and enjoys the fictitious tales, but to some unknown law, not based on human sentiment or convenience at all.

And thus, absurdly enough, we sometimes hear men ridicule the phenomena which actually do happen, simply because those phenomena do not suit their preconceived notions of what ghostly phenomena ought to be;--not perceiving that this very divergence, this very unexpectedness, is in itself no slight indication of an origin outside the minds which obviously were so far from anticipating anything of the kind.

And in fact the very qualities which are most apt to raise derision are such as the evidence set forth in the earlier chapters of this work might reasonably lead us to expect. For I hold that now for the first time can we form a conception of ghostly communications which shall in any way consist or cohere with more established conceptions; which can be presented as in any way a development of facts which are already experimentally known. Two preliminary conceptions were needed--conceptions in one sense ancient enough; but yet the first of which has only in this generation found its place in science, while the second is as yet awaiting its brevet of orthodoxy. The first conception is that with which hypnotism and various automatisms have familiarised us,--the conception of multiplex personality, of the potential coexistence of many states and many memories in the same individual. The second is the conception of telepathy; of the action of mind on mind apart from the ordinary organs of sense; and especially of its action by means of hallucinations; by the generation of veridical phantasms which form, as it were, messages from men still in the flesh. And I believe that these two conceptions are in this way connected, that the telepathic message generally starts from, and generally impinges upon, a subconscious or submerged stratum in both agent and percipient.[129] Wherever there is hallucination, whether delusive or veridical, I hold that a message of some sort is forcing its way upwards from one stratum of personality to another,--a message which may be merely dreamlike and incoherent, or which may symbolise a fact otherwise unreachable by the percipient personality. And the mechanism seems much the same whether the message's path be continued within one individual or pass between two; whether A's own submerged self be signalling to his emergent self, or B be telepathically stimulating the hidden fountains of perception in A. If anything like this be true, it seems plainly needful that all that we know of abnormal or supernormal communications between minds, or states of the same mind, still embodied in flesh, should be searched for analogies which may throw light on this strangest mode of intercourse between embodied and disembodied minds.

A communication (if such a thing exists) from a departed person to a person still on earth is, at any rate, a communication from a mind in one state of existence to a mind in a very different state of existence. And it is, moreover, a communication from one mind to another which passes through some channel other than the ordinary channels of sense, since on one side of the gulf no material sense-organs exist. It will apparently be an extreme instance of both these classes--of communications between state and state,[130] and of telepathic communications; and we ought, therefore, to approach it by considering the less advanced cases of both these types.

On what occasions do we commonly find a mind conversing with another mind not on the same plane with itself?--with a mind inhabiting in some sense a different world, and viewing the environment with a difference of outlook greater than the mere difference of character of the two personages will account for?

The first instance of this sort which will occur to us lies in spontaneous somnambulism, or colloquy between a person asleep and a person awake. And observe here how slight an accident allows us to enter into converse with a state which at first sight seems a type of incommunicable isolation. "Awake, we share our world," runs the old saying, "but each dreamer inhabits a world of his own." Yet the dreamer, apparently so self-enclosed, may be gently led, or will spontaneously enter, into converse with waking men.

The somnambulist, or rather the somniloquist--for it is the talking rather than the walking which is the gist of the matter--is thus our first natural type of the revenant.

And observing the habits of somnambulists, we note that the degree in which they can communicate with other minds varies greatly in different cases. One sleep-waker will go about his customary avocations without recognising the presence of any other person whatever; another will recognise certain persons only, or will answer when addressed, but only on certain subjects, his mind coming into contact with other minds only on a very few points. Rarely or never will a somnambulist spontaneously notice what other persons are doing, and adapt his own actions thereto.

Next let us turn from natural to induced sleep-waking, from idiopathic somnambulism to the hypnotic trance. Here, too, throughout the different stages of the trance, we find a varying and partial (or elective) power of communication. Sometimes the entranced subject makes no sign whatever; sometimes he seems able to hear and answer one person, or certain persons, and not others; sometimes he will talk freely to all; but, however freely he may talk, he is not exactly his waking self, and as a rule he has no recollection, or a very imperfect recollection, in waking life of what he has said or done in his trance.

Judging, then, from such analogy as communications from one living state to another can suggest to us, we shall expect that the communication of a disembodied or discarnate person with an incarnate, if such exist, will be subject to narrow limitations, and very possibly will not form a part of the main current of the supposed discarnate consciousness.

These preliminary considerations are applicable to any kind of alleged communication from the departed--whether well or ill evidenced; whether conveyed in sensory or in motor form.

Let us next consider what types of communication from the dead our existing evidence of communications among the living suggests to us as analogically possible. It appears to me that there is an important parallelism running through each class of our experiments in automatism and each class of our spontaneous phenomena. Roughly speaking, we may say that our experiment and observation up to this point have comprised five different stages of phenomena, viz., (I.) hypnotic suggestion; (II.) telepathic experiments; (III.) spontaneous telepathy during life; (IV.) phantasms at death; (V.) phantasms after death. And we find, I think, that the same types of communication meet us at each stage; so that this recurrent similarity of types raises a presumption that the underlying mechanism of manifestation at each stage may be in some way similar.

Again using a mere rough form of division, we shall find three main forms of manifestation at each stage: (1) hallucinations of the senses; (2) emotional and motor impulses; (3) definite intellectual messages.

(I.) And first let us start from a class of experiments into which telepathy does not enter, but which exhibit in its simplest form the mechanism of the automatic transfer of messages from one stratum to another of the same personality. I speak, of course, of post-hypnotic suggestions. Here the agent is a living man, operating in an ordinary way, by direct speech. The unusual feature lies in the condition of the percipient, who is hypnotised at the time, and is thus undergoing a kind of dislocation of personality, or temporary upheaval of a habitually subjacent stratum of the self. This hypnotic personality, being for the time at the surface, receives the agent's verbal suggestion, of which the percipient's waking self is unaware. Then afterwards, when the waking self has resumed its usual upper position, the hypnotic self carries out at the stated time the given suggestion,--an act whose origin the upper stratum of consciousness does not know, but which is in effect a message communicated to the upper stratum from the now submerged or subconscious stratum on which the suggestion was originally impressed.

And this message may take any one of the three leading forms mentioned above;--say a hallucinatory image of the hypnotiser or of some other person; or an impulse to perform some action; or a definite word or sentence to be written automatically by the waking self, which thus learns what order has been laid upon the hypnotic self while the waking consciousness was in abeyance.

(II.) Now turn to our experiments in thought-transference. Here again the agent is a living man; but he is no longer operating by ordinary means,--by spoken words or visible gestures. He is operating on the percipient's subconscious self by means of a telepathic impulse, which he desires, indeed, to project from himself, and which the percipient may desire to receive, but of whose modus operandi the ordinary waking selves of agent and percipient alike are entirely unaware.

Here again we may divide the messages sent into the same three main classes. First come the hallucinatory figures--always or almost always of himself--which the agent causes the percipient to see. Secondly come impulses to act, telepathically impressed; as when the hypnotiser desires his subject to come to him at an hour not previously notified. And thirdly, we have a parallel to the post-hypnotic writing of definite words or figures in our own experiments on the direct telepathic transmission of words, figures, cards, etc., from the agent, using no normal means of communication, to the percipient, either in the hypnotised or in the waking state.

(III.) We come next to the spontaneous phantasms occurring during life. Here we find the same three broad classes of messages, with this difference, that the actual apparitions, which in our telepathic experimentation are thus far unfortunately rare, become now the most important class. I need not recall the instances given in Chapters IV. and VI., etc., where an agent undergoing some sudden crisis seems in some way to generate an apparition of himself seen by a distant percipient. Important also in this connection are those apparitions of the double, where some one agent is seen repeatedly in phantasmal form by different percipients at times when that agent is undergoing no special crisis.

Again, among our telepathic impressions generated (spontaneously, not experimentally) by living agents, we have cases, which I need not here recapitulate, of pervading sensations of distress; or impulses to return home, which are parallel to the hypnotised subject's impulse to approach his distant hypnotiser, at a moment when that hypnotiser is willing him to do so.

And thirdly, among these telepathic communications from the living to the living, we have definite sentences automatically written, communicating facts which the distant person knows, but is not consciously endeavouring to transmit.

(IV.) Passing on to phantasms which cluster about the moment of death, we find our three main classes of cases still meeting us. Our readers are familiar with the visual cases, where there is an actual apparition of the dying man, seen by one or more persons; and also with the emotional and motor cases, where the impression, although powerful, is not definitely sensory in character. And various cases also have been published where the message has consisted of definite words, not always externalised as an auditory hallucination, but sometimes automatically uttered or automatically written by the percipient himself, as in the case communicated by Dr. Liébeault (see Appendix VIII. C), where a girl writes the message announcing her friend's death at the time when that friend is, in fact, dying in a distant city.

