Here the non-mathematical reader will exclaim: ‘Total failure, except in case 7!’ And, about that case, he will have his private doubts. But, arguing mathematically, M. Richet proves that the table was right, beyond the limits of mere chance, by fourteen to two. He concludes, on the whole of his experiments, that, probably, intellectual force in one brain may be echoed in another brain. But MM. Binet and Féré, who report this, decide that ‘the calculation of chances is, for the most part, incapable of affording a peremptory proof; it produces uncertainty, disquietude, and doubt’. [{196}] ‘Yet something is gained by substituting doubt for systematic denial. Richet has obtained this important result, that henceforth the possibility of mental suggestion cannot be met with contemptuous rejection.’
Mental suggestion on this limited scale, is a phenomenon much less startling to belief than the reality, and causal nature, of coincidental hallucinations, of wraiths. But it is plain that, as far as general opinion goes, the doctrine of chances, applied to such statistics of hallucinations as have been collected, can at most, only ‘produce uncertainty, disquietude, and doubt’. Yet if even these are produced, a step has been made beyond the blank negation of Hibbert.
The general reader, even if credulously inclined, is more staggered by a few examples of non-coincidental hallucinations, than confirmed by a pile of coincidental examples. Now it seems to be a defect in the method of the friends of wraiths, that they do not publish, with full and impressive details, as many examples of non-coincidental as of coincidental hallucinations. It is the story that takes the public: if we are to be fair we must give the non-coincidental story in all its features, as is done in the matter of wraiths with a kind of message or meaning.
Let us set a good example, by adducing wraiths which, in slang phrase, were ‘sells’. Those which we have at first hand are marked ‘(A),’ those at second-hand ‘(B)’. But the world will accept the story of a ghost that failed on very poor evidence indeed.
1. (A) A young lady, in the dubious state between awake and asleep, unable, in fact, to feel certain whether she was awake or asleep, beheld her late grandmother. The old lady wept as she sat by the bedside.
‘Why do you weep, grandmamma, are you not happy where you are?’ asked the girl.
‘Yes, I am happy, but I am weeping for your mother.’
‘Is she going to die?’
‘No, but she is going to lose you.’
‘Am I going to die, grandmamma?’