CHAPTER VI. Sensory Automatism

SENSORY AUTOMATISM

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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

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." 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. 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.

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.

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. 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) 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