(V.) And now I maintain that in these post-mortem cases also we find the same general classes persisting, and in somewhat the same proportion. Most conspicuous are the actual apparitions, with which, indeed, the following pages will mainly deal. It is very rare to find an apparition which seems to impart any verbal message; but a case of this kind has been given in Appendix IV. F. As a rule, however, the apparition is of the apparently automatic, purposeless character, already so fully described. We have also the emotional and motor class of post-mortem cases;[131] and these may, perhaps, be more numerous in proportion than our collection would indicate; for it is obvious that impressions which are so much less definite than a visual hallucination (although they may be even more impressive to the percipient himself) can rarely be used as evidence of communication with the departed.

But now I wish to point out that, besides these two classes of post-mortem manifestations, we have our third class also still persisting; we have definite verbal messages which at least purport, and sometimes, I think, with strong probability, to come from the departed.

I have, indeed, for the reader's convenience, postponed these motor cases to a subsequent chapter, so that the evidence here and now presented for survival will be very incomplete. Yet, at any rate, we are gradually getting before us a fairly definite task. We have in this chapter to record and analyse such sensory experiences of living men as seem referable to the action of some human individuality persisting after death. We have also obtained some preliminary notion as to the kind of phenomena for which we can hope, especially as to what their probable limitations must be, considering how great a gulf between psychical states any communication must overpass.

Let us now press the actual evidential question somewhat closer. Let us consider, for it is by no means evident at first sight, what conditions a visual or auditory phantasm is bound to fulfil before it can be regarded as indicating primâ facie the influence of a discarnate mind. The discussion may be best introduced by quoting the words in which Edmund Gurney opened it in 1888.[132] The main evidential lines as there laid down retain their validity, although the years which have since passed have greatly augmented the testimony, and in so doing have illustrated yet other tests of true post-mortem communication,--to which we shall presently come.

"It is evident that in alleged cases of apparitions of the dead, the point which we have held to distinguish certain apparitions of living persons from purely subjective hallucinations is necessarily lacking. That point is coincidence between the apparition and some critical or exceptional condition of the person who seems to appear; but with regard to the dead, we have no independent knowledge of their condition, and therefore never have the opportunity of observing any such coincidences.

"There remain three, and I think only three, conditions which might establish a presumption that an apparition or other immediate manifestation of a dead person is something more than a mere subjective hallucination of the percipient's senses. Either (1) more persons than one might be independently affected by the phenomenon; or (2) the phantasm might convey information, afterwards discovered to be true, of something which the percipient had never known; or (3) the appearance might be that of a person whom the percipient himself had never seen, and of whose aspect he was ignorant, and yet his description of it might be sufficiently definite for identification. But though one or more of these conditions would have to be fully satisfied before we could be convinced that any particular apparition of the dead had some cause external to the percipient's own mind, there is one more general characteristic of the class which is sufficiently suggestive of such a cause to be worth considering. I mean the disproportionate number of cases which occur shortly after the death of the person represented. Such a time-relation, if frequently enough encountered, might enable us to argue for the objective origin of the phenomenon in a manner analogous to that which leads us to conclude that many phantasms of the living have an objective (a telepathic) origin. For, according to the doctrines of probabilities, a hallucination representing a known person would not by chance present a definite time-relation to a special cognate event--viz., the death of that person--in more than a certain percentage of the whole number of similar hallucinations that occur; and if that percentage is decidedly exceeded, there is reason to surmise that some other cause than chance--in other words, some objective origin for the phantasm--is present."

But on the other hand, a phantasm representing a person whose death is recent is specially likely to arouse interest and, in cases where the death is previously known to the percipient, his emotional state may be considered a sufficient cause of the hallucination.

"If, then," Gurney continues, "we are to draw any probable conclusion as to the objective nature of post-mortem appearances and communications (or of some of them) from the fact of their special frequency soon after death, we must confine ourselves to cases where the fact of death has been unknown to the percipient at the time of his experience. Now, in these days of letters and telegrams, people for the most part hear of the deaths of friends and relatives within a very few days, sometimes within a very few hours, after the death occurs; so that appearances of the sort required would, as a rule, have to follow very closely indeed on the death. Have we evidence of any considerable number of such cases?

"Readers of Phantasms of the Living will know that we have. In a number of cases which were treated in that book as examples of telepathic transference from a dying person, the person was actually dead at the time that the percipient's experience occurred; and the inclusion of such cases under the title of Phantasms of the Living naturally occasioned a certain amount of adverse criticism. Their inclusion, it will be remembered, required an assumption which cannot by any means be regarded as certain. We had to suppose that the telepathic transfer took place just before, or exactly at, the moment of death; but that the impression remained latent in the percipient's mind, and only after an interval emerged into his consciousness, whether as waking vision or as dream or in some other form. Now, as a provisional hypothesis, I think that this assumption was justified. For in the first place, the moment of death is, in time, the central point of a cluster of abnormal experiences occurring to percipients at a distance, of which some precede, while others follow, the death; it is natural, therefore, to surmise that the same explanation will cover the whole group, and that the motive force in each of its divisions lies in a state of the 'agent' prior to bodily death. In the second place, some of the facts of experimental thought-transference countenance the view that 'transferred impressions' may be latent for a time before the recipient becomes aware of them; and recent discoveries with respect to the whole subject of automatism and 'secondary intelligence' make it seem far less improbable than it would otherwise have seemed that telepathy may take effect first on the 'unconscious' part of the mind.[133] And in the third place, the period of supposed latency has in a good many instances been a period when the person affected was in activity, and when his mind and senses were being solicited by other things; and in such cases it is specially easy to suppose that the telepathic impression did not get the right conditions for rising into consciousness until a season of silence and recueillement arrived.[134] But though the theory of latency has thus a good deal to be said for it, my colleagues and I are most anxious not to be supposed to be putting forward as a dogma what must be regarded at present merely as a working hypothesis. Psychical research is of all subjects the one where it is most important to avoid this error, and to keep the mind open for new interpretations of the facts. And in the present instance there are certain definite objections which may fairly be made to the hypothesis that a telepathic impression derived from a dying person may emerge after hours of latency. The experimental cases to which I have referred as analogous are few and uncertain, and, moreover, in them the period of latency has been measured by seconds or minutes, not by hours. And though, as I have said, some of the instances of apparent delay among the death-cases might be accounted for by the fact that the percipient's mind or senses needed to be withdrawn from other occupations before the manifestation could take place, there are other instances where this is not so, and where no ground at all appears for connecting the delay with the percipient's condition. On the whole, then, the alternative hypothesis--that the condition of the phenomenon on the 'agent's' side (be it psychical or be it physical) is one which only comes into existence at a distinct interval after death, and that the percipient really is impressed at the moment, and not before the moment, when he is conscious of the impression--is one which must be steadily kept in view.

"So far I have been speaking of cases where the interval between the death and the manifestation was so short as to make the theory of latency possible. The rule adopted in Phantasms of the Living was that this interval must not exceed twelve hours. But we have records of a few cases where this interval has been greatly exceeded, and yet where the fact of the death was still unknown to the percipient at the time of his experience. The theory of latency cannot reasonably be applied to cases where weeks or months divide the vision (or whatever it may be) from the moment of death, which is the latest at which an ordinary[135] telepathically transferred idea could have obtained access to the percipient. And the existence of such cases--so far as it tends to establish the reality of objectively-caused apparitions of the dead--diminishes the objection to conceiving that the appearances, etc., which have very shortly followed death have had a different causation from those which have coincided with or very shortly preceded it. For we shall not be inventing a wholly new class for the former cases, but only provisionally shifting them from one class to another--to a much smaller and much less well-evidenced class, it is true, but one nevertheless for which we have evidence enough to justify us in expecting more."

This, as I conceive, is a sound method of proceeding from ground made secure in Phantasms of the Living--and traversed in my own just previous chapter--to cases closely analogous, save for that little difference in time-relations, that occurrence in the hours which follow, instead of the hours which precede, bodily dissolution, which counts for so much in our insight into cosmic law.[136]

The hypothesis of latency which thus meets us in limine in this inquiry will soon be found inadequate to cover the facts. Yet it will be well to dwell somewhat more fully upon its possible range.

If we examine the proportionate number of apparitions observed at various periods before and after death, we find that they increase very rapidly for the few hours which precede death, and decrease gradually during the hours and days which follow, until after about a year's time they become merely sporadic.

