The acceptance of this conclusion does not, however, imply a negative answer to the question formulated above. The Society for Psychical Research had accumulated an impressive and, to almost all those who had first-hand acquaintance with it, a convincing mass of experimental evidence of the reality of telepathy (q.v.), the influence of mind on mind otherwise than through the recognized channels of sense. The successful experiments had for the most part been made between persons in close proximity, in the same room or in adjoining rooms; but they seemed to show that the state of consciousness of one person may induce directly (i.e. without the mediation of the organs of expression and sense-perception) a similar state of consciousness in another person, especially if the former, usually called the “agent,” strongly desired or “willed” that this effect should be produced on the other person, the “percipient.”
The question formulated above thus resolved itself for Gurney into the more definite form, “Can we find any good reason for believing that coincidental hallucinations are sometimes veridical, that the state of mind of a person at some great crisis of his experience may telepathically induce in the mind of some distant relative or friend an hallucinatory perception of himself?” It was at once obvious that, if coincidental apparitions can be proved to occur, this question can only be answered by a statistical inquiry; for each such coincidental hallucination, considered alone, may always be regarded as most educated persons of the present time have regarded them, namely, as merely accidental coincidences. That the coincidences are not merely accidental can only be proved by showing that they occur more frequently than the doctrine of chances would justify us in expecting. Now, the death of any person is a unique event, and the probability of its occurrence upon any particular day may be very simply calculated from the mortality statistics, if we assume that nothing is known of the individual’s vitality. On the other hand, hallucinatory perceptions of persons, occurring to sane and healthy individuals in the fully waking state, are comparatively rare occurrences, whose frequency we may hope to determine by a statistical inquiry. If, then, we can obtain figures expressing the frequency of such hallucinations, we can deduce, by the help of the laws of chance, the proportion of such hallucinations that may be expected to coincide with (or, for the purposes of the inquiry, to fall within twelve hours of) the death of the person whose apparition appears, if no causal relation obtains between the coinciding events. If, then, it appears that the proportion of such coincidental hallucinations is greater than the laws of probability will account for, a certain presumption of a causal relation between the coinciding events is thereby established; and the greater the excess of such coincidences, the stronger does this presumption become. Gurney attempted a census of hallucinations in order to obtain data for this statistical treatment, and the results of it, embodied in Phantasms of the Living, were considered by the authors of that work to justify the belief that some coincidental hallucinations are veridical. In the year 1889 the Society for Psychical Research appointed a committee, under the chairmanship of the late Henry Sidgwick, to make a second census of hallucinations on a more extensive and systematic plan than the first, in order that the important conclusion reached by the authors of Phantasms of the Living might be put to the severer test rendered possible by a larger and more carefully collected mass of data. Seventeen thousand adults returned answers to the question, “Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?” Rather more than two thousand persons answered affirmatively, and to each of these were addressed careful inquiries concerning their hallucinatory experiences. In this way it was found that of the total number, 381 apparitions of persons living at the moment (or not more than twelve hours dead) had been recognized by the percipients, and that, of these, 80 were alleged to have been experienced within twelve hours of the death of the person whose apparition had appeared. A careful review of all the facts, conditions and probabilities, led the committee to estimate that the former number should be enlarged to 1300 in order to make ample allowance for forgetfulness and for all other causes that might have tended to prevent the registration of apparitions of this class. On the other hand, a severe criticism of the alleged death-coincidences led them to reduce the number, admitted by them for the purposes of their calculation, to 30. The making of these adjustments gives us about 1 in 43 as the proportion of coincidental death-apparitions to the total number of recognized apparitions among the 17,000 persons reached by the census. Now the death-rate being just over 19 per thousand, the probability that any person taken at random will die on a given day is about 1 in 19,000; or, more strictly speaking, the average probability that any person will die within any given period of twenty-four hours duration is about 1 in 19,000. Hence the probability that any other particular event, having no causal relation to his death, but occurring during his lifetime (or not later than twelve hours after his death) will fall within the same twenty-four hours as his death is 1 in 19,000; i.e. if an apparition of any individual is seen and recognized by any other person, the probability of its being experienced within twelve hours of that individual’s death is 1 in 19,000, if no causal relation obtains between the two events. Therefore, of all recognized apparitions of living persons, 1 only in 19,000 may be expected to be a death-coincidence of this sort. But the census shows that of 1300 recognized apparitions of living persons 30 are death-coincidences and that is equivalent to 440 in 19,000. Hence, of recognized hallucinations, those coinciding with death are 440 times more numerous than we should expect, if no causal relation obtained; therefore, if neither the data nor the reasoning can be destructively criticized, we are compelled to believe that some causal relation obtains; and, since good evidence of telepathic communication has been experimentally obtained, the least improbable explanation of these death-apparitions is that the dying person exerts upon his distant friend some telepathic influence which generates an hallucinatory perception of himself.
These death-coincidences constitute the main feature of the argument in favour of telepathic communication between distant persons, but the census of hallucinations afforded other data from which a variety of arguments, tending to support this conclusion, were drawn by the committee; of these the most important are the cases in which the hallucinatory percept embodied details that were connected with the person perceived and which could not have become known to the percipient by any normal means. The committee could not find in the results of the census any evidence sufficient to justify a belief that hallucinations may be due to telepathic influence exerted by personalities surviving the death of the body.
The critical handling of the cases by the committee seems to be above reproach. Those who do not accept their conclusion based on the death-coincidences must direct their criticism to the question of the reliability of the reports of these cases. It is to be noted that, although only those cases are reckoned in which the percipient had no cause to expect the death of the person whose apparition he experienced, and although, in nearly all the accepted cases, some record or communication of the hallucination was made before hearing of the death, yet in very few cases was any contemporary written record of the event forthcoming for the inspection of the committee.
(W. McD.)
HALLUIN, a frontier town of northern France, in the department of Nord, near the right bank of the Lys, 14 m. N. by E. of Lille by rail. Pop. (1906) town, 11,670; commune, 16,158. Its church is of Gothic architecture. The manufactures comprise linen and cotton goods, chairs and rubber goods, and brewing and tanning are carried on; there is a board of trade arbitration. The family of Halluin is mentioned as early as the 13th century. In 1587 the title of duke and peer of the realm was granted to it, but in the succeeding century it became extinct.
HALM, CARL FELIX (1809-1882), German classical scholar and critic, was born at Munich on the 5th of April 1809. In 1849, after having held appointments at Spires and Hadamar, he became rector of the newly founded Maximiliansgymnasium at Munich, and in 1856 director of the royal library and professor in the university. These posts he held till his death on the 5th of October 1882. It is chiefly as the editor of Cicero and other Latin prose authors that Halm is known, although in early years he also devoted considerable attention to Greek. After the death of J. C. Orelli, he joined J. G. Baiter in the preparation of a revised critical edition of the rhetorical and philosophical writings of Cicero (1854-1862). His school editions of some of the speeches of Cicero in the Haupt and Sauppe series, with notes and introductions, were very successful. He also edited a number of classical texts for the Teubner series, the most important of which are Tacitus (4th ed., 1883); Rhetores Latini minores (1863); Quintilian (1868); Sulpicius Severus (1866); Minucius Felix together with Firmicus Maternus De errore (1867); Salvianus (1877) and Victor Vitensis’s Historia persecutionis Africanae provinciae (1878). He was also an enthusiastic collector of autographs.
See articles by W. Christ and G. Laubmann in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie and by C. Bursian in Biographisches Jahrbuch; and J. E. Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship, iii. 195 (1908).