A corresponding account of the incident has been received from Miss Jowett, the landlady's daughter. We owe the accounts of the incident to Mr. F. Schiller, who investigated the matter for the Oxford Phasmatological Society.
The persistency of the vision in this case is a feature very rarely found in cases of undoubted hallucination, and the fact that it was only seen through glass suggests that the whole appearance was due to a reflection of some kind, although it must be admitted that this explanation, which was considered and rejected by the percipients at the time, cannot be accommodated to the facts without difficulty.
In the epidemics of religious hallucination so common in the Middle Ages, and still occurring from time to time in Catholic countries, it would appear that as a rule there is no objective basis for the perception. When, as at Knock, in Ireland, a few years ago, the figure of the Virgin or a Saint is said to have been seen by a large number of persons simultaneously, it seems probable that in those who really saw the figure the hallucination was due to repeated verbal suggestions acting on minds which, under the influence of strong emotion, were temporarily in a state analogous to that of trance. The nearest analogy to such cases is no doubt to be found in hypnotism. A collective hallucination can be imposed upon a whole roomful of hypnotised persons by the mere command of the operator. But not the most explicit verbal suggestion—si vera est fabula—could make the courtiers in the fairy tale see the king's clothes; and there is no evidence that with normal persons in full possession of their ordinary faculties any hints derivable from look, word, or gesture could suffice to originate an instantaneous hallucination. Still, the possibility of such an explanation under certain conditions should perhaps be kept in view. (See later, Chapter XVI.)
A possible explanation of a different kind has been already illustrated by the story quoted on page 153, where it was shown that a solitary hallucination had grown in the course of five-and-twenty years into a collective vision. The narrator in this case was a child at the time of the alleged experience. Children and uneducated persons generally, who are not prone to analyse their own sensations, seem liable after a certain interval to mistake the image called up by another's recital for an actual experience of their own; and this is especially likely to occur when the auditor was present at the time of the experience or familiar with the scene of the occurrence. Indeed, most persons who visualise with moderate facility are probably liable to this form of mistake on a small scale. I had about five years since an example of this in my own case. A friend had described to me minutely some simple apparatus of his own invention. About a year later he brought the apparatus to London and offered to show it to me. I replied that I had already seen it; but on being confronted with it I found the proportions and general appearance of the actual object quite unlike my mental image of it. I had in fact never seen the object, but the image which I had mentally constructed to enable me to follow my friend's description a year before remained so vivid as to lead me to believe that it was founded on actual sensation. But a sensory hallucination is too striking and unusual an experience to be readily feigned, and it is very improbable that the memory of educated persons, at any rate, would be untrustworthy as regards their recent experiences of the kind. As already explained, the accounts of this and other forms of telepathic affection included in this book have in almost all cases been written down within ten years of the event.
When the fullest allowance has been made for all possible explanations we find a considerable number of cases remaining of which no other account can be given than that they are apparitions, due to no ascertained cause, which are perceived by two or more persons simultaneously. That the collective perception proves the objective, or—to use a less ambiguous word—the material existence of the thing perceived, is probably held now by few persons outside the ranks of professed mystics. Apart from the theoretical difficulties of such a hypothesis—difficulties which have by no means been surmounted by the invocation of fixed ether, intercalary vortex rings, space of four dimensions, and other subtler forms of the theory evolved in recent times,—it is to be noted that no facts of any significance have been adduced to support it. There is at present no trustworthy evidence that an apparition has ever been weighed or photographed,[122] or submitted to spectroscopic or chemical analysis. But, indeed, the theory betrays its own origin in a prescientific age; and without formal destruction by argument it has shared in the euthanasia which has overtaken many other pious opinions found inadequate to the facts. The phenomena which it professes to explain are paralleled in all their essential features by other phenomena, for which even its supporters would hardly be rash enough to claim substantial reality; and as the phantasms now to be discussed bear in all points a close resemblance to those already described as occurring to solitary percipients, probably no one who accepts the one class of appearances as hallucinatory will hesitate to accept the other.
But when the hallucinatory character of collectively-perceived, or, as they may be styled for brevity, "collective" phantasms is recognised, there are difficulties of interpretation to be dealt with. On the telepathic hypothesis there are two modes in which a collective hallucination may be conceived to originate: (a) it may be communicated direct from a third person to each of the percipients; or (b) it may be communicate by telepathic infection from one percipient to another. The first explanation involves in most cases, as Mr. Gurney has pointed out (Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. pp. 171, 172), serious theoretical difficulties. For on the view to which we are led by a review of all the evidence, a telepathic hallucination, like any other, is, as a rule, the work of the percipient's mind, and is not transferred ready made from the agent. As such it is frequently of slow growth, and there are grounds for believing that it is sometimes not externalised for the percipient's senses until some hours after the receipt of the original telepathic impulse. We should hardly expect, therefore, to find two percipients independently developing similar hallucinations, and at the same moment. But in most of the cases of collective hallucination hitherto reported, the hallucinations have been, so far as could be ascertained, similar and simultaneous, so as indeed to suggest a real figure rather than a hallucination. Moreover, in well-attested recent narratives it rarely happens that a connection between the hallucination and any unusual state of the person represented is clearly established; whilst in many, perhaps most cases, the hallucination has not been recognised as resembling any person known to either percipient, and has in some instances been purely grotesque. In most cases, therefore, it seems easier to believe that we have to deal with a contagious hallucination, which, whether initiated by a telepathic impulse, or purely subjective in its origin, has been transferred telepathically from the original percipient to others in his company at the time. In some cases, indeed, it is no doubt permissible, as suggested by Mr. Gurney, to conjecture that the minds of all the percipients may have been directly influenced by the agent, and that subsequently an overflow from the mind of one of the percipients may have served to reinforce the original impulse, and determine the exact moment of the explosion in his co-percipients, just as the current regulates the exact hour of striking in electrically synchronised clocks. Or again, the mind of each percipient may react upon the others. There are, however, a few cases where the percipients appear to have had experiences relating to the same event neither precisely similar nor simultaneous, which seem to require the hypothesis of an impulse in each case directly derived from the person represented. Some cases of the kind are given in Phantasms of the Living (vol. i. p. 362; vol. ii. 173-183), and others will be cited in the latter part of this chapter. It will be more convenient, however, to begin by giving examples of the ordinary type of collective hallucination.
Collective Auditory Hallucinations.
No. 78.—From MR. C. H. CARY.
"SECRETARY'S OFFICE, GENERAL POST OFFICE,
29th March 1892.
"At Bow, London, on the 8th March 1875, at about 8.30 P.M., I heard a voice say, 'Joseph, Joseph.' I was talking with my father and cousin (Joseph Cary) about the battle of Balaclava. I was in good health, etc. My age was nearly thirteen. All three of us heard the voice, which we suppose to have been that of Joseph's grandmother."[123]