Yet one more point must be touched on, to avoid misconception of the phrase cited above, that "the moment of death is the centre of a cluster of abnormal experiences, of which some precede, while others follow, the death." Gurney, of course, did not mean to assume that the act of death itself was the cause of all these experiences. Those which occur before death may be caused or conditioned, not by the death itself, but by the abnormal state, as of coma, delirium, etc., which preceded the death. This we say because we have many instances where veridical phantasms have coincided with moments of crisis--carriage-accidents and the like--occurring to distant agents, but not followed by death. Accordingly we find that in almost all cases where a phantasm, apparently veridical, has preceded the agent's death, that death was the result of disease and not of accident. To this rule there are very few exceptions. There is a case given in Phantasms of the Living (vol. ii. p. 52), where the phantasm seems on the evidence to have preceded by about half an hour (longitude allowed for) a sudden death by drowning. In this case the percipient was in a Norfolk farmhouse, the drowning man--or agent--was in a storm off the island of Tristan d'Acunha; and we have suggested that an error of clocks or of observation may account for the discrepancy. In another case the death was in a sense a violent one, for it was a suicide; but the morbidly excited state of the girl a few hours before death--when her phantasm was seen--was in itself a state of crisis. But there are also a few recorded cases (none of which were cited in Phantasms of the Living) where a phantasm or double of some person has been observed some days previous to that person's accidental death. The evidence obtained in the Census of Hallucinations, however, tended to show that cases of this sort are too few to suggest even primâ facie a causal connection between the death and the apparition (see Proceedings S.P.R. vol. x. p. 331).

I now proceed briefly to review some of the cases where the interval between death and phantasm has been measurable by minutes or hours.

It is not easy to get definite cases where the interval has been measurable by minutes; for if the percipient is at a distance from the agent we can seldom be sure that the clocks at both places have been correct, and correctly observed; while if he is present with the agent we can rarely be sure that the phantasm observed is more than a mere subjective hallucination. Thus we have several accounts of a rushing sound heard by the watcher of a dying man just after his apparent death, or of some kind of luminosity observed near his person; but this is just the moment when we may suppose some subjective hallucination likely to occur, and if one person's senses alone are affected we cannot allow much evidential weight to the occurrence.[137]

There are some circumstances, however, in which, in spite of the fact that the death is already known, a hallucination occurring shortly afterwards may have some slight evidential value. Thus we have a case where a lady who knew that her sister had died a few hours previously, but who was not herself in any morbidly excited condition, seemed to see some one enter her own dining-room, opening and shutting the door. The percipient (who had never had any other hallucination) was much astonished when she found no one in the dining-room; but it did not till some time afterwards occur to her that the incident could be in any way connected with her recent loss. This reminds us of a case (ii. p. 694[138]) where the Rev. R. M. Hill sees a tall figure rush into the room, which alarms and surprises him, then vanishes before he has time to recognise it. An uncle, a tall man, dies about that moment, and it is remarked that although Mr. Hill knew his uncle to be ill, the anxiety which he may have felt would hardly have given rise to an unrecognised and formidable apparition.

There are cases also where a percipient who has had an apparition of a friend shortly after that friend's known death has had veridical hallucinations at other times, and has never had any hallucination of purely subjective origin. Such a percipient may naturally suppose that his apparition of the departed friend possessed the same veridical character which was common to the rest, although it was not per se evidential, since the fact of the death was already known.

For the present, however, it will be better to return to the cases which are free from this important primâ facie drawback--cases where the percipient was, at any rate, unaware that the death, which the phantasm seemed to indicate, had in fact taken place.

In the first place, there are a few cases where a percipient is informed of a death by a veridical phantasm, and then some hours afterwards a similar phantasm differing perhaps in detail, recurs.

Such was the case of Archdeacon Farler (i. p. 414), who twice during one night saw the dripping figure of a friend who, as it turned out, had been drowned during the previous day. Even the first appearance was several hours after the death, but this we might explain by the latency of the impression till a season of quiet. The second appearance may have been a kind of recrudescence of the first; but if the theory of latency be discarded, so that the first appearance (if more than a mere chance coincidence) is held to depend upon some energy excited by the deceased person after death, it would afford some ground for regarding the second appearance as also veridical. The figure in this case was once more seen a fortnight later, and on this occasion, as Archdeacon Farler informs me, in ordinary garb, with no special trace of accident.

A similar repetition occurs in seven other cases recorded in Phantasms of the Living.[139]

Turning now to the cases where the phantasm is not repeated, but occurs some hours after death, let us take a few narratives where the interval of time is pretty certain, and consider how far the hypothesis of latency looks probable in each instance.

Where there is no actual hallucination, but only a feeling of unique malaise or distress following at a few hours' interval on a friend's death at a distance, as in Archdeacon Wilson's case (i. p. 280), it is very hard to picture to ourselves what has taken place. Some injurious shock communicated to the percipient's brain at the moment of the agent's death may conceivably have slowly worked itself into consciousness. The delay may have been due, so to say, to physiological rather than to psychical causes.

Next take a case like that of Mrs. Wheatcroft (i. p. 420), or of Mrs. Evens (ii. p. 690), or Sister Bertha (quoted below in Appendix VII. F), where a definite hallucination of sight or sound occurs some hours after the death, but in the middle of the night. It is in a case of this sort that we can most readily suppose that a "telepathic impact" received during the day has lain dormant until other excitations were hushed, and has externalised itself as a hallucination after the first sleep, just as when we wake from a first sleep some subject of interest or anxiety, which has been thrust out of our thoughts during the day, will often well upwards into consciousness with quite a new distinctness and force. But on the other hand, in the case (for instance) of Mrs. Teale (ii. p. 693), there is a deferment of some eight hours, and then the hallucination occurs while the percipient is sitting wide awake in the middle of her family. And in one of the most remarkable dream-cases in our collection (given in Chapter IV.), Mrs. Storie's experience does not resemble the mere emergence of a latent impression. It is long and complex, and suggests some sort of clairvoyance; but if it be "telepathic clairvoyance," that is, a picture transferred from the decedent's mind, then it almost requires us to suppose that a post-mortem picture was thus transferred, a view of the accident and its consequences fuller than any which could have flashed through the dying man's mind during his moment of sudden and violent death from "the striking off of the top of the skull" by a railway train.

If once we assume that the deceased person's mind could continue to act on living persons after his bodily death, then the confused horror of the series of pictures which were presented to Mrs. Storie's view--mixed, it should be said, with an element of fresh departure which there was nothing in the accident itself to suggest--would correspond well enough to what one can imagine a man's feelings a few hours after such a death to be. This is trespassing, no doubt, on hazardous ground; but if once we admit communication from the other side of death as a working hypothesis, we must allow ourselves to imagine something as to the attitude of the communicating mind, and the least violent supposition will be that that mind is still in part at least occupied with the same thoughts which last occupied it on earth. It is possible that there may be some interpretation of this kind for some of the cases where a funeral scene, or a dead body, is what the phantasm presents. There is a remarkable case (i. p. 265) [§ 664] where a lady sees the body of a well-known London physician--about ten hours after death--lying in a bare unfurnished room (a cottage hospital abroad). Here the description, as we have it, would certainly fit best with some kind of telepathic clairvoyance prolonged after death--some power on the deceased person's part to cause the percipient to share the picture which might at that moment be occupying his own mind.

It will be seen that these phenomena are not of so simple a type as to admit of our considering them from the point of view of time-relations alone. Whatever else, indeed, a "ghost" may be, it is probably one of the most complex phenomena in nature. It is a function of two unknown variables--the incarnate spirit's sensitivity and the discarnate spirit's capacity of self-manifestation. Our attempt, therefore, to study such intercourse may begin at either end of the communication--with the percipient or with the agent. We shall have to ask, How does the incarnate mind receive the message? and we shall have to ask also, How does the discarnate mind originate and convey it?

Now it is by pressing the former of these two questions that we have, I think, the best chance at present of gaining fresh light. So long as we are considering the incarnate mind we are, to some extent at least, on known ground; and we may hope to discern analogies in some other among that mind's operations to that possibly most perplexing of all its operations, which consists in taking cognisance of messages from unembodied minds, and from an unseen world. I think, therefore, that "the surest way, though most about," as Bacon would say, to the comprehension of this sudden and startling phenomenon lies in the study of other rare mental phenomena which can be observed more at leisure, just as "the surest way, though most about," to the comprehension of some blazing inaccessible star has lain in the patient study of the spectra of the incandescence of terrestrial substances which lie about our feet. I am in hopes that by the study of various forms of subliminal consciousness, subliminal faculty, subliminal perception, we may ultimately obtain a conception of our own total being and operation which may show us the incarnate mind's perception of the discarnate mind's message as no isolated anomaly, but an orderly exercise of natural and innate powers, frequently observed in action in somewhat similar ways.

It is, I say, from this human or terrene side that I should prefer, were it possible, to study in the first instance all our cases. Could we not only share but interpret the percipient's subjective feelings, could we compare those feelings with the feelings evoked by ordinary vision or telepathy among living men, we might get at a more intimate knowledge of what is happening than any observation from outside of the details of an apparition can supply. But this, of course, is not possible in any systematic way; occasional glimpses, inferences, comparisons, are all that we can attain to as yet. On the other hand, it is comparatively easy to arrange the whole group of our cases in some series depending on their observed external character and details. They can, indeed, be arranged in more than one series of this kind--the difficulty is in selecting the most instructive. That which I shall here select is in some points arbitrary, but it has the advantage of bringing out the wide range of variation in the clearness and content of these apparitional communications, here arranged mainly in a descending series, beginning with those cases where fullest knowledge or purpose is shown, and ending with those where the indication of intelligence becomes feeblest, dying away at last into vague sounds and sights without recognisable significance.

