Mr. Godfrey at our request made two other trials, without, of course, letting Mrs. —— know his intention. The first of these attempts was without result, owing perhaps to the date chosen, as he was aware at the time, being unsuitable. But a trial made on the 7th December 1886 succeeded completely. Mrs. ——, writing on December 8th, states that she was awakened by hearing a voice cry, "Wake," and by feeling a hand rest on the left side of her head. She then saw stooping over her a figure which she recognised as Mr. Godfrey's.
In this last case the dress of the figure does not seem to have been seen distinctly. But in the apparition of the 16th November, it will be observed that the dress was that ordinarily worn in the daytime by Mr. Godfrey, and that in which the percipient would be accustomed to see him, not the dress which he was actually wearing at the time. If the apparition is in truth nothing more than an expression of the percipient's thought this is what we should expect to find, and as a matter of fact in the majority of well evidenced narratives of telepathic hallucination this is what we actually do find. The dress and surroundings of the phantasm represent, not the dress and surroundings of the agent at the moment, but those with which the percipient is familiar. If other proof were wanting, this fact would in itself seem a sufficient argument that we have to deal, not with ghosts but with hallucinations. It is to be regretted, however, that most recent experimenters in this direction have succeeded only in producing apparitions of themselves. But a crucial experiment of the kind desired is to be found in an account published in 1822 by H. M. Wesermann, Government Assessor and Chief Inspector of Roads at Düsseldorf. He records five successful trials with different percipients, of which the fifth seems worth quoting in full.[111]
No. 62.—From H. M. WESERMANN.
"A lady, who had been dead five years, was to appear to Lieutenant —n in a dream at 10.30 P.M. and incite him to good deeds. At half-past ten, contrary to expectation, Herr ——n had not gone to bed, but was discussing the French campaign with his friend Lieutenant S—— in the ante-room. Suddenly the door of the room opened, the lady entered dressed in white, with a black kerchief and uncovered head, greeted S—— with her hand three times in a friendly manner; then turned to ——n, nodded to him, and returned again through the doorway.
"As this story, related to me by Lieutenant ——n, seemed to be too remarkable from a psychological point of view for the truth of it not to be duly established, I wrote to Lieutenant S——, who was living six[112] miles away, and asked him to give me his account of it. He sent me the following reply:—
"'... On the 13th of March, 1817, Herr ——n came to pay me a visit at my lodgings about a league from A——. He stayed the night with me. After supper, and when we were both undressed, I was sitting on my bed and Herr ——n was standing by the door of the next room on the point also of going to bed. This was about half-past ten. We were speaking partly about indifferent subjects and partly about the events of the French campaign. Suddenly the door out of the kitchen opened without a sound, and a lady entered, very pale, taller than Herr ——n, about five feet four inches in height, strong and broad of figure, dressed in white, but with a large black kerchief which reached to below the waist. She entered with bare head, greeted me with the hand three times in complimentary fashion, turned round to the left towards Herr ——n, and waved her hand to him three times; after which the figure quietly, and again without any creaking of the door, went out. We followed at once in order to discover whether there were any deception, but found nothing. The strangest thing was this, that our night-watch of two men whom I had shortly before found on the watch were now asleep, though at my first call they were on the alert, and that the door of the room, which always opens with a good deal of noise, did not make the slightest sound when opened by the figure.
"'S.
"'D——n, January 11th, 1818.'
"From this story (Wesermann continues) the following conclusions may be drawn:—
"(1) That waking persons, as well as sleeping, are capable of perceiving the ideas [Gedankenbilder] of distant friends through the inner sense as dream images. For not only the opening and shutting of the door, but the figure itself—which, moreover, exactly resembled that of the dead lady—was incontestably only a dream in the waking state, since the door would have creaked as usual had the figure really opened and shut it.
"(2) That many apparitions and supposed effects of witchcraft were very probably produced in the same way.
"(3) That clairvoyants are not mistaken when they state that a stream of light proceeds from the magnetiser to the distant friend, which visibly presents the scene thought of, if the magnetiser thinks of it strongly and without distraction."
More philosophic or more successful than recent investigators, Wesermann, it will be seen, varied the form of his experiment. In the first he caused his own figure to appear, but in each of the subsequent trials he chose a fresh image, meeting on each occasion with equal success. It should be observed, however, that though Wesermann seems to have been a careful as well as a philosophic investigator, he has omitted to record how often he made trials of this kind without producing any result, and it cannot fairly be assumed that there were no failures. But in comparing such cases as those here recorded with the experiments at close quarters described in Chapters II., III., and IV., it should be remembered that a failure which consists merely, as in Mr. Godfrey's second trial, in the absence of any unusual impression on the part of the percipient, detracts far less from the value of occasional success than failures attested by the production of wrong impressions; and further, that a sensory hallucination being a much rarer phenomenon than an idea, the improbability of chance-coincidence between a hallucination and the attempt (unknown to the percipient) to produce it is greater in the same proportion.
Later experience has not confirmed Wesermann's third inference, as to the stream of light proceeding from the agent; there are no grounds for regarding such an appearance as other than subjective, due to the percipient's preconceived ideas of what he ought to see. But another feature in the narrative is more significant. One is led to infer both from Herr S.'s description and from Wesermann's remarks in (1) that the figure seen resembled a deceased lady who was not known to either of the percipients. If this interpretation is correct, the figure seen cannot have been subjective in the same sense as the hallucinations described in Chapter IX. and Mr. Godfrey's apparition may be supposed to have been. The latter were, ex hypothesi, autoplastic—i.e., they were hallucinations built up in the percipient's own mind on a nucleus supplied from without. But what Herren S. and ——n saw was a heteroplastic image, a picture like that of a diagram or a card transferred ready-made from the agent's mind. We should not of course be justified, on the evidence of a single narrative of somewhat doubtful import, in concluding that such an origin for a hallucination is possible. But there are a few narratives to be cited later (Chapter XIII.) which also suggest such an interpretation.
In Mr. Godfrey's trials, as also in those made by Mr. S. H. B., the agent was asleep at the time of the experiment.[113] In the two cases which follow the agent was in a hypnotic trance. In the first instance, it will be seen, there appears to have been a reciprocal effect, the agent himself becoming aware at the time of the percipient's surroundings, and of the effect produced on her by his influence. The account was sent to us in January 1886.
No. 63.—From MR. H. P. SPARKS.