Herr Parish next censures the probable selection of good cases by collectors, on which the editors of the Census have already made observations, as they have also made large allowances for this cause of error. He then offers the astonishing statement that, 'in the view of the English authors, a view which is, of course, assumed in all calculations of the kind, an hallucination persists equally long in the memory and is equally readily recalled in reply to a question, whether the experience made but a slight impression on the percipient, or affected him deeply, as would be the case, for instance, if the hallucination had been found to coincide with the death of a near relative or friend.'[5] This assertion of Herr Parish's is so erroneous that the Report expressly says 'as years recede into the distance,' the proportion of the hallucinations that are remembered in them to those which are forgotten, or at least ignored, 'is very large.' Again, 'Hallucinations of the most impressive class will not only be better remembered than others, but will, we may reasonably suppose, be more often mentioned by the percipients to their friends.'[6]
Yet Herr Parish avers that, in all calculations, it is assumed that hallucinations are equally readily recalled whether impressive or not! Once more, the Report says (p. 246), 'It is not the case' that coincidental (and impressive) hallucinations are as easily subject to oblivion as non-coincidental, and non-impressive ones. The editors therefore multiply the non-coincidental cases by four, arguing that no coincidental cases (hits) are forgotten, while three out of four non-coincidentals (misses) are forgotten, or may be supposed likely to be forgotten. Immediately after declaring that the English authors suppose all hallucinations to be equally well remembered (which is the precise reverse of what they do say), Herr Parish admits that the authors multiply the misses by four, 'influenced by other considerations' (p. 289). By what other considerations? They give their reason (that very reason which they decline to entertain, says Herr Parish), namely, that misses are four times as likely to be forgotten as hits. 'To go into the reason for adopting this plan would lead us too far,' he writes. Why, it is the very reason which, he says, does not find favour with the English authors!
How curiously remote from being 'coincidental' with plain facts, or 'veridical' at all, is this scientific criticism! Herr Parish says that a 'view' (which does not exist) is 'of course assumed in all calculations;' and, on the very same page, he says that it is not assumed! 'The witnesses of the report—influenced, it is true, by other considerations' (which is not the case), 'have sought to turn the point of this objection by multiplying the whole number of (non-coincidental) cases by four.' Then the 'view' is not 'assumed in all calculations,' as Herr Parish has just asserted.
What led Herr Parish, an honourable and clearheaded critic, into this maze of incorrect and contradictory assertions? It is interesting to try to trace the causes of such non-veridical illusions, to find the points de repère of these literary hallucinations. One may suggest that when Herr Parish 'recast the chapters' of his German edition, as he says in his preface to the English version, he accidentally left in a passage based on an earlier paper by Mr. Gurney,[7] not observing that it was no longer accurate or appropriate.
After this odd passage, Herr Parish argues that a 'veridical' hallucination is regarded by the English authors as 'coincidental,' even when external circumstances have made that very hallucination a probable occurrence by producing 'tension of the corresponding nerve element groups.' That is to say, a person is in a condition—a nervous condition— likely, a priori, to beget an hallucination. An hallucination is begotten, quite naturally; and so, if it happens to coincide with an event, the coincidence should not count—it is purely fortuitous.[8]
Here is an example. A lady, facing an old sideboard, saw a friend, with no coat on, and in a waistcoat with a back of shiny material. Within an hour she was taken to where her friend lay dying, without a coat, and in a waistcoat with a shiny back.[9] Here is the scientific explanation of Herr Parish: 'The shimmer of a reflecting surface [the sideboard?] formed the occasion for the hallucinatory emergence of a subconsciously perceived shiny black waistcoat [quotation incorrect, of course], and an individual subconsciously associated with that impression.[10] I ask any lady whether she, consciously or subconsciously, associates the men she knows with the backs of their waistcoats. Herr Parish's would be a brilliantly satisfactory explanation if it were only true to the printed words that lay under his eyes when he wrote. There was no 'shiny black waistcoat' in the case, but a waistcoat with a shiny back. Gentlemen, and especially old gentlemen who go about in bath-chairs (like the man in this story), don't habitually take off their coats and show the backs of their waistcoats to ladies of nineteen in England. And, if Herr Parish had cared to read his case, he would have found it expressly stated that the lady 'had never seen the man without his coat' (and so could not associate him with an impression of a shiny back to his waistcoat) till after the hallucination, when she saw him coatless on his death-bed. In this instance Herr Parish had an hallucinatory memory, all wrong, of the page under his eyes. The case is got rid of, then, by aid of the 'fanciful addenda,' to which Herr Parish justly objects. He first gives the facts incorrectly, and then explains an occurrence which, as reported by him, did not occur, and was not asserted to occur.
I confess that, if Herr Parish's version were as correct as it is essentially inaccurate, his explanation would leave me doubtful. For the circumstances were that the old gentleman of the story lunched daily with the young lady's mother. Suppose that she was familiar (which she was not) with the shiny back of his waistcoat, still, she saw him daily, and daily, too, was in the way of seeing the (hypothetically) shiny surface of the sideboard. That being the case, she had, every day, the materials, subjective and objective, of the hallucination. Yet it only occurred once, and then it precisely coincided with the death agony of the old gentleman, and with his coatless condition. Why only that once? C'est là le miracle! 'How much for this little veskit?' as the man asked David Copperfield.
Herr Parish next invents a cause for an hallucination, which, I myself think, ought not to have been reckoned, because the percipient had been sitting up with the sick man. This he would class as a 'suspicious' case. But, even granting him his own way of handling the statistics, he would still have far too large a proportion of coincidences for the laws of chance to allow, if we are to go by these statistics at all.
His next argument practically is that hallucinations are always only a kind of dreams.[11] He proves this by the large number of coincidental hallucinations which occurred in sleepy circumstances. One man went to bed early, and woke up early; another was 'roused from sleep;' two ladies were sitting up in bed, giving their babies nourishment; a man was reading a newspaper on a sofa; a lady was lying awake at seven in the morning; and there are eight other English cases of people 'awake' in bed during an hallucination. Now, in Dr. Parish's opinion, we must argue that they were not awake, or not much; so the hallucinations were mere dreams. Dreams are so numerous that coincidences in dreams can be got rid of as pure flukes. People may say, to be sure, 'I am used to dreams, and don't regard them; this was something solitary in my experience.' But we must not mind what people say.
Yet I fear we must mind what they say. At least, we must remember that sleeping dreams are, of all things, most easily forgotten; while a full-bodied hallucination, when we, at least, believe ourselves awake, seems to us on a perfectly different plane of impressiveness, and (experto crede) is really very difficult to forget. Herr Parish cannot be allowed, therefore, to use the regular eighteenth-century argument— 'All dreams!' For the two sorts of dreams, in sleep and in apparent wakefulness, seem, to the subject, to differ in kind. And they really do differ in kind. It is the essence of the every night dream that we are unconscious of our actual surroundings and conscious of a fantastic environment. It is the essence of wideawakeness to be conscious of our actual surroundings. In the ordinary dream, nothing actual competes with its visions. When we are conscious of our surroundings, everything actual does compete with any hallucination. Therefore, an hallucination which, when we are conscious of our material environment, does compete with it in reality, is different in kind from an ordinary dream. Science gains nothing by arbitrarily declaring that two experiences so radically different are identical. Anybody would see this if he were not arguing under a dominant idea.