But I shall begin by referring to a small group of cases,[140] which I admit to be anomalous and non-evidential--for we cannot prove that they were more than subjective experiences--yet which certainly should not be lost, filling as they do, in all their grotesqueness, a niche in our series otherwise as yet vacant. If man's spirit is separated at death from his organism, there must needs be cases where that separation, although apparently, is not really complete. There must be subjective sensations corresponding to the objective external facts of apparent death and subsequent resuscitation. Nor need it surprise those who may have followed my general argument, if those subjective sensations should prove to be dreamlike and fantastic. Here, as so often in our inquiries, the very oddity and unexpectedness of the details--the absence of that solemnity which one would think the dying man's own mind would have infused into the occasion--may point to the existence of some reality beneath the grotesque symbolism of the transitional dream.

The transitional dream, I call it, for it seems to me not improbable--remote though such a view may be from current notions--that the passage from one state to another may sometimes be accompanied with some temporary lack of adjustment between experiences taking place in such different environments--between the systems of symbolism belonging to the one and to the other state. But the reason why I refer to the cases in this place is that here we have perhaps our nearest possible approach to the sensations of the spirit which is endeavouring to manifest itself;--an inside view of a would-be apparition. The narratives suggest, moreover, that spirits recently freed from the body may enjoy a fuller perception of earthly scenes than it is afterwards possible to retain, and that thus the predominance of apparitions of the recently dead may be to some extent explained.

We have, indeed, very few cases where actual apparitions give evidence of any continuity in the knowledge possessed by a spirit of friends on earth. Such evidence is, naturally enough, more often furnished by automatic script or utterance. But there is one case (which I give in Appendix VII. A) where a spirit is recorded as appearing repeatedly--in guardian-angel fashion--and especially as foreseeing and sympathising with the survivor's future marriage.

Among repeated apparitions this case at present stands almost alone; its parallels will be found when we come to deal with the persistent "controls," or alleged communicating spirits, which influence trance-utterance or automatic script. A case bearing some resemblance to it, however, is given in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 233, the main difference being that the repeated communications are there made in dream, and in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 450, [714 A], is recorded another case, where the deceased person seems to make repeated efforts to impress on survivors a wish prompted by continued affection.

Less uncommon are the cases where an apparition, occurring singly and not repeated, indicates a continued knowledge of the affairs of earth. That knowledge, indeed, runs mainly, as we shall presently see, in two directions. There is often knowledge of some circumstance connected with the deceased person's own death, as the appearance of his body after dissolution, or the place of its temporary deposit or final burial. And there is often knowledge of the impending or actual death of some friend of the deceased person's. On the view here taken of the gradual passage from the one environment into the other, both these kinds of knowledge seem probable enough. I think it likely that some part of the consciousness after death may for some time be dreamily occupied with the physical scene. And similarly, when some surviving friend is gradually verging towards the same dissolution, the fact may be readily perceptible in the spiritual world. When the friend has actually died, the knowledge which his predecessor may have of his transition is knowledge appertaining to events of the next world as much as of this.

But apart from this information, acquired perhaps on the borderland between two states, apparitions do sometimes imply a perception of more definitely terrene events, such as the moral crises (as marriage, grave quarrels, or impending crimes) of friends left behind on earth. In Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 25 [716 A], is a case of impressive warning, in which the phantom was seen by two persons, one of whom had already had a less evidential experience.

In another case of similar type,[141] the message, while felt by the percipient to be convincing and satisfactory, was held too private to be communicated in detail. It is plain that just in the cases where the message is most ultimately veracious, the greatest difficulty is likely to be felt as to making it known to strangers.

I have already given a case (Appendix VII. A) where a departed spirit seems to show a sympathetic anticipation of a marriage some time before it is contemplated. In another case (Journal S.P.R., vol v. p. 10), the percipient, Mrs. V., describes a vision of a mother's form suspended, as it were, in a church where her son is undergoing the rite of confirmation. That vision, indeed, might have been purely subjective, as Mrs. V. was familiar with the departed mother's aspect; though value is given to it by the fact that Mrs. V. has had other experiences which included evidential coincidences.

From these instances of knowledge shown by the departed of events which seem wholly terrene, I pass to knowledge of events which seem in some sense more nearly concerned with the spirit-world. We have, as already hinted, a considerable group of cases where a spirit seems to be aware of the impending death of a survivor.[142] In some few of those cases the foreknowledge is entirely inexplicable by any such foresight as we mortals can imagine, but in the case given in Appendix VII. B, though the family did not foresee the death, a physician might, for aught we know, have been able to anticipate it. However explained, the case is one of the best-attested, and in itself one of the most remarkable, that we possess.

I place next by themselves a small group of cases which have the interest of uniting the group just recounted, where the spirit anticipates the friend's departure, with the group next to be considered, where the spirit welcomes the friend already departed from earth. This class forms at the same time a natural extension of the clairvoyance of the dying exemplified in some "reciprocal" cases (e.g. in the case of Miss W., where a dying aunt has a vision of her little niece who sees an apparition of her at the same time; see Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 253). Just as the approaching severance of spirit from body there aided the spirit to project its observation among incarnate spirits at a distance upon this earth, so here does that same approaching severance enable the dying person to see spirits who are already in the next world. It is not very uncommon for dying persons to say, or to indicate when beyond speech, that they see spirit friends apparently near them. But, of course, such vision becomes evidential only when the dying person is unaware that the friend whose spirit he sees has actually departed, or is just about to depart, from earth. Such a conjuncture must plainly be rare; it is even rather surprising that these "Peak in Darien" cases, as Miss Cobbe has termed them in a small collection which she made some years ago, should be found at all. We can add to Miss Cobbe's cases two of fair attestation. (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 93, and vol. xiv. p. 288 [718 A and B]).

From this last group, then, there is scarcely a noticeable transition to the group where departed spirits manifest their knowledge that some friend who survived them has now passed on into their world. That such recognition and welcome does in fact take place, later evidence, drawn especially from trance-utterances, will give good ground to believe. Only rarely, however, will such welcome--taking place as it does in the spiritual world--be reflected by apparitions in this. When so reflected, it may take different forms, from an actual utterance of sympathy, as from a known departed friend, down to a mere silent presence, perhaps inexplicable except to those who happen to have known some long predeceased friend of the decedent's.

I quote in Appendix VII. C one of the most complete cases of this type, which was brought to us by the Census of Hallucinations.

There are other cases more or less analogous to this. In one[143] the apparition of a dying mother brings the news of her own death and that her baby is living. In another[144] a mother sees a vision of her son being drowned and also an apparition of her own dead mother, who tells her of the drowning. In this case, the question may be raised as to whether the second figure seen may not have been, so to say, substitutive--a symbol in which the percipient's own mind clothed a telepathic impression of the actual decedent's passage from earth. Such a view might perhaps be supported by some anomalous cases where news of the death is brought by the apparition of a person still living, who, nevertheless, is not by any normal means aware of the death. (See the case of Mrs. T., already given in Appendix IV. E.)

But such an explanation is not always possible. In the case of Mrs. Bacchus,[145] for instance, both the deceased person and the phantasmal figure were previously unknown to the percipient. This case--the last which Edmund Gurney published--comes from an excellent witness. The psychical incident which it seems to imply, while very remote from popular notions, would be quite in accordance with the rest of our present series. A lady dies; her husband in the spirit-world is moved by her arrival; and the direction thus given to his thought projects a picture of him, clothed as in the days when he lived with her, into visibility in the house where her body is lying. We have thus a dream-like recurrence to earthly memories, prompted by a revival of those memories which had taken place in the spiritual world. The case is midway between a case of welcome and a case of haunting.

I now come to a considerable group of cases where the departed spirit shows a definite knowledge of some fact connected with his own earth-life, his death, or subsequent events connected with that death. The knowledge of subsequent events, as of the spread of the news of his death, or as to the place of his burial, is, of course, a greater achievement (so to term it) than a mere recollection of facts known to him in life, and ought strictly, on the plan of this series, to be first illustrated. But it will be seen that all these stages of knowledge cohere together; and their connection can better be shown if I begin at the lower stage,--of mere earth-memory. Now here again, as so often already, we shall have to wait for automatic script and the like to illustrate the full extent of the deceased person's possible memory. Readers of the utterances, for instance, of "George Pelham" (see Chapter IX.) will know how full and accurate may be these recollections from beyond the grave. Mere apparitions, such as those with which we are now dealing, can rarely give more than one brief message, probably felt by the deceased to be of urgent importance.

A well-attested case where the information communicated in a vision proved to be definite, accurate, and important to the survivors is given in Appendix VII. D. In the same Appendix another case in this group is also quoted. It illustrates the fact that the cases of deepest interest are often the hardest for the inquirer to get hold of.

