6. (A) The writer, standing before dinner, at a table in a large and brilliantly lit hall, saw the door of the drawing-room open, and a little girl, related to himself, come out, and run across the hall into another room. He spoke to her, but she did not answer. He instantly entered the drawing-room, where the child was sitting in a white evening-dress. When she ran across the hall, the moment before, she was dressed in dark blue serge. No explanation of the puzzle could be discovered, but it is fair to add that no anxiety was excited.
7. (A) A young lady had a cold, and was wearing a brown shawl. After lunch she went to her room. A few minutes later, her sister came out, saw her in the hall, and went upstairs after her, telling her an anecdote. At the top of the stairs, the brown-shawled sister vanished. The elder sister was in her room, in a white shawl. She was visible, when absent on another occasion, to another spectator.
In two other cases (A) ladies, in their usual health, saw their husbands in their rooms, when, in fact, they were in the drawing-room or study. Here then are eight cases of non-coincidental hallucination, some of people awake, some of people probably on the verge of sleep, which are wholly without ‘coincidence,’ wholly unveridical. None of the ‘percipients’ was addicted to seeing ‘visions about.’ [{199}]
On the other side, though the writer knows several people who have ‘seen ghosts’ in haunted houses, and other odd phenomena, he knows nobody, at first hand, who has seen a ‘veridical hallucination,’ or rather, knows only one, a very young one indeed. Thus, between these personally collected statistics of spectral ‘sells’ on one part, and the world-wide diffusion of belief in ‘coincidental’ hallucination on the other, the human mind is left in a balance which mathematics, and the Calculus of Probabilities (especially if one does not understand it) fail to affect.
Meanwhile, we still do not know what causes these solitary hallucinations of the sane. They can hardly come from diseased organs of sense, for these would not confine themselves to a single mistaken message of great vivacity. And why should either the ‘sensory centre’ or the ‘central terminus’ just once in a lifetime develop this uncanny activity, and represent to us a person to whom we may be wholly indifferent? The explanation is less difficult when the person represented is a husband or child, but even then, why does the activity occur once, and only once, and not in a moment of anxiety?
The coincidental hallucinations are laid to the door of ‘telepathy,’ to ‘a telepathic impact from the mind of an absent agent,’ who is dying, or in some other state of rare or exciting experience, perhaps being married, as in Col. Meadows Taylor’s case. This is a theory as old as Lavaterus, and was proclaimed by Mayo in the middle of the century; while, substituting ‘angels’ for human agents, Frazer of Tiree used it, in 1700, to explain second sight. Nay, it is the Norse theory of a ‘sending’ by a sorcerer, as we read in the Icelandic sagas. But, admitting that telepathy may be a cause of hallucinations, we often find the effect where the cause is not alleged to exist. Nobody, perhaps, will explain our nine empty hallucinations by ‘telepathy,’ yet, from the supposed effects of telepathy they were indistinguishable. Are all such cases of casual hallucination in the sane to be explained by telepathy, by an impact of force from a distant brain on the central terminus of our own brains? At all events, a casual hallucination of the presence of an absent friend need obviously cause us very little anxiety. We need not adopt the hypothesis of the Maoris.
The telepathic theory has the advantage of cutting down the marvellous to the minimum. It also accounts for that old puzzle, the clothes worn by the ghosts. These are reproduced by the ‘agent’s’ theory of himself, perhaps with some unconscious assistance from ‘the percipient’. For lack of this light on the matter, M. d’Assier, a positivist, who believed in spectres had to suggest that the ghosts wear the ghosts of garments! Thus positivism, in this disciple, returned to the artless metaphysics of savages. Telepathy saves the believer from such a humiliating relapse, and, perhaps, telepathy also may be made to explain ‘collective’ hallucinations, when several people see the same apparition. If a distant mind can thus demoralise the central terminus of one brain, it may do as much for two or more brains, or they may demoralise each other.
All this is very promising, but telepathy breaks down when the apparition causes some change in the relations of material objects. If there be a physical effect which endures after the phantasm has vanished, then there was an actual agent, a real being, a ‘ghost’ on the scene. For instance, the lady in Scott’s ballad, ‘The Eve of St. John,’ might see and might hear the ghost of her lover by a telepathic hallucination of two senses. But if
The sable score, of fingers four,
Remained on the board impressed
by the spectre, then there was no telepathic hallucination, but an actual being of an awful kind was in Smailholm Tower. Again, the cases in which dogs and horses, as Paracelsus avers, display terror when men and women behold a phantasm, are not easily accounted for by telepathy, especially when the beast is alarmed before the man or woman suspects the presence of anything unusual. There is, of course, the notion that the horse shies, or the dog turns craven, in sympathy with its master’s exhibition of fear. Owners of dogs and horses may counterfeit horror and see whether their favourites do sympathise. Cats don’t. In one of three cases known to us where a cat showed consciousness of a spectral presence, the apparition took the form of a cat. The evidence is only that of Richard Bovet, in his Pandemonium; or, the Devil’s Cloyster (1684). In Mr. J. G. Wood’s Man and Beast, a lady tells a story of being alone, in firelight, playing with a favourite cat, Lady Catherine. Suddenly puss bristled all over, her back rose in an arch, and the lady, looking up, saw a hideously malignant female watching her. Lady Catherine now rushed wildly round the room, leaped at the upper panels of the door, and seemed to have gone mad. This new terror recalled the lady to herself. She shrieked, and the phantasm vanished. She saw it on a later day. In a third case, a cat merely kept a watchful eye on the ghost, and adopted a dignified attitude of calm expectancy. If beasts can be telepathically affected, then beasts have more of a ‘psychical’ element in their composition than they usually receive credit for; whereas if a ghost is actually in view, there is no reason why beasts should not see it.