In this connection I may refer again to Mrs. Storie's dream of the death of her brother in a railway accident, given in Chapter IV. While I think that Gurney was right--in the state of the evidence at the time Phantasms of the Living was written--in doing his best to bring this incident under the head of telepathic clairvoyance, I yet feel that the knowledge since gained makes it impossible for me to adhere to that view. I cannot regard the visionary scene as wholly reflected from the mind of the dying man. I cannot think, in the first place, that the vision of Mr. Johnstone--interpolated with seeming irrelevance among the details of the disaster--did only by accident coincide with the fact that that gentleman really was in the train, and with the further fact that it was he who communicated the fact of Mr. Hunter's death to Mr. and Mrs. Stone. I must suppose that the communicating intelligence was aware of Mr. Johnstone's presence, and at least guessed that upon him (as a clergyman) that task would naturally fall. Nor can I pass over as purely symbolic so important a part of the vision as the second figure, and the scrap of conversation, which seemed to be half heard. I therefore consider that the case falls among those where a friend recently departed appears in company of some other friend, dead some time before.

We have thus seen the spirit occupied shortly after death with various duties or engagements, small or great, which it has incurred during life on earth. Such ties seem to prompt or aid its action upon its old surroundings. And here an important reflection occurs. Can we prepare such a tie for the departing spirit? Can we create for it some welcome and helpful train of association which may facilitate the self-manifestation which many souls appear to desire? I believe that we can to some extent do this. At an early stage of our collection, Edmund Gurney was struck by the unexpectedly large proportion of cases where the percipient informed us that there had been a compact between himself and the deceased person that whichever passed away first should try to appear to the other. "Considering," he adds, "what an extremely small number of persons make such a compact, compared with those who do not, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that its existence has a certain efficacy."

Let us now review the compact-cases given in Phantasms of the Living and consider how far they seem to indicate ante-mortem or post-mortem communication. The twelve cases there recorded are such as fell, or may have fallen, within twelve hours of the death. In three of these cases, the agent whose phantasm appeared was certainly still alive. In most of the other cases the exact time relation is obscure; in a few of them there is strong probability that the agent was already dead. The inference will be that the existence of a promise or compact may act effectively both on the subliminal self before death and also probably on the spirit after death.

This conclusion is confirmed by several other cases, one of which is given in Appendix VII. E. This case suggests an important practical reflection. When a compact to appear, if possible, after death is made, it should be understood that the appearance need not be to the special partner in the compact, but to any one whom the agent can succeed in impressing. It is likely enough that many such attempts, which have faded on account of the surviving friend's lack of appropriate sensitivity, might have succeeded if the agent had tried to influence some one already known to be capable of receiving these impressions.[146] There is a case given in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 440, in which a lady, having made a compact with her husband and also with a friend, her phantom is seen after her death by her husband and daughter and the latter's nurse, collectively; but not by the friend, who was living elsewhere.

Again, we cannot tell how long the spirit may continue the effort, or, so to say, renew the experiment. In a case recorded in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. x. p. 378, the compact is fulfilled after a space of five years. In another case,[147] there had been no formal compact; but there is an attempt to express gratitude on an anniversary of death; and this implies the same kind of mindful effort as the fulfilment of a definite promise.

I have now traced certain post-mortem manifestations which reveal a recollection of events known at death, and also a persistence of purpose in carrying out intentions formed before death. In this next group I shall trace the knowledge of the departed a little further, and shall discuss some cases where they appear cognisant of the aspect of their bodies after death, or of the scenes in which those bodies are temporarily deposited or finally laid. Such knowledge may appear trivial,--unworthy the attention of spirits transported into a higher world. But it is in accordance with the view of a gradual transference of interests and perceptions,--a period of intermediate confusion, such as may follow especially upon a death of a sudden or violent kind, or perhaps upon a death which interrupts very strong affections.

Thus we have already (Appendix VII. B) encountered one striking case of this type,--the scratch on the cheek, perceived by the departed daughter, as we may conjecture, by reason of the close sympathy which united her to the mother who was caring for her remains.

There are also two cases closely resembling each other, though from percipients in widely different parts of the world, where a clairvoyant vision seems to be presented of a tranquil death-chamber. In that of Mr. Hector of Valencia, South Australia (see Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 353), the percipient sees in a dream his father dying in the room he usually occupied, with a candle burning on a chair by his bed; and the father is found dead in the morning, with a candle by his bedside in the position seen in the dream. There is not, however, in this case any sure indication that the dead or dying person was cognisant of his own body's aspect or surroundings. There may have been a clairvoyant excursion on the percipient's part, evoked by some impulse from the agent which did not itself develop into distinctness.[148]

But in certain cases of violent death there seems to have been an intention on the deceased person's part to show the condition in which his body is left. Such was Mrs. Storie's dream, or rather series of visions referred to earlier in this chapter. Such are the cases given in Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 365 [429 A], and Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iii. (1885) p. 95 [§ 730]. Here, too, may be placed two cases--those of Dr. Bruce (in Appendix IV. D) and Miss Hall (Journal S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 173 [731 A])--where there are successive pictures of a death and the subsequent arrangement of the body. The milieux of the percipients, the nature of the deaths, are here again totally disparate; yet we seem to see the same unknown laws producing effects closely similar.

In Dr. Bruce's case one might interpret the visions as coming to the percipient through the mind of his wife, who was present at the scene of the murder. But this explanation would be impossible in Miss Hall's case. Rather it seems as though some telepathic link, set up between the dying brother and the sister, had been maintained after death until all duties had been fulfilled to the departed. The case reminds one of the old Homeric notions of the restless appeal of unburied comrades.

In the case of Mrs. Green (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 420 [429 D]), we come across an interesting problem. Two women are drowned under very peculiar circumstances. A friend has apparently a clairvoyant vision of the scene, yet not at the moment when it occurred, but many hours afterwards, and about the time when another person, deeply interested, heard of the death. It is therefore possible to suppose that the apparently clairvoyant scene was in reality impressed telepathically on the percipient by another living mind. I think, however, that both the nature of the vision and certain analogies, which will appear later in our argument, point to a different view, involving an agency both of the dead and of the living. I conjecture that a current of influence may be started by a deceased person, which, however, only becomes strong enough to be perceptible to its object when reinforced by some vivid current of emotion arising in living minds. I do not say that this is yet provable; yet the hint may be of value when the far-reaching interdependencies of telepathy between the two worlds come to be better understood.

Two singular cases in this group remain, where the departed spirit, long after death, seems preoccupied with the spot where his bones are laid. The first of these cases (Journal S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 230 [733 A]) approaches farce; the second (in which the skeleton of a man who had probably been murdered about forty years before was discovered by means of a dream; see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 35), stands alone among our narratives in the tragedy which follows on the communication. Mr. Podmore in an article in the same volume (p. 303) suggests other theories to account for this case without invoking the agency of the dead; but to me the least impossible explanation is still the notion that the murdered man's dreams harked back after all those years to his remote unconsecrated grave. I may refer further to another case (in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iv. p. 155, footnote) where feelings of horror and depression were constantly experienced in a room over which a baby's body was afterwards found. This case makes, perhaps, for another explanation--depending not so much on any continued influence of the departed spirit as on some persistent influence inhering in the bones themselves--deposited under circumstances of terror or anguish, and possibly in some way still radiating a malignant memory. Bizarre as this interpretation looks, we shall find some confirmation of such a possibility in our chapter on Possession. Yet another case belonging to the same group (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 418) supplies a variant on this view; suggesting, as Edward Gurney has remarked, the local imprintation of a tragic picture, by whom and upon what we cannot tell.

I think it well to suggest even these wild conjectures; so long as they are understood to be conjectures and nothing more. I hold it probable that those communications, of which telepathy from one spirit to another forms the most easily traceable variety, are in reality infinitely varied and complex, and show themselves from time to time in forms which must for long remain quite beyond our comprehension.

The next class of cases in this series well illustrates this unexpectedness. It has only been as the result of a gradual accumulation of concordant cases that I have come to believe there is some reality in the bizarre supposition that the departed spirit is sometimes specially aware of the tune at which news of his death is about to reach some given friend.[149] Proof of such knowledge on his part is rendered harder by the alternative possibility that the friend may by clairvoyance become aware of a letter in his own proximity. As was shown in Phantasms of the Living, there is some evidence for such clairvoyance even in cases where the letter seen is quite unimportant.

Again, there are cases where the percipient states that a cloud of unreasonable depression fell upon him about the time of his friend's death at a distance, and continued until the actual news arrived; when, instead of becoming intensified, it lifted suddenly. In one or two such cases there was an actual presence or apparition, which seemed to hang about until the news arrived, and then disappeared. Or, on the other hand, there is sometimes a happy vision of the departed preluding the news, as though to prepare the percipient's mind for the shock (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 90 [735 A]). The suggested inference is that in such cases the spirit's attention is more or less continuously directed to the survivor until the news reaches him. This does not, of course, explain how the spirit learns as to the arrival of the news; yet it makes that piece of knowledge seem a less isolated thing.

Having thus referred to a number of cases where the apparition shows varying degrees of knowledge or memory, I pass on to the somewhat commoner type, where the apparition lacks the power or the impulse to communicate any message much more definite than that all-important one--of his own continued life and love. These cases, nevertheless, might be subdivided on many lines. Each apparition, even though it be momentary, is a phenomenon complex in more ways than our minds can follow. We must look for some broad line of demarcation, which may apply to a great many different incidents, while continuing to some extent the series which we have already been descending--from knowledge and purpose on the deceased person's part down to vagueness and apparent automatism.

Such a division--gradual, indeed, but for that very reason the more instructive--exists between personal and local apparitions; between manifestations plainly intended to impress the minds of certain definite survivors and manifestations in accustomed haunts, some of which, indeed, may be destined to impress survivors, but which degenerate and disintegrate into sights and sounds too meaningless to prove either purpose or intelligence.

Let us look, then, for these characteristics, not expecting, of course, that our series will be logically simple; for it must often happen that the personal and local impulses will be indistinguishable, as when the desired percipient is inhabiting the familiar home. But we may begin with some cases where the apparition has shown itself in some scene altogether strange to the deceased person.

We have had, of course, some cases of this type already. Such was the case of the apparition with the red scratch (Appendix VII. B); such too was the apparition in the Countess Kapnist's carriage (Appendix VII. E). Such cases, indeed, occur most frequently--and this fact is itself significant--among the higher and more developed forms of manifestation. Among the briefer, less-developed apparitions with which we have now to deal, invasions by the phantasm of quite unknown territory are relatively few. I will begin by referring to a curious case, where the impression given is that of a spiritual presence which seeks and finds the percipient, but is itself too confused for coherent communication (Mrs. Lightfoot's case, Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 453 [429 B]). It will be seen that this narrative is thoroughly in accordance with previous indications of a state of posthumous bewilderment supervening before the spirit has adjusted its perceptions to the new environment.

In cases like Mrs. Lightfoot's, where the percipient's surroundings are unknown to the deceased person, and especially in cases where the intimation of a death reaches the percipient when at sea, there is plainly nothing except the percipient's own personality to guide the spirit in his search. We have several narratives of this type. In one of these--Archdeacon Farler's, already referred to (p. 227), the apparition appears twice, the second appearance at least being subsequent to the death. It is plain that if in such a case the second apparition conveys no fresh intelligence, we cannot prove that it is more than a subjective recrudescence of the first. Yet analogy is in favour of its veridical character, since we have cases where successive manifestations do bring fresh knowledge, and seem to show a continued effort to communicate.[150]

Then, again, there are auditory cases where the phantasmal speech has occurred in places not known to the deceased person. (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iii. p. 90, and vol. v. p. 455.)

One specially impressive characteristic of apparitions (as has been already remarked) is their occasional collectivity--the fact that more percipients than one sometimes see or hear the phantasmal figure or voice simultaneously. When one is considering the gradual decline in definiteness and apparent purpose from one group of apparitions to another, it is natural to ask whether this characteristic--in my view so important--is found to accompany especially the higher, more intelligent manifestations.

I cannot find that this is so. On the contrary, it is, I think, in cases of mere haunting that we oftenest find that the figure is seen by several persons at once, or else (a cognate phenomenon) by several persons successively. I know not how to explain this apparent tendency. Could we admit the underlying assumptions, it would suit the view that the "haunting" spirits are "earthbound," and thus somehow nearer to matter than spirits more exalted. Yet instances of collectivity are scattered through all classes of apparitions; and the irregular appearance of a characteristic which seems to us so fundamental affords another lesson how great may be the variety of inward mechanism in cases which to us might seem constructed on much the same type.

I pass on to a group of cases which are both personal and local; although the personal element in most of them--the desire to manifest to the friend--may seem more important than the local element--the impulse to revisit some accustomed haunt.

In the case which I shall now cite the deceased person's image is seen simultaneously by several members of his own household, in his own house. Note the analogy to a collective crystal vision.[151]

The account is taken from Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 213. It is given by Mr. Charles A. W. Lett, of the Military and Royal Naval Club, Albemarle Street, W.

December 3rd, 1885.

On the 5th April 1873 my wife's father, Captain Towns, died at his residence, Cranbrook, Rose Bay, near Sidney, N. S. Wales. About six weeks after his death my wife had occasion, one evening about nine o'clock, to go to one of the bedrooms in the house. She was accompanied by a young lady, Miss Berthon, and as they entered the room--the gas was burning all the time--they were amazed to see, reflected as it were on the polished surface of the wardrobe, the image of Captain Towns. It was barely half figure, the head, shoulders, and part of the arms only showing--in fact, it was like an ordinary medallion portrait, but life-size. The face appeared wan and pale, as it did before his death, and he wore a kind of grey flannel jacket, in which he had been accustomed to sleep. Surprised and half alarmed at what they saw, their first idea was that a portrait had been hung in the room, and that what they saw was its reflection; but there was no picture of the kind.

Whilst they were looking and wondering, my wife's sister, Miss Towns, came into the room, and before either of the others had time to speak she exclaimed, "Good gracious! Do you see papa?" One of the housemaids happened to be passing downstairs at the moment, and she was called in, and asked if she saw anything, and her reply was, "Oh, miss! the master." Graham--Captain Towns' old body servant--was then sent for, and he also immediately exclaimed, "Oh, Lord save us! Mrs. Lett, it's the Captain!" The butler was called, and then Mrs. Crane, my wife's nurse, and they both said what they saw. Finally, Mrs. Towns was sent for, and, seeing the apparition, she advanced towards it with her arm extended as if to touch it, and as she passed her hand over the panel of the wardrobe the figure gradually faded away, and never again appeared, though the room was regularly occupied for a long time after.

These are the simple facts of the case, and they admit of no doubt; no kind of intimation was given to any of the witnesses; the same question was put to each one as they came into the room, and the reply was given without hesitation by each. It was by the merest accident that I did not see the apparition. I was in the house at the time, but did not hear when I was called.

C. A. W. LETT.

We, the undersigned, having read the above statement, certify that it is strictly accurate, as we both were witnesses of the apparition.

SARA LETT. SIBBIE SMYTH (nee TOWNS).

Gurney writes:--

Mrs. Lett assures me that neither she nor her sister ever experienced a hallucination of the senses on any other occasion. She is positive that the recognition of the appearance on the part of each of the later witnesses was independent, and not due to any suggestion from the persons already in the room.

There is another collective case which is noticeable from the fact that the departed spirit appears to influence two persons at a distance from each other in a concordant way, so that one of them becomes conscious of the appearance to the other.[152] Compare with this the incident given at the end of Appendix VII. G, when Miss Campbell has a vision of her friend seeing an apparition at a time when this is actually occurring.[153]

The case given in Appendix VII. F--which comes from excellent informants--is one of those which correspond most nearly to what one would desire in a posthumous message. I may refer also to General Campbell's case (in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 476) in which a long continued series of unaccountable noises and an apparition twice seen by a child in the house suggested to the narrator the agency of his dead wife. The case, which depends for its evidential force on a great mass of detail, is too long for me to quote; but it is worth study, as is any case where there seems evidence of persistent effort to manifest, meeting with one knows not what difficulty. It may be that in such a story there is nothing but strange coincidence, or it may be that from records of partially successful effort, renewed often and in ambiguous ways, we shall hereafter learn something of the nature of that curtain of obstruction which now seems so arbitrary in its sudden lifting, its sudden fall.

I will conclude this group by referring the reader to three cases closely similar, all well attested, and all of them capable of explanation either on local or personal grounds. In the first (Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 619 [744 A]) an apparition is seen by two persons in a house in Edinburgh, a few hours before the death of a lady who had lived there, and whose body was to be brought back to it. In the second (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 57 [744 B]) the dead librarian haunts his library, but in the library are members of his old staff. In the third (Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 212 [§ 744]), the dead wife loiters round her husband's tomb, but near it passes a gardener who had been in her employ.

In this last case the apparition was seen about seven and a half hours after the death. This, as Gurney remarked, makes it still more difficult to regard the case as a telepathic impression transmitted at the moment of death, and remaining latent in the mind of the percipient. The incident suggests rather that Bard, the gardener, had come upon Mrs. de Fréville's spirit, so to say, unawares. One cannot imagine that she specially wished him to see her, and to see her engaged in what seems so needless and undignified a retracing of currents of earthly thought. Rather this seems a rudimentary haunting--an incipient lapse into those aimless, perhaps unconscious, reappearances in familiar spots which may persist (as it would seem) for many years after death.

A somewhat similar case is that of Colonel Crealock (in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 432) where a soldier who had been dead some hours was seen by his superior officer in camp at night rolling up and taking away his bed.

It is, indeed, mainly by dwelling on these intermediate cases, between a message-bringing apparition and a purposeless haunt, that we have most hope of understanding the typical haunt which, while it has been in a sense the most popular of all our phenomena, is yet to the careful inquirer one of the least satisfactory. One main evidential difficulty generally lies in identifying the haunting figure, in finding anything to connect the history of the house with the vague and often various sights and sounds which perplex or terrify its flesh and blood inhabitants. We must, at any rate, rid ourselves of the notion that some great crime or catastrophe is always to be sought as the groundwork of a haunt of this kind. To that negative conclusion our cases concordantly point us.[154] The apparition is most often seen by a stranger, several months after the death, with no apparent reason for its appearance at that special time. This last point is of interest in considering the question whether the hallucinatory picture could have been projected from any still incarnate mind. In one case--the vision of the Bishop of St. Brieuc (given in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 460), there was such a special reason--the Bishop's body, unknown to the percipient, was at that moment being buried at the distance of a few miles. Mr. Podmore suggests (op. cit., vol. vi. p. 301) that it was from the minds of the living mourners that the Bishop's phantasm was generated. That hypothesis may have its portion of truth; the surrounding emotion may have been one of the factors which made the apparition possible. But the assumption that it was the only admissible factor--that the departed Bishop's own possible agency must be set aside altogether--lands us, I think, in difficulties greater than those which we should thus escape. The reader who tries to apply it to the apparitions quoted in my earlier groups will find himself in a labyrinth of complexity. Still more will this be the case in dealing with the far fuller and more explicit _motor___ communications, by automatic writing or speech, which we shall have to discuss in the two next chapters. Unless the actual evidence be disallowed in a wholesale manner, we shall be forced, I think, to admit the continued action of the departed as a main element in these apparitions.

I do not say as the only element. I myself hold, as already implied, that the thought and emotion of living persons does largely intervene, as aiding or conditioning the independent action of the departed. I even believe that it is possible that, say, an intense fixation of my own mind on a departed spirit may aid that spirit to manifest at a special moment--and not even to me, but to a percipient more sensitive than myself. In the boundless ocean of mind innumerable currents and tides shift with the shifting emotion of each several soul.

But now we are confronted by another possible element in these vaguer classes of apparitions, harder to evaluate even than the possible action of incarnate minds. I mean the possible results of past mental action, which, for aught we know, may persist in some perceptible manner, without fresh reinforcement, just as the results of past bodily action persist. This question leads to the still wider question of retrocognition, and of the relation of psychical phenomena to time generally--a problem whose discussion cannot be attempted here.[155] Yet we must remember that such possibilities exist; they may explain certain phenomena into which little of fresh intelligence seems to enter, as, for instance, the alleged persistence, perhaps for years, of meaningless sounds in a particular room or house.

And since we are coming now to cases into which this element of meaningless sound will enter largely, it seems right to begin their discussion with a small group of cases where there is evidence for the definite agency of some dying or deceased person in connection with inarticulate sounds, or I should rather say of the connection of some deceased person with the sounds; since the best explanation may perhaps be that they are sounds of welcome--before or after actual death--corresponding to those apparitions of welcome of which we have already had specimens. One of our cases (see Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 639 [§ 747]) is remarkable in that the auditory hallucination--a sound as of female voices gently singing--was heard by five persons, by four of them, as it seems, independently, and in two places, on different sides of the house. At the same time, one person--the Eton master whose mother had just died, and who was therefore presumably in a frame of mind more prone to hallucination than the physician, matron, friend, or servants who actually did hear the singing--himself heard nothing at all. In this case the physician felt no doubt that Mrs. L. was actually dead; and in fact it was during the laying out of the body that the sounds occurred.

I have already discussed (Chapter VI.) the nature of these phantasmal sounds;--nor is it contrary to our analogies that the person most deeply concerned in the death should in this case fail to hear them. But the point on which I would here lay stress is that phantasmal sounds--even non-articulate sounds--may be as clear a manifestation of personality as phantasmal figures. Among non-articulate noises music is, of course, the most pleasing; but sounds, for instance, which imitate the work of a carpenter's shop, may be equally human and intelligent. In some of the cases of this class we see apparent attempts of various kinds to simulate sounds such as men and women--or manufactured, as opposed to natural, objects--are accustomed to produce. To claim this humanity, to indicate this intelligence, seems the only motive of sounds of this kind.[156]

These sounds, in their rudimentary attempt at showing intelligence, are about on a level with the exploits of the "Poltergeist," where coals are thrown about, water spilt, and so forth. Poltergeist phenomena, however, seldom coincide with the ordinary phenomena of a haunt. We have one remarkable case (Journal S.P.R., vol. ix. p. 280-84 [868 B]) where Poltergeist phenomena coincide with a death, and a few cases where they are supposed to follow on a death; but, as a rule, where figures appear there are no movements; and where there are movements no apparition is seen. If alleged Poltergeist phenomena are always fraudulent, there would be nothing to be surprised at here. If, as I suspect, they are sometimes genuine, their dissociation from visual hallucinations may sometimes afford us a hint of value.

But after Poltergeists have been set aside,--after a severe line has been drawn excluding all those cases (in themselves singular enough) where the main phenomena observed consist of non-articulate sounds,--there remains a great mass of evidence to haunting,--that is, broadly speaking, to the fact that there are many houses in which more than one person has independently seen phantasmal figures, which usually, though not always, bear at least some resemblance to each other.[157] The facts thus baldly stated are beyond dispute. Their true interpretation is a very difficult matter. Mrs. Sidgwick gives four hypotheses, which I must quote at length as the first serious attempt ever made (so far as I know) to collect and face the difficulties of this problem, so often, but so loosely, discussed through all historical times. (From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. iii. pp. 146-8.)

"I will, therefore, proceed briefly to state and discuss the only four theories that have occurred to me.

"The two which I will take first in order assume that the apparitions are due to the agency or presence of the spirits of deceased men.

"There is first the popular view, that the apparition is something belonging to the external world--that, like ordinary matter, it occupies and moves through space, and would be in the room whether the percipient were there to see it or not. This hypothesis involves us in many difficulties, of which one serious one--that of accounting for the clothes of the ghost--has often been urged, and never, I think, satisfactorily answered. Nevertheless, I am bound to admit that there is some little evidence tending to suggest this theory. For instance, in the account,[158] of which I have given an abstract, of the weeping lady who has appeared so frequently in a certain house, the following passage occurs:--'They went after it (the figure) together into the drawing-room; it then came out, and went down the aforesaid passage (leading to the kitchen), but was the next minute seen by another Miss [M.] ... come up the outside steps from the kitchen. On this particular day, Captain [M.'s] married daughter happened to be at an upstairs window ... and independently saw the figure continue her course across the lawn and into the orchard.' A considerable amount of clear evidence to the appearance of ghosts to independent observers in successive points in space would certainly afford a strong argument for their having a definite relation to space; but in estimating evidence of this kind it would be necessary to know how far the observer's attention had been drawn to the point in question. If it had been a real woman whom the Miss [M.'s] were observing, we should have inferred, with perfect certainty, from our knowledge that she could not be in two places at once, that she had been successively, in a certain order, in the places where she was seen by the three observers. If they had noted the moments at which they saw her, and comparing notes afterwards, found that according to these notes they had all seen her at the same time, or in some other order to that inferred, we should still feel absolute confidence in our inference, and should conclude that there must be something wrong about the watches or the notes. From association of ideas, it would be perfectly natural to make the same inference in the case of a ghost which looks exactly like a woman. But in the case of the ghost the inference would not be legitimate, because, unless the particular theory of ghosts which we are discussing be true, there is no reason, so far as we know, why it should not appear in two or more places at once. Hence, in the case of the ghost, a well-founded assurance that the appearances were successive would require a careful observation of the times, which, so far as I know, has never been made. On the whole, therefore, I must dismiss the popular theory as not having, in my opinion, even a primâ facie ground for serious consideration.

"The theory that I will next examine seems to me decidedly more plausible, from its analogy to the conclusion to which I am brought by the examination of the evidence for phantasms of the living. This theory is that the apparition has no real relation to the external world, but is a hallucination caused in some way by some communication, without the intervention of the senses, between the disembodied spirit and the percipient, its form depending on the mind either of the spirit or of the percipient, or of both. In the case of haunted houses, however, a difficulty meets us that we do not encounter, or at least rarely encounter, in applying a similar hypothesis to explain phantasms of the living, or phantasms of the dead other than fixed local ghosts. In these cases we have generally to suppose a simple rapport between mind and mind, but in a haunted house we have a rapport complicated by its apparent dependence on locality. It seems necessary to make the improbable assumption, that the spirit is interested in an entirely special way in a particular house (though possibly this interest may be of a subconscious kind), and that his interest in it puts him into connection with another mind, occupied with it in the way that that of a living person actually there must consciously or unconsciously be, while he does not get into similar communication with the same, or with other persons elsewhere.

"If, notwithstanding these difficulties, it be true that haunting is due in any way to the agency of deceased persons, and conveys a definite idea of them to the percipients through the resemblance to them of the apparition, then, by patiently continuing our investigations, we may expect, sooner or later, to obtain a sufficient amount of evidence to connect clearly the commencement of hauntings with the death of particular persons, and to establish clearly the likeness of the apparition to those persons. The fact that almost everybody is now photographed ought to be of material assistance in obtaining evidence of this latter kind.

"My third theory dispenses with the agency of disembodied spirits, but involves us in other and perhaps equally great improbabilities. It is that the first appearance is a purely subjective hallucination, and that the subsequent similar appearances, both to the original percipient and to others, are the result of the first appearance; unconscious expectancy causing them in the case of the original percipient, and some sort of telepathic communication from the original percipient in the case of others. In fact, it assumes that a tendency to a particular hallucination is in a way infectious. If this theory be true, I should expect to find that the apparently independent appearances after the first depended on the percipient's having had some sort of intercourse with some one who had seen the ghost before, and that any decided discontinuity of occupancy would stop the haunting. I should also expect to find, as we do in one of the cases I have quoted, that sometimes the supposed ghost would follow the family from one abode to another, appearing to haunt them rather than any particular house.

"The fourth theory that I shall mention is one which I can hardly expect to appear plausible, and which, therefore, I only introduce because I think that it corresponds best to a certain part of the evidence;--and, as I have already said, considering the altogether tentative way in which we are inevitably dealing with this obscure subject, it is as well to express definitely every hypothesis which an impartial consideration of the facts suggests. It is that there is something in the actual building itself--some subtle physical influence--which produces in the brain that effect which, in its turn, becomes the cause of a hallucination. It is certainly difficult on this hypothesis alone to suppose that the hallucinations of different people would be similar, but we might account for this by a combination of this hypothesis and the last. The idea is suggested by the case, of which I have given an abstract, where the haunting continued through more than one occupancy, but changed its character; and if there be any truth in the theory, I should expect in time to obtain a good deal more evidence of this kind, combined with evidence that the same persons do not as a rule encounter ghosts elsewhere. I should also expect evidence to be forthcoming supporting the popular idea that repairs and alterations of the building sometimes cause the haunting to cease."[159]

These hypotheses--none of which, as Mrs. Sidgwick expressly states (op. cit., p. 145), seemed to herself satisfactory--did nevertheless, I think, comprise all the deductions which could reasonably be made from the evidence as it at that time stood. A few modifications, which the experience of subsequent years has led me to introduce, can hardly be said to afford further explanation, although they state the difficulties in what now seems to me a more hopeful way.

In the first place then--as already explained in Chapter VI.--I in some sense fuse into one Mrs. Sidgwick's two first hypotheses by my own hypothesis of actual presence, actual spatial changes induced in the metetherial, but not in the material world. I hold that when the phantasm is discerned by more than one person at once (and on some other, but not all other occasions) it is actually effecting a change in that portion of space where it is perceived, although not, as a rule, in the matter which occupies that place. It is, therefore, not optically nor acoustically perceived; perhaps no rays of light are reflected nor waves of air set in motion; but an unknown form of supernormal perception, not necessarily acting through the sensory end-organs, comes into play. In the next place, I am inclined to lay stress on the parallel between these narratives of haunting and those phantasms of the living which I have already classed as psychorrhagic. In each case, as it seems to me, there is an involuntary detachment of some element of the spirit, probably with no knowledge thereof at the main centre of consciousness. Those "haunts by the living," as they may be called, where, for instance, a man is seen phantasmally standing before his own fireplace, seem to me to be repeated, perhaps more readily, after the spirit is freed from the flesh.

Again, I think that the curious question as to the influence of certain houses in generating apparitions may be included under the broader heading of Retrocognition. That is to say, we are not here dealing with a special condition of certain houses, but with a branch of the wide problem as to the relation of supernormal phenomena to time. Manifestations which occur in haunted houses depend, let us say, on something which has taken place a long time ago. In what way do they depend on that past event? Are they a sequel, or only a residue? Is there fresh operation going on, or only fresh perception of something already accomplished? Or can we in such a case draw any real distinction between a continued action and a continued perception of a past action? The closest parallel, as it seems to me, although not at first sight an obvious one, lies between these phenomena of haunting, these persistent sights and sounds, and certain phenomena of crystal-vision and of automatic script, which also seem to depend somehow upon long-past events,--to be their sequel or their residue. One specimen case I give in Appendix (VII. G), where the connection of the haunting apparition with a certain person long deceased may be maintained with more than usual plausibility. From that level the traceable connections get weaker and weaker, until we come to phantasmal scenes where there is no longer any even apparent claim to the contemporary agency of human spirits. Such a vision, for instance, as that of a line of spectral deer crossing a ford, may indeed, if seen in the same place by several independent observers, be held to be something more than a mere subjective fancy; but what in reality such a picture signifies is a question which brings us at once to theories of the permanence or simultaneity of all phenomena in a timeless Universal Soul.

Such conceptions, however difficult, are among the highest to which our mind can reach. Could we approach them more nearly, they might deeply influence our view, even of our own remote individual destiny. So, perhaps, shall it some day be; at present we may be well satisfied if we can push our knowledge of that destiny one step further than of old, even just behind that veil which has so long hung impenetrably before the eyes of men.

Here, then, is a natural place of pause in our inquiry.

The discussion of the ethical aspect of these questions I have postponed to my concluding chapter. But one point already stands out from the evidence--at once so important and so manifest that it seems well to call attention to it at once--as a solvent more potent than any Lucretius could apply to human superstition and human fears.

In this long string of narratives, complex and bizarre though their details may be, we yet observe that the character of the appearance varies in a definite manner with their distinctness and individuality. Haunting phantoms, incoherent and unintelligent, may seem restless and unhappy. But as they rise into definiteness, intelligence, individuality, the phantoms rise also into love and joy. I cannot recall one single case of a proved posthumous combination of intelligence with wickedness. Such evil as our evidence will show us--we have as yet hardly come across it in this book--is scarcely more than monkeyish mischief, childish folly. In dealing with automatic script, for instance, we shall have to wonder whence come the occasional vulgar jokes or silly mystifications. We shall discuss whether they are a kind of dream of the automatist's own, or whether they indicate the existence of unembodied intelligences on the level of the dog or the ape. But, on the other hand, all that world-old conception of Evil Spirits, of malevolent Powers, which has been the basis of so much of actual devil-worship and of so much more of vague supernatural fear;--all this insensibly melts from the mind as we study the evidence before us.

Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest Non radii solis, neque lucida tela diei Discutiant sed, naturæ species ratioque.

Here surely is a fact of no little meaning. Our narratives have been collected from men and women of many types, holding all varieties of ordinary opinion. Yet the upshot of all these narratives is to emphasise a point which profoundly differentiates the scientific from the superstitious view of spiritual phenomena. The terror which shaped primitive theologies still tinges for the populace every hint of intercourse with disembodied souls. The transmutation of savage fear into scientific curiosity is of the essence of civilisation. Towards that transmutation each separate fragment of our evidence, with undesigned concordance, indisputably tends. In that faintly opening world of spirit I can find nothing worse than living men; I seem to discern not an intensification but a disintegration of selfishness, malevolence, pride. And is not this a natural result of any cosmic moral evolution? If the selfish man (as Marcus Antoninus has it) "is a kind of boil or imposthume upon the universe," must not his egoistic impulses suffer in that wider world a sure, even if a painful, decay; finding no support or sustenance among those permanent forces which maintain the stream of things?

I have thus indicated one point of primary importance on which the undesignedly coincident testimony of hundreds of first-hand narratives supports a conclusion, not yet popularly accepted, but in harmony with the evolutionary conceptions which rule our modern thought. Nor does this point stand alone. I can find, indeed, no guarantee of absolute and idle bliss; no triumph in any exclusive salvation. But the student of these narratives will, I think, discover throughout them uncontradicted indications of the persistence of Love, the growth of Joy, the willing submission to Law.

These indications, no doubt, may seem weak and scattered la comparison with the wholesale, thorough-going assertions of philosophical or religious creeds. Their advantage is that they occur incidentally in the course of our independent and cumulative demonstration of the profoundest cosmical thesis which we can at present conceive as susceptible of any kind of scientific proof. Cosmical questions, indeed, there may be which are in themselves of deeper import than our own survival of bodily death. The nature of the First Cause; the blind or the providential ordering of the sum of things;--these are problems vaster than any which affect only the destinies of men. But to whatever moral certainty we may attain on those mightiest questions, we can devise no way whatever of bringing them to scientific test. They deal with infinity; and our modes of investigation have grasp only on finite things.

But the question of man's survival of death stands in a position uniquely intermediate between matters capable and matters incapable of proof. It is in itself a definite problem, admitting of conceivable proof which, even if not technically rigorous, might amply satisfy the scientific mind. And at the same time the conception which it involves is in itself a kind of avenue and inlet into infinity. Could a proof of our survival be obtained, it would carry us deeper into the true nature of the universe than we should be carried by an even perfect knowledge of the material scheme of things. It would carry us deeper both by achievement and by promise. The discovery that there was a life in man independent of blood and brain would be a cardinal, a dominating fact in all science and in all philosophy. And the prospect thus opened to human knowledge, in this or in other worlds, would be limitless indeed.